"Inconsequent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be seen by his perseverance up to this time, was not a man to have his purposes diverted by such criticism, much of which must have been, in his eyes, worthless and inconsequent in the extreme. Nevertheless, he had his own misgivings. His captains came back one after another, with no good tidings of discovery, but with petty plunder gained as they returned from incursions on the Moorish coast. The prince concealed from them his chagrin ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... that he had been privileged to see God with his bodily eye, and on six different occasions had been reunited to him. In such a mental condition, it may well be supposed that his writings are mysterious, inconsequent and diffuse. An air of Platonism mingled with many Oriental ideas and ancient Egyptian recollections, pervades ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... though this man's duties were performed with the quiet promptness of a machine. If he was conscious of anything peculiar in the behavior of his companions toward him, he betrayed no indication of it. Such he was who stood listening, with an appearance of interest unusual in him, to our otherwise inconsequent chat. ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... ears, and starting all the way at every object which he never saw before.—I have as little torment of this kind as any creature alive; and yet I honestly confess, that many a thing gave me pain, and that I blush'd at many a word the first month,—which I found inconsequent and perfectly ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... beating of the drum went on. Harsh laughter rose; for every night the Indians contrived to find new epithets with which to revile the captives. So far there had been no hint of torture save the gamut. The Chevalier, even with his inconsequent knowledge of the tongue, caught the meaning of some of the words. The jests were coarse and vulgar, and the women laughed over them as heartily as the men. Modesty and morality were not among the ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... autograph (page 189) illustrates the black-track method. At first these dots look inconsequent and fortuitous, but a careful examination shows that the creature had four toes with claws on the forefeet, and five on the hind, which is evidence, though not conclusive, that it was a rodent; the absence of tail ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... of the twin belles was responsible for this change in his well-known habits. Unfortunately, no opportunity was given him for showing. Other and younger men had followed his lead into the box, and they saw him forced upon the good graces of the fascinating but inconsequent Miss Strange whose rapid fire of talk he was hardly of a ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... inconsequent girl, neglected as to her inner life by her only parent, and the following forces alive within her; to determine ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... and wondered how it was that Jane was able to do everything better than other people could; although, indeed, the bandaging showed more tenderness than skill, and there was something almost pathetically youthful and inconsequent in the manner of both ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... Gilbert, and Henry and Jimphy were together with their backs to the chauffeur. She did not appear to be tired nor had the sparkle of her beautiful eyes diminished. She lay against the padded back of the car and chattered in an inconsequent fashion that was oddly amusing. She did not listen to replies that were made to her questions, nor did she appear to notice that sometimes replies were not made. It seemed to Henry that she would have chattered exactly ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... and he smiled bitterly. "If I had any knowledge of mankind, if I were—instead of being a frivolous, inconsequent, and vain spirit—of a prudent and reflective spirit; if, in a word, I had, as certain persons have known how, regulated my life, you would not receive twenty thousand livres a year, but a hundred thousand, and you would not belong to the king, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... victim of a hallucination or just an everyday fool. To satisfy myself on this important question I looked about for the hallboy, with the intention of asking him if he had seen any such person go out, but that young and inconsequent scamp was missing from his post as usual and there was no one within sight to ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... obligatory scene. There is always the chance that no one may miss a scene demanded by logic or psychology; but an audience knows too well when it has been bored or distressed by a superfluous, or inconsequent, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... the policeman, who all the time was pursuing a stream of garrulous, inconsequent remarks, "I wonder whether you'd step outside and see Mr. Richards, the butler. Ask him if he would be so good as ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sleep, and when he woke long after it was early morning, and there was no one in the room but the old family nurse, who sat watching beside the bed. Something—some dim memory—that had stirred his brain in sleep, immediately rushed to his lips in the form of an inconsequent question. But before he could even frame the sentence, the thought that prompted it had slipped back into the deeper consciousness he had just left behind with the trance of ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... to the flight. The air was too full. One wearied of the ceaseless panorama of the gay bejewelled insects. They were the possessors of the prime of that glorious morning. Beautiful and frail, and inconsequent as they were, you envied them. They flitted on without guide or leader, venturing the dangers of water and air, flying up in the full blaze of the sun—eager, joyous, unconcerned. In the boat we were compelled to loll about between ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... nothing of him but amusement, promptly forgetting him; and asking divine great deeds of those before whom she bends the knee. Everything is judged by laws of its being; the diamond must be flawless; the ephemeral creation of fashion may be flimsy, bizarre, inconsequent. So Lucien may perhaps succeed to admiration in spite of his mistakes; he has only to profit by some happy vein or to be among good companions; but if an evil angel crosses his path, he will go to the very depths of hell. 'Tis a brilliant assemblage of good qualities embroidered upon ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... knows the game; whom, moreover, the gallery respects. Rastignac has quite as much intelligence as is needed at a given moment, as if a soldier should make his courage payable at ninety days' sight, with three witnesses and guarantees. He may seem captious, wrong-headed, inconsequent, vacillating, and without any fixed opinions; but let something serious turn up, some combination to scheme out, he will not scatter himself like Blondet here, who chooses these occasions to look at things ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... dream with strange lurid distinctness, a sort of resurrection dream of which the events of the two days before supplied the bones and skeleton outline. As in all very vivid and dreadful dreams the whole vision was connected and coherent, there were no ludicrous and inconsequent interludes, none of those breakings of one thread and hurried seizures of another, which though one is dreaming very distinctly, supply some vague mental comfort, since even to the sleeper they are reminders that his experiences are not solid but mere phantasies woven ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... commission of crime is both direct and indirect. We see its direct influence in those crimes which are committed whilst the culprit is either in a state of intoxication or else just recovering from such a state. To detect and trace its indirect influence a much closer study is required. The inconsequent, lazy and thriftless life of the criminal demands some sort of stimulant, and this is found readily at hand in alcohol. Alcohol is not the cause of the crimes of these people but it is closely associated with such cause. The man who stabs another in a saloon is not then guilty of ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... absentminded; instead of giving sensible replies to John's questions about the avalanche, he would mutter and say inconsequent things. Finally ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... urged by such imperious passions, so weak in imagination and controlled by so feeble a reason, receives such absolute freedom as this only at infinite peril. To a great number of these people, in the second or third generation, this freedom will mean vice, the subversion of passion to inconsequent pleasures. We have on record, in the personal history of the Roman emperors, how freedom and uncontrolled power took one representative group of men, men not entirely of one blood nor of one bias, but reinforced by the arbitrary caprice of adoption and political revolution. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... snap with any breath. Slowly, as if the Fates had decided not as yet to break that attenuated thread, the tingling, stinging shock passed. She found strength to read the whole article, almost intelligently, though at times her mind would wander to inconsequent things, and the beat of her own heart seemed to deaden her understanding. She remembered now everything, nearly everything, till she turned from her own door, a desperate, homeless outcast. She recalled a cab going somewhere, and then after what appeared to be an interval ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... weeks of their absence he had scarcely even mentioned his grandfather. He had been gay and inconsequent, or fiercely passionate in his devotion to her. But of his loss he had never spoken, and vaguely she had known that he had shut it out of his life with that other grim shadow that dwelt behind the locked door she might not open. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... would have inquired the genesis of so inconsequent a question, but Lady Alicia followed the trend of my thought, and answered at once as if my query had ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... the next morning that the House received a shock which loosed another riot, but one of a kind different from that which greeted Representative Rollinson's vote on the "Breaker." The reading-clerk had sung his way through an inconsequent bill; most of the members were buried in newspapers, gossiping, idling, or smoking in the lobbies, when a loud, cracked voice was ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... at the girl with a fixed expression that embarrassed her and caused her to glance appealingly at Patsy. Her friend understood and came to her rescue with some inconsequent remark about poor Mumbles, who was still moaning and rubbing; his pinched nose against Patsy's chin to ease ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... at last found reason to grumble at his silence. She had chattered away the whole time in her light-hearted, inconsequent fashion, and at last asked him a question to which she required more than a nod of the head in reply. And she had to ask it three times, a ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... and got out the materials, and in a few minutes they were bending busily over the broken plaque, as interested and eager about it as if no subject of more vital importance had ever distracted them. They were like two children together, often as quarrelsome, always as inconsequent; happy hard at work, and equally happy idling; apt to torment each other at times about trifles, but always ready to forget and forgive, and with that habit in common of forgetting everything utterly but the occupation of ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... strong, so pregnant of character, so peculiarly winning when lighted by the infrequent smile—she was never to gaze upon them again. It did not seem quite fair that, for all that the world had denied her, it should withhold from her this inconsequent delight. This was carrying misfortune too far; ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... lumbering slowly past them. Georgina, as she stood there, turned her face to her lover, and rested her eyes for some moments on his own. At last: "Nothing will help us; I don't think we are very happy," she answered, while her strange, ironical, inconsequent smile ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... work is sober and decorous, and not marred by any breach of good taste. It is in no sense remarkable, and has nothing special to connect it with Donatello. Its notoriety springs from a long and rather inconsequent story, which says that, having made his Christ in rivalry with Brunellesco, who was occupied on a similar work, Donatello was so much saddened at the superiority of the other crucifix that he exclaimed: "You make the Christ while I can only make a peasant: ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... disapproved of the way my Philosopher takes his poetry. His favorite poem is "A frog he would a-wooing go,"—especially the first quatrain. His analysis is very defective; he takes it as a whole. He likes the mystery of it, the quick action, the hearty, inconsequent refrain:— ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... If that sounds inconsequent, or, at any rate, incomprehensible, may I not plead that so do the ineffable Mysteries ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Scipio did not go under in the manner to have been expected of him. After the first shock, outwardly at least, there appeared to be no change in him. His apparently colorless personality drifted on in precisely the same amiable, inconsequent manner. What his moments of solitude were, only he knew. The agony of grief through which he passed, the long sleepless nights, the heartbreaking sense of loss, these things lay hidden under his meaningless exterior, which, however, defied ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... self, tremulous, inconsequent, full of irresistible tenderness for suffering and weakness even in its uncouthest garb, said incessantly, "I could do no less. If I die for it, still I could do no less. Somebody brought him into the world. ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... fling themselves down in the shadow of the trees to chew the sweet grass, and play "knifey," and talk.—Such talk!—endless and careless, and loud as the converse of young bulls. What did we talk about? Delightful and inconsequent shoutings— ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... painting in the soul of the listener or reader a realistic picture whose sublimity of conception impresses the understanding with awe and admiration, and impels the mind to rise involuntarily for the time to an elevation out of and above the inconsequent contemplation of the common ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... throw him into a renewed panic. It required a tremendous effort to concentrate upon his business affairs, and it took the genius of an actor to carry him through the inconsequent details of his every-day life without betrayal. Alone, at home, upon the crowded 'Change, in deadly-dull directors' meetings, that sinister shadow overhung him. These long, leaden hours of suspense were doing what nothing else had been able to do since ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... fashion rejected; in the museums he buries our ancient eikons, where they become impervious to neglect, praise, or criticism; while the collector—a malicious atavist unless he possess accidental perceptions—merely rescues the mistakes of his forefathers, to crowd public galleries with an inconsequent lumber which a better taste has ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... Denham; "but I didn't think—I don't know, though; perhaps I did think. I say, Val," he added in a strange, inconsequent way, as if rather ashamed of his recklessness, "that was rather ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... a wonderful visit to her mother's country and her mother's people, when for a summer she had rejoiced in the friendly, inconsequent, out-of-door life of a Massachusetts' seaside colony. Once on the North Shore, and later on Cape Cod, she had learned to swim, to steer a knockabout, to dance the "Boston," even in rubber-soled shoes, to ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... play. When we remember that less than two years were gone since the production of The Old Bachelor, the improvement in Congreve is remarkable. Almost his only concession to the groundlings is the star-gazing episode of Lady Froth and Brisk: a mistake, because it spoils her inconsequent folly, but a small matter. In his second play Congreve was himself, the wittiest and most polished writer of comedy in English. In the face of this fact 'the public' conducted itself characteristically: it more or less damned The Double-Dealer until the queen approved, ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... elevated railway station, and more because she was pushed up the steps by the hurrying mass of humanity that scurried like ants up and down, than for any other reason, climbed wearily up. As she sat pressed against a dirty man with a bundle, a sudden inconsequent thought struck her, and she removed her gloves in a leisurely way, took off her rings, dropped them into a roll of chamois-skin in the large bag, added to them a diamond cross and pendant from the lace at her neck and put on her gloves again. The ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... tenant. I confess that till lately a certain name brought to my fancy a bouncing, red-armed creature; but that by a change of lease upon our street it has acquired an alien grace and beauty. Perhaps a scrawny neighbor by the name of Falstaff might remain inconsequent, but I am sure that if a lady called Messilina moved in next door and were of charming manner, a month would blur the bad suggestion of her name; which presently—if our gardens ran together—would come to sound ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... them out again and again. He had always thought "them rich people took advantage of yer." But he had never supposed, somehow, they were such thieves, such mean thieves, as it appeared, they were. A curious ferment filled his restless, inconsequent brain. The poor were downtrodden, but they were coming to their rights. The land and its creatures were for the people! not for the idle rich. Above all, Westall was a devil, and must be put down. For the rest, if he could have given words ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and inconsequent—had sighed for country and sunshine, had longed for a ramble in the woods, the music of the birds, the sight of the meadows sugared ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy |
