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More "Trivial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the people, except such as ministered to a corrupt taste, like demoralizing pictures and inflammatory music. Why did not the arts maintain the severity of the Grecian models? Why did philosophy degenerate to Epicureanism? Why did poetry condescend to such trivial subjects as hunting and fishing? Why did, the light of truth become dim? Why were the great principles of beauty lost sight of? Why the discrepancy between the laws and the execution of them? Why was every triumph of genius perverted? It was because men, in their wickedness, were indifferent ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... knowing what else to do he put on his hat and went for a walk. Later he went to the shop and tried to work, but his hand trembled when he tried to hold a tool and the hay-loading apparatus on which he was at work seemed suddenly a very trivial and unimportant thing. ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... unwomanly vulgarity. The baseness that was in her took at least a more delicate exterior. She wrote to him simply and distantly, to state that there were some books and trifles of hers left at Laughton, which she prized beyond their trivial value, and to request, as she believed him to be absent from the Hall, permission to call at her old home, in her way to a visit in a neighbouring county, and point out to whomsoever he might appoint to meet her, the effects she deemed herself privileged to claim. The ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... forever. Such a person moves on, perchance, like a deep, noble river, in calm and silence, but still moves on, inevitably destined to lose himself in the common ocean. And this was the promise of Clarian's case. Whatever was his hidden woe, however trivial its rational results, or baseless its causes, it had beyond remedy seized upon his soul, and we knew, that, unless it could be done away with at the source, the end was certain: first the fury, then the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... landscape in a dream—by the deepening twilight. An immense repose pervaded the whole scene. It affected Katherine to a certain seriousness. Her social excitements and responsibilities, the undoubted success that had attended her maiden essay as hostess during the past week, shrank to trivial proportions. Another order of emotion arose in her. She became sensible of a necessity ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... round Stephen's Green and then down Grafton Street. Though his eyes took note of many elements of the crowd through which he passed they did so morosely. He found trivial all that was meant to charm him and did not answer the glances which invited him to be bold. He knew that he would have to speak a great deal, to invent and to amuse and his brain and throat were too dry for such a task. The problem of how he could pass the hours till he met Corley again ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... seem to some unimportant, negligible, even trivial. At any rate, it would be inevitable; since no one is wild enough to believe that Porto Rico can be turned back to Spain, or bartered away, or abandoned by the generation that took it. But make its people citizens now, and you have already made it, potentially, a State. Then behind ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... health and efficiency? If health is, then, so important to the individual and society, its pursuit is not a selfish or a trivial matter; it is rather a serious and unavoidable duty. The gospel of health is sorely needed in our modern world. Young men and women use up their apparently limitless capital with heedless waste; those who start with a lesser inheritance neglect the means at their command ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... divine help sent through her. One might think there was a touch of prophecy in that, and we will let it go at that; but to my mind it had its inspiration in those great men's accurate knowledge of the King's trivial and treacherous character. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... de Rohan to pass judgment upon the honor of women," cried Maria Theresa, exasperated by his lip-morality. "If the French ambassador presumes to come to me with such trivial complaints as I have heard to-day, I will direct my minister in Paris to make representations to the king of another and a more ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... pun-job dangerous as the Indian one. Turned by the current of some stronger wit Back from the object that you mean to hit, Like the strange missile which the Australian throws, Your verbal boomerang slaps you on the nose. One vague inflection spoils the whole with doubt, One trivial letter ruins all, left out; A knot can choke a felon into clay, A not will save him, spelt without the k; The smallest word has some unguarded spot, And danger lurks ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... A trivial circumstance often leads to a marvellous change in the conditions of men, communities, and nations. The playful act of a Boer lad picking up a shining pebble on the banks of the Orange River served as a beacon to lure persons to search for the ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... political power, or for any other cause, the harmony of the glorious 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. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Polk • James Polk
... don't dress at hap-hazard; for dress, so far from being a matter of small consequence, is in reality one of the fine arts,—so far from trivial, that each country ought to have a style of its own, and each individual such a liberty of modification of the general fashion as suits and befits her person, her age, her position in life, and the kind of character she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... of Substitutions is a large one, if Modifications, as they well may be, are added to it[347]. It will be readily concluded that some substitutions are serious, some of less importance, and many trivial. Of the more important class, the reading of [Greek: hamartematos] for [Greek: kriseos] (St. Mark iii. 29) which the Revisers have adopted in compliance with [Symbol: Aleph]BL[Symbol: Delta] and three Cursives, is a ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... out of the conflict defeated but respected. She had received a check in the Black Sea and her frontier line had been readjusted. Still her political losses were trivial. The war most deeply affected Austria. She had played a false game and had lost. The sceptre of European leadership slipped from her. The situation afforded to Bismarck and Cavour the opportunity each was ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... taken him far from things of trivial memory, looked at the man and repeated "Joe Johnson. ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... the present volume reference is made to a custom prevalent in northern India of employing the family barber to select the boys and girls to be married, it being considered too trivial and humiliating an act for the parents to attend to. In pronouncing such a custom ludicrous and outrageous we must not forget that not much more than a century ago an English thinker, Samuel Johnson, expressed the opinion that marriages might as well be arranged by the Lord Chancellor without consulting ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... sort ravishes them from themselves: but, this perturbation once overcome, we see that they insensibly flag and slacken of themselves, if not to the lowest degree, at least so as to be no more the same; insomuch as that upon every trivial occasion, the losing of a bird, or the breaking, of a glass, we suffer ourselves to be moved little less than one of the common people. I am of opinion, that order, moderation, and constancy excepted, all things are to be done by a man that is very imperfect and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... upon the gravel at the far side of the garden, but he did not raise his head. His interest in the trivial incidents of everyday life appeared to be ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... was determined that I should invite the queen, with several of her relations and friends, on board the Discovery, for the purpose of presenting them with some trivial matters, as tokens of my friendship and regard; and that, whilst thus employed, our conversation should be directed to ascertain whether an accommodation was still an object to be desired. That on this appearing to be the ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... of disease that fall to the care of the physician are trivial, self-limited, and rapidly recover under even the most crucifying dosages; Nature really winning the victories, the ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... he may have viewed with displeasure that despatch of business which was characteristic of the magistrate, Mr. Cooper. An end, at least, has been made of these abuses. Mr. Cooper is henceforth to draw his salary for the minimum of public service; and all larcenies and assaults, however trivial, must go, according to the nationality of those concerned, before the Consular or the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... And they're right. We are still doing what we have always done. We are using space flight for the boring, the trivial, the stupid; using genius for a toy, like a child banging an atomic watch on the floor. It happened with all our great discoveries and inventions: the gasoline engine, the telephone, the wireless. We've built civilizations of monumental stupidity on the wonders of ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... never forget, to my dying day, the effect produced upon me by the first half of this ascent. The day was as bright and beautiful as ever shone out of heaven. Hot it was, but not intensely so, for the sun's power was yet trivial; and as the winds were hushed, except when from time to time a light breeze rustled among the foliage of the pine-woods, the stillness that prevailed around struck me as something quite sublime. In proportion ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... woman chained The turn will come to us as to others—and go The language of party is eloquent The defensive is perilous policy in war The healthy only are fit to live The system is cursed by nature, and that means by heaven The world without him would be heavy matter The weighty and the trivial contended The rider's too heavy for the horse in England The greater wounds do not immediately convince us of our fate The people always wait for the winner The defensive is perilous policy in war The family ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... these are the things, which lie at the heart of mysticism. In the light of this, nothing in the world is trivial, nothing is unimportant nothing is common or unclean. It is the feeling that Blake has crystallised ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... told, as if she were listening to him, all the facts without forgetting a single detail, mentioning the most trivial matters with the minuteness of a countryman. And the child still kept assailing him, making kicks ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... Time. It serves no purpose that the careful clock Mark the appointment, the officious train Hurry to keep it, if the minutes mock Loud in your ear: 'Late. Late. Late. Late again.' Week-end is very well on Saturday: On Monday it's a different affair— A little episode, a trivial stay In some oblivious spot somehow, somewhere. On Sunday night we hardly laugh or speak: Week-end begins ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... laws of society. This is why: Great men are the slaves of their work. Their indifference to outer things, their devotion to their work, make simpletons regard them as egotists, and they are expected to wear the same garb as the dandy who fulfils the trivial evolutions called social duties. These men want the lions of the Atlas to be combed and scented like ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... laugh at the extraordinary appearance he presented; but a stronger feeling of interest and sympathy overruled the inclination, and the culprit was spared this humiliation. Richard was almost as much astonished as they were, for he had not regarded a thing so trivial as his personal experience, in the excitement and terror ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... praise to vain men—but to make him the companion in cause and in death of so many simple persons according to the world—old men, young men, and poor women—who in that same place (the Place de Greve) had endured fire and knife." D'Aubigne's narrative, as usual, is vivid, and mentions somewhat trivial details, which, however, are additional pledges of its accuracy; e.g., he alludes to the fact that, having spoken as above to those who stood on the side toward the river, he repeated his remarks to those on the other side of the Place de Greve, beginning with the words, "I ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... are much more successful in now and then starting a great bore;[I-13] and the others, having left all their own ordinary affairs and subjects of interest at home, were glad to make a matter of importance of the most trivial occurrence. A mighty poet, said the former class—who could it possibly be?—All names were recited—all Britain scrutinized, from Highland hills to the Lakes of Cumberland—from Sydenham Common to St. James's Place—even the Banks of the Bosphorus were ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... that almost beautiful, patience—the quality of her defect of callousness—Ottima leaves this also without comment. She gazes now from the closed window, sees a Capuchin monk go by, and makes some trivial remarks on his immobility at church; then once more offers Sebald the flask—the "black" (or, as we should say, the ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... When nothing which happens, happens except under God's direct responsibility, when nothing is said which is not one of your 'lines' in the drama which is being played, not so much by as through you, there can be no exteriorities, nothing can be trivial, in a record of life so conceived. And this point of view also helps the writer to keep all his details in proportion; the autobiographer's usual fault, artistically at least, being an inordinate valuation of small concerns, because ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... so trivial that will not pass upon some men's consciences to excuse their attendance at the public worship of God. Some are so unfortunate as to be always indisposed on the Lord's day, and think nothing so unwholesome as the air of a church. Others have their affairs so oddly contrived as to be always ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... recommending him to wrap up carefully in cold and wet weather, and that, like a good son and brother, he followed their advice. Lastly, he objected to smoking. Some of the items of this evidence are very trivial, but taken collectively they have considerable force. Of greater significance are the following additional items. Chopin's sister Emilia was carried off at the age of fourteen by pulmonary disease, and his father, as a physician ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... apparatus of the state. I think that our ministry (though there are things against them which neither you nor I can dissemble, and which grieve me to the heart) is by far the most honest and by far the wisest system of administration in Europe. Their fall would be no trivial calamity. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... what she could." That was high praise. She had brought her best to her Lord. Perhaps some of us make too much of our little acts and trivial sacrifices. Little things are acceptable if they are really our best. But Mary's deed was not a small one. The ointment she brought was very costly. She did not use just a little of this precious nard, but poured it all out on the head and feet of Jesus. "What ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... proved as ephemeral in England as the cloaks and feathers with which it had crossed the Channel, and we may pass over such trivial literary attempts as those of the Duchess of Newcastle to the writings of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Behn. These two novelists, if such they may still be called, represent, in narrative fiction, the period which extends from the Restoration to the opening of the eighteenth ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Trivial as Vane's discovery may seem, it was the result of long months and study of applied science, and certain dearly bought experiences, and though Mr Deering blamed himself for not having noticed the little addition which had thwarted all his plans and brought him to the verge ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... arms above him, listened with strained senses for news of Halsey's injury or death. For years she had feared that the violence she had seen wreaked upon others would touch her husband; violence offered to herself would have seemed a trivial grief in comparison. The fear that has long harped upon sore nerves has a cumulative action upon the ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... Army Corps were almost invariably confirmed; but they objected strongly to the same measure which they meted out to the men being consistently applied to themselves. They could not be brought to see that neglect of duty, however trivial, on the part of a colonel or brigadier was just as serious a fault as desertion or insubordination on the part of the men; and the conflict of opinion, in ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... school, such as Furius Bibaculus, continued to write during the first few years of the Augustan epoch, but cannot properly be regarded as belonging to it. [7] They pursued their own lines of thought, uninfluenced by the Empire, except in so far as it forced them to select more trivial themes, or to use greater caution in expressing their thoughts. But the great authors who are the true representatives of Augustus's reign, Virgil, Livy, and Horace, were brought into direct contact with the emperor, and much of ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Mr. Chantrey as if an age had passed over him. As persons who are drowning see in one brief moment all the course of their past lives, with its most trivial circumstances, so he seemed to have looked into his own future, stretching before him in gloom and darkness, and foreseen a thousand miserable results springing from this fatal source. She was his wife, dearer to him than any other object in the world; ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... of the two countries ever understanding one another, II 39; concern at our trivial notes, II 67; conversation with, on misunderstandings between America and Great Britain, and the peace settlement, II 165; depressed at tenor of Wilson's note proposing peace, sends him personal letter, II 207; in House of Lords speech welcomes America as ally, II 230; frequent ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... honest to a degree unusual among savages. When Major Abasa traveled among them in the winter of 1865, they sometimes refused compensation for their services, and were scrupulously careful to guard the property of their guests. Once the Major purposely left some trivial articles. The next day a native brought them forward, and was greatly astonished when pay was offered for ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... two or three comparatively trivial adventures. For twelve days they lived upon the juice of the scaltae, after which they fasted for three days. Then a bird brought them a branch of an unknown tree, bearing a bunch of bright red grapes, whereon they lived for four days, and then fasted for ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... went to trapping in the less settled parts of Nebraska, and for a while he lived in peace, until he fell into a saloon row over some trivial matter and invited four of his opponents outside to fight him with pistols; the four were to fire at the word, and Bill to do the same—his pistol against their four. In this fight he killed one man at first fire, but he himself was shot through the shoulder ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... has proved to be true to a sometimes almost ridiculous extent. The most trivial statement of fact can be relied on, provided it is given outside of trade or enmity or absolute indifference. The Indian loves to fool the tenderfoot. But a sober, measured statement you can conclude is accurate. And ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... sensation,—all these undoubtedly tend to keep down the level of literary taste. To many readers of good average ability, neither the esthetic nor the purely intellectual makes a strong appeal. Even minds of fine quality often find a welcome diversion in trivial reading. In fact, to expect every one and at all times to have his mind keyed up to the higher levels is neither sincere nor reasonable. And yet, making due allowance for intellectual limitations, for the busy and distracting conditions of modern ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... trivial matter for the high-souled maiden to devote herself, with sweet self-sacrifice, to those whose roughness and uncouth manners wounded her. The women, it is true, gladly accepted her aid, but the men, who had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... lay there the rough loft and its straw seemed to pass away, for the background of his mental picture to become the park and grounds about the old Hall, on one of the old sunny days when he and Scarlett had had a quarrel about some trivial matter, and were gazing threateningly at each other after uttering dire words, and were declaring that everything between them was quite at an end, and that they were never going to speak to ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... being deeply impressed with the fact that the Great Eastern had not up to that time had fair play. In her construction and general arrangements there have been some grave, and numerous more or less trivial errors. From first to last there has been a good deal of gross mismanagement; but the Great Eastern cannot, with justice, be pronounced a failure. Latterly she has done good service in laying ocean telegraph-cables, a species of work for ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... The weeds in the old garden took on fantastic shapes; figures hid behind the doors and crept about the passages; the rooks in the high elms became birds of ill-omen; the ivy bristled upon the walls, and the trivial explanations of the ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... is devoted all the little stock of sentimentality which Maria Petrovna possesses. She can talk of them by the hour to any one who will listen to her, and has related to the Popadya a hundred times every trivial incident of their lives. Though they have never given her much cause for anxiety, and they are now men of middle age, she lives in constant fear that some evil may befall them. What she most fears is that they may be sent ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... of human arrogance, Commits to trivial chance the fate of nations! While, with incessant thought, laborious man Extends his mighty schemes of wealth and pow'r, And towers and triumphs in ideal greatness; Some accidental gust of opposition Blasts all the beauties of his new ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... sneaker Of punch, could not wrangle more over their liquor. And you that are Goddesses, thus to be squabbling, As if you were bred up to scow'ring and dabbling! And all for a fig, or a fart, or a feather, Or some silly thing that's as trivial as either! For shame, my Fair Goddesses, bridle your passions, And make not in heaven such filthy orations About your bumfiddles; a very fine jest! When the heavens all know, they but stink at the best. Tho' ye think you much mend with your washes the matter, And help the ill-scent with your orange ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... Reflect!—'tis the peace of existence you stake On the turn of a die. And for whose—for his sake? While you witness this woman, the false point of view From which she must now be regarded by you Will exaggerate to you, whatever they be, The charms I admit she possesses. To me They are trivial indeed; yet to your eyes, I fear And foresee, they will true and intrinsic appear. Self-unconscious, and sweetly unable to guess How more lovely by far is the grace you possess, You will wrong your own beauty. The graces of art, You will take for the ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... she has selected of her own do her, indeed, much credit; she has discarded all that were trivial and merely local, and given only such as contain something ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... those of every author, can afford but a dim and dubious copy of his mind. Nor is it easy to decipher even this, with moderate accuracy. The haze of a foreign language, of foreign manners, and modes of thinking strange to us, confuses and obscures the sight, often magnifying what is trivial, softening what is rude, and sometimes hiding or distorting what is beautiful. To take the dimensions of Schiller's mind were a hard enterprise, in any case; harder ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... as a dramatist was due largely to his interest in all things that passed under his notice. Nothing was too trivial to observe. The tragic threads of human life, which escaped the eyes of the passing many or were ignored by them, always aroused his interest and attention; and more than once he had picked up one of these threads and followed it to the end. Out of these seemingly ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... ether into service as its vehicles of communication. Instead of the old-time masses of metal, or bands of leather, which moved stiffly through ranges comparatively short, there is to-day employed a medium which may traverse 186,400 miles in a second, and with resistances most trivial in contrast ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... no way diminishes its purposive character. Whether the mind is idealizing an aspect of reality (as in mathematics) or abstracting, classifying, and predicting (as in science), it is always the fact that a particular kind of reality is needed for some serious or trivial purpose which guides the operations of the thinker. A mind which craved to embrace all or 'any' reality need not think; it would do better to float without discrimination upon the flux of change. This procedure would be so absolutely antithetical to human knowing ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... this little transaction, however. In some piecemeal fashion, a sentence here, a phrase elsewhere, with scores or hundreds of pages intervening, History does, indeed, make yawning allusion to some such trivial circumstance; refraining from comment in the most well-bred manner imaginable. It is only the ill-affected, the malcontents, who dwell upon such details. Is this not, indeed, a most beautiful world, and ours the land of opportunity, progress, education? Let ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... live among such peacefulness, forgetting that, though life in the country may look peaceful to the stranger's eye, experience teaches us that gossip and scandal and the continual agitation round and round the trivial—an agitation so great that the trivial becomes colossal—at last rob life of anything resembling dolce far niente mid country lanes and in the shadow of some country church. In fact, it seems to me that the emotion which we seek—the ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... the East Cliff Hotel at Cromer and made numerous and trivial inquiries about the Cromer golf links. They had come, they volunteered, from Ely for a day of sea-bathing and golf; they were returning after dinner. The head-waiter of the East Cliff Hotel gave them ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... for a while they talked of trivial things—of plays, and books, and people. But every now and then would fall a silence, and their eyes would meet—and hold. Just for a moment or two; just for long enough to make them both realise the futility of the game they were playing. Then they would both speak at once, ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... adventures from diametrically different standpoints. One, in fact, was an optimist; the other a pessimist. One found fault with the war for not giving him enough hardship and adventure; the other was entirely fed up with adventures and hardships. This seems a trivial incident to jot down amidst issues so tremendous, but life is life, and my chat with these youngsters put some new life into me. Nearing the shore, I again struck Stopford's Headquarters, now beginning to look habitable. Braithwaite, and one or two others of my Staff turned up from Imbros at ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... "I rather think there was something of the sort. The boy's uncle—Captain Stewart—middle-aged, rather prim old party—you'll have met him, I dare say—he intimated to me one day that there had been some trivial row. You see, the lad isn't of age yet, though he is to be in a few months, and so he has had to live on an allowance doled out by his grandfather, who's the head of the house. The boy's father is dead. There's a quaint old beggar, if you like—the grandfather. He was rather a swell in the diplomatic, ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... you enter and read me? The house is clean and full of goodwill—Come!" But though they never ceased trying, they could never penetrate to those inner chambers. Sometimes—though they might be talking of most trivial matters—the appeal would suddenly grow pathetic, almost plangent, "What is this that shuts me off from you? We sit together and love one another: why am I set apart?" Time was when he had seemed to them consciously reticent, almost of set purpose; ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... dignity)—If the prisoner is going to put his trust in the saving grace of the elevated cars or the tardy ferry, the Court would prefer not to delay its consomme listening to such trivial excuses. The Court's ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... entered a sylvan world all their own. While he talked, questioning and replying gravely and at leisure, the man was revolving in his mind just what action would be best for the prisoners whose cause he had espoused. As for Judith, she had forgotten that such persons existed, that such trivial mischance as their arrest had just been; she was concerned wholly with the immediate necessity to charm, to ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... a matter of world-wide experience, verified by each of us in our own case, if we have ever been honest in the attempt, that the power of self-improvement is limited by very narrow bounds. Any man that has ever tried to cure himself of the most trivial habit which he desires to get rid of, or to alter in the slightest degree the set of some strong taste or current of his being, knows how little he can do, even by the most determined effort. Something may be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... knew that their happiness and comfort for years compelled an adjustment of life. When as at present any one who loses his temper can rush off to a court and get a marriage dissolved for some quite trivial reason, there is small encouragement to practice self-control. If a man and woman know that the consequences of conduct must be faced by them, and cannot be avoided by thrusting them upon others, they will ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... to the errors and passions of human nature, like their fellow creatures. No sister, for instance, ever loved another with stronger affection than poor Maura did her brother Felix, notwithstanding the repeated scoldings which, for very trivial causes, he experienced at her tongue. Woe, keen and scathing, be to those who dared, in her presence to ...
— Lha Dhu; Or, The Dark Day - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... pinning them in his coat with a flushed cheek, or read, with an ecstasy of appreciation, a line from some great writer, marking a meaning he had never found, or laugh at his old riding-clothes, his Southern prejudices, saying once: "To a man of the world like myself, these ideas seem trivial." ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... removed from some influences and far too closely joined to others. Much of the good of society is walled out from the school by barriers that arise in politics, City ways, all the bad life of the streets, the trivial interests of the day, affect the school too much. We are greatly at fault in all this, because we do not take education as yet seriously enough. There must be now a decision. Either the school must be content to remain what it is now, a local institution performing a very ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... unnerved the orphan that she was less able to cope successfully with this harrowing suspense than on former occasions; still the sanguine hopefulness of youth battled valiantly with the ghouls that apprehension conjured up, and she remembered that comparatively trivial occurrences had sometimes detained the train, which finally brought all its human ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... nursery was not without its annoyances, though as yet of a comparatively trivial kind. Sometimes, at night, the handle of the door was turned hurriedly as if by a person trying to come in, and at others a knocking was made at it. These sounds occurred after the children had settled ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... difficult for me to express the satisfaction we felt on landing at Angostura, the capital of Spanish Guiana. The inconveniences endured at sea in small vessels are trivial in comparison with those that are suffered under a burning sky, surrounded by swarms of mosquitos, and lying stretched in a canoe, without the possibility of taking the least bodily exercise. In seventy-five days we had performed a passage of five hundred leagues (twenty to a degree) on the five ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... place, hung a series of family portraits. One was of a lovely girl with oval face, olive complexion, and large dark tender eyes: and this was the gem of the whole collection; but it conferred little pleasure on the spectator, owing to a trivial circumstance—it was turned with its face to the wall; and all that met the inquiring eye was an inscription on the canvas, not intended ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... passed there, that good as this establishment might be in itself, it could only be so in a republic, or in a monarchy, like that of England, where the finances are absolutely governed by those who furnish them, and who simply furnish as much or as little as they please; but in a trivial, changing, and more than absolute state like France solidity necessarily is wanting, consequently confidence (at least of a discreet and proper kind): since a king, and under his name, a mistress, a minister, favourites; still more, extreme necessities, such as the deceased King experienced ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... they threatened towns on the coast, and at others they attacked ships on mid-ocean; and they seem to have followed their lawless pursuits at will. When caught, there was little delay in bringing them to trial and securing a conviction; and trivial technicality in forms played no part in reaching results. At times there were multiple executions, and in the community there was no morbid sentimentality shown for the miserable wretches. Not the least of their torture ...
— Piracy off the Florida Coast and Elsewhere • Samuel A. Green
... the Universal is ever with me, but that it is ever with me with ever-active concern. There was a time when it was hard for me to believe that a Mind busied with the immensities of the universe could come down to such trivial affairs as mine. Important as I might be to myself I could hardly be otherwise than lost amid the billions of forms of life which had come into existence through the ages. To the Three in One, on the Great White Throne, ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... Allison Sweeney's work undertakes to make a more continuous historical sketch of the achievements from year to year while at the same time guided by the topical plan. At times the author is lofty in his treatment and equally as often trivial. To say that Miller's and Sweeney's works are not scientific does not exactly cover the ground. They do not well measure up to the standard of the average ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... his words and sentences, as well as in his smile, as noiseless as a patent hinge, and in the folds of his eternal waterproof. He was incapable of giving an off-hand answer or opinion on the simplest occasion, and his tone of high deliberation increased in proportion as the subject was trivial or domestic. If his wife asked him at dinner if the potatoes were good, he replied that they were strikingly fine (he used to speak of the newspaper as "fine"—he applied this term to objects the most dissimilar), ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... under the impression that his three attendants had perished in the whirlwind. Happily this was incorrect. Directly he had left for my bungalow they had gone off to the public-house in Lympne to discuss the question of the furnaces over some trivial refreshment. ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... "Don't be trivial. What I mean is this. Scott is an unusual fellow. He's brought himself up from nothing, with only a boost here and there from someone who recognized his worth. He's rough and he's odd, but he has a mind. He will always be a man of importance in ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... the leader of whom, through the medium of an interpreter, had an interview with the chief. He wished to be permitted to cut sandal-wood, and an agreement was entered into. After a considerable quantity had been cut and sent on board, the chief wanted payment. This was refused on some trivial ground. The savages remonstrated. The white men threatened, and the result was that the latter were driven into their boats. They pulled off to their vessel, loaded a large brass gun that occupied the centre of the schooner's ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... there be some good men that look sadly on them) are trivial things; first as to the civil concern, because the government, whereof this nation is capable, being once seen, takes in all interests. And, secondly, as to the spiritual; because as the pretence of religion has always been turbulent in broken governments, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... any fine moral speeches, to herself. She only felt a slight shock, such as a word or a look from one we love too often gives us,—such as a child's trivial gesture or movement makes a parent feel,—that impalpable something which in the slightest possible inflection of a syllable or gradation of a tone will sometimes leave a sting behind it, even in a trusting heart. This was all. But it was true that what she saw ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... said, regarding the three volumes with no very favorable air, "Mighty poor stuff, I should say; just about as weak as they make it. But harmless. Some of the conversation—between the women—is natural; trivial, but natural. The plain truth is, my dear Linn, it is a very foolish, stupid book, which should never have been printed at all; but I suppose your fashionable friend could afford to pay for ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... the advantages proposed, allow me to express a hope that they will be turned to the best possible account. The privilege of the school being free, will not, I trust, tempt parents to withdraw their children from punctual attendance upon slight and trivial occasions; and they will take care, as far as depends upon themselves, that the wishes of the present benefactor may be met, and his intentions fulfilled. Those wishes and intentions I will take upon me to say, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... been prepared and written. There is no undue invasion, which a son's pride might be apt to make, of domestic privacy, and no dealing with irrelevant topics or elaboration of those set forth with becoming modesty and restraint; far less is there the discussion of any subject, for a trivial or vain purpose. Throughout the work we meet with no unnecessary lifting of veils or treatment of themes merely to satisfy morbid curiosity. Everywhere there is the evidence of sound judgment, unimpeachable taste, and a wholesome sanity. This is especially the case in the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... excellence but from defect: not because they have a more advanced reason, but because they have a less healthy instinct, than their neighbours. Thus, in those matters which relate to the sense of taste—I am obliged to take this almost trivial instance, because it so well illustrates the principle of the whole question—we hold the consent of men in general to be a good rule. If any one were to choose to feed upon what this common taste had pronounced to be disgusting, we should not ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... accessories to dress; and the use of them, except to define its chief terminal outlines, or soften their infringement upon the flesh, is a confession of weakness in the main points of the costume, and an indication of a depraved and trivial taste. When used, they should have beauty in themselves, which is attainable only by a clearly marked design. Thus, the exquisite delicacy of fabric in some kinds of lace does not compensate for the blotchy confusion of the shapeless flower-patterns worked upon it. Not that lace ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... knows! Talent, you say? Genius? Originality? Not a bit of it, sir!... People have lived and made a career side by side with me who were worthless, trivial, and even contemptible compared with me. They did not do one-tenth of the work I did, did not put themselves out, were not distinguished for their talents, and did not make an effort to be celebrated, but just look at them! Their names are continually in the newspapers and on men's lips! ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... conditions and then again brought into varying conditions. Think what has been done in few last years, look at pigeons, and cattle. With the amount of food man can produce he may have arrived at limit of fatness or size, or thickness of wool , but these are the most trivial points, but even in these I conclude it is impossible to say we know the limit of variation. And therefore with the [adapting] selecting power of nature, infinitely wise compared to those of man, that it is impossible to say we know the limit of races, which would be true kind; if of different ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... in some degree from his own, by which his philosophical writings are so eminently distinguished. Here, as in the biography of almost all other really great men, it is found, that some circumstances apparently trivial or accidental have given a permanent bent to their mind; have stored it with the appropriate knowledge, and turned it, as it were, into the allotted sphere, and contributed to form the matrix in which original thought was formed, and new truth communicated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... as soon as he had taken the necessary steps for the purpose. The licentiate lectured in the schools, precisely like the master, for whom indeed he acted. The fee for the licence was one commons, which may represent a shilling—in any case, it was trivial. The cost of Inception, on the other hand, was very great on account of the feasts, etc., which accompanied it; and as the licentiate already enjoyed some of the privileges of the master, there was an evident temptation to put off the evil day. Security was therefore ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... after their arrival in the town. But what, what had he done that she should break it between her hands, scattering the splinters as who should sow dragon's teeth? I could not believe he had done anything much amiss. I imagined her grievance a trivial one. But this did not make the case less engrossing. Again and again I would take the fan-stump from my pocket, examining it on the palm of my hand, or between finger and thumb, hoping to read the mystery it had been mixed up in, so that I might reveal that mystery to the world. To ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... a dozen instances, some trivial, or seemingly coincidental, but all forming our theory. There is one Ezekiel recounted, as we sat here talking that night. It was just a matter of old Horace MacNair's coming in on them once during a thunder-storm. The family were sitting in the big hall; the ladies with their feet up on chairs to ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... Quebec overland by means of walking postmen till a bush road should be cut from Quebec to the sea. In Prince Edward Island the old lieutenant-governor, Walter Patterson, declined to make way for the new one, Edmund Fanning. In the end Patterson gave up the contest. But the incident, trivial as it now appears, shows what a governor-general had to face in the early days when each province had queer little ways of its own. Patterson had no precise official reason. But he said he could not go home to answer charges he did not understand and leave an island which ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... forrein: And amongst those of our own Countrey, the unparalleled attestation of that renowned Provost of Eaton, Sir Henry Wootton: I know not thy palat how it relishes such dainties, nor how harmonious thy soul is; perhaps more trivial Airs may please thee better. But howsoever thy opinion is spent upon these, that incouragement I have already received from the most ingenious men in their clear and courteous entertainment of Mr. Wallers late choice Peeces, hath once more made me adventure into the World, presenting it with these ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... costly, are in themselves mere petty accessories to dress; and the use of them, except to define its chief terminal outlines, or soften their infringement upon the flesh, is a confession of weakness in the main points of the costume, and an indication of a depraved and trivial taste. When used, they should have beauty in themselves, which is attainable only by a clearly marked design. Thus, the exquisite delicacy of fabric in some kinds of lace does not compensate for the blotchy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... If such men will make a firm and solemn pause, and meditate dispassionately on the importance of this interesting idea; if they will contemplate it in all its attitudes, and trace it to all its consequences, they will not hesitate to part with trivial objections to a Constitution, the rejection of which would in all probability put a final period to the Union. The airy phantoms that flit before the distempered imaginations of some of its adversaries ...
— The Federalist Papers
... one to the lady to write her question on; she placed it in a cleft stick and burnt it in a lamp; but the stick was cleft at both ends, and Mike managed it so that she burnt the blank sheet, while he read what she had written. Very trivial; inferior of course to Casanova's immense cabalistic frauds, but it bears out my contention ... Have you ever read the Memoirs? What a prodigious book! Do you remember when the Duchesse de Chartres comes to consult the cabale in the little ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... studied through every available source of information. All the antiquarian collections in Oregon and California have been consulted, old trading-posts visited, and old pioneers and early missionaries conversed with. Nothing has been discarded as trivial or insignificant that could aid in the slightest degree in affording an insight into Indian character and customs ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... reply, that Sir Aymer was almost tempted to suppose that his uncle had some mode of corresponding with De Walton, unknown to the young knight himself, and to the rest of the garrison. And as the earl alluded to some particular displeasure which had been exhibited by De Valence on a late trivial occasion, his uncle's knowledge of this, and other minutiae, seemed to confirm his idea that his own conduct was watched in a manner which he did not feel honourable to himself, or dignified on the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Versailles road was the Chateau de Clagny, a royal maison de plaisance, of an attractive, but trivial, aspect, though its architecture was actually of a certain massiveness. Its gardens and the disposition of its apartments pleased the king's fancy when he chose to pass this way, which was often. He is said to have personally spent over two million francs ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... one should study it, but should join with it some other study, as Astrology or Astronomy. He says also that the greatest part of the art had perished by men's negligence; "For all that our musicians do now-a-days, is almost trivial if compared with what the old ones (antiqui) did, so that now hardly one or two (unus aut alter) can be found who know what harmony is, though the word is always on their tongue." (De Fructu, p. 54-5.) ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... as children to parents. A lock of hair from a loved one long since passed away, is a little thing,—a very little thing in the eye of a stranger,—but in the eye of a loving friend it is above price. So some things in this work, apparently trivial to the general reader, may be highly prized by others. I will give, for an ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... intimated to me, in a low tone of voice, that I should get into disgrace by my noncompliance. Napoleon looked over the whole of the house, entered into the most trivial details, and after addressing questions to several of the pupils: 'Well, madame,' said he, 'I am satisfied; show me your six best pupils.'" Madame Campan presented them to him; and as he stepped into his carriage, he desired that their ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... it means to a girl like Caroline Osborne! A girl who is trying to do something for humanity—to find the people she wants to uplift so trivial—so without souls!" ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... to make for indulging in levity in discussing this frivolous matter—it was beneath the dignity of the House to occupy itself with the further consideration of the charges against the honourable member for Middlesex. These charges were so trivial and ill-founded, and they originated in such a trumpery fear lest the Crown should suffer indignity where indignity was in no wise offered to it, that he begged the House to dismiss the matter forthwith and refuse Captain Matthews leave to absent himself from his Parliamentary ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... a narrow bit of dingy black cloth—just that and nothing more—a thing as trivial as the band which clips a closed umbrella. Was it such a band, and would he presently be asked to find the umbrella from which it had fallen or been twisted away? No. Umbrellas are not carried about museum buildings. Besides, this strip of cloth ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... change which Edwin's character had undergone. As to Edwin Drood himself, "purified by trial, strengthened though saddened by his love for Rosa," Edwin would have been one of those characters Dickens loved to draw—a character entirely changed from a once careless, almost trivial self, to depth and earnestness. "All were to join in changing the ways of dear old Grewgious from the sadness and loneliness of the earlier scenes" in the story, "to the warmth and light of that kindly domestic life for which, angular though ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... as though they were carried out of themselves into the divine. I have seen dancing more accomplished, more elaborate, more astonishing than this. But never any that seemed to me to fulfil so well the finest purposes of the art. The Russian ballet, in the retrospect, seems trivial by comparison. It was secular; but this was religious. For the first time I seemed to catch a glimpse of what the tragic dance of the Greeks might have been like. The rhythms were not unlike those of Greek choruses, the motions corresponded strictly to the rhythms, and all was attuned to a high ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... to communicate his views upon the situation to political circles at home. Apparently it did not occur to him that Mr. Creevey was malicious and might keep a diary. He therefore sent for him on some trivial pretext, and a ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... and for two hundred years later, the matter of attributing a book to this man or that was considered a trivial affair. Piracies were prevalent. All printers revised the work of classic authors if they saw fit, and often they were specially rewarded for it by the Church. It was about this time that some one slipped that paragraph into the ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should have been freed from any trivial business not connected with truly nautical duties, such being the case with his comrades. I mention all these particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... swiftly through the squad room upset a stool with a loud crash. Yet few of the soundly sleeping soldiers bothered their heads about such a series of trivial noises. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... tenacious affections and deep love of home, had been a sharp wrench, and she required long familiarity to reconcile her to new conditions. Though the first and greatest change from England to America would seem to have rendered all others trivial and not to be regarded, she had shrank from each as it came, submitting by force of will, but unreconciled till years had past. In Andover she had allowed herself to take firm root, certain that from this point she would never be dislodged, and the house had gradually become filled ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... which brought me into a mystery not yet solved, the ending of which I fear to guess. In a modern era, when it is commonly supposed that skeletons no longer hang in closets, that day after day brings commonplace occurrences or, at the best, trivial abnormalities to be explained to-morrow, that romance is dead, it is strange that Fate should have picked me, when, by custom and my own desire, I am aloof from all things turbulent, morbid, and uncanny, to play an unwilling part in so extraordinary ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... admiration, now excited only sorrow and regret. Having gazed on the chateau and its lovely scenery, till the banks again closed upon them, her mind became too much occupied by mournful reflections, to permit her to attend to the conversation, which Madame Cheron had begun on some trivial topic, so that they soon travelled ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... before use. They are very porous, and by absorbing moisture from the soil they may at once make it too dry, although in exactly the right condition before being placed in the pots. And old pots ought never to be used until they have been scrubbed quite clean. These may appear to be trivial matters, unworthy of attention. They have, however, an influence on the health of plants, and experienced growers know that a few apparent trifles make all the difference between success and failure. Pots which are dirty, or covered with green moss, prevent access of air, and tend to bring about ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... noun."—Fisk's Murray's Gram., p. 56. (7.) "An allegory is the representation of some one thing by an other that resembles it, and which is made to stand for it."—Murray's Gram., p. 341. (8.) "Had he exhibited such sentences as contained ideas inapplicable to young minds, or which were of a trivial or injurious nature."—Murray's Gram., Vol. ii, p. v. (9.) "Man would have others obey him, even his own kind; but he will not obey God, that is so much above him, and who made him."—Penn's Maxims. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... our guard against small troubles, which, by encouraging, we are apt to magnify into great ones. Indeed, the chief source of worry in the world is not real but imaginary evil—small vexations and trivial afflictions. In the presence of a great sorrow, all petty troubles disappear; but we are too ready to take some cherished misery to our bosom, and to pet it there. Very often it is the child of our fancy; and, forgetful ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... attaches to the consequences of neglect; the same remorse is felt by the individual offender. The exposure of the naked person is as much abhorred as telling a lie. The Turkish woman exposing her face, is no less conscience-smitten than if she murdered her child. There is no act, however trivial, that cannot be raised to the position of a moral act, by the imperative ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (Portulaca Oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the addition of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... both a lighter-timbered and a looser-built vessel than Hero; rather credulous, unstable, inconstant, and very much the sport of slight and trivial occasions. A very small matter suffices to upset him, though, to be sure, he is apt enough to be set right again. All this, no doubt, is partly owing to his youth and inexperience; but in truth his character is mainly ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... all this elucidation, we take shame to ourselves for admitting that there are points which, after all, we do not comprehend. They may be trivial; but in making up testimony, it is the little things which have weight. Trifles light as air are confirmation strong as proofs of Holy Writ, and confutation no less strong. When, as a proof of Nat's ardor in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... intelligent eye of the careful observer which gives these apparently trivial phenomena their value. So trifling a matter as the sight of seaweed floating past his ship, enabled Columbus to quell the mutiny which arose amongst his sailors at not discovering land, and to assure them that the eagerly sought New World was not far off. ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... it would seem, did not set out on distant missions until they were thoroughly convinced that they had ceased to make progress in the conversion of their countrymen in the land of their fathers. And it is no trivial evidence, at once of the strength of their convictions, and of the truth of the evangelical history, that they continued so long and so efficiently to proclaim the gospel in the chief city of Palestine. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... previous to his "Excursion," is there any allusion made, except of the most trivial and transient kind, to Revealed Religion. He certainly cannot be called a Christian poet. The hopes that lie beyond the grave—and the many holy and awful feelings in which on earth these hopes are enshrined and fed, are rarely if ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... fictions? Or why should we not fairly confess that, for aught we can tell, the whole is a fiction? For certainly, as to the amount of historic fact which these men affect to leave, it is obviously a matter of the most trivial importance whether we regard the whole Bible as absolute fiction or not. Whether an obscure Galilean teacher, who taught a moral system which may have been as good (we can never know from such corrupt documents that it was as good) ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... if I am found guilty, affect it during my whole life—and I shall attempt, in as few words as possible, to show that I am as innocent as any person in this room. I was reported on the 18th of December, 1870, for a very trivial offence. For this offence I submitted an explanation to the Commandant of Cadets. In explanation I stated the real cause of committing the offence for which I was reported. But this cause, as stated, involved another cadet, who, finding himself charged with an ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... provincial independence, influence the individual man precisely because they appeal to his imitative tendencies. But thereby they act so as to render him more or less immune in presence of the more trivial of the influences that, coming from without his community, would otherwise be likely to reduce him to the dead level of the customs of the whole nation. A country district may seem to a stranger unduly crude in its ways; but it does not become wiser in case, under the ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... a more orderly and intelligible kind which I shall die with an imperfect knowledge of. If there were miserable spirits whom we could help—then I think we should pause and have patience with their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don't feel bound to study them more than I am bound to study the special follies of a peculiar phase of human society. Others, who feel differently, and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment for us as ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... Inigo Jones, who had hitherto acted together with brotherly affection; "a circumstance," says Gifford, to whom I communicated it, "not a little important in the history of our calumniated poet." The trivial cause, but not so in its consequences, was the poet prefixing his own name before that of the architect on the title-page of a Masque, which hitherto had only been annexed;[7] so jealous was the great architect of his part of the Masque, and so predominant ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... use a path to the beach which took them over half a mile from the village. And they had been very humble and obedient and had made no complaint. Indeed, the agent had assured them that they had every reason to be grateful to the overlord, since in return for that trivial inconvenience they had been put to they would have the golfers there, and there would be employment for some of the village boys as caddies. Nevertheless, I had discovered that they were not grateful but considered that an injustice had ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... rite and husband and wife are equal.—Nothing like this teaching had been practiced in the pagan world. Woman was simply the servant, the creature, of man. She was to do his bidding, and might be divorced for trivial cause, or for none. Man was supreme and his will was law. The home in the Christian sense did not exist, because the husband ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... show what its individual and characteristic significance may have been in the midst of all the other human beings which surrounded it, he ought to know how to eliminate from among the numberless trivial incidents of daily life all which do not serve his end, and how to set in a special light all those which might have remained invisible to less clear-sighted observers, and which give his book caliber and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... beyond that not much. In painting, after all, there is in the less important details something of the craft of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not mechanical is often trivial enough. I don't wonder, now," he added, with a suspicion of a twinkle in the eye, "if you imagine that one comes down here in a fine frenzy every ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... the only passport to posterity. It is not range of information, nor mastery of some little known branch of science, nor yet novelty of matter that will ensure immortality. Works that can claim all this will yet die if they are conversant about trivial objects only, or written without taste, genius and true nobility of mind; for range of information, knowledge of details, novelty of discovery are of a volatile essence and fly off readily into other hands that know better how to treat them. The matter is ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... his mind; and though he did not become a mere sonata-maker, like some of his contemporaries, his whole soul was not always in his work; of this the inequalities in his music give evidence. In some movements (especially the closing ones) of the sonatas, the subject-matter is often trivial, and the passage-writing commonplace. The silkworm produces its smooth, regular ball of silk without effort, and in like manner Mozart could turn out Allegros, Rondos, sets of variations a discretion. The Sonata in C minor, to our thinking, is the only one in which he was entirely absorbed ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... still bedimmed her eyes, coupled with agitation, caused her to perform her wonted duty clumsily, and to stick a variety of pins in various unnecessary places. She was then sent to the kitchen with some trivial message to the cook. ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... inwardly, out of which he awoke only to attend to his immediate practical necessities. It was a happy inner world, peopled with his own friends, acquaintances, relatives, readings, ideas, and associations. Blessed is the man who has found the inner life more real than the trivial outer one. To him mere external annoyances are but as the little insects, which he may brush away at will. No man can be truly great who has not built up for himself a subjective world into which he may retire at will. The little child absorbed in a mythical land peopled by fairies and ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... obliges him to be acquainted with matters quite at variance with his ministry. The cura possesses the language, resides in the village, has the means of the confessional, [104] and when he wishes there are but few matters, even the most trivial, that can be hidden from him. On the contrary the alcalde, not having any of these advantages, can have knowledge of but few things, if the parish priest does not communicate them. I shall quote here what father Fray Manuel del Rio says on this point. "Although the temporal government of the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... abstinence was the only true preventive of drunkenness, and drunkenness must be stamped out if mankind was to be saved. The moderate drinker was censured not because he was wasting his money, or failing to "conserve his efficiency," but because for the sake of a trivial self-indulgence he was giving countenance to a practice which was consigning millions of his fellow men to wretchedness in this world and to ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... speculation;—though surely it is very sad that he found himself so short of "butter and firewood" when the poor Ex-King, and his young Wife, then in a specially interesting state, came to take shelter with him! [Solltl (Geschichte des Dreissigjahrigen Krieges,—a trivial modern Book) gives a notable memorial from the Brandenburg RATHS, concerning these their difficulties of housekeeping. Their real object, we perceive, was to get rid of a Guest so dangerous as the Ex-King, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... I was called away from London, with Mr. Westaby Jones, to consult in a matter of business. Mr. Westaby Jones is a member of the Stock Exchange and, amongst other trivial failings, he possesses one which is not altogether unknown in his profession. He cannot resist a small wager. On several occasions he has gambled with me and shown himself to be a gentleman of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean street. It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" The only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... sitting at the bows in the brilliant twilight, they tried to talk of trivial matters, but they gave no heed to what they were saying. They were lost in their own happiness and weariness. They felt no need to talk, or to hold hands, or even to look at each other; they ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... disappeared, apparently into the building. As the two came up, Merriman once more ran his eye idly over the vehicle. And then he felt a sudden mild surprise, as one feels when some unexpected though quite trivial incident takes place. He had felt sure that this lorry standing at the mill door was that which had passed him on the bridge, and which he had followed down the lane. But now he saw it wasn't. He had noted, idly but ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... her projects without assistance. A former secretary with some degree of literary talent had, upon dismissal, written up that office and its genius for a Sunday newspaper, and several hundred thousand good people, upon reading it, had marvelled at the tremendous means employed to such trivial ends. ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... touching than to behold a soft and tender female, who had been all weakness and dependence, and alive to every trivial roughness while treading the prosperous paths of life, suddenly rising in mental force to be the comforter and supporter of her husband under misfortune, and abiding with unshrinking firmness the bitterest blast of ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... gradually from the region of Ranny's breast pocket, and he had peace in his pen. His fellow-clerks suspected him of a casual encounter and no more. A matter too trivial for remark. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... which might affect her life, and thereby gratify Gardiner's sanguinary disposition. He himself came to examine her, respecting her removal from her house at Ashbridge to Dunnington castle a long while before. The princess had quite forgotten this trivial circumstance, and lord Arundel, after the investigation, kneeling down, apologized for having troubled her in such a frivolous matter. "You sift me narrowly," replied the princess, "but of this I am assured, that God has appointed a limit to your proceedings; and ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... thing seemed a most trivial incident, but it had an amazing sequel. On Saturday afternoons Mrs. Fisher, the caretaker, always came to sweep and tidy up the church in preparation for Sunday. She was a little, thin, sharp-nosed, impulsive woman, and just at present her nerves were rather in a shaky condition for ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... brought about as it had been by a laughably trivial occurrence; and, moreover, it was in the highest degree unfair, despite the fact that both duellists would face each other under similar conditions, with similar weapons, and with the same sun and the same ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... has in conquering the passions and in subduing the exigencies of the moment, with a view to the future, is conspicuous in the most trivial occurrences of the United States. The people, which is surrounded by flatterers, has great difficulty in surmounting its inclinations, and whenever it is solicited to undergo a privation or any kind of inconvenience, even to attain an end which is sanctioned ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... left most of the Irish chieftains or princes in possession of their ancient territories; bestowed some lands on the English adventurers; gave Earl Richard the commission of Seneschal of Ireland; and after a stay of a few months, returned in triumph to England. By these trivial exploits, scarcely worth relating, except for the importance of the consequences, was Ireland subdued, and annexed to the English crown. [FN [m] Ibid. p. 770. [n] ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... 'Having heard these joyful words of king Yudhishthira, Govinda of virtuous soul, that delighter of the Yadus, then addressed Partha. The latter, however, having at the instance of Krishna addressed those words unto Yudhishthira, became exceedingly cheerless for having committed a trivial sin. Then Vasudeva, smiling, said unto the son of Pandu, "What would have been thy condition, O Partha, if, observant of virtue thou hadst slain the son of Dharma with thy sharp sword? Having only addressed the king as thou, such cheerlessness hath possessed ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... may fairly be called such, since it was drawn up in separate counts, is very interesting reading. Of the "exceptions against the Book of Common Prayer," as the Puritans named their list of liturgical grievances, some must strike almost any reader of the present day as trivial and unworthy. Others again there are that draw a sympathetic Amen from many quarters to-day. To an American Episcopalian the catalogue is chiefly interesting as showing how ready and even eager were our colonial ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... solemnity, awe, deep grief, slowness of motion, darkness, and extreme or oppressive greatness of size. The scale runs, then, from the little to the large, from the bright to the dark, from ecstatic delight to horror, and from the trivial to ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... "why couldn't Hugh have been polite enough to keep from that slighting remark or at least laugh good-naturedly with the rest, and paid no more attention to it, instead of making so much of such a trivial affair!" ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... proud man then, touched easily by trivial things. Agnes's pitying manner stung me, and the tone in which I wakened Effie was far harsher than it should have been. She sprang up; and with a gentle dignity most new to me received her guests, and played the part of hostess ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... remembered an interesting fact about Diana's Grove—there is, I have long understood, some strange mystery about that house. It may be of some interest, or it may be trivial, in such a tangled skein as ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... country. I say nothing of your mother's despair, of the anguish of your bride, if harm befell you: that you must know better than I can do. But I am a subject. I know what your subjects feel; and were you to neglect any safeguard, however trivial, in these remaining hours of threatened danger, you would be doing England a wrong which might ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... food and the like, and improper speeches, etc., they are of two classes, viz., those committed consciously and those that are committed unconsciously. All sins that are committed consciously are grave, while those that are committed unconsciously are trivial or light. There is expiation for both. Indeed sin is capable of being washed away by (observance of) the ordinances spoken of. Those ordinances, however, have been laid down only for believers (in God) and those that have ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... exclaimed. "If ever you saw a young woman who was glad and thankful to turn her face toward home, I am that person. I think that one of the heaviest crosses humanity has to bear is to have constantly to decide between two or more absolutely trivial conclusions in one's own affairs; but when one is called upon to multiply one's useless perplexities by, say, ten, ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... old days. He remembered when his boyish eyes regarded it as the crowning work of opulence and distinction; he remembered a ball given there on some public occasion, which was to him the acme of social brilliancy and display. How tawdry and trivial it looked beside those later and more solid structures! How inconsistent were those long latticed verandas and balconies, pathetic record of that first illusion of the pioneers that their climate was a tropical one! A restaurant and billiard-saloon had ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... were the brisk and impulsive movements; there was some change; but the moment of awkward hesitation was over and the light was bad; and, while strolling down the platform for my luggage, we chatted with constraint about trivial things. ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... uneventful history. It is strange how forgotten events and persons start out of the blank oblivion in which they seem to have been engulfed, as I fix my memory steadily on the past. I find it very easy, even fascinating, to call up the incidents, trivial oftentimes, but having for me a significance of their own, which lie in my past track like the broken toys of childhood. It seems as if the past was for each of us a great collection of negatives laid away, from which we can take positive pictures when we will—from many of them, that is; ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... the busy streets, seeing nothing around him. His memory was going over the most trivial incidents connected with Natalie, as if every look of hers, every word she had uttered, was now become something inexpressibly precious. Were there not many things he could carry away with him to the land beyond the seas? No distance or time could rob him of the remembrance ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... your pardon for these trivial observations: I assure you I could write a letter ten times as long, if I were to specify all I like in your work. I more than like most of it; and I am charmed with your glorious love of liberty, and your other humane and noble sentiments. Your book I ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... years when the best beloved of Robin Tremayne had known no certainty whether he was living or dead, but had every reason rather to fear the latter. Compared with a deep, long-tried love like hers, this sentimental fancy over which Blanche was making herself cross and unhappy was almost trivial. But Mrs Tremayne knew that trouble is trouble, if it be based on folly; she thought that she recognised in Blanche, silly though she was in some points, a nobler nature than that of the vain, selfish, indolent mother from whom the ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... life is so intimately interwoven with that of your neighbor. Existence is so safe, so sane, so sure. Fanny knew that when she turned the corner of Elm Street every third person she met would speak to her. Life was made up of minute details, too trivial for the notice of the hurrying city crowds. You knew when Milly Glaenzer changed the baby buggy for a go-cart. The youngest Hupp boy—Sammy—who was graduated from High School in June, is driving A. J. Dawes's automobile now. My goodness, how time flies! Doeppler's grocery ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... And so in this trivial matter of appointing a guardian for a poor girl, the probate judge could not ignore Adelle in the mass of legal verbiage through which such things are done. Who was this Adelle Clark? and what sort of person was this aunt who seemed willing ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... impatiently: "He knows history as no one else could know it. Nothing, however trivial, escapes his search, and his memory is so absolute, so precise in details, that were it known in New York that such a man existed, the people ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... we know what the quarry bedding is, how are we to keep it always in our building? You may lay the stones of a wall carefully level, but how will you lay those of an arch? You think these, perhaps, trivial, or merely curious questions. So far from it, the fact that while the bedding in Normandy is level, that at Carrara is steep, and that the forces which raised the beds of Carrara crystallized them ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... his manner, his presence altogether, inspired a nameless sort of shrinking, inarticulate apprehensions, and mistrust which the girl found at once utterly unaccountable and dismally disappointing; so that, with every wish and will to do otherwise, she found herself involuntarily making excuse of trivial interests to keep out of Victor's way and, when there was no escaping, sitting silent and ill at ease in his society, or seizing on some slender pretext, it didn't matter what, to inveigle into their company a third somebody, ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... account approximates to Luke's, while in the third he is nearer Matthew's. A comparison of the three accounts, noting the slight, but often significant, variations, should be made. Nothing in the Gospels is trivial. 'The dust of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... The vireo rings the changes sweet, During the trivial summer days, Striving to lift our thoughts ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... worn, and the straw hat, though beribboned, was not impressive. She was a bony little girl, with quick, greenish eyes and a meagre pigtail of hair of the hue that will often cause a girl to be called Carrots. Her thin, eager face was lavishly freckled; her nose was trivial to the last extreme. Besides her hat, she carried and now nonchalantly drew refreshment from a stick of spirally striped candy inserted for half its length through the end of a lemon. The candy was evidently of a porous texture, so that the juice of the fruit would reach the consumer's ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... stopped at the East Cliff Hotel at Cromer and made numerous and trivial inquiries about the Cromer golf links. They had come, they volunteered, from Ely for a day of sea-bathing and golf; they were returning after dinner. The head-waiter of the East Cliff Hotel gave them the information they desired. He was an intelligent ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... can give us a purge and clean out our stomachs; but we do not call an artist a gentleman, whom we expect to invent for us the face of Christ. When we have made that primary mistake, all other mistakes in education are trivial in comparison. The very notion of an art academy should be, a body of teachers of the youth who are to be the guides of the nation through its senses; and that is a very important means of guiding it. We have done a good deal through dinners, but we may ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... is aware that there is nothing so humiliating to a male pupil at a public school as to be called a "girl-boy." Hence, for trivial offences a boy is often punished by being sandwiched between two girls, and compelled to remain there until the offence committed has been sufficiently atoned for. Now young Willard was frequently guilty of talking during ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... from the roof of the hall—still she seemed to be carried along apart from it all; to be enclosed by something which emanated from the man who held her, and which isolated them both. Once or twice he made some trivial remark, but nothing to need thinking about; and when the music stopped she felt for a second or two a sort of dizziness—like coming too suddenly out of a dim room ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... stream. The officers were powerless to enforce discipline; when these breaks happened the column was forced to come to a halt until every man had filled his canteen—and here is one, among the many trivial causes, that brought about the reverses of McDowell's masterly campaign. A march that ought to have been made in twenty-four hours, or thirty at the utmost, took more than three days! One of those days ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... once have we met, And we spoke of trivial things, Of the changes a twelvemonth brings, Of late Summer, lingering yet... (Ah, how should a heart that has loved forget?) Traitors ever to thwart his will His eyes confirm what I half divine. A bitter, bootless victory mine, He cannot choose but ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... for seeming, like The Rhine Gold, the merest Christmas tomfoolery to shallow spectators, is the product of a talent immeasurably inferior to Mozart's own. The libretto of Don Giovanni is coarse and trivial: its transfiguration by Mozart's music may be a marvel; but nobody will venture to contend that such transfigurations, however seductive, can be as satisfactory as tone poetry or drama in which the musician and the poet are at the same level. Here, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... over which he himself seemed to have no control, had of a truth led him forward, so that he, too, stood not far from the old woman now. He had watched her—silent and rigid,—conscious only of one thing—a trivial matter certes—of Editha's inquiring eyes fixed steadily ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... commentary of the truth of what I am saying," snarled the old scientist. "How can a person know the worthwhile things when he stores his mind with such trivial—you know far too much of such ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... men were not the main intent of Machiavelli's thought. His care in detail, especially in fortifications, of which he made a special study, in encampments, in plans, in calculations, is immense. Nothing is so trivial as to ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... power of apprehending formless spiritual essences, of seeing the eternal in the transitory, and in the things which are seen the unseen things of which they are the shadow. I call Mr. Yeats' poetry spiritual when it declares, as in the lines I quoted, that there is no beauty so trivial that it is not the shadow of the Eternal Beauty. A country is religious where it is common belief that all things are instinct with divinity, and where the love between man and woman is seen as a symbol, the highest we have, of the union of spirit and nature, and their final blending in the ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... and for many years he abstained from both tea and coffee. In those peaceful times, moreover, there was nothing either commanding or captivating about the Professor of Artillery. His little romance in Mexico had given him no taste for trivial pleasures; and his somewhat formal manner was not redeemed by any special charm of feature. The brow and jaw were undoubtedly powerful; but the eyes were gentle, and the voice so mild and soft as to belie altogether the set determination of the thin ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... our thoughts and feelings are very shallow and trivial, that even the wonderful faculty of language is inadequate to express all that the soul can experience. No true orator ever finds sentences majestic enough to interpret the sentiments that burn in his soul. Deep, pure love is never able to put into words its most sacred feelings and emotions. ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... franchise of an Englishman, and that on which all the rest vitally depend, is to be forfeited for some offence which no man knows, and which is to be proved by no known rule whatsoever of legal evidence. This is so anomalous to our whole constitution, that I will venture to say, the most trivial right, which the subject claims, never was, nor can be, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... appointed to the conquest of Cuba, Cortes found outlet for his adventurous spirit, and in the Indian warfare of the island gave promise of the valour and activity which underlay a jocular and seemingly trivial character. At the same time he became accustomed to the barbarous methods of conquest and cruelty displayed by the Spaniards in those regions, and to the abuse of power and arbitrary jealousies and exactions ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... considerable education, and though in neither force nor astuteness was he the equal of James Peake, it often pleased him to adopt towards his friend a philosophic pose—the pose of a seer, of one far removed from the trivial disputes in which ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... younger maids timidly kept out of her way, and Kuni surpassed them in pride and looked down upon them, because her free artist blood rebelled against placing herself on the plane of a servitor. She did not vouchsafe them a word, yet neither did she allow any of them to render her even the most trivial service. But she could not escape Seifried, the equerry of her mistress's eldest son. At first, according to her custom, she had roused the handsome fellow's hopes by fiery glances which she could not ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Tree, "always seemed to me an epicure in life. He was always intent on extracting the last drop of honey from every flower that came in his way. He was absorbed in the business of the moment, however trivial. As a companion, he was delightfully witty; as a personality, as much a creature of romance ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... flickering shadows shadows, or—or had Kniaz, after all, spoken the truth when he said this valley was haunted? The moonlight rendered every object I looked upon so startlingly vivid, that not even the most trivial detail escaped my notice, and the more I scrutinized the more firmly the conviction grew on me that I was in a neighbourhood differing essentially from any spot I had hitherto visited. I saw nothing with which I had been formerly conversant. The few trees at hand resembled no growth of either ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... expense when they were introduced into France and South Germany and Italian vineyards, and were fought out only by what might be considered a magnificent effort on the part of the European governments, especially France. On our native wild grapes those diseases are almost trivial, and the wild seedlings in the woods are practically immune, but when we cultivate them and select the tenderer varieties, the black rot is pretty bad, especially on the Concord, and particularly when ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... never seen a gentler prince, nor yet one more splendidly lavish. The people had not only the necessities of life, but the luxuries, the superfluities, too. For days and days in the Forum there was an incessant shower of tickets that were exchangeable, not for bread or trivial sums, but for gems, pictures, slaves, fortunes, ships, villas and estates. The creator of that shower ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... roof and wall, Defend dark Night, though noon around her fall, From the fierce play of solar day-beams bright. But if she be assailed by fire or light, Her powers divine are nought; they tremble all Before things far more vile and trivial— Even a glow-worm can confound their might. The earth that lies bare to the sun, and breeds A thousand germs that burgeon and decay— This earth is wounded by the ploughman's share: But only darkness serves for human seeds; Night therefore ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... owns it! Hear, Earth and Heaven, he owns it! No excuse! No varnish, no disguise!—He will not stoop To use dissembling with a wretch he scorns, Nor thinks it worth his pains to fool me further! Proceed, brave sir, proceed! In trivial strain Tell me how light are lovers' oaths, how fond Youth's heart of change, how quick love comes and flies; And own that yours for me is flown for ever. Then with indifference ask a parting kiss, Hope we shall still be friends, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... composition of sacred music, of which he had already produced several fine specimens. He was wont to say, that this was an occupation 'better suited to the circumstances of a man advancing in years, than that of adapting music to such vain and trivial words as the musical drama generally consists of.' The truth was, he had discovered his forte. But the tide of fashionable feeling ran so strongly against him, that even the performance of the oratorios of Saul and Israel in Egypt ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... picturesque and significant of these events was the reconciliation with his old friend David Belasco. Twelve years before, through an apparently trivial thing, a breach had developed between these two men whose fortunes had been so intimately entwined. They had launched their careers in New York together; the old Madison Square Theater had housed their first theatrical ambition; they had kept pace on the road to fame; their joint productions ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... own. If she disliked a neighbour, she almost always disliked her for a reason which we saw, directly it was pointed out to us, to be just, but it was generally one which had not been given before. Her talk upon matters externally trivial was thus much more to me than many discourses upon the most important topics. On moral questions she expressed herself without any regard to prejudices. She did not controvert the authenticity of the ordinary standards, but nevertheless behaved as if she herself were ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... step was the most difficult but with a deliberate effort of will he accomplished it to his satisfaction. His secret thoughts he buried beneath a continuous mental preoccupation with the vain and the trivial. It was important to the success of his plan that his companions ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... labor of condensing from the immense amount of collected materials, accounts for the delay of the publication. As neither Mr. Thome nor Mr. Kimball were here while the work was in the press, it is not improbable that trivial errors have occurred, especially ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... edition, (being transcribed closely from the originals,) if compared with the letters already published, will prove that the latter are open to many corrections, both in trivial and more important respects. I have forborne, however, attracting attention to the deviations from the original text, either in Nissen or Jahn. I have no wish to be punctilious about trifles, where, as in the case of Jahn, the principal points are ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... interlineations, cross lines, and all other offenses against epistolary propriety. The letter "bespeaks the man." Letters of friendship should be colloquial, chatty, and familiar. Whatever is interesting to you will be interesting to your friends, however trivial it may seem ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... design, he will burst all bounds, and establish again the old truth that each of us will prove himself a fool given perfect opportunity. Nor need the occasion of this revolution be a great one; the most trivial event may produce the great fire which burns up ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Rome by the Pontiff before he had quite finished the tombs at San Lorenzo. He was received gladly. Clement respected this man like one sacred, and talked with him familiarly, both on grave and trivial subjects, as he would have done with his equals. He sought to relieve him of the burden of the Tomb of Julius, so that he might settle in Florence permanently, not only to finish the works already begun, but that he might ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... then, Smith," says Captain Dyer, smiling, "and, no matter what it is—if it is the most trivial thing in any way ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... since he joined the regiment. "If we call the old man Squeers we should dub Billy Mark Tapley," said Gordon one day, when the lad had laughed off the effect of an unusually acrimonious rasping over a trivial error in the Guard Report book. "He's no end kind when a fellow's in a fix," said Gray, in explanation, "and all the time he was soaking me I was thinking how he stood by Jimmy Carson in his scrape"—a serious scrape it was, too, for young Carson, detailed ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... to my dying day, the effect produced upon me by the first half of this ascent. The day was as bright and beautiful as ever shone out of heaven. Hot it was, but not intensely so, for the sun's power was yet trivial; and as the winds were hushed, except when from time to time a light breeze rustled among the foliage of the pine-woods, the stillness that prevailed around struck me as something quite sublime. In proportion as we rose, likewise, above the level of the valley, every sight and sound appeared ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... it was impossible for her to say what she did not feel, however trivial the occasion; and upon Elinor therefore the whole task of telling lies when politeness required it, always fell. She did her best when thus called on, by speaking of Lady Middleton with more warmth than she felt, though with far ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... little incident (hourly of course repeated, and trivial to all sea-going people) I own I was immensely moved, and never can think of it but with a heart full of thanks and awe. We trust our lives to these seamen, and how nobly they fulfil their trust! They are, under heaven, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Drew's opinion. He would never allow me the pleasure of indulging in any flights of fancy over these trivial adventures of ours. He would never let me set them off against "the heroic background" of Paris. As for Paris, we saw nothing of war there, he would say, except the lighter side, the homecoming, leave-enjoying side. We needed to know more of the horror and the tragedy of it. We needed ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... under the control of the governor of the province of Gran Chaco, in spite of the protests of the French consul. Here they were treated with the utmost cruelty. They were bastinadoed and otherwise punished for the most trivial offences. Many died under these inflictions. Of the few survivors some endeavored to escape through the forests of Gran Chaco to Bolivia and Peru. Three were caught, brought back and tortured, while the others, of whom no tidings were ever received afterward, probably perished ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... flowing eloquence would have seemed as far from affecting my life as the source and flow of the sacred Ganges, and yet it was some trivial irritation of it that kept us from hearing his philosophy that night, and, more important to me, that sent another to expound ideas far different than could ever have come from the famous thinker. All the college, all ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... despised him, was now becoming his servant, in the sense in which Christ was the "servant" of his brethren. Not with any conscious Christian intention—far from it; but still under a kind of mysterious compulsion. The humblest duties, the most trivial anxieties, where Radowitz was concerned, fell, week by week, increasingly to Falloden's portion. A bad or a good night—appetite or no appetite—a book that Otto liked—a visit that amused him—anything ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... observed the fact that many of life's grimmest battles and deepest tragedies scarce ripple the surface of trivial things? We are always rubbing elbows with the big issues and never knowing anything about it. Certainly no one at the Double Cross guessed what was always in the mind of the foreman. Jim thought he was "sore" because of Dick. Dick thought Ford was jealous of him, and trying to think of some scheme ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... was ready, and with a good supply of resinous boughs cut into lengths for torches, we lit up and embarked upon our return journey, to find that what had looked so terrible through the darkness of ignorance was a perfectly trivial affair. It was through resounding cavern and winding tunnel, shrouded in gloom, but utterly wanting in terrors and difficulties, being merely the gliding down a subterranean stream out into broad ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... want to be mewed up here, while others are out where thrones and empires are sweeping by! I do not want to parse verbs, add fractions, and mark ledgers, while others are the poets, the singers, the statesmen, the rulers, and the wealth-controllers of the world! We wish to step out of the trivial experience into that which is significant. Each day brings uneasiness of soul. "Man's unhappiness," says Carlyle, "as I construe it, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which with all his cunning he ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... forgive Albert his lackeys and his valet. He forgot the words of the illustrious duke, who said, "I pay my lackeys to be insolent, to save myself the trouble and ridicule of being so." Old Tabaret was surprised at his young friend's display of bitterness, in speaking of these trivial details. ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... a Tuscan order of priests, who attempted to predict futurity by observing the beasts offered in sacrifice. They formed their opinions most commonly from inspecting the entrails, but there was no circumstance too trivial to escape their notice, and which they did not believe in some degree portentous. The arusp'ices were most commonly consulted by individuals; but their opinions, as well as those of the augurs, were taken on all important affairs of state. The arusp'ices ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... just why I'm a bit slow in this matter," he said, manfully. "It may seem a trivial reason to you, Governor Waymouth. I stopped to wonder how it would affect my friendship with the Presson family if I ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... to be able to exchange the trivial, yet important, little confidences in which fourth-graders indulge when teacher's back is turned, or to win her quick, flashing smile as a reward for sharpening her pencil or for judicious prompting ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... not serious.[319] In England, Power has investigated the relations of the sexual system to eye disease. He is inclined to think that the effects of masturbation have been exaggerated, but he believes that it may produce such for the most part trivial complaints as photopsisae, muscsae, muscular asthenopia, possibly blepharospasm, and perhaps conjunctivitis. He goes on, however, to point out that more serious complaints of the eye are caused by excess in normal coitus, by sexual ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... away, because—how trivial it looked to him now, and how childish seemed his conduct—because he thought his father too hard on him; would not allow him enough liberty; wanted to dictate to this man of sixteen; he intended to show him that he ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... bitter realisation. Her whole happiness had been ruined—utterly and remorselessly, because she and Tony had missed the train at the Dents de Loup. It seemed incredible! Such a trivial, unimportant small happening to have brought the whole fabric of a man's and woman's happiness toppling headlong to the ground! A little hysterical sound—half laugh, half sob—escaped her. And Brett— She could hardly endure to think of him. It was past belief that any man ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... ane and the other." Vautr. edit. has, "either the one or the other." Some other trivial differences in this ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... natural size, and make a noise that sounded as if she had tried to say something and the word caught on a hook in her throat, she was ready to sit. Having three feathered animals in this condition, and having coaxed Steve into buying some Plymouth Rock eggs at the trivial sum of three dollars a sitting, Nannie proceeded to capture the hens and put them upon nests of her own placing, wholly ignorant of the fact that if there is one thing above all others in which a hen ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... kind of literature they liked and the comments they made on it; he had expected that with the education they had received, and with their experience of the seriousness of life, they would prefer something less trivial. He supposed, however, that a romantic love-story, where a poor American girl marries an English lord, formed a refuge for them from the real world which promised them so little and held them so cheap. It was quite useless for one to try to make him realize his behavior in consorting with servants ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... not know it at the time. She had enough to bear—her own distress over the loss of the doll, and the reproaches of Serena and her mother. They agreed that the loss of the doll served her right for her disobedience, and that nothing should be said to Joe West. They also thought the affair too trivial to fuss over. Lily Rosalie even in her designer's eyes was not what she was ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... nose and a certain, startled expression of the eyes, worry me. But the little Soeur Victoire says comfortingly that he will soon be well, though he does not wish to eat and his jaws are a little stiff. O, chere Soeur, in your sweet faith, are stiffened jaws such a trivial circumstance? ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... than my personal adventures. But in that part of my life which may be considered relatively of a public character, or in which events of a public interest occurred, I have ample record made at the time. In what is peculiar to myself, and so of relatively trivial moment, dates and the order of events are of little importance. It occurred to me in the connection, that to give a human document of Puritan family life, and the development of a mind from the archaic severity ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... brought no light, and her going out had left nothing dark. She was old and ill-tempered and bitter of speech, and, though all doors opened hospitably at her approach, all closed quickly when she was gone. Her spoiled youth had left her sensitive to trivial stings, unforgivable to fancied wrongs. In a childish oversight she detected hidden malice and implacable hate in a thoughtless jest. Her bitterness and her years waxed greater together, and she lost alike her youth and her self-control. ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... calculating brain may be used for statesmanship or science, or merely for gambling. You, we will say, have a true eye and a cunning hand; will you use them on the passing fashion of the hour—the morbid, the trivial, the insincere—or in illustrating the eternal truths and dignities, the heroisms and sanctities of life, and its ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... letters and stores. Meanwhile, as the traders are going to Casembe's, he accompanies them thither. Casembe he finds to be a fierce chief, who rules his people with great tyranny, cutting off their ears, and even their hands, for the most trivial offenses. Persons so mutilated, seen in his village, excite a feeling of horror. This chief was not one easily got at, but Livingstone believed that he gained an influence with him, only he could not quite overcome his prejudice against him. The year 1867 ended with ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... of the Sila was Gaetano Ricca. On account of some trivial misunderstanding with the authorities, this man was compelled in the early eighties to take to the woods, where he lived a wild life (alla campagna; alla macchia) for some three years. A price was set on his head, but his daring and knowledge ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... that many mothers make the sad mistake of showing the child that they are shocked by trivial sayings and trifling experiences of their little people. If we could only get it into our heads for once and for all that our children are born into this world veritable little thieves and falsifiers, as well as ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... cheese was brought, Mr. Jessup left them on a trivial pretext, and absented himself so long that at length she began to wonder what would happen if he had "done a bilk," and left them to discharge the score. The waiter hovered around, nicking at the side-tables with his napkin and brushing them ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... for the words seemed trivial and out of place in face of the effect the girl's appearance had on him, but ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... of course, no hope of salvation. Help that arrived now would be too late. Lourdes would be teeming. The trivial round of Pau would be in full blast. The possible passage of another car would spare us—me particularly—some ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... for the preponderance of the trivial in the affairs of life, all women and nearly all men would believe in Fate. This is borne out by the evidence of great men, who are fatalists one and all—or who were so until these modern, ultrapsychologic days in which overthinking ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... at my destined haven, and, what is very unusual for me, have been successful in several trivial circumstances, such as getting over the ferry (which is difficult at this season), finding temporary quarters for my chevaux without difficulty or delay. I cannot help regarding these as harbingers of good luck. I am, however, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... position, so many provincial autocrats, brought constantly into conflict with the popular body, and unable to conceive any system of government possible that did not place the province directly under the control of the imperial authorities, to whom appeals must be made in the most trivial cases of doubt or difficulty. The representative of the crown brooked no interference on the part of the assembly with what he considered his prerogatives and rights, and as a rule threw himself into the arms of ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... provide for his work. It astonished him to find how reluctant he was to return; he seemed to have found the sort of life he needed in this quiet place. He had walked with the Vicar, and had been deluged with interesting particulars about the parish. Much of it was very trivial, but Howard saw that the Vicar had a real insight into the people and their ways. He had not seen Maud again to speak to, and it vexed him to find how difficult it was to create occasions for meeting. His mind and imagination had been taken captive by the girl; he thought of her constantly, ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... you to waive it. You see, questions about me are so comparatively trivial. What sort of ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... gauntlet for the actual ownership of man by man. Even Russia never fought for serfdom, and Austria has only enslaved nations, not individuals. In civil wars, especially, all historic divergences have been trivial compared to ours, so far as concerned the avowed principles of strife. In the French wars of the Fronde, the only available motto for anybody was the Tout arrive en France, "Anything may happen in France," which gayly recognized the absurd chaos of the conflict. In the English civil ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... cutting up the carcass of the animal, they discovered it had been shot at by hunters not more than a week previously, as an arrow-head and a musket-ball were still in the wounds. Under other circumstances such a matter would have been regarded as trivial, but as they knew the Snake Indians had no guns, the presence of the bullet indicated that the elk could not have been wounded by one of them. They were aware that they were on the edge of the Blackfeet country, and as these savages were supplied with firearms, it was surmised ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... kind, or it may mean stronger in the sense of the capacity to perform feats of strength. It being commonly assumed that vitality and muscularity are identical, this distinction is, on that assumption, merely academic and trivial. But as muscularity and vitality are not identical, and have indeed very little to do with each other, and as muscularity may even in certain conditions prejudice vitality, the distinction is not ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... and gesticulation was quite uncalled for. It is remarkable, however, how much may be done by mere action and intonation to impress the listener with the idea that the speaker must be a person of uncommon intelligence. But when half a dozen such talkers are engaged in discussion upon some trivial topic, and each employs the same means to enforce his views upon the rest (this occurs nightly in the cafes at Cahors), the Northerner is inclined to think that they are all mad. The wiry old man explained to me, in order to account for the ease and agility ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners. We have no right to purge the popular Press of all that we think vulgar or trivial. Dr. Horton may possibly loathe and detest Limericks just as I loathe and detest riddles; but I have no right to call them flippant and unprofitable; there are wild people in the world who like riddles. I am so afraid of this movement passing off into mere formless rhetoric and platform passion ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... occupied with politics and aggrandizement ever to become cultured. In spite of this heritage from the Greeks, decadence took place among the Arabs, and, as the centuries go on, what they do becomes more and more trivial, and their writing has less significance. Just the opposite happened in Europe. There, there was noteworthy progressive development until the magnificent climax of thirteenth century accomplishment was reached. It is often ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... Iscariot had notice (for those assemblies were public and notorious) he ran from Bethany, and offered himself to betray his Master to them, if they would give him a considerable reward. They agreed for thirty pieces of silver.' In a case so memorable as this, nothing is or can be trivial; and even that curiosity is not unhallowed which has descended to inquire what sum, at that era of Jewish history, this expression might indicate. The bishop replies thus:—'Of what value each piece was, is uncertain; but ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... Kagekatsu, the lord of Echigo and Aizu. He had retired to Aizu after having solemnly made a covenant(192) with the others engaged in the plot to take measures against Ieyasu. He was summoned to Kyoto to pay his respects to the emperor, but on some trivial excuse he declined to come. Ieyasu now saw that nothing but war would settle the disputes which had arisen. He repaired to Yedo and to Shimotsuke, and made preparations for the conflict which he ...
— Japan • David Murray
... feelings. In a halting way they may sometimes say a word of that nature to another boy, or pal, but before a girl, however much she may move their compassion, they remain dumb. I remember, when my age was about nine, the case of a quarrel about some trivial matter I once had with my closest friend, a boy of my own age who, with his people, used to come yearly on a month's visit to us from Buenos Ayres. For three whole days we spoke not a word and took no notice of each other, whereas before we had been inseparable. ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... in their favour observed? They are rendered nugatory in trivial as in serious cases. By a late act, Catholic chaplains are permitted in gaols, but in Fermanagh county the grand jury lately persisted in presenting a suspended clergyman for the office, thereby evading the statute, notwithstanding the most pressing ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... and again is to avoid all fine writing, all descriptions of mere scenery and trivial events. What the world wants are racy, real, genuine scenes, and the more out of the way the better. Poetry is utterly to be avoided. If Apollo were to come down from Heaven, John Murray would not take his best manuscript as a gift. Stick to yourself, to what you have ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... prepared and written. There is no undue invasion, which a son's pride might be apt to make, of domestic privacy, and no dealing with irrelevant topics or elaboration of those set forth with becoming modesty and restraint; far less is there the discussion of any subject, for a trivial or vain purpose. Throughout the work we meet with no unnecessary lifting of veils or treatment of themes merely to satisfy morbid curiosity. Everywhere there is the evidence of sound judgment, unimpeachable taste, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... importance of the subject on which he spoke. But when I tried to reconstruct from the ashes of my industrious notes the mental conflagration which I had witnessed, I was at a complete loss to understand what had happened. The records were not only dull, they seemed essentially trivial, and almost overwhelmingly unimportant. But the magic had been there. Apart from the substance, the performance had been literally enchanting. I do not honestly believe that Mr. Gladstone was a man of great intellectual force, or even of very deep emotions. He was a man of ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pointed unwittingly the significance of that trivial matter on the same night. He dined at the house of an old friend, and after the ladies had gone he moved up into the next chair, and so sat beside a weary-looking official from the Punjab named ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... exceptional crises in life, in the moments of intense insight or emotion which philosophy calls knowledge and religion faith, the weight of custom falls away, the truth breaks through the veil, and the most trivial object or accident comes to reflect in itself the whole system of nature or the whole providence of God. At such moments man realises that in order to live he must die, that in order to be free he must obey, and that only by surrendering his fancied independence ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... Europe. He was so far fond of nature that, anticipating the most recently developed of modern tastes, he ascended Mount AEtna and the Mons Casius, in order to enjoy the spectacle of sunrise. In his villa at Tivoli he indulged a trivial fancy by christening one garden Tempe and another the Elysian Fields; and he had his name carved on the statue of the vocal Memnon with no less gusto than a modern tourist: audivi voces divinas. His memory was prodigious, his eloquence in the Latin language ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... read the confused answers of Mr. Adams and note his apparent misapprehension of questions that would tend to involve him, and note the apparent failure of his theretofore wonderfully clear and exact memory of the most trivial and unimportant details, I am inclined to reject the whole story as a fabrication that has been punctured and fallen to pieces. . . . I find it to be impossible to rely upon the testimony of Henry C. Adams. Excluding it the will is ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... presence, the noise she made at work in the adjoining room, even with her silence, she enveloped mademoiselle in the despair that exhaled from her person. At the slightest word she would bristle up. Mademoiselle could not address an observation to her, ask her the most trivial question, give her an order or express a wish: everything was taken by her as a reproach. And thereupon she would act like a madwoman. She would wipe her eyes and grumble: "Oh! I am very unfortunate! I can see that mademoiselle doesn't care for ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... there were no divine and therefore natural law behind all that, why should that trivial incident, the crucifixion of one among the unnumbered host of vagabonds executed every year in the reign of Tiberius and the Caesars that followed him, how comes it that we are here today? Why are railways built and special trains organized and six ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... stated, in his reply (July 22) to a letter from Aguinaldo, that he had no authority to recognize Aguinaldo's assumption of dictatorship. The native swaggering soldiery, with the air of conquerors, were ever ready to rush to arms on the most trivial pretext, and became a growing menace to the peaceful inhabitants. Therefore, on October 25, Aguinaldo was again ordered to withdraw his troops still farther, to distances varying from five to eight miles ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... own inheritance, And stretching backward, dim and dimmer still, Is lost in a remote antiquity. Grapes do not come of thorns nor figs of thistles, And even a great poet's divinest thought Is coloured by the world he knows and sees. The little intimate things of every day, The trivial nothings that we think not of, These go to make a part of each man's life; As much a part as do the larger thoughts He takes account of. Nay, the little things Of daily life it is which mold, and shape, And make him ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... gliding swiftly through the squad room upset a stool with a loud crash. Yet few of the soundly sleeping soldiers bothered their heads about such a series of trivial noises. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... fresh heart from that trivial diversion of thought, and stood quietly contemplating alternately the hall below and that above (both of which were visible from my place on the intermediate platform; all was still in both of these wide corridors), to make sure of the safety of my enterprise; and now, once ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... problem than in the character of his dialogue. The whole tradition of structural technique rests upon a more or less arbitrary rearrangement of life. Othello, the noblest of tragedies, no less than the most trivial French farce, depends for the continuity of its mere action on an improbable artifice. Desdemona's handkerchief may almost be taken to symbolise that element in the drama which Hauptmann studiously denies himself. And he does so by reason of his more ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... require something more elevated; the assemblies of the people, something more spirited; and at the bar, public and capital causes, something more accurate. But a private deliberation, and causes of trivial consequence, as the stating of accounts and the like, need little beyond the plain and easy manner of common discourse. Would it not be quite shameful to demand in elaborate periods the payment of money lent, or appeal to the emotions in speaking of the repairs ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... the hedges that runs out at last upon the common. You may imagine the young people brushed up after the labours of the day, and making this novelty, as they would make any novelty, the excuse for walking together and enjoying a trivial flirtation. You may figure to yourself the hum of voices along the road in the gloaming. ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... snatch my prize away, Due to the deeds of many a dreadful day? A prize as small, O tyrant! match'd with thine, As thy own actions if compared to mine. Thine in each conquest is the wealthy prey, Though mine the sweat and danger of the day. Some trivial present to my ships I bear: Or barren praises pay the wounds of war. But know, proud monarch, I'm thy slave no more; My fleet shall waft me to Thessalia's shore: Left by Achilles on the Trojan plain, What spoils, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... slight tremor about the knees. The lady had a "grande revolution," as French patients say,—went home, and kept her bed for the rest of the day. Perhaps the reader may smile at the mention of such trivial indispositions, but in more sensitive natures death itself follows in some cases from no more serious cause. An old gentleman fell senseless in fatal apoplexy, on hearing of Napoleon's return from Elba. One of our early friends, who recently died ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... the path to play. This is commendable neither in poet nor errand-boy. The Metaphysical School failed, not because it toyed with imagery, but because it toyed with it frostily. To sport with the tangles of Neaera's hair may be trivial idleness or caressing tenderness, exactly as your relation to Neaera is that of heartless gallantry or of love. So you may toy with imagery in mere intellectual ingenuity, and then you might as well go write acrostics: or you may toy with it in raptures, and then ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... I desire that it should be as nearly perfect as may be. Most of the emendations are trivial and do not affect the substance—all are merely ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... place, fireth; changed often, it doth nothing. The purest joy we can experience in one we love, is to see that person a source of happiness to others. When you are with the person loved, you have no sense of being bored. This humble and trivial circumstance is the great test—the only sure ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... is an instance of that happy power of applying old stories, for which Mr. Windham, no less than Sheridan, was remarkable, and which, by promoting anecdote into the service of argument and wit, ennobles it, when trivial, and gives new ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... had obeyed an academic intention it seemed to March poor and coarse, as in the bronze fountain beside the Church of St. Lawrence. The water spins from the pouted breasts of the beautiful figures in streams that cross and interlace after a fancy trivial and gross; but in the base of the church there is a time-worn Gethsemane, exquisitely affecting in its simple-hearted truth. The long ages have made it even more affecting than the sculptor imagined it; they have blurred the faces and figures in passing till their ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... slave and men like him, players of farces, composers of indecent songs, written at the expense of their companions in the hope of raising a laugh—these are the men he likes and keeps about him. {20} You may think that these are trivial things, men of Athens: but they are weighty, in the judgement of every right-minded man, as illustrations of the temper with which Philip is cursed. At present, I suppose, these facts are overshadowed by his continual prosperity. Success has a wonderful ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... passed and Mrs. Pantin twittered brightly on impersonal subjects, introducing topics which evidenced clearly that her mentality was of a higher order than that of the women about her, whose conversation consisted chiefly of gossip and trivial happenings, Mrs. Toomey came to think that she was mistaken and that this friendly visit was ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... The trivial round, the common task, Would furnish all we ought to ask; Room to deny ourselves; a road To bring ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... a method of observing nature different from that of all the three and yet succeeding in everything which they had attempted, often in vain. Both Keats and Moore had an eye for the beauty which lay in trivial and daily objects. But in both of them, there was a want of deep religious reverence, which kept Moore playing gracefully upon the surface of phenomena without ever daring to dive into their laws or inner meaning; ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... across at his neighbor, he found the dark glasses focused upon himself with such fixity that he responded with a friendly nod, and, making some trivial remark, found Mr. Mannering not at all averse to conversation. A few commonplaces were exchanged until the arrival of Mr. Rosenbaum's order, when ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... my poor words do but paint you wrong, Nor can I utter, in one trivial song, The goodness I ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... farewell of a people and country that I love is that I shall always possess them in memory—a treasure which no one can take from me. As I look back over the quickly speeding year I find that I have forgotten those trivial incidents of discomfort which pricked my hurrying feet. All I can recall is the rugged beauty of the land, the brave and simple people with their hardy manhood and more than generous hospitality, and most of all my little bairns who hold in their ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... was finished to the regret of the servants, who had kept an amused eye on Antonio's performance, while pretending to be busy on some trivial tasks near the Patio or court. In her own room, the Senorita was faint with laughter as she watched Antonio dusting the two ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... godliness, and their noble adherence, in the face of obstacles, to the dictates of their consciences, that their wills were not developed past the reasonable limit of nature. What wonder is it that their descendants inherit this peculiarity, though they may develop it for much less worthy and more trivial causes than the exiling themselves for a question of faith, even the carrying-out of personal ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... what hath been before-mentioned, and common to them with the Mountebank, viz. Vapouring and braging of their skill, and decrying Physicians, by talking above the Capacity of those they converse with, who therefore take all they say to be authentick, though never so absurd, and trivial, and many times to set off themselves they will venture to speak Latine commonly as false as the matter, although some of them at Coffee-Houses, and in other mixt Companies, by venturing so boldly have been met with and baffled, and made to depart thence with shame and discredit enough, which ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... began that Wednesday afternoon seems, as I look back to it now, a bit of the remote past, instead of seven days of a year ago. Its happenings, important and wonderful as they were, seem trivial and tame compared with those which came afterward. And yet, at the time, that week was a season of wild excitement and delightful anticipation for Hephzibah, and of excitement not unmingled with doubts and misgivings for me. For us both it was a busy week, ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Is—er—Mr. Johnson at home?" He came near saying "Take-Notice," but caught himself in time. Take-Notice Johnson was what men called the man whom Andy had ridden over to see upon a more or less trivial matter. ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... passed through many trivial vicissitudes, changes of ownership, vexed land-titles, and royal encroachments. For several years the people had no visible government at all. They did not hold themselves so well in hand as did New York, and were less audacious and aggressive in resistance; but in one way or ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... and the other papers made much of the capture of Denison. Still, I was not prepared for the host of Maiden Lane cases that followed. Many of them were essentially trivial. But one proved to ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... absurd if I had asked where we were going, so I held my tongue, for at such moments a man should take heed to his words. Branicki was silent, and I thought the best thing I could do would be to engage him in a trivial conversation. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the minds of our people a new appreciation of the problems of national life and a deeper understanding of the meaning and aims of democracy. Matters which heretofore have seemed commonplace and trivial are seen in a truer light. The urgent demand for the production and proper distribution of food and other national resources has made us aware of the close dependence of individual on individual and nation on nation. The effort to keep up social and industrial organizations, ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... for his amusement, he gives him to understand that he looks on his fidelity as only securable by the bastinado, and makes him the subject of his practical jokes. The respectable giant Morgante dies of the bite of a crab, as if to spew on what trivial chances depends the life of the strongest. Margutte laughs himself to death at sight of a monkey putting his boots on and off; as though the good-natured poet meant at once to express his contempt of a merely and grossly anti-serious mode of existence, and his ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... done yet; but it has mainly touched the details, not the general principles. The system is wonderfully complete for its own ends, and the more one studies it the less one sneers. Many a form which at first seems to the volunteer officer merely cumbrous and trivial he learns to prize at last as almost essential to good discipline; he seldom attempts a short cut without finding it the longest way, and rarely enters on that heroic measure of cutting red-tape without finding at last that he has entangled his own ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... madame Wang speedily suggested addressing Pao-yue, "change it and have done; and you, sir, needn't lose your temper over such a trivial matter!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... A rather pathetic incident occurred one day. Just after we had finished lunch three of us were seated, talking of the meals the "Australia" provided, when a fragment of shell came through the roof on to the table and broke one of the enamel plates. This may seem a trivial affair and not worth grousing about; but the sorry part of it was that we only had one plate each, and this loss entailed one man having to wait until the others ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... uncongenial; he must have joy of some kind, or he will fall into despair. The company and the joy can best be supplied by the wife to the husband, and by the husband to the wife. If the woman is dull and trivial, then her husband soon begins to neglect her; if she is meek and submissive, the neglect does not rouse her, and there are no violent consequences; but it is awful to think of the poor creature who sits at home and dimly wonders ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... in detail, which might have appeared trivial, the nature of the bottom of the sea immediately surrounding Keeling atoll; and I will now describe with almost equal care the soundings off the fringing-reefs of Mauritius. I have preferred this arrangement, ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... his unintelligibility, or imputed it only to the abtruse high nature of the topics handled. Let us hope so, let us try to believe so! There is no doubt but Coleridge could speak plain words on things plain: his observations and responses on the trivial matters that occurred were as simple as the commonest man's, or were even distinguished by superior simplicity as well as pertinency. "Ah, your tea is too cold, Mr. Coleridge!" mourned the good Mrs. Gilman once, in her kind, reverential and yet protective manner, handing him a very tolerable ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... although our readers may smile because he regarded the matter in such a serious light, they must remember that this was almost, if not altogether, his first sorrow; and we are far from believing the sorrow of a child the trivial thing it is generally considered, and perhaps but the beginning of ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers
... relations to some other essences. The air of presumption which there might seem to be in proclaiming that mathematics reveals what has to be true always and everywhere, vanishes when we remember that everything that is true of any essence is true of it always and everywhere. The most trivial truths of logic are as necessary and eternal as the most important; so that it is less of an achievement than it sounds when we say we have grasped a truth that is ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... thousands of more or less hypocritical or more or less cynical persons annually visit the place for the sake of the probable catastrophe, and that I came late in the day to work myself up about it. There was in fine the TRIVIAL association, one of the vulgarest in the world; but which give me pause no longer, I think, simply because its vulgarity is so advertised. The revolution performed by Strether under the influence of the most interesting of great cities was to have nothing to do with any ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... was called away from London, with Mr. Westaby Jones, to consult in a matter of business. Mr. Westaby Jones is a member of the Stock Exchange and, amongst other trivial failings, he possesses one which is not altogether unknown in his profession. He cannot resist a small wager. On several occasions he has gambled with me and shown himself to be a gentleman of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... to take the tax off of whisky, so it can be sold cheaper, and be obtained in greater quantities by the masses. Any such great laws for the benifit of the nation, of course, would justify a change in the Constitution and the laws; but for any frivolous cause, any trivial cause, madam, we male custodians of the sacred Constitution would stand as walls of iron before it, guarding it from any shadow of change. Faithful we ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... man; there was something about those brown eyes of his that appealed to me. Also it struck me as odd that he should happen to be present on this occasion, for I have always held that there is nothing casual or accidental in the world; that even the most trivial circumstances are either ordained, or the result of the workings of some inexorable law whereof the end is known by whatever power may direct our steps, though it ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... of my predecessor, Polensky, I had found a collection of powder colors, grease paints, toupee-paste, spirit-gum and other materials which threw a curious light on his activities. On my return to the shop I made a few experiments with these materials and was astonished to find on what trivial peculiarities facial expression depends. For instance, I discovered that a strip of court-plaster, carried tightly up the middle of the forehead—where it would be hidden by a hat—altered the angle of the eyebrows ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... counterbalancing merits, and the mode of treating Home Rule purposely adopted in these pages has, it is conceived, two not inconsiderable advantages. The first of these advantages is that it diverts the mind from a crowd of personal, temporary, and in themselves trivial considerations, which, though they possess not only an apparent but also a real significance, are at bottom irrelevant to the final decision of the true points at issue. Whether, for example, Mr. Gladstone ought to ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... the gravest fault in this poem is the frequent intermixture, as in these two lines, of trivial thoughts and circumstances with those of a ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... known psychoses, constantly evidence a sort of paranoid habitus, a paranoid trend which is exclusively directed against those who had anything to do with their conviction and safe-keeping. The most trivial occurrences in their environment are endowed by them with a personal note of prejudice. The delay of a letter, the refusal to grant some of their unusual requests, an attendant's accidental failure to sweeten their coffee sufficiently, the slightest ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... well had never failed to interest and excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, I committed to memory its external appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also fell, at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I might have entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when a stiff ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... to pleasures in general, when he cannot deny that they are different? What common property in all of them does he mean to indicate by the term 'good'? If he continues to assert that there is some trivial sense in which pleasure is one, Socrates may retort by saying that knowledge is one, but the result will be that such merely verbal and trivial conceptions, whether of knowledge or pleasure, will spoil the discussion, ...
— Philebus • Plato
... to call this woman mother? Because by nature's law she has authority over me, am I to be trampled upon in this manner? Am I to be goaded with insult, loaded with obloquy, and suffer my feelings to be outraged on the most trivial occasions? I owe her respect as a son, but I renounce her as a friend. What an example does she show me. I hope in God I shall never follow it. I have not told you all, nor can I; I respect you as a female, nor altho I ought to confide in you as a sister, will I shock you with the repetition ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... Armenian's flowing eloquence would have seemed as far from affecting my life as the source and flow of the sacred Ganges, and yet it was some trivial irritation of it that kept us from hearing his philosophy that night, and, more important to me, that sent another to expound ideas far different than could ever have come from the famous thinker. All the college, all in Harlansburg who were well-to-do and wise, watched for ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... he lay there the rough loft and its straw seemed to pass away, for the background of his mental picture to become the park and grounds about the old Hall, on one of the old sunny days when he and Scarlett had had a quarrel about some trivial matter, and were gazing threateningly at each other after uttering dire words, and were declaring that everything between them was quite at an end, and that they were never going to speak to each ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... to the hermitage. In Master's presence my friend received such spiritual peace that he was soon a constant visitor. The trivial preoccupations of daily life are not enough for man; wisdom too is a native hunger. In Sri Yukteswar's words Dijen found an incentive to those attempts-first painful, then effortlessly liberating-to locate a realer self within his bosom than the humiliating ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... he never spoke of it. There was that side to it, too. It induced another order of reflection. He was so much in the habit of relating to her, partly for her amusement, partly for his own, all the happenings, both trivial and important, of each day, that his silence with regard to this one, which surely must be considered strange—strange, if no more—was noticeable. A wretched woman toward whom he was acting on behalf of a friend! It surely couldn't, couldn't be a wretched woman toward whom he was acting, ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... theory of aerial navigation. There is a long list of "don'ts" in flying; in the handling of one's machine, in the weather one flies in, in all the feats that one should attempt and leave alone. A number of details must be memorised, and must never be forgotten or overlooked, trivial though some of them may seem. The frame of mind of the man who flies must be alert, yet quiet and reposeful; he must be clear-headed, not hot-headed. The man who is in a hurry, who ignores details when he sets out on a flight, is the man who runs risks and is bound sooner or ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... hesitation Aram named a sum so moderate, so trivial, that the Minister, accustomed as he was to the claims of younger sons and widowed dowagers—accustomed to the hungry cravings of petitioners without merit, who considered birth the only just title to the right of exactions from the public—was literally startled by the contrast. "More than ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... know too much—too much to smile At trivial errors of the heart and hand, Nor be too proud to play the friend the while, And cease to ...
— All That Matters • Edgar A. Guest
... of all their honor when once the first step downward has been taken. The decree was passed, and Cicero finished his last speech on so poor an occasion. But though the thing itself then done be small and trivial to us now, it was completed in magnificent language.[223] The passage of which I give the first words below is very fine in the original, though it does not well bear translation. Thus he ended his fourteenth Philippic, and the silver tongue which had charmed ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... Seven Dials. In strength of lungs, it must be granted, the Italian easily surpasses the Londoner, for the Southern voice is positively alarming in its vigour and its far-reaching power. No one—man, woman or child—can apparently speak below a scream; even the most amiable or trivial of conversations seems to our unaccustomed ears to portend an imminent quarrel, to so high a pitch are the naturally harsh voices strained. Morning, noon and night the same hubbub of men shouting, of women screeching, and of children yelling continues for nobody minds noise ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... saw the trouble was not with the college, the trouble was with the young man. He had mentally dwelt on some trivial slights until he had got so out of harmony with the institution that he had lost the power to derive any benefit from it. No college is a perfect institution—a 5 fact, I suppose, that most college presidents and college men are quite willing to admit; but a college does supply certain advantages, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... Eleven years before, when Anna was a baby, Mrs. Livingstone had playfully told the captain, who was one day deploring his want of a wife, that if he would wait he should have her daughter. To this he agreed, and the circumstance, trivial as it was, made a more than ordinary impression upon his mind; and though he as yet had no definite idea that the promise would ever be fulfilled, the little girl was to him an object of uncommon interest. Mrs. Livingstone knew this, and whenever Anna's future prospects were the ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... strangely peaceful, idyllic day—all save its ending. Looking back on it, I know that the sun which set that evening went down on the last of my happiness. But it all seems trivial now. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... church somewhere in Europe of which it is said that if a certain brick were removed the whole edifice would fall in ruins. Pee-wee was not even an amateur engineer. That world-stirring consequences could flow from an act so casual and trivial as securing a fishing rod never entered his innocent and pre-occupied mind. He did not know that in the hasty calculations of Townsend all the component parts of this system of props and fetters were necessary one to another. He removed the brick and the cathedral ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... one of the fortunate four who lived through Isandhlwana. On this occasion his usual good fortune attended him, for though his horse was killed and his helmet knocked off, he was not touched. The Boer loss was very trivial. ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... Passions which will inevitably render them miserable? A thing which can never be otherwise whilst Women are bred up in no right Notions of Religion and Vertue; or to know any use of Reason but in the service of their Passions and Inclinations; or at best of their (comparatively trivial) Interests. ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... half an hour, talking at intervals in a constrained, awkward way about trivial subjects. Then as Easton did not come, Ruth decided to serve Slyme without waiting any longer. With this intention she laid the baby in its cot, but the child resented this arrangement and began ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... defendant, and the latter had threatened him. Was any one else present? Yes. John Bly and Mr. Louder were both present when he threatened to kill her husband. Charles Stevens remembered having a slight altercation when he was quite a boy with Mr. Williams; but it was such a trivial matter that he had forgotten it till now. Then she told that her loving husband feared he would be slain by Charles Stevens, and that he went away to New York city on a voyage, and that the same ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... spacious reading room, exclusively for the English papers. The love of news is at all times natural; but at a distance from home the mind is doubly anxious for the details of what is going on there, and attaches an interest to particulars which, under other circumstances, it would consider as too trivial to be worthy of attention. During my stay on the Continent, I felt very forcibly the truth of Dr. Johnson's observation, "that it is difficult to conceive how man can exist without a newspaper." I was, however, for a considerable time, forced to be satisfied ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... great influence for him, summoned a council at Constantinople in the year 867, to decree the counter-excommunication of the Western Patriarch. Of the eight articles which were drawn up on this occasion for the incrimination of the Church of Rome, all but two relate to trivial matters, such as the observance of Saturday as a fast, and the shaving of their beards by the clergy. The two important ones deal with the doctrine of the Procession of the Holy Spirit, and the enforced ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... seeing the living plant, to observe if it was not referable to some other genus; accordingly Mons. L'HERITIER, who, when lately in England, saw it in the royal garden at Kew, joined it to the genus Selago, retaining the trivial name of ovata, bractaeata would perhaps have been a better name; for though its ovate inflorescence may be peculiar to the species, its bracteae or floral leaves are so very singular that they constitute the most prominent feature of ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 6 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... Very trivial in Dr. Dunlap's eyes were the anxieties of some poor fellows whom he saw later in the day appealing to Colonel Menard. The doctor was returning to a patient. The speeches were over, and the common meadow had become a wide picnic ground under the slant ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... creative. They have observed the simple fact that the will to do anything can and does, at a certain pitch of intensity set up by conviction of its necessity, create and organize new tissue to do it with. To them therefore mankind is by no means played out yet. If the weight lifter, under the trivial stimulus of an athletic competition, can 'put up a muscle,' it seems reasonable to believe that an equally earnest and convinced philosopher could 'put up a brain.' Both are directions of vitality to a certain end. Evolution shews us this direction of vitality doing all sorts of things: ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... was uttered. In the same day he would be a Radical and a Conservative, devoted to the Church and a scoffer at parsons, animated on behalf of staghounds and a loud censurer of aught in the way of hunting other than the orthodox fox. On all trivial outside subjects he considered it to be his duty as a tradesman simply to ingratiate himself; but in a matter of breeches he gave way to no man, let his custom be what it might. He knew his business, and was not going to be told by any man whether the garments which ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... some time, and my duties, as he detailed them, sounded astonishingly light. Indeed, he paused occasionally as if seeking to augment them by the addition of trivial household tasks. ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... then from his small eyes at the white face in the corner. When they got out at the station, he offered Ida his arm and she took it half-unconsciously. The path was too narrow to permit of three to walk abreast, and Joseph sent Isabel on in front; and on some trivial excuse or another contrived to lag some little distance behind her. Every now and then he pressed Ida's arm more closely to his side, looking at her with sidelong and lingering glances, and at last he said, in a kind of whisper, so that Isabel ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... bookish, scholastic, solid, profound, deep-read, book- learned; accomplished &c (skillful) 698; omniscient; self-taught. known &c. v.; ascertained, well-known, recognized, received, notorious, noted; proverbial; familiar, familiar as household words, familiar to every schoolboy; hackneyed, trite, trivial, commonplace. cognoscible[obs3], cognizable. Adv. to one's knowledge, to the best of one's knowledge. Phr. one's eyes being opened &c. (disclosure) 529; ompredre tout c'est tout pardonner[French: to know all ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and with a half-lazy arrogance he answered, "Why should I try to create a personal and trivial future, when I can, without striving, merely survive from a far more glorious past? Listen, Mademoiselle, do you think as much can be accomplished by one short generation as by many? For instance, could a garden such as this be produced in the lifetime of one man?" He waved his arm ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... remember such a trivial circumstance, Mademoiselle. M. de Marmont saw me after that here as guest in your father's house. He was greatly surprised at finding me—a mere tradesman—in such an honoured position. Surprise ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... generations upon his back, the devout took no more thought of them than they themselves took thought of the devout. The life of Osiris, on the other hand, was intimately mingled with that of the Egyptians, and his most trivial actions immediately reacted upon their fortunes. They followed the movements of his waters; they noted the turning-points in his struggles against drought; they registered his yearly decline, yearly compensated by his aggressive returns and his intermittent victories over Typhon; his ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... his hand resting on the table, turned over in his mind the names and deeds of those who were accounted as his friends, but whom he suspected to be his enemies. He had close to his hand slips of paper, on which were written notes of the most trivial doings of those by whom he was generally surrounded; and the very spies who gave him the information were themselves the unfortunate subjects of similar notices from others. The wretched man was tortured by distrust; ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... Hear, Earth and Heaven, he owns it! No excuse! No varnish, no disguise!—He will not stoop To use dissembling with a wretch he scorns, Nor thinks it worth his pains to fool me further! Proceed, brave sir, proceed! In trivial strain Tell me how light are lovers' oaths, how fond Youth's heart of change, how quick love comes and flies; And own that yours for me is flown for ever. Then with indifference ask a parting kiss, Hope we shall still be friends, profess ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... than to behold a soft and tender female, who had been all weakness and dependence, and alive to every trivial roughness while treading the prosperous paths of life, suddenly rising in mental force to be the comforter and supporter of her husband under misfortune, and abiding with unshrinking firmness the bitterest blast ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... you not do this perfectly trivial thing for me? If not, say so now, and let us end this farce of pretending that you care a snap ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... for this, his spirits were good. If now and then he was appalled at what he, a shy fellow with no antecedents to recommend him and no persuasive powers, had undertaken, he thought of Olivia Guion. The thing he was attempting became trivial when compared with the possible ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... Sheridan, &c.' She said, 'Now you don't know the meaning of clever, Sheridan might be clever; yes, Sheridan was clever,—scamps often are; but Johnson hadn't a spark of cleverality in him.' No one appreciated the opinion; they made some trivial remark about 'cleverality,' ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of animal motion which degenerates into restlessness and buffoonery in the Neapolitan, or the native of Languedoc, assumes a more dignified character in the Catalan, who is certainly a gentleman of Nature's own making. One of the crew, a tall athletic fellow, was holding forth to the rest on some trivial matter with a varied and graceful action, which might have served as a model to a painter. The rest were at breakfast; but even their mode of pouring the wine on their tongues at arm's length, from the long spout of a sort of glass kettle, had somewhat classical ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... substituted without great loss. As between complete and accomplish, complete considers rather the thing as done; accomplish, the whole process of doing it. Commit, as applied to actions, is used only of those that are bad, whether grave or trivial; perpetrate is used chiefly of aggravated crimes or, somewhat humorously, of blunders. A man may commit a sin, a trespass, or a murder; perpetrate an outrage or a felony. We finish a garment or a ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... sensations, but how false and inaccurate the judgments we form of things! I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most excellent performances of genius, which I felt at that age from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible. Every trivial cause of pleasure is apt to affect the man of too sanguine a complexion: his appetite is too keen to suffer his taste to be delicate; and he is in all respects what Ovid says ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... with eager out-stretched hands, and in all these months she had not had one single regret, or one moment of longing for peaceful, grey-tinted England, or the friends with whom she had visited and hunted and done the hundred and one trivial things wealthy beautiful girls are accustomed to do in England, and who in her case had continued their social career without breaking their hearts or engagements on account of the monetary debacle of their one time companion. Her instinct ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... abnormally large proportion of the "unfittest" left as our residuum. But in comparison with the armies of the unfit systematically produced by our industrial system, the stratum of residuum deposited in the metropolis by the flood of immigration rolling westward, is too trivial to disturb the equanimity of candid observers. Only the perverted vision which leads New York's most famous charitable institutions to imprison beggars and kidnap the children of the very poor in the name of philanthropy, can so confuse cause and effect. If we were civilized, if we were doing the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... prognostication possess over every rank of society. Such scenes as that described in the Spectator, where so much unhappiness was created by spilling the salt, are still realized every day in nearly every family in Great Britain. All phenomena which cannot easily be accounted for, and hundreds of trivial incidents, are considered by the gravest as portentous signs of events to come. The coincidence of any event and its prognostic, though it might have been ten to one that it would happen, is received as evidence of their connexion, which it would be impiety ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... no doubt, but beyond that not much. In painting, after all, there is in the less important details something of the craft of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not mechanical is often trivial enough. I don't wonder, now," he added, with a suspicion of a twinkle in the eye, "if you imagine that one comes down here in a fine frenzy every ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... very angry, and yet all this is a trivial part of what we have a long time been discussing. The sudden glint of wealth in certain quarters has changed the aspect of even book collecting, that once most individual ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... ever you saw a young woman who was glad and thankful to turn her face toward home, I am that person. I think that one of the heaviest crosses humanity has to bear is to have constantly to decide between two or more absolutely trivial conclusions in one's own affairs; but when one is called upon to multiply one's useless perplexities by, say, ten, life is ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... oppidan of his day should have utterly ignored the supposed inferiority of the less wealthy section of the school, and looked on worth and high character as none the worse for being clothed in a coarse serge gown, is a fact seemingly trivial to ordinary readers, but very noticeable to Eton men. As a rank and file collegian myself, and well remembering the Jew and Samaritan state that prevailed between oppidans and collegers, I remember with pride that ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Genevieve, her melancholy gaze on George. Yesterday she would have had Emelene's childlike faith. But this stranger, who, for a trivial and tyrannical reason, had sent away ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... our one act, the previous work's his own. You criticize the soul? it reared this tree— This broad life and whatever fruit it bears! What matter though I doubt at every pore, Head-doubts, heart-doubts, doubts at my finger's ends, Doubts in the trivial work of every day, Doubts at the very bases of my soul In the grand moments when she probes herself— If finally I have a life to show, The thing I did, brought out in evidence Against the thing done to me underground By hell and all its brood, for aught I know? I say, whence ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... first knew him. His strange household of fretful and disappointed almspeople seems as well known as our own. At the head of these pensioners was the daughter of a Welsh doctor, (a blind old lady named Williams), who had written some trivial poems; Mrs. Desmoulins, an old Staffordshire lady, her daughter, and a Miss Carmichael. The relationships of these fretful and quarrelsome old maids Dr. Johnson has himself sketched, in a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Thrale:—"Williams hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of lime dust, which will collect in the pipes mainly at the points where they are constricted; and as the pipes will be of comparatively large bore until the actual burner is readied, it will be chiefly at the orifices where the deposition occurs. This cause, though trivial, is often overlooked. It will be obviated whenever the plant is intelligently designed. As the phosphoric anhydride, or pentoxide, which is produced when a gas containing phosphorus burns, is a solid body, it may be deposited at the burner jets. This cause may be removed, ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... been less like him in impetuosity and stubbornness. They became engaged, they made preparations for a marriage which was never consummated and for years was never definitely abandoned; mutual devotion is ever and anon interrupted by serious or trivial quarrels, and the imperfect relation drags on to the vexation of both, until Grillparzer as an old man of sixty takes lodgings with the Froehlich sisters and, finally, makes Katharina his ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the poor? we must answer that they include widely divergent types of character,—the selfish and the {12} unselfish, the noble and the mean, workers and parasites—and that, in going among them, we must be prepared to meet human beings differing often from ourselves, it may be, in trivial and external things, but like ourselves ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... some high stimulus to call into play her strong and well-trained faculties. Money-making, the natural sphere of man, has become a more and more absorbing pursuit, while the usual feminine occupations have become more than ever trivial and unimportant at the very moment when the feminine mind has taken a new start in its development. The woman who is fresh from reading Gauss and Pindar, and who has taken sides in the discussion ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... which every moment of his time thus necessarily bore, unlike most literary men, he was never ruffled in the slightest degree by the interruptions of his family, even on the most trivial occasions; the book or the pen was ever laid down with a smile, and he was ready to answer any question, or to enter with youthful readiness into any temporary ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Great Britain, by her vast wealth, her excited and protected industry, is enabled to bear a burden of taxation, which, when compared to that of other nations, appears enormous; but which, when her immense riches are compared to theirs, is light and trivial. The gentleman from South Carolina has drawn a lively and flattering picture of our coasts, bays, rivers, and harbors; and he argues that these proclaimed the design of Providence that we should be a commercial people. I agree with him. We ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... of whatever party. If such men will make a firm and solemn pause, and meditate dispassionately on the importance of this interesting idea; if they will contemplate it in all its attitudes, and trace it to all its consequences, they will not hesitate to part with trivial objections to a Constitution, the rejection of which would in all probability put a final period to the Union. The airy phantoms that flit before the distempered imaginations of some of its adversaries would quickly ...
— The Federalist Papers
... say everything was nearly perfect. As a result, satire tended toward personal whines, like The Curate, toward attacking tiresomely obvious objects, like the superficial chit-chat of Lloyd's Conversation, toward trivial quarrels, like Churchill's Rosciad, toward broadly unimpeachable morals, like Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes. It is understandable that many writers, such as Joseph Warton and Christopher Smart, abandoned satire ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... seeing it acted on the stage! We realized what Irish feeling was when we heard these angry cries, and noted how appeals that would have affected English partisans fell on deaf ears. I remember how one night in the summer of 1880, when the Irish members kept us up very late over some trivial Bill of theirs, refusing to adjourn till they had extorted terms, a friend, sitting beside me, said, "See how things come round. They keep us out of bed till five o'clock in the morning because our ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... was prolific, and which found their way to him. His quickness in detecting the drift of an author was marvellous. Two or three pages of a pamphlet were generally sufficient to put him in complete possession of the writer's object, while nothing was too trivial for his attention where there existed a possibility of its contributing a clue to the problems of his command. Not the least onerous of the doctor's duties was the deciphering of private letters found in prizes, a channel by which important public interests are often ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... "On trivial occasions any initiated man may personate Ukuku or issue commands for the family. On other occasions, as in Shiku, to raise prices, the society lays its commands ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... disgust at what he chose to consider a competition in assininity between his two old friends, turned from them to Betty with some trivial remark. As he spoke he was contrasting her with the splendid Zoraida and had he voiced the comparison Zoraida must have whitened with anger and mortification while Betty flushed up, startled. He would have said; "One is like a poison serpent ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... registrar sympathetically, "but I can't let you go. We're going to be very strict about this vacation. A great many girls went home early at Christmas, and it's no exaggeration to say that a quarter of the college came back late on various trivial excuses. This time we're not going to have that sort of thing. The girls who come back at all must come on time; the only valid excuse at either end of the vacation will be serious ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... quite content to think and speak about public affairs as I conceive best conduces to the interests both of myself and of the Republic. Moreover, I make this declaration the more openly and frequently, both because my brother Quintus is Caesar's legate, and because no word of mine, however trivial, to say nothing of any act, in support of Caesar has ever transpired, which he has not received with such marked gratitude, as to make me look upon myself as closely bound to him. Accordingly, I have the advantage of his popularity, which you ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... himself. Many people were indebted to him for his kindly services in the police station and the justice courts, for in those days Irish constituents easily broke the peace, and before the establishment of the Juvenile Court, boys were arrested for very trivial offenses; added to these were hundreds of constituents indebted to him for personal kindness, from the peddler who received a free license to the businessman who had a railroad pass to New York. Our third campaign against him, when we succeeded in making ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Holroyd was as guiltless as Mark himself of any intention to portray Mr. Humpage in the pages of 'Illusion'; he had indeed heard of him from the Langtons, but the resemblances in the imaginary solicitor to Dolly's godfather were few and trivial enough, and, like most of such half-unconscious reminiscences, required the aid of a malicious dulness to pass as ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... there will assuredly come of it such burning as, in its appointed mode and measure, shall shine before men, and be of service constant and holy. Degrees infinite of lustre there must always be, but the weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which worthily used will be a gift also to ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... was stern to the point of injustice, the most trivial offence did not escape his punishment, every evening he held a court of justice by which he had those who were accused imprisoned in the ship's hold, flogged, or shot. Yet there was one person whom he never attacked, Glasby. He spent whole nights in questioning him about his ...
— The Corsair King • Mor Jokai
... its vehicles of communication. Instead of the old-time masses of metal, or bands of leather, which moved stiffly through ranges comparatively short, there is to-day employed a medium which may traverse 186,400 miles in a second, and with resistances most trivial in contrast ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... Part of his great work. In the Second there was no longer room for such discussion. But he has supplied the place by garrulous reminiscences, personal anecdotes, incidental adventures, and a host of trivial details,— trivial in the eyes of the pedant,—which historians have been too willing to discard, as below the dignity of history. We have the actors in this great drama in their private dress, become acquainted with their personal habits, listen to their familiar sayings, and, in short gather ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... are, it will only be for some trivial ailment amongst the native people, and I should ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... authorities forgot their customary caution and encouraged the circulation of any story that told in favor of the American colonies. Little did they realize the impression that the statement of grievances—so trivial compared with the injustices that were being inflicted upon the Spanish colonials—was making upon their subjects overseas, who until then had been carefully guarded from all modern ideas of government. American successes were hailed with enthusiasm ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... apparently trivial acts in an uneventful life, it was decisive. As she expected, she met two or three of her late applauders, whom, she fancied, looked sheepish and embarrassed; she met, also, her companions looking for her in some alarm, who really appeared astonished at ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... lady—what would your friend's situation be if, as you put it, she 'got rid' of her husband on so trivial a pretext?" ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... comet's tail. But the swift-blooded Irishman felt himself caught away strangely and suddenly into another world. Out of the abyss of the subconscious there rose a gesture prophetic and immense. The trivial phrase and that intercepted look opened a great door of wonder in his heart. In a second he grew "absent-minded." Or, rather, something touched a button and the whole machinery of his personality shifted round noiselessly and instantaneously, ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... pontifex maximus, that the holder might not, if high office were added to the title, prove detrimental to liberty, which was then their principal care. And I do not know but that, by fencing it in on every side to excess, even in the most trivial matters, they exceeded bounds. For, though there was nothing else that gave offence, the name of one of the consuls was an object of dislike to the state. They declared that the Tarquins had been too much habituated to sovereignty; that it had originated with Priscus: that Servius ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... a loyal and venerable ex-slave as an artless exponent of freedom, freedom of conduct as well as of speech, the author of this trivial volume is perhaps not composing an individual so truly as individualizing a composite, ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... wanted with him? They had talked of Simla and the Moffatts. The conversation had gone in spurts, she looking at him every now and then with eyes that seemed to say more than her words. All that she had actually said was perfectly insignificant and trivial. Yet there was something curious in her manner, and when the time came for him to take his departure she had bade him ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... see for himself, all tend to fall at once into the production of bad blank verse. And here it may be pertinently asked, Why bad? And I suppose it might be enough to answer that no man ever made good verse by accident, and that no verse can ever sound otherwise than trivial when uttered with the delivery of prose. But we can go beyond such answers. The weak side of verse is the regularity of the beat, which in itself is decidedly less impressive than the movement of the nobler prose; ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... medical work is that it admits of organization, and consequently of the distribution of the work in such a manner as to avoid wasting the time of highly qualified experts on trivial jobs. The individualism of private practice leads to an appalling waste of time on trifles. Men whose dexterity as operators or almost divinatory skill in diagnosis are constantly needed for difficult cases, are ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... Arts, used and known as the Temple of Sculpture. The panels express not so much the historical Greek tradition - though they are, indeed, produced in the purest Greek manner - as they do the high spirit and ideals of Greek art, the devoted seeking for divine fire, the determined opposition to the trivial and the base. Each of the panels is once repeated. The panel of "The Triumph of Apollo" shows the fiery god of Inspiration, Music and the Sun in a procession of worshipers; his flaming wings are the rays of the sun. The panel of "The Unattainable in Art" might well be called "The Struggle for the ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... furnish the grandest, the most brilliant recollection of our whole lives. We felt at this moment that all our actions would engage the attention of the astonished world, and that every movement we made, however trivial, ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
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