"Irrelevant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... or what did you see, through your field glasses, when you looked from the top of Snake Ridge?" Sudden wisely chose to waive any irrelevant arguments. ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... will break down, like the rest, sometimes. My pertinacious querist stopped, I suppose, when he had got to the end of his list, and apparently spent the rest of the evening in a slow process of digestion; for he would break out, now and then, at the most irrelevant times, with a repetition of one of his former interrogations, which I had to answer again, briefly as I might. About sundown le Bon Gualtier returned, sorely travel-worn himself, and with an utterly exhausted horse. He had ascertained that our companions ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... book is not so much a life of Milton as a collection of materials out of which a careful reader may sift the main facts of the poet's biography. His passion for minute detail is only to be equalled by his diffuseness on points mainly if not altogether irrelevant. He gives us a Survey of British Literature, occupying one hundred and twenty-eight pages of his first volume, written in the main with good judgment, and giving the average critical opinion upon nearly every writer, great and small, who was in any sense a contemporary ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... way of dismissing a question she liked not was to pour out matters which were quite irrelevant, when to stop her was altogether past hope. I had learned to wait. She, at my desire, made Jack her aid in her affairs, as I was fully occupied with my father's neglected business. Now, too, she was busy finding Jack a wife, and would tell me all about it, striding to and fro, ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... then his 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 well, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... iron staircase of unreality. Fantastic stairs. Wisps of gloom. Singing pains in her climbing legs like a piano key hit very hard and held down with a pressing forefinger. She could listen to her pain. That was her thought as she climbed. How the irrelevant little ideas would slide about in her sudden chaos. She must concentrate now. Terribly. Morton ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... How plausible it appears! And yet it is irrelevant, as Dr. Priestly frankly confesses, who tries to save the credit of the apostle by the convenient principle of accommodation! The whole force of Peter's reasoning depends upon the word "corruption." David did see corruption; therefore, he could ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... the Odd Girl had developed such improving powers of catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed with unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would address the servants in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had painted Master B.'s room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.'s bell away and balked the ringing, and if they could suppose ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... of philosophy and art is experience. And it is the wanderer, the life-explorer without irrelevant preoccupations, who is the true naturalist, collecting experiences and making maps for spiritual eyes. What then does the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... there is no difficulty in producing a word, whereas an image cannot always be brought into existence at will, and when it comes it often contains much irrelevant detail. In the second place, much of our thinking is concerned with abstract matters which do not readily lend themselves to imagery, and are apt to be falsely conceived if we insist upon finding images that ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... either by acceptance, on grounds held to be satisfactory, of a divine revelation, or by inference from the facts of the world (as the presence of design or of moral order); but, when it is reached, all other facts of science are treated as irrelevant. If, then, science confines itself to the observation of sequences, the relation between the two cannot be one of permanent hostility, since their material is not the same. They clash when an old nonreligious belief, adopted by religion, is confronted by an antagonistic scientific ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... been much irrelevant discussion about the ability or inability of commanders in the North and South. The fact is that political instead of military ideas controlled in a very large degree the selection of commanders in the Union armies; while for three whole years the authorities in Washington ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... to feel how it is that other men go wrong. At that moment I felt vividly how men might go wrong, even unto dynamite. If one of those huddled men under the trees had stood up and asked for rivers of blood, it would have been erroneous—but not irrelevant. It would have been appropriate and in the picture; that lurid grey picture of insolence on one side and impotence on the other. It may be true (on the whole it is) that this social machine we have made is better than anarchy. Still, it is a machine; and ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... [ibid]; he suppresses facts furnished by the authorities upon whom he draws [133]; he insinuates what is utterly false [135]; he evidently wishes his readers to understand what he does not venture openly to say [220-21]; he prejudices readers by irrelevant gibes [271]; he has made people believe what is untrue [333]; he was quite as prejudiced and unfair as the notorious Bishop Bale [342]; his narrative has been exposed as untrustworthy by reason of its bias, but has not even yet been subjected to complete and thorough criticism [352]. In ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... simplicity. The Idiot Boy, for all its banalities, is as immortal as The Ode, and The Solitary Reaper will live side by side with the great sonnets while the love of literature endures. While we read these poems we tell ourselves that it is almost irrelevant to mourn the fact that the man who wrote them gave up his faith in humanity for faith in Church and State. His genius survives in literature: it was only his courage as a politician that perished. At the same time, he wished to impress himself ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... arbitrary; independent, unallied; unconnected, disconnected; adrift, isolated, insular; extraneous, strange, alien, foreign, outlandish, exotic. not comparable, incommensurable, heterogeneous; unconformable &c. 83. irrelevant, inapplicable; not pertinent, not to the, purpose; impertinent, inapposite, beside the mark, a propos de bottes[Fr]; aside from the purpose,, away from the purpose,, foreign to the purpose, beside the purpose, beside the question, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... others when she felt most in need of sympathy and love. She put her strong arms around Aunt Debby, and held her for a moment close to her heart. From that moment the two women became of one accord. Womanlike, they sought relief from their high tension in light, irrelevant talk and care for the trifling details of their surroundings. Aunt Debby brought water and towels for Rachel's toilet, and fluttered around her, solicitous, helpful and motherly, and Rachel, weary of long companionship with men, delighted in the restfulness ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... accused, so long as these same bailiffs or magistrates were allowed to decide what weight should be given, both to their own testimony and that of other witnesses, for, if they wished to convict, they would of course decide that any testimony, however frivolous or irrelevant, in addition to their own, was sufficient. Certainly a magistrate could always procure witnesses enough to testify to something or other, which he himself could decide to be corroborative of his own testimony. And thus the prohibition would ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... bit of specious nonsense," returned the ghost, throwing a quart of indignation into the face of the master of Harrowby. "It may rank high as repartee, but as a comment upon my statement that you do not know what you are talking about, it savors of irrelevant impertinence. You do not know that I am compelled to haunt this place year after year by inexorable fate. It is no pleasure to me to enter this house, and ruin and mildew everything I touch. I never aspired to be a shower-bath, ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... two sat long in the twilight, talking very little, and with their eyes rarely meeting, although their hands met frequently at quite irrelevant intervals. Just the graze of a butterfly to make it certain that the other was there: but all the while they both regarded the tiny fire which had set each content of the room a-dancing in the companionable ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... raising his brows, conscious of a humane but very faint interest in Mr. Timson's affairs. Mr. Harum got out a cigar, and, lighting it, gave a puff or two, and continued with what struck the younger man as a perfectly irrelevant question. It really seemed to him as if his senior were ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... Only details, irrelevant for readers in America, have been eliminated. Little Perrine's loyal ideals, with their inspiring sentiments, are preserved by her through the most discouraging conditions, and are described with the simplicity for which Hector Malot is famous. The building ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... "but do you mean to say that this reward was put on publicly?" to which my friend answered with an air of gentlemanly boredom at being interrupted to gratify my thirst for irrelevant detail:— ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... which the Saviour died—not His sufferings which expiate sin, but the innocence, the meekness, the love to man and obedience to God in which they were borne. The Atonement, in short, was a moral achievement, to which physical suffering and death are essentially irrelevant. This is our old enemy, the false abstraction, once more, and that in the most aggressive form. The contrast of physical and moral is made absolute at the very point at which it ceases to exist. As against ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... at this totally irrelevant reference to the worthy collector of chimpanzees with whom I ought to have dined that evening, that I glanced sharply at Grant. The result was that I did not look at Mr Shorter. I only heard him answer, in his most nervous ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... believed, will remove the doubts from the mind of every impartial inquirer, respecting the credibility of Maria Monk's narrative: nevertheless, a few additional remarks may not be irrelevant: especially as there is a marvellous skepticism in reference to the admission of valid testimony concerning the Roman priesthood, their system and practice. We are deafened with clamour for proof to substantiate Maria Monk's ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... strength in human character. As the exercise of muscle builds up physical vigour, so the persistent exertion of will develops mental and moral power. Men who have a paramount aim in life should never hesitate in strangling all irrelevant and inferior appellants for sympathy. A comparatively briefless attorney should trample out as he would an invading worm the temptation to dream rose-coloured visions, wherein bows, arrows, and bleeding hearts are thick and plentiful ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... perceived that he paid no notice, he went up to him and asked him one or two questions, but as the old priest was dull of hearing and a dotard, and as he had lost his teeth, and his tongue was blunt, he made most irrelevant replies. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... born fiends, are disagreeable. I'm sure that's why we've been so happy together,—because you've never taken anything I've done or said that was foolish or unkind personally. You've always known it was just so much irrelevant rubbish, just an excrescence, a passing sickness; never, never your real ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... irrelevant, by way of reproach, is an argument in universal request: and it often happens that the argument so produced really tells against the producer. So common is it that we forget how boyish it is; but we are strikingly reminded when it actually comes from a boy. In a certain ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... said, "may seem to you irrelevant, yet please answer them if you can. Mr. Hamilton Fynes, for instance,—was he, to your knowledge, acquainted with Mr. ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... knights at your peril, marshals!" said he; "no man in this chamber is above the laws, and they protect every Scot who resents unjust aspersions upon his own character, or irrelevant and prejudicing attacks on that of an arraigned friend. It is before the majesty of the laws that I now stand; but were injury to usurp its place, not all the lords in Scotland should detain me a moment in a scene ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... stray into a political disquisition, to such a point that the presiding judge interfered, whereupon he immediately sat down with a strange smile. His client was condemned to pay a considerable sum of money, a circumstance which did not, however, seem to cause Eugene the least regret for his irrelevant digression. He appeared to regard his speeches as mere exercises which would be of use to him later on. It was this that puzzled and disheartened Felicite. She would have liked to see her son dictating the law to ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... prolonged watching and anxiety and exposure; my eyes were burning and my head throbbing with the fever that consumed me, while my teeth were chattering with cold to such an extent that I could scarcely make my speech intelligible. Wild, fantastic, irrelevant fancies were whirling confusedly through my brain, and I found it simply impossible to fix my mind upon the important question of the direction in which we ought to steer upon the resumption of our voyage. For the impression now forced itself upon me that poor ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... request, "Please explain." Mr. Dodgson told him that he was much too young to understand anything about such a difficult subject. The child listened to what his father said, and appeared to think it irrelevant, for he still ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... the Greek but found in the Hebrew, many of which upon internal evidence must be regarded as late intrusions into the latter.(13) And occasionally a word or phrase in the Hebrew, which spoils the rhythm or is irrelevant to the sense, is not found in ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... following passages in this letter, containing personal references which might, in permanence, have given pain or offense, are now omitted—the substance of them being also irrelevant to my main purpose. These few words about the American war, with which they concluded, are, I think, worth retaining:—"All methods of right government are to be communicated to foreign nations by ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... honest pair melted in tears."[148] He had at this time whimsically assumed the name of Renou, and he wrote to a friend that of course he had married in this name, for he adds, with the characteristic insertion of an irrelevant bit of magniloquence, "it is not names that are married; no, it is persons." "Even if in this simple and holy ceremony names entered as a constituent part, the one I bear would have sufficed, since ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... probable that he was a student at that university. "There is reason to believe that both the universities were frequented by Scotish students; many particular names are to be traced in their annals; nor is it altogether irrelevant to mention that Chaucer's young clerks of Cambridge who played such tricks to the miller of Trompington, are described as coming from the north, and ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... personal altercations here, Mr Bruce, on irrelevant topics. Mr Bruce," he continued, suddenly giving him the label, "have ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the artist and for the man who understands art, all scales and standards disappear except that of the purely aesthetic beauty which consists in harmony of line and tone; the most perfect human form has no more value than a splash of mud; or rather both mud and human form disappear as irrelevant, and all that is left for judgment is the arrangement of colour and form originally suggested by those accidental and ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... to her that Mrs. Harrington was not half as correct in her playing of the part of a dying woman as she would have seen to it that anyone else was; also, that things did not seem legal without the wolfhound. Then she was shocked at herself for such irrelevant thoughts. The thing to do was to keep poor Mrs. Harrington quieted. So she beckoned the clergyman and the De Guenthers nearer, and herself sped the marrying ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... to draw from me an opinion on the extraordinary rally the child had made. That was her way; she always invited discussion of a subject by comments about something wholly irrelevant. ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... writer who has no authority in matters of philosophy, I had affirmed that no one had properly appreciated him, Mr. Congreve's remarks would apply: but as I did neither of these things, they appear to me to be irrelevant, if not unjustifiable. And even had it occurred to me to quote M. Comte's expressions about Hume, I do not know that I should have cited them, inasmuch as, on his own showing, M. Comte occasionally speaks very decidedly touching writers ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... He was becoming irrelevant; a question to the point cut short his speech, like a pang of pain, and he felt extremely discouraged and weary. He was coming to that, he was coming to that—and now, checked brutally, he had to answer by yes or no. He answered truthfully by a curt 'Yes, I did'; and fair of face, big of frame, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... whoever he was, to extend his own. But does the letter referred to, or the quotation now given respecting Lord Anson's permission to publish it, in any degree determine the question, or any thing connected with it? The Editor has a different opinion of it; he thinks it quite irrelevant—that it does not yield the least shadow of proof, that Mr Robins had any thing to do with the volume of the Narrative, already given to the public. All that can be legitimately inferred from it amounts ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... be linked to the living world. By perpetually asking for sympathy an end is put to real friendship. The friend is afraid to intrude anything which has no direct reference to the patient's condition lest it should be thought irrelevant. No love even can long endure without complaint, silent it may be, an invalid who is entirely self-centred; and what an agony it is to know that we are tended simply as a duty by those who are nearest to us, and that they will really ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... find a common name, did not permanently succeed. The visionaries and "heretics" decried as "Rosicrucians" and "alchymists" were considered as enemies and persecuted. It is irrelevant whether there was an organized fraternity of rosicrucians; it was enough to be known as a rosicrucian. (Keller, Z. Gesch. d. B., p. 21.) The great organization did not take place until a great European power spread over it its protecting hand, i.e., in 1717, when in England ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... men dropped their tools. They gathered their lunches together and fell to a voracious feeding. At last, pipes appeared. They stretched themselves to the smoker's ease. For a while, the silence was unbroken. Then, here and there, somebody dropped an irrelevant remark. ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... something else to talk about; and glancing up at the moon, made some remark upon the beauty of the evening, which I did not answer, as being irrelevant ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... either silently ignored or purposely set aside. The Physical, it is said, is too remote from the Spiritual. The Moral World may afford a basis for religious truth, but even this is often the baldest concession; while the appeal to the Physical universe is everywhere dismissed as, on the face of it, irrelevant and unfruitful. From the scientific side, again, nothing has been done to court a closer fellowship. Science has taken theology at its own estimate. It is a thing apart. The Spiritual World is not only a different world, but a different kind of world, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... review of "The Token" in Willis's Boston periodical, "The American Monthly Magazine" for September, 1829, where it is described as a "pleasing story, told quite inartificially," and is illustrated by a brief extract. It may not be irrelevant to observe that a similar "provincial tale" appeared in this number of the magazine, "The Downer's Banner," and if it was not by the same youthful author, it shows that the same kind of subject had singularly interested two writers in that neighborhood. It is, however, only ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... wished that Dame Lovell would ask an irrelevant question, which might lead to conversation—that Friar Andrew would awake—that Cicely would rush in with news of the cows having broken into the garden—or that anything would occur which would put a stop to the examination of those volumes before ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... and for more than half an hour he regaled Kapfer with a story that, stripped of descriptive and irrelevant material concerning Elkan's own feelings in the matter, ought to have taken only five ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... Heem look lak' Circle J boun' for be wan man short," replied the half-breed, and the girl, upon whom not a word nor a move had been lost, noticed that Purdy's jaw tightened as the Texan laughed at the apparently irrelevant remark. ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... of respective or proportionate values. The one who has judgment is the one who has ability to size up a situation. He is the one who can grasp the scene or situation before him, ignoring what is irrelevant, or what for the time being is unimportant, who can seize upon the factors which demand attention, and grade them according to their respective claims. Mere knowledge of what the right is, in the abstract, mere intentions of following the right in ...
— Moral Principles in Education • John Dewey
... habits and character are formed, have been rather familiar with long silences. Such voices as broke into them were anything but conversational. No. I haven't got the habit. Yet this discursiveness is not so irrelevant to the handful of pages which follow. They, too, have been charged with discursiveness, with disregard of chronological order (which is in itself a crime), with unconventionality of form (which is an impropriety). I was told severely that ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... mistress. He had, as we have seen, worked pretty hard, even before 1829, and his work had partly taken forms not yet mentioned—political pamphlets and miscellaneous articles which are now accessible in the Edition definitive of his works, and hardly one of which is irrelevant to a just conception of him. Nor did he by any means abandon these by-works after 1829; indeed, he at one time started and almost entirely wrote, a periodical called the Revue parisienne. He wrote some dramas ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... books of Homer as a proof of this confidence, and hopes that it will not be abused; he challenges Addison to point out the ill nature in the Essay upon Criticism; and winds up by making an utterly irrelevant charge (as a proof, he says, of his own sincerity) of plagiarism against one of Addison's Spectators. Had such a letter been actually sent as it now stands, Addison's good nature could scarcely have held out. As it is, we can ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... the better able to prescribe from always having had a sound mind in a sound body? As a fact, my experience in those things concerning which you allege its insufficiency has never been presented to you for judgment, and its discussion is therefore entirely irrelevant. If my statements are false, they are false; if my arguments are inconclusive, they are inconclusive: disprove the one and refute the other. But whether this state of things be owing to a want of experience, or inability to use experience aright, or any ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... of the Fourth Estate; and in his addresses to young aspirants he ever laid stress on the crucial faculty of sifting out the essentials, whether in narrative or argument, from whatever was of secondary importance, circumstantial, or irrelevant. The confidence and accuracy with which Mrs. Purchase challenged him to put his faith and his method into instant practice, staggered him not a little. He felt himself hit, so ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to examine the literature of the neighbouring countries likewise. I had expected to find the Kalevipoeg an Esthonian variant of the Kalevala; but I found it so dissimilar, and at the same time so interesting, when divested of the tedious and irrelevant matter that has been added to the main story, that I finally decided to publish a full account of it in prose, especially as nothing of the kind has yet been attempted in English, beyond a ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... of to-day conceals the fact that he is incapable of his proper task of training, developing and equipping the mind, will no longer be made by the teacher. Nor will the teacher be permitted to subordinate his duties to the entirely irrelevant business of his pupils' sports. The teacher will teach, and confine his moral training, beyond enforcing truth and discipline, to the exhibition of a capable person doing his duty as well as it can be done. He will know that his utmost province is only a part ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... not associate with the contiguous elements of its altered environment, and appeared to have developed some of the eccentricities which come of isolation. One of these was a "wing," conspicuously irrelevant in point of architecture, and no less rebellious in the matter of purpose; for it was a combination of laboratory, menagerie, and museum. It was here that the doctor indulged the scientific side of his nature in ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... in the midst of Madame Bertrand's effusive benevolence, seemed quite irrelevant to the matter in hand, but nevertheless imparted ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... exactly so,' said Mr. Purdie with a heavy sigh that seemed irrelevant. 'Weel, ma lad,' he resumed hurriedly, 'if ye tak' a sate here, I'll awa' up the stair an' get yer aunt. She generally has a bit snooze aboot this time—efter her meal, ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... to-morrow being settled upon, and despite the fact that several of the party waiting on the sidewalk looked cold and impatient, Mrs. Curtis found it impossible to tear herself away until certain utterly irrelevant matters had been lightly touched upon and lingeringly abandoned. The officers were just beginning to pour forth from head-quarters when the group of ladies finally got under way again and Miss Travers ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... the blow under which Agamemnon sank was neither more nor less guiltily struck because it was dealt with an axe, because it was under pretence of giving him a bath, or because his feet were entangled in a long robe. These circumstances are all irrelevant. Those only are relevant which attach some special reasonableness or unreasonableness to the thing done Thus the provocation that Clytemnestra had from her husband's introduction of Cassandra into her house made her act of vengeance less unreasonable: on ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... with a good deal of accuracy, yet foreign idioms and other defects will occasionally be perceived. In some instances the editor has taken the liberty to make free corrections of the author's style, and to omit a good deal of irrelevant matter. ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... addresses of welcome in all ages have done—of two words, by dexterously using which, any man can make a good speech of this character. These two words are "We" and "You;" and all else not connected with these is irrelevant and useless. They do not constitute two parts of the same speech but ordinarily play back and forth, like a game of battledore. Who "we" are; what "we" have done; how "we" saw "you;" what "we" have heard of "you;" how great and good "you" are thought to be; the joy at "your" coming; what "we" ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... to domestic comfort and well-being*, and thus to all the virtues which have their earliest and surest nurture in domestic life. There are homes at once affluent and joyless, groaning with needless waste and barren of needed comfort, in which the idea of repose seems as irrelevant as Solomon's figure of lying down on the top of a mast, and all from a pervading spirit of disorder. In such dwellings there is no love of home. The common house is a mere lodging and feeding place. Society is sought elsewhere, pleasure elsewhere; and for ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... articulated, the climactic effect is, as a rule, beautifully graduated and sure in its final force: the multitude of littles which go to make up the story are, upon examination, seen to be not irrelevant but members of the one body, working together towards a common end. It is a puzzling question how this firm art was secured: since technique does not mean so much a gift from heaven as the taking of forethought, the self-conscious skill of a practitioner. Miss ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work; going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle but his prosperity—that sort of New Woman they ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... spring! It is and always will be the most horrible season. Can you lay hold of one sensible idea, Kroeger, can you work out the tiniest point or effect with any calmness, when you are feeling an indecent prickling in your blood and are upset by a whole mass of irrelevant sensations which so soon as you test them are unmasked as unmistakably trivial and wholly unusable stuff? As for me, I am going to the cafe now. That is neutral ground, untouched by the change of seasons, you see; it represents, so to speak, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... regret that I have found it impossible to print more than a few of the following reviews complete. The writing of those days was, in almost every case, extremely prolix, and often irrelevant. It nearly always makes heavy reading in the originals. The principle of selection adopted is to retain the most pithy, and attractive, portion of each article: omitting quotations and the discussion of particular passages. It therefore becomes necessary to remark—in justice ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... said He to that poor palsied sufferer lying there upon the little light bed in front of Him. He had been brought to Christ to be cured of his palsy. Our Lord seems to offer him a very irrelevant blessing when, instead of the healing of his limbs, He offers him the forgiveness of his sins. That was possibly not what he wanted most, certainly it was not what the friends who had brought him wanted for him, but Jesus knew better than they what the man suffered most from ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... summer-house, which somehow struck him as a great deal more ancient than before. Though the day was just as fine as yesterday, it seemed a wretched little place this time. There was a circle on the table, left no doubt from the glass of brandy having been spilt the day before. Foolish and irrelevant ideas strayed about his mind, as they always do in a time of tedious waiting. He wondered, for instance, why he had sat down precisely in the same place as before, why not in the other seat. At last ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... be called to order by any other while speaking, for the use of any indecorous remark, personal allusion, or irrelevant matter; but this must be done in a courteous and conciliatory manner, and the question of order will at once be ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... may say what you please about feminine "togs," That they're ugly, unhealthy, are burdens or clogs, Too high, or too low, or too loose, or too tight, There is just one reply (but 'tis more than enough) To such "rational," but most irrelevant stuff:— If not in the Fashion, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... to himself. He was under an intolerable necessity to convey something that he felt, and he created them with that intention alone. He did not hesitate to simplify or to distort if he could get nearer to that unknown thing he sought. Facts were nothing to him, for beneath the mass of irrelevant incidents he looked for something significant to himself. It was as though he had become aware of the soul of the universe and ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... king, I was accompanied by the premier's sister, a fair and friendly woman, whose whole stock of English was, "Good morning, sir"; and with this somewhat irrelevant greeting, a dozen times in an hour, though the hour were night, she relieved her pent-up feelings, and gave expression to her sympathy and regard ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... the world and to be absolutely truthful is very difficult, is all but impossible," remarked Miss Burleigh with a mild sententiousness that sounded irrelevant, but came probably in the natural sequence of ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... Mrs. Nelson Smith and Lord Annesley-Seton was touched upon in the papers; and though it was irrelevant to the subject in hand, mention was made of the Nelson Smiths' plan ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... point Lady Durwent interrupted him with a tirade which, in common with a good many domestic unpleasantries, was born of much that was irrelevant, springing from sources not readily apparent. She abused the public-school system of England, and sneered at the county families which blessed the neighbourhood with their presence. She reviled Lord Durwent's habits, principally because they were ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... been her teacher, and, of course, the place was filled, nor was there room for any other. She had that symptom which appears in all the students of Goethe,—an ill-dissembled contempt of all criticism on him which they hear from others, as if it were totally irrelevant; and they are themselves always preparing to say the right word,—a prestige which is allowed, of course, until they do speak: when they have delivered their volley, they pass, like their foregoers, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... was momentarily out of favor, while the perpetual smuggling of the Dutch had convinced Napoleon that the only means to secure the continental embargo was to incorporate Holland with France. Three days later Murat received still higher praise, with a perfectly irrelevant clause interjected: "I suppose Godoy will come by way of Bayonne." This was, of course, a hint to send the Prince of the Peace into France. If the commander of the French forces should act on the suggestion, he would do the work ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... not seem to need an explanation of this apparently irrelevant speech. "Could you fix it all up in one day?" he inquired ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... be observed that neither theory brings any aid to the attempt of Professor Max Mueller and others to demonstrate etymologically the original unity of the human race. Mr. Wedgwood leaves this question aside, as irrelevant to his purpose. M. Renan combats it at considerable length. The logical consequence of admitting either theory would be that the problem was ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... irrelevant and valueless to the Court; and facts, indisputable facts, are all that ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... alone. That he did not know natural history as did Aristotle, who lived a thousand years later, is not to his discredit, and to emphasize the fact were irrelevant. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... isn't just a matter of I.Q. It increases the total level of consciousness. Ordinarily the human brain screens out thousands of irrelevant stimuli. You're not aware of your watch ticking, or the fly on the wall, or your own body odor. You just don't notice them. But under LRXD, the brain becomes aware of everything simultaneously. Nothing is screened out. Furthermore, the subject is capable of correlating everything. The human ...
— Last Resort • Stephen Bartholomew
... be permitted to do in this chapter is to say a good word for these involuntary, helpless, wistful facts that keep tagging a man's mind around. I know that I am exposing myself in standing up for them to the accusation that I have a mere irrelevant, sideways, intellectually unbusinesslike sort of a mind. I can see my championship even now being gently but firmly set one side. "It's all of a piece—this pleasant, yielding way with ideas," people say. "It goes with the slovenly, lazy, useless, polite state ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... or not. The sexual obsession was tempered, and about three weeks later I had my first 'pollution'—the 'angel of the night,' as Mantegazza with better sense calls it. From that time on I had pollutions every two or three weeks, with dreams sometimes of masturbation or of nymphs, or quite irrelevant matters. For a time these gave me perfect relief; then my 'dilectatio morosa' began to grow again, and the phallus would become so sensitive that working about on the belly would liberate ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... "interest" in its obverse aspect—to fear, to dislike of various kinds of physical, social, and personal pain. The subject-matter does not appeal; it cannot appeal; it lacks origin and bearing in a growing experience. So the appeal is to the thousand and one outside and irrelevant agencies which may serve to throw, by sheer rebuff and rebound, the mind back upon the material from which it is ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... the gibe as irrelevant. The saddle invited. Once aboard and before they reached the Ranty he was detailing answers to some ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... Perhaps I have seen too much of seals, but I find the range of their accomplishments limited, and their impatience for fish and lump sugar too frankly greedy before and after each act. Their banjo-playing is of a most casual and irrelevant sort; they ring bells, to be sure; in extreme cases they fire small cannon; and their feat of balancing large and little balls on their noses is beyond praise. But it may be that the difficulties overcome are too obvious in their instances; I find myself holding my breath, and ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... have recovered from its charm, analyse it. You will see that, in its apparent lawlessness and wandering like idle memories, it is constructed with the minute care, and almost with the actual harmony, of poetry; and that vague, interrupting, irrelevant, lovely last sentence is like the refrain which returns at the end of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... nothing but red pepper, so the literature of that day was dominated by the style and spirit of the Talmud and saturated with its subtleties. Astronomy, philosophy, mathematics, and poetry swarmed with puns, alliterations, pedantic allusions; they were overladen with irrelevant notes and interwoven with quaint and strained interpretations. Guenzburg was the first, with the exception of Erter perhaps, to try to remedy the evil. "Every writer," he maintained, "should guard himself against the fastidiousness or stiffness which results from pedantry, and take great ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... 3 appear irrelevant here, but the command to collect from the Egyptians jewels, which might be bartered for necessaries, may well have been given to Moses simultaneously with the assurance that he would lead forth the people after the next plague, and the particulars of the people's ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Enoch Pratt Hospital.[3] He remained there for one year and eight months, during which time his mood showed great variability. At times he would be elated, again depressed or anxious, often silly with irrelevant laughter. Towards the end of his admission he had quite long intervals when he appeared normal. Eight months after his discharge he began to have monthly attacks lasting from one to two weeks. At the beginning of 1911 he came under the observation ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... of her professors of philosophy to give an honest or intelligent reception to a thoughtful, closely reasoned, and earnest plea for philosophical reform in this very direction, or to criticise it with anything better than irrelevant and unparliamentary personalities, studied and systematic misrepresentation both of the plea and of the pleader, and a demoralizing example of libel, so bitter and so extreme as to furnish abundant ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... her shoulders as she looked up at him. The soft-coal fire in the grate purred and flickered; the drop-light cast a mellow radiance on her face. She let her eyes fall, and then lifted them for an irrelevant glance at the clock on ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... GIOVANNI SGAMBATI,[A] IN D MAJOR, the form flows with such unpremeditated ease that it seems all to the manner born. It may be a new evidence that to-day national lines, at least in art, are vanishing; before long the national quality will be imperceptible and indeed irrelevant. ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... thought he perceived, that something had occurred to lessen him in the esteem of the shrewd old Scotch doctor, who contemplated him and his prayer-book with critical eyes. "I confess, after all, that there are cases in which written prayers are a kind of security," Dr Marjoribanks said in an irrelevant manner to Dr Rider when Mr Wentworth had passed them—an observation at which, in ordinary cases, the Curate would have smiled; but to-day the colour rose to his face, and he understood that Dr Marjoribanks did not think him qualified to carry comfort or instruction to a sick-bed. Perhaps the ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... took Mercy's basket from her arm; and they walked along in silence, not knowing that it was silence, so full was it of sweet meanings to them in the simple fact that they were walking by each other's side. The few words they did speak were of the purposeless and irrelevant sort in which unacknowledged lovers do so universally express themselves in their earlier moments alone together,—a sort of speech more like birds chirping than like ordinary language. When they parted at the door of Stephen's ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Restoration. In a page he triumphantly establishes the boundary-line between the poetry of art and nature—Pope and Shakespeare—which to the present day remains as a clear guide, while at the same time Campbell and Byron and Bowles are filling the periodicals with protracted and often irrelevant arguments on one side or the other which only the critically curious now venture to look into. In the space of a single lecture he takes a sweeping view of all the great movements which gave vitality and grandeur ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... magnetism, or like electricity; that the difference between magnetism and electricity, and the powers illustrated by them, is an essential part of my system, but that the animal Life of man is the identity of all three. To whatever other system this objection may apply, it is utterly irrelevant to that which I have here propounded: though from the narrow limits prescribed to me, it has been propounded with an inadequacy painful to my ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of Gall was a science of facts relevant to great principles. The science of his opponents was a science of irrelevant facts, revealing no philosophy. Students of nature adhered to Gall; students of books and adherents of authority neglected him. Of this there is no better illustration than the great collection of De Ville in ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... are called upon by Paley to recognize design in works in which this stamp, this label of human workmanship, is wanting. The mental operation required in the one case is radically different from that performed in the other; there is no parallel, and Paley's demonstration is totally irrelevant."[XIII-2] But, surely, all human doings are not "products of design;" many are contingent or accidental. And why not suppose that the finder of the watch, or of the watch-wheel, infers both design and human workmanship? The two are mutually exclusive only on the supposition ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... to go, but as he wends, One swift irrelevant retort he sends. "Your logic and your taste I both disdain, You've quoted wrong from Jonson and Montaigne." The shaft goes home, and somewhere in the rear Birrell in smallest ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... more story about this great field-day, though it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression. But all of us have a little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to men, just a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,—so that we should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first heavy-heeled aggressor ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... sense of awe seemed to crush him to the ground. Persistently he gazed at a brilliant star in the tail of the Great Bear and recollected how Kousma the peasant in the melon-field had called this majestic constellation a "wheelbarrow." He felt annoyed, in a way, that such an irrelevant thought should have crossed his mind. He gazed at the black garden in sharp contrast to ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... power are actually selected, for the purpose of being placed there, by the voices of their fellow-men, all inquiry into the personal character of a candidate is often suppressed, such inquiry being condemned as wholly irrelevant and improper, and they who succeed in attaining to power enjoy immunities in their elevation which are ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... I had no idea. He ought to have plenty, but I haven't had a minute all week to send the laundry out." Then, dismissing the subject as irrelevant—"I must ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... see this readily, by the way in which she tried to put me off, changing the conversation whenever I got on to the forbidden ground, and suggesting various irrelevant queries on my endeavouring again to chain her wilfully-erratic attention down to the one topic that I only thought worthy ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... selection, from the originals in the Vatican, appeared in Theiner's Annals of Gregory XIII. The letters written under Pius V. are beyond the limits of that work; and Theiner, moreover, has omitted whatever seemed irrelevant to his purpose. The criterion of relevancy is uncertain; and we shall avail ourselves largely of the unpublished portions of Salviati's correspondence, which were transcribed by Chateaubriand. These manuscripts, with others ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... proposed embodying in this Preface one or two caustic reviews of our late work, from an Agnostic source, but have been deterred from so doing, for the reason that we deem it in bad taste as well as irrelevant at this late day. We shall be pardoned, however, in alluding to The National Quarterly Review, for the captious manner in which it treated us after we had courteously replied to several inquiries made of us in its two- or three-page review. After complaining ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... debates, the prosing of bores, interrupted by angry cries of "Vote! Vote!" the reiterated announcement of the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations that the conferees could not agree, the perpetual nagging of two Democrats and one Populist, the long trying intervals of debate on matters irrelevant to the great question torturing every mind, during which there was much confusion on the floor: the Senators talked constantly in groups except when the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations brought in his amended bill;—all this had made up a day trying ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... filter papers and the like but the mere layman may learn in a short time with profit the meaning of a chemical equation, and find a kind of diagrammatic knowledge sufficient to meet all he requires. To discard what is irrelevant to the purpose is one of the most difficult but most important things to be learned. Instead of using "Euclid" as a means of teaching scholars to reason, they are expected to use compasses carefully ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... was lighted up with rows of wax candles, very lean ones, but the best the poor people could afford. All the villagers assembled soon afterwards, dressed in their best, he women with flowers in their hair, and a few simple hymns, totally irrelevant to the occasion, but probably the only ones known by them, were sung kneeling; an old half-caste, with black- spotted face, leading off the tunes. This finished, the congregation rose, and then marched in single file up one side of the ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... Carton presented the facts. Now and then Kahn would rise to object to something as incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial. But there was lacking something in his method. It was not the old Kahn. In fact, one almost felt that Carton was disappointed in his adversary, that he would have preferred a stiff, straight from the ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... time the man continued to gaze in silence, and, when at length he spoke, it was to ask an entirely irrelevant question. ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... memory-series in their minds; the race memory was such a conglomeration that all they could do was strike randomly at memories until the correct area was touched, and then follow up from there. The result was usually irrelevant and ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... broken English "Port" and "Starboard" in quick succession. The master answered "Port" and "Starboard" each time the order was given, adding each time as an addendum, "Look at that blooming cable chain hanging over the side!" so that the confusion of orders and irrelevant responses to them became a menacing danger to safe navigation. The pilot swore in French at the captain, requesting him to steer the vessel and not to mind the —— chain being over the side, and the ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... are commonly used on this side of the Channel, and who impart to their Salads an endless variety of flavourings. Here, however, we are only concerned with the plants that are, or should be, in requisition for the Salad-bowl at different seasons of the year. But it will not be irrelevant to allude to the fact, admitted by medical men of high reputation, that the appetite for fresh, crisp, uncooked vegetables is a really healthy craving, and that free indulgence in Salads is a means of supplying the human frame with important elements of plant-life. In the process of cooking, ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... all right, and the ink within easy reach, how they keep back from the final plunge! And after they have begun to write, how they dally with their subject; shrink back as long as possible from grappling with its difficulties; twist about and about, talking of many irrelevant matters, before they can summon up resolution to go at the real point they have got to write about! How much unwillingness there is fairly to put the neck to ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... morals of men actually have been, how they came into being, and what function they have served in human life. Thus we shall be sure that our theory is in touch with reality, and be saved from mere closet-philosophies and irrelevant speculations. Our task in this First Part will be not to criticize by reference to any ethical standards, but to observe and describe, as a mere bit of preliminary sociology, what it is in their lives to which men have given the name "morality," ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... not whether to laugh or weep when I think of the occasion on which the following charmingly irrelevant remarks were made to me: "We are all proud of our village library and even prouder of the feeling that prompted such a gift. I am reminded," the speaker went on to say, "of a cousin of mine who got a present of exquisite fruit (preserved in ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... William's remarks next became irrelevant. For example, after being wrapped in silence for over half an hour, he suddenly flung out the question, 'How many people do you know who ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... attentive to the play; but being of a more excitable nature than his accomplished friend, it was observable that he more frequently applied himself to the gin-and-water, and moreover indulged in many jests and irrelevant remarks, all highly unbecoming a scientific rubber. Indeed, the Artful, presuming upon their close attachment, more than once took occasion to reason gravely with his companion upon these improprieties; ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... is, I fear, more fascinating to the writer than convincing to the reader, so I will be as brief as possible in this particular, nor will I, like one John Gunn who wrote a treatise on fingering the violoncello, fill up space with irrelevant matter such as the modes and tunings of the ancient Greek lyres, etc., highly interesting as these subjects may be, although it is a very tempting method of getting over the "bald and unconvincing" nature of the ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... was irrelevant. I hadn't said anything about work. The topic of conversation I had introduced was "food." In fact, I didn't want to work. I wanted to take the ...
— The Road • Jack London
... all individuals, varies in degree. The complete absence of it marks a man out as "stolid," "cold," "callous," "brutal." Such a type of personality may be efficient and successful in pursuits requiring nothing besides a direct analysis of facts, uncolored by any irrelevant access of feeling, as in the case of mathematics and mechanics. But the geniuses even in strictly intellectual fields have frequently been men of sensitiveness, delicacy, and responsiveness to the feelings of others. That intellectual analysis, however, does frequently blunt the poignancy ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... to make such accusation, none too scrupulous in her methods. She leads you on with a number of irrelevant comments and questions, until you find she's extracted from you a whole host of things you never meant to say. She is ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... they have gone from one extreme to the other, often with a trivial consideration of the importance of the points involved, and always with an entire absence of a universal point of view, of that genius which grasps a question in its entirety and is not confused by irrelevant details. It is only of late when the matter has come before the Federal Supreme Court and the courts of a few States which have been educated by a frequent recurrence of disputes of this sort that we begin again to ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... being inspected in that serious piece of prosaic business by the second mate, our captain was set free to charm the very souls of the juveniles by wandering for miles along the coral strand inventing, narrating, exaggerating to his heart's content. Pausing now and then to ask questions irrelevant to the story in hand, like a wily actor, for the purpose of intensifying the desire for more, he would mount a block of coral, and thence, sometimes as from a throne, or platform, or pulpit, impress some profound piece of wisdom, or some thrilling point, or ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... get a Space Platform even ready to take off for a journey that in theory should last forever. It was daunting to think that before a space ship could be built and powered and equipped with machinery there had to be such wildly irrelevant plans worked out as a proper check of controls for the piston-engine ships that flew parts to the job. The details ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... region of abstract ideas the same law runs. Let a word be changed or repeated, it brings in either case its contribution of emphasis, and must be carefully chosen for the part it is to play, lest it should upset the business of the piece by irrelevant clownage in the midst of high matter, saying more or less than is set down for ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... and Mrs. Dering softly caressed the plump, white hand, that to-morrow she would give away, and now and then a pause would come, when the mother's eyes would fill with tears, and her lips tremble, and then some one would rush in, to break the silence, and thrust irrelevant nonsense into the groove ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... question chosen from the great body of English criticism, and, where possible, a portrait of the author. Ample explanatory notes of such passages in the text as call for special attention are supplied, but irrelevant annotation and explanations of the obvious are ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... about your appearance," said Miss Sherrard, who could not help feeling slightly annoyed at what she considered such a very irrelevant remark. ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... is a small matter, but not irrelevant, that this striking mistake is commonly supported by a striking misquotation. We have all heard people cite the celebrated line of Dryden as "Great genius is to madness near allied." But Dryden did not say that great genius was to madness ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... deliberating something in his own mind. He was well acquainted with Malcolm Sage's habit of asking apparently irrelevant questions. ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... anew by that. The monstrous inadequacy of it was too much for him. He had tricked her, certainly, and that wasn't a manly thing to do. He seemed to be trying to get his faculties adjusted. Yet the words he uttered finally were pathetically irrelevant, it would have seemed. He ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... and evidently followed a direct connection of thought in a speech apparently irrelevant. "I understand the young Malone wants to marry Henrietta. I hope she won't; he seems rather a ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... in 1762, in no sense outlined a workable system of education. Instead, in charming literary style, with much sophistry, many paradoxes, numerous irrelevant digressions upon topics having no relation to education, and in no systematic order, Rousseau presented his ideas as to the nature and purpose of education. Emphasizing the importance of the natural development of the child (R. 264 a), he contended that the three great teachers of man were nature, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... dead silence in the room. There had been nothing thus far in the case leading up to this description, and those present looked at Ned with wonder in their faces. To say the least, the questions seemed irrelevant. ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... be altogether irrelevant to mention, as bearing on this subject, that the painful circumstances which attended the emigration of 1847 created for a time in this Province a certain prejudice against emigration generally. The ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin |
