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More "Inane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tells us, as an immense Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are set on that to steady it. At the Last Day they shall disappear "like clouds"; the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself off into wreck, and as dust and vapor vanish in the Inane. Allah withdraws his hand from it, and it ceases to be. The universal empire of Allah, presence everywhere of an unspeakable Power, a Splendor, and a Terror not to be named, as the true force, essence and reality, ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... icicles, which only that nation seems able to produce in her public servants. Presumably through a century-long contact with the races of the East, the English diplomat of the Sir Edward Grey type presents the bland, imperturbable, non-committal, almost inane expression of the Oriental that hardly gives one any criterion of the tremendous power of perception ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... tender daughter and are laughed at as inane; Vain you face the snow, oh mirror! for it will evanescent wane, When the festival of lanterns is gone by, guard 'gainst your doom, 'Tis what time the flames will kindle, and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... for the benefit of all; it would be necessary to do so unless the individuals were not only perfect, but also absolutely of one mind on all subjects relating to their welfare. Can the imagination picture existence more inane? ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... least understanding what his friend was driving at, and stupidly wondering if he ever had noticed any difference in Joe's ears, J.W. stared with inane bewilderment. "Is one really larger than the other?" ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... children too? You sentimental ass, Arthur!" Clarges laughed. It was a funny laugh, a kind of inane ripple that nevertheless tickled everybody who heard it. "But it's too smoky here. Come up stairs to the drawing room. There's a jolly big drawing room with a piano, and we can say what we want ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... somewhat lively and frivolous woman, accustomed to the amusements and stir of Paris, used to sit all day long, day after day, and for the most part of the time alone, though she received tiresome and inane visits which led her to think her loneliness preferable to empty tittle-tattle. If she permitted herself the slightest gleam of intelligence, it gave rise to interminable comment and embittered her condition. She occupied herself a great deal with ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... tickling of the imagination, this leisurely enjoyment of looking over all those picturesque announcements; it is like passing along the street with its shopwindows in all their lustre and glamour. But this soft and inane pleasure has been crushed by the arrangement after to-day's fashion. Those pages on which advertising and articles are mixed helterskelter do not allow the undisturbed mood. It is as if we constantly had to alternate between lazy strolling and energetic running. Thus ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... there is a reason for it somewhere, and our business is to find it out, and not loftily to assure our patients that there is nothing much the matter, and all they need is rest, or a little cheerful occupation. Furthermore, the most inane thing that a sympathizing friend or kindly physician can do to a neurasthenic, is to advise him to take his mind off himself or his symptoms. The utter inability to do that very thing is one of the chief symptoms of the disease, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... or nervous or hysterical about her. And then, subsequently, when he had met her on her own ground, she had endeavoured to put him at his ease. Funny that, but he appreciated it, nevertheless. And she could talk. She didn't giggle and ask inane questions. Nor did she treat him as some sort of a natural curiosity, who might be expected to do something shocking but entertaining at any moment. She was sensible as—well—as sensible as ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... intoxicated with the exuberance of their own verbosity; incompetent to administer the people; wasting time and money upon expensive funerals. Life is too short to waste in trying to get to the bottom of these inane studies." From this it will be seen that Lao-tsz was by no means alone in despising Confucius' conservative and ritualistic views, though it is quite possible that Yen-tsz may still have respected him as a man and a politician. Finally, Confucius, finding that the Ts'i ministers were all ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... think I do not know that? Do you think I did not feel that just now, when I sat by her side, talking inane rubbish about books and plays and pictures, while every stolen glance at my darling's face was like a dagger thrust into my heart? I will not alarm her. I will consult Mr. Sheldon—will do anything, ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... see, was always most graciously kind and charming whenever they met. But that was just her natural self. She was charming and gracious to everyone—even to Charles Pixley, the while he swamped her with inane tittle-tattle, and higher proof of grace than that it ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... be done; and, when Dick evaded and then attempted to dismiss the subject, took up another and began to expatiate on it, some work he himself was doing, something that had developed in connection with it. He asked inane questions, complimented Dick on his looks, began to tease him about some girl. And poor Dick—his nervousness, his despair almost, the sense of the waning of his opportunity! It was cruel. He was becoming more and more restless, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... looked down at his head, knew that there were a dozen absurd wishes in her heart, none of which could possibly ever become facts. He was so different from the self-assertive young men she knew, with their silly flirtations, their inane small-talk, their capacity for Scotch whisky and long hours. For days she had studied him as through microscopic lenses; his guilelessness was real. It just simply could not be; her ears had deceived ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... wits, litterateurs, society women. But for a young girl to jog on from year to year striving neither for knowledge nor lovers, making her world of the whims and wants of a weak-minded old man, composedly building up every day models which she knew would prove failures to-morrow,—here was a most inane life. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... knee to Baal, who hold fast to what is high and good in the doctrine of political equality; in whose hearts the altar-fires of rational liberty are kept aglow, beaconing the darkness of that illimitable inane where their countrymen, inaccessible to the light, wander witless in the bogs of political unreason, alternately adoring and damning the man-made gods of their own stature. Of that bright band fueling the bale-fires of political consistency I can not profess myself ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... lying on the bed, fully dressed, even to her hat, and with muddy boots. She was maundering over to herself the silly words of some inane song of the day. She was horribly flushed, and— But let me make an end of it. My wife was grossly and quite unmistakably drunk, and the stuffy little room ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... sorrow of my father, the municipal architect, I had changed my position nine times, going from one department to another, but all the departments were as like each other as drops of water; I had to sit and write, listen to inane and rude remarks, and just wait ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... me to her, smiled and bowed. His smile was inane, but he bowed very well; he had been groomed into that sort of thing or ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... discomfort and deprivations, would have been full of glory and excitement. As it was, the dulness and monotony of the jingling of the cow-bell made even his stupid childish mind dismal. All the pleasant exhilaration of youth seemed to have deserted the boy, and life to him became as inane and bovine as to the original ringer of that bell grazing all the season in her own shadow ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... woman in the Bayswater drawing-room. I was filled with a holy joy because Wells had stirred up the dregs again, and more violently than ever. I rapturously reflected, "How angry this will make them!" "Them" being the whole innumerable tribe of persons, inane or chumpish (this adjective I give to the world), who don't mind froth but won't have dregs. Human nature—you get it pretty complete in "Tono-Bungay," the entire tableau! If you don't like the spectacle of man whole, if you are afraid of humanity, ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... TOBIAE SMOLLET M.D. Viri iis virtutibus Quas in homine et cive Et laudes, et imiteris, ..... Postquam mira... Se......... .... Tali tantoque viro, suo patrueli, ...... Hanc columnam, Amoris eheul inane monumentum, In ipsis Leviniae ripis, Quas primis infans vagitibus personuit, Versiculisque jam fere moriturus illustravit, Ponendam ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... utterly at a loss for anything to say. The whole thing had been so unexpected, so very opposite to the commonplace ending he had anticipated, that he was too dazed and confused to do anything but smile in an inane and foolish manner. He had rather looked forward to seeing some eccentric individual, some elderly recluse who lived there with a servant or two. And here he was, face to face with the man who, at the present moment, was to him the ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... the inane. Again I found myself sitting in the little hotel parlor, by the side of a man with glittering eye, with a third somebody on the other side ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... Leander across the material Hellespont was but a trifle to!—In which of the villages Hotham and Dickens lodged, I did not learn or inquire; nor are their copious Despatches, chronicling these sublime phenomena from day to day for behoof of St. James's, other than entirely inane to us at this time. But one thing we do learn from them: Our Crown-Prince, escaping the paternal vigilance, was secretly in consultation with Dickens, or with Hotham through Dickens; and this in the most tragic humor on his side. In such effulgences of luxury ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... "Standard" was very wroth. It would not have been so sore perhaps at being dubbed "Betsy Prig;" but, being in fact almost a reprint of the "Herald," the suggestion of "Mrs. Harris"—a creature of no existence, the mere reflex of Mrs. Gamp's own inane and besodden brain—was too calmly provoking, as it was meant to be, to be borne in silence. These two journals were highly unpopular at the time; for the "Manchester School" was making headway, and Free Trade was already a powerful and significant cry. So when Punch laughed at them for two—though ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... inane; unoccupied, void, vacant, unfilled, tenantless, blank, evacuated; free, devoid of, lacking, destitute; senseless, hollow, vain, delusive, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... directing him to seize the heights at Hamilton's House, nearly three miles from his right division, and to keep the whole of his command in readiness to move at once, was sent instead. Sumner received an order equally inane, in reference to Marye's Heights. The resulting operations which should have been carefully co-ordinated and vigorously supported, were weak and indecisive. As the day wore away Lee took advantage of the delays and the opportunities which they offered him, and assumed the offensive. ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... the observant Cappy, as plainly as if it had a tongue and had spoken, that Captain Aaron Porter expected shortly to be exposed to the chill northwest winds outside as he piloted a vessel to sea. In the manufacture of sheer inane conversation, therefore, Cappy tugged the ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... trash, whether profane or simply stupid and nonsensical. As the number of musical creations remaining will not be very large, let him retain for the present all that are not positively bad or inane; a few old song melodies have, through long usage, lost their original associations, and hence, though perhaps only imperfectly adapted to devotional purposes, are yet, on the whole, unobjectionable, and perhaps better ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... penalties. England will either learn it or England also will cease to exist amongst nations. England will either learn to reverence its heroes, and discriminate them from its sham heroes and valets and gas-lighted histories, and to prize them as the audible God's voice amid all inane jargons and temporary market-cries, and say to them with heart loyalty, 'Be ye King and Priest and Gospel and guidance for us,' or else England will continue to worship new and ever new forms of Quackhood and so, with what resiliences ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... simple manner, at a macer, at what door the judges came out of the court, as he was a countryman, and was curious to see their Lordships dressed in their usual every-day clothes. The request was complied with; and Will, as a stupid gazing man from the Highlands, who wished to get an inane curiosity gratified by what had nothing curious in it, was placed in a convenient place to see the Solomons pass forth on their way to their respective dwellings. They soon came; and Will's lynx eye caught, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... single thought or feeling with that vigour which once gave it life and truth. It was a period of religious and metaphysical delirium, when everything became everything, when Maya and Sophia, Mitra and Christ, Viraf and Isaiah, Belus, Zarvan, and Kronos were mixed up in one jumbled system of inane speculation, from which at last the East was delivered by the positive doctrines of Mohammed, the West by the pure Christianity of the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noon-day nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's twenty digits. While I was on it, "pinnacled dim in the intense inane," a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye or a cat-o'nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... tunc documenta futuri? Quae voces avium? quanti per inane volatus? Quis vatum discursus erat? Tibi corniger Ammon, Et dudum taciti rupere silentia Delphi. Te Persae cecinere Magi, te sensit Etruscus Augur, et inspectis Babylonius horruit astris; Chaldaei stupuere senes, Cumanaque rursus ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... so graceful a faith the Greeks had their share; what was crude and inane in it becoming, in the atmosphere of their energetic, imaginative intelligence, refined and humanised. The oak-grove of Dodona, the seat of their most venerable oracle, did but perpetuate the fancy that the sounds of the wind in the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the catalogue of inane remarks with a comfortable purring complacency that held out no hope of an early abandoning of the topic. Francesca sat and wondered why the innocent acceptance of a cutlet and a glass of indifferent claret should lay one open to such ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... aren't you, with your liveries and illimitable expenses, and your low bows to money, and your immense intimacy with all lords and ladies that honor the city by visiting it. You are prodigiously patriotic with your inane imitations of a splendor impossible to you in the nature of things. You are the ideal American woman, aren't you, ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... but cowardice; and even of these they speak obscurely. Nothing is said of an under world. They supposed the ghosts at death floated upward naturally, true children of the mist, and dwelt forever in the air, where they spent an inane existence, indulging in sorrowful memories of the past, and, in unreal imitation of their mortal occupations, chasing boars of fog amid hills of cloud and valleys of shadow. The authority for these views is Ossian, "whose genuine strains," Dr. Good observes, "assume a higher ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... directly into the lungs as is the case when it is inhaled through the parted lips. Children, as well as grown people, should learn to keep the mouth closed during sleep; this would prevent many lung diseases, the disagreeable habit of snoring, and the vacant, inane expression produced by an ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... Scotorum! potuit, quo sospite solo, Libertas patriae salva fuisse tuae: Te moriente, novos accepit Scotia cives, Accepitque novos, te moriente, deos. Illa nequit superesse tibi, tu non potes illi, Ergo Caledoniae nomen inane, vale. Tuque vale, gentis priscae fortissime ductor, Ultime ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... round of lunches, dinners, balls, operas, theatres, card-parties, and inane jabber," he answered. "A mixture of various kinds of food which people eat recklessly with the natural results,—dyspepsia, inertia, mental vacuity, and general uselessness. A few Court 'functions,' some picture ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... shadow. Thus, like some wild naming, wild thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious Mankind thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick- succeeding grandeur through the unknown deep. Thus, like a God- created fire-breathing spirit host, we emerge from the Inane, haste stormfully across the astonished earth, then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled and her seas filled up. On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped; the rear of the host read traces ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... they who do not shove Cravings in the van of Love. Courtly dames are here to woo, Knowing love if it be true. Reverence the blossom-shoot Fervently, they are the fruit. Mark them stepping, hear them talk, Goddess, is no myth inane, You will say of those who walk In the woods of Westermain. Waters that from throat and thigh Dart the sun his arrows back; Leaves that on a woodland sigh Chat of secret things no lack; Shadowy branch-leaves, waters clear, Bare or veiled they move sincere; Not by slavish terrors tripped Being ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... another, he thought of impossible things; one after another, he thought of things merely inane and futile, for he was trying to do something beyond his power. Penrod was never brilliant, or ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... Robespierre's pageant was so retrograde and false, its politics were still more inane. It is a monument of presumptuous infatuation that any one should feel so strongly as he did that order could only be restored on condition of coming to terms with religious use and prejudice, and then that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... myself as the sole reality in the world, and then to imagine what more I would 'claim' if I were allowed to. If you suggest the possibility of my claiming that a mind should come into being from out of the void inane and stand and COPY me, I can indeed imagine what the copying might mean, but I can conjure up no motive. What good it would do me to be copied, or what good it would do that mind to copy me, if farther consequences are expressly and in principle ruled out as motives for ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... all both better and wiser men than we were before. We have already gained by it many notable experiences, and it has put our wisdom, and our foolishness also, to the test. It has both humbled and exalted our pride. It has cut away from the national character all those inane excrescences of vanity and brag which judicious people everywhere, who were friendly to us, could not choose but lament to see us exercise at such large discretion. It has brought us face to face with realities the most terrible the world has ever beheld. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... superior rebuff, Helen came to the inane Lily Pearl's support in a manner she knew would hit loyal Polly's most ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... minded now! For more than a year after the publication of "Diadems and Faggots" the letters, the inane indiscriminate letters of condemnation, of criticism, of interrogation, had poured in on him by every post. Hundreds of unknown readers had told him with unsparing detail all that his book had been to them. And the wonder of it was, when all ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... that funny, somewhat inane laugh of his, which had deceived the clever men of two countries as to ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... a pickax, a spade, a military gas-mask, and six carboys of sulfuric acid, all to be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned house in Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep; and failing, passed the hours in reading and in the composition of inane verses to counteract ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... deluding them; so that a large portion of the throng in the hall of trial, not venturing to change their judgment, though upon the manifest evidence just given them, awaited in painful suspense the return of the judges, interchanging with an air of mystery and inane importance the usual remarks prompted by ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... their ennui. Isabel saw them arrive with a good deal of assiduity at her aunt's hotel, and pronounced on them with a trenchancy doubtless to be accounted for by the temporary exaltation of her sense of human duty. She made up her mind that their lives were, though luxurious, inane, and incurred some disfavour by expressing this view on bright Sunday afternoons, when the American absentees were engaged in calling on each other. Though her listeners passed for people kept exemplarily genial by their cooks and dressmakers, two or three of them thought her cleverness, which was ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... wanted to stop at a shop window, and I wouldn't let you. The window contained an inane repetition display of thirty horrible prints at two and six each of Lalan's 'Triumph.'" Leighton sprang to his feet. "God! Poster lithographs at two and six! Boy, Lalan's 'Triumph' was a triumph once. He turned it into a mere success. Before the paint was dry, he let them ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... only reading at first. In most of the amateur shows, the players never do anything else but read the parts. They read, crossing back and forth whenever the coach thinks they ought to cross, and it doesn't mean a thing. I watched that very thing in an amateur show not so long ago, and it was inane. Nobody should move from one place on the stage to another without a reason for moving. There is a reason for every inflection of the voice. A person with common sense will read a part intelligently, but only a person with a dramatic spark inside of the body will be able to ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... aere isto vagentur, Apostolus ait: In quibus ambulastis aliquando juxta Saeculum mundi istius, secundum principem potestatis aeris spiritus, qui nunc operatur in filos diffidentiae (Eph, ii,2). Haec autem omnium doctorum opinio est, quod aer iste qui coelum et terram medius dividens, inane appellatur, plenus sit contrariis fortitudinibus." See also his Com. in Isaiam, lib. xiii, cap. 50 (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. xxiv, p. 477). For Augustine, see the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... think these too narrow bounds for the capacious mind of man to expatiate in, which takes its flight further than the stars, and cannot be confined by the limits of the world; that extends its thoughts often even beyond the utmost expansion of Matter, and makes excursions into that incomprehensible Inane. I grant all this, but desire any one to assign any SIMPLE IDEA which is not received from one of those inlets before mentioned, or any COMPLEX IDEA not made out of those simple ones. Nor will it be so strange to think these few simple ideas sufficient ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... reference to man, would not satisfy the instinctive desires of human nature, or account for the facts of material nature. It did not long answer to say, if it ever was said, that the Universe was drifting in the void inane, and neither it, nor any mind within or without it, knew of its whence, its whither, or its whereabouts; that man was drifting in the Universe, knowing little of his whereabouts, nothing of his whence or whither; that there ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... prose addressed to its greatness and its mystery by men who had never penetrated either the one or the other? The sea is uncertain, arbitrary, featureless, and violent. Except when helped by the varied majesty of the sky, there is something inane in its serenity and something stupid in its wrath, which is endless, boundless, persistent, and futile—a grey, hoary thing raging like an old ogre uncertain of its prey. Its very immensity is wearisome. At any time ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... his own in explaining his frequent bursts of laughter while they ate their breakfast in the cabin. And Florrie found trouble in accepting his explanations, for they were irrelevant, incompetent, and inane. ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... labor has been spent in trying to produce human speaking-machines. Words are built up out of letters; short words are grouped into inane sentences such as are never used; and sentences are arranged into unnatural and insipid discourse. To grasp the thin ghost of the thought, the little human spirit must reverse its instinct to reach toward the higher, and, ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... very specialized course a single institution may be treated; but even in a general course, treating the several human institutions as evolutionary organisms seems preferable and is more interesting than a chronological narrative, which grows more inane the more general the course. Courses which come to modern times can trace existing institutions and their immediate antecedents, thus giving an advantage that many instructors neglect from the mere ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... hermitage,—all like apparitions now, bringing with them airs from heaven, or else blasts from the other region,—there is perhaps not one of a more undoubtedly supernal character than yourself,—so pure and still, with intents so charitable; and then vanishing, too, so soon into the azure inane, as an apparition should." ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... really dramatic moments of our lives it is always the inane that first suggests itself. It was so likely that Macdonald would have ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... Pity The Few The Great and the Really Great Love "Mush" Wives Children One of the Minor Tragedies The "Glorious Dead" Always the Personal Note Clergymen Their Failure Work In the East-end Mysticism and the Practical Man Abraham Lincoln Reconstruction Education The Inane and Unimaginative Great Adventure Travel The Enthralling Out-of-Reach The Things which are not Dreamed of in Our Philosophy Faith Spiritualism On Reality in People Life Dreams and Reality Love of God The Will ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... and the dark tardy when he marched up the street. It was a gantlet of eyes and whispers. He felt inane to an imbecility. The whole village was eying the boss on his way to spark a stenog. His little love-affair was as clandestine as Lady Godiva's ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... had grown like his father's, but he looked much older than ever the hale old mountaineer had done, or than his real age; so worn and lined was his face, his skin tanned, his eyelids and temples puckered by burning sun, his hair and beard white as the inane of his old mare, the proud Adlerstein port entirely gone. He stooped even more without his staff than with it; and, when he yielded himself with a sigh of repose to his wife's tendance, she found that he had not ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... become more than an illusion of guilt. He is, this sly fellow, a memory, inarticulate and envious. He envies me because I am clever enough to laugh at my madness. However, I will consider him later, in his various guises, for of all the Mallares, dumb though he is and ludicrous with inane tears, he interests ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... popping of champagne corks. It was neither brilliant, witty nor impersonal,— brilliant, witty and impersonal talk is never generated in modem society nowadays. "I would much rather listen to the conversation of lunatics in the common room of an asylum, than to the inane gabble of modern society in a modern drawing-room"—said a late distinguished politician to the present writer—"For the lunatics always have the glimmering of an idea somewhere in their troubled brains, but modern society has neither brains nor ideas." Fragmentary ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... only metamorphosis of this kind that I came across. It was as though there were something in the atmosphere which turned paupers into capitalists and inane milksops into men of brains ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... antichrist in his frantic blusterings may bite off his own tongue, may fulminate all kinds of evils, bans, excommunications, wars, desolations, and burnings, as long and as much as he likes. But if we take refuge with the Lord God, what can this inane, worn-out man and water-bubble do to us?" With more in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... numeros etiam ille ciet cognata per artem Corpora, quae valido saliunt excussa petauro: Membraque per flammas orbesque emissa flagrantes, Delphinumque suo per inane imitantia motu, Et viduata volant ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... on one side, the general on the other, the ladies round them. Farther back still her eyes fell on all the uplifted moustaches, the light ones, the brown, the black, the dyed, the thin moustaches, the thick, the curved, and the inane, the drooping, the smartly curled. Among that melancholy and shaggy crowd a few clean-shaven faces looked ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... determined never to marry; and I suppose has formed this determination purposely that he may spend all he can obtain, without being teased by any qualms of conscience. For the destructive system of individual property involves a thousand absurdities; and the proud but inane successor of a Sydney or a Verulam, instead of knowing how difficult the subject of identity itself is, instead of perceiving that man is nothing but a continuity, or succession of single thoughts, and is therefore in reality no more ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... to get your help that I came in. I'm tired of those confounded dinners. You know yourself that they are all alike—the same people, the same flowers, the same things to eat, and the same inane twaddle in the shape of talk. ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... "that any regulation which neglected human nature was bound to fail. Man, that absurd and passionate animal, cannot thrive under an intelligent system. To be acceptable to the majority a law must be unjust. The French demobilization system is inane, and that is why it is ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... the imponderable. Therefore, an object just as large but lighter Declares infallibly its more of void; Even as the heavier more of matter shows, And how much less of vacant room inside. That which we're seeking with sagacious quest Exists, infallibly, commixed with things— The void, the invisible inane. ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... growth of the human mind flourishes in Calabria, but is not popular as a subject of conversation. The more old-fashioned werewolves cling to the true versipellis habits, and in that case only the pigs, the inane Calabrian pigs, are dowered with the faculty of distinguishing them in daytime, when they look like any other "Christian." There is a record, in Fiore's book, of an epidemic of lycanthropy that attacked the boys of Cassano. (Why only the boys?) It began on 31 July, 1210; and the season ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... speeches of some of our members of Parliament. Only read them, I wish no man so ill an to inflict upon him the torture of hearing them—read them, I say, and you will have taken the very highest degree in the order of inane flippancy. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... existence it has been, he says, the constant, burning desire of the Montenegrins to be joined to it. We may well rub our eyes at a letter in the same newspaper from Lord Sydenham, who makes the perfectly inane remark that this constant, burning desire was never probable. "Montenegro already is Serbia," says Mr. Leiper, "and Serbia Montenegro, in every way except verbally." But Lord Sydenham has set himself up as a stern critic of the Serbs in Montenegro; therefore he cannot countenance the Leiper articles, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... to see imported into the theatre. They bring with them, not only their songs, which, when offensive in their wording, are sometimes made doubly dangerous by their tunefulness; not only their dances, which are usually vulgar, when they are not inane, but their style and manner and 'gags,' which are generally the most deplorable of all. The objection to music-hall artists on the stage is, not only that they take the bread out of the mouths of 'the profession,' which is a minor consideration for the public, but that they ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... cannot be gainsayed. But in America, at least, the injury to the young men is greater apparently than to the young women. At any evening party in New York, at any "Hop" in Newport or Saratoga, the faces of the men are of a lower type, their talk is more inane, their manners are more vulgar. The girls are empty enough, heaven knows! but they seem capable of better things, most of them. And they are not so wholly spoiled in character. I have found very fashionable girls capable of large sacrifices for love, or kindred, or obedience to some divine ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... Court of High Commission longer casts its upas-shadow athwart the hearts of men, the great world is "growing nobler and better," I hereby tender my services to pilot them through that Perdition which does not hover indeterminate in the inane limboes of dogmatic theology, but hath a well-defined latitude and longitude; is visual, tactual,—in which untold millions of mankind writhe and shriek from ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... an adjournment to the dining-room to play bagatelle, the most inane of games, to which the billiard-player goes with contempt, changed quickly to wrath when he cannot put the balls into absurd little holes. Mary was an adept, and took pleasure in showing James how the thing should be done. He noticed ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... into matter where spirit identifies itself with every form of life, and assimilates their essences. This cyclic pilgrimage it undertook, foreseeing pain, but "preferring free will to passive slavery, intellectual, self- conscious pain, and even torture, 'while myriad time shall flow,' to inane, imbecile, instinctual beatitude," foreseeing pain, but knowing that out of it all would come a nobler state of life, a divinity capable of rule, a power to assist in the general evolution of nature. It is true in the experience of many that going deep within themselves, an ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... doing his homework conscientiously in the evening, being exquisitely polite to his family, his instructors, and the various foolish people who visited his home for the sole purpose (apparently) of making inane remarks to him. He saw all this, and the picture was far from unattractive—in the distance. In the immediate future, however, there were various quite important things to be done. There was a whole normal lifetime of crime to be crowded into one day. Looking out of his window he espied the gardener ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... because it was democratic and defended because it was democratic; and Napoleon was not feared as the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats. What France set out to prove France has proved; not that common men are all angels, or all diplomatists, or all gentlemen (for these inane aristocratic illusions were no part of the Jacobin theory), but that common men can all be citizens and can all be soldiers; that common men can fight and can rule. There is no need to confuse the question with any of those escapades of a floundering ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... big sister Solly, Edward, and the very name is so inane. If she hasn't any big sister Solly, what are we ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... did. Much more let prior, and as it were, rehearsal scenes of Federation come and go, henceforward, as they list; and, on Plains and under City-walls, innumerable regimental bands blare off into the Inane, without note ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... is one luxury of which I never felt the need, and with which, permit me to tell you, I can readily dispense. I have little respect for women, and no desire to be wearied with their inane garrulity." ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... and the verse seems to go on of itself, like the enchanted boat in Alastor, with no one at the helm. Vision succeeds vision in glorious but bewildering profusion; ideal landscapes and cities of cloud "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." These poems are like the water-falls in the Yosemite, which, tumbling from a height of several thousand feet, are shattered into foam by the air, and waved about over the valley. Very beautiful is this descending spray, and the rainbow dwells in its {261} bosom; but there is ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Pancks steamed out of his little dock at a quarter before six, and bore straight down for the Patriarch, who happened to be then driving, in an inane manner, through a stagnant account of Bleeding Heart Yard. Pancks instantly made fast to him ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... verandah rail whistling the lively, lilting measures of "There's a Girl Wanted There"—the "silly ass" seemed to become a thousand times sillier than ever; for he forthwith set down his cup, and, turning to Anita, said with an inane sort of giggle, "I say, you know, here's a lark. Let's have a game of 'Slap Hand,' you and I—what? Know it, don't you? You try to slap my hands, and I try to slap yours, and whichever succeeds in doing it first gets a prize. ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... it irritating because it ignored questions of current policy, and it was discouraging to the Filipinos who were reminded by it of the hopeless future for their country to which time had brought no progress. But with all the faults and unworthiness of the later rulers, and the inane attempts of their parasites to distract attention from these failings, there remains undimmed the luster of Spain's early fame. The Christianizing which accompanied her flag upon the mainland and islands of the New World is its ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... he said in an assertive voice quite different from his futile and inane pleadings of a short while before. "Hurry, Eveley, I want you. Dress for motoring, my car is here. I shall wait in the ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... The picture! That inane and seemingly worthless drawing over the fireplace in The Colonel's Own, whose presence in so rich a room has always been ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... found that a "taste" for shirt-tags had been created by this exciting bit of experience, and other men, who had been loudly laughing and cheering over the discomfiture of Chickering and his inane friends, found themselves suddenly on the ground, with wicked-looking knives flashing before their eyes, and their shirts being mutilated by the pressure of ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... Their training had led them to think in army corps, and they frankly and sneeringly asked us, "What could you do?" They were still in the stage where they freely applied to enemies and possible enemies the expression, "They are afraid of us." "The more enemies, the more glory," was the inane motto so popular early in the war that it was even ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... be to them but the idle vaporings of a mind diseased. Your acute ears shall hear these daughters express the wish that you were dead; and then in your blindness you will give yourself into the keeping of a woman as dull, inane and unfeeling as the foolish child you first chose as wife. But with it all your obstinacy shall constitute your power; and that beauty which was yours in youth shall be with you to the last. You shall feel all the torments of the damned and become inured to the scorching ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and tendered him the bills. "Now," he said gravely, "this is the last, unless—unless you cut out such people as Celeste La Rue and others that you train with. I'm tired of paying bills for your inane extravagances and parties. I can curtail your income and what's more, I ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... those lists inane Wise regulator, Number holds the reins Of those indomitable steeds; Number has set a bit i' the foaming mouths Of these Leviathans, and with nervous hand Controls them ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... were staring down at it solemnly, for once no inane grin on the supervisor's face. And that of Ross Metaxa was ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... after hearing his wife's aggressive diatribes, but a stalwart man of six feet, with a comely face bespeaking solid determination in every line. And when one comes to think of it, it is not the big blustering man or woman that rules, but the quiet, apparently inane specimens that look so meek that they are held up as models of propriety and gentleness. Miss Grosvenor immediately nailed him for her meeting, and politics being the only subject discussed, he aired his particular bug. This was ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... gods fall into various groups, the most significant being the triad of Fire, Wind, and Sun.[11] Not much weight is to be laid on the theological speculations of the time as indicative of primitive conceptions, although they may occasionally hit true. For out of the number of inane fancies it is reasonable to suppose that some might coincide with historic facts. Thus the All-gods of the Rig Veda, by implication, are of later origin than the other gods, and this, very likely, was the case; but it is a mere guess on the part ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... him for assistance, he naturally selected those men whom he could control. The first that recommended himself was one Harold, a youth of inane and plastic character, carried away by the example of an actor, and full of execrable quotations, going to show that he was an imitator of the master spirit both in text and admiration. This Harold was a gunner, and therefore versed in arms; he had traversed the whole lower portion ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... military conquest, by unscrupulous "business" methods, or by the favoritism of sovereigns; but it is in every instance always independent of any exertion, of any socially useful labor of the inheritor, who often squanders his property in idleness or in the whirlpool of a life as inane as it ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... laughing. 'Possibly in your place I might plunge into the unspeakable delights of that ascetic course; it possesses the merits of novelty and originality, and it is not very expensive. Your Monna Lisa is sweet, but inane as music for the ballet; I ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... don't catch me there; and said nothing. But I reflected that yesterday I might myself have made the same inane ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... unable to contain himself any longer. "Is this the inane, prosaic existence for which you have given up one of the most brilliant careers the world had to offer a man? It's bad enough to have wrecked that, but for one possessing the wealth you do to waste his life after such fashion; it's simply ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... "Do make some attempt to subdue that inane wit. I fancy you'll feel rather cheap hearing that that thousand dollars is the first payment on ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... the unimportant and the important; to their habit of rising at times into the clouds rather than above the clouds, and of there disporting themselves in regions "close-bordering on the impalpable inane;" to their too conspicuous want of order, system, perspective. The dramatic machinery of "Sartor Resartus" is therefore turned to a third service. It is made the vehicle of much good-humoured satire upon these and similar characteristics ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... fancied any joke perpetrated upon Cousin Albert must be pretty strong or the father would stamp it as inane and without humor. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... freshness of the God-breathed spirit air, Pass through my soul, and make it strong to love; Wither with gracious cold what demons dare Shoot from my hell into my world above; Let them drop down, like leaves the sun doth sear, And flutter far into the inane and bare, Leaving my middle-earth calm, wise, ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... provocative; one seemed to be in converse with Mr. Copley, who was not beyond converse yet, though Rupert saw he had been some time drinking. His face was flushed a little, his eyes dull, his features overspread with that inane stupidity which comes from long-continued and purely sensual indulgence of any kind, especially under the fumes of wine. To the side of this man, Rupert saw Dolly go. She went in, as I said, with a light, quick ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... however, Johnny said we must get ready, so I was provided with a fur-lined leather coat, leather helmet, goggles and a large pair of fur gauntlets. We went over to the aerodrome where our fiery steed was champing its bit as though longing to spring into the "vast inane." Two or three attendants were getting it ready. It was an R.E.8 plane and a machine gun was fixed on one side. Johnny climbed into his position and I took a seat behind him. An attendant came up ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... telephone an order for a pickax, a spade, a military gas-mask, and six carboys of sulfuric acid, all to be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned house in Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep; and failing, passed the hours in reading and in the composition of inane verses to counteract ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... moments of our lives it is always the inane that first suggests itself. It was so likely that Macdonald ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... speaking to Desmond O'Connor, to whom he unburdened himself, "'Gifford will never learn. He believes himself to be a journalistic planet. I don't mind an ordinary honest fool that knows it is a fool, but a fool that regards its own inane folly as the final thing in wisdom ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... they paid no heed to Raoul Beardsley. He had regained his composure, and far down in his eyes something leaped into rapt expression; he adjusted his glasses and peered around cautiously, beaming. He beamed at them all, and had to suppress an inane glee.... ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... stuff a girl was made of. Nothing foolish or nervous or hysterical about her. And then, subsequently, when he had met her on her own ground, she had endeavoured to put him at his ease. Funny that, but he appreciated it, nevertheless. And she could talk. She didn't giggle and ask inane questions. Nor did she treat him as some sort of a natural curiosity, who might be expected to do something shocking but entertaining at any moment. She was sensible as—well—as ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... epitaph of a bright young athlete who had been possessed of health, riches, and all fair prospects. No one warned him; none of those who swilled expensive poisons for which he paid ever refused to accept his mad generosity; he was cheered down the road to the gulf by the inane plaudits of the lowest of men; and one who was evidently his companion in many a frantic drinking-bout could find nothing to say but "He was a fool!" At this moment there are thousands of youths in our great towns and cities who are leading the heartless, senseless, semi-delirious life ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... following the sound of some one just beyond the veranda rail whistling the lively, lilting measures of "There's a Girl Wanted There," "the silly ass" seemed to become a thousand times sillier than ever. He set down his cup, and, turning to Anita, said with an inane sort of giggle, "I say, you know, here's a lark. Let's have a game of 'Slap Hand,' you and I—what? Know it, don't you? You try to slap my hands, and I try to slap yours, and whichever succeeds in ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... eulogized by Burke, and in most men's minds a sort of beatified individual. How glorious, having finished off one's affairs in Bedfordshire, or in fact finding them very dull, inane, and worthy of being quitted and got away from, to set out on a cruise, over the Jails first of Britain; then, finding that answer, over the Jails of the habitable Globe! "A voyage of discovery, a circum-navigation of charity; ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... him. In a self-tormenting mood he allowed the corners of his mouth to droop as if he were playing the part of pantaloon on the stage; disarranged his hair yet more wildly; put out his tongue at his own image in the mirror; croaked a string of inane invectives against himself; and finally, like a naughty child, blew the leaves of his manuscript from the table ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... feelings of Arthur and Angela. He hesitated before her, confused, and she kept her head down over the dog. But presently Aleck, getting bored, moved on, and, as it would have been inane to continue to stare at the floor, she had to raise herself as slowly as she might. Soon their eyes arrived in the same plane, and whether a mutual glance of intelligence was exchanged, or whether their power ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... insincere, imbecile. Its sole function was, and always has been, to help idlers of the upper classes to while away their evenings. The absurd notion of a Platonic music was rivalled by the absurdity of the composition. The inane dialogue was made up of interminable recitative, in the midst of which an occasional chorus—introduced in conformity with supposed classical practice—must have come as a most refreshing relief; for choruses they ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... and high office are always a trifle ponderous when conversing with ladies. Young lieutenants—or, at all events, officers not above the rank of captain—are far more successful at the game. How they contrive to be so God only knows. Let them but make the most inane of remarks, and at once the maiden by their side will be rocking with laughter; whereas, should a State Councillor enter into conversation with a damsel, and remark that the Russian Empire is one of vast extent, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... see God, be pure. If you will not be pure, you will grow more and more impure; and instead of seeing God, will at length find yourself face to face with a vast inane—a vast inane, yet filled full of one inhabitant, that devouring monster, your own false self. If for this neither do you care, I tell you there is a Power that will not have it so; a Love that will make you care by ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... Poets of America" was next examined. The general air of gloom—hopeless gloom—was depressing. Such mawkish sentimentality and despair; such inane and mortifying confessions; such longings for a lover to come; such sighings over a lover departed; such cravings for "only"—"only" a grave in some dark, dank solitude. As Mrs. Dodge puts it, "Pegasus generally feels ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... philosophers have declared that truth lies at the bottom of a well;—the well in which the truth in regard to these matters lies would seem to stretch far enough down—reaching, in fact, almost to the kingdom of the Inane. The beautiful simplicity of Bible truths has often become so perverted—so overloaded by the vain works (and words) of man's device—as barely to escape total extinction. Witness 'repentance'; in what a farrago of endless absurdities and palpable ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... had never read the inane rat and cat stories of American school "readers" when he wrote that. ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... and his mind is dense, And his lack of saving wit complete; But most amazingly immense Is his inane self-confidence And his innate conceit. But every Glug, and great King Splosh Bowed to Sir Stodge, the fuddled Swank, The muddled Swank of Gosh— The engineering, peeping, peering, Sneering ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... get freedom from the inane interruptions of the mentally deficient," said Clovis, "but it seems I ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... the habit of "playing 'possum" on the part of our opossum, the trick would seem to be particularly inane. The truth of the matter is, what is attributed to an unusual brilliancy on the part of the creature is positively unusual witlessness. The animal has an exceedingly small brain, as compared with that of a dog of similar size, and to ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... upon comparatively easy words) were greeted with some laughter, and the ridiculed spellers sought their seats with hanging heads. By and by, however, the failures were not all at the bottom of the class; here and there such lists as "inane, profane, humane, insane, mundane, urbane," or, "staid, unlaid, mermaid, prayed, weighed, portrayed" began to pick out uncertain ones the entire length ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... What inane small talk I uttered in the Leslies' big, over-furnished drawing-room I know not. All I remember is that I sat with some insipid girl whose hair was flaxen and as colourless as her mind, sipping my tea while I ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... faith the Greeks had their share; what was crude and inane in it becoming, in the atmosphere of their energetic, imaginative intelligence, refined and humanised. The oak-grove of Dodona, the seat of their most venerable oracle, did but perpetuate the fancy that the sounds of the wind in the trees may be, for certain prepared and chosen ears, intelligible ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... this matchless Venus, that of Medici seems as inane and trifling as mere physical beauty always must by the side of beauty baptized, and made sacramental, as the symbol of that ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... betake myself,—to books, "the immortal children" of "the understanding, courage, and abilities" of the wise and good,—ay! and to inane, drivelling, doting books, the bastard progeny of vanity and ignorance,—books over which one dawdles in an amusing dream and pleasant spasm of amazement, and which teach us wisdom as tipsy Helots taught the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are set on that to steady it. At the Last Day they shall disappear "like clouds"; the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself off into wreck, and as dust and vapor vanish in the Inane. Allah withdraws his hand from it, and it ceases to be. The universal empire of Allah, presence everywhere of an unspeakable Power, a Splendor, and a Terror not to be named, as the true force, essence ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... Halls," as they were called during their first year of existence, but an old-established haunt of those who aimed at "seeing life"—a great resort of ambitious young bloods about town. Not very long before this time, a powerful trust had been formed to confer the stuffy and inane delights of the "Hall" upon that sturdily respectable suburban middle class—the backbone of London society—which had hitherto, to a great extent, eschewed this particular form of dissipation. The trust amassed wealth by striking a shrewd blow at our national character. Its entertainments ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... means satisfied. As to his speech, indeed, though it had the worth just ascribed to it and more, and though masses of it were deliberately put on paper by himself, in prose and verse, and continue to be printed and kept legible, what he spoke has pretty much vanished into the inane; and except as record or document of what he did, hardly now concerns mankind. But the things he did were extremely remarkable; and cannot be forgotten by mankind. Indeed, they bear such fruit to the present hour as all the Newspapers are obliged to be taking note of, sometimes to an unpleasant ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... Saint-Omer," caligraphist[TN-110] and sworn expert in the courts of law. Joseph Prudhomme is the synthesis of bourgeois imbecility; radiant, serene, and self-satisfied; letting fall from his fat lips "one weak, washy, everlasting flood" of puerile aphorisms and inane circumlocutions. He says, "The car of the state floats on a precipice." "This sword is the proudest day of my life."—Henri Monnier, Grandeur et D['e]cadence de Joseph ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... early time, for that matter, the instinct of the right estimate of such values and of its reducing to the inane the dull dispute over the "immoral" subject and the moral. Recognising so promptly the one measure of the worth of a given subject, the question about it that, rightly answered, disposes of all others—is ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... writer of Rome. He never realized the degradation possible to Christianity until he visited "The Eternal City," with its huge shams and ghastly superstitions. He never saw Hinduism with its myriad inane rites and debasing idolatry half so grotesque, idiotic, and repulsive, as in this city of Benares, where one ought to see the religion of these two hundred odd million people at its best, and not ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... blest If Some-one gave his nimble tongue a rest And, turning Trappist, stanched the fearsome gush Of egotistic and thrasonic slush; Or if Lord X. eschewed his daily speeches And took to canning Californian peaches; Or if egregious LYNCH could but abstain From "ruining along the illimitable inane" At Question-time, and try to render PLATO'S Republic into Erse, or grow potatoes; Or if our novelists wrote cheerful books, Instead of joining those superfluous cooks Who spoil our daily journalistic broth By lashing it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... Insurrection did. Much more let prior, and as it were, rehearsal scenes of Federation come and go, henceforward, as they list; and, on Plains and under City-walls, innumerable regimental bands blare off into the Inane, without note from us. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... neighbour sat down, he turned to me with an inane smile which occupied all his face. 'Good evening,' he said, in a baronial drawl. 'Miss Cayley, I gathah? I asked the skippah's leave to set next yah. We ought to be friends—rathah. I think yah know my poor deah old aunt, Lady ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... days we rode comfortably here and there and looked at things. The things could not be spoiled, but their effect was very materially marred by the swarms of tourists. Sometimes they were silly, and cracked inane and obvious jokes in ridicule of the grandest objects they had come so far to see; sometimes they were detestable and left their insignificant calling-cards or their unimportant names where nobody could ever have any object in reading them; sometimes they were pathetic ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... last in her too-splendid bedroom, she put arms and head down on the dressing-table and sobbed. These people were simple where she was complicated and complicated where she was simple. It was all uncomfortable and different. She thought of Jim Nolan's unfrilled conversation, of his clumsy, rather inane compliments, of his primitive amoeba-like type of humor. She saw the whole course of her life of mean shifts and wranglings with her mother; and though its moral niggardliness was unappreciated, its physical meagerness sickened her in contrast to the ease and beauty of these newer scenes. ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... Stops the white cloud on its way, As it drives with driftless drifting O'er the vacant vault of day, And in sounds of soft upbraiding Calls it down the void inane To the gilding and the shading Of the mountain and ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... perusal—that he should buy no faster than as he can read straight through what he has already bought—is a supposition alike preposterous and unreasonable. "Surely you have far more books than you can read," is sometimes the inane remark of the barbarian who gets his books, volume by volume, from some circulating library or reading club, and reads them all through, one after the other, with a dreary dutifulness, that he may be sure that he has got the value ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... ancient serpent, may hiss and rage. Yes, the Roman antichrist in his frantic blusterings may bite off his own tongue, may fulminate all kinds of evils, bans, excommunications, wars, desolations, and burnings, as long and as much as he likes. But if we take refuge with the Lord God, what can this inane, worn-out man and water-bubble do to us?" With more ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... indicated, the characters are those with which the author loves to surround himself. A tuft-hunting county baronet's widow, an inane captain of dragoons, a graceless young baronet, a lady with groundless pretensions to feeble health and poesy, an obsequious nonentity her husband, and a flimsy and artificial young lady, are the personages in whom we are expected to find amusement. Two ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... where spirit identifies itself with every form of life, and assimilates their essences. This cyclic pilgrimage it undertook, foreseeing pain, but "preferring free will to passive slavery, intellectual, self- conscious pain, and even torture, 'while myriad time shall flow,' to inane, imbecile, instinctual beatitude," foreseeing pain, but knowing that out of it all would come a nobler state of life, a divinity capable of rule, a power to assist in the general evolution of nature. It is true in the experience of many that going deep within themselves, an elemental consciousness ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... cab, watched her with growing sympathy. In her very conformity to type, she represented so naturally a real and living unit of humanity. Her poor commonplace prettiness was already on the wane, stamped out by the fear and trouble of the last few months. Yet inane though her features, lacking altogether strength or distinction, there was stamped into them something of that dumb, dog-like fidelity to some object which redeemed them from utter insignificance. Wrayson, as he watched her, found himself thinking more kindly of the dead man himself. In his vulgar, ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... And the inane chorus of pleased laughs that followed Polk Hayes's brainless disposal of the important question in hand made me ashamed of being a woman—though it was funny. Still I bided my time and Polk saw the biding, I could tell by the expression ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... preserves something also of the wit and civilisation of the eighteenth century. Lines like "a Muezzin from the tower of darkness cries," or "Their mouths are stopped with dust" are successful in the same sense as "Pinnacled dim in the intense inane" or "Through verdurous glooms and ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... alkalkuli. In en. In front antauxe. In place of, to put anstatauxi. In that manner tiamaniere. Inability neebleco. Inaccessible neatingebla. Inaccurate neakurata. Inaction senokupo. Inactive senokupa. Inadvertence malatenteco. Inane malplena. Inanimate senviva. Inappreciable netaksebla. Inappropriate nedeca. In as much as tial ke. Inattention neatenteco. Inaudible neauxdebla. Inauspicious nefavora. Incalculable nekalkulebla. Incapable nekapabla. Incapacity nekapableco. Incarnate korpigi. Incarnation ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... said to be a mere matter of display and ostentation. Many despise wealth, and contented with little take pleasure in slender diet and inexpensive living. Though some are inflamed with desire for office, many there are who hold it in so low esteem that they can imagine nothing more inane or worthless. Other things too, which seem to some admirable, very many regard as of no value. But all have the same feeling as to friendship,— alike those who devote themselves to the public service, those who take delight in learning ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... the Really Great Love "Mush" Wives Children One of the Minor Tragedies The "Glorious Dead" Always the Personal Note Clergymen Their Failure Work In the East-end Mysticism and the Practical Man Abraham Lincoln Reconstruction Education The Inane and Unimaginative Great Adventure Travel The Enthralling Out-of-Reach The Things which are not Dreamed of in Our Philosophy Faith Spiritualism On Reality in People Life Dreams and Reality Love of God The ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... rebellio flammis, Nec tulit impietas majus in urbe scelus. Quid tanto vesana malo profecit Erynnis? Ipsa sui testis pignoris extat humus. Crypta manet, memoresque trahit confessio cives, Nec populi fallit marmor inane fidem. Orphana, turba, veni, viduisque allabere saxis, Est aliquid soboli ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... interrogative—and was confined to generalities. But this could not continue long. Hermione was an enthusiastic talker and seldom discussed banalities. From every circle where she found herself the inane was speedily banished; pale topics—the spectres that haunt the dull and are cherished by them—were whipped away to limbo, and some subject full-blooded, alive with either serious or comical possibilities, was very soon upon the carpet. By chance Artois happened to speak of two people ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... more empty, which I would call the vein political, read the speeches of some of our members of Parliament. Only read them, I wish no man so ill an to inflict upon him the torture of hearing them—read them, I say, and you will have taken the very highest degree in the order of inane flippancy. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... English icicles, which only that nation seems able to produce in her public servants. Presumably through a century-long contact with the races of the East, the English diplomat of the Sir Edward Grey type presents the bland, imperturbable, non-committal, almost inane expression of the Oriental that hardly gives one any criterion of the tremendous power of perception ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... Society at Hampstead had long ago missed the faithful, inseparable pair—the pair who never spoke, who sat in the background listening with shy, earnest faces, with innocence that yearned, wide-eyed, after wisdom, while it followed, with passionate subservience, the inane. Arthur had proved himself powerless to keep it up. If an archangel's trump had announced a lecture for that evening, it would not have roused ...
— The Judgment of Eve • May Sinclair
... understanding what his friend was driving at, and stupidly wondering if he ever had noticed any difference in Joe's ears, J.W. stared with inane bewilderment. "Is one really larger than the ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... would have passed in, gratified to gain That positive eternity of pain Instead of this insufferable inane. ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... harmless, inane, well-meant question. Poor Mrs. George might well be excused for feeling bewildered over the effect. Romney gathered his long legs together, stood up, and swept the unfortunate speaker a ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... writings of Emerson the spirit of these orders manifests itself. His range of subjects is very wide, ascending to the highest sphere of spiritual contemplation, bordering on that "intense inane" where thought loses itself in breathless ecstasy, and stooping to the homeliest maxims of prudence and the every-day lessons of good manners, And all his work was done, ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... that a large portion of the throng in the hall of trial, not venturing to change their judgment, though upon the manifest evidence just given them, awaited in painful suspense the return of the judges, interchanging with an air of mystery and inane importance the usual remarks prompted ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... hidden, yet—to him—subtly revealed, warmth of Mrs. Taine's greeting embarrassed him with a momentary sense of shame. The frothing gush of Louise's inane ejaculations, and the coughing, choking, cursing of Mr. Taine,—whose feeble grip upon the flesh that had so betrayed him was, by now, so far loosed that he could scarcely walk alone,—set the painter struggling for ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... eventually to L4,000 a year (a large income in pre-war days) and of attractive appearance, she had no lack of suitors, even though she thought modern dancing inane, and had little skill at ball-games. I have indicated her appearance by some few phrases already; but to enable you to visualize her more definitely I might be more precise. She was a tall woman rather than large built, like ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... unfailingly, and her Jersey letter was one of the chief events of each week. She was fonder of her daughter at a distance than she had ever been when they were together. "That will be something to tell Violet," she would say of any inane bit of gossip that was ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... at his head, knew that there were a dozen absurd wishes in her heart, none of which could possibly ever become facts. He was so different from the self-assertive young men she knew, with their silly flirtations, their inane small-talk, their capacity for Scotch whisky and long hours. For days she had studied him as through microscopic lenses; his guilelessness was real. It just simply could not be; her ears had deceived ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... scanty white locks and a fringe of white whiskers under the chin, and these framed a smiling face and features that were extremely winning in expression. No one could remember ever seeing Old Hucks when he was not smiling, and the expression was neither set nor inane, but so cheery and bright that you were tempted to smile with him, without knowing why. For dress he wore a much patched pair of woolen trousers and a "hickory" shirt of faded blue, with rough top boots and a dilapidated straw hat that looked as if it ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... to blurt out the fact that she was not my niece at all; that I had no authority over her in any way. But what would be the use? It would lead only to explanations and I did not wish to make explanations. I wanted to get through with the whole inane business and be ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... things for the pleasure-seekers. Let them go to the Falls, and Lake Nyassa, and the Himalayas, and those tourist treasures; but why come and chatter inane banalities about his ruins: his treasured, mysterious relic of perhaps the oldest civilisation the world ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... talk like a man," I said, sternly. "Do you think it is manly to use those mushy and inane forms of address? That man is neither dear nor old ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... understand," said Dr. Belford, "the creature has no strong vices—he is too bloodless and inane for them. Even when he had money it doesn't appear that he gambled, and I don't believe he drinks. He is simply wanting in principle, feeling and everything. Eliza says he has scarcely spoken to his wife, or she to him, since the baby ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... embarrassing; he apologised; but her face was not startled; it was not aware of him; it wore a singular expression of resolution. A very singular expression which, as it were, detained him for a moment. In order to cover his embarrassment, he made some inane remark on the weather, upon which, instead of returning another inane remark according to the tacit rules of the game, she only gave him a smile of unfathomable meaning. Nothing could have been ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... scanning the youth's face with foolishly smiling eyes, noted the flush on his cheek, the odd glitter in his handsome eyes, and even caught a whiff of wine upon his breath. Alarm grew in Garnache's mind, but his face maintained its foolish vacancy, its inane smile. He bowed again and, with a wave of the ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... flock to the music and don't come to the service, and that the pieces played are profane, or mundane, or inane, or something—not what ought to be played on Sunday. Of course 'tis Lautmann who ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... was indeed changed, so much so that her old friends who had not seen her for some time could scarcely have known her. She was no longer fat and inane. Her figure had become slim and graceful; her face had become expressive and remarkably pretty, and her manners were those of a well-bred and self-possessed lady. Gildart felt that he could no more have taken ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... you could tell me where my hotel is, officer?" Oliver began. "What hotel?" said the policeman uninterestedly. Oliver noticed with an inane distinctness that he had started to swirl his nightstick as a large blue cat might switch its tail. He wondered if it would be tactful to ask him if he had ever been a drum major. Then he realized that the policeman ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... been so fierce as to be almost like a rap from a policeman's club, and there was an enforced and temporary suspension of the inane chatter. The attendant youth tried to assume the incensed and threatening look with which an ancient gallant would have laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. But some animals and men only become absurd when they try to appear formidable. It was ludicrous to see him weakly frowning ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... of nature, by the aid of the principles of unity (among all kinds of which teleological unity is the highest), while it ought not to attempt to soar above the sphere of experience, beyond which there lies nought for us but the void inane. The critical examination, in our Transcendental Analytic, of all the propositions which professed to extend cognition beyond the sphere of experience, completely demonstrated that they can only conduct us to a possible experience. If we were not ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... thought of impossible things; one after another, he thought of things merely inane and futile, for he was trying to do something beyond his power. Penrod was never brilliant, or even ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... intelligent English journals, and the best-informed English politicians (men with one foot and two ears in the Cabinet) these true things written and repeated, and watched while they died out into the Vast Inane and Immense Absurd from which they ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... tone of fervour and devotion pervading the book that contrasts pleasantly with the trivially inane tone some writers think fit to adopt in writing for and about children. All Sunday-school teachers and parents would do well to lay its ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... proximity to the bold colouring of "The Ambassadors"; so that its own subtle, yet reticent superiority is well-nigh shouted down by its lusty neighbour. It is a picture to be seen by itself; as it must stand by itself in the usual inane gallery of ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... steamed out of his little dock at a quarter before six, and bore straight down for the Patriarch, who happened to be then driving, in an inane manner, through a stagnant account of Bleeding Heart Yard. Pancks instantly made fast to him and ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... the struggle over political institutions will be seen no more,—their subject-matter has ceased to be. The study of all such matters will belong to the history of civilization. The vast mass of inane productions—the evidences of a spoiled taste, often possible only through sacrifices at the altar of the author's vanity—are gone. Even speaking from the view-point of present conditions, it may be said without exaggeration that four-fifths of all literary productions ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... made without any claim on serious thought. It is indeed a pleasant tickling of the imagination, this leisurely enjoyment of looking over all those picturesque announcements; it is like passing along the street with its shopwindows in all their lustre and glamour. But this soft and inane pleasure has been crushed by the arrangement after to-day's fashion. Those pages on which advertising and articles are mixed helterskelter do not allow the undisturbed mood. It is as if we constantly had to alternate between lazy strolling and energetic running. ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... some inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my unfamiliarity with the language. For although two nations use the same words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the dictionary. The business of life is not carried on by words, but in set phrases, each with a special ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... motion then to go away, always politely, cleverly suppressing my sense of indignation at their conduct; and they would do so, only to make room for a worse crowd. The town's business stopped; people left their stalls and shops to glare aimlessly at or to ask inane and unintelligible questions about the barbarian who seemed to have dropped suddenly from the heavens. When I addressed a few words to them in strongest Anglo-Saxon, telling them in the name of all they held sacred to go away and leave ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... it.... She overpowered me a little at first. I was slow to realize how one's intents and sensations could be absolutely physical. I could pity, but there was something actually creepy about her. I was inane enough to ask if she could not return for a visit. She sank back and shut her eyes and clenched ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... colonel stared at him for a long moment, then gave an inane giggle. He stepped back and flicked Joe Mauser a salute. "Very well, captain. As a matter of routine, I shall report this use of an aircraft for reconnaissance purposes, and undoubtedly a commission will meet to investigate the propriety of the ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... of economy—adopt and enforce some rules and regulations for the benefit of all; it would be necessary to do so unless the individuals were not only perfect, but also absolutely of one mind on all subjects relating to their welfare. Can the imagination picture existence more inane? ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... through the Infinitude on Cloth, as on a Faust's Mantle, or rather like the Sheet of clean and unclean beasts in the Apostle's Dream; and without such Sheet or Mantle, would sink to endless depths, or mount to inane limbos, and in either ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... very pretty." Stopping before the dressing-table, Gabriella frowned on the photograph of a young man in a silver frame—a young man with a fascinating smile and inane features. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... hopelessly about him, utterly at a loss for anything to say. The whole thing had been so unexpected, so very opposite to the commonplace ending he had anticipated, that he was too dazed and confused to do anything but smile in an inane and foolish manner. He had rather looked forward to seeing some eccentric individual, some elderly recluse who lived there with a servant or two. And here he was, face to face with the man who, at the present moment, was to him the most interesting ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... it as he hadn't seen it hitherto. It must have given what value there was to her poor little roles in motion pictures. Now that his eye had caught it, it surprised, and to some degree disturbed, him. It was more than the show-girl's inane prettiness, or the comely wax-work face of the girl on the cover of a magazine. With due allowance for her Anglo-Saxonism and honesty, she was the type of woman to whom "things happen." Things would happen to her, Allerton surmised, beyond anything she could experience ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... which radiated from his person. A contingent of Little White Cows, a kind of bodyguard, stood at a respectful distance beyond, intent upon his every movement. The Master never stirred. He sat there to be looked at—accustomed to homage almost divine; beatifically inane. Like the Christians of old, he wore no hat. The head was nearly bald. A long cloak, glistening with grease stains, swathed his limbs and portly belly, on which one suspected multitudinous wrinkles of fat. Two filmy lidless eyes, bulging on a level with his forehead, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Great God! wilt thou leave me all alone here upon earth? O God! for which of my sins dost thou punish me in my children? For mercy's sake, call me home before she also leaves me, who is the joy of my life. And I can do nothing to turn aside this fatality—stupid inane old man that I am! And this Jacques de Boiscoran—if he were guilty, after all? Ah the wretch! I would hang ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... represent the only metamorphosis of this kind that I came across. It was as though there were something in the atmosphere which turned paupers into capitalists and inane milksops into men ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... once was a critic whose bane Was his dread of a style that was plain, So, resolved to refresh us, He strove to be precious, But sank to the nether inane. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... anything else but read the parts. They read, crossing back and forth whenever the coach thinks they ought to cross, and it doesn't mean a thing. I watched that very thing in an amateur show not so long ago, and it was inane. Nobody should move from one place on the stage to another without a reason for moving. There is a reason for every inflection of the voice. A person with common sense will read a part intelligently, but only a person with a dramatic spark inside ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... them. Very pretty," said Kit amicably, not knowing the significance of it, but conscious of the wide range one might cover in a few minutes of simple Sonora ranch life. From the tragic and weird to the childishly inane was ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... wickedness! The man will be looking all day long for his heroine in the tin-shop, by the forge or in the factory, in the counting-room, and he will not find her, and he will be dissatisfied. A man who gives himself up to the indiscriminate reading of novels will be nerveless, inane, and a nuisance. He will be fit neither for the store, nor the shop, nor the field. A woman who gives herself up to the indiscriminate reading of novels will be unfitted for the duties of wife, mother, sister, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... our political opinions, we have been grossly misunderstood and misrepresented. There never was a time, even in the re-election of Lincoln, when to differ from the leading party was considered more inane and treasonable. Because we made a higher demand than either Republicans or Abolitionists, they in self-defense revenged themselves by calling us Democrats; just as the church at the time of its apathy on the slavery question ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... upset for several days. For a time I resolutely put all thought of what had occurred from my mind, but as soon as I felt able, I sat down, with the whole matter before me, as it were, and deliberately looked it in the face. I think I never felt more inane in my life than when I remembered my folly, as I now regarded it. All that saved me from utter self-abasement was the fact that it had occurred at a time when I was at such a low ebb physically, by reason ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... craft, I call them—would force us to leave off painting quiet interiors," continued Pelgram, lowering his voice with mournful impressiveness, "because, forsooth, interiors are inane, undramatic things unless relieved by color! Not our color, but the bright, blazing color that roars and raves. Still-lifes they condemn unless they swim in seas of pure emotion. For with them color is emotion, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... inhospitable even in the sunlight. The rock walls rose sheer, the roofs slanted rakishly, the signs scratched on the rock by facetious riders were pointless and inane. Lone picked his way through the crooked defile that was marked MAIN STREET on the corner of the first huge boulder and came abruptly into the road. Here he turned north and shook his ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... wholly to the guidance of his imagination, and the verse seems to go on of itself, like the enchanted boat in Alastor, with no one at the helm. Vision succeeds vision in glorious but bewildering profusion; ideal landscapes and cities of cloud "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." These poems are like the water-falls in the Yosemite, which, tumbling from a height of several thousand feet, are shattered into foam by the air, and waved about over the valley. Very beautiful is this descending ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... medical whites. Unnecessarily, to break the silence with any inane remark, Coffin said: "Going ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... also found. These usually have little blue beads for eyes, and are of the quaintest and naivest appearance conceivable. Here we have an elderly man with a long pointed beard, there two women with inane smiles upon their countenances, here another woman, of better work this time, with a child slung across her shoulder. This figure, which is in the British Museum, must be very late, as prehistoric ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... Macbeth was ruthlessly struck out as containing an obvious allusion to the steersman of St. Peter's bark. Finally, bored and bothered by the political and theological Dogberrys of the day, with their inane prejudices, their solemn stupidity, and their entire ignorance of the conditions necessary for the growth of sane and healthy art, Madame Ristori made up her mind to leave the stage. She, however, was extremely anxious to appear once before a Parisian audience, Paris ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... or else blasts from the other region,—there is perhaps not one of a more undoubtedly supernal character than yourself,—so pure and still, with intents so charitable; and then vanishing, too, so soon into the azure inane, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... native places slang which would never, in ordinary times, have penetrated there. In the army you will hear a Scotchman doing what he never did before—dropping his aitches. He has caught it from his English comrades. You will hear him say "Not 'arf"—an inane tag which, despite its popularity in London, failed to find any foothold north of the Tweed before the war. "Not 'arf" was mouthed by Sassenach comedians on the music-hall stages of Edinburgh and ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... silver, every day, Dies to gray. There are knots in every skein. Hours of work and hours of play Fade away Into one immense Inane. Shadow and substance, chaff and grain, Are as vain As the foam or as the spray. Life goes crooning, faint and fain, One refrain: 'If it ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... CHAOS next the notes melodious pass, How suns exploded from the kindling mass, 490 Waved o'er the vast inane their tresses bright, And charm'd young Nature's opening eyes with light. Next from each sun how spheres reluctant burst, And second planets issued from the first. And then to EARTH descends the moral strain, How isles, emerging ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... do not. Unspeakable imbroglio of negotiations, mostly insane, welters over all the Earth; the Belleisles, the Aulic Councils, the British Georges, heaping coil upon coil: and here, notably, in that now so extremely sordid murk of wiggeries, inane diplomacies and solemn deliriums, dark now and obsolete to all creatures, steps forth one little Human Figure, with something of sanity in it: like a star, like a gleam of steel,—shearing asunder your big balloons, and letting out their diplomatic hydrogen;—salutes with his hat, "Gentlemen, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to the heavens, "That inane moon, which makes no response, is beginning to get on my nerves," he soliloquised. "Let me see now! There is certainly master Criqueboeuf, but it is a long journey to the quartier Latin, and when ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... volubility of a versifier's tongue! And perchance it will not be considered out of my line of duty if I venture to remind my most illustrious and renowned MASTER—" this with a withering sneer,—"that if he has any more remarkable nothings to dictate concerning this particularly inane creation of his fancy 'Nourhalma,' 'twill be well that we should proceed therewith, for the hours wax late and the sun veereth ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... your inches and carry him single-handed right from the front door. I know he rowed for Cambridge, but, all the same, it was the act of a fool. And I told him so. Of course, he only grinned. You know that inane, irresistible grin of his when he's done something he ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... exerted a powerful influence on the mind of Plato, and, through him, upon succeeding ages; and that, in some of its aspects, it now survives, and is more influential to-day than in any previous age; but this element of immutable and eternal truth was certainly not contained in the inane and empty formula, "that numbers are real existences, the causes of all other existences!" If the fame of Pythagoras had rested on such "airy nothings," it would have melted away before ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... condigno. And yet they bid us doubt whether there be a habit present. How, therefore, do they know whether they acquire merit de congruo or de condigno [in full, or half]? But this whole matter was fabricated by idle men [But, good God! these are mere inane ideas and dreams of idle, wretched, inexperienced men who do not much reduce the Bible to practise], who did not know how the remission of sins occurs, and how, in the judgment of God and terrors of conscience, trust in works is driven out of us. Secure hypocrites always ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... unnecessary noise, for instance, of the clashing of doors, which is so extremely ill-mannered and vulgar, is a direct proof of the dulness and poverty of thought that one meets with everywhere. In Germany it seems as though it were planned that no one should think for noise; take the inane drumming that goes on as an instance. Finally, as far as the literature treated of in this chapter is concerned, I have only one work to recommend, but it is an excellent one: I mean a poetical epistle in terzo rimo by the famous painter ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... careful men and careless women, the latter very scrumptious in their imported frocks. The sight of these Parisianisms abashed Cassy no more than her appearance abashed Paliser. Etiquette, Formality, the Proper Thing, the great inane gods of the ante-bellum heavens, he had never acknowledged and now, though locally their altars remained and their worship persisted, he knew they were forever dead, blown into the dust-bin of the things that were, tossed there in derision by that ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... afternoons—monsieur with his club, his maitresse, his gambling and his debts—the children with their English governess. A villa by the sea, tennis, infants and sand-forts. The annual stupid voyage en Suisse. The inane slavery of it all. You who are a bohemian, you who live—with all your freedom—all my freedom! Non, merci! I have seen all that! Bah! You are as crazy ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... father's, but he looked much older than ever the hale old mountaineer had done, or than his real age; so worn and lined was his face, his skin tanned, his eyelids and temples puckered by burning sun, his hair and beard white as the inane of his old mare, the proud Adlerstein port entirely gone. He stooped even more without his staff than with it; and, when he yielded himself with a sigh of repose to his wife's tendance, she found that he had not merely the ordinary hurts of travelling, but that ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... suppose has formed this determination purposely that he may spend all he can obtain, without being teased by any qualms of conscience. For the destructive system of individual property involves a thousand absurdities; and the proud but inane successor of a Sydney or a Verulam, instead of knowing how difficult the subject of identity itself is, instead of perceiving that man is nothing but a continuity, or succession of single thoughts, and is therefore in reality no more than the thought of the moment, believes there ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... ad congressum incitarit, et horum apud me copiolas elevarit, adversarii perpetuum in Scripturis exponendis ingenium, plenum fraudis, inane prudentiae. Statim haec, philosophi, tangeretis. ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... a perpetual holiday, and that whoever is not born to an independent income is striving for one or longing for one because it gives holidays for life. To which I reply, first, that heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside; and that the genuine popular verdict on it is expressed in the proverb "Heaven for holiness and Hell for company." Second, I point ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... "Click—click—click—tick—tick—tick," so goes the economic clock. And that clock, with its silly face, has shut us out from the stars. It tells us the time; but behind the dial of the hours is now for us no vision of the solemn wheeling spheres, of spirit flames and that ultimate point of light "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." "America is a clock," I said; and then I remembered the phrase, "America is Niagara." And like a flake of foam, dizzy and lost, I was swept away, out into the infinite, out ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... absorb a good deal at Beechwood in four days, chiefly of the machinery of modern wealth. There were the elaborate meals, the drinking, the card-playing, the motors, the innumerable servants, and the sickening atmosphere of inane sentimentalism between the sexes. Everybody seemed to be having "an affair," and the talk was redolent of innuendo. Adelle had occasion to observe the potency of her lamp in this society. She worked it ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... may believe it," with an inane giggle. "I'm going to bring my art class over to Clarendon to revel in your treasures, some day, soon. You'll be at home to them, ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... sight of so much human flesh. At the same time it discouraged her. In the presence of these two she felt insignificant, even while she pitied them. She wished to get away, but instinctive breeding held her in her chair, chatting. She hoped what she said wasn't too inane; she didn't know quite what she ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... insincere"! "Too trivial"! or for an instant pause And doubly damn with negligent applause! Impute, in fine, the prowess of the Vicar Less to repentance than to too much liquor! Find Louis naught! de Gatinais inane! Gaston unvital, and George Erwyn vain, And Degge the futile fellow of Audaine! Nay, sir, no Epilogue avails to save— You're damned, and Bulmer's ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... people and—— Oh yes! old Barking is very kind," he went on, with a change of tone. "Only I wish Lady Louisa would warn him he need not trouble himself to be amusing. He came and sat by me, towards the end of the evening, and told me the most inane stories in that inflated manner of his. Verily, they were ancient as the hills, and a weariness to the spirit. But that good-looking, young fellow, Decies, swallowed them all down with the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... before, and there is a whispering in the moonlit garden, and young people steal off for wholly superfluous glasses of water, and the men give her duty dances, and she is old—ah, so old!—under the rouge and inane smiles and dainty fripperies that caricature her lost youth! No, my dear, you needn't envy this woman! Pity her, my dear!" pleaded Clarice Pendomer, and with a note of earnestness in ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... foreknowledge mans free will! what monster-growth of human brain, What powers of light shall ever pierce this puzzle dense with words inane? ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... filled my heart, to that odious little flirt, Baby Blake, a young damsel that hawked her tender affections about at the beck and call of every male biped who might for the moment be enthralled by her charms! It was like his cool impudence. And then, again, his asking me his stupid, inane questions, as if I cared what man, and how many. Lizzie Dangler or any other girl might have "in tow," as he called it. Idiot! I declare to you I positively hated Horner at that moment, inoffensive and ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... dreariness to contemplate more closely her neighbors on board, but found them scarcely more interesting. Several were playing cards, others moodily staring out of the windows, while a few were laughing and talking with the girls, their conversation inane and punctuated with profanity. One man was figuring on a scratch pad, and Hope decided he must be an engineer employed on the line; others she classed as small merchants, saloon-keepers, and frontier riff-raff. ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... Legation," unostensibly as something very different? Handsome Stanislaus did duly become Lover of the Grand-Duchess; and has duly, in the course of Nature, some time ago (date uncertain to me), become discarded Lover; the question rising, What is to be done with that elegant inane creature, and his vaporous sentimentalisms and sublime sorrows and disappointments? "Let us make him King of Poland!" said the Czarina, who was always much the gentleman with her discarded Lovers ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... glasses deliberately, put them on the pile of papers beside him, and stood waiting. There was a courteous enquiry in his very attitude, although as yet he spoke no word. His head was tilted slightly backward, and his smile might have seemed almost inane in its width and in the impression of permanency which it conveyed, were it not for the intellectuality of the brow, the force of the fine aquiline nose, and the watchful perspicacity ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... A man of colossal force, With a perfectly splendid gift For soaring and moral uplift. For, though nobody so uniquely Can hearten The British Weekly, His readers will cheerfully spare Him to go and remain in the air, Careering along the inane In a Nicoll-plated plane With, to lend him additional fervour, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... in the morning, goes off himself to Mother Redcap's, a favourite tavern—suburban in those days—or house of call for City tradesmen. There he smokes half a pipe and drinks a pint of ale. In the evening at another tavern he smokes a pipe and drinks two pints of cider, winding up the inane day at his club, where he smokes three pipes before coming home at twelve to go to ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... on falsehood? Have I not read and heard from the most intelligent English journals, and the best-informed English politicians (men with one foot and two ears in the Cabinet) these true things written and repeated, and watched while they died out into the Vast Inane and Immense Absurd ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... his convictions as a woman-hater and genuinely despising Hilma both as a girl and as an inferior, the idea of her worried him. Most of all, he was angry with himself because of his inane sheepishness when she was about. He at first had told himself that he was a fool not to be able to ignore her existence as hitherto, and then that he was a greater fool not to take advantage of his position. Certainly ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... champagne corks. It was neither brilliant, witty nor impersonal,— brilliant, witty and impersonal talk is never generated in modem society nowadays. "I would much rather listen to the conversation of lunatics in the common room of an asylum, than to the inane gabble of modern society in a modern drawing-room"—said a late distinguished politician to the present writer—"For the lunatics always have the glimmering of an idea somewhere in their troubled brains, but modern society has neither brains nor ideas." ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... and of vast beauty and exquisite gowning, had flashed in appalling procession before her mental vision. The idea, in the face of the appalling actuality, was so rich that Bobby pursued it no further lest he spoil it, and talked about the weather and equally inane topics ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... then, subsequently, when he had met her on her own ground, she had endeavoured to put him at his ease. Funny that, but he appreciated it, nevertheless. And she could talk. She didn't giggle and ask inane questions. Nor did she treat him as some sort of a natural curiosity, who might be expected to do something shocking but entertaining at any moment. She was sensible as—well—as sensible ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... does not mean decrease of knavery. Cheating, and lying, and taking bribes, and abuse of authority are ingrained into their very souls; and all the cut and dry formulas of namby pamby philanthropists, the inane maunderings of stay-at-home sentimentalists, the wise saws of self-opinionated theorists, who know nothing of the Hindoo as he really shews himself to us in daily and hourly contact with him, will ever persuade me that native, as opposed to English rule, would be productive of aught but burning ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... years. A solemn apartment near the Etoile—madame with her afternoons—monsieur with his club, his maitresse, his gambling and his debts—the children with their English governess. A villa by the sea, tennis, infants and sand-forts. The annual stupid voyage en Suisse. The inane slavery of it all. You who are a bohemian, you who live—with all your freedom—all my freedom! Non, merci! I have seen all that! Bah! You are ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... never do anything else but read the parts. They read, crossing back and forth whenever the coach thinks they ought to cross, and it doesn't mean a thing. I watched that very thing in an amateur show not so long ago, and it was inane. Nobody should move from one place on the stage to another without a reason for moving. There is a reason for every inflection of the voice. A person with common sense will read a part intelligently, but only a person with a dramatic spark inside of the ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... felt called upon to celebrate it. The guileless tried to see the imaginary line of the meridian which the sophisticated pointed out to them on the water; the cream-peppermint lady went so far as to say she felt the jar as the steamer passed over it. Conjectures, witty, mathematical, or inane, were made as to the identity of to-day, if yesterday was Friday and to-morrow going to ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... the boarding house table, hearing the same stale jokes or caustic remarks about Mrs. Atterson's food from Fred Crackit and the young men boarders of his class, or the grumbling of Mr. Peebles, the dyspeptic invalid, or the inane monologue ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... who do not bow the knee to Baal, who hold fast to what is high and good in the doctrine of political equality; in whose hearts the altar-fires of rational liberty are kept aglow, beaconing the darkness of that illimitable inane where their countrymen, inaccessible to the light, wander witless in the bogs of political unreason, alternately adoring and damning the man-made gods of their own stature. Of that bright band fueling the bale-fires of political consistency I can not profess ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... is altogether unsoldierly; it is fussy and inflated; a full blown specimen of the pompously inane. How can Burnside venture to say that after the repulse, during three days he expected the enemy to leave his stronghold and attack him—Burnside? The rebels never did anything to justify such a supposition. They are neither idiots nor madmen, and only from a McClellan, or some bright pupils ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... not startled; it was not aware of him; it wore a singular expression of resolution. A very singular expression which, as it were, detained him for a moment. In order to cover his embarrassment, he made some inane remark on the weather, upon which, instead of returning another inane remark according to the tacit rules of the game, she only gave him a smile of unfathomable meaning. Nothing could have been more singular. The good-looking young gentleman of questionable appearance took not the slightest ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... inarticulate and envious. He envies me because I am clever enough to laugh at my madness. However, I will consider him later, in his various guises, for of all the Mallares, dumb though he is and ludicrous with inane tears, he interests me ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... has the right to do evil or ever will have, so long as God is God. These people talk much and loudly about freedom—the magic word!—assert with much pomp and verbosity the rights of man, proclaim his independence, and are given to much like inane vaunting and braggadocio. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... England is the so-called comic pictorial sequence. All the big papers have from one to half a dozen of these sequences, each by a different artist. Bud Fisher with "Mutt and Jeff" comes first in popularity, I believe, and then there are his rivals and his imitators. Nothing more inane than some of these series could be invented; and yet they persist and could not, I am told, be dropped by any editor ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... sake talk like a man," I said, sternly. "Do you think it is manly to use those mushy and inane forms of address? That man is neither dear nor old ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... foolishly smiling eyes, noted the flush on his cheek, the odd glitter in his handsome eyes, and even caught a whiff of wine upon his breath. Alarm grew in Garnache's mind, but his face maintained its foolish vacancy, its inane smile. He bowed again and, with a wave of the hands towards the ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... something subdued and broken in the tone. His features had grown like his father's, but he looked much older than ever the hale old mountaineer had done, or than his real age; so worn and lined was his face, his skin tanned, his eyelids and temples puckered by burning sun, his hair and beard white as the inane of his old mare, the proud Adlerstein port entirely gone. He stooped even more without his staff than with it; and, when he yielded himself with a sigh of repose to his wife's tendance, she found that he had not merely the ordinary hurts of travelling, but that there ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... attractive. A man shouldn't cry after he's made up—that's a theatrical commandment, or ought to be. Probably a man shouldn't anyhow. But some do. I imagined Everett had, and that he'd done it with his head in his arms and his arms in the litter of the big table. I think I shook hands with him—one does inane things sometimes—but I don't know what I said. I had something like your experience—I just wasn't there for a minute ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... fasting, and that I had not a penny. To complete the measure of my misfortune, my hat was spoiled by the rain. How was I to appear in the drawing-room of a woman of fashion with an unpresentable hat? I had always cursed the inane and stupid custom that compels us to exhibit the lining of our hats, and to keep them always in our hands, but with anxious care I had so far kept mine in a precarious state of efficiency. It had been neither strikingly new, nor utterly shabby, neither ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... in a gentle, well-bred sort of way in their eagerness to get into the saloon. They were mostly silent, as is the way of the English among strangers, but a few, here and there, who seemed to have already made each other's acquaintance, passed the usual inane remarks about the absurdly inconvenient arrangements generally of the ship. Some half a dozen stewards were showing the passengers to their places at table, as they passed in through the doorways; and upon ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... incredible to you. The Histories and Biographies written of this Cromwell, written in shallow, sceptical generations that could not know or conceive of a deep, believing man, are far more obscure than Cromwell's Speeches. You look through them only into the infinite vague of Black and the Inane. "Heats and jealousies," says Lord Clarendon himself: "heats and jealousies," mere crabbed whims, theories, and crotchets; these induced slow, sober, quiet Englishmen to lay down their ploughs and work; and fly into red fury of confused war against ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... him, utterly at a loss for anything to say. The whole thing had been so unexpected, so very opposite to the commonplace ending he had anticipated, that he was too dazed and confused to do anything but smile in an inane and foolish manner. He had rather looked forward to seeing some eccentric individual, some elderly recluse who lived there with a servant or two. And here he was, face to face with the man who, at the present moment, was to him the most ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... "This is no place to talk. Mr. O'Neil's splendid gallantry renders our mere thanks inane. He must allow us to express our gratitude ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... foot on it Razumov became aware that, except for the woman in charge of the refreshment chalet, he would be alone on the island. There was something of naive, odious, and inane simplicity about that unfrequented tiny crumb of earth named after Jean Jacques Rousseau. Something pretentious and shabby, too. He asked for a glass of milk, which he drank standing, at one draught (nothing but tea ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... year '49 has left me nothing to tell. For me, it was the inane life of that draff of Society - the young man-about-town: the tailor's, the haberdasher's, the bootmaker's, and trinket-maker's, young man; the dancing and 'hell'-frequenting young man; the young man of the 'Cider Cellars' and Piccadilly saloons; ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... She went in search of him, accompanied by the melancholy Shot and the two Poms, rescued from the kitchen regions, to which they had been banished because of their inane habit of barking with or without reason. She was grateful to the Poms, now that she was out of hearing of the sick-room, for the manner in which they leaped upon her and filled the air with their clamorous joy. There was nothing ominous ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... but a different order directing him to seize the heights at Hamilton's House, nearly three miles from his right division, and to keep the whole of his command in readiness to move at once, was sent instead. Sumner received an order equally inane, in reference to Marye's Heights. The resulting operations which should have been carefully co-ordinated and vigorously supported, were weak and indecisive. As the day wore away Lee took advantage of the ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... hand, and silly the thread.' She bent her head in its wadded black velvet hood, but excused herself from rising, as she was crippled by rheumatic pains. She had evidently once been a pretty little person, innocent and inane, and her face had become like that of a withered baby, piteous in its expression of pain and weariness, but otherwise somewhat vacant. At first, indeed, there was a look of alarm. Perhaps she expected every visitor to come ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in a very simple manner, at a macer, at what door the judges came out of the court, as he was a countryman, and was curious to see their Lordships dressed in their usual every-day clothes. The request was complied with; and Will, as a stupid gazing man from the Highlands, who wished to get an inane curiosity gratified by what had nothing curious in it, was placed in a convenient place to see the Solomons pass forth on their way to their respective dwellings. They soon came; and Will's lynx eye caught, in a moment, the face of the President, whom, to his great satisfaction, he ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... her vitality at low ebb, she doubted her ability to weather it. Was she being punished, she wondered, for protesting against the life the Fates appeared to have mapped out for her? Was this futile inane end coming to her because since that day when she had stood looking down upon Prouty and vowed to succeed she had fought and struggled and struck back, instead of meekly acknowledging herself crushed and beaten? Had she shaken her fist at the Almighty in so doing, ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... (victor Boylaee) recessus, Naturae meditaris opus, qua luce colores{ciii:1} Percipimus, quali magnus ferit organa motu Cartesius, quali volitant primordia plexu Ex atomis, Gassende, tuis; simulacraque rerum Diffugiunt tacito vastum per inane meatu: Mutato varios mentitur lana colores Lumine; dum tales ardens habet ipse figuras Purpura, Sidonioque aliae tinxere veneno: Materiam assiduo variatam, ut Protea, motu Concipis, hinc formae patuit nascentis origo, Hinc hominum species, & vasti ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... black and inhospitable even in the sunlight. The rock walls rose sheer, the roofs slanted rakishly, the signs scratched on the rock by facetious riders were pointless and inane. Lone picked his way through the crooked defile that was marked MAIN STREET on the corner of the first huge boulder and came abruptly into the road. Here he turned north and shook ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... anxiously for the object which could produce so grotesque a smile. There is nothing, for the conversation has been as lead, but the smile does not subside; it only passes through the endless variations that succeed each other from the inane grin to the affected simper which is meant to be tender. The whole face moves perpetually, as the facial muscles of a corpse, excited by an electric current, seem to parody all the ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... offensive as the word blackguard does. The emptiness of the person to whom it applies is very harmless. Its etymon blague (bladder, tobacco-bag), the pouch, which smoking voluptuaries use to deposit their tobacco, is perfectly symbolic of the inane, bombastic, windy, and long-winded speeches and sayings of the blagueur. Every French commercial traveller, buss-tooter, and Parisian jarvy is one. When he deports himself with modesty, and shows a gentlemanly ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... shows marked advance. The book, with its delicious rhymes by Hamish Hendry, is one to treasure, as is also her "Adventures in Toy Land," designs marked by the diablerie of which she, alone of lady artists, seems to have the secret. In this the wooden, inane expression of the toys contrasts ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... indeed changed, so much so that her old friends who had not seen her for some time could scarcely have known her. She was no longer fat and inane. Her figure had become slim and graceful; her face had become expressive and remarkably pretty, and her manners were those of a well-bred and self-possessed lady. Gildart felt that he could no more have taken the liberties he had ventured on in former years than ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... discoverable to the writer, in the field of composition, have been by the photographers themselves—the best things as well as the most inane; but in the face of so many results that earnest workers with the camera produce and continue to put forth, which cannot find a place in the categories of Art, it would seem that these preachments have been unheeded, or were ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... each to each,—they have more independence, both the woman and the man, and occupations and the solace without can be so easily obtained! Madame de Ventadour, in retiring from the mere frivolities of society—from crowded rooms, and the inane talk and hollow smiles of mere acquaintanceship—became more sensible of the pleasures that her refined and elegant intellect could derive from art and talent, and the communion of friendship. She drew around her the most cultivated minds of her time and country. Her abilities, her wit, and ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dressing-table and sobbed. These people were simple where she was complicated and complicated where she was simple. It was all uncomfortable and different. She thought of Jim Nolan's unfrilled conversation, of his clumsy, rather inane compliments, of his primitive amoeba-like type of humor. She saw the whole course of her life of mean shifts and wranglings with her mother; and though its moral niggardliness was unappreciated, its ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... is in a sense a further development of The Tale (Class I.), though it has a more definite plot. It is the most favored form of the short story to-day, and its popularity is responsible for a mess of inane commonplace and bald realism that is written by amateurs, who think they are presenting pen pictures of life. For since its matter is gathered from our everyday lives, it requires some degree of skill to make ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... of his own in explaining his frequent bursts of laughter while they ate their breakfast in the cabin. And Florrie found trouble in accepting his explanations, for they were irrelevant, incompetent, and inane. ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... Turcomans, Persians, and Curds; the operations of the hammam or bath are disclosed to us, and we are surreptitously introduced along with the hero to the mysteries the Persian harem or anderun, and its petty existence, inane frivolity, open jealousy, and clandestine intrigue. The death and funeral of the old barber provide an opportunity for a valuable account of ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... quod recolentem uehementius coquit. Nam in omni aduersitate fortunae infelicissimum est genus infortunii fuisse felicem." "Sed quod tu," inquit, "falsae opinionis supplicium luas, id rebus iure imputare non possis. Nam si te hoc inane nomen fortuitae felicitatis mouet, quam pluribus maximisque abundes mecum reputes licet. Igitur si quod in omni fortunae tuae censu pretiosissimum possidebas, id tibi diuinitus inlaesum adhuc inuiolatumque seruatur, poterisne meliora quaeque ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... shove Cravings in the van of Love. Courtly dames are here to woo, Knowing love if it be true. Reverence the blossom-shoot Fervently, they are the fruit. Mark them stepping, hear them talk, Goddess, is no myth inane, You will say of those who walk In the woods of Westermain. Waters that from throat and thigh Dart the sun his arrows back; Leaves that on a woodland sigh Chat of secret things no lack; Shadowy branch-leaves, waters clear, Bare or veiled they move sincere; Not by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... burst into verse, of a quality not to be doubted. Of that quality the reader shall judge, for I am going to quote a "creation" written under circumstances which, to say the least, were adverse. Before writing these lines I had never attempted verse in my life—barring intentionally inane doggerel. And, as I now judge these lines, it is probably true that even yet I have never written a poem. Nevertheless, my involuntary, almost automatic outburst is at least suggestive of the fervor that was in me. These fourteen lines were written within thirty minutes of the time I first ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... of the big casements were open, and music and odd bursts of laughter drifted out. Somebody, it seemed, was singing an amusing song, but the snatches of it that reached Nasmyth struck him as pointless and inane. He had been at Bonavista a week, but, after his simple, strenuous life in the Bush, he felt at times overwhelmed by the boisterous vivacity with which his new companions pursued their diversions. There are not many men without an occupation ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... all the town flock to the music and don't come to the service, and that the pieces played are profane, or mundane, or inane, or something—not what ought to be played on Sunday. Of course 'tis ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... imported into the theatre. They bring with them, not only their songs, which, when offensive in their wording, are sometimes made doubly dangerous by their tunefulness; not only their dances, which are usually vulgar, when they are not inane, but their style and manner and 'gags,' which are generally the most deplorable of all. The objection to music-hall artists on the stage is, not only that they take the bread out of the mouths of 'the profession,' which is a minor consideration for the public, but ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... I then: "Some one frames upon the keys That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain The night and moonshine; music which we seize To body forth our vacuity." She then: "Does this refer to me?" "Oh no, it is I who am inane." ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... appeared to be similarly occupied. In the high, wide hall were groups of careful men and careless women, the latter very scrumptious in their imported frocks. The sight of these Parisianisms abashed Cassy no more than her appearance abashed Paliser. Etiquette, Formality, the Proper Thing, the great inane gods of the ante-bellum heavens, he had never acknowledged and now, though locally their altars remained and their worship persisted, he knew they were forever dead, blown into the dust-bin of the things that were, tossed there in derision by ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... alone here upon earth? O God! for which of my sins dost thou punish me in my children? For mercy's sake, call me home before she also leaves me, who is the joy of my life. And I can do nothing to turn aside this fatality—stupid inane old man that I am! And this Jacques de Boiscoran—if he were guilty, after all? Ah the wretch! I would hang ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... figured; in the other the motto Mort m'est vie; while two curly objects, which did duty for tears, filled up the lower corners. The books of Henri III., even when they are absolutely worthless as literature, sell for high prices; and an inane treatise on theology, decorated with his sacred emblems, lately brought about 120 pounds ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... vehement Dutch the unfortunate wretch who had waded to the rescue. The horse, made sadder if not wiser by blows from his master, allowed himself to be backed for a certain distance, until it was safe for me to descend and take my postponed bath. I had but time to bow and murmur more inane thanks, to receive another bow and polite murmur in return (both murmurs being drowned by the sea) when the retrograde movement of the bathing-machine parted me and my living life-preserver. He stood in the water looking after ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... Fortia pax alta corda quiete tenet: At nobis medio Fama est quaesita periclo, Quoque magis durum est, hoc magis omne placet. Plurima quid referam? Si tu ista refellere nescis, Vicimus, inque auras crimen inane fugit. ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... of fervour and devotion pervading the book that contrasts pleasantly with the trivially inane tone some writers think fit to adopt in writing for and about children. All Sunday-school teachers and parents would do well to lay its lessons ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... I wouldn't have believed it possible for George Alison to lift a man of your inches and carry him single-handed right from the front door. I know he rowed for Cambridge, but, all the same, it was the act of a fool. And I told him so. Of course, he only grinned. You know that inane, irresistible grin of his when he's done something ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... just as almost all puddings are, or may be, called cabinet pudding? The one word "Julienne" covers all the watery, chill and tasteless, or terribly salt, decoctions, in which a few shreds of vegetables appear drifting through the illimitable inane. Other names are given at will by the help of a cookery-book and a French dictionary; but all these soups, at bottom, are attempts to be Julienne soup. The idea of looking on soup "as a vehicle for applying to the palate certain herbal flavours," is remote indeed ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... her hair in the Madonna style. It is utterly unsuited to her face. Unless her ears are deformed this style of hirsute lambrequins should not be worn by a full, round-faced woman. The arrangement sketched in No 15 adds effectively to her appearance, not only making her look younger, but less inane. ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... in nubes abiit. Ut in aequore summo Umbra viri visa est, visam fera saevit in umbram. Utque Iovis praepes, vacuo cum vidit in arvo Praebentem Phoebo liventia terga draconem, 715 Occupat aversum, neu saeva retorqueat ora, Squamigeris avidos figit cervicibus ungues, Sic celeri missus praeceps per inane volatu Terga ferae pressit dextroque frementis in armo Inachides ferrum curvo tenus abdidit ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... down at his head, knew that there were a dozen absurd wishes in her heart, none of which could possibly ever become facts. He was so different from the self-assertive young men she knew, with their silly flirtations, their inane small-talk, their capacity for Scotch whisky and long hours. For days she had studied him as through microscopic lenses; his guilelessness was real. It just simply could not be; her ears had deceived her that memorable ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... And so it comes that his letters to Madame von Stein leave one only amazed with the more sorrowful admiration that the unrivaled genius of the civilized world in its most civilized age found perfect satisfaction in the inane routine of the life of a court dignitary in ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... already republished in this pleasant edition, Ravenshoe has always seemed to me the best in every respect; and in spite of its feeble plot and its impossible lay-figures—Erne, Sir George Hillyar, and the painfully inane Gerty—I should rank The Hillyars and the Burtons above the more terrifically imagined and more neatly constructed Geoffry Hamlyn. But this is an opinion on which I lay ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and the Really Great Love "Mush" Wives Children One of the Minor Tragedies The "Glorious Dead" Always the Personal Note Clergymen Their Failure Work In the East-end Mysticism and the Practical Man Abraham Lincoln Reconstruction Education The Inane and Unimaginative Great Adventure Travel The Enthralling Out-of-Reach The Things which are not Dreamed of in Our Philosophy Faith Spiritualism On Reality in People Life Dreams and Reality Love of ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... contempt; while fashionable—or unfashionable idiots, who are scarcely capable of a grammatical answer to a dinner invitation, (those formidably confounded he's and him's!)—think themselves privileged to join some inane laugh against a clever, but not yet famous, author, because, forsooth, one character in his novel may be an old acquaintance, or one epithet in a long poem may be weak, indelicate, tasteless, or foolish, or one philosophical fact in an essay is misstated, or one statistical conclusion ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... aggressive diatribes, but a stalwart man of six feet, with a comely face bespeaking solid determination in every line. And when one comes to think of it, it is not the big blustering man or woman that rules, but the quiet, apparently inane specimens that look so meek that they are held up as models of propriety and gentleness. Miss Grosvenor immediately nailed him for her meeting, and politics being the only subject discussed, he aired his particular bug. ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... man of short speech, but his humour is as broad as his drinks are long. He affects a rowdy geniality and a swaggering gait, by which he seeks to overawe the inoffensive. Though he has but a small stock of intelligence, he passes for a wit amongst his associates by dint of perpetually repeating an inane catch-word. With this, and a stamp of the foot, he will greet a friend who may meet him before lunch. Amongst his intimates such a welcome is held to be intensely humorous. He scatters the same sort of stamp and the identical remark broadcast over the loungers who congregate in front of HATCHETT's; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... economy—adopt and enforce some rules and regulations for the benefit of all; it would be necessary to do so unless the individuals were not only perfect, but also absolutely of one mind on all subjects relating to their welfare. Can the imagination picture existence more inane? ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... flashing of eyes, creates a dazzling effect absolutely unknown to colder northern climes. Eyes,—so potent to bewitch and to command, are a strangely neglected influence in certain forms of social intercourse. English eyes are too often dull and downcast, and wear an inane expression of hypocrisy and prudery; unless they happen to be hard and glittering and meaningless; but in southern climes, they throw out radiant invitations, laughing assurances, brilliant mockeries, melting tendernesses, by the thousand flashes, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the corners of his mouth to droop as if he were playing the part of pantaloon on the stage; disarranged his hair yet more wildly; put out his tongue at his own image in the mirror; croaked a string of inane invectives against himself; and finally, like a naughty child, blew the leaves of his manuscript from the ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... Adelle, being left to her usual occupation of silent observation, managed to absorb a good deal at Beechwood in four days, chiefly of the machinery of modern wealth. There were the elaborate meals, the drinking, the card-playing, the motors, the innumerable servants, and the sickening atmosphere of inane sentimentalism between the sexes. Everybody seemed to be having "an affair," and the talk was redolent of innuendo. Adelle had occasion to observe the potency of her lamp in this society. She worked it first upon the waiting-woman assigned to her, to whom she gave a large fee and who coached ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... draw inane caricatures of himself, which he would present to us with a triumphant laugh of immoderate calibre. I have preserved some of these, but decidedly prefer du Maurier's rendering of our common friend. In the accompanying drawing ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... that is one luxury of which I never felt the need, and with which, permit me to tell you, I can readily dispense. I have little respect for women, and no desire to be wearied with their inane garrulity." ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... venal pomp proceeds From echoing town to town! The clam'rous preacher and his train, Organ and bell with sound inane, The crimson cross, the book, the keys, The flag that spreads before the breeze, The triple-belted crown! It wends its way; and straw is sold— Yea! deadly drugs for heavy gold, To feeble hearts whose pulse is fear; And though some smile, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... (and usually upon comparatively easy words) were greeted with some laughter, and the ridiculed spellers sought their seats with hanging heads. By and by, however, the failures were not all at the bottom of the class; here and there such lists as "inane, profane, humane, insane, mundane, urbane," or, "staid, unlaid, mermaid, prayed, weighed, portrayed" began to pick out uncertain ones the entire ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... word from Delarey—generally interrogative—and was confined to generalities. But this could not continue long. Hermione was an enthusiastic talker and seldom discussed banalities. From every circle where she found herself the inane was speedily banished; pale topics—the spectres that haunt the dull and are cherished by them—were whipped away to limbo, and some subject full-blooded, alive with either serious or comical possibilities, was very soon upon the carpet. By chance Artois happened ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... her own way. The desire of compensating for what had passed with Norman, led to great civilities from Dr. and Mrs. Hoxton, which nobody was at liberty to receive except Flora. Pretty, graceful, and pleasing, she was a valuable companion to a gentle little, inane lady, with more time and money than she knew what to do with; and Mrs. Hoxton, who was of a superior grade to the Stoneborough ladies in general, was such a chaperon as Flora was glad to secure. Dr. May's old loyal feelings could not help regarding her notice of his ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... at him curiously. Once he came across Marie and her father on the leeward side of the boat. For decency's sake he had to stop. He made an inane remark on the weather and said he thought they were going to have a ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... work, there is a reason for it somewhere, and our business is to find it out, and not loftily to assure our patients that there is nothing much the matter, and all they need is rest, or a little cheerful occupation. Furthermore, the most inane thing that a sympathizing friend or kindly physician can do to a neurasthenic, is to advise him to take his mind off himself or his symptoms. The utter inability to do that very thing is one of the chief symptoms of the disease, which will not disappear until the underlying cause has been ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... was concluded by an adjournment to the dining-room to play bagatelle, the most inane of games, to which the billiard-player goes with contempt, changed quickly to wrath when he cannot put the balls into absurd little holes. Mary was an adept, and took pleasure in showing James how the thing should ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... sacra Romanus credidit ossa loco; Sontibus addixit quae caeca rebellio flammis, Nec tulit impietas majus in urbe scelus. Quid tanto vesana malo profecit Erynnis? Ipsa sui testis pignoris extat humus. Crypta manet, memoresque trahit confessio cives, Nec populi fallit marmor inane fidem. Orphana, turba, veni, viduisque allabere saxis, Est ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... treated at length of [Greek: pronoia] in the Strom.; see Orig. [Greek: peri archon] III. 1; de orat. 6 etc. Evil is also subject to divine guidance; see Clem., Strom. I. 17. 81-87: IV. 12. 86 sq. Orig. Hom. in Num. XIV., Lomm. X., p. 163: "Nihil otiosum, nihil inane est apud deum, quia sive bono proposito hominis utitur ad bona sive malo ad necessaria." Here and there, however, Origen has qualified the belief in Providence, after the genuine fashion of antiquity ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... cherish this poem in their hearts are justly incensed whenever they come across a copy of it to which some one, a few years ago, had the effrontery to add this inane stanza:— ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... around him for assistance, he naturally selected those men whom he could control. The first that recommended himself was one Harold, a youth of inane and plastic character, carried away by the example of an actor, and full of execrable quotations, going to show that he was an imitator of the master spirit both in text and admiration. This Harold was a gunner, and therefore versed in arms; he had traversed the whole lower portion ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... splendid that he got to you in time!" but he didn't really care. Mrs. Hilary found that women were better listeners than men. Women are perhaps better trained; they think it more ill-mannered not to show interest. They will listen to stories about servants, or reports of the inane sayings of infants, they will hear you through, without the flicker of a yawn, but with ejaculations and noddings, while you tell them about your children's diseases. They are well-bred; they drive themselves on a tight rein, and endure. They are ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... these simagrees, as if ashamed to "play their fantastic tricks" before the god of nature, when so forcibly reminded of his presence; and more than once on these occasions I have been surprised to find how much intellect lurked behind the inane mask of fashion. But in America the effect of fine scenery upon this class of persons is different, for it is exactly when amongst it, that the most strenuous efforts at elegant nonchalance are perceptible among the young exquisites of the western world. It ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... of the more or less witty labels applied to Heyst during his aimless pilgrimage in this section of the tropical belt, where the inane clacking of Schomberg's ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... Much more let prior, and as it were, rehearsal scenes of Federation come and go, henceforward, as they list; and, on Plains and under City-walls, innumerable regimental bands blare off into the Inane, without ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... price of margarine— Occupy the hours of leisure that he snatches from the screen; But the works of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE he dismisses as inane, And he harbours no ambition to enact the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... day, Dies to gray. There are knots in every skein. Hours of work and hours of play Fade away Into one immense Inane. Shadow and substance, chaff and grain, Are as vain As the foam or as the spray. Life goes crooning, faint and fain, One refrain: 'If it ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... are so fond of showing their parts and powers as to make their consultations very tedious. Young Ned Rutledge is a perfect bob-o-lincoln,—a swallow, a sparrow, a peacock; excessively vain, excessively weak, and excessively variable and unsteady, jejune, inane, and puerile." Sharp words these! This session of Congress resulted in little else than the interchange of opinions between Northern and Southern statesmen. It was a mere advisory body, useful, however, in preparing ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... "For absolute inane, insensate romanticism," said he, "I recommend you to the recently engaged. You used to have some sense. You were clever enough to refuse me and now you go and forever ruin my opinion of you by making ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... the material Hellespont was but a trifle to!—In which of the villages Hotham and Dickens lodged, I did not learn or inquire; nor are their copious Despatches, chronicling these sublime phenomena from day to day for behoof of St. James's, other than entirely inane to us at this time. But one thing we do learn from them: Our Crown-Prince, escaping the paternal vigilance, was secretly in consultation with Dickens, or with Hotham through Dickens; and this in the most tragic humor on his side. In such effulgences of luxury and scenic grandeur, how sad ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... women which are also found. These usually have little blue beads for eyes, and are of the quaintest and naivest appearance conceivable. Here we have an elderly man with a long pointed beard, there two women with inane smiles upon their countenances, here another woman, of better work this time, with a child slung across her shoulder. This figure, which is in the British Museum, must be very late, as prehistoric Egyptian antiquities go. It is almost ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... spiritual difficulty presented by this prevalent spirit of national pride—sufficiently stubborn still, however inane a conceit it may seem on sober reflection—if this animus of factional insubordination could be overcome or in some passable measure be conciliated or abated, there is much to be said in favor of such a plan of peaceable submission to an extraneous ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... he turned to me with an inane smile which occupied all his face. 'Good evening,' he said, in a baronial drawl. 'Miss Cayley, I gathah? I asked the skippah's leave to set next yah. We ought to be friends—rathah. I think yah know my poor deah old ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... sesquihoram. Deinde pactus cum auriga de manticis, rursus invitor ad cenam. Excuso, non proficio. Apparatus tum erat praelautus, sed mihi frustra. Ubi confovissem stomachum sorbitiuncula, 160 domum me confero; dormiebam enim apud cantorem. Egredior; ibi corpus inane mire ad nocturnum coelum ...
— Selections from Erasmus - Principally from his Epistles • Erasmus Roterodamus
... him. This sudden reversion to an easy every-day plane had brought Sansome's first mood again to the surface. In this atmosphere of orderly tete-a-tete he was again the society man. Nan breathed freer. He murmured something inane and conventional ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... by telephone an order for a pickax, a spade, a military gas-mask, and six carboys of sulfuric acid, all to be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned house in Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep; and failing, passed the hours in reading and in the composition of inane verses ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... How inane and silly their conversation is! Sometimes a whim comes upon them, and one runs for a few yards; the whim takes possession of others, and they do exactly the same. One seizes another round the body and wrestles with him. Immediately the others begin ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... and silk stockings rolled up over his knees. He was supposed to be one of the extinct Mauleverers; harmless and even benevolently disposed; given to plucking flowers in the garden at dusk; and to gliding along passages, and loitering on the stairs in a somewhat inane manner. The bolder-spirited among the girls would have given a twelve-month's pocket money to see him. Miss Pillby declared that the sight of that snuff-coloured ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... "How inane you are, Rose," said Jack. "Nothing less queen-like, in that decorative sense, than Imogen, can be imagined. She works day and night for this thing in which you pretty young people get all the sixpences and she all the kicks. To bear the burden ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... thought. It is indeed a pleasant tickling of the imagination, this leisurely enjoyment of looking over all those picturesque announcements; it is like passing along the street with its shopwindows in all their lustre and glamour. But this soft and inane pleasure has been crushed by the arrangement after to-day's fashion. Those pages on which advertising and articles are mixed helterskelter do not allow the undisturbed mood. It is as if we constantly had to ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... turned away from this outside dreariness to contemplate more closely her neighbors on board, but found them scarcely more interesting. Several were playing cards, others moodily staring out of the windows, while a few were laughing and talking with the girls, their conversation inane and punctuated with profanity. One man was figuring on a scratch pad, and Hope decided he must be an engineer employed on the line; others she classed as small merchants, saloon-keepers, and frontier riff-raff. They would glance curiously at her as they marched up ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... time that Joanna had seen her sister calm and collected while she herself was flustered—but this evening a sense of her own awkwardness helped to put her at a still greater disadvantage. She found herself making inane remarks, hesitating and stuttering—she grew sulky and silent, and at last suggested that Ellen would like ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... the open carriage-door, whence she smiled down to the colonel on one side, the general on the other, the ladies round them. Farther back still her eyes fell on all the uplifted moustaches, the light ones, the brown, the black, the dyed, the thin moustaches, the thick, the curved, and the inane, the drooping, the smartly curled. Among that melancholy and shaggy crowd a few clean-shaven faces looked ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... at him for a long moment, then gave an inane giggle. He stepped back and flicked Joe Mauser a salute. "Very well, captain. As a matter of routine, I shall report this use of an aircraft for reconnaissance purposes, and undoubtedly a commission will meet to investigate the propriety of the ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... pretty." Stopping before the dressing-table, Gabriella frowned on the photograph of a young man in a silver frame—a young man with a fascinating smile and inane features. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... other perfectly well, will enjoy themselves together without restraint in their ordinary apparel. But nothing can be more artificial than the behavior of people together who rarely "dress up." It seems impossible to make the conversation as fine as the clothes, and so it dies in a kind of inane helplessness. Especially is this true in the country, where people have not obtained the mastery of their clothes that those who live in the city have. It is really absurd, at this stage of our civilization, that we should be so affected by such an insignificant accident ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... at their residence, Scamperley." By the way, what an odd phrase that same "entertaining" always sounds to my ear. When I learn that the Marquis of Mopes has been "entertaining" his friends, the Duke of Drearyshire, Count and Countess Crotchet, Viscount Inane, Sir Simon and Lady Sulkes, the Honourable Hercules Heavyhead, etc., etc., at his splendid seat, Boudoir Castle, I cannot refrain from picturing to myself the dignified host standing on his bald head for the amusement of his immovable visitors, ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... them, a somewhat lively and frivolous woman, accustomed to the amusements and stir of Paris, used to sit all day long, day after day, and for the most part of the time alone, though she received tiresome and inane visits which led her to think her loneliness preferable to empty tittle-tattle. If she permitted herself the slightest gleam of intelligence, it gave rise to interminable comment and embittered her condition. She occupied herself a great deal with her children, not so much from taste as for ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... Normandy. He and his people, who constitute one of the most picturesque and curious elements in European history, are confused for most of us by irrelevant controversies which would have been entirely unintelligible to them. The worst of these is the inane fiction which gives the name of Norman to the English aristocracy during its great period of the last three hundred years. Tennyson informed a lady of the name of Vere de Vere that simple faith was more valuable ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... hated her. He saw now why she and Griffiths loved one another, Griffiths was stupid, oh so stupid! he had known that all along, but had shut his eyes to it, stupid and empty-headed: that charm of his concealed an utter selfishness; he was willing to sacrifice anyone to his appetites. And how inane was the life he led, lounging about bars and drinking in music halls, wandering from one light amour to another! He never read a book, he was blind to everything that was not frivolous and vulgar; he had never ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the present day makes to his reader: but it will undoubtedly appear to many persons that I have not fulfilled the terms of an engagement thus voluntarily contracted. They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... of, that is. I just have ten or twelve—just enough to make me think I'm drunk. Then I keep on until I think I'm sober. Then I know I'm drunk!" They are beginning, unfortunately for their audiences, to take themselves seriously. This is a pity, for the more spontaneous and inane they are, the more they are in their place on the vaudeville stage. There is more make-believe and hard work on the halls to-day, and I think they are none the better for it. As soon as art becomes self-conscious, its end is near; and that, I am afraid, is what is ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... not feared as the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats. What France set out to prove France has proved; not that common men are all angels, or all diplomatists, or all gentlemen (for these inane aristocratic illusions were no part of the Jacobin theory), but that common men can all be citizens and can all be soldiers; that common men can fight and can rule. There is no need to confuse the question with any of those escapades of a floundering modernism which have made ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... Coleridge or Keats, it preserves something also of the wit and civilisation of the eighteenth century. Lines like "a Muezzin from the tower of darkness cries," or "Their mouths are stopped with dust" are successful in the same sense as "Pinnacled dim in the intense inane" or "Through verdurous glooms and winding ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... of some of our members of Parliament. Only read them, I wish no man so ill an to inflict upon him the torture of hearing them—read them, I say, and you will have taken the very highest degree in the order of inane flippancy. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... practical, hard-headed training instead of worry. Bend your sense, your intellect, your time, your energy, to seeking how to train your children, instead of doing the senseless, foolish, inane, and utterly useless thing of worrying ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... drunken satyr, filled me with unconquerable disgust. In spite of an interminable row of contrabassi, with which a conductor usually coquettes at musical festivals, his performance was so expressionless and inane that I turned away in disgust as from an alarming and repulsive problem, and desisted from all attempts to explain the impassable gulf which, as I again perceived, yawned between my own vivid and imaginative conception ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... I do not know that? Do you think I did not feel that just now, when I sat by her side, talking inane rubbish about books and plays and pictures, while every stolen glance at my darling's face was like a dagger thrust into my heart? I will not alarm her. I will consult Mr. Sheldon—will do anything, everything, to save her! To ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... could be lazier, emptier of head, more inane of life than her sister Martha. "She wouldn't even keep clean if it wasn't the easiest thing in the world for her to do, and a help at filling in her long idle day." Yet—Martha Galland had every comfort ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... him, upon succeeding ages; and that, in some of its aspects, it now survives, and is more influential to-day than in any previous age; but this element of immutable and eternal truth was certainly not contained in the inane and empty formula, "that numbers are real existences, the causes of all other existences!" If the fame of Pythagoras had rested on such "airy nothings," it would have melted away before the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... accursed volubility of a versifier's tongue! And perchance it will not be considered out of my line of duty if I venture to remind my most illustrious and renowned MASTER—" this with a withering sneer,—"that if he has any more remarkable nothings to dictate concerning this particularly inane creation of his fancy 'Nourhalma,' 'twill be well that we should proceed therewith, for the hours wax late and the sun veereth toward ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... to him, on this occasion, "I get so very tired of young men sometimes. They can be so inane. I do declare, they are nothing more than shoes and ties and socks and canes strung together in some unimaginable way. Vaughn Greanelle is for all the world like a perambulating manikin to-day. He is just an English suit with a ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... to show him heroic in his determination to sail off alone to his doom has no dramatic point; it has no bearing on his salvation, for nothing happens until Senta jumps into the sea, and we feel sure nothing would have happened if she had not jumped. That lesson, at any rate—a childish, inept, inane, insane one at best—is not set forth in the Dutchman. The only other possible one is that self-sacrifice is a worthy and beautiful thing in itself. In itself, I say, for Senta's self-sacrifice is purely a fad: she knows nothing of Vanderdecken ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... that soul of theirs, by which they went Alive upon the earth. And I have bent Regard on many a woman, who gave sign God willed her beautiful, when he drew the line That shaped each float and fold of beauty's tent: Her soul, alas, chambered in pigmy space, Left the fair visage pitiful—inane— Poor signal only of a coming face When from the penetrale she filled the fane!— Possessed of thee was every form of thine, Thy very hair replete with ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... "What a noisy inanity is this world," wrote Carlyle in his diary at the opening of the year 1835. Without the few great men who, like Carlyle, can lift themselves and others above it, it would be still noisier, still more inane. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... abruptly, as if chopping out the words of a text. Their hands hanging superciliously over their laps make their arms look as if they had been broken at the wrists. The monotony of their faces is strongly emphasized. Every face bears the same expression of self-satisfaction, haughtiness, and inane respect for the wealth ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... doubled about, or, perhaps more aptly, performed a journalistic somersault—having written a diffuse biography and other works dealing with Rizal. He is strong in unassorted facts, but his comments, when not inane and wearisome, approach a maudlin wail over "spilt milk," so the above is given ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... walls for the reception of such a performance, is almost marvellous. It is, throughout, in the worst possible taste. The countenance of Cupid, who is sitting on the bed or couch with the vacant grin of an ideot, is that of a negro. It is dark, and of an utterly inane expression. The colouring is also too ruddy throughout. Near to this really heartless picture, is one of a woman flying; well drawn, and rather tenderly coloured. Opposite, is a picture of Venus supported in the air ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... truth. It was a period of religious and metaphysical delirium, when everything became everything, when Maya and Sophia, Mitra and Christ, Viraf and Isaiah, Belus, Zarvan, and Kronos were mixed up in one jumbled system of inane speculation, from which at last the East was delivered by the positive doctrines of Mohammed, the West by the pure Christianity of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... day he looked at her; and when Jennings looked, he saw—as must anyone who lives well by playing upon human nature. He did not like her expression. She did not habitually smile; her light-heartedness, her optimism, did not show themselves in that inane way. But this seriousness of hers was of a new kind, of the kind that bespeaks sobriety and saneness of soul. And that kind of seriousness—the deep, inward gravity of a person whose days of trifling with themselves and with the facts of life, and of being trifled with, are over—would ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... the half affectionate derision which he directed against the old tyrants or humbugs of the earlier nineteenth century—the pompous Dedlock or the fatuous Nupkins, the grotesque Bumble or the inane Tigg. In those old books his very abuse was benignant; in Hard Times even his sympathy is hard. And the reason is again to be found in the political facts of the century. Dickens could be half genial with the older generation of ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... the woodlouse, very blandly, "I am likewise the created,—I the equipoise of thee; I the particle, the atom, I behold on either hand lie The inane of measured ages that ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... editor had never read the inane rat and cat stories of American school "readers" when he wrote that. ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... young athlete who had been possessed of health, riches, and all fair prospects. No one warned him; none of those who swilled expensive poisons for which he paid ever refused to accept his mad generosity; he was cheered down the road to the gulf by the inane plaudits of the lowest of men; and one who was evidently his companion in many a frantic drinking-bout could find nothing to say but "He was a fool!" At this moment there are thousands of youths in our great towns and cities who are leading the heartless, senseless, semi-delirious life of the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
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