"Inconsequential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... than to be bound in a fatalistic doctrine. But the anti-determinists wildly confuse a perverted determinism of ends with a scientific determinism of means. And only the former determinism is truly fatalistic. This confusion is to be found equally central in Henry Oldenburg's inconsequential letters to Spinoza and in Bernard Shaw's shamelessly silly Preface to Back to Methuselah. Fundamental confusions remain ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... throw the body into the river before midnight; it is folly, we say, to suppose all this, and to suppose at the same time, (as we are resolved to suppose,) that the body was not thrown in until after midnight'—a sentence sufficiently inconsequential in itself, but not so utterly preposterous as the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to pick up even the rudiments of the trade. He didn't have any more idea of news values than a rabbit. He had the most amazing faculty for overlooking what was vital in the news, but he could always be depended upon to pick out some trivial and inconsequential detail and dress it up with about half a yard of old-point lace adjectives. He never by any chance used a short word if he could dig up a long, hard one, and he never seemed to be able to start a story without a quotation ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... clung to him, hiding her face, and the sobs shook her. Her breast was strained against him, he felt the beating of her heart, a fever ran through all his blood. And as he held her close, a queer inconsequential thought came into his mind. It shocked him, and he ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... me any more than I liked him. He thinks I'm frivolous and inconsequential, and totally unfitted for this position of trust. I dare say Jervis has had a letter from him by now asking to ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... as it is called, is so retrenched or abbreviated in many parts, as to be almost throughout inconsequential, and often so obscured by the unskilful abridgement of Purchas as to be nearly unintelligible. We have not therefore deemed it necessary or proper to insert it in our Collection, as not tending to any useful purpose, nor containing any valuable or even amusing information. Almost ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... theory of the game of Auction provides for a bidding in which each one of the four suits competes with each other, and also with the No-trump. Using the Bridge count, this does not take place. The two black suits, by reason of their inconsequential valuation, are practically eliminated from the sea of competitive bidding. The Diamond creates only a slight ripple, and even the Heart has to be unusually strong to resist the ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... "Is—inconsequential! The main point is—the 'Frisco Pet is dead. Gillett won't speak; you won't; Lord Ronsdale can't. Another to whom I am about to tell the story, will, I ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... knowledge of the printed schedule she was studying, yet he had to concede that she was giving a splendid imitation of an experienced hand. Her acting annoyed him. He turned toward Hilmer with an indifferent comment on the weather and the talk veered to inconsequential subjects. Helen continued her scrutiny ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the Shad. For some time his curiosity had been stirred by the unusual attentions paid to Skippy Bedelle by his old side-partner, Doc Macnooder. Doc was eminently practical and if Doc devoted any part of his time to an inconsequential underformer, in the language of the ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... On the other hand, the controlling aim in any subject may be to develop the power to reason about natural phenomena, the power to observe, and the power to discriminate between vital and inconsequential details. If this be the aim, the assignment of subject matter must be reduced, the phenomena studied must be submitted in the forms of problems, first-hand observations must be made, and students must be led to see the errors in their observations and their reasoning. The course which ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... laughter, the parting words, both grave and gay, which were spoken by those who had been her companions during the long journey, fell on ears which heard, but transmitted them to her mind vaguely, and her answers were inconsequential, so much so, that more than one friend regarded her with troubled surprise and whispered to another that Rose was either not well, or was dazed with happiness. And when Dorothy ventured to hint at the latter alternative, the girl acknowledged ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... comment on The Dunciad. Most of the critics, to be sure, were anything but impartial; in many instances they were smarting from Pope's satire and sought any critical weapons available for retaliation. But it will not do to dismiss these men or their responses to The Dunciad as inconsequential; they had the weight of numbers on their side and, more important, the authority of long-established ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... noticed, but they troubled him little, principally because he was coming to realize the great change in himself. More and more that change was forcing itself upon him. The stories and novels he had read during the first years of the war, the stories by English writers in which young men, frivolous and inconsequential, had enlisted and fought and emerged from the ordeal strong, purposeful and "made-over"—those stories recurred to him now. He had paid little attention to the "making-over" idea when he read those tales, but now he was forced to believe ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... extraordinarily faithful reporting, as one may prefer; but not a few French and Russian writers have failed to accomplish in two volumes what Crane achieved in two hundred pages. In the same category is "George's Mother," a triumph of inconsequential detail piling up with ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... thirty. A dapper, exquisite little man. He was distraught at the sight of this tearful damsel and, very naturally attributed her distress to unpreparedness. Petty was a pretty, inconsequential little creature born to play upon the feelings of one man or another. It did not much matter who he happened to be so long as he could satisfy the sentimental element in her makeup, and she was ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... backward, that evening seemed to Scott to stand out as a dream, unforeseen, yet not inconsequential. Nothing that had gone before appeared to him to be able to explain it. It just was, a fact without any planning or volition on his part. He had known Catia from his little boyhood, had been used to her, had counted on her in a sense; but always he had held himself ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... crowds he recently addressed, with the trust, we suppose, that somebody might be fortunate enough to find in that instrument the clause which supported his theory. Mr. Johnson, however, though the most consequential of individuals, is the most inconsequential of reasoners; every proposition which is evident to himself he considers to fulfil the definition of a self-evident proposition; but his supporters at Philadelphia must have known, that, in affirming that insurgent States recover their former rights by the fact of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... left all this. I left it in that, to us, inconsequential manner in which a bird flies away from a comfortable branch. It was as though all unknowing I had heard a whisper or seen something. Well—perhaps! One day I was perfectly right and the next everything was gone—glamour, ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... the incidents converge to one main incident will avoid tiresome enumerations of inconsequential events, which frequently fill the compositions of young pupils. Such essays generally start with "a bright, clear morning," and "a party of four of us." After recounting a dozen events of no consequence ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... shooting and the opening of the season; dogs and the training of dogs; and why some go gun-shy and why some ace blinkers. From sport and its justification, they became inconsequential; and she was beginning to enjoy the freshness of their chance acquaintance, his nice attitude toward things, his irrelevancy, ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... inconsequential," said Miss Blair. "You cannot start upon a train of sequences in this world unless you go on to the bitter end. Besides, after all, why do you object to lying? I suppose you were brought up to tell the truth, and so was I, and I really think I venerate the truth more than anything else, ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... thickly wooded and unexplored recesses of the unknown and mysterious forest of the mind, I doubt not but that I should achieve the same results as if I had started upon my journey with a dream. If this be true, and I firmly believe that it is, in the case of that universally used and apparently inconsequential word "the," to which the normal person can be expected to have such a large number of associations, of varying degrees of intimacy or remoteness, how much truer is it when we have such a definite mental fact or mental state as a dream as the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... discrimination, practically inspired, grows firm and stable, irrelevant qualities are stripped off, and the mechanical process, the efficacious infallible order, is clearly disclosed beneath. Meantime the incidental effects, the "secondary qualities," are relegated to a personal inconsequential region; they constitute the realm of appearance, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the Vimy Ridge attack, when I returned to England to sit with my wife and children in a cellar whenever it was a fine night and listened to the guns and bombs. God, who knows all, might make something of this sort of inconsequential drift of one day into the next, but I give ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... make it part of ourselves. We absorb it into that which is integral and immortal—our very essence. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: its loveliness can never pass away" is a truth of experience, not the idle fancy of the poet. For to have seen the beautiful is not inconsequential, it is not even a responsibility entirely your own; the beautiful thing has also seen you. Henceforth your life can never be quite the same, and the beautiful thing looked upon has either ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... along?" (Penny was an inconsequential dog that had been given to Clytie by one whom ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... told himself, he was a hunter out of his domain. He would always feel intimidated and insecure in this land of aliens and unknowns. He even sympathetically wondered who it was that had said: "Foreigners are fools!" Then a sudden, irrational, inconsequential sense of gratitude took possession of him, as he felt and heard the woman at work so close beside him. There was a feeling of companionship about it that made ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... to tell me about Mr. Blake, anyway? I don't want to hear a lot of inconsequential gossip. I ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... through the ordeal somehow—with an appearance of pleasure—though it was hard for her to play the hypocrite! But so soon as she decently could, without cutting short the inevitable inconsequential chatter which fills the first moments of renewed friendships, she hurried Hester to a room and during her absence sat immovable in her chair on the porch staring ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... be given to relief of the members of the Commission from the necessity of detailed attention to comparatively inconsequential matters which, under the existing law, must receive their direct and personal consideration. It is in the public interest that the members of the Commission should not be so pressed by minor matters that they have inadequate time for investigation and consideration of the larger questions ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... so very little is expected of the blind, and little thought is given to their possibilities. Senator Gore, the blind Senator from Oklahoma, says: "It is a mistake to tell the sightless their loss is insurmountable or inconsequential. It is neither. The sightless confront a situation, not a theory. We ought to study their problems, and help them to lessen their burdens, to smooth their path, and to multiply their resources, to enable them to ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... expected to see Sherlock Holmes impatient under this rambling and inconsequential narrative, but, on the contrary, he had listened with the greatest concentration ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... an author, artist or actor are blithely charged to genius, and we are content to let it go at that for fear that other people may think we don't know any better. As for myself, I may be foolish and inconsequential, but heaven will bear witness that I am not mean enough to call myself ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... leaning back in his chair, with his slow smile drawled in an inconsequential way: "I reckon, now that the financial obsequies of Mr. Jefferson Worth has been indefinitely postponed owin' to the corpse refusin' to perform, that Company bunch will wear mournin' because said funeral didn't come off as per schedule. Them roosters are ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... are good-looking and more intelligent than you would believe," Louise rejoined carelessly. She had put Lawford Tapp aside as inconsequential. ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... of unillegal graft. He is not to be dreaded by widows and orphans; he is a reducer of surplusage. His favorite disguise is that of the target-bird at which the spendthrift or the reckless investor may shy a few inconsequential dollars. He is readily vocalized by tobacco; so, with the aid of two thick and easy-burning brevas, I got the story of his ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... he was preoccupied by technical requirements. But in the rondel he has put himself before all competitors by a happy knack and a prevailing distinction of manner. He is very much more of a duke in his verses than in his absurd and inconsequential career as a statesman; and how he shows himself a duke is precisely by the absence of all pretension, turgidity, or emphasis. He turns verses, as he would have come into the king's presence, with a ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... strange question at such a hallowed time as this. And so inconsequential, too. I was a little shocked. And yet I was aware of a stir of some kind away back in the deeps of my memory somewhere. It set me to musing—thinking—searching. Smoked herrings. Smoked herrings. The ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... seemed quickly to awake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... around two hundred thousand dollars. That, however, is not the greatest risk that I have in mind. On board this craft are five people without whom it would be rather hopeless for anyone to go on building the Pollard type of boat. Therefore, besides risking a valuable craft and our own rather inconsequential lives, we go further and put the United States Navy in danger of having only a couple of our boats. Now, the fact is, we want the Navy to have three or four dozen of our submarine craft, for we ourselves believe implicitly in the great worth of the ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... little while, glowering at the colonel. It enraged him to be blocked in that manner by a small and inconsequential man. This he felt Colonel Landcraft to be, measured against his own strength and importance in that country. Himself and the other two big cattlemen in that section of the state lorded it over an area greater ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... story of how Longworth became a landowner is given by Houghton as follows: His first client was a man accused of horse stealing. In those frontier days, a horse represented one of the most valuable forms of property; and, as under a system wherein human life was inconsequential compared to the preservation of property, the penalty for stealing a horse was usually death. No term of reproach was more invested with cutting contempt and cruel hatred than that of a horse thief. The case looked black. But Longworth somehow contrived to get ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... a search warrant or a writ of replevin? This whimsical view of the case only exasperated him the more as it presented the utter hopelessness of approaching her—of ever seeing her again—and, when the dogs came chasing an utterly inconsequential and useless butterfly in his direction, he pelted them with stones until they yelped. Hang the dogs, anyhow. It was all ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... characterized, he emerged, a moment later, from the portals of the club, still chuckling mildly to himself as he struggled into a light evening overcoat. His temper, having run the gamut of boredom, interest, perturbation, mystification, and plain amusement, was now altogether inconsequential: a dangerous mood for Maitland. Standing on the corner of Twenty-sixth Street he thought it over, tapping the sidewalk gently with his cane. Should he or should he not carry out his intention as declared to Bannerman, and go to Greenfields that ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... desirous of any opportunity of serving you, benefiting you; I could not think the finding myself in a position to feel this, just this and no more, a sufficiently fortunate event ... but I must needs get up, or imitate, or ... what is it you fancy I do? ... an utterly distinct, unnecessary, inconsequential regard for you, which should, when it got too hard for shamming at the week's end,—should simply spoil, in its explosion and departure, all the real and sufficing elements of an honest life-long attachment and affections! ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... having come into the room and closed the door, "I have a word to say. I told Mr. Mann I would come here and explain why my niece cannot take part in any such foolish and inconsequential exhibition as this ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... now in the house, each one an interested party in her ruin; the man she had left, and Cy James, who was full of cowardly passion for her, and Patty Cannon, who, in her present frame of mind, would gloat to see Hulda's virtue sacrificed as something inconsequential ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... because unintentional—illuminating testimony to the difference between the Irish and the British temperament. And this testimony supports the point I am trying to make—that the "typical" logicless, inconsequential Irish mind, so winsome and so exasperating, is not the kind of brain to produce ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... her tendency to wander away from the direct line and ramble about among irrelevant and inconsequential trifles. Sometimes these rambles are altogether entertaining and enable her pupils to pass the time pleasantly, but they lack "terminal facilities." They lead from nowhere to nowhere in the most fascinating and fruitless meanderings. ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... t' gracious!" he exclaimed. "Dat suttinly am a most inconsequential mannah in which to project a transmigatory object in ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... continued his pleasant, inconsequential observations, and Gerald lay with closed eyes, quite motionless, until, watching him, Selwyn saw his hand was trembling where it lay clinched beside him. And presently the boy turned his face to ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... inevitable expression of a healthy growing regard for the best in life, a call to right living that is no mean dictum of policy, but which is renewed every morning as the sun comes out of the sea. However inconsequential the habit of indecision may seem, it is really one of the most disabling of bad habits. Its continuance contributes largely to the sum of nervous exhaustion. Whatever its origin, whether it stands in the relation of cause or effect, it is an indulgence that insidiously ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... have found, as you would find if you had left youth behind and could see yourself in your own ink, that the first tracery of any controlling factor in your life was faint and inconsequential to you at the time, without presage of its importance until you saw other lines, also faint and inconsequential in their beginnings, drawing in toward it to form ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Kendrick, "the admiral's eyes haunt me. Perhaps you know that he plays a game—a game of solitaire. I have good reason to remember that game. It is a silly inconsequential game. You would scarcely believe that it once sent a man ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... studious attitude of an incorruptible neutral. Old Grandsire Templey, his father-in-law, sat always in the same low chair on the porch in summer and back of the stove in winter, with his palsied hands crossed on his staff-head and his toothless gums mumbling in inconsequential talk. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... rather than in bourgeois conditions, she finds the theme most congenial to her interest and to her powers. That theme is the struggle of some elect individual to outgrow the restrictions laid upon him—or more frequently her—by numbing circumstances. The early, somewhat inconsequential Alexander's Bridge touches this theme, though Bartley Alexander, like the bridge he is building, fails under the strain, largely by reason of a flawed simplicity and a divided energy. Pioneers and artists, in Miss Cather's understanding of their natures, ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... then I stood by the gate and looked up into the clear June sky. No man, I think, can remain long silent under the stars, with the brooding, mysterious night around about him, without feeling, poignantly, how little he understands anything, how inconsequential his actions are, ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... or girl had the right to pass his door if she so desired, and that he was an idiot for thinking otherwise. The argument was only slightly adequate. But Alan was not interested in mysteries, especially when they had to do with woman—and such an absurdly inconsequential thing as a handkerchief. ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... secret horror. But evidently Ida May Bostwick was wedded to the tawdry conveniences and gayeties of city life. Tunis could not wholly understand why any sane person should assume this attitude; in fact, he suspected a good deal of it was put on. How could a girl, even one as inconsequential and flighty as Ida May evidently was, hold in contempt the offer he had brought her from Cap'n ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... the writer of 'slams.' He is as debonair and inconsequential as a young Hermes to whom only the serious lessons of life can teach sympathy and true insight, if he will ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... one of those inconsequential requests with which she liked to busy everybody about her. She did this, she explained, because if many people were not doing something ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... through an adjoining window. And what did I see there?" Her eye turned on Frederick. His right hand had stolen toward his left, but it paused under her look and remained motionless. "Only an old man sitting at a table and—" Why did she pause, and why did she cover up that pause with a wholly inconsequential sentence? Perhaps Frederick could have told, Frederick, whose hand had now fallen at his side. But Frederick volunteered nothing, and no one, not even Sweetwater, guessed all that lay beyond that AND which was left hovering in the air ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... bridle-rein of Eloise's horse, drawing her up close beside me, whenever the way permitted, conscious that she must feel, even as I did, the terrible loneliness of our surroundings, and the strain of this slow groping through the unknown. We conversed but little, and then in whispers, and of inconsequential things—of hope and fear, even of literature and music, of anything which would take our minds off our present situation. I smiled afterwards to remember the strange topics which came up between us in the midst of that gloom. And yet, in some vague way, I comprehended that amid the silence, ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... have not yet asked after the dear one—the mamma, who loves you so," said Dolores, in rather an inconsequential way. ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... character of Samuel Johnson is the most vividly conceived and deeply etched in all the realm of books. But if he gives merely the simple facts, then Boswell is no less a genius, for he has omitted the irrelevant and inconsequential, and by playing off the excellent against the absurd, he has placed his subject among the few great wits who have ever lived—a man who wrote remarkably ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... munificent. Reading the index of private schools and colleges is important for their children and youth, but still more important for the community upon which unbridled passion, inability to work or to spend properly, inconsequential thinking, mediaeval ideals of caste, etc., can inflict greater injuries than ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... glass he held out to him. The glances of the company told him Zouche was 'on,' and that it was no good trying to stem the flow of his ideas, or check the inconsequential nature of his speech. Lotys had moved her chair a little back from the table, and with both arms encircling the child, Pequita, was talking to her in low ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... not waiting afar in some vague futurity. Shall we not enter to-day into this kingdom of heaven which is at hand? Shall we not enter to-day into the very joy of the Lord? Pain and sorrow may invest the conditions of the moment, but they are forces which are transmuting the inconsequential into the significant; the common and trivial into the exalted and the sublime. The discord is merged into sublime harmonies that thrill the air; the glory of the Lord shines round about, and we enter ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... of mind the most inconsequential inferences were drawn. One said that the brightness of the dawn—a fact easily explained by the diurnal motion of the globe—showed him that his soul was immortal. He asserted further that he had, at an earlier period of his life, trailed bright clouds ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... miraculousness—I don't know there is such a word, but there should be—of which sets me wondering continually, is that she should have been willing to marry an odd, inconsequential sort of stick like me. And I find myself saying over and over: "WHAT have I ever done to ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Club just before he went to France. The affair had died, drowned in the turmoil of the war and quite forgotten in the arabesque of these three months, but a picture of her, poignant, debonnaire, immersed in her own inconsequential chatter, recurred to him unexpectedly and brought a hundred memories with it. It was Edith's face that he had cherished through college with a sort of detached yet affectionate admiration. He had loved to draw her—around his room had been a dozen sketches of her—playing ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... gravity of any particular mineral has a considerable range, and a medium has been taken. The possible error is inconsequential for the purpose of ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... had become unconscious of her physical presence. The apparition of Simeon had set him to gathering in gloomy assembly a vast number of circumstances about his two children; each circumstance was so trivial in itself that by itself it seemed foolishly inconsequential; yet, in the mass, they bore upon his heart, upon his conscience, so heavily that his very shoulders stooped with the weight. "Put your house in order," the newcomer within him was solemnly warning; and Hiram was puzzling over his meaning, was dreading what that meaning ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... commonly such as require no great depth of thought or energy of expression. His Fables are generally stale, and therefore excite no curiosity. Of his favourite, "The Two Springs," the fiction is unnatural, and the moral inconsequential. In his Tales there is too much coarseness, with too little care of language, and not sufficient rapidity of narration. His great work is his Chase, which he undertook in his maturer age, when his ear was improved to the approbation of blank verse, of which, however, ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... how small a matter makes one famous. A few months ago I was an humble, inconsequential country doctor. My greatest delight and ambition at that time was to find the indicated remedy, and see the sick recover. And I declare to you now, that while I enjoy this racing through the skies, and the roar and acclamation of the multitudes, yet all these are but ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... early eighties, and some who are not quite forgotten, such as the two Edgars, Fawcett and Saltus, and the days when every visiting Englishman, no matter what he might have done in real life, in fiction had to stay, while in New York, at the Brevoort House. All sorts of inconsequential novels flit through the mind in recalling that bygone period. There was a gentleman whose atrociously written, but marvellously constructed "thrillers" were to be found in every deck chair at the noon hour on transatlantic ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... she possessed to the task of supporting her weakened limbs; but she managed it, with now and then a rest, leaning against a tree or a rock. Tommy had found her tongue again, to keep up a running fire of inconsequential chatter that served its purpose well, assisting Harriet in keeping her mind from her ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... emotional appeal. He made her feel alive. Even when she disapproved of him, she was conscious of him. She put him resolutely out of her mind, to have him reappear in her dreams, not as a lover, but as some one dominant and insistent, commanding her to do absurd, inconsequential things. ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Had old Caleb been alive, he would have informed her that such action was analogous to the theft of a hot stove, and that no business man possessed of a grain of common sense would have hastened to reimburse her for the loss after an inconsequential search of only two days. Had she been more worldly wise, she would have known that business men do not part with twenty-five hundred dollars that readily—otherwise, they would not be business men and would not be ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... lost every particle of lustre and seemed to sink back and down. The chairman of the committee stated the point he had in view. Mr. Tilden asked him to restate it once or twice; made curious and inconsequential remarks, appeared like a man just going to sleep, and finally said: "I will see you on the subject on a future occasion." The committee withdrew. In one moment he resumed the conversation with the brilliancy and vivacity of a boy. Subsequently the chairman of the committee ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... she slipped away from them to reappear lower down among the rose trees, her white dress gathering all that was left of the lingering glow. The junior partner, feeling himself never so much junior, though he knew it was but a scant year or two, sat on through Lessing's inconsequential comment on business and the day's adventures, hearing not a word; now and then his chair creaked with the intensity of his preoccupation. It grew dusk and the lamps blossomed in the house behind them; presently ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... of happier talents. I would rather have a Birch, or a Hawkins, appear heavy, cold, and prolix, than that anything material which concerns a Tillotson, or a Johnson, should be lost. It must also be confessed, that an anecdote, or a circumstance, which may appear inconsequential to a reader, may bear some remote or latent connexion: a biographer who has long contemplated the character he records, sees many connexions which escape an ordinary reader. Kippis, in closing the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... whether of occupation, status or property, nor does it run at all consistently from parent to child. When all is told the argument returns to the safe ground that these variations in point of patriotic animus are sporadic and inconsequential, and do not touch the general proposition that, one with another, the inhabitants of Europe and the European Colonies are sufficiently patriotic, and that the average endowment in this respect runs with consistent uniformity across all differences of time, place and circumstance. ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... fewest needed, seeing the distance of their operations from home; while Great Britain, relying wholly on her navy for the integrity of her empire, equally cannot afford the hostility of a nation having twenty battleships, and with whom her points of difference are as inconsequential to her as they are ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... next year after Dr. Wells's paper was published there appeared in France the third volume of the Memoires de Physique et de Chimie de la Societe d'Arcueil, and a new epoch in meteorology was inaugurated. The society in question was numerically an inconsequential band, listing only a dozen members; but every name was a famous one: Arago, Berard, Berthollet, Biot, Chaptal, De Candolle, Dulong, Gay-Lussac, Humboldt, Laplace, Poisson, and Thenard—rare spirits every one. Little danger that the memoirs of such a band ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Kennedy credit for a tactfulness that I didn't know the old fellow possessed. He carried through the preliminary questions very well for a pseudo-doctor, appealing to me as his assistant on inconsequential things that enabled me to "save my face" perfectly. When he came to the critical moment of opening the black bag, he made a very appropriate and easy remark about not having brought any sharp shiny instruments or nasty ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... "What must I do?" And the answer is: You must do four things in order to retain your place as a normal being upon this earth: eat, work, associate with your kind, rest. Just four things we must do, and outside of this everything is incidental, accidental, irrelevant and inconsequential. Then how to eat, work, associate and rest wisely and best constitutes life. Every man should be free to work out these four equations for himself, his freedom ending where another man's rights begin. To these ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... known evil is preferable to an unknown good.' If I should find myself in China and get caught in such a difficulty, I would invoke the obscurest saint in the calendar before Confucius or Buddha. Whether this is due to the manifest superiority of Catholicism or to the inconsequential and illogical inconsistency in the brains of the yellow race, a profound study of anthropology alone ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... bare rice-fields, on the brown villas and cottages huddled in their fences of evergreen like birds in their nests, on the red trunks of the cryptomeria trees, on the brown carpet of matted pine-needles, on the grey crumbling stones of the old graveyard, on the high-pitched temple roofs, and on the inconsequential swarms of humanity drifting to their devotions, casting their pennies into the great alms-trough in front of the shrine, clanging the brass bell with a prayer for good luck, and drifting home again with their bewildered, ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... Dickinson, after the inconsequential treatment accorded him in the recent contest for United States senator, suddenly discovered that domestic reasons disabled him from serving longer as attorney-general. Then James T. Brady declined, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... civilization offers the leisure to learn, and an opportunity to test themselves out against a big field of ardent competitors. But for energetic, forward-looking, idealistic young people, the opportunities offered by western civilization are deemed inconsequential, trivial and in the long run, inadequate. For them, the game is not worth ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... moments in which to write home; with his kind of people, to ride to-day's new interest to death and put off yesterday's till another time, is nature itself. He ran up stairs and wrote glowingly, enthusiastically, to his mother about the hogs and the corn, the banks and the eye-water—and added a few inconsequential millions to each project. And he said that people little dreamed what a man Col. Sellers was, and that the world would open its eyes when it found out. And he ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... so gay, so sweet tempered and so utterly inconsequential. If things were going well in camp, if the sun was shining and everybody was feeling amiable then she was entirely happy, but if things were going wrong, then it was that Meg counted, for she kept her temper through almost any kind of stress. She did not have so many moods as Polly, she ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... that he wove a great deal of himself into the character of the stars. In other words, the personal element counted a great deal. When somebody once remonstrated with him about giving up so much of his valuable time to what seemed to be inconsequential talks with ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... each one of them, to comprehend that in the vast organism of an army at war the individual unit does not count. To himself he may be of prime importance and first consideration, but in the general carrying out of the scheme he is a mote, a molecule, a spore, a protoplasm—an infinitesimal, utterly inconsequential thing to be sacrificed without thought. Thus we diagnosed their mental poses. Along toward five o'clock a goodish string of cars was added to our train, and into these additional cars seven hundred French soldiers, who had been ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... or inconsequential irrespective of their size. The wars of Troy were fought for a woman, and Charles VIII, of France, bumped his head against a stone doorway and died because he did not stoop low enough. And to descend from history down to my own poor chronicle, Mr. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... gather but have not strewed, and that is ever injurious and never beneficial. Our conceit is flattered and enlarged, our importance magnified, our "dignity"—God save the mark!—made more impressive, and as a result, we are more the target for the inconsequential worries of life. We worry if we are not flattered, if our importance is not recognized even by strangers, and our dignity not honored—in other words we worry that we are not kow-towed to, deferred ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... church members often are pitiful in their concern for the trivial affairs of the local church and institution, about its building and organizations, its suppers and bazaars. What a pathetic and inconsequential way of serving Christ! He needs, instead, men and women who are out on the frontiers of modern life, representing ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... left it behind and had settled in Orange, New Jersey, that he can be said to have given definite shape to his life. He was only forty in 1887, and all that he had done up to that time, tremendous as much of it was, had worn a haphazard, Bohemian air, with all the inconsequential freedom and crudeness somehow attaching to pioneer life. The development of the new laboratory in West Orange, just at the foot of Llewellyn Park, on the Orange Mountains, not only marked the happy beginning of ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... man sat at Vuyning's right hand during dinner. And when the ones who pass their lives in city streets spoke of skyscrapers or of the little Czar on his far, frozen throne, or of insignificant fish from inconsequential streams, this big, deep-chested man, faultlessly clothed, and eyed like an Emperor, disposed of their Lilliputian chatter with ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... and clipped foliage of the Boboli Gardens; far to the left the paved height of the Piazzale Michelangelo rose above the somber sweep of roofs and bridges; an aged bell rang harshly and mingled with the inconsequential clatter on the Lungarno. An overwhelming sense of the mystery of being stabbed, sharp as a knife, at her heart; a choking longing possessed her to experience all—all the wonders of ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the Council (says Knight) are elected by the same class as the aldermen, but in very varying and—in comparison with the size and importance of the wards—inconsequential numbers. Bassishaw and Lime Street Wards have the smallest representation—four members—and those of Farringdon Within and Without the largest—namely, sixteen and seventeen. The entire number of the Council is 240. Their meetings are held under the presidency ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... day, however, she found him at her desk when she came in. They had ten minutes of inconsequential banter before Miss Cashell ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... Betty sat looking at him calmly, her hands idle in her lap. If there were in her soul any of the turmoil that was fast rising in his, it was not outwardly manifested by any sign whatever. For that matter, MacRae knew that he himself was placid enough on the surface. Nor did he feel the urge of inconsequential speech. There was no embarrassment in that mutual silence, only the tug of a compelling desire to take her in his ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... dynamic centers follows no one conceivable law. Mental activity continues according to a law of co-relation. But there is no logical or rational co-relation in the dynamic consciousness. It pulses on inconsequential, and it would be impossible to determine any sequence. Out of the very lack of sequence in dynamic consciousness does the individual himself develop. The dynamic abstraction of a child's precepts follows no mental law, and even no law which ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... joss-sticks, rice, fish, pork, and a jar of samshoo (rice arrack) are taken aboard, and by ten o'clock we are underway. Two men, named respectively Ah Sum and Yung Po, a woman, and a baby of eighteen months comprise the company aboard. Ah Sum, being but an inconsequential wage-worker, at once assumes the onerous duties of towman; Yung Po, husband, father, and sole proprietor of the sampan, manipulates the rudder, which is in front, and occasionally assists Ah Sum by poling. The boat-wife ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... not understand you. You are very inconsequential. It does you a great deal of harm. You intend to leave your home without any reason, without even a pretext. And you wish to run through Europe with whom? With a Bohemian, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... fire-maker's hand was laid on the trespass board, even as his inconsequential muscles were braced to rip it loose from its post,—a squeal from the girl in the blue picture hat and the Nile-green georgette waist, ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... who was rambling on in her old inconsequential way, presently added, "but Rod is merely SMUG. I happened to mention some building in New York—I didn't know what to talk to the man about! He immediately told me that the Mason building down town was reinforced concrete throughout. ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... be possible out of this mass of material to tell the story of Robert Burns's life simply and clearly, neither wandering away into the family histories and genealogies of a crowd of uninteresting contemporaries, nor wasting time in elaborating inconsequential trifles? What is wanted is a picture of the man as he was, and an understanding of all that tended to make him the name and the power he is ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... prior, disgusted with the endless and inconsequential debates and wars between Islam and Christianity, he had betaken himself to Cipango, [Footnote: Supposably Japan.] wherever that might be. There, in a repentant hour, he had conceived the idea of a Universal Religious Brotherhood, with God for its accordant principle; ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... constantly loved by the most understanding and considerate of husbands has escaped these horrors. Besides the wrongs done to women in marriage, those involved in promiscuity, infidelities and rapes become inconsequential in ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... they can. I can hear them. 'What, she—Bertram Henshaw's wife?—a frivolous, inconsequential "Billy" like that?' Bertram!"—Billy turned fiercely despairing eyes on her lover—"Bertram, sometimes I wish my name were 'Clarissa Cordelia,' or 'Arabella Maud,' or 'Hannah ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... How casual, uncertain, and inconsequential the vital order seems in our own solar system—a mere incident or by-product in its cosmic evolution! Astronomy sounds the depths of space, and sees only mechanical and chemical forces at work there. ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... took no more notice of these suggestions than by shaking his head. He had grown accustomed to his wife by this time, and regarded silence on his own part as a great preservative against long inconsequential arguments. But every time that Mrs. Gibson was struck by Cynthia's beauty, she thought it more and more advisable that Mr. Osborne Hamley should be cheered up by a quiet little dinner-party. As yet no one but the ladies of Hollingford and Mr Ashton, the vicar—that hopeless and impracticable ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell |
