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More "Trivial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Reformation, a few people came over into this New World for conscience' sake. Perhaps this apparently trivial incident may transfer the great seat ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... faultily adjusted its proportions in the original outline, I find that I have dwelt too briefly and too feebly upon the capital interest at stake. To apply a correction to some popular misreadings of history, to show that the criminal (because trivial) occasions of war are not always its trifle causes, or to suggest that war (if resigned to its own natural movement of progress) is cleansing itself and ennobling itself constantly and inevitably, were it only through its connection ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... which every moment of his time thus necessarily bore, unlike most literary men, he was never ruffled in the slightest degree by the interruptions of his family, even on the most trivial occasions; the book or the pen was ever laid down with a smile, and he was ready to answer any question, or to enter with youthful readiness into any temporary topic of amusement ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... be sure, sought, in characteristic modern fashion, "to make of history a natural science." This was the case with the so-called philosophy of history of positivism. What has been the net result of the laws of history which it has given us? A few trivial generalities which justify themselves only by the most careful consideration of their ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... in the way were swept like a scurry of leaves out into the meadow alongside the road, and one of the tribunes and the general turned in their saddles to look at the confiscated flock. The second tribune observed their interest in this trivial incident with disgust. The young general, whose military cloak flaunted a purple border, called ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... manifestly unfair; but even though liberal allowance be made for this error, in the total of about 3000 cases tabulated in the last thirty years, the undisputed instances of mob violence are shamefully numerous. Rape is by no means the only crime thus punished; sometimes the charge is so trivial that one recoils in horror at the thought of taking human life ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... the subject furious; a word, a look, or some trivial circumstance are enough for him to prove the infidelity of his wife. The latter has to avoid the slightest thing which might arouse jealousy, but all in vain; reserve and even prudery are regarded by the jealous husband as hypocrisy. The unfortunate ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Deep, we hold Our dwelling, utmost of all human-kind, And free from mixture with a foreign race. This man, a miserable wand'rer comes, Whom we are bound to cherish, for the poor And stranger are from Jove, and trivial gifts To such are welcome. Bring ye therefore food 260 And wine, my maidens, for the guest's regale, And lave him where the stream is shelter'd most. She spake; they stood, and by each other's words Encouraged, placed Ulysses where the bank ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... I ask you to waive it. You see, questions about me are so comparatively trivial. What sort ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... herd of kings. I mean there shall not be a hint of doubt About whose world this is. So I have bid, From all the utter regions of my land, The kings whom I allow to rule, who breathe My air, to feast with me and for a while Flatter their trivial lives with a brief relish Of being king of the world's kings in Shushan. Yea, and I will dismay their wits with splendour; No noise shall be against me in the world. I am more open, kinder than Lord God, Who never shows how much he ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... position which Artaxerxes takes in his dealings with Rome (A.D. 229-230), sufficiently indicate that any reverses which he sustained at this time in his struggle with Chosroes and the unsubmitted Arsacidae must have been trivial, and that they certainly had no greater result than to establish the independence of Armenia, which, by dint of leaning upon Rome, was able to maintain itself against the Persian monarch and to check the advance of the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... goes from party to party—she gives herself up heart and mind and soul to pleasures which she ought to consider only as the trivial means to great ends; and she forgets the woman who reared her, and cared for her, and watched over her from her infancy, and who tried to inspire her with a noble ambition.—Yes, read to me, child, read. Give me new thoughts, if you can, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Alexander had once lost his confidence and become suspicious and easily alarmed, there was no circumstance so trivial that he did not make an omen of it, and the palace was full of sacrifices, lustrations, and soothsayers. So terrible a thing is disbelief in the gods and contempt for them on the one hand, while superstition and excessive reverence for them presses on men's guilty consciences ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... and introduced by Mang Mang the High Lord, and Miao Miao, the Divine, into the world of mortals, and how it would be led over the other bank (across the San Sara). On the surface, the record of the spot where it would fall, the place of its birth, as well as various family trifles and trivial love affairs of young ladies, verses, odes, speeches and enigmas was still complete; but the name of the dynasty and the year of the reign were obliterated, and could not ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... all three. David walked about the room, looking for things he did not want, and asking questions he did not wish answered, although he hoped they would interest his mother. But his spirits soon flagged. The conversation became trivial and absurd. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... see acquaintances of yours in deepest mourning, it does not occur to you to go up to them and babble trivial topics or ask them to a dance or dinner. If you pass close to them, irresistible sympathy compels you merely to stop and press their hand and pass on. A widow, or mother, in the newness of her long veil, has her hard path made as ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... rivals; yet it is only the passions, and strong passions, that can lift the soul to great things; without them there is nothing sublime, whether in conduct or in productions—art becomes childish and virtue trivial." ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... mewed up here, while others are out where thrones and empires are sweeping by! I do not want to parse verbs, add fractions, and mark ledgers, while others are the poets, the singers, the statesmen, the rulers, and the wealth-controllers of the world! We wish to step out of the trivial experience into that which is significant. Each day brings uneasiness of soul. "Man's unhappiness," says Carlyle, "as I construe it, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which with ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... whispering to me, that I shall one day be inmate of the same dwelling with my cousin, partaker with her in all the delights which spring from mutual good offices, kind words, attentions in sickness and in health,—conversation, sometimes innocently trivial, and at others profitably serious;—books read and commented on, together; meals ate, and walks taken, together,—and conferences, how we may best do good to this poor person or that, and wean our spirits from the world's cares, without divesting ourselves of its charities. ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... made upon him was worthy; but even here Holbein, a man of lesser gift and power, has perhaps succeeded in leaving a more dignified, a more satisfying series; one containing, if not so many masterpieces, fewer on which an accidental or trivial subject or mood has left its impress. Yet, in spite of this, it is Duerer's, not Rembrandt's, not Holbein's character, that impresses us as most serious, most worthy to be held as a model. It is before his portrait of himself that Mr. Ricketts "forgets all other portraits whatsoever, in the ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... no pretence of being well born or well educated; nor did she assume airs. She was a perfectly natural woman, who, realizing that she was a daughter of the Heavenly King, sought to rightly represent Him. Nothing rough, mean, nor trivial would become a member of the heavenly household; but joy, peace, gentleness, kindness, goodness—the graces of the Spirit should be seen in her. And they were. The consciousness of her heavenly relationship also gave her a dignity that held itself graciously in any ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... which Hesden Le Moyne undertook when he assumed the care and protection of Eliab Hill, was no trivial one, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... feel in taking so long a farewell of a people and country that I love is that I shall always possess them in memory—a treasure which no one can take from me. As I look back over the quickly speeding year I find that I have forgotten those trivial incidents of discomfort which pricked my hurrying feet. All I can recall is the rugged beauty of the land, the brave and simple people with their hardy manhood and more than generous hospitality, and most of all my ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... and valet, inquiring their way as strangers, found the new staff headquarters of the Grays established in an army building, where Bouchard had been assigned to trivial duties, back of the Gray range. As their former chief entered a room in the disorder of maps and packing-cases, the staff-officers rose from their work to stand at salute like stone images, in respect to a field-marshal's ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... the grass—"natural" or "artificial"—into hay, there is more or less loss of nutritive matter sustained by fermentation, the dispersion of the smaller leaves by the wind, and other agencies. But this unavoidable loss is trivial when compared with the prodigious waste sustained, in Ireland at least, by allowing the hay to remain too long in cocks in the field. "Within the last three or four years," says Mr. Baldwin, of the Glasnevin Albert Model Farm, "we have made agricultural tours ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... House all eyes—trivial in figure, undistinguished, slightly ludicrous, almost shambling, shrinking under observation so that he gained a reputation for mystery, with only one feature to catch your attention, a most amazingly fine pair of eyes. It was as if nature had concentrated on those eyes, treating ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... who looked to him for guidance when childhood and youth were passed—these, sir, these are the ones to whom his death is a loss, in comparison to which all others which may hereafter befall them must ever seem trivial and unimportant." ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... be considered as trivial in an army which in any degree affects the health or spirit of the troops, upon which often, more than upon number, the fate of battles depends. The troops of Gen. Gates' army had frequently felt the consequence of eating bad ...
— A sketch of the life and services of Otho Holland Williams • Osmond Tiffany
... do. I believe you understand something of what was going on within me when Roland came into my life. In the light of what has transpired, the fact that I was neglected by my husband seems absurd—trivial. But it is not ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... two of the women, bantering them. McGregor thought the conversation inane and trivial. It skirted the edge of things and ran off into vague references to other times and adventures of which he ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... so unnerved the orphan that she was less able to cope successfully with this harrowing suspense than on former occasions; still the sanguine hopefulness of youth battled valiantly with the ghouls that apprehension conjured up, and she remembered that comparatively trivial occurrences had sometimes detained the train, which finally brought all its human ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... have spoken probably, and proceed upon a prin- ciple as inductive as the other. That doctrine of Epicurus, that denied the providence of God, was no atheism, but a magnificent and high-strained conceit of his majesty, which he deemed too sublime to mind the trivial actions of those inferior creatures. That fatal necessity of the stoicks is nothing but the immutable law of his will. Those that heretofore denied the divinity of the Holy Ghost have been condemned but as hereticks; ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... by those who have read "Butler's Book," that in addition to a number of trivial derelictions of duty, General Smith was charged with the more serious one of having failed through negligence and an untimely cessation of operations, to capture Petersburg, when it was claimed that all the conditions were favorable to success. It should also be recalled that several weeks after ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... illustrative evidence,—will be prompt to let forth their comments in some such strain as the following:—"The state of the ancient heathens, thus brought upon us in one cheap declamation more, is now a matter of trivial import, just fit to give some show and exaggeration to the stale common-place, that ignorance is likely to produce depravity, and that depravity and misery are likely enough to go together. The pagans might be wretched enough; and perhaps also the matter has been extravagantly ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... the table, and Frances Chislett chatted with Sir Lionel. They were close by me, and every word they said was audible. It was the veriest chit-chat, and Leo's remarks on the little bunch of charms and knicknacks that he found in the workbox seemed trivial to foolishness. "I'd no idea Damer was so empty-headed," I thought, and I rather despised Miss Chislett for ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... held it quite likely that the blood of Praxiteles or his compeers may still have flowed through his veins—certain at all events, that there hung about his person the traditions of the versatile colonists on the shores of Magna Graecia who, freed by legions of slaves from the trivial vexations which beset modern lives, were able to create in their golden leisure those monuments of beauty which are the envy and despair of our generation. On all that concerned the history and technique of ancient bronzes, more especially, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... from its intrinsic recommendations. By promising we bind ourselves to learn nothing from time, to make no use of knowledge to be acquired. Promises depose us from a full use of our understanding, and are to be tolerated only in the trivial engagements of our day-to-day existence. It follows that marriage is an evil, for it is at once the closest form of cohabitation, and the rashest of all promises. Two thoughtless and romantic people, met in youth under circumstances full of delusion, have bound themselves, ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... for an hour, listening to the silence. Her mind busied itself with trivial memories. She thought of Amelia Plecks.... It would have comforted her to hear that knock and the rattle of her dinner tray. The little sitting-room at Hudson's Hotel, with its bit of tapestry and its yellow tea-set and its vases filled with flowers, seemed to her memory ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... house fly out of the window, and saying, "There is room enough in the world for thee and me." It is a high proof of his cleverness that he generally succeeds in raising the desired feeling in his readers even from such trivial occasions. He was a minute philosopher, his philosophy was kindly, and he taught the delicate art of making much out of little. Less coarse than Fielding, he is far more corrupt. Fielding goes bluntly ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... curtained glass door of the ell sitting room. "Just a little sermon to start us out right—back to work. It is a serious business, you know, Joe—reconstruction! It's a big task. Let's not fall down on it or be trivial—shirk any of the responsibilities. Good-night," she added suddenly, giving her hand. "It's been a glorious day. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... kind of literature they liked and the comments they made on it; he had expected that with the education they had received, and with their experience of the seriousness of life, they would prefer something less trivial. He supposed, however, that a romantic love-story, where a poor American girl marries an English lord, formed a refuge for them from the real world which promised them so little and held them so cheap. It was quite useless ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... he had come to deliver a letter to Count von Bernstorff, the German Ambassador, but such a mission seemed so trivial that rumor as to the real intentions of the craft was rife throughout the entire country. There were suspicions that she had put in for fuel, or ammunition, or supplies. But nothing to justify these thoughts occurred. ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... much, though the water which fell in a musical drip from the stack nearest the rails into what impressed one as a sensible, frugal tub, until it, too, filled and overflowed and betrayed its trivial nature, was sweet on his tongue and grateful to ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... anything more than an idea and fiction of thought, or whether it relates to an object in the world. If we say of a thing that in relation to some other thing it is too large or too small, the former is considered as existing for the sake of the latter, and requiring to be adapted to it. Among the trivial subjects of discussion in the old schools of dialectics was this question: "If a ball cannot pass through a hole, shall we say that the ball is too large or the hole too small?" In this case it is indifferent what expression we employ; for we do not know which exists for the sake of the ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... the jury,—I should be sorry to treat with levity any charge which I see that you treat with solemnity. The charge of treason is here, I find, a very grave one: though elsewhere I have known it as common and as trivial as assault and battery. However, be that as it may, I trust there can be no offence in my noticing without much gravity the attempt of the learned gentleman who opened the case for the crown to aggravate the matter against me by ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... continue to test at exactly the same mental age by the Binet scale, year after year. In their case, familiarity with the tests does not in the least improve the responses. At each retesting the responses given at previous examinations are repeated with only the most trivial variations. Of 352 feeble-minded children tested at Vineland, three years in succession, 109 gave absolutely no variation, 232 showed a variation of not more than two fifths of a year, while 22 gained as much as one year in the three tests. The latter, presumably, ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... king-maker, rests there, careless now about such trivial things as earthly kings and earthly kingdoms; and Salisbury, who did good service at Poitiers. Just before you come to the abbey, and right on the river's bank, is Bisham Church, and, perhaps, if any tombs are worth ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... so-called criminal syndicalism statutes aimed at anarchists but which, loosely construed, had been applied to punish socialism, pacifism, and left-wing ideologies, the charges often resting on far-fetched inferences which, if true, would establish only technical or trivial violations. They proposed 'clear and present danger' as a test for the sufficiency of evidence in particular cases. I would save it, unmodified, for application as a 'rule of reason' in the kind of case for which it was devised. When the issue is criminality of a hot-headed speech on a street ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... whose predominance is the cause of criminal acts, there are brought into play those altruistic feelings which check criminal acts. Thus the discipline of natural consequences is applicable to grave as well as trivial faults; and the practice of it conduces not simply to the repression, but to the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... that, "Trifles swell the sum of human happiness and woe." Our highest and holiest aspirations, our purest and warmest affections, are frequently called forth by what in itself may be deemed of trivial importance. The fragrant breath of a flower, the passing song of the merry milk-maid, a soothing word from one we love, will often change the whole current of our thoughts and feelings, and, by carrying us back to the days of childhood, ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... he published Palaeographical and Philological Materials for the History of the Slavonic Alphabets, and in 1858 Essay towards an Historical Grammar of the Russian Tongue, which, despite some trivial defects, is still a standard work, abounding with rich material for students, carefully collected from an immense quantity of ancient records and monuments. In close connexion with this work in his Historical Chrestomathy of the Church-Slavonic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Trivial and empty rhyming is of course abundant in such an uncritical mass of verse, and we also meet with insipid puns, like that on the Arabic word din, "religion," and the German word dienen, ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... study, even the sombre facts of death and burial, and the unknown life beyond. She touches these themes sometimes lightly, sometimes almost humorously, more often with weird and peculiar power; but she is never by any chance frivolous or trivial. And while, as one critic has said, she may exhibit toward God "an Emersonian self-possession," it was because she looked upon all life with a candor as unprejudiced as it ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... "If ever you saw a young woman who was glad and thankful to turn her face toward home, I am that person. I think that one of the heaviest crosses humanity has to bear is to have constantly to decide between two or more absolutely trivial conclusions in one's own affairs; but when one is called upon to multiply one's useless perplexities by, say, ten, life ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... with effect on a Court or University stage, the real living theatre has been no place for it since the days of Greece. Milton confesses as much when in his preface he assails "the poet's error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons, which by all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people." In his view tragedy should be eclectic; in Shakespeare's it should be all embracing. Shelley, perhaps, judged more rightly than either when he said: "The ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... speech without the usual lowering of the voice. And it is just that small drop of half a tone that invites further confidence. In such small matters as these lies the secret of conversational success, and by such trivial tricks of the tongue we are daily and hourly deceived. The man or the woman who lowers the tone at the end of speech defers to the listener's opinion, and usually receives it. The manner with which Fitz broke off led his listener to believe that he was not attending to the conversation. Agatha ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... trivial things, along the way, with a lightness of manner, which was none the less as delicately cautious as the footsteps of a cat walking on a shelf of fragile china. Each felt the challenge and response of natures keyed to the same pitch of life's ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... possession I have one bundle that has been kept apart, and has evidently no connection with Dr. Butler's own life. I cannot use these letters, therefore, for my book, but over and above the charm of their inspired spelling, I find them of such an extremely trivial nature that I incline to hope the reader may derive as much amusement from them as I have done myself, and venture to give them the publicity here which I must refuse them in my book. The dates and signatures have, with the exception of ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... "Such trivial questions will be discussed at a more fitting time," answered Brother Timon, sharply, as he burnt his fingers with a very hot potato. "Neither sugar, molasses, milk, butter, cheese, nor flesh are to be used among us, for nothing is to be admitted ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... nine until five-thirty daily she was required, at 4:56 on the sixth day, to cross the set, open a door, stop, turn, appear to be listening, and recross the set to meet someone entering from the opposite side. This scene, trivial as it appeared, was rehearsed seven times before the director was ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... the Mysteries had a real spiritualising and moralising influence on large numbers of those who were initiated, and that this influence was increasing under the early empire. The ceremonies may have been trivial, and even at times ludicrous; but the discovery had been made that the performance of solemn acts of devotion in common, after ascetical preparation, and with the aid of an impressive ritual, is one of the strongest incentives to piety. Diodorus is not alone in saying (he is ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... was unfinished: there are many prosaical passages in it, many lame and harsh lines, incorrect and even ungrammatical expressions, trivial images, and, above all, many Lombard provincialisms, which are not in their nature of a "significant or graceful" sort,[6] and which shocked the fastidious Florentines, the arbiters of Italian taste. It was to avoid these in his own poetry, that Boiardo's ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... never assimilate with mine. She will go through life a disappointed woman; while, if I set her free, she will find some man whom she loves and will be happy with him. You may as well confess that this is true. You may as well acknowledge that her nature is too light, too trivial to be rent asunder by any falsity of mine. Ethel will never break her heart; but you might break yours, Lesley—and I—I also—have ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... inquiry will satisfy you, that, though there have been disorders in the town of Boston, some of them did not merit notice, and that such as did have been magnified beyond the truth." The events of the eighteenth of March and of the tenth of June were reviewed: the former were pronounced trivial, and such as could not have been noticed to the disadvantage of the town but by persons inimical to it; the latter were conceded to be criminal, and the actors in them guilty of a riot; but, in justice to the town, it was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... invasion, which a son's pride might be apt to make, of domestic privacy, and no dealing with irrelevant topics or elaboration of those set forth with becoming modesty and restraint; far less is there the discussion of any subject, for a trivial or vain purpose. Throughout the work we meet with no unnecessary lifting of veils or treatment of themes merely to satisfy morbid curiosity. Everywhere there is the evidence of sound judgment, unimpeachable ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... recoil, some of us find ourselves recklessly striving to forget and ignore them, and some find a surer refuge in facts that are stronger still than they; but to one and all, in kindly compassion to human weakness, each new emotion, each passing interest and trivial incident, combines to interpose a barrier between us and the terrible moment that overwhelmed us; and time which, in later years, seems to drag out the slow hours and days into long ages of dreary grief, can deal swiftly and ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... altogether in the dark, and feeling that she was so, she knew that she could not give counsel as a friend or a sister. Lucy had begun by declaring—so Mrs. Robarts thought—that nothing had passed between her and Lord Lufton but words of most trivial import, and yet she now accused herself of falsehood, and declared that that falsehood was the only thing which she did ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... is not very easy to define rigorously. In the most typical form some moral precept is set forth by means of a conception purely fantastic, and usually somewhat trivial into the bargain; there is something playful about it, that will not support a very exacting criticism, and the lesson must be apprehended by the fancy at half a hint. Such is the great mass of the old stories of wise animals or foolish men that have amused our childhood. But we ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of diet, rather than the exhibition of medicine, should, under these circumstances, be relied on for remedying the evil. Calomel, and such like remedies, "the little powders of the nursery," ought not to be given on every trivial occasion. More mischief has been effected, and more positive disease produced, by the indiscriminate use of the above powerful drug, either alone or in combination with other drastic purgatives, than would be credited. Purgative medicines ought at all times to be ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... These trivial advantages were amply compensated by the victory of Welf over Frederick of Hohenstaufen, at Hochstadt, and the occupation ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... some twenty dollars might have been a trivial matter to me once—I had at times cast that sum away as vainly as Washington had cast a dollar across the Potomac; but here I had lost my all, whether large or small; and not only had I been bilked out of it—I had bilked myself out of it by sinking, in pretended smartness, ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... Oftentimes, Conscript Fathers, have I spoken at length in this assembly. Oftentimes have I inveighed against the luxury and avarice of our citizens, and, therefore, have I many men my enemies. I, who have never pardoned my own soul even for any trivial error, could not readily excuse in others the lusts which result in open criminality. But, although you neglected those crimes as matters of small moment, still the republic, by its stability and ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... Giton?" Under her eyes, I flushed hotly and, if I had any virility left, I lost it then; my whole body seemed to be inert. "My queen," I cried, "do not mock me in my humiliation. I am bewitched!" (Circe's anger was far from being appeased by such a trivial excuse; turning her eyes contemptuously away from me, she looked at her maid,) "Tell me, Chrysis, and tell me truly, is there anything repulsive about me? Anything sluttish? Have I some natural blemish that disfigures ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... strong enough so to traverse, repress, and check all those causes which tended to divergence, that the written language of educated men on both sides of the water remains precisely the same, their spoken manifesting a few trivial differences of idiom; while even among those classes which do not consciously acknowledge any ideal standard of language, there are scarcely greater differences, in some respects far smaller, than exist ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... times they circle round the place, Five times the winding course retrace; No trivial game is here; the strife Is waged for Turnus' own dear life. CONINGTON, AEneid, ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... one to work improving the various posts round Krugersdorp, setting a fine example to all by the interest he took in the work, and showing his thoroughness by the attention he devoted to even the most trivial details. He also took infinite pains to make Christmas as pleasant as he could for every one. The regiment was, of course, very much split up in the various forts and fortified houses, but headquarters still remained till the end of the year in our ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... suddenly brought back into the world of trivial things? "Why, this is Mr. Carter, Mr. Shafton. He can speak ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... young Darian doctor named Korvan rather condescendingly demonstrated that the former blue pigmentation was a viral product quite unconnected with the plague, and that it had been wiped out by a very trivial epidemic of—such and such. Calhoun regarded that young man with a detached interest. Maril thought him wonderful, even if she had to give him the material for his work. Calhoun shrugged and ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... great sorrows with resignation, and seem to gain a certain dignity and force of character through trouble, but who are utterly vanquished by trivial annoyances. ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... own number. And this effect was a permanent one. Thenceforth for foreign powers to talk of mediation between the republic and the ancient master, to suggest schemes of reconciliation and of a return to obedience, was to offer gratuitous and trivial insult, and we shall very soon have occasion to mark the simple eloquence with which the thirty-eight Spanish standards of Turnhout, hung up in the old hall of the Hague, were made to reply to the pompous rhetoric of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... You may think it trivial, but it was certainly a portent. One of the acolytes had half his head clean shaved! A most extraordinary sight! I could not take my eyes from it, and I heartily wished I had an Omen-book with me to tell me what ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... disease that fall to the care of the physician are trivial, self-limited, and rapidly recover under even the most crucifying dosages; Nature really winning the victories, the physician carrying off ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... many a lady was known to have ruined her husband by the purchase of those costly articles; now, however, thanks to French mock jewelry, they are enabled to bedeck themselves in glittering ornaments at trivial expense. Another of their passions is a fondness for perfumes. They are continually besprinkling themselves with eau de Cologne, esprit de Lavande, agua rica, or mistura. The latter is a fragrant ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... again to the cause of his imprisonment. As the long, weary hours dragged by, he studied the matter with the utmost care, giving painstaking thought to the slightest details and the most trivial acts. His points were, consequently, well made. They were reasonable, logical, probable. The scheme broadened as he progressed. What he had supposed to be a mere matter of revenge now loomed up clearly and distinctly before him as a bold plot against himself—a piece of ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... his acts, gave the titles of books he read, and named the distinguished people he met. This diary is nearly as valuable as that of Samuel Pepys, save that unfortunately it does not record the inconsequential and amplify the irrelevant, for it is the seemingly trivial that pictures character. Godwin's diary forms a continuous history of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... add that none of the letters were intended for publication; they were written to near relatives and friends currente calamo, and are full of familiar expressions and allusions which may seem trivial and uninteresting to ordinary readers. Those, however, who care to study my sister's character I think cannot fail to trace in these records some of its strongest features; her keen enjoyment of the beauties of Nature,—her love for animals,—for her Home,—her lares and penates;—and ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... anything looks to me more likely, and less incredible, than that a man who could walk with God should only have a poor earthly life to do it in, and that all these aspirations, these emotions, should be bounded and ended by a trivial thing, that touches only the physical frame. Surely, surely, there is nothing so absurd as to believe that he who can say 'Thou art my God,' and who has said it, should ever by anything be brought to cease ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... when she does allow herself to talk she has the manner and accent of a refined lady. Yes, there is a deep mystery about her, which is utterly beyond my comprehension. I remember once when she had been talking for a long time about Guy and his wonderful qualities, I suddenly happened to ask her some trivial question about her life before she came to Chetwynde; but she looked at me so wild and frightened, that she really startled me. I was so terrified that I instantly changed the conversation, and rattled on so as to give her time to recover herself, and prevent ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... vain men—but to make him the companion in cause and in death of so many simple persons according to the world—old men, young men, and poor women—who in that same place (the Place de Greve) had endured fire and knife." D'Aubigne's narrative, as usual, is vivid, and mentions somewhat trivial details, which, however, are additional pledges of its accuracy; e.g., he alludes to the fact that, having spoken as above to those who stood on the side toward the river, he repeated his remarks to those on the other side of the Place de Greve, beginning ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... therefore, was nourished by the inspiring influences that come from the victorious struggle of a people to maintain their national life. He was by no means the only sculptor of his time whom fame remembers, but he alone, rejecting trivial themes, consecrated his talent to the nobler subjects of his country's religious life and the ideal conception of her protecting gods. No doubt, Phidias, like all who are born with the artistic temperament, would be interested from childhood in the progress of the splendid ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... short time, often only a few minutes, elapses before the confusion caused by the presence of the shadows of these generally unimportant features ceases to interfere with the observation, and we can distinguish between those details which are really noteworthy and others which are trivial and evanescent. Every formation we are studying should be observed, and drawn if possible, under many different conditions of illumination. It ought, in fact, to be examined from the time when its loftiest ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... city they are constantly exposed to its excitements, and subjected to the restraints of its artificial modes, with few outward influences to counteract upon their development; with very little, indeed, except the discipline and the affections of home to emancipate them from the tendencies to a trivial, artificial, and sordid life. They would gladly supply to them the healthful tone and vigor—the outer and inner bloom and freshness—which are the product of out-door life in the pure air of the country. But they ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... debate within himself. He felt that he ought to tell his new acquaintance that he knew who he was, that, however trivial their conversation might be, it somehow resembled eavesdropping to talk to a chance fellow-passenger as if he were a complete stranger. But it required again a certain effort ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... unpretentious country lane that the advent of the electric car had found it. When Carrados had taken in these details there seemed little else to notice. He was on the point of giving Harris the order to go on when his ear caught a trivial sound. ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... wont to sit reading his prints, in the warm weather. The flowers and the hedges had grown to a certain wildness; and the smell of the American roses carried me back-as odours will-to long-forgotten and trivial scenes. Here I had been caned many a day for Mr. Daaken's reports, and for earlier offences. And I recalled my mother as she once ran out at the sound of my cries to beg me off. So vivid was that picture that I could hear Mr. Carvel say: ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... had given her his heart, and she had played with it. For her sake he had striven to be famous; for her alone had he toiled through dreary years in London, the goal her lap, in which he should one day place his book—a poor, trivial little work, he knew (yet much admired by the best critics). Never had his thoughts wandered for one instant of that time to another woman; he had been as faithful in life as in death; and now she came to the edge of the pool and peered down at his ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... Hotel de Rambouillet, by its ingenious absurdities. Their excellent design to refine the language, the manners, and even morality itself, branched out into every species of false refinement; their science ran into trivial pedantries, their style into a fantastic jargon, and their spiritualising delicacy into the very puritanism of prudery. Their frivolous distinction between the mind and the heart, which could not always be made to go together, often perplexed them ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... relations to each other. Its language, flavoured here and there with the phraseology of the novel, is consistently appropriate. The fourth and last act is feeble. Nobody can sympathise with "the late remorse of love" in a nature so trivial as that of Thornhill, and the incident of the reconciliation between Olivia and her husband, therefore, goes for nothing. It is the beautiful relation between the father and his daughter that animates the play. It is paternal love that thrills its ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... an extreme; and almost every action of their lives, however trivial, is more or less influenced by some superstitious notion. They believe in a good and evil spirit; and in a future state of rewards and punishments. They assert that the souls of persons deceased pass into another world, where ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... silly," said Patty, thoughtfully, "but I can't help feeling that Mabel not only wants me to visit her this summer, but she needs me. Now, I don't mean to be conceited, but, don't you know, you can tell when people seem to need you, if only in a trivial way." ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... big brothers respected him less than ever. To them flower-hunting, as an occupation, seemed trivial and effeminate. Flowers, though they were well enough in their proper places,—the front garden or the grass,—were usually a nuisance that crept through the crops and choked their growth, until descended upon and tediously jerked up, one ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... of a parish church is concerned with its internal economy but even the records of this are not quite trivial for they enlighten us on many points wherein we are rightly curious. We are, for instance, constantly reminded, as Dr. Gasquet points out in "Mediaeval Parish Life," that "religious life permeated society in the Middle Ages, particularly in the fifteenth century, through the minor confraternities" ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... accident that this nest of the ovenbird is discovered. The concealment could not be better. It is this peculiarity of nest construction — in shape like a Dutch oven — that has given the bird what DeKay considers its "trivial name." Not far from the nest the parent birds scratch about in the leaves like diminutive barnyard fowls, for the grubs and insects hiding under them. But at the first suspicion of an intruder their alarm becomes pitiful. Panic-stricken, they become fairly limp with fear, and drooping her wings ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... sense of shame that always overcomes us at the committal of any such trivial error, I stumbled hastily back, when my foot trod upon something that broke under my weight. I never let even small things pass without some notice. Stooping, then, for what I had thus inadvertently ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... Macartney, coffee-seller," to the care of the Dockgate-keeper, we had not much spare time left in which to stamp and post it, so we took leave of the owner of the pop-shop. He was now very unwilling to let us go. He did not ask another question about his mother, but he was consumed with trivial curiosity about us. Once again he alluded to Biddy. We were standing outside, and his eye fell upon ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... rueful, bloody stories Of Tyrants, Jacobites, and Tories: From liberty how angels fell, That now are galley-slaves in hell; How Nimrod first the trade began Of binding Slavery's chains on Man; How fell Semiramis—God damn her! Did first, with sacrilegious hammer, (All ills till then were trivial matters) For ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... observation of the vane in many different places, and the interchange of results by telegraph, would put the weather, as it were, in our power, by betraying its ambushes before it is ready to give the assault. At first sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial than the lives of those whose single achievement is to record the wind and the temperature three times a day. Yet such men are doubtless sent into the world for this special end, and perhaps there is no kind of accurate observation, whatever its object, that has not its ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... arrival, Brett was not idle. He visited a prominent jeweller in the Rue de la Paix, and, after making some trivial purchases, led the conversation to the question of diamonds. By skilful inquiry he ascertained a good deal about precious stones, both in their crude and their finished states. The accommodating Frenchman showed him a good many samples of ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... might promote each other's enjoyments, by living peaceably together, fall out in regard to some trivial misunderstanding, and engage in angry disputes, and a bitter warfare, disturbing the harmony of the neighborhood, and destroying their own happiness—the young who exercise practical observation, will be instructed, to avoid similar troubles in their own affairs. They will realize ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... the gold which it contained. The object of the theft was clearly determined, therefore, and this made it the more difficult to understand; for, after all, why should a man run so great a risk to secure so trivial a spoil? ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... as he sat by David's bedside, was David's attitude toward that threatened return of his. For David had opposed it, offering a dozen trivial, almost puerile reasons. Had shown indeed, a dogged obstinacy and an irritability that were somehow oddly like fear. David afraid! David, whose life and heart were open books! David, whose eyes ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... priceless boon, seems to shrink from conceding it to man—the invisible tribes that abhor him oppose themselves to the gain that might give them a master. The duller of those who were the life-seekers of old would have told you how some chance, trivial, unlooked-for, foiled their grand hope at the very point of fruition; some doltish mistake, some improvident oversight, a defect in the sulphur, a wild overflow in the quicksilver, or a flaw in the bellows, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the pleasure his society afforded, would anticipate the fitter mention to be made hereafter. But what in this respect distinguishes nearly all original men, he possessed eminently. His place was not to be filled up by any other. To the most trivial talk he gave the attraction of his own character. It might be a small matter,—something he had read or observed during the day, some quaint odd fancy from a book, a vivid little out-door picture, the laughing exposure of some imposture, or a burst of sheer mirthful enjoyment,—but of its kind ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... shortness of the time of their imprisonment. They had lived years in dread thought, and but a few hours in reality. They had suffered for the spans of lives to find that the clock had imperturbably registered brief intervals. They had played the gamut of dread, terror, and anguish, to learn how trivial, after ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... process? Shall we sit With memory, warming our weak hands at it, And say: "So be it; we have had one hour"? Surely the mountains are a better dower, With their dark scope and cloudy infinite, Than small perfection, trivial exquisite; 'Mid all that dark the ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... favour; whence is it that they are perpetually "going about to establish their own righteousness?" Why do they endeavour to persuade themselves that sin is a trifling concern, or that at least their sins are trivial and excusable? It is obvious, that they form very low and inadequate ideas of the greatness of their debt, and the utter worthlessness of their own merit—they do not realize their ruined and bankrupt ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... I believe that in London itself, in the heart of the civilised and religious world, she was going through trials which make mine, in the grim darkness of the Polar night, seem trivial and easy? ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... of droning speeches went on and on. Each tribe presented its claims, and metaphor shouldered metaphor. It sounded trivial as the bragging of blue-jays, but I interpreted carefully and kept the different headings in mind. Then I asked Cadillac's permission, and took ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... thing are all very well in their way, but one must live; he had wasted too much of his youth in solitude. O mihi proeteritos referat si Jupiter annos! Next session he would arrange things better. Success in examinations—what trivial fuss when one looked at it from the right point of view! And he had fretted himself into misery, because Chilvers had got ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... AEschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe,—these seven,—were the greatest of the great, up to the year 1800. They are not all equal in rank, and even in the work of that heptarchy of genius, there were trivial things to be found.... ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Government. After Judge Douglas has established this proposition, which nobody disputes or ever has disputed, he proceeds to assume, without proving it, that slavery is one of those little, unimportant, trivial matters which are of just about as much consequence as the question would be to me whether my neighbor should raise horned cattle or plant tobacco; that there is no moral question about it, but that it is altogether a matter of dollars and cents; that ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... and negligence. and made even their last efforts seem only the exuberances or flowering-off of a mind capable of higher excellencies, but unambitious to attain them. There was nothing to alarm or overpower. On whatever topic she touched, trivial or severe, it was alike en badinant; but in the midst of this sportiveness, her genius poured itself forth in a thousand delightful fancies, and scattered new graces and ornaments on every object within its sphere. In its ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... Geneva, in 1712, son of Isaac Rousseau and Susannah Bernard, citizens. My father's share of a moderate competency, which was divided among fifteen children, being very trivial, his business of a watchmaker (in which he had the reputation of great ingenuity) was his only dependence. My mother's circumstances were more affluent; she was daughter of a Mons. Bernard, minister, and possessed a considerable share of modesty and ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... frequently expressed in severe denunciation of any who presumed to entertain conservative views of the situation of affairs and who still hoped for conciliation and peace. Suspicions were often created by trivial but well-intended acts or remarks that were susceptible of a double construction, and loyal sentiment was often so pronounced in its denunciation of the South that no word or remark could be tolerated that by any possibility ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... virtually side by side in the same village. This, however, was in Champagne, not in Provence. Both families farmed vineyards for a once famous abbey in the vicinity of Epernay, early in the seventeenth century. To me, personally, this trivial discovery meant a great deal. It somehow aroused my interest in M. Zola and his works. Of the latter I had then only glanced through two or three volumes. With M. Zola himself I was absolutely unacquainted. However, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... England and all Europe, saving only the Frenchmen, worshipt almost, had this of the god-like in him: that he was impassible before victory, before danger, before defeat. Before the greatest obstacle or the most trivial ceremony; before a hundred thousand men drawn in battalia, or a peasant slaughtered at the door of his burning hovel; before a carouse of drunken German lords, or a monarch's court, or a cottage table where his plans ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... hair from a loved one long since passed away, is a little thing,—a very little thing in the eye of a stranger,—but in the eye of a loving friend it is above price. So some things in this work, apparently trivial to the general reader, may be highly prized by others. I will give, for ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... Most persons cherish prejudices, and think certain pursuits degrading or useless. Thus, business-men sneer at artists, and artists sneer at business-men. Jefferson had nothing of this. He understood and appreciated the value of every employment. No knowledge was too trivial for him; with the same affectionate interest, he observed the courses of the winds and the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... in Germany; and now comes the oratorio in England,—the oratorio as we know it and hear it to-day. Handel was its great originator. He began his English career as an operatic writer; but he soon tired of setting music to the trivial subjects so common in opera, which, as he himself declared, were not suited to a composer advancing in years. There were other inducements, however, which led him to turn to the oratorio, and among them one of the most powerful unquestionably was his disgust with the cabals which were organized against ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... their still, enigmatic gaze, was subtly conscious of an odd sense of repulsion, almost amounting to dread, and then Elisabeth, making some trivial observation as she moved nearer to the fire, smiled across at her, and, in the extraordinary charm of her smile, the momentary sensation of ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... attacked on ground where his troops could not deploy, but with extreme coolness and judgment beat off the enemy. To cover thirty-two miles in a day and fight a way out of an ambuscade in the evening is an ordeal for any leader and for any troops. Two killed and seven wounded were our trivial losses in a situation which might have been a serious one. The Boers appear to have been the escort of a strong convoy which had passed along the road some miles in front. Next morning both convoy and opposition had disappeared. The cavalry rode on amid ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... occurred about this time, he slightly resented a piece of marked incivility on the part of Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick, who had married the Princess Eliza of Denmark; but it is not likely that so trivial an affair, if it were known at court, could have called down upon him the ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... and, be it great or small, he applies the highest of all motives to this matter. 'For ye know the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich yet for your sakes He became poor.' The trivial things of life are to be guided and shaped by reference to the highest of all things, the example of Jesus Christ; and that in the whole depth of His humiliation, and even in regard to His cross and passion. We have here set forth, as the pattern to which the Christian life is to be conformed, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... better to be done than childishly to pout at the conqueror; that is, I could not recognize that his weapons were good, and that I should seize and destroy him with them. In short, for want of a definite principle of action I have drifted at random, my life without plan—I have been a mere trivial man ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... ban of her great secret purpose she had ceased to regard men and women except as they could be turned into the instruments of her will. And her use for them was over. As for their merely human character and experience—Toni saw through these at once. And it all seemed to her futile and trivial in the fierce reflection of those infernal fires through which she had had ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... me to express the satisfaction we felt on landing at Angostura, the capital of Spanish Guiana. The inconveniences endured at sea in small vessels are trivial in comparison with those that are suffered under a burning sky, surrounded by swarms of mosquitos, and lying stretched in a canoe, without the possibility of taking the least bodily exercise. In seventy-five days we had performed a passage of five hundred leagues (twenty to a degree) on the five ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... he carried a lady from Putney in such a night as this, and she bade him lie down by her, which he did, and did give her content, and a great deal more roguery. Home and found my girl knocking at the door (it being 11 o'clock at night), her mistress having sent her out for some trivial business, which did vex me when I came in, and so I took occasion to go up and to bed in a pet. Before I went forth this morning, one came to me to give me notice that the justices of Middlesex do meet to-morrow at Hicks Hall, and that I as one am desired ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... for more than a certain fixed and relatively short time entirely without food or air. Dr. Buckland tried a number of experiments upon toads in this manner—experiments wholly unnecessary, considering the trivial nature of the point at issue—and his conclusion was that no toad could get beyond two years without feeding or breathing. There can be very little doubt that in this conclusion he was practically correct, and that the real fine old crusted ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... be disappointed in the child when he comes home next year." It would be difficult to determine how much of this was true; Miss Emily was aggravated and, although she would never have confessed to so trivial a matter, the perpetual worship of Rose—"the ugliest thing you ever saw"—was irritating her. The days followed, then, when Angelina was constantly in her aunt's company, and to neither of them was this ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... times an insupportable ennui in listening to the confessions of people who had never learned either to think or to feel with any degree of distinctness, and whom his most fervent exhortations could not lift above the most trivial interests of a mere animal life. He was weary of the childish quarrels and bickerings of the monks, of their puerility, of their selfishness and self-indulgence, of their hopeless vulgarity of mind, and utterly discouraged with their inextricable labyrinths of deception. A melancholy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... night in accomplishing the engirdlement of the Flying Fish, could have heard and understood the airy way in which the fact of their close proximity was dismissed by the baronet as a matter of the most trivial importance, they would have been intensely disgusted. Happily for their dignity they were blissfully unconscious of it; and whilst Sir Reginald and his companions were luxuriating in the bath, and afterwards ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... air, as one might say, that you are engaged in experimental chemical work for the Government, and I should have thought, and hoped, that this would occupy your mind to the exclusion of such trivial affairs as servants' love-making. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152. January 17, 1917 • Various
... Congress of the United States, a part of their powers under the commission were, it seems, of a commercial nature. They were authorized, in the most ample and undefined manner, to form a commercial treaty with America on the spot. This was no trivial object. As the formation of such a treaty would necessarily have been no less than the breaking up of our whole commercial system, and the giving it an entire new form, one would imagine that the Board of Trade would have ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to be acquainted with matters quite at variance with his ministry. The cura possesses the language, resides in the village, has the means of the confessional, [104] and when he wishes there are but few matters, even the most trivial, that can be hidden from him. On the contrary the alcalde, not having any of these advantages, can have knowledge of but few things, if the parish priest does not communicate them. I shall quote here what father Fray Manuel del Rio ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... voice sweet nature's sweetest tunes Sang the glad song of twenty cloudless Junes. Her raiment,—nay; go, reader, if you please, To some sage Treatise on Antiquities, Whence writers of historical romances Cull old embroideries for their new-spun fancies; I care not for the trivial, nor the fleeting. Beneath her dress a woman's heart was beating The rhythm of love's eternal eloquence, And I confess to you, in confidence, Though flowers have grown a thousand years above her, Unseen, unknown, with all my soul I ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... he statesman or hod-carrier. What difference, if an honest heart beat beneath a laborer's hickory shirt, or one of fine linen? 'One hand, if it's true, is as good as another, no matter how brawny or rough.' Mary, do not think the trivial affairs of the home beneath your notice, and do not imagine any work degrading which tends to the betterment of the home. Remember, 'Who sweeps a room as for Thy law, makes that and ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... cottage door. The rocks, the sea-weed on the ocean floor, The willows in the meadow, and the free Wild winds of the Atlantic welcome me; Then why shouldst thou be dead, and come no more? Ah, why shouldst thou be dead, when common men Are busy with their trivial affairs, Having and holding? Why, when thou hadst read Nature's mysterious manuscript, and then Wast ready to reveal the truth it bears, Why art thou silent! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... For many reasons it was useless, he rapidly decided, to try and surprise them as they boarded; there was a better and surer way. And, as always, he attended to every little detail—details that to others might have seemed trivial—of ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... hearers. Perhaps Molire wished not only that the general public should be prepared to find instructions and warnings for married men, but also that they who were wont to regard the theatre as injurious, or at best trivial, should know that he professed to educate, as well as to entertain. We must count the adoption of similar titles by Sheridan and others amongst the tributes, by imitation, to ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... comes for you to perform, and the audience have proposed subjects and invented cases for discussion, you should get rid of the difficult ones by calling them trivial, and complain that there is nothing in this selection that can really test a man's powers. When they have chosen, do not hesitate a moment, but start; the tongue is an unruly member; do not attempt to rule ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... there, in the utter darkness. Neither, now, would have the advantage. He had been a fool to leave one of the doors without its double lock, of some sort. He had once been told that it was always through the more trivial contingency that ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... now excited only sorrow and regret. Having gazed on the chateau and its lovely scenery, till the banks again closed upon them, her mind became too much occupied by mournful reflections, to permit her to attend to the conversation, which Madame Cheron had begun on some trivial topic, so that they soon travelled in ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... about the way He did His work at the beginning; a world which went wrong so early and so easily was anything but "very good," although He pronounced it to be so according to the Genesis writer. Besides, why should a trivial act of transgression have sent it all wrong? We take leave of our common ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... those who, whenever they were urged of old to be rid of their Wantonness, or drunkenness, or avarice, would say: "God is merciful, and better than His word; He will never damn his own creature upon a cause so trivial." But here they yelped blasphemy, asking: "Where is that mercy boasted to be infinite?" "Silence, ye whelps!" said a huge, crabbed devil who heard them, "Silence! would he have mercy who did nought to obtain it? Would ye that ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... the perverted reverence with which they regarded the words and even the letters, and the very shapes of the letters, in which their sacred books were written. Their perversions of the law of God, their subtle refinements of interpretation, their trivial conceits, their false and misleading comments and inferences, all certainly tended to encourage the hypocrisy which our Lord rebuked, and against which St. Paul contended. But we still see something of the same spirit in the attempt to maintain ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... because I have discovered how nearly our nation and the whole world escaped horrors beside which those of The Leader's actual regime would seem trivial. Give me reasons, arguments, proofs beyond question, which I can put into my report on his career! I must demonstrate beyond question that psi ability did not cause his ascendancy! Help me to contrive a lie which will keep anyone, ever, from dreaming that psi ability can be used ...
— The Leader • William Fitzgerald Jenkins (AKA Murray Leinster)
... and for two hundred years later, the matter of attributing a book to this man or that was considered a trivial affair. Piracies were prevalent. All printers revised the work of classic authors if they saw fit, and often they were specially rewarded for it by the Church. It was about this time that some one slipped that ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... the gravest fault in this poem is the frequent intermixture, as in these two lines, of trivial thoughts and circumstances with those of a ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... sustains;—then with protended spear Checks his approaching jaws. Furious he strives To wound the harden'd steel;—on the sharp point He grinds his teeth: now from his poisonous mouth, Began the blood to flow, and sprinkling ting'd The virid grass; but trivial still the hurt; For shrinking from the blow, and twisting back His wounded neck, the stroke he still prevents Deeper to pierce, by yielding to its force. But pushing arduous on, Agenor's son, Fix'd in his throat the steel;—and the sharp point Forc'd through ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... anything heretic or infidel in her replies on religious subjects, and only getting candid common sense in return for their suspicions, her judges turned to the idea of satanic inspiration and support. But it proved equally useless. Her patriotism shone clear above every trivial ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... at St. Navier and the North, there was little thought of French or English; the sheer problem of existence there drowned other considerations. He would, he thought, go out in the spring ... leave Myrtle Forge with its droning anvil, the endless, unvaried turning of water wheel, and the facile, trivial chatter in and about the house. David Forsythe, back from England in the capacity of master of fluxing metals, might acquire his, Howat's, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... better than Dr. Bowdler did. He does not Bowdlerise who uses pumice to a blot, but he who rubs the copy into holes wherever he can find an honest letter with a downstroke thicker than becomes a fine-nibbed pen. A trivial play of fancy in one of the pieces in this volume, easily removed, would have been as a dead fly in the pot of ointment, and would have deprived one of Lucian's best works of the currency to which ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... vision;" I should be unwilling to force home the argumentum ad hominem of Dr. Blundell, but I would not consent to make a question of a momentous fact which is no longer to be considered as a subject for trivial discussions, but to be acted upon with silent promptitude. It signifies nothing that wise and experienced practitioners have sometimes doubted the reality of the danger in question; no man has the right to doubt it any longer. ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... them in those markets where slaves were known to fetch the highest price. This was a recognised trade, but it exposed the Phoenicians to the danger of reprisals, and made them objects of an undying hatred. When on these distant expeditions they were subject to trivial disasters which might lead to serious consequences. A mast might break, an oar might damage a portion of the bulwarks, a storm might force them to throw overboard part of their cargo or their provisions; in such predicaments they had no means of repairing the damage, and, unable to ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... says Dowd. "It was a remarkable experience. Weird, you might say. You see, it was the last day of our stay in Florida; our last foursome of the season. We had been losing steadily for several days, Ellins and I. Not that the stakes were high. Trivial. Dollar Nassau, with side bets. I'd been off my drive again and Ellins had been putting atrociously. Anyway, we had ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... "On trivial occasions any initiated man may personate Ukuku or issue commands for the family. On other occasions, as in Shiku, to raise prices, the society lays ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... city—existent, immortal, and waiting to be revealed—you and I may belong to-day. 'We have a strong city.' You may lay hold of life either by the side of it which is transient and trivial and contemptible, or by the side of it which goes down through all the mutable and is rooted in eternity. As in some seaweed, far out in the depths of the ocean, the tiny frond that floats upon the billow goes down and down and down, by filaments ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... continually administered, in the manner described, from Friday evening at nine o'clock until Monday morning at nine. This treatment lasted sixty hours, and sixteen ounces of chloroform were used. No injurious effects, however trivial from the treatment adopted, ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... other things, an account of a certain village council who were working hard at all this business; and the record of their intense earnestness in getting to the bottom of some matter which in time past would have been thought quite trivial, as, for example, the due proportions of alkali and oil for soap-making for the village wash, or the exact heat of the water into which a leg of mutton should be plunged for boiling—all this joined to the ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... made use of the same searching analytical observation that had so quickly taught him the secret of the ax-swing. He knew that each of the things he saw, no matter how trivial, was either premeditated or the product of chance. If premeditated, he tried to find out its reason for being. If fortuitous, he wished to know the fact, and always attempted to figure out the ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... casting off their lovers. He had too much respect for his own heartiness of love to believe himself unworthy of Mary; that mock humble conceit did not enter his head. He thought he did not "hit Mary's fancy"; and though that may sound a trivial every-day expression, yet the reality of it cut him to the heart. Wild visions of enlistment, of drinking himself into forgetfulness, of becoming desperate in some way or another, entered his mind; ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... sins in respect of unclean food and the like, and improper speeches, etc., they are of two classes, viz., those committed consciously and those that are committed unconsciously. All sins that are committed consciously are grave, while those that are committed unconsciously are trivial or light. There is expiation for both. Indeed sin is capable of being washed away by (observance of) the ordinances spoken of. Those ordinances, however, have been laid down only for believers (in God) and those that have faith. They are not for atheists or those that have no faith, or those ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... that feeling, Charles Holland; I can fully understand it. I do not blame you for it—it is a most natural one; but when you know all, you will feel with me how necessary it must have been to my peace to seize upon every trivial circumstance that can help me to a belief in my ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... at last hear her natural voice, her original sweet and attractive voice, to which the music is beginning to return, shily and timidly, my heart overflows with joy. But, two minutes after, she is again bawling out her most trivial remarks, with a cheerful unconcern that disarms my wrath. Then I plead for silence as I would for mercy, draw her down upon my lap, take her head in my arms and nurse her as I ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... is no use denying that there IS something on my mind. And yet it is such an absurd business that I hesitated to bother you about it. On the other hand, although it is trivial, it is undoubtedly queer, and I know that you have a taste for all that is out of the common. But in my opinion it comes more in Dr. Watson's ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... man's image but God's. It is incorruptible, and the soul may trust it safely; it will serve her beyond the stars. But it cannot give us friends, or the embrace of a lover, or the touch of children, for with our fellow mortals it has no concern. It cannot even give the joys we call trivial—fine weather, the pleasures of meat and drink, bathing and the hot sand afterwards, running, dreamless sleep. Have we learnt the true discipline of a bankruptcy if we turn to such coinage as this? Will it really profit us so much ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... very apex of popularity, while he, with his ten years initiation, had not yet developed brains enough, in the estimation of the Ashcroft people, that would justify them in placing in his charge the management of the most trivial social affair. What had he done that this measure should be constantly graduated out to him? Well, things would be different. He would "can" personality and take up the "big mitt" of public things. But how was ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... into English), indicate his impatience at the trivial wants and necessities which interrupt his creative work and take his thoughts from his compositions. Instances of bad grammar in his letters are frequent, when dealing with ordinary topics. In no sense a polished man, he could, however, when the occasion required it, assume in his grammar ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... college. Naturally, we were all in favor of the idea. We all agreed that we wanted something besides Shakespeare for a change, but no one could suggest anything else. We wanted something really representative, and the majority of these plays for amateurs are rather trivial. Finally, Sara Emerson suggested that the play be written by a member of the senior class. There was a general protest, and Elizabeth Wade asked Sara if she would mind writing it. Rather unkind in her, wasn't it?" asked Emma, with a ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... forgotten that only a few years before he had been a cheap little ticket-seller grateful for a bow from any actor who had ever had his name up. Crossley insisted that he was not a victim of folie de grandeur, that, on the contrary, he had become less vain as he had risen, where he could see how trivial a thing rising was and how accidental. ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... Kandar did not die in battle. It may never come. If it does, it will come as a vague rumor, as an idle tale, as absurd gossip about a fleet whose home planet may not even be remembered when the tales are told. There will be trivial stories about a fleet which abandoned the world it should have defended, and fled so far that its enemies did not bother to follow it. If the tale reaches Mekin, it may not be believed. It may not ever be linked to ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... present instance; and I was filled with chagrin and disgust at the thought of how simple an accident had sufficed to mar and defeat what might otherwise have proved a perfect surprise to Mendouca and his crew. Still, although I could not conceal from myself the fact that this apparently trivial accident had placed the attacking party at a woeful disadvantage, by warning their antagonists of the intended attack, and thus putting them on the alert, I had seen enough of British pluck to hope that even yet, despite all, it might ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... dangers and hardships really commenced; again they were obliged to take to the fields, feeling their way along blind paths and cart-tracks that could scarcely be discerned in the darkness. The most trivial obstacle sufficed to drive them a long way out of their course. They squeezed through hedges, scrambled down and up the steep banks of ditches, forced a passage for themselves through the densest thickets. Jean, in whom a low fever had developed under the drizzling ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... fellow-traveler. Shivering in the sharp morning air, Magdalen waited, while the preliminaries of departure were in progress, conscious of nothing but a giddy bewilderment of thought, and a helpless suspension of feeling. The events of the night confused themselves hideously with the trivial circumstances passing before her eyes in the courtyard. She started with the sudden terror of the night when old Mazey re-appeared to summon her out to the cart. She trembled with the helpless confusion of the night when the veteran cast the eyes of indulgence on her ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... previous to his "Excursion," is there any allusion made, except of the most trivial and transient kind, to Revealed Religion. He certainly cannot be called a Christian poet. The hopes that lie beyond the grave—and the many holy and awful feelings in which on earth these hopes are enshrined and ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... convincing. Just then—this was early in 1863—news came to him that the old pilot he had wounded by his satire, Isaiah Sellers, was dead. At once the pen-name of Captain Sellers recurred to him. That was it; that was the sort of name he wanted. It was not trivial; it had all the qualities—Sellers would never need it again. Clemens decided he would give it a new meaning and new association in this far-away land. He ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... own waking self, for instance, my half-asleep self is almost a personality of genius. He can create visions that the waking self can remember, but cannot originate, and cannot trace to any memory of waking impressions. These apparently trivial things thus point to the existence of almost wholly submerged potentialities in a mind so everyday, commonplace, and, so to speak, superficial as mine. This fact suggests that people who own such minds, the vast majority of mankind, ought not to make themselves the ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... crowd think kindly or clearly about any subject under the sun? I fancy not. My own real idea of the character of the various mobs that see the rabbits die is such that I could not venture to frame it in words. The sport is so mean, so trivial, so purposeless, that I should go a long way to avoid seeing it now that ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... stairs, and it was not until she was gone that he remembered that she did not know the body of her husband had been found—sewed in a sack and at the bottom of the river. Young husbands have been known to quarrel with their wives over matters as trivial as bedroom wall-paper; they have even been known to leave home for several days at a time when angry; in extreme cases they have even been known to seek death at their own hands; but it is not at all usual for a ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... occasions, I had no opportunity of making any observations on the manners and customs of our neighbours. Occasionally Mrs. Tod mentioned them in her social chatter, while laying the cloth; but it was always in the most cursory and trivial way, such as "Miss March having begged that the children might be kept quiet—Mrs. Tod hoped their noise didn't disturb ME? but Mr. March was such a very fidgety gentleman—so particular in his dress, too—Why, Miss ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... man to know concerning either God or himself is so plain, that he that runs may read. In answer to such like cant, for it is nothing more,—a cant produced by the most profound ignorance, and frequently attended with the most deplorable envy, I ask, is then the Delphic precept, KNOW THYSELF, a trivial mandate? Can this be accomplished by every man? Or can any one properly know himself without knowing the rank he holds in the scale of being? And can this be effected without knowing what are the natures which he surpasses, ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... he could not but note how soon the tragedy of the preceding night seemed forgotten. Some bemoaned the loss of money or valuables; a few, more fortunate, related how they had outwitted the robbers and escaped with trivial loss, but only an occasional careless word of pity was heard for the young stranger who had met so sad a fate. So quickly and completely does one human atom sink out of sight! It is like the dropping of a pebble in the sea: a momentary ripple, that ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... to spend a moment before her mirror, there to arrange her dress, the plaiting of her hair—perhaps the expression of her face—all things that to men may appear trivial, but to women important—even in the hour of sadness and despair. No blame to them for this. It is but an instinct—the primary care of their lives—the secret spring ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... excited contempt and laughter only. Eight hundred Degrees of one kind and another were invented: Infidelity and even Jesuitry were taught under the mask of Masonry. The rituals even of the respectable Degrees, copied and mutilated by ignorant men, became nonsensical and trivial; and the words so corrupted that it has hitherto been found impossible to recover many of them at all. Candidates were made to degrade themselves, and to submit to insults not tolerable to a ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... derived; consequently, if a document has been analysed upon fifty different slips, the same references must be repeated fifty times. Hence a slight increase in the amount of writing to be done. It is certainly on account of this trivial complication that some obstinately cling to the inferior note-book system. Again, in virtue of their very detachability, the slips, or loose leaves, are liable to go astray; and when a slip is lost how is it to ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... heart was torn and bleeding, after the death of her only child, her thoughts were taken off herself by the necessary duty of providing mourning garments for herself, her husband, and the slaves. This trivial task had at least helped her to forget for a few hours the bitterness of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... expenditures of society on its trivial pleasures at a time when men and women are out of work and children are crying for food is a cruel and ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... sent them hunting the enemies of mankind: they were bent to the chase, scenting the game, knowing the infinite meaning of their hunt and the glory of victory. Mary Cresswell had listened but a half hour before her world seemed so small and sordid and narrow, so trivial, that a sense of shame spread over her. These people were not only earnest, but expert. They acknowledged the need ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... lay there the rough loft and its straw seemed to pass away, for the background of his mental picture to become the park and grounds about the old Hall, on one of the old sunny days when he and Scarlett had had a quarrel about some trivial matter, and were gazing threateningly at each other after uttering dire words, and were declaring that everything between them was quite at an end, and that they were never going to speak ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... tasks; I'll not abandon One of these—nay pride, my health; Every trivial or grand one Is a noble ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... the saddest commentary of the truth of what I am saying," snarled the old scientist. "How can a person know the worthwhile things when he stores his mind with such trivial—you know far too much of such things, ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... not much spare time left in which to stamp and post it, so we took leave of the owner of the pop-shop. He was now very unwilling to let us go. He did not ask another question about his mother, but he was consumed with trivial curiosity about us. Once again he alluded to Biddy. We were standing outside, and his eye fell upon the row of ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... If this trivial instance has been dealt with at such length it is because, for one reason, it is typical of the foundation of so many of the Borgia legends, and, for another, because when history has been carefully sifted for evidence of the ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... needs to be quite as fully considered. "Many men of genius have written worse scrawls than I do," said a boy at Eugby, when his teacher remonstrated with him for his bad penmanship; "it is not worth while to worry about so trivial a fault." Ten years later, when he had become an officer in the Crimea, his illegible copy of an order caused the loss of many ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... one. We cannot walk with another unless we are agreed. The lapse of friendship is often due to this, that one has let the other travel on alone. If one has sought pleasure, and the other has sought truth; if one has cumbered his life with the trivial and the petty, and the other has filled his with high thoughts and noble aspirations; if their hearts are on different levels, it is natural that they should now be apart. We cannot stay behind with the camp-followers, and at the same time fight in the van with the heroes. If we would keep our ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... conception of justice that we should be dealt with, as if we had all along had a clear knowledge of the fact thus carefully concealed from us. What should we think of the justice of a father, who gave his son every reason to suppose that a trivial fault would only be visited by a box on the ear; and then, years afterwards, put him on the rack for a week ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... chair-backs to remind me of the graveyard. I can still remember the sombre aisles of that house, the vault-like shadows, the magnificent window curtains that blotted out the windows. Life was too trivial for such things. She never knew she tired of them, but she did. That was the secret of her temper, I think; they engendered her sombre Calvinism, her perception of the trashy quality of human life. The pretence that they were the accessories to human life ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... masses of metal, or bands of leather, which moved stiffly through ranges comparatively short, there is to-day employed a medium which may traverse 186,400 miles in a second, and with resistances most trivial in contrast with ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... that he retained in his memory very slight and trivial, as well as important things. As an instance of this, it seems that an inferiour domestick of the Duke of Leeds had attempted to celebrate his Grace's marriage in such homely rhimes as he could make; ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... of roving robbers. At times they threatened towns on the coast, and at others they attacked ships on mid-ocean; and they seem to have followed their lawless pursuits at will. When caught, there was little delay in bringing them to trial and securing a conviction; and trivial technicality in forms played no part in reaching results. At times there were multiple executions, and in the community there was no morbid sentimentality shown for the miserable wretches. Not the least of their torture was sitting in the meeting-house on the Sunday before execution ...
— Piracy off the Florida Coast and Elsewhere • Samuel A. Green
... was lying. That was evident to the guard. At the same time he did not want to be placed in the position of disobeying orders against making trivial arrests. He knew by the color of the liquid it was not ginger ale. A brilliant thought came to him. He would test the beer and thus have the evidence. But here a difficulty was encountered. While the rule prohibiting employees ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... renewed his slumbers on the edge of a volcano whose ominous rumbling the Southern heart had heard and interpreted aright. He was too near to catch the true import of the detonations of those subterranean forces which were sounding, week after week, in the columns of the Liberator. They seemed trivial, harmless, contemptible, like the toy artillery of children bombarding Fort Independence. Garrison's moral earnestness and enthusiasm seemed to the Boston mayor like the impotent rage of a man nursing memories of personal ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... to some happiness and a certain indulgence and the 'droit de temperament,' means something and need not always be selfish. If you do not think this, then there is only the other extreme of austere abnegation of self for any cause however trivial. Nature is the only guide and I don't believe Nature is bad. Of course the curse of freedom will allow one for a long time to distort and vilely modify natural instincts, but at least one can fly from the too palpable artificial. Dear ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... years in India—as if that mattered! When will people recognise that the truths of democratic policy are independent of time and space? Liberalism is a category, an eternal mode of thought, which cannot be overthrown by any trivial happenings. I am sick of the word 'facts.' I ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... no doubt, but beyond that not much. In painting, after all, there is in the less important details something of the craft of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not mechanical is often trivial enough. I don't wonder, now," he added, with a suspicion of a twinkle in the eye, "if you imagine that one comes down here in a fine frenzy every morning to ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... dignified form at present known to us, and with them also it accompanies a lapse of ordinary consciousness, at least to the extent that circumstances of time and place and daily life become insignificant and trivial, or even temporarily non-existent; but the notable thing is that a few persons, not of genius at all, are liable to an access of something not altogether dissimilar, and exhibit a kind of lucidity or clairvoyant perceptivity, which, though doubtless of ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... Involuntary laughter. When the pleasure arising from new combinations of words and ideas, as in puns; or of other circumstances, which are so trivial, as to induce no voluntary exertion to compare or consider their present importance or their future consequence; the pleasure is liable to rise into pain; that is, the ideas or sensual motions become exerted too violently for want of some antithetistic ideas; in the same ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... indifferently. This sort of thing did not appeal to East Houston Street sensibilities, and there was no applause at the end. The girl essayed a few bars of her second number, a popular air in trivial waltz time, but with even poorer success. Then she broke down altogether and retired distressfully. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... drawers would be out with trays of foam-headed tankards to moisten those importunate throats. The ale-drinking, the rude good-fellowship, the heartiness, the laughter at discomforts, the craving to see the fight—all these may be set down as vulgar and trivial by those to whom they are distasteful; but to me, listening to the far-off and uncertain echoes of our distant past, they seem to have been the very bones upon which much that is most solid and virile in this ancient race ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stirred so hot a strife that Oswiu was prevailed upon to summon in 664 a great council at Whitby, where the future ecclesiastical allegiance of his realm should be decided. The points actually contested were trivial enough. Colman, Aidan's successor at Holy Island, pleaded for the Irish fashion of the tonsure, and for the Irish time of keeping Easter: Wilfrid pleaded for the Roman. The one disputant appealed to the authority of Columba, the other to ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... is a good one to follow in bedroom pictures; no "rogue's gallery" of photographs, no useless, meaningless, and trivial pictures, but just a madonna or two, perhaps a photographic copy of some old master, with a favorite illuminated quotation—something to help and ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... just a few miscellaneous reminiscences, many of them no doubt trivial, but they may perhaps be not entirely devoid of interest, when it is remembered that they are the impressions and recollections of one who was then a boy of ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... who's dreadfully neglected by her husband; that's Mademoiselle Cecile, the butcher's daughter, a girl that no one will marry because she's scrofulous." In this way she could have continued jerking out biographical scraps for days together, deriving extraordinary amusement from the most trivial, uninteresting incidents. However, as soon as eight o'clock struck, she only had eyes for the frosted "cabinet" window on which appeared the black shadows of the coterie of politicians. She discovered the secession of Charvet and Clemence by missing their bony silhouettes ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... reforming. But within the law there was ample room for "efficient" men to acquire more money than their salaries, and they naturally grasped their opportunities, as did the general officers. Freke, whom Isabelle disliked, with her trivial woman's prejudice about face and manners, embodied a Device,—in other words he was an instrument whereby some persons could make a profit, a very large profit, at the expense of other persons. The A. and P. 'was friendly to Freke.' The Pleasant Valley Coal Company never wanted cars, and it ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... least effort to him, any more than it is to a baby to be innocent. It is his spontaneous act, and a baby is not more unconscious in its innocence. I never knew such loftiness, so simply borne. I have never known him to stoop from it in the most trivial household matter, any more than in a larger or more public one." [Footnote: J. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... rebel ranks, by decimating the Union army; and here you have it in a tangible form. I am informed that Judge Attocha was a rebel captain. He is a rebel still, and in the exercise of this authority is banishing your soldiers for trivial military offenses, in irons, with forfeited wages; for which their families ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... Professor Forbes's work (we had almost said epic poem) on 'Glaciers.' Even an agricultural writer, if he have a real insight in him—if he have anything of that secret of the piu nel' uno, 'the power of discovering the infinite in the finite;' of seeing, like a poet, trivial phenomena in their true relation to the whole of the great universe into which they are so cunningly fitted; if he has learned to look at all things and men, down to the meanest, as living lessons written with the finger of God; if, in ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... German tongue. It is a weary torture to be a stupid, uncomprehended foreigner. I am lost in a linguistic swamp. It is necessary to employ one man to talk to another. The commisionnaire does not understand more than half I say. What might he not be interpreting to the other fellow? The most trivial want costs me a world of anxiety and trouble. I desired some blotting-paper. I went to a little stationery shop. I said, "Paper! paper! fuer die blot, you know. Ich bin Englisher—er: ink no dry; what you call um? Vas? vas? Hang it!" They took ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... would have done had she been her own natural self, and not in the strange, dreamy, broken-down state, which seemed to take interest in nothing. Still, she felt some interest in seeing Dr. Grey appear, though but in a trivial thing, rather different from what she had at first supposed him. And when, after an interval of awful silence, during which Miss Gascoigne looked like a brooding hurricane, and Miss Grey frightened out of her life ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... least sure that that soil would not be taken from him, and that in giving part of his time to his master, he was at liberty to enjoy the rest according to his fancy. The farmer afterwards became proprietor of the soil he cultivated, and master, not only of himself, but of his lands; certain trivial obligations or fines being all that was required of him, and these daily grew less, and at last disappeared altogether. Having thus obtained a footing in society, he soon began to take a place in provincial assemblies; and he made the last bound ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... commonest design, and degraded by their gilded shops, wide-fuming, flaunting, glittering, with apparatus of eating or of dress. Splendor of palace-flank and goodly quay, insulted by floating cumber of barge and bath, trivial, grotesque, indecent, as cleansing vessels in a royal reception room. Solemn avenues of blossomed trees, shading puppet-show and baby-play; glades of wild-wood, long withdrawn, purple with faded shadows of blood; sweet windings and reaches of river far among the brown vines and white ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... relates, evinced, as he thought, that even then he preferred to aggravate his fault rather than consent to suppress any part of the truth, an effort which had been unnatural to his mind. His fanciful, yet striking illustration may open our inquiry. "This trivial passage," the little story alluded to, "I have mentioned now, not that I think that in itself it deserves a relation, but because as the sun is seen best at his rising and his setting, so men's ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... regrets were fast becoming too much for him, he left the humble kitchen and went up-stairs. But not to sleep. Locking the door (something he never remembered doing before in all his life), he began to handle over his clothes and other trivial belongings. Choosing out a certain strong suit, he laid it out on the bed and then went to a bureau drawer and drew out an old-fashioned wallet. This he opened, but after he had counted the few bills it contained he shook his head and put them all back, only ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... dangerous gulf by distracting their attention from their altercation to a consideration of their plans for the immediate future. Accustomed to frequent arguments in which more hair than blood is wasted, the apes speedily forget such trivial encounters, and presently Chulk and Taglat were again squatting in close proximity to each other and peaceful repose, awaiting the moment when the ape-man should lead them into the village ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... What need more trivial ills to quote, The freshly-furnished house that shines, The coxcomb's fashionable coat, Both brushed and polished "to the nines," Both yielding to some fatal flaw; A crack; a fiend who plays the flute; Both, both examples of the law Of Rift ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... without really knowing what these doctrines are. He sneers at the doctrines and practices of religion, because he cannot refute them. He speaks with the utmost gravity of the fine arts, the fashions, and even matters the most trivial, and he turns into ridicule the most sacred subjects. In the midst of his own circle of fops and silly women, he utters his shallow conceits with all the pompous ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... be guilty of such sacrilege?" he cried. "It is this cursed habit of yours of using God's name upon every trivial occasion that makes our enemies think us a nation of hypocrites! Back ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... them for that. A great deal depends on the safety of that boat. In fact, if you come to think about it, you will see that whatever grievance you may have, it is, after all, a very trivial one compared with the burden that weighs on me just now, and I should much prefer not to have anything to do with disputes between the passengers until we are out of our ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... according to my conception and in strict accordance with my deeply thought-out principles, and with such tools as I find most simple and most suitable for the work I have to do, then do so, and I shall feel highly honoured and very proud; but, if a lighter, more trivial creation will, or would satisfy your (craving I will not call it, that suggests pertinacity, a great end being in view), say, passing fancy, then I would rather see vacant the place occupied by you, as in such an one I should take no interest whilst speaking or working, just as ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... that this life is an outlying waste, forsaken of God and unblessed, and that the world is so hopelessly bad that it must be wholly renounced. On the contrary, it is for Him one of the provinces of the divine kingdom, and the most trivial of our occupations and the most transient of our joys and sorrows find their place in the divine order. It is not necessary to endorse Renan's idyllic picture of the Galilean ministry to believe that for Jesus all life, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... counsel of M. de Pibrac, who acted the part of a double dealer, telling me that I ought not to pardon an affront offered by such a mean fellow, but insist upon his being dismissed; whilst he persuaded the King my husband that there was no reason for parting with a man so useful to him, for such a trivial cause. This was done by M. de Pibrac, thinking I might be induced, from such mortifications, to return to France, where he enjoyed the offices of president and ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... said, 'Why, Helen, you don't mean that, do you?' and I said I certainly did. We parted rather stiffly. It was his last evening at home, and I had put on the frock in honor of it. He wrote as soon as he reached London, and referred to the dress again. He said such trivial things should never be permitted to come between two people who loved each other. I returned that it was not trivial, but a matter of principle, which I should support. John, it actually parted us. Actually parted us! ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... like a hermit crab in his college in Oxford. Lately he had a bad breakdown, and was ordered an immense rest and change; so now he has ventured out to blink at the universe beyond Carfax and the High, I expect he will find us shamelessly trivial and ignorant. How his eyes will open when they look upon this glaring world and behold some glaring facts! I shall invite Miss Maitland to join our party; she is of a nice suitable age, and I shall pair her off with Martin; we will take George's durwan, as courier, for he has Upper ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... proficiency from his casual acquaintance with vaqueros and small traders that he was glad to leave the matter in his young kinsman's hands. Again, by one of those illogical sequences which make a lifelong reputation depend upon a single trivial act, Clarence's social status was settled forever at El Refugio Rancho by his picturesque diversion of Flynn's parting gift. The grateful peon to whom the boy had scornfully tossed the coin repeated ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... the marvels of nature. It is a point comparatively trivial that this genus includes the largest of orchids ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... you one of those vistas, or anses, with colonnades of cocoa-palm—at the end of which you see smoking the chimney of a sugar-mill, and catch a glimpse of the hamlet of negro cabins (cases);—or merely picture to yourself one of the most ordinary, most trivial scenes: nets being hauled by two ranks of fishermen; a canot waiting for the embellie to make a dash for the beach; even a negro bending under the weight of a basket of fruits, and running along the shore to get to market; —and illuminate ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... eyes the happenings of that morning were trivial, they were far-reaching in their importance to Georgina, for they gave her three memories—Jeremy's teeth, the Towncrier's bell, and her own name on the porringer—to make a deep impression ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... are the Alpine landscapes which create A fund for contemplation;—to admire Is a brief feeling of a trivial date; But something worthier do such scenes inspire: Here to be lonely is not desolate, For much I view which I could most desire, And, above all, a lake I can behold Lovelier, not dearer, than our ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... of the trials undergone by the Ladysmith staff were the heliograms from the Tugela and the constant surprises of the dchiffrage. Sometimes pessimistic, sometimes the reverse and frequently trivial, there was scarcely an occasion on which they were helpful. The troubles of the relieving force ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... and your father's signature genuine." He folded the paper, slipped it in its envelope and returned it to her. "There is one thing now which I must most earnestly caution you against. Do not sign any paper, no matter who wishes it or orders it—no matter if it is the most trivial household receipt. Do not write any letters yourself, or notes to any one, even to Mr. Hamilton; you understand they might be intercepted. If anyone wishes you to sign a paper relating to the matter of your father's estate, say you cannot do so until you have shown it in private to Mr. ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... suggestion, Mr. Wyatt. Put the money in your billbook, hand it to the stakeholder, and let him give it, unopened, to the winner. Of course, you will first take out your other money. There is no need for them to know that more than a trivial sum is at stake. We do not want to ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... rite and husband and wife are equal.—Nothing like this teaching had been practiced in the pagan world. Woman was simply the servant, the creature, of man. She was to do his bidding, and might be divorced for trivial cause, or for none. Man was supreme and his will was law. The home in the Christian sense did not exist, because the husband and ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... as a great anthropologist. He works on a big scale; no one in any department of research, not even Darwin, has employed a wider induction of facts. No one, again, has dealt more conscientiously with each fact; however seemingly trivial, it is prepared with minute pains and cautious tests for its destiny as a slip to be placed under the anthropological microscope. He combines, so to speak, the merits of Tintoretto and Meissonier.... That portion of the book which is concerned with totemism ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... and became, Bonaparte always called the other Consuls about him before proceeding with the most trivial measure. The Legislative Corps did not exercise much influence during his reign, but he signed no decrees of any kind without first discussing them with the Council of State. This Council, composed of the most enlightened and learned men of France, prepared laws, ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... remember it is a woman speaking to you, and things which you will count silly and trivial mean very much to her. There was one night last June—only last June! To think of it! So little while ago there was no Mlle. Celie—" and, as Hanaud raised his hand, she said hurriedly, "Yes, yes; I will control myself. But to think of ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... and love, in store for Mary. Selina prayed that it might prove so;—but she prayed with tears in her eyes, and trembling in her soul! For where are the destinies of persons thus exquisitely organized—thus full of love and loveliness—thus readily swayed to joy or sorrow, by the trivial incidents of life—characterised by what the world calls happiness—such happiness, I mean, as is enjoyed by the serene and the prudent, the unexcitable, the unaspiring! Miss Stanley foresaw only too truly, that the best days likely to be enjoyed by her sister, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... worth pausing over, worth deliberation:—all this poetry, yes! poetry, surely, of their alternate work and play; light and shade, call it! Had it been, after all, a life in itself less commonplace than theirs—that life, the trivial details of which their Horace had touched so daintily, gilded ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... surprising what trivial ideas and memories, such as tags of old songs, or anecdotes more or less appropriate to the occasion, will run in our heads when we are anxious about anything, and are forced to remain in inactivity. All the time certain lines of Sir Walter Scott would worry Green, ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... other making love at the back of my house. Is it for a Transcendental Philosopher to feel any curiosity on such an occasion? Or can I, whose life is worth only eight and a half years' purchase, be supposed to have leisure for such trivial employments? However, to put this out of question, I shall say one thing, which will perhaps shock some readers, but I am sure it ought not to do so, considering the motives on which I say it. No man, I suppose, employs much of his time on the ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... are doing and all that is going on in the city, so that I may enjoy at second-hand what my wretched health prevents my enjoying for myself. Remember that I shall expect full details, and that no detail is too trivial to interest.—Your affectionate Aunt, ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... civilization. If France in the sixteenth century be tried by this criterion, the conclusion is inevitable that for her the age of barbarism had not yet completely passed away. The catalogue of crimes to which death was affixed as the penalty is frightfully long; some of them were almost trivial offences. A boy less than sixteen years of age was hung for stealing jewelry from his master.[74] On the other hand, with flagrant inconsistency, a nobleman, Rene de Bonneville, superintendent of the royal mint, for the murder of his brother-in-law, was ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... calm and liquid green, the colour of peace. Here I encountered another friend, a retiring man of letters, who lives apart from the world in dreams of his own. He is a bright-eyed, eager creature, tall and shadowy, who has but a slight hold upon the world. We talked for a few moments of trivial things, till a chance question of mine drew from him a sad statement of his own health. He had been lately, he said, to a physician, and had been warned that he was in a somewhat precarious condition. I tried to comfort him, but he shook his head; and though he ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the change which Edwin's character had undergone. As to Edwin Drood himself, "purified by trial, strengthened though saddened by his love for Rosa," Edwin would have been one of those characters Dickens loved to draw—a character entirely changed from a once careless, almost trivial self, to depth and earnestness. "All were to join in changing the ways of dear old Grewgious from the sadness and loneliness of the earlier scenes" in the story, "to the warmth and light of that kindly domestic life for which, angular though he thought himself, his true and genial nature ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... was far from "all right"—very far from it. It was no trivial thing, that letter; they never had been trivial things, those letters of hers, that involved so often a matter of life and death—as this one now, perhaps, as her actions would seem to indicate, involved life and death more urgently than any that had gone ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... see an enemy approaching give warning to the others by a peculiar cry. In several of the species this cry resembles the syllables 'seek-seek' repeated with a hiss. Others bark like 'toy-dogs,' while still other kinds utter a whistling noise, from which one species derives its trivial name of 'whistler' among the traders, and is the 'siffleur' of the ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... done,—placing them all together on a plate and serving one to each at the table. This dainty way, however, would hardly make a bad article good, and no one would crave a berry of ancient firkin butter. For, as trivial a matter as it seems, this single condiment of food, one has only to encounter it in a strong, cheesy state to feel it among the most important things in the cuisine. Then one suddenly discovers that butter is in everything. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... connecting link of the whole, that which was entrusted to Brigadier-General Perryn, did not perform its allotted part, by crossing the river at Cools. The consequence of this was that the victorious columns were left insulated, and would have been exposed to no trivial danger, had the enemy felt a sufficient reliance upon their own strength to incite them to act with the requisite promptitude and vigour. Painful, therefore, as it was to retire before a routed foe, the British troops were compelled to ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... each of these inspections he had to brush aside the calcined portion of the letter, once so warm and beautiful with love, but changed to something that seemed to him a semblance of his own heart just then,—black, trivial, and empty. ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... footsteps upon the gravel at the far side of the garden, but he did not raise his head. His interest in the trivial incidents of everyday life appeared ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... the Germans." Like Eckermann, the other beloved friend of Goethe, he possessed the power of eliciting the great poet-philosopher's dicta on all imaginable topics. Zelter wrote to Goethe on anything and everything, trivial and otherwise, but his letters never failed to educe strains of the most illuminating comment. The "Letters to Zelter" were published in Berlin in 1833, and the following epitome is ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Green and then down Grafton Street. Though his eyes took note of many elements of the crowd through which he passed they did so morosely. He found trivial all that was meant to charm him and did not answer the glances which invited him to be bold. He knew that he would have to speak a great deal, to invent and to amuse and his brain and throat were too dry for such a task. The problem of how ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... ten or twelve slaves and freedmen rushed into the room in trepidation, almost in terror, so savage was the temper of the lord whom they served, and so merciless his wrath, at the most trivial fault ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... coping with big human problems, such emotion may seem trivial, but it was perhaps this constant forced endurance that kept one up, made one almost supersensitively sentimental. Little things grew to ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... Fortitude thus is a two-sided virtue, moderating two opposite tendencies: while Temperance is one-sided, moderating Desire alone. Life, rationally considered, bears undoubtedly a high value, and is not to be lightly thrown away, or risked upon trivial or ignoble objects. The brave man is circumspect in his ventures, and moderate in his fears, which implies that he does fear somewhat. He will fear superhuman visitations, as the judgments of God. He will dread disgrace, and still more, sin. ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... one place, fireth; changed often, it doth nothing. The purest joy we can experience in one we love, is to see that person a source of happiness to others. When you are with the person loved, you have no sense of being bored. This humble and trivial circumstance is the great test—the only sure ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... these objects, nor these objects without man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life. Whole Floras, all Linnaeus' and Buffon's volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but the most trivial of these facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or, in any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most lively and agreeable manner. The seed of a plant,—to ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... given Ransom Vane by the tramp proved but a trivial affair, and immediately on his recovery from the nervous shock into which it had thrown him, the young man came to Grandon and communicated his suspicions ...
— Five Thousand Dollars Reward • Frank Pinkerton
... "Are you satisfied?" said she as she looked up from washing her cunt by the side of me. "No, it's so quick,—you fetch me so quickly." "That is no fault of mine." She had said so often before. I recollect all these apparently trivial, these various feelings and circumstances, as well as if it were yesterday, for she had ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... is trivial, but it is characteristic. Hawthorne had doubtless remarked the smell of the sour bread, and to him it called up a vivid recollection of some stroll in Rome; for, of all our senses, the smell is notoriously the most powerful in awakening associations. But then what do ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... departments, of Calverly, of Locker-Lampson, of Mr. Andrew Lang, of Mr. W. S. Gilbert. The comic muse, indeed, has marvellously extended her blandishments during the last two generations, and has discovered methods of trivial elegance which were quite unknown to our forefathers. Here must certainly be said a word in favor of those French forms of verse, all essentially lyrical, such as the ballad, the rondel, the triolet, which have been ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... with them. Dane swallowed three or four times and hoped that his superior officer had not noticed that sign of discomfort. Though Van Rycke, in spite of his general air of sleepy benevolence and careless goodwill, noticed everything, no matter how trivial, which might have a bearing on the delicate negotiations of Galactic Trade. He had not climbed to his present status of expert Cargo-master by overlooking anything at all. ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... for beads and other trivial ornaments, and for cigar-holders and the mouth-pieces of pipes. It is regarded by the Turks as specially valuable, inasmuch as it is said to be incapable of transmitting infection as the pipe passes from mouth to mouth. The variety most valued in the East is the pale ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the mysterious and sublime Faust who sings the horrible disgust and nothingness of everything; and this crowd are asking themselves anxiously whether Montrose's voice has not changed!" Then he listened, like the others, and behind the trivial words of the libretto, through that music which awakens profound perception in the soul, he had a sort of revelation as to how Goethe had been able to conceive the ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... raised above the daily cares, the troubles, and the sorrows of life. As the drama, with the arts which are subservient to it, may, from neglect and the mutual contempt of artists and the public, so far degenerate, as to become nothing better than a trivial and stupid amusement, and even a downright waste of time, we conceive that we are attempting something more than a passing entertainment, if we propose to enter on a consideration of the works produced by the most distinguished nations in their most ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... selected these gifts, if indeed she had not prepared them with her own hands. A certain delicacy of feeling prevented him from saying as much to her brother, or of even questioning him upon any point, however trivial, as to any matter of a peculiar nature concerning Isabella. Sometimes he longed to ask the boy about the subject, but he could not bring himself to do so; he felt that it would be indelicate and unpleasant to Isabella, and therefore he limited himself to careful inquiries ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... blood for me? How can there enter into the heart of the Christian who believes he has received ineffable and eternal treasures through the Son of God, the inclination to permit his neighbor to suffer a trivial want when he can easily extend relief? Much less would it be possible for the Christian to injure or to do injustice to his neighbor for the sake of shamefully gaining some small advantage. Rather he would reflect: "If I am, through Christ, a child of God and ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... half the sweet, trivial things that they said. But I remember how they told us stories of their own babies, and we laughed with them over treasured sayings of long-ago lips, or grieved with them over silences, or rejoiced at glad things that had been. Regardless of ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... teach to his subjects? and what is there that he is not able to render them skilful in learning? I, who of all young women was the most simple-minded, and ordinarily with barely power to loose my tongue, when among my companions, concerning the most trivial and ordinary affairs, now, because of this my affection, mastered so speedily all his modes of speech that, in a brief space, my aptness at feigning and inventing surpassed that of any poet! And there were few questions put to me in response to which, after ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... an understanding with him. He strutted off with far more manner than had been his at any time since the arrival of Lanyard, and vented an excess of spirits by berating bitterly an unhappy clown of a waiter for some trivial fault. ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... go into the matter again. All I need do here is to recall the fact that, in the United States, alone among the great nations of history, there is a right way to think and a wrong way to think in everything—not only in theology, or politics, or economics, but in the most trivial matters of everyday life. Thus, in the average American city the citizen who, in the face of an organized public clamour (usually managed by interested parties) for the erection of an equestrian statue of Susan B. Anthony, the apostle of woman suffrage, in front of the chief railway station, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... not in the least distressed by Anne's absences. He believed that she was thoroughly enjoying both her own protest and Mrs. Eliott's society. And the arrangement really solved the problem nicely. Otherwise the whole thing was trivial to him. He remained unaware of the tremendous spiritual conflict that was being waged round the person of ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... continued Prince Andrew, "and at Anna Pavlovna's they listen to me. And that stupid set without whom my wife cannot exist, and those women... If you only knew what those society women are, and women in general! My father is right. Selfish, vain, stupid, trivial in everything—that's what women are when you see them in their true colors! When you meet them in society it seems as if there were something in them, but there's nothing, nothing, nothing! No, don't marry, my dear fellow; don't ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Fontenelle's phrase more nearly than that of the English translator describes Rapin. Though Rapin's erudition was great, he escaped the quagmire of pedantry. He refers most frequently to the scholiasts and editors in "The First Part" (which is so trivial that one wonders why he ever troubled to accumulate so much insignificant material), but after quoting them he does not hesitate to call their ideas "pedantial" (p. 24) and to refer to their statements as grammarian's ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... little experience and less responsibility, and they apparently thought that they were going to transform the land between the rising and setting of the sun. They produced endless ordinances, and scarce a day went by save that a number of new regulations were issued, some trivial, some striking at the oldest and most cherished institutions in the country. The Government was changed from an absolute monarchy to one where the King governed only by the advice of his Ministers. The power of direct address to the throne was denied ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... many a poet and—in later times—many an investigator has set his feet. It would not be worthy of us, whom science and technical ability has raised to so high an intellectual position as explorers of Nature in every field—should we neglect anything however trivial, deeming ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... this time undergoing a great change. There was an end of his old careless acceptance of things. He laughed less and performed apparently trivial actions with an earnestness which had its comical side. And he began to display an appearance of self-respect which seemed ill-justified by his position and ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... matters of fact, but in matters of fact of the most familiar, the least animating, and the most unpleasant kind; but he relies for the effect of novelty on the microscopic minuteness with which he dissects the most trivial objects—and for the interest he excites, on the unshrinking determination with which he handles the most painful. His poetry has an official and professional air. He is called in to cases of difficult births, of fractured limbs, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... these technical devices we shall find that there are four kinds of experiences whose records are carefully stored away in our minds. Some were always so far from the center of our attention that we could swear they never had been ours; others, although once present in consciousness, were so trivial and unimportant that it seems ridiculous to suppose them conserved; others never came into our waking minds at all and entered our lives only in special states, such as sleep or delirium or dreams. All these we should expect to forget; the astonishing thing is that they ever ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... part, as a means of fighting the Provisional Government, preached the opposite doctrine, that of sabotage. In every manner possible they encouraged the workers to limit production, to waste time and materials, strike for trivial reasons, and, in short, do all that was possible to defeat the effort to place ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... by what she had been about to say as a trivial thing,—"that I wish what the old woman said was true. I wish it with all my heart. She was like what I think a mother must be to me. I have always been running away to her, ever since you brought me first. ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... Bethel, Virginia; the ambush of a Union railroad train at Vienna Station; and Lyon's skirmish, which scattered the first collection of rebels at Boonville, Missouri. Comparatively speaking all these were trivial in numbers of dead and wounded—the first few drops of blood before the heavy sanguinary showers the future was destined to bring. But the effect upon the public was irritating and painful to a degree entirely out of proportion to ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... is no difficulty about interesting children. The real difficulty is to bore them. Almost any tale will interest a child. It need not be well constructed or thrilling; it may be filled with the most unexciting and trivial incidents, but so long as it carries the mind along at all, it will interest a child. The hunger which intelligent children have for stories is almost inexhaustible. They like to have their stories repeated, and insist that the characters should reappear over and over again, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... out of mere curiosity, I walked down to the offices to ask a trivial question about my baggage. It was easy to turn the talk to other matters connected with the voyage ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... very curious circumstance, showing how sometimes records of the most trivial and insignificant things come down to us from ancient times in a clear and certain form, while all that is really important to know is involved in doubt and obscurity—that the household expense-book of Anne at Middleham is still extant, showing all the little items of expense ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... foolishness, the strangest thing of all. Lazarus thinks that his curer was God himself who came and dwelt in flesh among those he had made, and went in and out among them healing and teaching, and then died. "It is strange, but why write of trivial matters when things of price call every moment for remark? Forget it, my ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... is all, the form cannot a second time be galvanized into life. Pastoral, relying for its distinctive features upon the accidents rather than the essentials of life, failed to justify its pretentions as a serious and independent form of art. The trivial toy of a courtly coterie, it attempted to arrogate to itself the position of a philosophy, and in so doing exposed itself to the ridicule of succeeding ages. Men with a stern purpose in life turned wearily from the sickly amours ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... could." That was high praise. She had brought her best to her Lord. Perhaps some of us make too much of our little acts and trivial sacrifices. Little things are acceptable if they are really our best. But Mary's deed was not a small one. The ointment she brought was very costly. She did not use just a little of this precious nard, but poured it all out on the head and feet of Jesus. ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... of serious history connected with these letters which I was the first I think to discover. They were intended to satirise the trivial scraps brought forward in Mrs. Norton's matrimonial case—Norton v. Lord Melbourne. My late friend, "Charles Dickens the younger," as he used to call himself, in his notes on Pickwick, puts aside this theory altogether as a mere unfounded ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... are asked what did you then, when all the world was red, And some shall say, "I fell in France," and some, "I mourned my dead;" With all the brave assembled there in glory long to live, How trivial our lives shall seem who had but gold ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... cap in hand. The clergyman said no more. He was one of those sensitive men who often know instinctively whether or not their words find response in the heart of the hearer, and to whom it is always a pain to say anything, even the most trivial, which awakes no feeling ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... opportunity Erskine had ever enjoyed of speaking to Gertrude at leisure and alone. Yet their conversation had never been so commonplace. She, liking the game, played very well and chatted indifferently; he played badly, and broached trivial topics in spite of himself. After an hour-and-a-half's play, Gertrude had announced that this game must be their last. He thought desperately that if he were to miss many more strokes the game must presently end, and an opportunity which might ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium, and doubted as to whether I was senseless in feeling works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the civilized world to be trivial and positively bad, or whether the significance which this civilized world attributes to the works of Shakespeare was itself senseless. My consternation was increased by the fact that I always keenly felt the beauties of poetry in every form; then why ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... is the basis of this book: on this basis, which is poetic, a spiritual motive, the whole creation is raised, and the book is destined to be more than an occasional account of travel or an amusing but trivial display of wit and fancy. It is a poem, and a poem, as ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... and "Dead Souls." One reveals an extraordinary power of condensation: the other an infinite expansion. One deals with heroes and mighty exploits; the other with positively commonplace individuals and the most trivial events. One is the revival of the glorious past; the other a reflection of the sordid present. One is painted with the most brilliant hues of Romanticism, and glows with the essence of the Romantic spirit—Aspiration; the other looks at life through an achromatic lens, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... published an edition of the play, with a dedication to Congreve, never doubted, and there is no reason to doubt, that Addison was the author. 'The piece,' Mr. Courthope writes, 'is like Cato, a standing proof of Addison's deficiency in dramatic genius. The plot is poor and trivial, nor does the dialogue, though it shows in many passages traces of its author's peculiar vein of humour, make amends by its brilliancy for the tameness of ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... a God, to Him there can be nothing mean and nothing great. The most trivial things must be equal under His regard as the most august. All-powerful, omniscient, and omnipresent, He must encompass all things, and pervade all things. Ignorant of nothing, forgetting nothing, despising nothing, He ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... the Association he also delivered his well-known lecture to working men "On a Piece of Chalk," a perfect example of the handling of a common and trivial subject, so as to make it] "a window into the Infinite." [He was particularly interested in the success of the meeting, as his friend Hooker was President, and writes to Darwin, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... so as to prove to my enemies that they were powerless to disturb my peace of mind. Study became my refuge and consolation; and I plunged into work with the energy of despair. I should probably still live at Sainte-Marthe now, had it not been for a trivial circumstance. One day I had a quarrel with my most determined enemy, a girl named Anais de Rochecote. I was a thousand times right; and I would not yield. The superior dared not tell me I was wrong. Anais was furious, and wrote ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... is true, for the publication of my reply in the July number were a little later re-opened by Dr. Adler, on receiving advice from a legal friend of his own that to publish it would be his wisest course; but he himself broke them off on a trivial pretext, after receiving contrary advice from Dr. Royce's counsel, together with a copy of the legal protest sent to me personally. Thus Dr. Royce himself, recalling his original consent, procured the ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... widely diffused and plentiful mineral, and seems to belong almost equally to all geological formations. 2. Eagle cents issued in 1858 are of no value to collectors, because they lack rarity. 3. Your exchange is too trivial. ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... captain's stand-point, the confusion had a very grave aspect; while from that of the seamen, it was a matter of trivial consequence. The commander was mortified to find the discipline so weak; and he could have no confidence in himself or his crew until his orders were promptly obeyed. He was thinking only of the welfare of the ship and her crew. He had no intention of punishing the students, when he suggested the ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... said he, waving his hand at me; "I am only beginning. Those are trivial cases of alteration. Surgery can do better things than that. There is building up as well as breaking down and changing. You have heard, perhaps, of a common surgical operation resorted to in cases where the nose has been ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... as Bert it presented itself as a series of incidents, some immense, some trivial, but collectively incoherent. He never had a sense of any plain issue joined, of any point struggled for and won or lost. He saw tremendous things happen and in the end his world darkened to disaster ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... At the confessional Leonora opened her heart to the priest. It is probable that he communicated with the governor. De Soto's indignation was thoroughly roused. He summoned the culprit before him. Tobar, deeming his offense a very trivial one, without hesitation acknowledged it, thinking, perhaps, that he might receive some slight reprimand. He was not a little surprised when the governor said ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... discuss them further," she responded, with an effort at smiling ease. "Evidently you do not appreciate that to the majority of the strong women of the country whose husbands have been sent to Washington as members of the Government social interests seem trivial compared with the great public questions they are required to consider. These women doubtless feel little inclination for fashionable and—or—frivolous festivities, and find an occasion like this better suited to their conception of ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... sublime picture, nor the writer of an heroic poem, should introduce any trivial circumstances that are likely to draw the attention from the principal figures. Such compositions should form one great whole: minute detail will inevitably weaken their effect. But in little stories, which record the domestic incidents of familiar ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... highest duty. To have the best nations, the free and civilized nations, disarm and leave the despotisms and barbarisms with great military force, would be a calamity compared to which the calamities caused by all the wars of the nineteenth century would be trivial. Yet it is not easy to see how we can by international agreement state exactly which power ceases to be free and civilized and which comes near the line of barbarism or despotism. For example, I suppose it would be very difficult to get ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... daughter of Xixona, our dearest Rebecca was no more dead than you and I; and it was in his rage and fury against Ivanhoe that Isaac told that cavalier the falsehood which caused the knight so much pain and such a prodigious deal of bloodshed to the Moors: and who knows, trivial as it may seem, whether it was not that very circumstance which caused the destruction in Spain of ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... away as he spoke he might have observed that her fingers tightened their grip of the pearls almost convulsively, as if to break the rope. It was a gesture slight and trivial, yet arguing perhaps vexation. But Tremayne did not see it, and had he seen it, it is odds it would have conveyed no ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... broken; but, despite these manifest facial defects, and notwithstanding the squalor of his surroundings, a very high collar and a red necktie gave him the unmistakable air of the cheap dandy. Again I gave a civil evasion to the girl's trivial question, and as I did so her companion, looking over her frowzy pompadour, stared at me with insolent familiarity. I jerked my head in hurriedly, and, shutting the window, turned my attention to Little Lottie. It was not long before ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... why not read good healthy stuff, which will be of permanent use to you in your journey through the world? Why devour garbage when rich meats are constantly about you? 'To stuff our minds with what is simply trivial, simply curious, or that which at best has but a low nutritive power, this is to close our minds to what is solid and enlarging and spiritually sustaining.'[27] Look at it which way you will, the man who purposely neglects the great books deliberately ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... Coniers—they advanced southward, and began to appear formidable to the Government. Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, was ordered by Edward to march against them at the head of a body of Welshmen; and he was joined by five thousand archers, under the command of Stafford, Earl of Devonshire. But a trivial difference about quarters having begotten an animosity between these two noblemen, the Earl of Devonshire retired with his archers, and left Pembroke alone ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... quite often. He was always amusing, always agreeable, interested in all sorts of things, ready to give his undivided attention to any sort of a problem, no matter how trivial, to consider it attentively, and to find for it a fair and square deliberate solution. This is exceedingly comforting to the feminine mind. He taught Gringo not to "jump up"; he found out what was the matter with the Gold of Ophir cutting; he discovered ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house, Then died; with Lazarus by, for aught I know, And yet was ... what I said nor choose repeat, And must have so avouched himself, in fact, In hearing of this very Lazarus Who saith—but why all this of what he saith? Why write of trivial matters, things of price Calling at every moment for remark? I noticed on the margin of a pool 280 Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort, Aboundeth, very nitrous. It ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... we take shame to ourselves for admitting that there are points which, after all, we do not comprehend. They may be trivial; but in making up testimony, it is the little things which have weight. Trifles light as air are confirmation strong as proofs of Holy Writ, and confutation no less strong. When, as a proof of Nat's ardor in the pursuit of knowledge, we are told that he walked ten miles after ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... the strokes of fate we have curiously trivial demonstrations. Lorne met Hesketh's eye with the steadiness of a lion's in his own; the unusual thing he did was to take his hands out of his pockets and let his arms hang loosely by his side. It was as tragic a gesture of helplessness as if he had ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... negligence. and made even their last efforts seem only the exuberances or flowering-off of a mind capable of higher excellencies, but unambitious to attain them. There was nothing to alarm or overpower. On whatever topic she touched, trivial or severe, it was alike en badinant; but in the midst of this sportiveness, her genius poured itself forth in a thousand delightful fancies, and scattered new graces and ornaments on every object within its sphere. In its wanderings from the trifles of the day to ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... number of women who are nervous, which means they have not control of their nerves, but let them run away with them. Sometimes this is shown in palpitation of the heart, headache, backache, and many other disorders. There may be a tendency to cry at trivial things, or a feeling of having "the blues." The cause usually can be found in uncongenial surroundings or occupation, loss of friends, or real or fancied troubles. Whatever the cause, it should be removed, if possible, and measures taken to restore the worn out nerves that are crying ...
— Confidences - Talks With a Young Girl Concerning Herself • Edith B. Lowry
... most often the highest expression of happiness or unhappiness; lovers understand each other better when they are silent, and a fervent, passionate speech delivered by the grave only touches outsiders, while to the widow and children of the dead man it seems cold and trivial. ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... health; and it is not my custom to give passages to total strangers, especially when by so doing I should run the risk of embroiling myself with the Spanish authorities, with whom I have no quarrel. No, Senor, you must pardon my seeming churlishness in refusing so apparently trivial a favour, but I decline to associate myself in any way with the quarrel between your country and Spain. I have the honour to bid ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... edifice, varied with uncorresponding masses: and the mind of the Italian we find similarly irregular, a thing of various and ungovernable impulse, without fixed principle of action; the Englishman's, regular and uniform in its emotions, steady in its habits, and firm even in its most trivial determinations. ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... more successful in now and then starting a great bore;[I-13] and the others, having left all their own ordinary affairs and subjects of interest at home, were glad to make a matter of importance of the most trivial occurrence. A mighty poet, said the former class—who could it possibly be?—All names were recited—all Britain scrutinized, from Highland hills to the Lakes of Cumberland—from Sydenham Common to St. James's ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... to me to say, in his case: "You can speak with supreme excellence; sing with considerable excellence you never can. And the Age itself, does it not, beyond most ages, demand and require clear speech; an Age incapable of being sung to, in any but a trivial manner, till these convulsive agonies and wild revolutionary overturnings readjust themselves? Intelligible word of command, not musical psalmody and fiddling, is possible in this fell storm of battle. Beyond all ages, our Age admonishes whatsoever thinking or writing man ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... with the facts of vertebrate comparative anatomy, the distinguishing characteristics of the primates seem to be trivial in nature. It is surprising to find how insignificant are the details to which appeal must be made in order to draw a line between our own division of mammalia and the others. It is well to review them as they are given in the standard text-books of comparative anatomy. Primates are ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... the old-time masses of metal, or bands of leather, which moved stiffly through ranges comparatively short, there is to-day employed a medium which may traverse 186,400 miles in a second, and with resistances most trivial in contrast ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... under-robes, Euryale secretly rejoiced at the accident. She remembered that when her heart was torn and bleeding, after the death of her only child, her thoughts were taken off herself by the necessary duty of providing mourning garments for herself, her husband, and the slaves. This trivial task had at least helped her to forget for a few hours the bitterness ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... places, and the interchange of results by telegraph, would put the weather, as it were, in our power, by betraying its ambushes before it is ready to give the assault. At first sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial than the lives of those whose single achievement is to record the wind and the temperature three times a day. Yet such men are doubtless sent into the world for this special end, and perhaps there is no kind of accurate observation, whatever its object, ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... have chosen, to permit so mean a thing as you to live. As for the old fool beside you, who thought to stay my power with his box of tricks—his gas-box is already being analyzed by my chemists, and in a few hours the trivial secret will ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... question, specially presented by an illegal body, under electoral arrangements made by its new officers,—which officers not only receive, but count the votes, and make the returns,— while all the rest is merely unimportant and trivial. It is just the sort of sovereignty for which Louis Napoleon provided when he wished to procure a popular sanction for the numberless atrocities of the coup-d'etat of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... go hand in hand; both are born of an extreme sensitiveness, and the man who smiles at the trivial misfits of life realizes also that all men who tread the earth are living under a sentence of death, and that Fate has merely allowed them ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... immensely improved during the next twenty years. Education has almost banished drunkenness from Germany; and had England no drunkenness, no thriftlessness, no reckless multiplication, our social miseries would be comparatively trivial. ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... lines of Caleb's face, and his absorbed and dreamy manner, which would have sat well on some alchemist or abstruse student, were at first sight an odd contrast to his occupation, and the trivialities about him. But, trivial things, invented and pursued for bread, become very serious matters of fact; and, apart from this consideration, I am not at all prepared to say, myself, that if Caleb had been a Lord Chamberlain, or a Member of Parliament, or a lawyer, or even a great speculator, ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... moment with thoughts which seemed to mark him a century beyond his compeers; "purchased by that single moment of suffering called death. It is mine, my beloved, and shall be thine; and oh, when we meet there, how trivial will seem the dark woes and boding cares of earth! I have told thee the vision of my vigil, Agnes, my beloved; again I have seen that blessed spirit, aye, and there was no more sadness on his pale brow, naught, naught of earth—spiritualized, etherealized. He hovered ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... to the last of the opinions of Confucius which I shall make the subject of remark in this place. A commentator observes, with reference to the inquiry about recompensing injury with kindness, that the questioner was asking only about trivial matters, which might be dealt with in the way he mentioned, while great offences, such as those against a sovereign or a father, could not be dealt with by such an inversion of the principles of justice [5]. In the second Book of the Li Chi there is the following passage:— 'With the slayer of ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... quiet directness of manner. He had a way of abruptly finishing his speech without the usual lowering of the voice. And it is just that small drop of half a tone that invites further confidence. In such small matters as these lies the secret of conversational success, and by such trivial tricks of the tongue we are daily and hourly deceived. The man or the woman who lowers the tone at the end of speech defers to the listener's opinion, and usually receives it. The manner with which Fitz broke off led his listener to believe that he was ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... journal is that which contains the discussion of the politics of the day. In America three-quarters of the enormous sheet which is set before the reader are filled with advertisements, and the remainder is frequently occupied by political intelligence or trivial anecdotes: it is only from time to time that one finds a corner devoted to passionate discussions like those with which the journalists of France are wont ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... their return from Brighton that he broke out, first on some trivial occasion, and cursed her aloud. He said he hated the sight of her pale face, for it always reminded him of ruin and misery; that he had the greatest satisfaction in telling her that he was utterly ruined; that his father was dead, and had ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... that her master should appear at such time as seemed most opportune for her purposes. And how must every unconscious action, every innocent saying have been noted down in the tablets of that crafty mind! What explanation, indeed, could be given of those trivial caresses now so surely magnified and distorted ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... help or strength, when the whole heart leaps to the lips, or pleads dumbly, in its great need. Notwithstanding all teachings to the point, it never really occurred to her that God had as quick and sympathetic an ear for a little prayer of few words over some trivial worry, given silently in the busy kitchen, or on the crowded street, as He had for those when she knelt down at night, and absently asked for her daily bread, and to forgive as she was forgiven, and then get properly into bed and refrained ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... he ran from Bethany, and offered himself to betray his Master to them, if they would give him a considerable reward. They agreed for thirty pieces of silver.' In a case so memorable as this, nothing is or can be trivial; and even that curiosity is not unhallowed which has descended to inquire what sum, at that era of Jewish history, this expression might indicate. The bishop replies thus:—'Of what value each piece was, is uncertain; but their own nation ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... opinion had long been a subject of amicable dispute between them: but, Latterly, the contest was getting to be too important to admit of trivial discussions on the part of Marmaduke, whose acute discernment was already catching faint glimmerings of the important events that were in embryo. The sparks of dissension soon kindled into a blaze; and the colonies, or rather, as they quickly declared themselves, THE STATES, ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... longest I've ever spent. Sometimes she seemed to sleep, sometimes whispered to herself about her mother, her grandfather, the garden, or her cats—all sorts of inconsequent, trivial, even ludicrous memories seemed to throng her mind—never once, I think, did she speak of Zachary, but, now and then, she asked the time.... Each hour she grew visibly weaker. John Ford sat by her without moving, his heavy breathing was often the only sound; sometimes she rubbed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and anxious to allay her fears. The incident was by no means trivial, as he knew. Passengers on the great transatlantic steamers are safeguarded by every possible means; and the fact that he had been attacked in the few minutes that the deck lights had been out of order pointed to an espionage that was both close ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... save. It's whether we can save any! How dirty lace curtains get! It must be the soft coal—yes, it is a life and death struggle—I must see to Ariadne's underwear. It is too warm for these sunny days.—Oh! Oh! Paul and I have quarreled! And what about! About such sickeningly trivial things—how badly 'Stashie dusts! There are rolls of dust under the piano—but I thought people only quarreled—quarreled terribly—over great things: unfaithfulness, cruelty, differences in religion! Oh, if I only now had a religion, a religion which would—Yes, Ariadne; but ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... found himself quite unexpectedly upon the high road to Red Chief's Crossing. Cass knew by the lurid cloud of dust that hid the distance, that the up coach had passed. He had already reached that stage of superstition when the most trivial occurrence seemed to point in some way to an elucidation of the mystery of his treasure. His eyes had mechanically fallen to the ground again, as if he half expected to find in some other waif a hint or corroboration of his imaginings. Thus abstracted, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... I should have preferred his waiting for more favourable weather. He accomplished much under the circumstances, but would have done more in better weather. I am afraid he was anxious to get back to the ball. This is a bad time for such things. We have too grave subjects on hand to engage in such trivial amusements. I would rather his officers should entertain themselves in fattening their horses, healing their men, and recruiting their regiments. There are too many Lees on the committee. I like all to be present at ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... the day when I loved you. It was so small, and cramped, and selfish, before—and life was so hard, and stupid, and purposeless. To live, to sleep, to eat, for some years, and then to die—it was so trivial and so material. But now the narrow walls seem in an instant to have fallen, and a boundless horizon stretches around me. And everything appears beautiful. London Bridge, King William Street, Abchurch Lane, the narrow stair, the office with the almanacs and the shining ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... impression which exists. Yet a love of truth compels me to observe—only in a very slight sound, approaching to a whisper—that there are indications of the ravages of the worm, both at the beginning and end; but very, very trivial. It is bound like the preceding volume; and measures thirteen inches and nearly three quarters, by about nine inches ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... can be said, and is said, against the literature of information, I do not for a moment deny. It is shapeless, it is trivial, it may give an unreal air of knowledge, it unquestionably lies along with the rest of popular literature under the general indictment that it may spoil the chance of better work, certainly by wasting time, possibly by ruining taste. But these obvious objections are the ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... correct view is that any considerable sum of money paid to a child at that child's request is an advancement; thus payment of a son's debts of honour has been held to be an advancement. On the other hand, trivial gifts and presents to a child are ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... difficult of application. Yet a criticism may be worth making which rests only on probabilities or impressions. Great disputes will arise about the merits of different passages, about what is truly characteristic and original or trivial and borrowed. Many have thought the Laws to be one of the greatest of Platonic writings, while in the judgment of Mr. Grote they hardly rise above the level of the forged epistles. The manner in which a writer would or would not have written at a particular time of life must be acknowledged ...
— Laws • Plato
... the public to the play brought in its train some annoyance to the author: "I find success, even in the most trivial things, raises the indignation of scribblers," he wrote to Parnell on March 18th, "for I, for my 'What D'ye Call It' could neither escape the fury of Mr. Burnet or the German doctor. Then, where will rage end when Homer is to be translated? ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... such events with good taste and then will present them so that they will have a bearing upon the more important phases of the man's life and character. Hundreds of the stories told about Lincoln would be trivial but for the fact that they help us better to understand the real ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... come there during my sleep under unusual circumstances and from a very different life, but the thought didn't disturb me or trouble my mind in any way. My chief emotion was a curious feeling of expectancy. I knew that I was about to have some new and curious experience, something not trivial, and I was eager to ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... there is nothing over which contention can arise. What crimes are committed are punished with a severity seemingly out of all proportion to what you would call justice. A persistent offender even of fairly trivial wrongdoing is put to death without compunction. There is no imprisonment, except for those awaiting trial. Punishment is a reprimand with the threat of death if the offense is committed again, or death itself immediately. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... maybe you will not hereafter set it down to my reproach that I wasted an hour of a May morning in a denunciation of Jargon, and in exhorting you upon a technical matter at first sight so trivial as the choice between abstract ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... placed chairs and hassocks for their master, their mistress, and the noble stranger. Another low chair, or rather a sort of stool, was placed close beside that of Master Heriot; and though the circumstance was trivial, Nigel was induced to notice it, because, when about to occupy that seat, he was prevented by a sign from the old gentleman, and motioned to another of somewhat more elevation. The clergyman took his station behind the reading-desk. The domestics, a numerous family ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... up and raising a paw scraped at her hand, until she opened it, when he thrust his chin into her palm. It was a trivial incident, but it somehow ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... to bring. Thus the time was, and not so many years ago either, when the newsman constantly brought home to our doors— though I am afraid not to our hearts, which were custom-hardened— the most terrific accounts of murders, of our fellow-creatures being publicly put to death for what we now call trivial offences, in the very heart of London, regularly every Monday morning. At the same time the newsman regularly brought to us the infliction of other punishments, which were demoralising to the innocent part of the community, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... circumstanced as we were, I pointed out to Kitty that an engagement ring was the outward and visible sign of her dignity as an engaged girl; and that she must forthwith come to Hamilton's to be measured for one. Up to that moment, I give you my word, we had completely forgotten so trivial a matter. To Hamilton's we accordingly went on the 15th of April, 1885. Remember that—whatever my doctor may say to the contrary—I was then in perfect health, enjoying a well- balanced mind and an absolute tranquil spirit. Kitty and I entered Hamilton's ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... how sagacious, how mathematically ordered! we exclaim; but we gaze without emotion, and we turn away without regret. It does not vex us to read how Ghirlandajo used to scold his prentices for neglecting trivial orders that would fill his purse with money. Similar traits of character pain us with a sense of impropriety in Perugino. They harmonise with all we feel about the work of Ghirlandajo. It is bitter mortification to know that Michael Angelo ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... kissed her tears away, she begged him to tell her what he still actually owed, and, after some little demur, he consented. The amount of the debt, which lay heavily on his conscience, was comparatively a trivial thing to her. But when he had told her all, she looked at him with eyes which, although very loving, were ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... last satisfactorily settled, and the night of June 2 was fixed for the attempt. On this night the officers whose good will had been secured were to be on guard, and the plot seemed easy of execution. But once more the innate in decision of Maximilian's character interfered. For some trivial cause he postponed the venture, and thus lost his last opportunity. Too many were in the secret for it to remain one. Some one made disclosures, which reached the ears of the authorities, and led to ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... Englishman, and that on which all the rest vitally depend, is to be forfeited for some offence which no man knows, and which is to be proved by no known rule whatsoever of legal evidence. This is so anomalous to our whole constitution, that I will venture to say, the most trivial right, which the subject claims, never was, nor can be, forfeited in ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... peoples. The suckauhock with its varying shades of purple was particularly beautiful. Its value was double that of the white and the darker its color, the more highly it was prized. But the laborious method of production imparted no trivial value to ...
— Wampum - A Paper Presented to the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society - of Philadelphia • Ashbel Woodward
... to the representatives of the Atlantic as well as of the Western states. Most of our European readers will, we think, agree with us, that, considering the entire absence of provocation, and the infinitely trivial nature of the matter in dispute, these rhetorical flourishes are without parallel in ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... that Mrs. C.S. PEEL does not deserve well of her country. She is evidently a capable person and hustled about the country for the Ministry of Food to some purpose before the days of compulsory rationing. Her general idea seems to be that simple folk are tremendously interested in the most trivial and indirect details of important folk. So she will tell you how Sir HENRY REW and Mr. ULICK WINTOUR were fond of tea (Sir HENRY liked a bun as well); how Mr. KENNEDY JONES once lent her his car; how Lord DEVONPORT, asked if biscuits were ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... interesting to remark, even in apparently trivial things, how all nature is full of compensating processes. We give our servants household bread, while we live on the finest of the wheat ourselves. The mistress eats that which pleases the eye more, the maid what sustains and nourishes the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... him. He had a box strapped to his shoulders containing divers articles of traffic, and appeared to be one of those itinerant traders who often resorted to Alhama and the other garrison towns under pretext of vending trivial merchandise, such as amulets, perfumes, and trinkets, but who often produced rich shawls, golden chains and necklaces, and valuable ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... fascinated me. Were these flickering shadows shadows, or—or had Kniaz, after all, spoken the truth when he said this valley was haunted? The moonlight rendered every object I looked upon so startlingly vivid, that not even the most trivial detail escaped my notice, and the more I scrutinized the more firmly the conviction grew on me that I was in a neighbourhood differing essentially from any spot I had hitherto visited. I saw nothing ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... bring the end of his cane down upon the ground with a tremendous thump, and gesticulate like a man laboring under strong excitement; but this was nothing out of the ordinary, for Major Jimmy had been known to get excited over the most trivial discussion; on one occasion, indeed, he had even mounted a dry-goods box, and, as the boys expressed ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... holy task of training mind Is not a trivial thing, Its influence lives, grows and expands Till harvest it ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... characterises the old buildings of a German town. These quaint and stately houses, wedged one into the other, with their many storeys, their steeply sloping roofs and eye-like roof-windows, were still in sympathetic touch with the trivial life of the day which swarmed in and about them. He wandered leisurely along the narrow streets that ran at all angles off the Market Place, one side of which was formed by the gabled RATHAUS, with its ground-floor ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... of what they are destined to become. We are comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling. Every generation makes the discovery, that its divine vigor has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... The woman had been at home almost a twelvemonth, and Caius had some natural interest in questioning Morrison as to her welfare and general demeanour. The strange gaunt creature had for his imagination very much the fascination that a ghost would have had. We care to hear all about a ghost, however trivial the details may be, but we desire no personal contact. Caius had no wish to meet this woman, for whom he felt repulsion, but he would have been interested to hear Neddy Morrison describe her least action, ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... say: "What a tempest in a teapot?" To many this may seem a very trivial affair, but how small a thing can influence our lives! A breath, the passing of a summer shower, may help or hinder plans which alter our entire lives. And Miss Preston was wise enough to understand it. ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... inspired, but improved, by order and symmetry. There was nothing in it to dazzle by wildness, and surprise by eccentricity. It was of a higher species of moral beauty. It contained everything great and elevated, but it had no false or trivial ornament. It was not the model cried up by fashion and circumstance: its excellence was adapted to the true and just moral taste, incapable of change from the varying accidents of manners, of opinions, and times. General Washington is not the idol of a day, ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... worked hard each afternoon, and conscientiously, only to be filled at the last with despair and despondence. She had read, re-read, written and re-written it, until she knew every word by heart, and all seemed stale, dull, and trivial. ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... not strange that so many controversies about more or less trivial matters should have obscured in the minds of both Englishmen and Americans the fundamental identity of aim and purpose in the larger things of life. For notwithstanding the German influence in America which has had an undue ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... appears to have given occasion for the first skit, and it was scarcely necessary to do more than parody the grandiloquent newspaper language. "The clouds soon dissipated, and the appearance of the azure vault left trivial hopes of further needful supplies from the uncorked bottles of heaven. In a few moments the horizon was again overshadowed, and an almost impenetrable gloom mantled the face of the skies.... The majestic roar of disploded thunders, now bursting with a sudden crash, and now wasting ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... critical secretary, so keen in detecting conversational inaccuracies, having but two words to quote from a printed document, got one of them wrong. But this trivial comment must not lead the careful reader to neglect to note how much is made of what is really nothing at all. The word aleatory, whether used in its original and limited sense, or in its derived extension as a technical term of the civil law, ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the first time I looked upon Blanche, I felt that I had at last found the gift rarely accorded to us here,—the fulfilment of a promise hidden in every heart, but often waited for in vain. Hitherto my all-sufficing self-hood had never been stirred by the mighty touch of Love. I had been amused by trivial and superficial affections, like the gay triflers of whom Rasselas says, 'They fancied they were in love, when in truth they were only idle.' But that sentiment which is never twice inspired, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... not refer to the bets upon horseflesh at Ascot, Epsom, and Goodwood, by which fortunes change owners in an hour and so many men are ruined, but rather to the general habit of betting upon any and every subject to settle a question, no matter how trivial, for which the Englishman is everywhere renowned on the Continent. Betting is with most other nations a form of speech, but with Englishmen it is a serious fact, and no one will be long in their company without finding an opinion backed up by a bet. It would not be very difficult ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... and rare exigencies or emergencies, which constitute the justa causa of dissembling or misleading, whether it be extreme as the defence of life, or a duty as the custody of a secret, or of a personal nature as to repel an impertinent inquirer, or a matter too trivial to provoke question, as in dealing with children or madmen, there seem to be ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... was within a few paces of her now. There was a smile upon his lips, and in that smile she saw the final confirmation of her fears. When Leopold of Lutha smiled his upper lip curved just a trifle into a shadow of a sneer. It was a trivial characteristic that Barney Custer did not share ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in thoughts of a different nature, but she managed to reply to her ladyship, and occasionally ventured a remark upon some trivial matters. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... morality is that of a highly respectable British cynic; his intelligence is largely one of trifles; he is wise over trivial and trumpery things. He delights in reminding us—with an air!—that everybody is a humbug; that we are all rank snobs; that to misuse your aspirates is to be ridiculous and incapable of real merit; that Miss Blank has just slipped out to post a letter to Captain ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... hour, listening to the silence. Her mind busied itself with trivial memories. She thought of Amelia Plecks.... It would have comforted her to hear that knock and the rattle of her dinner tray. The little sitting-room at Hudson's Hotel, with its bit of tapestry and its yellow tea-set and its vases filled with flowers, seemed ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... After the sixth century no monuments were built at all rivalling in scale the creations of the former period. The later churches were, with few exceptions, relatively small and trivial. Neither the plan nor the general aspect of Hagia Sophia seems to have been imitated in these later works. The crown of dome-windows was replaced by a cylindrical drum under the dome, which was usually of insignificant size. The exterior was treated ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... course of my travels, I found myself at Denver in Colorado. We stayed here, at first, one day only, to break our journey farther up into the Rocky Mountains. The previous day, when wandering about Colorado Springs, my friend and I had come across a lady doctor by chance; and having asked some trivial question, we were invited into her pretty little house, where we chatted for half-an-hour on various subjects—including spiritualism. We gave no account of our experiences, but simply mentioned the fact that we had some interest in ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... sickness had received the most friendly treatment from everybody, were in general just as indifferent as the rest; and I do not believe that any one among them would have gone half a mile out of his road, or have sacrificed the most trivial self-gratification to serve us. Okotook and Iligliuk, whom I had most loaded with presents, and who had never offered me a single free gift in return, put into my hand, at the time of their first removal from Winter Island, a dirty, ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... hand, such an enterprise on our part, if directed against Spanish commerce on the seas, as was suggested by several excellent officers, would have had but a trivial objective. The commerce of Spain was cut up, root and branch, by our expeditions against her colonies, Cuba and Manila; for her most important trade depended upon monopoly of the colonial markets. The slight ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... far concealed. And yet this young man has the self-confidence to come to me and to demand your hand as though it were a matter of course that I should accede to so trivial a request. It is, as a matter of course, quite impossible. You understand that; do you not?" When she did not answer him at once, he repeated the question. "I ask you whether you do not feel that it ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... who presides over it; while theatrical exhibitions of extemporaneous oratory and flights of fancy, make the ordinary ritual of public worship, or the quiet practice of private devotion, seem tame and trivial. The tendency of the evil is, that the direct access to a communion with above is barred against the deluded and dependent devotee, much in the same manner as the votaries of Romanism are driven for aid to the intermediate intercession of the Virgin and the Saints. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... be in all matters of business subjected to the ministration of these gentry: and what a pity it is that some steady Englishmen will not qualify themselves to fulfil their functions. But, from the most important diplomatic negotiations down to the most trivial matter of convenience, procedure can only be had through such agency: at least almost without exception at present, whatever revolutions may lurk in the recent studies of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... from these trivial and slightly interesting comic songs to poems of a serious import, which played so important a part in Goliardic literature, must of necessity be abrupt. It forms no part of my present purpose to exhibit the Wandering Students in their capacity as ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... Maelstrom in which the tiny boat is engulfed, and the sensations of the fishermen—awe, wonder, horror, curiosity, hope, alternating or intermingled—are described with the same quiet precision as the trivial preliminary adventures. The man's dreary expectation of incredulity seals our conviction of the truth of his story. In The Manuscript Found in a Bottle, too, we may trace the first suggestion of that idea which finds ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
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