"Trivial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... our way hither, we had seen this road and this hotel and these people in the glare of the electric lights, and from an orchestra that was playing there we caught the trivial air of a popular refrain of the music halls; but when in a dip of the ground all this had disappeared, what a sense of deliverance possessed us, how far off this turmoil seemed! As soon as we commenced to tread upon the sand of centuries, where all at ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... beforehand.[Footnote: 'Is as much entitled to a fair valuation, under the lans of induction, as if it had been more probable beforehand'—One of the cases which La Place notices as entitled to a grave consideration, but which would most assuredly be treated as a trivial phenomenon, unworthy of attention, by commonplace spectators, is—when a run of success, with no apparent cause, takes place on heads or tails, (pile ou croix) Most people dismiss such a case as pure accident. But La Place insists on its being duly valued as a fact, however unaccountable ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... motor that happened to be standing in the Dunbar driveway. As the strange little girl gazed at the tourists she dropped something—a book—and the woman with her, evidently a caretaker, shook her violently at the trivial accident. ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... more savages, who had spent nearly half the night in accomplishing the engirdlement of the Flying Fish, could have heard and understood the airy way in which the fact of their close proximity was dismissed by the baronet as a matter of the most trivial importance, they would have been intensely disgusted. Happily for their dignity they were blissfully unconscious of it; and whilst Sir Reginald and his companions were luxuriating in the bath, and afterwards dallying with ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... search of the station clock and eagerly pointed out its whereabouts, another because he has told you, without being asked, that the train starts in ten minutes, another because he pointed out your carriage, which for a brief transitory instant you failed to recognize, and others for equally trivial things, for which they all seem keenly on the alert—you shut yourself in with a feeling of relief that must be something akin to escaping from a gang of brigands. King Backsheesh evidently rules ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... Reformation, a few people came over into this New World for conscience' sake. Perhaps this apparently trivial incident may transfer the great seat ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... faultily adjusted its proportions in the original outline, I find that I have dwelt too briefly and too feebly upon the capital interest at stake. To apply a correction to some popular misreadings of history, to show that the criminal (because trivial) occasions of war are not always its trifle causes, or to suggest that war (if resigned to its own natural movement of progress) is cleansing itself and ennobling itself constantly and inevitably, were it only through its connection ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... which every moment of his time thus necessarily bore, unlike most literary men, he was never ruffled in the slightest degree by the interruptions of his family, even on the most trivial occasions; the book or the pen was ever laid down with a smile, and he was ready to answer any question, or to enter with youthful readiness into any temporary topic of amusement ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... be sure, sought, in characteristic modern fashion, "to make of history a natural science." This was the case with the so-called philosophy of history of positivism. What has been the net result of the laws of history which it has given us? A few trivial generalities which justify themselves only by the most careful consideration of their ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... in the way were swept like a scurry of leaves out into the meadow alongside the road, and one of the tribunes and the general turned in their saddles to look at the confiscated flock. The second tribune observed their interest in this trivial incident with disgust. The young general, whose military cloak flaunted a purple border, called ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... manifestly unfair; but even though liberal allowance be made for this error, in the total of about 3000 cases tabulated in the last thirty years, the undisputed instances of mob violence are shamefully numerous. Rape is by no means the only crime thus punished; sometimes the charge is so trivial that one recoils in horror at the thought of taking human life ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... the subject furious; a word, a look, or some trivial circumstance are enough for him to prove the infidelity of his wife. The latter has to avoid the slightest thing which might arouse jealousy, but all in vain; reserve and even prudery are regarded by the jealous husband as hypocrisy. The unfortunate ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Deep, we hold Our dwelling, utmost of all human-kind, And free from mixture with a foreign race. This man, a miserable wand'rer comes, Whom we are bound to cherish, for the poor And stranger are from Jove, and trivial gifts To such are welcome. Bring ye therefore food 260 And wine, my maidens, for the guest's regale, And lave him where the stream is shelter'd most. She spake; they stood, and by each other's words Encouraged, placed Ulysses where the bank ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... I ask you to waive it. You see, questions about me are so comparatively trivial. What sort ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... herd of kings. I mean there shall not be a hint of doubt About whose world this is. So I have bid, From all the utter regions of my land, The kings whom I allow to rule, who breathe My air, to feast with me and for a while Flatter their trivial lives with a brief relish Of being king of the world's kings in Shushan. Yea, and I will dismay their wits with splendour; No noise shall be against me in the world. I am more open, kinder than Lord God, Who never shows how much he ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... position which Artaxerxes takes in his dealings with Rome (A.D. 229-230), sufficiently indicate that any reverses which he sustained at this time in his struggle with Chosroes and the unsubmitted Arsacidae must have been trivial, and that they certainly had no greater result than to establish the independence of Armenia, which, by dint of leaning upon Rome, was able to maintain itself against the Persian monarch and to check the advance of the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... goes from party to party—she gives herself up heart and mind and soul to pleasures which she ought to consider only as the trivial means to great ends; and she forgets the woman who reared her, and cared for her, and watched over her from her infancy, and who tried to inspire her with a noble ambition.—Yes, read to me, child, read. Give me new thoughts, if you can, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Alexander had once lost his confidence and become suspicious and easily alarmed, there was no circumstance so trivial that he did not make an omen of it, and the palace was full of sacrifices, lustrations, and soothsayers. So terrible a thing is disbelief in the gods and contempt for them on the one hand, while superstition and excessive reverence for them presses on men's guilty consciences ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... and introduced by Mang Mang the High Lord, and Miao Miao, the Divine, into the world of mortals, and how it would be led over the other bank (across the San Sara). On the surface, the record of the spot where it would fall, the place of its birth, as well as various family trifles and trivial love affairs of young ladies, verses, odes, speeches and enigmas was still complete; but the name of the dynasty and the year of the reign were obliterated, and could not ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... all three. David walked about the room, looking for things he did not want, and asking questions he did not wish answered, although he hoped they would interest his mother. But his spirits soon flagged. The conversation became trivial and absurd. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... see acquaintances of yours in deepest mourning, it does not occur to you to go up to them and babble trivial topics or ask them to a dance or dinner. If you pass close to them, irresistible sympathy compels you merely to stop and press their hand and pass on. A widow, or mother, in the newness of her long veil, has her hard path made as ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... rivals; yet it is only the passions, and strong passions, that can lift the soul to great things; without them there is nothing sublime, whether in conduct or in productions—art becomes childish and virtue trivial." ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... mewed up here, while others are out where thrones and empires are sweeping by! I do not want to parse verbs, add fractions, and mark ledgers, while others are the poets, the singers, the statesmen, the rulers, and the wealth-controllers of the world! We wish to step out of the trivial experience into that which is significant. Each day brings uneasiness of soul. "Man's unhappiness," says Carlyle, "as I construe it, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which with ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... whispering to me, that I shall one day be inmate of the same dwelling with my cousin, partaker with her in all the delights which spring from mutual good offices, kind words, attentions in sickness and in health,—conversation, sometimes innocently trivial, and at others profitably serious;—books read and commented on, together; meals ate, and walks taken, together,—and conferences, how we may best do good to this poor person or that, and wean our spirits from the world's cares, without divesting ourselves of its charities. ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... made upon him was worthy; but even here Holbein, a man of lesser gift and power, has perhaps succeeded in leaving a more dignified, a more satisfying series; one containing, if not so many masterpieces, fewer on which an accidental or trivial subject or mood has left its impress. Yet, in spite of this, it is Duerer's, not Rembrandt's, not Holbein's character, that impresses us as most serious, most worthy to be held as a model. It is before his portrait of himself that Mr. Ricketts "forgets all other portraits whatsoever, in the ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... no pretence of being well born or well educated; nor did she assume airs. She was a perfectly natural woman, who, realizing that she was a daughter of the Heavenly King, sought to rightly represent Him. Nothing rough, mean, nor trivial would become a member of the heavenly household; but joy, peace, gentleness, kindness, goodness—the graces of the Spirit should be seen in her. And they were. The consciousness of her heavenly relationship also gave her a dignity that held itself graciously in any ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... which Hesden Le Moyne undertook when he assumed the care and protection of Eliab Hill, was no trivial one, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... feel in taking so long a farewell of a people and country that I love is that I shall always possess them in memory—a treasure which no one can take from me. As I look back over the quickly speeding year I find that I have forgotten those trivial incidents of discomfort which pricked my hurrying feet. All I can recall is the rugged beauty of the land, the brave and simple people with their hardy manhood and more than generous hospitality, and most of all my ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... and valet, inquiring their way as strangers, found the new staff headquarters of the Grays established in an army building, where Bouchard had been assigned to trivial duties, back of the Gray range. As their former chief entered a room in the disorder of maps and packing-cases, the staff-officers rose from their work to stand at salute like stone images, in respect to a field-marshal's ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... the grass—"natural" or "artificial"—into hay, there is more or less loss of nutritive matter sustained by fermentation, the dispersion of the smaller leaves by the wind, and other agencies. But this unavoidable loss is trivial when compared with the prodigious waste sustained, in Ireland at least, by allowing the hay to remain too long in cocks in the field. "Within the last three or four years," says Mr. Baldwin, of the Glasnevin Albert Model Farm, "we have made agricultural tours ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... House all eyes—trivial in figure, undistinguished, slightly ludicrous, almost shambling, shrinking under observation so that he gained a reputation for mystery, with only one feature to catch your attention, a most amazingly fine pair of eyes. It was as if nature had concentrated on those eyes, treating ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... who looked to him for guidance when childhood and youth were passed—these, sir, these are the ones to whom his death is a loss, in comparison to which all others which may hereafter befall them must ever seem trivial and unimportant." ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... be considered as trivial in an army which in any degree affects the health or spirit of the troops, upon which often, more than upon number, the fate of battles depends. The troops of Gen. Gates' army had frequently felt the consequence of eating bad ...
— A sketch of the life and services of Otho Holland Williams • Osmond Tiffany
... do. I believe you understand something of what was going on within me when Roland came into my life. In the light of what has transpired, the fact that I was neglected by my husband seems absurd—trivial. But it is not ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... two of the women, bantering them. McGregor thought the conversation inane and trivial. It skirted the edge of things and ran off into vague references to other times and adventures of which he ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... so unnerved the orphan that she was less able to cope successfully with this harrowing suspense than on former occasions; still the sanguine hopefulness of youth battled valiantly with the ghouls that apprehension conjured up, and she remembered that comparatively trivial occurrences had sometimes detained the train, which finally brought all its human ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... have spoken probably, and proceed upon a prin- ciple as inductive as the other. That doctrine of Epicurus, that denied the providence of God, was no atheism, but a magnificent and high-strained conceit of his majesty, which he deemed too sublime to mind the trivial actions of those inferior creatures. That fatal necessity of the stoicks is nothing but the immutable law of his will. Those that heretofore denied the divinity of the Holy Ghost have been condemned but as hereticks; ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... by those who have read "Butler's Book," that in addition to a number of trivial derelictions of duty, General Smith was charged with the more serious one of having failed through negligence and an untimely cessation of operations, to capture Petersburg, when it was claimed that all the conditions were favorable to success. It should also be recalled that several weeks after ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... illustrative evidence,—will be prompt to let forth their comments in some such strain as the following:—"The state of the ancient heathens, thus brought upon us in one cheap declamation more, is now a matter of trivial import, just fit to give some show and exaggeration to the stale common-place, that ignorance is likely to produce depravity, and that depravity and misery are likely enough to go together. The pagans might be wretched enough; and perhaps also the matter has been extravagantly ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... the table, and Frances Chislett chatted with Sir Lionel. They were close by me, and every word they said was audible. It was the veriest chit-chat, and Leo's remarks on the little bunch of charms and knicknacks that he found in the workbox seemed trivial to foolishness. "I'd no idea Damer was so empty-headed," I thought, and I rather despised Miss Chislett for ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... held it quite likely that the blood of Praxiteles or his compeers may still have flowed through his veins—certain at all events, that there hung about his person the traditions of the versatile colonists on the shores of Magna Graecia who, freed by legions of slaves from the trivial vexations which beset modern lives, were able to create in their golden leisure those monuments of beauty which are the envy and despair of our generation. On all that concerned the history and technique of ancient bronzes, more especially, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... from its intrinsic recommendations. By promising we bind ourselves to learn nothing from time, to make no use of knowledge to be acquired. Promises depose us from a full use of our understanding, and are to be tolerated only in the trivial engagements of our day-to-day existence. It follows that marriage is an evil, for it is at once the closest form of cohabitation, and the rashest of all promises. Two thoughtless and romantic people, met in youth under circumstances full of delusion, have bound themselves, ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... for an hour, listening to the silence. Her mind busied itself with trivial memories. She thought of Amelia Plecks.... It would have comforted her to hear that knock and the rattle of her dinner tray. The little sitting-room at Hudson's Hotel, with its bit of tapestry and its yellow tea-set and its vases filled with flowers, seemed to her memory ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... house fly out of the window, and saying, "There is room enough in the world for thee and me." It is a high proof of his cleverness that he generally succeeds in raising the desired feeling in his readers even from such trivial occasions. He was a minute philosopher, his philosophy was kindly, and he taught the delicate art of making much out of little. Less coarse than Fielding, he is far more corrupt. Fielding goes bluntly ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... curtained glass door of the ell sitting room. "Just a little sermon to start us out right—back to work. It is a serious business, you know, Joe—reconstruction! It's a big task. Let's not fall down on it or be trivial—shirk any of the responsibilities. Good-night," she added suddenly, giving her hand. "It's been a glorious day. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... kind of literature they liked and the comments they made on it; he had expected that with the education they had received, and with their experience of the seriousness of life, they would prefer something less trivial. He supposed, however, that a romantic love-story, where a poor American girl marries an English lord, formed a refuge for them from the real world which promised them so little and held them so cheap. It was quite useless ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... he had come to deliver a letter to Count von Bernstorff, the German Ambassador, but such a mission seemed so trivial that rumor as to the real intentions of the craft was rife throughout the entire country. There were suspicions that she had put in for fuel, or ammunition, or supplies. But nothing to justify these thoughts occurred. ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... much, though the water which fell in a musical drip from the stack nearest the rails into what impressed one as a sensible, frugal tub, until it, too, filled and overflowed and betrayed its trivial nature, was sweet on his tongue and grateful to ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... anything more than an idea and fiction of thought, or whether it relates to an object in the world. If we say of a thing that in relation to some other thing it is too large or too small, the former is considered as existing for the sake of the latter, and requiring to be adapted to it. Among the trivial subjects of discussion in the old schools of dialectics was this question: "If a ball cannot pass through a hole, shall we say that the ball is too large or the hole too small?" In this case it is indifferent what expression we employ; for we do not know which exists for the sake of the ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... the jury,—I should be sorry to treat with levity any charge which I see that you treat with solemnity. The charge of treason is here, I find, a very grave one: though elsewhere I have known it as common and as trivial as assault and battery. However, be that as it may, I trust there can be no offence in my noticing without much gravity the attempt of the learned gentleman who opened the case for the crown to aggravate the matter against me by ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... continue to test at exactly the same mental age by the Binet scale, year after year. In their case, familiarity with the tests does not in the least improve the responses. At each retesting the responses given at previous examinations are repeated with only the most trivial variations. Of 352 feeble-minded children tested at Vineland, three years in succession, 109 gave absolutely no variation, 232 showed a variation of not more than two fifths of a year, while 22 gained as much as one year in the three tests. The latter, presumably, ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... king-maker, rests there, careless now about such trivial things as earthly kings and earthly kingdoms; and Salisbury, who did good service at Poitiers. Just before you come to the abbey, and right on the river's bank, is Bisham Church, and, perhaps, if any tombs are worth ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... so-called criminal syndicalism statutes aimed at anarchists but which, loosely construed, had been applied to punish socialism, pacifism, and left-wing ideologies, the charges often resting on far-fetched inferences which, if true, would establish only technical or trivial violations. They proposed 'clear and present danger' as a test for the sufficiency of evidence in particular cases. I would save it, unmodified, for application as a 'rule of reason' in the kind of case for which it was devised. When the issue is criminality of a hot-headed speech on a street ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... whose predominance is the cause of criminal acts, there are brought into play those altruistic feelings which check criminal acts. Thus the discipline of natural consequences is applicable to grave as well as trivial faults; and the practice of it conduces not simply to the repression, but to the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... that, "Trifles swell the sum of human happiness and woe." Our highest and holiest aspirations, our purest and warmest affections, are frequently called forth by what in itself may be deemed of trivial importance. The fragrant breath of a flower, the passing song of the merry milk-maid, a soothing word from one we love, will often change the whole current of our thoughts and feelings, and, by carrying us back to the days of childhood, ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... he published Palaeographical and Philological Materials for the History of the Slavonic Alphabets, and in 1858 Essay towards an Historical Grammar of the Russian Tongue, which, despite some trivial defects, is still a standard work, abounding with rich material for students, carefully collected from an immense quantity of ancient records and monuments. In close connexion with this work in his Historical Chrestomathy of the Church-Slavonic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Trivial and empty rhyming is of course abundant in such an uncritical mass of verse, and we also meet with insipid puns, like that on the Arabic word din, "religion," and the German word dienen, ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... study, even the sombre facts of death and burial, and the unknown life beyond. She touches these themes sometimes lightly, sometimes almost humorously, more often with weird and peculiar power; but she is never by any chance frivolous or trivial. And while, as one critic has said, she may exhibit toward God "an Emersonian self-possession," it was because she looked upon all life with a candor as unprejudiced as it ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... "If ever you saw a young woman who was glad and thankful to turn her face toward home, I am that person. I think that one of the heaviest crosses humanity has to bear is to have constantly to decide between two or more absolutely trivial conclusions in one's own affairs; but when one is called upon to multiply one's useless perplexities by, say, ten, life ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... with effect on a Court or University stage, the real living theatre has been no place for it since the days of Greece. Milton confesses as much when in his preface he assails "the poet's error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons, which by all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people." In his view tragedy should be eclectic; in Shakespeare's it should be all embracing. Shelley, perhaps, judged more rightly than either when he said: "The ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... speech without the usual lowering of the voice. And it is just that small drop of half a tone that invites further confidence. In such small matters as these lies the secret of conversational success, and by such trivial tricks of the tongue we are daily and hourly deceived. The man or the woman who lowers the tone at the end of speech defers to the listener's opinion, and usually receives it. The manner with which Fitz broke off led his listener to believe that he was not attending to the conversation. Agatha ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... trivial things, along the way, with a lightness of manner, which was none the less as delicately cautious as the footsteps of a cat walking on a shelf of fragile china. Each felt the challenge and response of natures keyed to the same pitch of life's ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... possession I have one bundle that has been kept apart, and has evidently no connection with Dr. Butler's own life. I cannot use these letters, therefore, for my book, but over and above the charm of their inspired spelling, I find them of such an extremely trivial nature that I incline to hope the reader may derive as much amusement from them as I have done myself, and venture to give them the publicity here which I must refuse them in my book. The dates and signatures have, with the exception of ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... "Such trivial questions will be discussed at a more fitting time," answered Brother Timon, sharply, as he burnt his fingers with a very hot potato. "Neither sugar, molasses, milk, butter, cheese, nor flesh are to be used among us, for nothing is to be admitted ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... nine until five-thirty daily she was required, at 4:56 on the sixth day, to cross the set, open a door, stop, turn, appear to be listening, and recross the set to meet someone entering from the opposite side. This scene, trivial as it appeared, was rehearsed seven times before the director was ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... the Mysteries had a real spiritualising and moralising influence on large numbers of those who were initiated, and that this influence was increasing under the early empire. The ceremonies may have been trivial, and even at times ludicrous; but the discovery had been made that the performance of solemn acts of devotion in common, after ascetical preparation, and with the aid of an impressive ritual, is one of the strongest incentives to piety. Diodorus is not alone in saying (he is ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... was unfinished: there are many prosaical passages in it, many lame and harsh lines, incorrect and even ungrammatical expressions, trivial images, and, above all, many Lombard provincialisms, which are not in their nature of a "significant or graceful" sort,[6] and which shocked the fastidious Florentines, the arbiters of Italian taste. It was to avoid these in his own poetry, that Boiardo's ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... never assimilate with mine. She will go through life a disappointed woman; while, if I set her free, she will find some man whom she loves and will be happy with him. You may as well confess that this is true. You may as well acknowledge that her nature is too light, too trivial to be rent asunder by any falsity of mine. Ethel will never break her heart; but you might break yours, Lesley—and I—I also—have ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... inquiry will satisfy you, that, though there have been disorders in the town of Boston, some of them did not merit notice, and that such as did have been magnified beyond the truth." The events of the eighteenth of March and of the tenth of June were reviewed: the former were pronounced trivial, and such as could not have been noticed to the disadvantage of the town but by persons inimical to it; the latter were conceded to be criminal, and the actors in them guilty of a riot; but, in justice to the town, it was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... invasion, which a son's pride might be apt to make, of domestic privacy, and no dealing with irrelevant topics or elaboration of those set forth with becoming modesty and restraint; far less is there the discussion of any subject, for a trivial or vain purpose. Throughout the work we meet with no unnecessary lifting of veils or treatment of themes merely to satisfy morbid curiosity. Everywhere there is the evidence of sound judgment, unimpeachable ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... recoil, some of us find ourselves recklessly striving to forget and ignore them, and some find a surer refuge in facts that are stronger still than they; but to one and all, in kindly compassion to human weakness, each new emotion, each passing interest and trivial incident, combines to interpose a barrier between us and the terrible moment that overwhelmed us; and time which, in later years, seems to drag out the slow hours and days into long ages of dreary grief, can deal swiftly and ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... altogether in the dark, and feeling that she was so, she knew that she could not give counsel as a friend or a sister. Lucy had begun by declaring—so Mrs. Robarts thought—that nothing had passed between her and Lord Lufton but words of most trivial import, and yet she now accused herself of falsehood, and declared that that falsehood was the only thing which she did ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... is not very easy to define rigorously. In the most typical form some moral precept is set forth by means of a conception purely fantastic, and usually somewhat trivial into the bargain; there is something playful about it, that will not support a very exacting criticism, and the lesson must be apprehended by the fancy at half a hint. Such is the great mass of the old stories of wise animals or foolish men that have amused our childhood. But we ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of diet, rather than the exhibition of medicine, should, under these circumstances, be relied on for remedying the evil. Calomel, and such like remedies, "the little powders of the nursery," ought not to be given on every trivial occasion. More mischief has been effected, and more positive disease produced, by the indiscriminate use of the above powerful drug, either alone or in combination with other drastic purgatives, than would be credited. Purgative medicines ought at all times to be ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... These trivial advantages were amply compensated by the victory of Welf over Frederick of Hohenstaufen, at Hochstadt, and the occupation ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... some twenty dollars might have been a trivial matter to me once—I had at times cast that sum away as vainly as Washington had cast a dollar across the Potomac; but here I had lost my all, whether large or small; and not only had I been bilked out of it—I had bilked myself out of it by sinking, in pretended smartness, ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... Oftentimes, Conscript Fathers, have I spoken at length in this assembly. Oftentimes have I inveighed against the luxury and avarice of our citizens, and, therefore, have I many men my enemies. I, who have never pardoned my own soul even for any trivial error, could not readily excuse in others the lusts which result in open criminality. But, although you neglected those crimes as matters of small moment, still the republic, by its stability and ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... Giton?" Under her eyes, I flushed hotly and, if I had any virility left, I lost it then; my whole body seemed to be inert. "My queen," I cried, "do not mock me in my humiliation. I am bewitched!" (Circe's anger was far from being appeased by such a trivial excuse; turning her eyes contemptuously away from me, she looked at her maid,) "Tell me, Chrysis, and tell me truly, is there anything repulsive about me? Anything sluttish? Have I some natural blemish that disfigures ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... strong enough so to traverse, repress, and check all those causes which tended to divergence, that the written language of educated men on both sides of the water remains precisely the same, their spoken manifesting a few trivial differences of idiom; while even among those classes which do not consciously acknowledge any ideal standard of language, there are scarcely greater differences, in some respects far smaller, than exist ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... times they circle round the place, Five times the winding course retrace; No trivial game is here; the strife Is waged for Turnus' own dear life. CONINGTON, AEneid, ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... one to work improving the various posts round Krugersdorp, setting a fine example to all by the interest he took in the work, and showing his thoroughness by the attention he devoted to even the most trivial details. He also took infinite pains to make Christmas as pleasant as he could for every one. The regiment was, of course, very much split up in the various forts and fortified houses, but headquarters still remained till the end of the year in our ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... suddenly brought back into the world of trivial things? "Why, this is Mr. Carter, Mr. Shafton. He can speak ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... young Darian doctor named Korvan rather condescendingly demonstrated that the former blue pigmentation was a viral product quite unconnected with the plague, and that it had been wiped out by a very trivial epidemic of—such and such. Calhoun regarded that young man with a detached interest. Maril thought him wonderful, even if she had to give him the material for his work. Calhoun shrugged and ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... great sorrows with resignation, and seem to gain a certain dignity and force of character through trouble, but who are utterly vanquished by trivial annoyances. ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... own number. And this effect was a permanent one. Thenceforth for foreign powers to talk of mediation between the republic and the ancient master, to suggest schemes of reconciliation and of a return to obedience, was to offer gratuitous and trivial insult, and we shall very soon have occasion to mark the simple eloquence with which the thirty-eight Spanish standards of Turnhout, hung up in the old hall of the Hague, were made to reply to the pompous rhetoric of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... You may think it trivial, but it was certainly a portent. One of the acolytes had half his head clean shaved! A most extraordinary sight! I could not take my eyes from it, and I heartily wished I had an Omen-book with me to tell me what ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... disease that fall to the care of the physician are trivial, self-limited, and rapidly recover under even the most crucifying dosages; Nature really winning the victories, the physician carrying off ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... many a lady was known to have ruined her husband by the purchase of those costly articles; now, however, thanks to French mock jewelry, they are enabled to bedeck themselves in glittering ornaments at trivial expense. Another of their passions is a fondness for perfumes. They are continually besprinkling themselves with eau de Cologne, esprit de Lavande, agua rica, or mistura. The latter is a fragrant ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... again to the cause of his imprisonment. As the long, weary hours dragged by, he studied the matter with the utmost care, giving painstaking thought to the slightest details and the most trivial acts. His points were, consequently, well made. They were reasonable, logical, probable. The scheme broadened as he progressed. What he had supposed to be a mere matter of revenge now loomed up clearly and distinctly before him as a bold plot against himself—a piece of ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... his acts, gave the titles of books he read, and named the distinguished people he met. This diary is nearly as valuable as that of Samuel Pepys, save that unfortunately it does not record the inconsequential and amplify the irrelevant, for it is the seemingly trivial that pictures character. Godwin's diary forms a continuous history of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... add that none of the letters were intended for publication; they were written to near relatives and friends currente calamo, and are full of familiar expressions and allusions which may seem trivial and uninteresting to ordinary readers. Those, however, who care to study my sister's character I think cannot fail to trace in these records some of its strongest features; her keen enjoyment of the beauties of Nature,—her love for animals,—for her Home,—her lares and penates;—and ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... anything looks to me more likely, and less incredible, than that a man who could walk with God should only have a poor earthly life to do it in, and that all these aspirations, these emotions, should be bounded and ended by a trivial thing, that touches only the physical frame. Surely, surely, there is nothing so absurd as to believe that he who can say 'Thou art my God,' and who has said it, should ever by anything be brought to cease ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... when she does allow herself to talk she has the manner and accent of a refined lady. Yes, there is a deep mystery about her, which is utterly beyond my comprehension. I remember once when she had been talking for a long time about Guy and his wonderful qualities, I suddenly happened to ask her some trivial question about her life before she came to Chetwynde; but she looked at me so wild and frightened, that she really startled me. I was so terrified that I instantly changed the conversation, and rattled on so as to give her time to recover herself, and prevent ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... vain men—but to make him the companion in cause and in death of so many simple persons according to the world—old men, young men, and poor women—who in that same place (the Place de Greve) had endured fire and knife." D'Aubigne's narrative, as usual, is vivid, and mentions somewhat trivial details, which, however, are additional pledges of its accuracy; e.g., he alludes to the fact that, having spoken as above to those who stood on the side toward the river, he repeated his remarks to those on the other side of the Place de Greve, beginning ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... therefore, was nourished by the inspiring influences that come from the victorious struggle of a people to maintain their national life. He was by no means the only sculptor of his time whom fame remembers, but he alone, rejecting trivial themes, consecrated his talent to the nobler subjects of his country's religious life and the ideal conception of her protecting gods. No doubt, Phidias, like all who are born with the artistic temperament, would be interested from childhood in the progress of the splendid ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... short time, often only a few minutes, elapses before the confusion caused by the presence of the shadows of these generally unimportant features ceases to interfere with the observation, and we can distinguish between those details which are really noteworthy and others which are trivial and evanescent. Every formation we are studying should be observed, and drawn if possible, under many different conditions of illumination. It ought, in fact, to be examined from the time when its loftiest ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... city they are constantly exposed to its excitements, and subjected to the restraints of its artificial modes, with few outward influences to counteract upon their development; with very little, indeed, except the discipline and the affections of home to emancipate them from the tendencies to a trivial, artificial, and sordid life. They would gladly supply to them the healthful tone and vigor—the outer and inner bloom and freshness—which are the product of out-door life in the pure air of the country. But they ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... debate within himself. He felt that he ought to tell his new acquaintance that he knew who he was, that, however trivial their conversation might be, it somehow resembled eavesdropping to talk to a chance fellow-passenger as if he were a complete stranger. But it required again a certain effort ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... unpretentious country lane that the advent of the electric car had found it. When Carrados had taken in these details there seemed little else to notice. He was on the point of giving Harris the order to go on when his ear caught a trivial sound. ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... trivial instance has been dealt with at such length it is because, for one reason, it is typical of the foundation of so many of the Borgia legends, and, for another, because when history has been carefully sifted for evidence ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... wont to sit reading his prints, in the warm weather. The flowers and the hedges had grown to a certain wildness; and the smell of the American roses carried me back-as odours will-to long-forgotten and trivial scenes. Here I had been caned many a day for Mr. Daaken's reports, and for earlier offences. And I recalled my mother as she once ran out at the sound of my cries to beg me off. So vivid was that picture that I could hear Mr. Carvel say: ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... had given her his heart, and she had played with it. For her sake he had striven to be famous; for her alone had he toiled through dreary years in London, the goal her lap, in which he should one day place his book—a poor, trivial little work, he knew (yet much admired by the best critics). Never had his thoughts wandered for one instant of that time to another woman; he had been as faithful in life as in death; and now she came to the edge of the pool and peered down at his ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... Hotel de Rambouillet, by its ingenious absurdities. Their excellent design to refine the language, the manners, and even morality itself, branched out into every species of false refinement; their science ran into trivial pedantries, their style into a fantastic jargon, and their spiritualising delicacy into the very puritanism of prudery. Their frivolous distinction between the mind and the heart, which could not always be made to go together, often perplexed them ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... relations to each other. Its language, flavoured here and there with the phraseology of the novel, is consistently appropriate. The fourth and last act is feeble. Nobody can sympathise with "the late remorse of love" in a nature so trivial as that of Thornhill, and the incident of the reconciliation between Olivia and her husband, therefore, goes for nothing. It is the beautiful relation between the father and his daughter that animates the play. It is paternal love that thrills its ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... an extreme; and almost every action of their lives, however trivial, is more or less influenced by some superstitious notion. They believe in a good and evil spirit; and in a future state of rewards and punishments. They assert that the souls of persons deceased pass into another world, where ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... silly," said Patty, thoughtfully, "but I can't help feeling that Mabel not only wants me to visit her this summer, but she needs me. Now, I don't mean to be conceited, but, don't you know, you can tell when people seem to need you, if only in a trivial way." ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... big brothers respected him less than ever. To them flower-hunting, as an occupation, seemed trivial and effeminate. Flowers, though they were well enough in their proper places,—the front garden or the grass,—were usually a nuisance that crept through the crops and choked their growth, until descended upon and tediously jerked up, one ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... of a parish church is concerned with its internal economy but even the records of this are not quite trivial for they enlighten us on many points wherein we are rightly curious. We are, for instance, constantly reminded, as Dr. Gasquet points out in "Mediaeval Parish Life," that "religious life permeated society in the Middle Ages, particularly in the fifteenth century, through the minor confraternities" ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... accident that this nest of the ovenbird is discovered. The concealment could not be better. It is this peculiarity of nest construction — in shape like a Dutch oven — that has given the bird what DeKay considers its "trivial name." Not far from the nest the parent birds scratch about in the leaves like diminutive barnyard fowls, for the grubs and insects hiding under them. But at the first suspicion of an intruder their alarm becomes pitiful. Panic-stricken, they become fairly limp with fear, and drooping her wings ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... sense of shame that always overcomes us at the committal of any such trivial error, I stumbled hastily back, when my foot trod upon something that broke under my weight. I never let even small things pass without some notice. Stooping, then, for what I had thus inadvertently ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... Macartney, coffee-seller," to the care of the Dockgate-keeper, we had not much spare time left in which to stamp and post it, so we took leave of the owner of the pop-shop. He was now very unwilling to let us go. He did not ask another question about his mother, but he was consumed with trivial curiosity about us. Once again he alluded to Biddy. We were standing outside, and his eye fell upon ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... rueful, bloody stories Of Tyrants, Jacobites, and Tories: From liberty how angels fell, That now are galley-slaves in hell; How Nimrod first the trade began Of binding Slavery's chains on Man; How fell Semiramis—God damn her! Did first, with sacrilegious hammer, (All ills till then were trivial matters) For ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... observation of the vane in many different places, and the interchange of results by telegraph, would put the weather, as it were, in our power, by betraying its ambushes before it is ready to give the assault. At first sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial than the lives of those whose single achievement is to record the wind and the temperature three times a day. Yet such men are doubtless sent into the world for this special end, and perhaps there is no kind of accurate observation, whatever its object, that has not its ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... arrival, Brett was not idle. He visited a prominent jeweller in the Rue de la Paix, and, after making some trivial purchases, led the conversation to the question of diamonds. By skilful inquiry he ascertained a good deal about precious stones, both in their crude and their finished states. The accommodating Frenchman showed him a good many samples of ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... might promote each other's enjoyments, by living peaceably together, fall out in regard to some trivial misunderstanding, and engage in angry disputes, and a bitter warfare, disturbing the harmony of the neighborhood, and destroying their own happiness—the young who exercise practical observation, will be instructed, to avoid similar troubles in their own affairs. They will realize ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... the gold which it contained. The object of the theft was clearly determined, therefore, and this made it the more difficult to understand; for, after all, why should a man run so great a risk to secure so trivial a spoil? ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... as he sat by David's bedside, was David's attitude toward that threatened return of his. For David had opposed it, offering a dozen trivial, almost puerile reasons. Had shown indeed, a dogged obstinacy and an irritability that were somehow oddly like fear. David afraid! David, whose life and heart were open books! David, whose eyes ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... priceless boon, seems to shrink from conceding it to man—the invisible tribes that abhor him oppose themselves to the gain that might give them a master. The duller of those who were the life-seekers of old would have told you how some chance, trivial, unlooked-for, foiled their grand hope at the very point of fruition; some doltish mistake, some improvident oversight, a defect in the sulphur, a wild overflow in the quicksilver, or a flaw in the bellows, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the pleasure his society afforded, would anticipate the fitter mention to be made hereafter. But what in this respect distinguishes nearly all original men, he possessed eminently. His place was not to be filled up by any other. To the most trivial talk he gave the attraction of his own character. It might be a small matter,—something he had read or observed during the day, some quaint odd fancy from a book, a vivid little out-door picture, the laughing exposure of some imposture, or a burst of sheer mirthful enjoyment,—but of its kind ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... shortness of the time of their imprisonment. They had lived years in dread thought, and but a few hours in reality. They had suffered for the spans of lives to find that the clock had imperturbably registered brief intervals. They had played the gamut of dread, terror, and anguish, to learn how trivial, after ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... process? Shall we sit With memory, warming our weak hands at it, And say: "So be it; we have had one hour"? Surely the mountains are a better dower, With their dark scope and cloudy infinite, Than small perfection, trivial exquisite; 'Mid all that dark the ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... favour; whence is it that they are perpetually "going about to establish their own righteousness?" Why do they endeavour to persuade themselves that sin is a trifling concern, or that at least their sins are trivial and excusable? It is obvious, that they form very low and inadequate ideas of the greatness of their debt, and the utter worthlessness of their own merit—they do not realize their ruined and bankrupt ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... I believe that in London itself, in the heart of the civilised and religious world, she was going through trials which make mine, in the grim darkness of the Polar night, seem trivial and easy? ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... of droning speeches went on and on. Each tribe presented its claims, and metaphor shouldered metaphor. It sounded trivial as the bragging of blue-jays, but I interpreted carefully and kept the different headings in mind. Then I asked Cadillac's permission, and took ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... thing are all very well in their way, but one must live; he had wasted too much of his youth in solitude. O mihi proeteritos referat si Jupiter annos! Next session he would arrange things better. Success in examinations—what trivial fuss when one looked at it from the right point of view! And he had fretted himself into misery, because Chilvers had got ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... AEschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe,—these seven,—were the greatest of the great, up to the year 1800. They are not all equal in rank, and even in the work of that heptarchy of genius, there were trivial things to be found.... ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Government. After Judge Douglas has established this proposition, which nobody disputes or ever has disputed, he proceeds to assume, without proving it, that slavery is one of those little, unimportant, trivial matters which are of just about as much consequence as the question would be to me whether my neighbor should raise horned cattle or plant tobacco; that there is no moral question about it, but that it is altogether a matter of dollars and cents; that ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... and negligence. and made even their last efforts seem only the exuberances or flowering-off of a mind capable of higher excellencies, but unambitious to attain them. There was nothing to alarm or overpower. On whatever topic she touched, trivial or severe, it was alike en badinant; but in the midst of this sportiveness, her genius poured itself forth in a thousand delightful fancies, and scattered new graces and ornaments on every object within its sphere. In its ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... Geneva, in 1712, son of Isaac Rousseau and Susannah Bernard, citizens. My father's share of a moderate competency, which was divided among fifteen children, being very trivial, his business of a watchmaker (in which he had the reputation of great ingenuity) was his only dependence. My mother's circumstances were more affluent; she was daughter of a Mons. Bernard, minister, and possessed a considerable share of modesty and ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... frequently expressed in severe denunciation of any who presumed to entertain conservative views of the situation of affairs and who still hoped for conciliation and peace. Suspicions were often created by trivial but well-intended acts or remarks that were susceptible of a double construction, and loyal sentiment was often so pronounced in its denunciation of the South that no word or remark could be tolerated that by any possibility ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... virtually side by side in the same village. This, however, was in Champagne, not in Provence. Both families farmed vineyards for a once famous abbey in the vicinity of Epernay, early in the seventeenth century. To me, personally, this trivial discovery meant a great deal. It somehow aroused my interest in M. Zola and his works. Of the latter I had then only glanced through two or three volumes. With M. Zola himself I was absolutely unacquainted. However, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... England and all Europe, saving only the Frenchmen, worshipt almost, had this of the god-like in him: that he was impassible before victory, before danger, before defeat. Before the greatest obstacle or the most trivial ceremony; before a hundred thousand men drawn in battalia, or a peasant slaughtered at the door of his burning hovel; before a carouse of drunken German lords, or a monarch's court, or a cottage table where his plans ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... hair from a loved one long since passed away, is a little thing,—a very little thing in the eye of a stranger,—but in the eye of a loving friend it is above price. So some things in this work, apparently trivial to the general reader, may be highly prized by others. I will give, for ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... Most persons cherish prejudices, and think certain pursuits degrading or useless. Thus, business-men sneer at artists, and artists sneer at business-men. Jefferson had nothing of this. He understood and appreciated the value of every employment. No knowledge was too trivial for him; with the same affectionate interest, he observed the courses of the winds and the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... in Germany; and now comes the oratorio in England,—the oratorio as we know it and hear it to-day. Handel was its great originator. He began his English career as an operatic writer; but he soon tired of setting music to the trivial subjects so common in opera, which, as he himself declared, were not suited to a composer advancing in years. There were other inducements, however, which led him to turn to the oratorio, and among them one of the most powerful unquestionably was his disgust with the cabals which were organized against ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... their still, enigmatic gaze, was subtly conscious of an odd sense of repulsion, almost amounting to dread, and then Elisabeth, making some trivial observation as she moved nearer to the fire, smiled across at her, and, in the extraordinary charm of her smile, the momentary sensation of ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... attacked on ground where his troops could not deploy, but with extreme coolness and judgment beat off the enemy. To cover thirty-two miles in a day and fight a way out of an ambuscade in the evening is an ordeal for any leader and for any troops. Two killed and seven wounded were our trivial losses in a situation which might have been a serious one. The Boers appear to have been the escort of a strong convoy which had passed along the road some miles in front. Next morning both convoy and opposition had disappeared. The cavalry rode on amid ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle |
