"Insignificance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which Drusilla credited Davenant brought into daily existence a feature too prodigious to find room there. Or, rather, having found the room through sheer force of its own bulk, it dwarfed everything else into insignificance. It hid all objects and blocked all ways. You could get neither round it nor over it nor through it. You could not even turn back and ignore it. You could only stand and stare at it helplessly, giving it ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... the humility and the melancholy of the Russian character are partly caused by the climate, and the vast steppes and forests, which seem to indicate the insignificance of man. ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... as these, binding these States together as one nation, whose integrity nothing but treason would seek to destroy or weaken, the fierce invective of the Southern, and the feeble sophistry of the Northern traitor shrink to insignificance. They are at once the record and the prophecy of our success, declaring the foundation on which the Government is based, and pointing to yet greater glories to be attained in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was the Duke of Brittany, cherishing a jealous independence; the royal Dukes, Berri, Bourbon, Anjou, are all so many potential sources of danger and difficulty to the Crown. The conditions of the nobility are altogether changed; the old barons have sunk into insignificance; the struggle of the future will lie between the King's cousins and himself, rather than with the older lords. A few non-royal princes, such as Armagnac, or Saint-Pol, or Brittany, remain and will go down with the others; the "new men" of the day, the bastard ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... the better. The world is a vastly overrated place, and society is about the biggest fraud going." She left off teasing the little dog, sat bolt upright, and looked full at Dominic Iglesias, her eyes serious, redeeming all the insignificance of her features and those little doubtful details of the general effect of her. "Don't make any mistake about either of them," she said. "Let the world and society alone as you value your peace of mind and independence. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... learned instructors, were meagre and vapid—they were not calculated to enlarge the mind or to move the affections—they consisted frequently of doubtful disputations relating to the ceremonials of their worship—and the very air with which they were delivered betrayed the insignificance of the topics of discussion. But Jesus spake with a dignity which commanded respect, and with the deep seriousness of a great Teacher delivering to perishing sinners ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... of Charlotte Bronte, unhappiness was more than juvenile fretfulness. All her career was a revolt against conventionality, against isolation, against irresistible natural forces, such as climate and ill-health and physical insignificance. Would this insubmissive spirit have passed out of her writings, as it passed, for instance, out of those of George Sand? I am not sure, for we see it as strongly, though more gracefully and skilfully expressed, in Villette as in the early letters which her biographers have printed. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... was within his reach, and assured that he had but to wink his eye to see his enemies scattered before him, he became impatient of all restraint; and determined, on his return, to crush the States into insignificance. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... place where a bonnet is least required. I have seen a farmer, whose worth, intelligence, and manly dignity found fitting expression in the dress that he daily wore, sacrifice this harmonious outward seeming in an hour, and sink into insignificance, if not vulgarity, by putting on a dress-coat and a shiny stove-pipe hat to go to meeting or to "York." A dress-coat and a fashionable hat are such hideous habits in themselves, that he must be unmistakably a man bred to wearing them, and on whom they sit ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Bess's master sinks into insignificance, when compared with the far-famed wickedness of another slave-holder, known all over the island as "Old Joe Eddings." There seem to have been no bounds to his cruelty and licentiousness; and the people ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... indeed, got worse, and worst of all when their landlord died, and they were left to the tender mercies of a factor. The name of this man we do not know, nor need we seek to know it. We know the man himself, and he will live for ever a type of tyrannous, insolent insignificance. ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... Chatterton. He had nothing but admiration for that young woman; there had been daring in her conquest of Frida Tancred, there were ingenuity and determination in the final elopement. Was it possible that he was piqued at the insignificance of the part she had assigned to him? She had left him to settle up the sordid accounts while she ran away with the lady. He had got to say to Colonel Tancred, "Colonel Tancred, I am not your daughter's seducer and abductor; ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... ambition of the young artists. An Irishman and a Corkman had gone out from them, and amazed men by the grandeur and originality of his works of art. He had thrown the whole of the English painters into insignificance, for who would compare the luscious commonplace of the Stuart painters, or the melodramatic reality of Hogarth, or the imitative beauty of Reynolds, or the clumsy strength of West, with the overbearing grandeur of ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... there it might quite readily be missed. The appearance of the comet of 1668 corresponded well with that of the comet of 1843. Each was remarkable for its extremely long tail and for the comparative insignificance of its head. In the northern skies, indeed, the comet of 1843 showed a very straight tail, and it is usually depicted in that way, whereas the comet of 1668 had a tail showing curvature. But pictures of the comet of 1843, as seen in the southern hemisphere, show it with a curved tail, and also the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... lip was caught between her teeth it was to fight back the tears. The world was so cold and stern and brutal; this man was so much like the environment; she was so woefully, desperately heart-sick. On this lofty crest of a devil-tossed land she felt the insignificance of a fly clinging to the ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... a crawling baseness equal to her previous audacity He limped audaciously Height to which her insignificance had risen His death, so happy for him and so sad for his friends His habits were publicly known to be those of the Greeks In order to say something cutting to you, says it to himself Madame de Maintenon in returning young and poor from America No means, ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Court Memoirs of France • David Widger
... beyond a certain point of time; and all that could be said, at most, would be, that so far as the evidence could be traced, there was nothing to contradict the hypothesis. But when you look, not to the testimonial evidence—which, considering the relative insignificance of the antiquity of human records, might not be good for much in this case—but to the circumstantial evidence, then you find that this hypothesis is absolutely incompatible with such evidence as we have; which ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... emotionally fatigued. The battle, on which everything turns, scarcely affects him. The deaths of Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloster seem 'but trifles here'; and anything short of the incomparable pathos of the close would leave him cold. There is something almost ludicrous in the insignificance of this battle, when it is compared with the corresponding battles in Julius Caesar and Macbeth; and though there may have been further reasons for its insignificance, the main one is simply that there ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... considered as a territory, or as the original seat of the Hellenic people, ceased to have much importance, in the eyes of historians, from the time when it became a conquered province; and it declined into absolute insignificance after the conquest of so many other provinces had degraded Hellas into an arithmetical unit, standing amongst a total amount of figures, so vast and so much more dazzling to the ordinary mind. Hence it was that in ancient times no complete history of ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... men who would otherwise have been insignificant. The example of men who rejoiced to part with their lives for the sake of their religion, became to the world the most impressive voice which it yet heard of the insignificance of this life when compared with the life to come. "What will it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" became thus one of the most stupendous inquiries which could be impressed on future generations, and affected all the relations of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... watched, I thought, as every one must surely think, with strange paradoxical feelings, of one's own utter insignificance in creation, mingled with the delightful consciousness of our individual importance in the eyes of the Maker and Father of all. An atom among worlds, as one feels, sitting there at such an hour and in such a spot, still we remember with ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... to go further, the captain summoned two of his men and instructed them to seize him, one by either arm, and in this manner the wretched man was dragged over the ground until he agreed to walk. And what made the whole thing more bitter and harder to endure was the utter insignificance of that little pimply-faced, bald-headed officer, so insufferably consequential in his brutality, who took advantage of his knowledge of French to vituperate the prisoners in it in curt, incisive words that cut and stung like ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Presently these sank into insignificance beside a more definite sound—the crackle of dry leaves and the snapping of twigs beneath a heavier footfall than that of any marauding Tom, and through a clearing in the woods slouched the figure of a man, gun on shoulder, the secret of his ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... death in a second of time. Moist matter, in that terrific emptiness, would explode, and become stone; and—listen to this, Carmina—the explosion itself would be frozen, and produce no sound. Think of serious people looking up in that dreadful direction, and talking of going to Heaven. Oh, the insignificance of man, except—I am going to make a joke, Ovid—except when he pleases his old mother by going away for the benefit of his health! And where are you going? Has sensible Carmina advised you? I agree with her beforehand, whatever ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... she fall into line, and, for instance, "bring her music" and sing after dinner when Lucia asked her? As regards music, it was possible that she might be almost too great an addition, and cause the rest of the gifted amateurs to sink into comparative insignificance. At present Lucia was high-priestess at every altar of Art, and she could not think with equanimity of seeing anybody in charge of the ritual at any. Again to so eminent an opera-singer there must ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... name, formed of coral, very low and narrow, and scarcely one mile and a half in length. The streets in the city are narrow, although the houses are mostly lofty and well constructed; but the place in itself is fast sinking into insignificance, and its finest buildings falling rapidly into decay. Mozambique, like many other cities of the world, is now reduced from its ancient wealth and vice-regal splendor, to the almost forgotten seat of desolation ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... capacity to transport supplies. The quantity of grain received at Corinth from the north was therefore limited, and before reaching the different outposts, by passing through intermediate depots of supply, it had dwindled to insignificance. I had hopes, however, that this condition of things might be ameliorated before long by gathering a good supply of corn that was ripening in the neighborhood, and would soon, I thought, be sufficiently hard to feed to my animals. Not far from my headquarters there was a particularly fine ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan
... without. And, O, Emma, we'll have room for a thirty-fourth girl, if she happens along. I never thought of that. In the face of all that a college education will mean to this girl our personal comfort rather pales into insignificance." ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... this story from Betterton the actor. How far Davenant exaggerated to Betterton his own influence or his exertions, we cannot tell. Another account assigns the credit of the intervention to Secretary Morris and Sir Thomas Clarges. After all, it is probable that he owed his immunity to his insignificance and his harmlessness. The formality of burning two of his books by the hands of the hangman was gone through. He was also for some time during the autumn of 1660 in the custody of the serjeant-at-arms, for on 15th December, there is an entry in the Commons journals ordering ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... away to conceal their amusement at something strange in his insignificance, and the younger ones pushed each other, laughed aloud, and ran off in ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... Giljyes were too much occupied in plundering the dead to pursue them, but they were much delayed by the amiable anxiety of the men to carry on their wounded comrades. The morning of the 13th dawned as they approached Gundamuk, revealing to the enemy the insignificance of their numerical strength; and they were compelled, by the vigorous assaults of the Giljyes, to take up a defensive position on a height to the left of the road, "where they made a resolute stand, determined to sell their lives at the dearest possible price. At this time they could only muster ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... of which the memory will live in Scotland as long as it is a nation, and which ranks in moral dignity and dramatic interest with the greatest scenes in history. When did a subject ever use a manlier freedom with his Sovereign? When did mere titular kingship more plainly shrink into insignificance in presence of the moral majesty vested in the spirit of a true man? No writer can afford to describe the scene in other words than ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... lived retired from it, who had both of them happened to enjoy from their earliest times the use not only of good books, but of good company—those live books, which are such pleasant and sometimes such profitable reading. Society has this good at least: that it lessens our conceit, by teaching us our insignificance, and making us acquainted with our betters. If you are a young person who read this, depend upon it, sir or madam, there is nothing more wholesome for you than to acknowledge and to associate with your ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the museum. There would be the sense, rather than the vision, of the white shoulders of Castor and Pollux beside their steeds above the dark-green garden spaces on either hand; there would be the front of the Church of Ara Coeli visible beyond the insignificance of Rienzi's monument; and filling in the other end of the piazza which Michelangelo imagined, and not the Romans knew, there would be the palace of the senator, to which the mayor and the common council of modern Rome ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... the Sarratts cavalierly to begin with, just because they were outsiders, and because 'Willy' was making such a fuss with them; for she was almost as easily jealous in her brother's case as in Marsworth's. But now Nelly's sad remoteness from ordinary life, her very social insignificance, and the lack of any links between her and the great Farrell kinship of relations and friends, made her company, and her soft, listening ways specially welcome and soothing ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... we are so well aware that the temporal order of things is vain, empty, hollow, and frivolous, that we hesitate at giving a tangible shape even to friendship. We have too much regard for each other to be guilty of a weakness towards each other. Both alike convinced of the insignificance of human affairs, and possessed of the same aspirations for what is eternal, we could not bring ourselves to admit having of a set purpose concentrated our thoughts upon what is casual and accidental. For there can be no doubt that ordinary friendship presupposes the conviction ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... transept roofs, looks scarcely worthy of a moderately important parish church, much less of a cathedral. However, when it is found possible to undertake the change, it should be remembered that Rochester is a small cathedral, and that the opposite fault to the present insignificance must also be avoided. The new spire must neither be too lofty nor too elaborate. Finally, as Sir Gilbert Scott pointed out, the parapets of the nave and its aisles are unworthy of the building, and a considerable amount of internal repair is necessary. These matters will have to be seen to as soon ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... other words upon the bulk of the Swedish nation, which was and continued to be an integral part of the Swedish body-politic, Christian III. on his accession had crushed the middle and lower classes in Denmark and reduced them to political insignificance. Yet it was not the king who benefited by this blunder. The Danish monarchy since the days of Margaret had continued to be purely elective; and a purely elective monarchy at that stage of the political development of Europe ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... people, it is true, said that she was "just a fairy of a crathur, and too little for anythin'," and she was, no doubt, diminutive in size. Nor had she any brilliancy of colouring to make amends in a humming-bird's fashion for the insignificance of her proportions, resembling rather, with her dark eyes and hair, one of those filmy white blossoms which look the paler and frailer for their knots of ebon stamens, or the delicate moth who shows fine black pencillings among his pearly down. Still, nobody denied that she had "an uncommon purty ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... a sleepless night, he had a panic-stricken sense of his insignificance under the crushing weight of law and order. All the strength born of bitterness oozed out as he stood before the magistrate rigidly and heard the charge preferred. He had a despairing vision of Yvonne Rupert, mocking, inaccessible, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... began, "the case before your notice has become, from one of apparent insignificance, one of intense interest and importance. A merchant of this city, well known to you all, both by his wealth and his long residence in your midst, appears before this court and accuses a woman of theft. She is arrested and every evidence of her guilt is found on ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... in great men, must be supposed to be the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the applications of their inferiors. While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy. The conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its original state of white paper. A sucking babe might have posed him. What was it then? Was he rich? Alas, no! ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... large business would be a sufficient compulsory influence; but now Hawkeye was frightened; and before Col. Sellers knew what he was about, Hawkeye, in a panic, had rushed to the front and subscribed such a sum that Napoleon's attractions suddenly sank into insignificance and the railroad concluded to follow a comparatively straight coarse instead of going miles out of its way to build up a metropolis in the muddy ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... the existing order of things, of which the efforts at revolution in several small states, such as Aix-la-Chapelle and Geneva may be cited as examples. These were so many instances of the democratic spirit which now prevailed; but they sink into insignificance when compared with the commotion which had commenced ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... gentleman—for these bashful gentlemen do get married sometimes; how it is ever brought about, is a mystery to us—a married bashful gentleman either causes his wife to appear bold by contrast, or merges her proper importance in his own insignificance. Bashful young gentlemen should be cured, or avoided. They are never hopeless, and never will be, while female beauty and attractions retain their influence, as any young lady will find, who may ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Character," or in his compilation from the wisdom of the past, "The Choice of Pearls" (if, indeed, this last book be his). The "Royal Crown" is a diadem of praises of the greatness of God, praises to utter which make man, with all his insignificance, great. ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... were raised, her cheeks were pink, her eyes sparkling. She rose slowly to her feet, and, child though she was, the dignity of her demeanour was such that Lady Delahaye with her accusing forefinger seemed to shrink into insignificance. ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was not of the kind with which providence endows millions of foolish people, apparently by way of preventing them from realising their insignificance, or, at the worst, making their smallness tolerable. It arose from knowledge of the great and inexhaustible treasure of love which was hers to bestow; so convinced was she of the value of this wealth, that she guarded it jealously, not permitting it to suffer taint or deterioration from ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... by demonstrating the insignificance of this globe in the vast scale of creation, has led ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... convinced that if Cook was not an accomplice in the train robbery, he was involved in something criminal, and Sam regretted that he had not been more thorough in his investigations. Now that Chip was in the hands of his enemies, all others sank into insignificance; so with keen eyes and sharp ears, Sam kept ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... well. As we stand by the cradle of the Master and peer into the manger at that which every human being loves, a baby, our earthly differences of nationality, of rank, power, station, and influence—things that are but the guinea's stamp upon the gold of character and personality—fade into insignificance and become as nothing. The little child in life notices none of these distinctions, he marks nothing of them. Let us come as little children before Him. We may be war-battered, sin-marked, toil-stained, care-burdened. Let us forget it ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... wore away, Tom began to wish that the situation might declare itself. The drear wildness of the mountain height oppressed him with a sense of personal insignificance which was rather overwhelming. The great white mountains seemed to stare down upon him as though pitilessly indifferent to his fate. How could they care what became of one solitary son of earth? Did they not stand fast for ever more, from century to ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... offices if he would abandon Lewis. When the imperial ambassador, in July 1677, complained of the No Popery cry, they replied that there was no question of religion, but of liberty. In the case of Oates and his comrades, the political motive faded into insignificance beside the religious. At first the evidence was unsubstantial. Oates was an ignorant man, and he obtained credit only by the excitement and distrust caused by the discovery of the premeditated coup d'etat. Godfrey, the magistrate who conducted the inquiry, warned James that ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... altogether unique, and invited us to join him in paying it a visit. The scene of his enterprise was a sunny little village lying high among vineyarded hills, and bearing the name of Notre Dame des Commiers. Owing to its remoteness and insignificance, the Roman Catholic authorities had never replaced its last priest, who withdrew during the turmoils of the Revolution. For all their ecclesiastical needs the people were obliged to descend to the next village, the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... this reduction of a man from greatness to insignificance. The old Berselius dying, bound in chains, would have mastered this woman with one glance of his eye. The new Berselius, free, wealthy, and with all his material powers at command, was yet her creature, an object of pity to his ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... tremble even before he was lifted into the water, and after his first immersion he was revealed to be a dog weighing about one-fourth of what an observer of Duke, when Duke was dry, must have guessed his weight to be. His wetness and the disclosure of his extreme fleshly insignificance appeared to mortify him profoundly. He wept. But, presently, under Penrod's thorough ministrations—for the young master was inclined to make this bath last as long as possible—Duke plucked up a heart and began ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... columns in cream color and decked in places with blood-red spots or blotches of Titanic size. The ceiling you cannot see. It is too high for the lights you have to reach. On the left you are suddenly confronted by a stalagmitic formation so large and so grand that all others are dwarfed into insignificance. You think of the dome of the Capitol at Washington. You are standing at the sloping base but cannot see the top. Just here the guide announces in an awestruck voice 'Blondy's Throne.' And who is Blondy? Only a fair-haired, blue-eyed, intrepid and daring fifteen-year-old boy, ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... of this imposing monument is borrowed from that of the famous arches at Rome; but the transversal arch is an additional feature, while its reliefs, and inscriptions, and its colossal proportions throw the arches of Rome into comparative insignificance. The interior sides of the piers are inscribed with the names of ninety-six victories; under the transversal arches are the names of generals. A group upon the northern pier of the eastern front represents the departure of the army in 1792:—"The ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... Heavenly Father, which on any showing was the fundamental axiom of our Lord's teaching, and which our author thus accepts as a cardinal article in his own creed,—what is it but a theological proposition of the most overwhelming import, before which all other 'dogmas' sink into insignificance? ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... placed the bullet on the table, his companions looked at it with intense astonishment. All the consequences likely to result from this incident, notwithstanding its apparent insignificance, immediately took possession of their minds. The sudden apparition of a supernatural being could not have ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... usually very regular and well constructed. Within, at the centre, is a mound not more than a foot high containing the sepulchral deposit. Occasionally there are more than one of these minute mounds, which often escape notice by reason of their insignificance. ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... misery. I instilled courage into your hearts in order that this Bhima who is possessed of the strength of ten thousand elephants and whose prowess and manliness are widely known, might not sink into insignificance and ruin. I instilled courage into your hearts in order that this Vijaya, who was born after Bhimasena, and who is equal unto Vasava himself might not be cheerless. I instilled courage into your hearts in order that Nakula and Sahadeva, who are always devoted to their ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... make us more formidable. The Alarmists will hear this with new apprehensions; they will no doubt return to us with a view to diminish our force, and encumber us with their alliance in order to reduce us to insignificance." ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... and frilled shirt-front, he was a very inferior attraction, while his chaplain was simply nowhere. He had his innings for one brief hour in the cathedral, where the judges were compelled to sit as meekly as so many jurymen under a lengthy summing-up; but after that one bright flash he sank into insignificance, and dragged out the remainder of the assize like the stick of a burnt-out ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... elements that wreck the marble dome Proud with the polish of the artisan— Bolts that crash shivering through the humble home, Traced with the insignificance of man— Are architects of thine, and proudly plan Rich monuments to show thy growing prime: Earthquakes that rend the rocks with dreadful span, Lightnings that write in characters sublime, Inscribe their labours all unto the ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... Seuenochensis Tetrastichon." It is perhaps worth while remarking that this Antiprognosticon was directed against Anthony Ascham, Roger's brother, which may perhaps account for some of the bitterness in the above passage from the Scholemaster. These slight productions, however, sink into insignificance in comparison with his chief work, "The Palace ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... was a real girl scout, but faithful as she unconsciously was to the then unwritten laws of the sisterhood, she faded into insignificance when my absolutely true-to-type Scout appeared in the guise of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Rebecca did not reform, convert or uplift her seniors, her parents, grandparents, neighbors and constituents, but she could never keep ...
— The Girl Scouts: A Training School for Womanhood • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... king, hold a very much higher place in the public regard than the book on which he so prided himself. To foreigners, whose judgments are unhampered by his recorded opinion, his character as an original historian sinks into insignificance, and he is known only as a philosopher ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... day Romana, with a small body of cavalry, left Toabado, crossed the Minho, descended into the valley of the Tamega, and took refuge close to the Portuguese frontier line. Here he was, for a time, safe from the pursuit of the French, the insignificance of his force being his best protection. Soult lost no time. As soon as the English army had left, Corunna opened its gates to him, as did Ferrol, although neither of these towns could have been taken without a siege, and Soult must have been delayed until a battering-train ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... departure, I find within myself only a smile of careless mockery for the swarming crowd of this Lilliputian curtseying people—laborious, industrious, greedy of gain, tainted with a constitutional affectation, hereditary insignificance, and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... interests, culminated at length in the abolition of that most odious system of oppression from which they had sprung, and in a charter of liberties before which the famous charter of King John sinks into insignificance. ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... Sovereignty"—and to his relations with Mr. Webster—Mr. Lincoln said: "It would be amusing, if it were not disgusting, to see how quick these Compromise breakers administer on the political effects of their dead adversaries. If I should be found dead to-morrow morning, nothing but my insignificance could prevent a speech being made on my authority, before the end of next week. It so happens that in that 'Popular Sovereignty' with which Mr. Clay was identified, the Missouri Compromise was expressly reserved; and it was a little singular if Mr. Clay cast his mantle upon Judge Douglas ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... class of their subjects, who from the Tudor times onward provided the country with most of her statesmen and her captains, and in the aggregate mainly swayed her fortunes. At the same time the political influence of the Church was reduced to comparative insignificance by the treatment of the whole hierarchy almost as if it were a branch, and a rather subordinate branch, of the civil administration; by the appropriation of its wealth to secular purposes, to the enrichment ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... complete manuscript written by the very hand of Isidor Werner! I came strangely into possession of it, and it relates a story of interest and wonder, compared with which the mystery of his disappearance pales into insignificance. But the reader may judge for himself, for here follows the story exactly as he wrote it. Upon his manuscript I have bestowed hardly more than a ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... the wives of a village doctor and a village dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial brawl over paying a servant a dollar more a week. Yet this insignificance echoed cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and the orators who deemed themselves international leaders were but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas denouncing a million Carols, with a hundred thousand ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... and the country cleared and stocked with the reasonable returns of so great a trade; the forests are stripped and nothing left in prospect, but the gloomy apprehension when the timber is gone, of sinking into insignificance and poverty. Formerly the woods swarmed with American adventurers who cut as they pleased. These men seeing the advantages that were given them, and wishing to make the most of their time, cut few but prime trees, and manufactured only the best part of what ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... laying tiles is so trifling as hardly to be worth estimating, except to show its insignificance. The estimate, by English engineers, is two cents per rod for "pipe laying and finishing." What is included in "finishing," does not appear. From the personal observations of the writer, it is believed that an active ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... crumbled beneath her feet, and left her face to face with stern realities. Nothing was the same, or ever would be the same, again. Issues, causes, topics, which scarcely a week before had seemed of such vital and engrossing importance, shrivelled into insignificance or extinction under the scorching blast ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... come to story-telling the marvels of our own age shrink into insignificance beside the brave deeds and absorbing experiences of the days when fairies were better known; and so we go back to "once on a time" for the tales that we most love—and that children have ever loved since ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... some time after did she remember her own private embarrassment. And, by then, the incident had taken its proper place in her mind—had sunk to the level of insignificance ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... a sight before. Benham faded into insignificance in comparison. She was excited, and she gazed eagerly at the spectacle. Yet her look, though absorbed, was stern. This sort of thing was unlike anything American within her personal experience. This avenue of grand houses and this procession of fine individuals and fine vehicles made ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... woman, or rather the hope of a woman, she was uninteresting,—still a pale, passive, commonplace girl. What womanhood she might expect was slow in coming to her. Even with the halo of the Clark inheritance she could arouse slight amorous interest in any man. And thus Adelle's insignificance again saved her—shall we say?—from the mean fate of becoming ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... avenues,—the milkmen, the truck-drivers, the workman, even the occasional tramp,—wherever they may come from or go to, or what their real habitat may be,—are invariably Americans. I give it as an honest record, whatever its significance or insignificance may be, that during the last year, between the hours of six and eight A. M., in and about the locality I have mentioned, I have met with but two unmistakable foreigners, an Irishman and a German. Perhaps it may be necessary to add to this statement that the people I have ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... beast, to a fool, to a devil. The excessive drinker first becomes stupid, then idiotic, then a maniac. Men of the finest geniuses, most acute minds, and profound learning, have dwindled under the touch of this withering demon to the merest insignificance, and been hooted by boys for their silly speeches and silly actions, or chained in a madhouse as unsafe in society. Of eighty-seven admitted into the New York hospital in one year, the insanity of twenty-seven was occasioned by ardent spirit; and the physicians ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... man console himself with the idea that his chances of success are multiplied in degree with the insignificance, or seeming insignificance, of his aims. Perhaps the very reverse of this is the truth. He who seeks for many objects of enjoyment—whose tastes are diversified—has probably the very best prospect that some of them may be gratified. He is like the merchant whose ventures ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... on that evening when he accompanied Amy home from Mrs Yule's; since then he had allowed his pressing occupations to be an excuse for the paucity of his visits. It seemed to him perfectly intelligible that Reardon, sinking into literary insignificance, should grow cool to a man entering upon a successful career; the vein of cynicism in Jasper enabled him to pardon a weakness of this kind, which in some measure flattered him. But he both liked and respected Reardon, and at present he was in the mood to give expression to ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... establishments are all national, and depend entirely upon the existence of native rule. They are officered by the aristocracy of the country, chiefly landed, who know that they are not fitted for either civil or military office under our system, and must be reduced to beggary or insignificance should our rule be substituted for that of their native chief. In the other, all the establishments are foreign, like our own. The Seiks were not altogether of the first class, like those of Rajpootana and Bundelcund, but they were so for the most part; and when they saw all offices of trust by ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... where I now rarely visit. I am on these sad terms (and blush to confess it) with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns and Hazlitt. Last of all, there is the class of book that has its hour of brilliancy - glows, sings, charms, and then fades again into insignificance until the fit return. Chief of those who thus smile and frown on me by turns, I must name Virgil and Herrick, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which today is one of the greatest needs of the South. The advances have been conditioned upon the planting and cultivating a given amount of cotton. During recent years no other staple has so fallen in price, and the result has been hard on the farmers. All else has faded into insignificance before the necessity of raising cotton. The result on the fertility of the soil is also evident. Luckily cotton makes light demands on the land, but the thin soil of many districts has been unable to stand even the light demands. Guano ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... the same company which had brought this expedition to a successful issue next turned their attention to a small country house occupied by a widow, whom I had often begged to take refuge with us. But, secure in her insignificance, she had always declined our offers, preferring to live solitary and retired in her own home. But the freebooters sought her out, burst in her doors, drove her away with blows and insults, destroyed her house ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... laden with merchandise, furled their sails in that deserted harbor, where now scarcely a fisherboat is seen; for on Crail, as on all its sister towns along the coast, fell surely and heavily the terrible blight of 1707, and now it is hastening rapidly to insignificance and decay. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... engrossing, and at every fresh winding of the road she held her breath in suspense, while the wild rose colour deepened in her cheeks. Suppose—suppose they met him! How would he look? What would he do? What would he think? Even the compliment to herself faded into insignificance ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... understanding. Struggling a good while with these thoughts, by degrees I felt myself more firm. I derived at length some confidence from what in other circumstances usually produces timidity. I grew less anxious, even from the idea of my own insignificance. For, judging of what you are by what you ought to be, I persuaded myself that you would not reject a reasonable proposition because it had nothing but its reason to recommend it. On the other hand, being totally destitute of all shadow of influence, natural or adventitious, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... for a pillow and God's kindly sky for a quilt. I had heard of a bed of thorns, of the soft side of a plank, and of the bed-rock. But all my bodily experience, theoretical or practical, sinks into insignificance before a bed of cobblestones. Nothing in ancient or modern history can compare with it, unless it be the Irishman's famous down couch, which consisted of a single feather laid upon a rock, and, like him, if it had not been for the ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... every form. The want of ideas and information would have withdrawn many writers from the combat, had they not possessed CAPITALS, exclamations (!!!!), and dashes—officered by epithets of horror, as an army of reserve. These attempts to impart energy to weakness, and terror to insignificance, gave to the articles of many old newspapers the aspect of auction bills, rather ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... indeed he had all but seen into it from the first. But, although to his intimate friends known as a great and indeed wonderful talker, he was generally regarded as a somewhat silent man, and in truth possessed to perfection the gift of holding his tongue. Except that his outward insignificance was so great as to pass the extreme, he was not one to attract attention; but those who knew Wingfold well, heard him speak of Mr. Polwarth, the gate-keeper, oftener than of any other; and from what she heard him say, Dorothy had come to have ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... chair and brought into the foreground of his mind the figures of those men and women who had told his story, finding them, to his dismay, unexpectedly crude and unlifelike. And the story itself. Was unhappiness so necessary, after all? They suddenly seemed to crumble away into insignificance, these men and women of his creation. In their place he could almost fancy a race of larger beings, a more extensive canvas, a more splendid, a riper ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... on the balcony, his favorite hound by his side. Long he gazed, looking at every familiar place of his youth. He knew now that every foot of it would be his. He had no bitterness in his heart. Not he, for in the love and constancy of Alice Westmore all such things seemed unspeakable insignificance to the ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... eat their own bread.' So that is clear enough. Apparently what He meant was to emphasize the supreme need of the other kind of food—'the meat that endures unto everlasting life.' The one pales into such insignificance—into nothingness!—compared with the other, that He puts His hand over it—He puts it out of sight completely, and says, 'Look at this! This is the supreme thing, ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... read your account of this unfortunate being, and his forlorn piece of self-history, with that smile of half-interest which the annals of insignificance excite, till I came to where he says, "I was bound apprentice to Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathematics," etc.; when I started as one does on the recognition of an old acquaintance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... contracted and dwarfed. All around are monuments of human skill, and every thing as little as the human mind. But when he steps beyond the crowds of life and embarks on the bosom of the ocean, he begins to see Divinity in its most awful forms. He realizes the insignificance of the creature and the ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... owing to prejudice, and imperfect or false information. The wild and dangerous attempt which has for some time been persisted in to obtain an act of our Legislature, to abolish so very important and necessary a branch of commercial interest[578], must have been crushed at once, had not the insignificance of the zealots who vainly took the lead in it, made the vast body of Planters, Merchants, and others, whose immense properties are involved in that trade, reasonably enough suppose that there could be no danger. The encouragement ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... unique historic position of the first voyage of Columbus, which brought together two streams of human life that had been disjoined since the glacial period. But as an achievement in ocean navigation that voyage of Columbus sinks into insignificance beside it.... When we consider the frailness of the ships, the immeasurable extent of the unknown, the mutinies that were prevented or quelled, and the hardships that were endured, we can have no hesitation in speaking of Magellan as ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... absolutely inadequate. History, however, has indemnified Milton for the neglect and poverty he endured. He has shot up into stature while those of his contemporaries who bulked largest in the eyes of the world have dwindled and shrunk into insignificance in comparison with him. The witty, dissolute king, Charles II., is now seen to be a wretched pigmy: Milton, who died in blindness and political disgrace, is the real king of that era, overtopping all the rulers, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... head. "You must not rely on Dr. Suaby too much. In a prison or an asylum each functionary is important in exact proportion to his nominal insignificance; and why? Because the greater his nominal unimportance the more he comes in actual contact with the patient. The theoretical scale runs thus: 1st. The presiding physician. 2d. The medical subordinates. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... by German hosts at the very outset, the collapse of the Emperor Nicholas's legions in Poland in 1915, the Dardanelles failure, Bulgaria's accession to the ranks of our enemies and the resultant overthrow of Serbia, the fall of Kut, Roumania's unhappy experience—sink into insignificance compared with the downfall of the Romanoffs and what that downfall ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... Its insignificance alone saved it from positive ugliness, but the minister gave it as he passed, a fond admiring glance. He knew every grey stone in its walls, and every pane of glass in its narrow windows. He had not built it with his own hands but his heart had been in the laying of every stone and the driving ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... whether we regard them as a reconquest by Christendom or a conspiracy of Jews or a part of the lingering quarrel with Moslems, are alike the effect of forces gathered and loosened in that one mysterious moment in the history of the city. They equally proclaim the paradox of its insignificance and its importance. ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... moon's surface is the enormous magnitude of its volcanic crater formations. In comparison with these, the greatest on the surface of the earth are reduced to insignificance. Paradoxical as the statement may at first appear, the magnitude of the remains of the primitive volcanic energy in the moon is simply due to the smallness of its mass. Being only about one-eightieth part of the bulk of the earth, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... till its coat shone like satin and every hair of its wetted mane lay smooth—felt that no small matter was happening, but an important and solemn affair. Every general and every soldier was conscious of his own insignificance, aware of being but a drop in that ocean of men, and yet at the same time was conscious of his strength as a part of that ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... and to the same effect. It comes from Mahomed Reza Khan, who, as your Lordships will remember, had been reduced by Mr. Hastings from a situation of the highest rank and authority, with an income of suitable magnitude, to one of comparative insignificance, with a small salary annexed. This man is made to disgrace himself, and to abet the disgrace and injury done to his country, by bearing his testimony to the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... contemplates the dumping of workers on scrap heaps. None of the advocates view the equipment of workers for industry in terms radically different from the terms in which they are viewed by business men; they offer them technique and matter of insignificance and indirection; they make no suggestion or move to open up the adventure of industry for the worker's actual participation in it; they accept the organization of industry which excludes their participation as an unalterable fact; ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... being your precarious situation, who could wonder that you should put a negative on any measure which must annihilate your power, deprive you of your emoluments, and at once reduce you to that state of insignificance for which God and nature designed you." Earls Gower and Hillsborough reprobated this severe language of Chatham, as calculated to inflame the public mind both here and in the colonies, and questioned if the noble lord ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... say." And then she spoke to me of God, who alone can determinate man's trials, either by the end He ordains, or the resignation He inspires. I felt myself carried with her into the regions where our sorrows shrink into insignificance as the horizon broadens around them. And I remember she uttered this fine thought, "See how my son has suffered! It makes one believe, Monsieur Fabien, that the elect of the earth are the hardest tried, just as the stones that crown the building ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... he gazed at it the more simple it became, so that he was on the point of folding it and replacing it in his pocket, sadly disconcerted at its insignificance. He had hoped that he might have stumbled across something of real value, not only some secret information concerning the designs of the enemy, but also some evidence of an incriminating nature against his ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... valleys so masked by timber and brushwood that one came across them only by accident. There is something in the naked face of Nature, in the sheer magnificence of incredible heights and the marvellous massiveness of big timber that somehow dwarfs man into insignificance and makes him realise the puniness of his strength. There was something in the scenes now opening up before the rangers that subdued them and beat them into silence. There was beauty in the sight, the soft eternal beauty of an unravished land, but over and above ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... darting thought Stanor recalled his impressions on first meeting the girl a week before, and his own outspoken surprise at the insignificance of the sister of his beautiful hostess. A plain, odd little creature, that had been the involuntary verdict, but almost immediately it had been amended. Plain, but charming; distinctly the little thing had charm! Now, at the expiration ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... few moments' rest, and threw myself upon the sofa. The old outlook, the old ideas had been torn up by the root. The things which had seemed to be of life itself only a few hours ago seemed now to have lapsed into the insignificance of trifles. I thought of myself and my old life with the tolerance of one who watches a child at play. Sport and all its kindred delights—the whole glorification of the physical life—I viewed as a ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Republicans inculcate, with whatever of ability they can, that the negro is a man, that his bondage is cruelly wrong, and that the field of his oppression ought not to be enlarged. The Democrats deny his manhood; deny, or dwarf to insignificance, the wrong of his bondage; so far as possible crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him; compliment themselves as Union-savers for doing so; and call the indefinite outspreading of his bondage "a sacred ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... they were at some distance from town, were brought and distributed among them. The most disaffected were purchased with the largest presents. Even Malatchee himself seemed fully contented with his share, and the savages in general perceiving the poverty and insignificance of the family of Bosomworth, and their total inability to supply their wants, determined to break off all connection with ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... he had had ability, for the higher work of government. He was restless, quick in movement, rapid and confused in speech, lavish of worthless promises, always in a hurry, and at once headlong, timid, and rash. "A borrowed importance and real insignificance," says Walpole, who knew him well, "gave him the perpetual air of a solicitor.... He had no pride, though infinite self-love. He loved business immoderately; yet was only always doing it, never did it. When left to himself, he always ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... and with justice too, if I am not very much mistaken. The last time I saw him, he was very near his end, and spoke of his death as calmly and tranquilly as if he had lived the purest life imaginable. He is long since in his grave, and his family has sunk into insignificance. I do not believe a more thorough villain ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... sense of his own dignity enables him to sustain the shock of considerable hazard with spirit and fortitude. But, in London, the feeling of self-importance is totally lost and suppressed in the bosom of a stranger. A painful conviction of insignificance—of nothingness, I may say—is sunk upon his heart, and murmured in his ear by the million, who divide with him that consequence which he unconsciously before supposed he possessed in a general estimate ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... Every sentence is an essay.' She amused herself in the coach with knotting; he would scarcely allow this species of employment any merit. 'Next to mere idleness (said he) I think knotting is to be reckoned in the scale of insignificance; though I once attempted to learn knotting. Dempster's sister (looking to me) endeavoured to teach me it; but I ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. I hate such skies. Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart; and cloudy soft nights are more kindly to our littleness. ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... manner that the call was an important one. Brewster was seated at his writing-table, deep in thought. The exclamation that followed Rawles's cough of announcement was so sharp and so unmistakably fierce that all other evidence paled into insignificance. The butler's interruption came at a moment when Monty's mental arithmetic was pulling itself out of a very bad rut, and the cough drove it ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... brother, all the insignificance of man, as compared with the magnitude and duration of the universe, need not stagger our faith that the divinest thing in the universe is a heart that has learnt to love God and aspires after Him, and should but increase our wonder and our gratitude ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... such an argument, addressed mainly to Presbyterians and other zealots for a State Church, the question of Disestablishment was rather to be avoided; nay, for himself, that question had faded into insignificance for the time in comparison with the vaster question whether the Republic should be preserved or the Stuarts brought back, and most willingly would he have been, assured of the preservation of the Republic even though a State Church should continue to be part and parcel of it, and the special battle ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... which boasted a garden, and was famous as a view-point. From the door a carriage containing a man was about to drive away. The man was approaching middle age, and had an air of quiet self-reliance which redeemed him from insignificance. He was plainly dressed, in clothes which were not new, and altogether he did not appear to be a personage who, from the hotel-keeper's point of view, would be of supreme importance. Yet the landlord and another besieged the quiet man with compliments and pleadings, ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... forward and to right and left, where the sides of the river were formed by precipices which ran up so high that the trees growing here and there on the ledges looked quite small, I felt a kind of shrinking sensation at my own insignificance, and turned at last to see what effect ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... despite his inflated leaders, was a thoroughly sensible man, who fully recognised the potentialities of the port, and yet saw that it was doomed to sink into comparative insignificance, and that the "collection of humpies on a mud bank" was to be the future capital of the Far North. But he struggled on gamely. He was a genial, merry-hearted old bachelor, who had once loved his paper as a mother loves her ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... this assignment; but I did not ask permission to visit Washington, though within a couple of hours' ride of the capital, and hastened back to my assigned post. Besides my wish to cut my connection with West Virginia on general military theories of its insignificance as a theatre of war, my stay there would have been intolerable, since General Milroy, in whose judgment I had less confidence than in that of any of my other subordinates, was, by the curious outcome ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... into the delusion. The best of their poets", the sweet-tongued Filicaja among others, "accepted farms in Arcadia forthwith; ... and so little transitory did the fashion turn out to be, that not only was Crescimbeni its active officer for eight-and-thirty years, but the society, to whatever state of insignificance it may have been reduced, exists at the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... immoral, unworthy of a reformed outcast, but if my real heart's desire could be fulfilled, I would live over again those few months of exquisite happiness, and die before waking to the terrible reality of my insignificance in the sight of him who was more than life to me—die while I was still something to be missed, to be regretted. He would have tired of me had I been his wife, and that would have been as terrible as my present lot—even more, for I must have seen his weariness day by day, and no amount of social ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... months, and the great arable region of wheat, that takes in Athabaska and Saskatchewan, where the flies are a nuisance for 6 or 7 weeks, but no more so than they were in Ontario, Michigan, Manitoba, and formerly England; and where the cultivation of the land will soon reduce them to insignificance, as it has invariably done in other similar regions. It is quite remarkable in the north-west that such plagues are most numerous in the more remote regions, and they disappear in proportion as the country is opened ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... cathedral as to situation, surroundings, and general charm and grace. This no one would attempt to deny; but, in another environment, how different might it not appear,—as for instance placed beside Amiens, where in one particular alone, the mere height of nave and choir, it immediately dwindles into insignificance. Under such conditions its graceful spire becomes dwarfed and attenuated. Need more be said?—The writer thinks not, since the present work does not deal with the comparative merits of any two cathedrals or of ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... I faded into insignificance. Stenson was a man after the Inspector's heart. A few eager questions brought the desired result. A dark red toque with a grey bird's wing; a wine-coloured zouave jacket and skirt, black braided; a dark blue bodice; a plain gold brooch (the first trinket I had given ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... woman" is usually much to be pitied, but surely the reason is that the woman is not superior enough. She has capabilities and knowledge, and has learnt to value them, and is right in so doing, but she has not learnt the next page of Life's Lesson Book, which is, the relative insignificance of her own acquirements, and the value of the qualities she has not got,—qualities which her husband very likely possesses, only he has not the feminine power of expression. How often a woman's seeming superiority lies in this gift ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... sphere is at home, her home stores should be exhaustless—the stores she cannot go abroad to seek. I would add to strength beauty, and to beauty grace, in the intellectual proportions, so far as possible. It were ungenerous, in man to condemn the best half of human intellect to insignificance merely because ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... eternal verity until he has freed himself from pretensions. The human mind, bared to a centuried slime, is teeming with repulsive life of countless world-delusions. Struggles of the battlefields pale into insignificance here, when man first contends with inward enemies! No mortal foes these, to be overcome by harrowing array of might! Omnipresent, unresting, pursuing man even in sleep, subtly equipped with a miasmic weapon, ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... despair, and yet he did not believe in the possibility of triumph. He preferred an honorable death to a dishonorable peace. He would rather fail amidst the proud ruins of Prussia, made great by his hand, than return with her to their former petty insignificance. They offered him peace, but a peace which compelled him to return the lands he had conquered, and to pay to his victorious enemies the ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... on the Oakland side watching 'Frisco devoured. In a space of time so short that it all seems to me like a dream now the whole city, slumbering peacefully but a moment before, presented a perdition beside which Dante's inferno seems to pale into insignificance." ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... arms, sobbing at longer and longer intervals, until he was quiet. I was so occupied with Peepy that I lost the letter in detail, though I derived such a general impression from it of the momentous importance of Africa, and the utter insignificance of all other places and things, that I felt quite ashamed to have ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... complained that the message was not sent to both houses of parliament, and this suggestion gave rise to another debate, in which lord Bathurst and others made some melancholy reflections upon the state of insignificance to which the peers of England were reduced. Such remarks, however, were very little minded by the ministry, who had obtained a complete victory over all opposition. The supplies, ordinary and extraordinary, being granted, with every ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... don't know me; I swar I've lived to be clean ashamed o' myself." And with this soliloquy, half to himself and partly addressed to the drover, the old hunter seemed almost fit to cry, at his imaginary insignificance and dotage. ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... souls of the heathen, supplemented by the paternal care of a monarch solicitous for the welfare of his subjects. The political exigencies of the day are forgotten; military commanders and civil governors sink into insignificance and become mere executives of the priestly will, while the heroic efforts of Junipero Serra to convert the natives, his courage in the face of danger, his sublime zeal, and his unwearied devotion, make him the impelling factor in the ...
— The March of Portola - and, The Log of the San Carlos and Original Documents - Translated and Annotated • Zoeth S. Eldredge and E. J. Molera
... am the smallest part of this trial. I have lived long enough to appreciate my own personal insignificance in relation to a great issue, that involves the welfare of the whole people. What you may choose to do to me will be of small consequence after all. I am not on trial here. There is an infinitely greater issue that is being tried today in this court, though you may not be conscious of ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... arrival at Rome," says The Liverpool Echo, "Prince Buelow proceeded to the Villa Malte, his usual residence at Rome, where he will stay until he takes up his quarters at the Caffarelli police." Our alleged harsh treatment of aliens fades into insignificance by the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various
... for whom he was willing to suffer even unto death. The mercy that could stoop to ransom such a transgressor, claimed an affection before which poor Derry's deep love for his earthly darling paled, as the things of time fade into insignificance before ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis |
