... however, be insensible to the present outcry against the triviality and meanness, both of thought and language, which some of my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical compositions; and I acknowledge that this defect, where it exists, is more dishonourable to the Writer's own character than false refinement or arbitrary ... — The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth Read full book for free!
... This has very naturally followed, from a conception of our real life, as having an inaccessible security, 'hid in God,' as Paul said, whereby the accidents and vicissitudes of the personality are reduced to relative triviality. ... — Equality • Edward Bellamy Read full book for free!
... design. The just relation of scale between the building and all its parts was admirably maintained; the ornament was distributed with rare judgment, and the vigor of its design saved it from all appearance of triviality. ... — A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin Read full book for free!
... fifteen, of whom you spoke last week, but a form of slavery? Again, by way of climax, what will the Western world think of a country that permits a mistress to beat a slave girl to death for eating a piece of watermelon—as reported by your correspondent from Hankow? The triviality of the provocation reminds us of the divorce of a wife for offering her mother-in-law a dish of half-cooked pears. The latter, which is a classic instance, is excused on the ground of filial duty, ... — The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin Read full book for free!
... Tower on Campden Hill. I don't know whether Londoners generally realise how high it looks when one comes out, in this way, almost immediately under it. For the second it seemed to me that at the foot of it even human war was a triviality. For the second I felt as if I had been drunk with some trivial orgie, and that I had been sobered by the shock of that shadow. A moment afterwards, I realised that under it was going on something more enduring ... — The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton Read full book for free!
... have been more ill-timed and useless. But his gallant work of the coming night and morrow, when Hooker left him almost alone to resist the fierce assaults of our victorious and elated foe, was ample compensation for his subordinate share in the triviality and fatal issue of Saturday's manoeuvring. Nor can blame fall upon him in as full measure as upon Hooker; although he seems illy to have construed what was transpiring in his front, and what he reported may have seriously misled ... — The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge Read full book for free!
... with the adventitious position of woman referred to in another paper,[277] the feminine interests and habits are set so strongly toward dress and personal display that they are not readily diverted. Women may and do protest against the triviality of their lives, but emotional interests are more immediate than intellectual ones, and human nature does not drift into intellectual pursuit voluntarily, but is forced into it in connection with the urgency of practical activities. The women who are obliged to work are of ... — Sex and Society • William I. Thomas Read full book for free!
... walking along a country lane with an easy and conversational companion. That companion had been a part of his recent drama; it was the red-haired poet Gregory. They were walking like old friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about some triviality. But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, ... — The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton Read full book for free!
... to the florist, my lord. She has had a loss in her family lately, which perhaps accounts for the lack of triviality your lordship complains of in ... — An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde Read full book for free!
... flashlight on him and found his face averted; so rising and crossing to the other side of the cot, I again flashed the light to see if he seemed in any pain. What I saw unnerved me most surprisingly, considering its relative triviality. It must have been merely the association of any odd circumstance with the sinister nature of our location and mission, for surely the circumstance was not in itself frightful or unnatural. It was merely that my uncle's facial expression, disturbed ... — The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft Read full book for free!
... obtained a charming development of the gardener's art. Admirable, however, as are these miniature reproductions of natural scenery and consummate as is the skill displayed in bringing all their parts into exact proportion with the scale of the design, they are usually marred by a suggestion of triviality. In this respect, greater beauty is achieved on an even smaller scale by dwarfing trees and shrubs so that, in every respect except in dimensions, they shall be an accurate facsimile of what they would have been had they grown for cycles unrestrained in the forest. The Japanese ... — A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi Read full book for free!
... only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality at the head of the present war. Not the slaughter of ten million men can make the quality of the German Kaiser other ... — New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various Read full book for free!
... with but one advice,—be patient; say little; do as little as possible; and endeavor to appear insensible to their insults. I would say to you, if you will excuse the triviality of the comparison, imitate those feeble insects who simulate death when they are touched. They are defenceless; and that is their only chance ... — The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau Read full book for free!
... contemporary life in the Norwegian capital. It is a pale, and rather labored story, in which a young girl, of the Rosamond Vincy type, is held up to scorn, and the atrocity of flirtation is demonstrated by the most tragic consequences. There is likewise an air of triviality about "Adam Schrader" (1879); and Lie became seriously alarmed about himself when he had to register a third failure. Like its predecessor, this book is full of keen observations, and the sketches of the ... — Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen Read full book for free!
... blamed by French writers for frittering away the first precious months of his reign in dreams, or in the settlement of minor details, the triviality of which was in glaring contrast with the gravity of the issues before him. True as this criticism may be in theory, it is perhaps to be regretted—if we consider his Majesty's youth and inexperience, and his absolute ignorance of ... — Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson Read full book for free!
... exhibit of restlessness the American woman gives. To an unaccustomed observer she seems always to be running about on the face of things with no other purpose than to put in her time. He points to the triviality of the things in which she can immerse herself—her fantastic and ever-changing raiment, the welter of lectures and other culture schemes which she supports, the eagerness with which she transports herself ... — The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell Read full book for free!
... place around the world as we had done before, Satan showing me a hundred wonders, most of them reflecting in some way the weakness and triviality of our race. He did this now every few days—not out of malice—I am sure of that—it only seemed to amuse and interest him, just as a naturalist might be amused and interested by ... — The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain Read full book for free!
... a vein of the extremest circumstantiality. With deliberate malice I loaded a prolix narrative with every triviality that a fairly retentive memory could rake out of the half-forgotten past. I cudgelled my brains for irrelevant incidents. I described with the minutest accuracy things that had not the faintest significance. I drew a vivid picture of the ... — The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman Read full book for free!
... laughter is a result of the pleasure we take in escaping from the restraint of grave feelings. That this is a part-cause is true. Doubtless very often, as Mr. Bain says, "it is the coerced form of seriousness and solemnity without the reality that gives us that stiff position from which a contact with triviality or vulgarity relieves us, to our uproarious delight." And in so far as mirth is caused by the gush of agreeable feeling that follows the cessation of mental strain, it further illustrates the general ... — Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer Read full book for free!
... remained for two years, he had met the lady who was to become his wife. Mrs. Renfield was the widow of one of the diplomatists who languish in perpetual first secretary-ship at our various embassies. Her life had given her ease without triviality, and a sense of the importance of politics seldom found in ladies of her nationality. She regarded a public life as the noblest and most engrossing of careers, and combined with great social versatility an equal gift for reading blue-books and studying debates. So sincere ... — The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton Read full book for free!
... never triviality. If we want lightness of touch and wittiness, have we not Die Meistersinger, the greatest comedy in the world, or a merry piece like Mozart's Nozze di Figaro? Here is all the wit that one wants, yet the level is kept high throughout. ... — War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones Read full book for free!
... it kindled animation in the most cheerless or torpid of invalids. I cannot imagine that any memorabilia occurred during the visit; but I will use the time that would else be lost upon the settling of that point, in putting down any triviality that occurs to my recollection. Both Lamb and myself had a furious love for nonsense, headlong nonsense. Excepting Professor Wilson, I have known nobody who had the same passion to the same extent. And things of ... — Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey Read full book for free!
... excellence with intellectual emptiness, but also because he was a man whose glowing hatred of all injustice and sympathy for all suffering never evaporated in empty words. His fine literary perception enabled him to detect the genuine excellence which underlay the superficial triviality of Crabbe's verses. He discovered the genius where men like North and Shelburne might excusably see nothing but the mendicant versifier; and a benevolence still rarer than his critical ability forbade him to satisfy his ... — Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen Read full book for free!
... felicity of diction he surpasses anything of which Dryden was capable. The flaws in his style are mainly due to carelessness in the rimes and some questionable coining of words. He also occasionally lapses into the vulgarity and triviality which marred ... — Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats Read full book for free!
... thick-skinned Facts; Facts to be wrestled down only by the real vigour of Roman thews!—As for me, I honour, in these loud-babbling days, all the Silent rather. A grand Silence that of Romans;—nay the grandest of all, is it not that of the gods! Even Triviality, Imbecility, that can sit silent, how respectable is it in comparison! The 'talent of silence' is our fundamental one. Great honour to him whose Epic is a melodious hexameter Iliad; not a jingling Sham-Iliad, nothing true in it but the hexameters and ... — Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle Read full book for free!
... culture can grow forth. His own experiences lead him most frequently to the consideration of these problems; and it is especially in the tempestuous period of youth that every personal event shines with a double gleam, both as the exemplification of a triviality and, at the same time, of an eternally surprising problem, deserving of explanation. At this age, which, as it were, sees his experiences encircled with metaphysical rainbows, man is, in the highest degree, in need of a guiding hand, because he has suddenly and almost instinctively convinced ... — On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche Read full book for free!
... so convinced of the triviality of this amusement that to find at last that he had taken it in the most disastrous earnest ... — Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells Read full book for free!
... twenty-one kreuzers correspond with the three weeks which remained from the day of the dream to the end of the school term, and thus to the end of the treatment. It was obviously financial considerations which had moved the lady to refuse the proposal of the directress, and which were answerable for the triviality of ... — Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud Read full book for free!
... fall Saved by her confidence that she's small,— As what no kindred word will fit Is uttered best by opposite, Love in the tongue of hate exprest, And deepest anguish in a jest,— Feeling the infinite must be Best said by triviality, Speaks, where expression bates its wings, Just happy, alien, little things; What of all words is in excess Implies in a sweet nothingness, With dailiest babble shows her sense That full speech were full impotence; And while she ... — New Poems • Francis Thompson Read full book for free!
... island home has its history. The land is small, but the changes among the inhabitants, and the achievements of its heroes, have redeemed it from triviality, and made it among nations great and important. The deeds Englishmen have done, the afflictions they have suffered, the victories they have won, and the results that they have brought about, conspire to make every county famous for ... — Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope Read full book for free!
... at once that thought took hold of me with an overwhelming power—I saw the truth as I had never seen it before in my life. I saw how we live in society; and how social convention and triviality have us in such a grasp that it never even dawns upon us that the laws it dictates are not eternal and necessary! "You must be dignified, and calm, and commonplace," ... — The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair Read full book for free!
... England, a surfeit of materialism had produced a lack of high spiritual purpose in the nation at large; there was much confusion of ideas and ideals; and also much triviality, which was especially offensive when it masqueraded under some high-sounding name. An unhealthy sentimentality—the antithesis of morality—has gone hand in hand with a peculiarly sordid and repulsive materialism. The result was a soil in which various noxious ... — Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward Read full book for free!
... liked to dance with Missy because she was such a good dancer, and Jim kept wanting to cut in to get an extra dance with her himself. Somehow even the sting of the visiting girl's laugh and of Raymond's defection seemed to have subsided into triviality. And when Raymond came up to ask for a dance she experienced a new and pleasurable thrill in telling him she was already engaged. That thrill disturbed her a little. Was it possible that she was vindictive, wicked? But when she saw Jim approaching while Raymond was receiving his conge, ... — Missy • Dana Gatlin Read full book for free!
... American ships, or to import many articles from the United States, and given special privileges in the West Indies, had more than doubled their imports from the mother country; the amount rising from L379,411 to L829,088. These sums are not to be regarded in their own triviality, but as harbingers of a development, which it was hoped would fill the void in the British imperial system caused by the loss of the former colonies. The West Indies showed a more gradual increase, though still satisfactory; ... — Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan Read full book for free!
... the long-continued violations of law in the West, and for the horrors which resulted from his exploitation of the Indians, was Astor ever prosecuted? To repeat, no; nor was he disturbed even by such a triviality as a formal summons. Yet, to realize the full enormity of acts for which he was responsible, and the complete measure of immunity that he enjoyed, it is necessary to recall that at the time the Government had already begun to assume the role of looking upon the Indians as its wards, ... — History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus Read full book for free!
... week," says I, "while you were away in London, he ran young Richards through the lungs over some triviality, and they say ... — The Honourable Mr. Tawnish • Jeffery Farnol Read full book for free!
... have had experience of the unceremonious methods which Fate often chooses when communicating to us important arrangements. We have seen by what a little seeming triviality of an incident she may intimate that our cherished hope has been struck dead, or that the execution of some other decree has turned the current of our life away. It is sometimes as if she contemptuously sent us a grotesque and dwarfish ... — Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various Read full book for free!
... perhaps even with relief, at the first call of the larger life, the larger loyalty. Two tears stole out on to her lashes, and slipped down her check. Mere concessions to overwrought feeling, and she knew it; knew, in the depths of her, that she was no triviality, but a woman into whose hands power had been given; the power of things primeval that ... — The Great Amulet • Maud Diver Read full book for free!
... qualified for the work, but Mrs. Bunker was most kind; she would consider her offer and let her know, and left. She had decided already. The memory of her work for Eleanor Kemp,—the humiliation and the triviality of this form of disguised charity,—had convinced her, and Eleanor Kemp was a lady and a friend and a competent person, all of which Mrs. Howard Bunker was not. "I'd scrub floors first," Milly said stoutly, and straightway ... — One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick Read full book for free!
... has not until now been confessed by those who suffer from it or who are participants, as mere witnesses, in its tyranny. It is the obsession of man by the flower. In the shape of the flower his own paltriness revisits him—his triviality, his sloth, his cheapness, his wholesale habitualness, his slatternly ostentation. These return to him and wreak upon him their dull revenges. What the tyranny really had grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in country lodgings, where the most ... — Essays • Alice Meynell Read full book for free!
... imagines himself in his callow days and as he is foolishly instructed to regard himself by the more vinous and more hilarious of the old graduates who annually come back to a college to offer themselves—though this is not their conscious purpose—as an object lesson in the loud triviality peculiar and traditional to such hours of reunion. Adolescence, however, when left to itself, has other and very different hours which Mr. Tarkington shows ... — Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren Read full book for free!
... Jews—at any rate as it is set forth in their own sacred Books—is pre-eminently the history of a race singled out by an overruling Power for the education of conscience. To this bear witness the laws of the Two Tables, and most of those other laws, purely ceremonial, whose apparent triviality in some particulars is at any rate a mode of symbolizing what was the main object of the Lawgiver—keeping the heart and conscience pure. To this bear witness the indignant denunciations of their prophets, as ... — Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various Read full book for free!
... have been making a good deal of fuss about your being a young lady, now I think of it. Peter especially has been rather a nuisance about it, breaking into my most precious moments of triviality with the sweetly solemn thought that our little girl has grown ... — Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley Read full book for free!
... to ask him at once what the lost pages had contained, and why they had been cut out. The matter might be a mere triviality which he could explain in a moment. But on softly opening his bedroom door I found him sleeping, and Parnham (whom the strong light always burnt in the room rendered more wakeful) informed me that his master had been in a deep sleep ... — The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner Read full book for free!
... even after he had turned the key in his own door to find the light still blazing, betraying the fact of Helen's wakeful presence. He dallied over the triviality of hanging up ... — Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie Read full book for free!
... that I had some extraordinary ideas and ideals, and it has turned out that I am a most ordinary official, a cardplayer, and have no partiality for ideas of any sort. I am a worthy representative of the rotten world from which you have run away because you were revolted with its triviality and emptiness. Recognise it and be just: don't be indignant with me, but with yourself, as it is your ... — The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov Read full book for free!
... Nor is the case much better, if instead of waiting for the actual application of coercion, I act in obedience to authority from the hope and fear of the State's rewards and punishments. For virtue has ceased, and I am acting from self-interest. It is a triviality to distinguish, as Whig thinkers do, between matters of conscience (in which the State should not meddle) and my conduct in the civil concerns of daily life (which the State should regulate). What sort of moralist can he be, who makes no conscience of ... — Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford Read full book for free!
... old to be forgotten. Everybody agreed that it was second only to Rome. The African writers squandered the most hyperbolical praises upon it. For them it is "The splendid, the august, the sublime Carthage." Although there may well be a certain amount of triviality or of patriotic exaggeration in these praises, it is certain that the Roman capital of the Province of Africa was no less considerable than the old metropolis of the Hanno and Barcine factions. With a population almost as large as that of Rome, it ... — Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand Read full book for free!
... together, John Morrison and his mother, with the curtains drawn, and the clear fire glowing on the red bricks of the fireplace. The old lady, after her custom, was prone to silence. Since Hilda's death she had said little, sparing the occasion the triviality of useless words. That afternoon she had ridden with her son to the funeral, holding him up with her strength, fortifying him with her courage. But now that his wife was gone for ever, and the pleasant house was overcast ... — The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon Read full book for free!
... possess one's self of the actual mind of the individual man"—such was Macready's definition of the player's art; and to this we may add the testimony of Talma. He describes tragic acting as "the union of grandeur without pomp and nature without triviality." It demands, he says, the endowment of high sensibility ... — Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter Read full book for free!
... considerable surprise that afternoon. He had told Robert Black to find William Roper and bring him to him. He wished to hear the story he had told Lord Loudwater the evening before, for it might be of a triviality to make the hypothesis that Lord Loudwater had committed suicide yet less worthy of serious consideration. Black was a long while finding William Roper, for he was at work in the woods. Indeed, he had not yet heard that ... — The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson Read full book for free!
... that scarcely a single proof had been discovered of treasonable practice, and that the loyalty of the mass of the people was itself a sufficient guarantee against the impulses of the evil-minded. [299] Such was the impression of triviality and imposture produced at the Diet by this report, that the representatives of several States proposed that the Commission should forthwith be dissolved as useless and unnecessary. This, however, could not be tolerated by Metternich and his new ... — History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe Read full book for free!
... indeed, of these Romans d'aventures is surprising, and they very seldom display the flatness and triviality which mar by no means all but too many of their English imitations. Some of the faults which are part cause of these others they indeed have—the apparently irrational catalogues of birds and beasts, stuffs and vegetables; the long moralisings; the religious ... — A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury Read full book for free!
... of justice can any Queen have in her bosom who will send such a one back, to heap sin upon sin, to fasten the bonds of iniquity on the soul of my child?' Postage-stamps and postmarks and an old envelope! The triviality of the things as compared with the importance of everlasting life made her feel that they were unworthy to be even noticed. It did not occur to her that the presence of a bodkin might be ample evidence of murder. Post-marks indeed,—when ... — John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope Read full book for free!
... man and starved his moral nature. The scanty, slashed, ridiculous garments of the nobles and the wealthy betray an absurd poverty of taste and weakness of intellect.[49] One of the most striking characteristics of these small minds is their triviality; they are incapable of attention; they retain nothing. No one who reads the writings of the period can fail to be struck by ... — The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France Read full book for free!
... Her smile was somewhat wistful. "Nothing but silly imaginings." She laughed and when she spoke again her voice was as light as if her world held only triviality and laughter. "Yet there be important things to decide. What ... — The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck Read full book for free!
... et une depense toute royale, a pu reussir a m'ennuyer', shows how little he had realised the fatiguing effect of theatrical splendour too persistently displayed. St. Evremond finds juster cause for his bored state of mind in the triviality of the subject-matter of operas, and his words are worth quoting at some length: 'La langueur ordinaire ou je tombe aux operas, vient de ce que je n'en ai jamais vu qui ne m'ait paru meprisable dans la disposition du sujet, et dans les ... — The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild Read full book for free!
... misgivings as to the issue of his sickness, and felt the sources of life still springing essentially unadulterate within him. From time to time, indeed, Marius, labouring eagerly at the poem from his dictation, was haunted by a feeling of the triviality of such work just then. The recurrent sense of some obscure danger beyond the mere danger of death, vaguer than that and by so much the more terrible, like the menace of some shadowy [116] adversary in the dark with whose mode of attack they had no acquaintance, disturbed him ... — Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater Read full book for free!
... real definition, and finding that every letter in succession must still give something less than is received—that O, for instance, cannot give to P all which it received from N—then no matter for the triviality of the loss in each separate case, always it is gathering and accumulating; your hands drop down in despair; you feel that a principle of death pervades the machinery; retard it you may, but come it will at last. And a proof remains behind, as your only result, that whilst ... — The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey Read full book for free!
... is a revelation of the beauty of the English language, and it profoundly influenced Ruskin and other prose writers of the Victorian Age. It has two chief faults,—diffuseness, which continually leads De Quincey away from his object, and triviality, which often makes him halt in the midst of a marvelous paragraph to make some light jest or witticism that has some humor but no mirth in it. Notwithstanding these faults, De Quincey's prose is still among the few supreme examples of style in our language. Though he was profoundly influenced ... — English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long Read full book for free!
... hindrance; the fear haunts me. With such terrible real things pressing upon me, my imagination can shape nothing substantial. When I have laboured out a story, I suddenly see it in a light of such contemptible triviality that to work at it is an ... — New Grub Street • George Gissing Read full book for free!
... soul of his own which for sheer simplicity is something staggering. Vernede with an Oriental and inscrutable placidity varied every now and then with dazzling agility and Meredithian humour. Waldo d'Avigdor who masks with complete fashionable triviality a Hebraic immutability of passion tried in a more ironical and bitter service than his Father Jacob. Lawrence and Maurice Solomon, who show another side of the same people, the love of home, the ... — Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward Read full book for free!
... contrived, a year or two later, to work myself up into the wished-for state.... She was a woman in society, and with all the awe of that institution that Paulina lacked. Our relation was consequently one of those unavowed affairs in which triviality is the only alternative to tragedy. Luckily we had, on both sides, risked only as much as prudent people stake in a drawingroom game; and when the match was over I take it that we ... — The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton Read full book for free!
... folly of the thing offended him, and he was ashamed of his own eager speculation, as one who pores over the high-sounding announcements in the agony column of the daily paper, and finds nothing but advertisement and triviality. He walked to the window, and stared out at the languid morning life of his quarter; the maids in slatternly print-dresses washing door-steps, the fishmonger and the butcher on their rounds, and the tradesmen standing at ... — Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various Read full book for free!
... is a long thin fellow, one James Hart, noted for his aversion to the delicacies of the table and his dismissal of cookery as a triviality unworthy of the consideration of a serious man. ... — The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler Read full book for free!
... after effect of a good dinner, that dwindling away of pleasant emotions; perhaps it was the very triviality of the offense for which he was thus suddenly arraigned; at any rate, he lost his temper, and he was rather ... — The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath Read full book for free!
... motive is in the borrowing robbed of much of its dignity and beauty, and individualised in a fashion which, were any other master than Titian in question, would have brought it to the verge of triviality. Still as an example of his unrivalled mastery in rendering the glow and semi-transparency of flesh, enhanced by the contrast with white linen—itself slightly golden in tinge; in suggesting the appropriate atmospheric environment; in giving ... — The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips Read full book for free!
... other. Leaving out theological terms as far as possible, it is the subconscious feeling that one can be wrong with Nature as well as right with Nature; that the point of wrongness may be a detail (in the superstitions of heathens this is often quite a triviality); but that if one is really wrong with Nature, there is no particular reason why all her rivers should not drown or all her storm-bolts strike one who is, by this vague yet vivid hypothesis, her ... — Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton Read full book for free!
... of pathos is only adapted to elevated minds, playful satire can only be adequately represented by a heart imbued with beauty. The former is preserved from triviality by the serious nature of the theme; but the latter, whose proper sphere is confined to the treatment of subjects of morally unimportant nature, would infallibly adopt the form of frivolity, and be deprived ... — The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller Read full book for free!
... his impression of the triviality of the occasion: they all seemed desperately searching for that something he had lost and which was overwhelmingly important to him; and all the while the music stuttered and mocked and confused a tragic need. Or it was like a momentary release from deadly ... — Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer Read full book for free!
... There is not left any vestige of despair, or misanthropy, or cunning, or exclusiveness, or the ignominy of a nativity or color, or delusion of hell or the necessity of hell—and no man thenceforward shall be degraded for ignorance or weakness or sin. The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into anything that was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer—he is individual—he is complete in himself—the others are as good as he, only he sees it, and they do not. He is not one of the chorus—he does not ... — Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman Read full book for free!
... they go, but well within the bounds of that anatomically artistic expression which is the raison d'etre of sculpture and its choice of the human form as its material. But the character saves it from this category; what one may almost call its psychological interest redeems its superficial triviality. ... — French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell Read full book for free!
... things, when we remember that Puritanism, which means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always ... — Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton Read full book for free!
... himself, so he wrote to Goethe, before a different tribunal. Much that had seemed very good in prose would not do at all; for verse tended to invest everything with an imaginative nimbus which rendered triviality... — The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas Read full book for free!
... belov'd," and the solemn phrase that follows, in Tristan's death-scene. Apart from its influence on later composers, there is surely no more passionate, powerful, and moving drama in the world than "Don Giovanni." Despite the triviality of Da Ponte's book, the impetus of the music carries along the action at a tremendous speed; the moments of relief occur just when relief is necessary, and never retard the motion; the climaxes are piled up ... — Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman Read full book for free!
... little more uneasy than usual. In the beginning of dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from the mass of a magistrate's mind fell too noticeably. She wondered how a man like Mr. Casaubon would support such triviality. His manners, she thought, were very dignified; the set of his iron-gray hair and his deep eye-sockets made him resemble the portrait of Locke. He had the spare form and the pale complexion which became a student; as different as possible from the blooming Englishman of the red-whiskered ... — Middlemarch • George Eliot Read full book for free!
... she rode through the timber how it was she had been so quick to doubt this grave, unsmiling hillman upon such a mere triviality as the finding of a glove. And then she wondered at her changed attitude toward him. She had feared him at first, then despised him. And now—she recalled with a thrill, the lean ruggedness of him, the unwavering eyes and the ... — The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx Read full book for free!
... and if the cheerfulness comes at times near to being that of a martyr on the rack, while the fun is perilously apt to swing from themes that are nice for a lady's wit to others that are not so nice, and back to sheer triviality, what, in the name of a population of sand-flies and negroes, can you expect? It is much that so lifelike a picture of a region so desolate should be presented on the whole with sweetness and charm, when no better material ... — Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various Read full book for free!
... of the folly and triviality of all messages coming, or purporting to come, from the Unseen. I think here, as elsewhere, like clings to like, and we get very much what we deserve; or rather, to put it in a more philosophical and Emersonian way, we receive ... — Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates Read full book for free!
... no lack of literature on all subjects; Kant speaks sarcastically of "the deluge of books with which our part of the world is inundated every year." But the fatal defects of the poetry then produced was triviality and the "wateriness" of its style. Yet it was during the years that Goethe spent in Leipzig that there appeared a succession of works which mark a new departure in German literature. In 1766 Herder, who was subsequently to exercise such a profound influence ... — The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown Read full book for free!
... with the reflections which he ought to have offered upon her altar. That is what struck me as odd; not his neglecting to remember her in a moment of danger, since then we often forget everything except some triviality of the hour. But, of course, this is all nonsense, which I oughtn't to write here even, as most people have their own ways of being fond of each other. Also, it is no affair ... — Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard Read full book for free!
... the limits of incoherency and triviality, but it possesses considerable zest. But ... — Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin Read full book for free!
... Maries' College of Winchester at Oxenford", marks a very decided epoch in the development of English architecture. His works, in an architectural style found nowhere but in England, are the outcome of a mind free from triviality, and full of common sense. His buildings are admirably suited to their purpose, and at first sight they appear to be so simple in design that it has been suggested that Wykeham cared more for the constructive than the artistic side of building. It is true that he considered sound construction ... — Winchester • Sidney Heath Read full book for free!
... on matrimony but that sort of language sounds to me like a hysterical outcry from a person whose family is already tottering. It is at least certain that a great many of these cornerstones of society are tottering, and why? Because there dwell in them triviality and vacuity, which prepare the way of the devil. Who can think that intellectual divergence, disagreement upon great public questions, would disrupt a family worth holding together? On the contrary, nothing save a community of great interests—whether ... — The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper Read full book for free!
... our host and his nephew. The latter comes in for a good deal of my conversation, as most of my remarks have to be taken up and rebellowed by him with a loud emphasis, that contrasts absurdly with their triviality; and even then they mostly miscarry, and turn ... — Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton Read full book for free!
... literary circles, that they are maintained for a long time. As far back as in the time of Rome, it was remarked that often books have their own very strange fates: consisting in failure notwithstanding their high merits, and in enormous undeserved success notwithstanding their triviality. The saying arose: "pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli"—i.e., that the fate of books depends on the understanding of those who read them. There was harmony between Shakespeare's writings and the view of life of ... — Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy Read full book for free!
... walls plastered with religious prints cut from journals, even the ordinary furniture of everyday use—the little washhandstand with the common delf ewer, the chest of drawers that might have been bought for thirty shillings—lost their coarseness; their triviality disappeared, until nothing was seen or felt but ... — A Mummer's Wife • George Moore Read full book for free!
... faculty, which however, had shaped itself gigmanically only. Fond of quizzing, yet not very maliciously. Has a broad, black brow, indicating force and penetration, but the lower half of the face diminishing into the character at best of distinctness, almost of triviality." ... — Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson Read full book for free!
... passed it by weeping, and did not enter it; I glanced up at the belfry, and there hung the bell, shrouded in black, and its tongue tied back. Now I knew! Now I understood the stupendous calamity that had overtaken England. Invasion? Invasion is a triviality to it. It was ... — Innocents abroad • Mark Twain Read full book for free!
... temple of art is a lottery. The town that had welcomed her so wildly now went Elssler-mad. The gossamer floatings of this French danseuse possessed everyone. People courted trash and trumpery. Greatness gave way to triviality. This pitiful condition preyed upon her. The flame of genius never for a moment became less dim, but her eyes grew larger, brighter, more melancholy. Sometimes she would fall into a painful reverie and I knew too well the subject of ... — The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham Read full book for free!
... of this I won't be sure) more closely restricted by the accidents of circumstance and individual character; (2) as I have hinted, the Beach of Falesa has faults of construction, one of which is serious, if not vital, while The Isle of Voices, though beautifully composed, is tied down by the triviality of its subject. But The Bottle Imp is perfectly constructed: the last page ends the tale, and the tale is told with a light grace, sportive within restraint, that takes nothing from the seriousness of the subject. Some may think this extravagant praise for a little story ... — Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch Read full book for free!
... attitude of normal people. Such would still fain believe that the grave is not the end, but many of them are in a state of bewilderment and insecurity. On the one hand men have never grown reconciled to the heart-breaking triviality of death, never accepted this dispensation without a question, a hope, or, failing hope, a sense of rebellion; on the other, we have to recognise that we live in an age when multitudes have ceased to accept religious beliefs simply upon the authority of the Bible—when educated people ... — Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer Read full book for free!
... of sorrow to Jesus at the supper. Some of the Twelve had fallen into muttering dispute among themselves over the matter of individual precedence,[1191] possibly as to the order in which they should take their places at table, over which triviality scribes and Pharisees as well as the Gentiles often quarreled;[1192] and again the Lord had to remind the apostles that the greatest of them all was he who most willingly served his fellows. They had been taught before; yet now, at this late ... — Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage Read full book for free!
... opened the door of the Duke of Burghley's house. Fairfield, at the man's look of astonishment, remembered that he was unshaven, and that his clothes had been thrown on haphazard. It was a queer thought to intrude at such a time. But he was usually a scrupulously dressed man, and the triviality worried him. ... — The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest Read full book for free!
... nothing!" Durkin was growing impatient of this curtly condescending tone. It was the ponderosity of officialdom, he felt, grown playful, in the face of a passing triviality. ... — Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer Read full book for free!
... was not, and Mr. Alwynn and Charles departed together, Charles ruefully remembering that he had still to ask advice on a subject the triviality of which would hardly allow of ... — The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley Read full book for free!
... Quinny, preparing to annex the topic, "whether the situation actually happened or not, which is in itself a mere triviality, Peters has constructed it in a masterly way, the proof of which is that he has made me listen. Observe, each person present might have taken the ring—Flanders, a broker, just come a cropper; Maude Lille, a woman on the ragged side of life in desperate means; either Mr. and Mrs. Cheever, suspected ... — Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson Read full book for free!
... Tracy, it must be made plain that with all her faults, small spite was not a part of her character. Yet to-day, her anger had been stirred by an incident so small that its very triviality annoyed her pride. It was Mark Lavendar's custom, when his visits to Stoke Revel included a Sunday, cheerfully to evade church-going. His Sundays in the country were few, he said, and he preferred ... — Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin Read full book for free!
... makes a neat pendant to the renaissance art of Aachen. People who begin to collect have lost the first fury of creation. The change that came over plastic art in France towards the end of the twelfth century is reflected in the accomplished triviality of Chretien de Troyes. The eleventh century had produced the Chanson de Roland, a poem as grand and simple as a Romanesque church. Chretien de Troyes melted down the massive conceptions of his betters and twisted them into fine-spun ... — Art • Clive Bell Read full book for free!
... inexperienced. This, it appears, is the language of the dead; its purport is taken down progressively by one of the expert, writing, I was told, "as fast as a telegraph operator"; and the communications are at last made public. They are of the baldest triviality; a schooner is perhaps announced, some idle gossip reported of a neighbour, or if the spirit shall have been called to consultation on a case of sickness, a remedy may be suggested. One of these, immersion in scalding water, not long ago proved fatal to the patient. The ... — The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson Read full book for free!
... all duty, all social mores. That was the essence of E science, that any requirement outside of his own making didn't exist. It had to be that way. That kind of mind could not tolerate barriers, but spent itself constantly in destroying them. Erect barriers of triviality, and it would waste its substance upon trivial matters. The only answer was to remove all possible barriers for the E, lest immersion in something trivial prevent that mind from seeking out a barrier to ... — Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton Read full book for free!
... and the great things of which they are a part. But the great things are too great for them. They cannot put them into words. And they ought not to try, for the secret of letter-writing is intimate triviality. Bill could not have described the retreat from Mons; but he could have told, as he told me, about the blister he got on his heel, how he hungered for a smoke, how he marched and marched until he fell asleep ... — Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner) Read full book for free!
... of this deeper whole. If by turning from his superficial life he can set himself in the depths of reality, then a magnificent life, with the widest prospects, opens out before him. "He may win the whole of infinity for his own, and set himself free from the triviality of the merely human without losing himself in an alien world." And if he does so, he is led to place greater emphasis upon the high ideals of life than upon material progress. He learns to value the beautiful far above the merely useful; the inner life above mere existence, a genuine spiritual ... — Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones Read full book for free!
... be deemed a compliment. It is perhaps a triviality on my part, but I feel prompted to say that I have at no time discussed your position or prospects with Mrs. Frothingham, and that I have neither offered advice on the subject nor have been requested to do so. If this statement should appear to you at all germane to the ... — The Whirlpool • George Gissing Read full book for free!
... the triviality of this amusement that to find at last that he had taken it in the ... — Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells Read full book for free!
... to the days when the foundations of our constitution were laid; or far away over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars, worshipping strange gods, and writing strange characters from right to left. The odd triviality of the last detail, its unworthiness of the sentiment of the passage, leaves the reader checked, what sets out as a fine stroke of imagination dwindles down to a sort of literary conceit. And this puerile twist, by the way, is all the poorer, when it is considered ... — Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley Read full book for free!
... with them. Such impatience is neither unnatural nor wholly unreasonable. It must be confessed that no good work ever made heavier drafts upon the faith and patience of the philanthropic. What with the triviality of the Indian character, the absurd punctilio with which, in his lowest estate, he insists on embarrassing the most ordinary business, and his devotion to sentiments utterly repugnant to our social and industrial genius; what, again, with the endless variety of tribal relations ... — The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker Read full book for free!
... spirit hardly to be looked for in such a primeval daughter of Eve. Her imagination and her reading had saved the girl's sweet modesty. A certain detachment made it possible for her to ignore the squalor of the actual and see it only as a surface triviality, to let her mind dwell in inner concepts of goodness and beauty while bestiality crossed ... — Man Size • William MacLeod Raine Read full book for free!
... reigned eight years. The very year of Her Majesty's accession was signalised by two noteworthy endeavours to put away wrong. We will turn first to that which seems the least immediately philanthropic, although the injustice which it remedied was trivial in appearance only, since in its everyday triviality it weighed most heavily on the most numerous class—that of the humble ... — Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling Read full book for free!
... whole. If by turning from his superficial life he can set himself in the depths of reality, then a magnificent life, with the widest prospects, opens out before him. "He may win the whole of infinity for his own, and set himself free from the triviality of the merely human without losing himself in an alien world." And if he does so, he is led to place greater emphasis upon the high ideals of life than upon material progress. He learns to value the beautiful far above the merely useful; ... — Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones Read full book for free!
... in evening hours when the home was particularly united in some glow of visitors or birthday celebration, she would be persuaded to recall some of those old songs and simple apologues, with such charm that even her husband, to whom verse was naturally an incomprehensible triviality, was visibly softened, and perhaps, deep in the sadness of his silent nature, moved to a passing realisation of a certain something kind and musical in life which ... — Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne Read full book for free!
... this view in dream phenomena. But however good the evidence, we shall fail to make out a case unless dream experiences are conceded to be as real as any other. The reluctance we may have to make this concession comes first from the purely subjective character of dreams, and secondly from their triviality and irrationality—it is as though the muddy sediment of daytime thought and feeling and that alone were there cast forth. In answer to the first objection, advanced psychology affirms that the subconscious mind, from which dreams arise, approaches more nearly to the ... — Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon Read full book for free!
... place to place around the world as we had done before, Satan showing me a hundred wonders, most of them reflecting in some way the weakness and triviality of our race. He did this now every few days—not out of malice—I am sure of that—it only seemed to amuse and interest him, just as a naturalist might be amused and interested by ... — The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain Read full book for free!
... diction he surpasses anything of which Dryden was capable. The flaws in his style are mainly due to carelessness in the rimes and some questionable coining of words. He also occasionally lapses into the vulgarity and triviality which marred certain of his ... — Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats Read full book for free!
... met the lady who was to become his wife. Mrs. Renfield was the widow of one of the diplomatists who languish in perpetual first secretary-ship at our various embassies. Her life had given her ease without triviality, and a sense of the importance of politics seldom found in ladies of her nationality. She regarded a public life as the noblest and most engrossing of careers, and combined with great social versatility an equal gift for reading blue-books and studying debates. So ... — The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton Read full book for free!
... where the accident with the tar-pot had left its stain, the Dago still broke into little meaningless smiles. For him, at any rate, the narrow scope between the stem and stern of the Anna Maria was not the world. He had but to lift up the eyes of his mind to behold, beyond it and dwarfing it to triviality, the glamours of a life in which it had no part. Those who saw him at his dreary penance had their excuse for thinking him mad, for there were moments when his face glowed like a lover's, his lips moved in soundless speech, and ... — Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon Read full book for free!
... not till a good many hours later that the anticlimax of the recent situation struck Trix. Excitement had prevented her from realizing it at first. In the excitement of what the thing stood for, she had overlooked the utter triviality of the thing itself. When, later, the two separated themselves in a measure, and she looked at the thing as apart from what it indicated, the ludicrousness of it struck ... — Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore Read full book for free!
... ill-timed and useless. But his gallant work of the coming night and morrow, when Hooker left him almost alone to resist the fierce assaults of our victorious and elated foe, was ample compensation for his subordinate share in the triviality and fatal issue of Saturday's manoeuvring. Nor can blame fall upon him in as full measure as upon Hooker; although he seems illy to have construed what was transpiring in his front, and what he reported may have seriously misled ... — The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge Read full book for free!
... to add force to your words by tones and gestures that emphasize ideas of the contrast in weights between the two sides of the scale. By your light tone you can indicate the triviality of objections to your proposition. With the heavier tone of power you can suggest the great weight of the favorable ideas. If you use broad gestures of your whole hand and full arm, you can seem to ... — Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins Read full book for free!
... dance with Missy because she was such a good dancer, and Jim kept wanting to cut in to get an extra dance with her himself. Somehow even the sting of the visiting girl's laugh and of Raymond's defection seemed to have subsided into triviality. And when Raymond came up to ask for a dance she experienced a new and pleasurable thrill in telling him she was already engaged. That thrill disturbed her a little. Was it possible that she was vindictive, wicked? But when she saw Jim approaching while Raymond was receiving his conge, ... — Missy • Dana Gatlin Read full book for free!
... senseless day, after its happy but meaningless triviality, the throng and mixed perfumery and silly courteous gestures, his blessed solitude! Oh solitude, that noble peace of the mind! He loved the throng and multitude of the day: he loved people: but sometimes ... — Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley Read full book for free!
... of New York the actual original scenes of the incidents had been demolished and built upon by new apartment-houses, or new railroad stations, or new factories seventy-five stories high, was an unobstructing triviality. Accounts of his manner of conducting himself in European courts to which he had supposedly been bidden, of his immense popularity in glittering circles, of his finely democratic bearing when confronted by emperors surrounded by their guilty splendors, were the joy of remote villages and towns. ... — T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett Read full book for free!
... first place," said Quinny, preparing to annex the topic, "whether the situation actually happened or not, which is in itself a mere triviality, Peters has constructed it in a masterly way, the proof of which is that he has made me listen. Observe, each person present might have taken the ring—Flanders, a broker, just come a cropper; Maude ... — Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson Read full book for free!
... pre-eminently the history of a race singled out by an overruling Power for the education of conscience. To this bear witness the laws of the Two Tables, and most of those other laws, purely ceremonial, whose apparent triviality in some particulars is at any rate a mode of symbolizing what was the main object of the Lawgiver—keeping the heart and conscience pure. To this bear witness the indignant denunciations of their prophets, as well as the impassioned pleadings to return to a better mind and ... — Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various Read full book for free!
... should be collected and written down makes a neat pendant to the renaissance art of Aachen. People who begin to collect have lost the first fury of creation. The change that came over plastic art in France towards the end of the twelfth century is reflected in the accomplished triviality of Chretien de Troyes. The eleventh century had produced the Chanson de Roland, a poem as grand and simple as a Romanesque church. Chretien de Troyes melted down the massive conceptions of his betters and twisted them into fine-spun conceits. He ... — Art • Clive Bell Read full book for free!
... the florist, my lord. She has had a loss in her family lately, which perhaps accounts for the lack of triviality your lordship ... — An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde Read full book for free!
... discovered that she had very little to write, at least that she wanted to write, to her aunt. She began, however, resolutely with a little account of her life. But it seemed another thing on paper, addressed to the loving eyes at Brandon. There were too much luxury and idleness and triviality in it, too much Carmen and Count Crispo and flirtation ... — Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner Read full book for free!
... evidence we have of divine guidance in the production of this literature is to be found among the earliest productions. There we see earnestness of purpose combined with heavenly aspiration and deep searching after truth. Subsequent to this we see the light vanishing and earnestness giving place to triviality of thought, to the ravings of superstition, to the inanities of ceremonialism and to the laws of social and religious bondage. All this progress downward is in direct ratio to our distance from ... — India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones Read full book for free!
... comparison of him. I am placed between our host and his nephew. The latter comes in for a good deal of my conversation, as most of my remarks have to be taken up and rebellowed by him with a loud emphasis, that contrasts absurdly with their triviality; and even then they mostly miscarry, and turn into ... — Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton Read full book for free!
... testimony against those who deeply discredit it. Offenses against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that the demand must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were advanced ... — African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt Read full book for free!
... contrast between the lovely entourage of this notorious place and the triviality and vulgar nature of its commerce. The one long, winding street may be described as a vast bazaar, more suited to Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims than to holders of railway tickets and ... — In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards Read full book for free!
... that Puritanism, which means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be left over, by every rationalistic system of life. ... — Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton Read full book for free!
... fellow he is. 'Spring is the most horrible season,' he said, and went to the cafe. For a man must know what he wants, mustn't he? You see, the spring makes me nervous too, I too am upset by the charming triviality of the recollections and sensations which it awakens; only that I cannot bring myself to the point of chiding and scorning the spring for it; for the fact is that I am ashamed before it, ashamed before its pure naturalness and its victorious youth. ... — The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various Read full book for free!
... sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite openness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has gained a sense of possible depths in all directions. Under these circumstances, some triviality and great confusion in its positive achievements are not unpromising things, nor even unamiable. These are the Wanderjahre of faith; it looks smilingly at every new face, which might perhaps be that of a predestined friend; it chases after any engaging stranger; ... — Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana Read full book for free!
... the field, the men could not compass such orderliness within their ranks as could the women. With the former everything was of the antiquated and rough-hewn and ill-fitting and unsuitable and badly-adapted and inferior kind; their heads were full of nothing but discord and triviality and confusion and slovenliness of thought. In brief, they displayed everywhere the male bent, the rude, ponderous nature which is incapable either of managing a household or of jumping to a conclusion, as well as remains always distrustful and lazy and ... — Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol Read full book for free!
... more uneasy than usual. In the beginning of dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from the mass of a magistrate's mind fell too noticeably. She wondered how a man like Mr. Casaubon would support such triviality. His manners, she thought, were very dignified; the set of his iron-gray hair and his deep eye-sockets made him resemble the portrait of Locke. He had the spare form and the pale complexion which became a student; as different as possible from the blooming Englishman of the red-whiskered ... — Middlemarch • George Eliot Read full book for free!
... excess of naturalness which degenerates into the mawkish. The nature of the plan—which, after all, is substantially though not in form a set of sonnets on a single theme—is favorable to those pictures of common landscape and of daily life, redeemed from triviality by genial feeling and a perception of the lurking beautiful, which are the author's distinguishing characteristic. The scheme, too, enables him appropriately to indulge in theological and metaphysical reflections; where he is not quite ... — International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various Read full book for free!
... subdivision of labor carried out as never before. The movement is irresistible; it brings with it exactness, exhaustive knowledge, a narrow but complete self-satisfaction, with such accompanying faults as pedantry, triviality, and the kind of partial blindness which belong to intellectual myopia. The specialist is idealized almost into sublimity in Browning's "Burial of the Grammarian." We never need fear that he will undervalue himself. To be the supreme authority on anything ... — The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Read full book for free!
... couldn't get a-nigh of 'em. Finally," said Hinge, "after two or three hours, they drives back to the Star and Garter, and goes in there. I found out, sir," he went on, with a growing air of importance which, considering the triviality of the intelligence he had so far brought me, was hard to bear with—"I found out, sir, as they'd ordered lunch; but I didn't likes to leave 'em without knowing what they was up to, and so I 'ung about, sir. That comes easy, sir," ... — In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray Read full book for free!
... the folly and triviality of all messages coming, or purporting to come, from the Unseen. I think here, as elsewhere, like clings to like, and we get very much what we deserve; or rather, to put it in a more philosophical and Emersonian way, we receive what ... — Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates Read full book for free!
... particular in its patronizing way of dwelling upon the thinness of the American social environment and the consequent provincialism of Hawthorne's books. The "American Note Books," in particular, seem to Mr. James a chronicle of small beer, and he marvels at the triviality of an existence which could reduce the diarist to recording an impression that "the aromatic odor of peat smoke in the sunny autumnal air is very pleasant." This peat-smoke entry has become proverbial, and is mentioned by nearly everyone who ... — Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers Read full book for free!
... novelettes, as one had to wait so long for one's money and then get so little; but in the humour I then found myself I plunged into the fray, if not with enthusiasm, at least with a dogged perseverance that was almost as good. Granger's Weekly liked triviality and dialogue, a lot of fuss about nothing and a happy ending. I gave it to them in a heaping measure. Dixie's Monthly, from which I had a short-story order, set dialect above rubies. I didn't know ... — Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne Read full book for free!
... sais comment l'opera avec une musique si parfaite, et une depense toute royale, a pu reussir a m'ennuyer', shows how little he had realised the fatiguing effect of theatrical splendour too persistently displayed. St. Evremond finds juster cause for his bored state of mind in the triviality of the subject-matter of operas, and his words are worth quoting at some length: 'La langueur ordinaire ou je tombe aux operas, vient de ce que je n'en ai jamais vu qui ne m'ait paru meprisable dans la ... — The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild Read full book for free!
... himself for a fool for letting her go—a boy's trick. But then the whole affair did not desperately engage him. He sat in the comfortable chair, and lit a cigarette, shielding it with his hand so that she would not see it, recognize in its triviality his detachment. A wave of weariness swept over him; the night was like a blanket on the land. Minutes passed without her return; soon he would go in search of her; he would find her ... in the dark house.... He shut ... — Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer Read full book for free!
... condition of the French and English workers, "Prussian" must compare the first manifestation, the beginning of the English and French Labour movement, with the German movement which has just begun. He neglects to do this. His reasoning therefore runs upon a triviality, such as that industry in Germany is not yet so developed as in England, or that a movement in its beginnings looks different from a movement that has ... — Selected Essays • Karl Marx Read full book for free!
... tenderness in his nature, but the exhibition of it was repressed on principle,—a man of high character and probity, greatly esteemed by his associates. He endeavored to bring up his children in sound religious principles, and to leave no room in their lives for triviality. One of the two weekly half-holidays was required for the catechism, and the only relaxation from the three church services on Sunday was the reading of "Pilgrim's Progress." This cold and severe discipline at home would have been intolerable but for the more lovingly ... — Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner Read full book for free!
... treason; they bud and put out there, and afterwards shoot up vigorously, and grow to prodigious bulk, cultivated by custom. And it is a very dangerous mistake to excuse these vile inclinations upon the tenderness of their age, and the triviality of the subject: first, it is nature that speaks, whose declaration is then more sincere, and inward thoughts more undisguised, as it is more weak and young; secondly, the deformity of cozenage does not consist ... — The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne Read full book for free!
... thoughts that are hidden under words, and thus possess one's self of the actual mind of the individual man"—such was Macready's definition of the player's art; and to this we may add the testimony of Talma. He describes tragic acting as "the union of grandeur without pomp and nature without triviality." It demands, he says, the endowment of high ... — Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter Read full book for free!
... outside the theater in which grim circumstance stages it for a single playing—unless, indeed, the curtain rings down on a tragedy that brings the actors before their district judge for trial. And, as so frequently is the case, the beginning was casual to the point of triviality. ... — Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower Read full book for free!
... it's jist naething, jist a—a triviality, like; but Ah see there's a great crood frae the Oa, the day, an' jist as many Murphys an' Connors; an' Ah heerd a lot o' wild talk aboot Fenians, an' the like. They would be sayin' Pat Murphy was a Fenian; an' that Tam Caldwell would be for sendin' him oot o' the Glen. ... — The Silver Maple • Marian Keith Read full book for free!
... clear that America will start at a disadvantage when she starts upon the mission of salvage and reconciliation which is, I believe, her proper role in this world conflict. One would have to be blind and deaf on this side to be ignorant of European persuasion of America's triviality. I would not like to be an American travelling in Europe now, and those I meet here and there have some of the air of men who at any moment may be dunned for a debt. They explode without provocation into excuses ... — War and the Future • H. G. Wells Read full book for free!
... But don't you see it is the triviality of the offence which makes the penance necessary. Had he knocked me over the head with a pickaxe, or burned the house down, I should have had a right to be angry. But I was angry because he wanted a horse on Sunday;— and therefore ... — The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope Read full book for free!
... unanswered, was enough to arouse the most violent scenes. Hitherto they had been restrained by the presence of others, but now it was the same whether they were alone or not. Very soon, as far as brutality of expression or the triviality of the question was concerned, he was as ... — Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson Read full book for free!
... misery, to broaden and exalt life. It is very hard—perhaps it is impossible—to present in a page or two the substance and quality of nearly a month's conversation, conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that ranges carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly resuming a constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and jest and go and come back, and all ... — The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells Read full book for free!
... a truism to say that we ought to look at life in the light of eternity. Only then does the true significance of the meanest action in life appear. Life is redeemed from triviality and vulgarity. So far from worldly possessions losing their value, and ordinary occupations appearing insignificant, their importance is realised as never before. If man does not live for ever, his character and actions seem of comparative unimportance. If he does live for ever, it is rational ... — Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson Read full book for free!
... escaping from the restraint of grave feelings. That this is a part-cause is true. Doubtless very often, as Mr. Bain says, "it is the coerced form of seriousness and solemnity without the reality that gives us that stiff position from which a contact with triviality or vulgarity relieves us, to our uproarious delight." And in so far as mirth is caused by the gush of agreeable feeling that follows the cessation of mental strain, it further illustrates the general principle above set forth. ... — Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer Read full book for free!
... by a spiritist, partly with a view to investigate mediums; and one of the five colleagues who declined my invitation is widely quoted as an effective critic of our evidence. So runs the world away! I should not indulge in the personality and triviality of such anecdotes, were it not that they paint the temper of our time, a temper which, thanks to Frederic Myers more than to any one, will certainly be impossible after this generation. Myers was, I think, decidedly exclusive and intolerant ... — Memories and Studies • William James Read full book for free!
... had been his. She slipped on and on, forgetting herself, revelling, dreaming; and it was proof at least of the Alice Strowbridge which might have been, that there came to her fingers and her throat that night no sound of cheap sensuous melody, no florid triviality from any land. With a voice which had mastered the world, she sang the best of the masters of the world. So music, with all its wooing, its invitation, its challenge, its best appeal, for a time filled and thrilled this strange auditorium, until forsooth later comers might, ... — Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough Read full book for free!
... it,[211] he does not succeed,—with the few exceptions just referred to,—in convincing us very deeply of the reality of his feelings. They are either trivially or extravagantly stated. Sometimes this sense of triviality is caused by the poet's excessive fondness for all sorts of diminutive expressions, giving an artificial effect, an effect of "Taendelei" ... — Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun Read full book for free!
... making a good deal of fuss about your being a young lady, now I think of it. Peter especially has been rather a nuisance about it, breaking into my most precious moments of triviality with the sweetly solemn thought that our little girl has grown ... — Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley Read full book for free!
... Hill. I don't know whether Londoners generally realise how high it looks when one comes out, in this way, almost immediately under it. For the second it seemed to me that at the foot of it even human war was a triviality. For the second I felt as if I had been drunk with some trivial orgie, and that I had been sobered by the shock of that shadow. A moment afterwards, I realised that under it was going on something more enduring than stone, and ... — The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton Read full book for free!
... Chapuys' remark on the triviality of its business, more than a score of acts were passed, some limiting such abuses as the right of sanctuary, some dealing in the familiar way with social evils like the increase of beggars and vagabonds. The act depriving sanctuary-men, who committed felony, of any ... — Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard Read full book for free!
... which people rave over in Spain, but has a strength in its refinement which comes from its expression in the exquisitely carven marble. When this is grayed with age it is indeed of the effect of old silver work; but the plateresque in Valladolid does not suggest fragility or triviality; its grace is perhaps rather feminine than masculine; but at the worst it is only the ultimation of the decorative genius of the Gothic. It is, at any rate, the finest surprise which the local architecture has to offer ... — Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells Read full book for free!
... am not much of an authority on matrimony but that sort of language sounds to me like a hysterical outcry from a person whose family is already tottering. It is at least certain that a great many of these cornerstones of society are tottering, and why? Because there dwell in them triviality and vacuity, which prepare the way of the devil. Who can think that intellectual divergence, disagreement upon great public questions, would disrupt a family worth holding together? On the contrary, ... — The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper Read full book for free!
... Mrs. de Tracy, it must be made plain that with all her faults, small spite was not a part of her character. Yet to-day, her anger had been stirred by an incident so small that its very triviality annoyed her pride. It was Mark Lavendar's custom, when his visits to Stoke Revel included a Sunday, cheerfully to evade church-going. His Sundays in the country were few, he said, and he preferred to enjoy them in the temple of nature, generally taking a long walk before ... — Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin Read full book for free!
... seemed possible; all was vague and contradictory. She had talked to these Brennans, seen how they lived, could guess what their past was, what their future must be. In that neat little house their uneventful life dribbled away in maiden idleness; neither hope nor despair broke the triviality of their days—and yet, was it their fault? No; for what could they do if no one would marry them?—a woman could do nothing ... — Muslin • George Moore Read full book for free!
... was somewhat wistful. "Nothing but silly imaginings." She laughed and when she spoke again her voice was as light as if her world held only triviality and laughter. "Yet there be important things to decide. What ... — The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck Read full book for free!
... lost his impression of the triviality of the occasion: they all seemed desperately searching for that something he had lost and which was overwhelmingly important to him; and all the while the music stuttered and mocked and confused a tragic need. Or it was ... — Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer Read full book for free!
... fiction, as Byron had introduced it in the sphere of verse thirty years earlier. It was an inestimable gift; it had to come to us, from Charlotte Bronte or another, to save our literature from a decline into triviality and pretension. But she suffered, as Byron had suffered, in the direct ratio of her originality. If a writer employs passion in an age which has ceased to recognise it as one of the necessities of literary vitality he is safe to be accused of perverting ... — Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse Read full book for free!
... with the study of the languages, and with the very best interpreters. They have been carefully translated, written, and rewritten, to obtain their true spirit and meaning, expunging passages, where it was necessary to avoid tediousness of narration, triviality of circumstance, tautologies, gross incongruities, and vulgarities; but adding no incident and drawing no conclusion, which the verbal narration did not imperatively require or sanction. It was impossible to mistake the import of terms and phrases where the means of their analysis ... — The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft Read full book for free!
... it was observed that the phenomena which apparently point to some unaccountable supernormal faculty of acquiring knowledge are 'trivial.' These anecdotes illustrate the triviality; but the facts certainly left a number of people, wholly unfamiliar with such experiments, under the impression that Miss Angus's glass ball was like Prince Ali's magical telescope in the 'Arabian Nights.'[19] ... — The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang Read full book for free!
... but never triviality. If we want lightness of touch and wittiness, have we not Die Meistersinger, the greatest comedy in the world, or a merry piece like Mozart's Nozze di Figaro? Here is all the wit that one wants, yet the level is kept high throughout. It ... — War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones Read full book for free!
... always felicitous. There are times when it has the true epic touch—or at least as much of it as is possible in an age of detail and elaboration; there are times when it has a touch of the pathetic—when in homeliness of phrase and triviality of rhythm it is hardly to be surpassed; and there are times, as in The Snake Charmer when, as in certain pages in the work of Richard Wagner, it is so studiously laboured and so heavily charged with ornament and colour as to be almost pedantic in infelicity, almost repellent by ... — Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley Read full book for free!
... normal people. Such would still fain believe that the grave is not the end, but many of them are in a state of bewilderment and insecurity. On the one hand men have never grown reconciled to the heart-breaking triviality of death, never accepted this dispensation without a question, a hope, or, failing hope, a sense of rebellion; on the other, we have to recognise that we live in an age when multitudes have ceased to accept religious beliefs simply upon the authority of the Bible—when educated people generally ... — Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer Read full book for free!
... touch of at some time or other. Leaving out theological terms as far as possible, it is the subconscious feeling that one can be wrong with Nature as well as right with Nature; that the point of wrongness may be a detail (in the superstitions of heathens this is often quite a triviality); but that if one is really wrong with Nature, there is no particular reason why all her rivers should not drown or all her storm-bolts strike one who is, by this vague yet vivid hypothesis, her enemy. This may be a mental sickness, ... — Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton Read full book for free!
... was so full of goodness and hospitable feeling, that it kindled animation in the most cheerless or torpid of invalids. I cannot imagine that any memorabilia occurred during the visit; but I will use the time that would else be lost upon the settling of that point, in putting down any triviality that occurs to my recollection. Both Lamb and myself had a furious love for nonsense, headlong nonsense. Excepting Professor Wilson, I have known nobody who had the same passion to the same extent. And things of that nature better illustrate the realities of Lamb's social life than the gravities, ... — Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey Read full book for free!
... nothing important," blustered my good uncle. "Some triviality such as you can answer in a moment. A little room? Yes, I know one, there, under the stairs. Come, I will find the door for you. Why did we ever come to this ... — The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green Read full book for free!
... science—that, if you like, for us all, is "the question of the hour!" And what a question! of what surpassing importance, in the presence of which all other "questions" whatever dwindle into mere academic triviality. For just as the ancient State was wounded to the heart through the death of her healthy sons in the field, just so slowly, just so silently, is the modern receiving deadly hurt by the botching and tinkering of her unhealthy children. The net result is in each case the same—the ... — Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel Read full book for free!
... a considerable surprise that afternoon. He had told Robert Black to find William Roper and bring him to him. He wished to hear the story he had told Lord Loudwater the evening before, for it might be of a triviality to make the hypothesis that Lord Loudwater had committed suicide yet less worthy of serious consideration. Black was a long while finding William Roper, for he was at work in the woods. Indeed, he had not ... — The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson Read full book for free!
... conversational companion. That companion had been a part of his recent drama; it was the red-haired poet Gregory. They were walking like old friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about some triviality. But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a ... — The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton Read full book for free!
... diction of the Wallace Collection has it (No. 382). In this the equal delicacy of the sentiment and of the painting combine to effect a little masterpiece of Louis Quinze art. It is simple and natural, and entirely free from the besetting sins of so slight a picture triviality, affectation, empty prettiness, or simply silliness. In its way it is perfect, and for that perfection is for ever reserved the popularity which we find temporarily accorded to pictures like Frith's Dolly ... — Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies Read full book for free!
... would be better to keep that provisionally clear of subjects made to the hand of writers of plays. She would not go beyond hypnotic suggestion at present. She approached it with the air of one who dismisses a triviality. ... — When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan Read full book for free!
... "the idle rich," but he summoned the idle rich, the well-to-do, the gentry of independent means, the comfortable annuitants, the sportsmen, the writers and dramatists of pleasure, the artists of triviality, the pretty rhymers, and the people who are too busy for thought, to rise against themselves. It was a much harder summons to obey, and generally they answered with a shrug and a mutter of "madness," "mere ... — Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson Read full book for free!
... with intellectual emptiness, but also because he was a man whose glowing hatred of all injustice and sympathy for all suffering never evaporated in empty words. His fine literary perception enabled him to detect the genuine excellence which underlay the superficial triviality of Crabbe's verses. He discovered the genius where men like North and Shelburne might excusably see nothing but the mendicant versifier; and a benevolence still rarer than his critical ability forbade him ... — Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen Read full book for free!
... of that time had all the vices except triviality, all the virtues except moderation; they were either ruffians or saints. Life was rude enough to kill feeble organisms; and thus characters had an energy unknown to-day. It was forever necessary to provide beforehand against a thousand dangers, to ... — Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier Read full book for free!
... particular moment I cannot say, but I fancy to an early one who has lately become a widower. After more exact knowledge I do not care to enquire; for to confess ignorance on the subject, implying that one has treated as a triviality and has forgotten the most important detail of a matter that to her is of vital importance, is to hurt her feelings; while to angle for information is but to entangle oneself. To speak of Him as "Tom," when Tom has belonged for weeks to the dead and buried past, to hastily correct oneself ... — Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome Read full book for free!
... strong streak of triviality in them, which you don't see in cats. They won't have fine enough characters to concentrate on the things of most weight. They will talk and think far more of trifles than of what is important. Even when ... — This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr. Read full book for free!
... proceeds, appalling to the inexperienced. This, it appears, is the language of the dead; its purport is taken down progressively by one of the experts, writing, I was told, 'as fast as a telegraph operator'; and the communications are at last made public. They are of the baldest triviality; a schooner is, perhaps, announced, some idle gossip reported of a neighbour, or if the spirit shall have been called to consultation on a case of sickness, a remedy may be suggested. One of these, immersion in scalding water, not long ago proved fatal to the patient. The whole business is very ... — In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson Read full book for free!
... merely of this religion or of that, Pagan or Christian, but in the life of the winds and rains. Such churches as this, anything but swept and garnished, correspond in a way to Browning's poetry; there is the high solemnity brought home to you, not disturbed, by the very triviality of the details; mysteries and wonders overarching the real living life of ex-votos and pictures of runaway horses and houses on fire; the life worn like the porphyry discs of the pavement, precious bits trodden into the bricks, the life of the present filched ... — The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee Read full book for free!
... style is a revelation of the beauty of the English language, and it profoundly influenced Ruskin and other prose writers of the Victorian Age. It has two chief faults,—diffuseness, which continually leads De Quincey away from his object, and triviality, which often makes him halt in the midst of a marvelous paragraph to make some light jest or witticism that has some humor but no mirth in it. Notwithstanding these faults, De Quincey's prose is still among the few supreme examples of style in our ... — English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long Read full book for free!
... a drive through the cool air; and then, as old fellows do, we bantered each other about our ages, each claiming to be older than the other, and the kind, sweet young girl sat listening with that tolerance of youth for the triviality of age which is so charming. When he could do no more, he said he was sorry, and wished me luck, and drove on; and I being by this time tired with my three miles' tramp, took advantage of a wayside farmhouse, ... — Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells Read full book for free!
... archaisms, which he much affected (he gives, therefore, no quotations from post-Augustan writers). His style shows the defects of an age in which men had ceased to feel the full meaning of the words they used, and strove to hide the triviality of a subject under obscure phrases and florid expression. Yet, on the whole, he is a very interesting writer, and the last that can in any ... — Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce Read full book for free!
... the morning Madame de Saint-Simon was happily delivered of a child. God did us the grace to give us a son. He bore, as I had, the name of Vidame of Chartres. I do not know why people have the fancy for these odd names, but they seduce in all nations, and they who feel the triviality of them, imitate them. It is true that the titles of Count and Marquis have fallen into the dust because of the quantity of people without wealth, and even without land, who usurp them; and that they have become so worthless, that people of quality who are Marquises or Counts (if they ... — Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre Read full book for free!
... divinely reposes, and sleeping dreams loftier dreams. The motive is in the borrowing robbed of much of its dignity and beauty, and individualised in a fashion which, were any other master than Titian in question, would have brought it to the verge of triviality. Still as an example of his unrivalled mastery in rendering the glow and semi-transparency of flesh, enhanced by the contrast with white linen—itself slightly golden in tinge; in suggesting the appropriate atmospheric environment; in giving the full splendour ... — The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips Read full book for free!
... the cocked gun rode grimly behind me. I did not know whither we went or to what end. We might be shot down from behind a tree or murdered in our saddles. It was not a land where men took desperate measures upon a triviality. And I knew that Abner rode into something that little men, lacking courage, would gladly ... — The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various Read full book for free!
... The triviality of what they were saying to each other struck Greif all at once, as compared with the horror of what they had left behind them at Greifenstein. It was but the third day since that fearful catastrophe had darkened his life, and he was exchanging remarks about the clothes ... — Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford Read full book for free!
... such triviality. In fact, I'd think it unlikely they could be bothered with priests. If I was a god, certainly ... — Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds Read full book for free!
... confidence that she's small,— As what no kindred word will fit Is uttered best by opposite, Love in the tongue of hate exprest, And deepest anguish in a jest,— Feeling the infinite must be Best said by triviality, Speaks, where expression bates its wings, Just happy, alien, little things; What of all words is in excess Implies in a sweet nothingness, With dailiest babble shows her sense That full speech were full impotence; And while she feels the heavens lie bare, ... — New Poems • Francis Thompson Read full book for free!
... element in the world of New York. I very soon came to the conclusion that the professional, paid mediums were, in many cases, the worst kind of impostors, and, in all cases, so far as any intellectual evidence was concerned, of an absurd triviality. Even in the private circles, where no trace of fraud could be suspected, the good faith of all entering them being assured, I found sometimes such extraordinary credulity that the subject would have been offensive to any dispassionate investigator who was not, ... — The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James Read full book for free!
... incident at all. The whole representation, it is argued, lacks the sobriety which is characteristic of the authentic miracles of the Gospels and broadly separates them from the ecclesiastical miracles, about which there is generally an air of triviality and grotesqueness. ... — The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker Read full book for free!
... and love, the nigher it is to the flame, the more remote (there's a word, remote!)—the more remote it is from the frost." Shakespeare and Scott have condescended to caricature the style or the manner of the inventor of euphuism: I cannot think their burlesque of his elaborate and sententious triviality so happy, so humorous, or so exact as this. But it is not on his capacity as a satirist or humorist, it is on his occasionally triumphant success as a serious or tragic poet, that the fame of Marston rests assuredly ... — The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne Read full book for free!
... and in their criticism of one another the personal appearance is the first and most, important subject discussed. A personal beauty ideal has little value to the character; in fact, it tends to exaggerate vanity and triviality and selfishness; it leads away from the higher aspects of reality. If you ask the majority of women which would they rather be, very beautiful or very intelligent, most will say without question (in their frank moments) that they would rather be very beautiful. Those who are attempting ... — The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson Read full book for free!
... point, I find it no longer possible to continue celebrating that great moment in the social life of a vast empire without accusing myself of triviality and hypocrisy. I have become aware that I really care nothing about it, and know almost as little. I fancy that with most English people who have passed the heyday of their youth, perhaps without having drunk deeply, or at all, of the delirious ... — London Films • W.D. Howells Read full book for free!
... was growing impatient of this curtly condescending tone. It was the ponderosity of officialdom, he felt, grown playful, in the face of a passing triviality. ... — Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer Read full book for free!
... the white heat of "And He shall purify," and "For unto us a Child is born," with its recurring climaxes of ever-increasing intensity. He frankly imitated none of these things, but they must, consciously or unconsciously, have heightened the nobility of the great choral fugues that relieve the triviality of so much ... — Haydn • John F. Runciman Read full book for free!
... me with but one advice,—be patient; say little; do as little as possible; and endeavor to appear insensible to their insults. I would say to you, if you will excuse the triviality of the comparison, imitate those feeble insects who simulate death when they are touched. They are defenceless; and that is ... — The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau Read full book for free!
... of our little island home has its history. The land is small, but the changes among the inhabitants, and the achievements of its heroes, have redeemed it from triviality, and made it among nations great and important. The deeds Englishmen have done, the afflictions they have suffered, the victories they have won, and the results that they have brought about, conspire to make every county famous ... — Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope Read full book for free!
... present, individuals are lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion rules the world. The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments, while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses. This is as true in the moral and social relations of private life as in public transactions. ... — The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various Read full book for free!
... Force—the Thing has been the same. Upon our own atom of the universe it is given the generic name of Love and its existence is that which the boldest need not defy, the most profound need not attempt to explain with clarity, the most brilliantly sophistical to argue away. Its forms of beauty, triviality, magnificence, imbecility, loveliness, stupidity, holiness, purity and bestiality neither detract from nor add to its unalterable power. As the earth revolves upon its axis and reveals night and day, Spring, Summer and Winter, so ... — The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett Read full book for free!
... exhibition of fanciful power by the artist; not beauty or truth in the literal sense at all, but inventive affluence of unreal yet absurdly comic forms, with just a flavour of the terrible added, to give a grim dignity, and save from the triviality of caricature."[38] With the exception of The Heretic's Tragedy, Caliban upon Setebos is probably the finest piece of grotesque art in the language. Browning's Caliban, unlike Shakespeare's, has no active part to play: if he has ever seen ... — An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons Read full book for free!
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