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Unessential   Listen
noun
Unessential  n.  Something not constituting essence, or something which is not of absolute necessity; as, forms are among the unessentials of religion.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Unessential" Quotes from Famous Books



... tale which Giovanni Verga wrote and which supplied the librettists, G. Targioni-Tozzetti and G. Menasci, with the plot of Mascagni's opera. Sententious as the opera seems, it is yet puffed out, padded, and bedizened with unessential ornament compared with the story. This has the simplicity and directness of a folk-tale or folk-song, and much of its characteristic color and strength were lost in fitting it out for music. The ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... stared slightly at the unessential query. "Don't know,—one of the river miners, I reckon. It's an urgent case. I'll go and get everything ready. You'd better," he added, with an ominous glance at her gray frock, "put something over ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte

... little French knots, and elaborate little buttonholes that would never see a button, a large and fine piece of embroidery on which she had been working for many months. She had that decadent love of minute finish in the unessential so often seen in persons of a ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson

... imagine myself sitting in an office and dealing with such unessential things as stocks and bonds.... And ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead

... noticed it and misunderstood the cause, for he added in parenthetical explanation: "Yes, the man whose portmanteau you took charge of is dead; but you did your duty, Mr. Trent, in the matter, although the recovery of the portmanteau was unessential ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... combination arose, first, Pulci's determination to write a poem of a mixed order, which should retain for him the ear of the many, and at the same time give rise to a poetry of romance worthy of higher auditors; second, his banter of what he considered unessential and injurious dogmas of belief, in favour of those principles of the religion of charity which inflict no contradiction on the heart and understanding; third, the trouble which seems to have been given him by critics, "sacred and profane," in consequence of these originalities; ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... op. 2, No. 2, Largo; the unessential details omitted in the following (in order to economize space) appear, of course, in the original,—to which the ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius

... not sick, are not good for nothing, are not childless, and, therefore, do not consult physicians; but the reasoning which shall judge and weigh the facts presented, assigning to each its proper value, and, discarding unessential elements, shall draw a just conclusion, is not limited ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... the details after I returned to my normal state. And of course he laughed good-naturedly at what he called my foolery. Yet I could distinctly remember that in my Adam Strang adventure I had frequently played chess. The trouble was that whenever I came back to consciousness in solitary, unessential and intricate details faded from ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... renders Religion more burdensome and difficult than it is in its own Nature, betrays many into Sins of Omission which they could not otherwise be guilty of, and fixes the Minds of the Vulgar to the shadowy unessential Points, instead of the more weighty and more important Matters ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... he notes that the greater part of the cones, all those of small size, are made up of finely divided rock, which may have been more or less cemented by the processes of change which go on within it. It is thus clear that the lava flows are unessential—indeed, we may say accidental—contributions to the mass. In the case of Vesuvius they certainly do not amount to as much as one tenth of the elevation due to the volcanic action. The share of the lava in Vesuvius is probably greater than the average, for during the ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... practised so rigidly, which was so elastic to cover little pleasures and the minor comforts of life, broke like a cobweb when she tried to stretch it over larger needs and desires. The severity of her self-denial was directed entirely against the trivial and the unessential. With regard to the indispensable materials for happiness, she seemed to feel that she possessed an unquestionable right to enjoy them at any cost; and she had reassured Gabriella with an optimism which appeared perfectly genuine. After talking to her the girl ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... metaphysical and over-fine. What he means for his more elevated characters are tiresome with something of that melodramatic sentimentality with which Mr. Dickens has infected so much of the lighter literature of the day. Here and there the style suffers from that overmuchness of unessential detail and that exaggeration of particulars which Mr. Dickens brought into fashion and seems bent on wearing out of it,—a style which is called graphic and poetical by those only who do not see that it is the cheap substitute, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... without cause—that the type of photoplay comedy-dramas originated by Douglas Fairbanks are less than one-half action, the rest being merely clever but often unessential sub-titling. While this criticism is rather severe, it cannot be denied that certain stories of the kind mentioned, featuring this star and others, have been far too dependent for their appeal to the spectator upon the humorous, epigrammatic sayings of ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... him is for the most part an unessential ornament; its songs are frequently wholly episodical, without reference to the action, and more distinguished for brilliancy than for sublimity and true inspiration. "The Chorus," says Aristotle, "must be considered ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... shall not do so, is for the reason that while theoretically I recognize the important part that breeding plays in all animal production, for the practical proposition of producing poultry products at the lowest possible cost, a knowledge of the technical science of breeding is unessential and may, by diverting the poultryman's time to unprofitable ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings

... in 1852, stated that Malay can be written or spoken without the least difficulty, without a word of Sanskrit or Arabic, and described the foreign elements in Malay as "extrinsic and unessential."[14] But several words of the first necessity are Sanskrit. It would be difficult to speak Malay intelligibly, while avoiding the use of the relative pronouns yang (Sansk. yas, ya, yat, who, which) and mana (Sansk. mna, measure), or of the common auxiliary ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell

... is not a question of what I want. I was not put here in the world to frivol through a life of gross pleasure. I have serious work to do in the service of humankind, and I can do it only by rigid concentration and ruthless elimination of the unessential. Surely ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... left at Greenwich Observatory, for the information of Sir George Airy, the astronomer-royal, a similar document, still preserved among the archives. A fortnight afterwards Airy wrote asking for information about a point in the solution. Adams, who thought the query unessential, did not reply, and Airy for some months took no steps to verify by telescopic search the results of the young mathematician's investiation. Meanwhile, Leverrier, on the 10th of November 1845, presented to the French Academy a memoir on Uranus, showing that the existing ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... this unessential sort dribbled on for a considerable time. Everybody was tired out by now, except Joan. The tribunal prepared to rise. At this point Cauchon forbade Joan to try to escape from prison, upon pain of being held guilty of the crime of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... those which are not common to all the things to which the name applies. Thus a particular complexion, colour, height, creed, nationality cannot form any part of the intension of the term 'man.' But among the attributes common to a class we cannot distinguish between essential and unessential, except by the aid of definition itself. Formal logic cannot recognise any order of priority between the attributes common to all the members of a class, such as to necessitate our recognising some as genera and differentiae ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin

... really helped him over many dangers. His discrimination had none of the hair-splitting sophistry of the ancient teachers. He despised useless subtleties, and, with admirable tact, let go what seemed to him unessential; but, if he was not to lose his faith or his reason, he could do nothing, after all, but found the new doctrine on words and conditions of life fifteen hundred years old, and in some cases he became the victim of what his adversary ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... all forms of military doctrine, and the greatest of these is frightening. Ares, the god of war, has two satellites, Terror and Affright. Fear is the Gorgon's head. The serpents are very real, very effective, in their way, but logically they are unessential tresses. The Gorgon stares you out of countenance, and that suffices. The object is the removal of an obstacle. Killing and wounding are but means to an end. Hand-to-hand fighting is rare, and it would be easy to count the instances in which cavalry meets the shock of cavalry. Crossing ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve

... literature" with a morbid avidity, as if it had been a drug; and a drug it is—a drug dulling one to all fine and fresh sensations—a drug from the effects of which I am only now, at this late hour, beginning slowly to recover. They set one upon a completely wrong track, bringing forward what is unessential and throwing what is essential into thebackground. Dear heavens! how well I recall those grey discriminations. Wordsworth was the fellow who hit upon the idea of the anima mundi. Shelley's "philosophy ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... hundred times in miniature, in one denomination after another; special talent is restricted to a narrow field; buildings and church-plants are multiplied, but lie largely disused; sects and communities are at loggerheads on unessential points; all this—and the world is not being saved! The Church fails to see openings for aggressive work; it fails to seize strategic points; it does not carry a well-knit local organization, with a husbanding of economic force; it does not front the world in dead-earnest; it is not proud and ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... is a person who sees everything in its wrong proportions," she answered. "He mistakes the essential for the unessential, and vice versa. He can never recognize the beauty in art or nature, because he can never get any further than the unpleasant details. One might call him a mental earth-worm who has only the smallest possible outlook. Mr. ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie

... providential that the published statement of the Governor-General can be checked not only by an account which Rizal secretly sent to friends, but also by the candid memoranda contained in the untruthful executive's own secret folios. While some unessential details of Rizal's career are in doubt, not a point vital to establishing his good name lacks proof that his character was exemplary and that he is worthy of the hero-worship which ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig

... English heathen. But from the very beginning the Church of England has retained the traces of her early origin, when Gregory the Great was Pope, when the claim to be universal bishop was deemed untenable, when even the ritual of the Mass was still in unessential details flexible. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... kept on repeating to myself, "They will not sign, they will not sign," and intellectually I believed my own words. And yet I was continually imagining the war already over and what I merely thought seemed unessential and irrelevant. The stress of wild hopes and mental agitation became almost ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt

... one rather remarkable fact to be observed in this picture and many Venetian works, and this is that the most accented edges are reserved for unessential parts, like the piece of white drapery on the lower arm of the girl with the cymbals, and the little white flower on the boy's head in front. The edges on the flesh are everywhere fused and soft, the draperies being much sharper. You may notice ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... substance containing the effective principle in a much more concentrated form than the original glycerine solution. For application in practice this purification of the glycerine extract offers no advantage, because the substances so eliminated are unessential for the human organism. The process of purification would make the cost of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various

... phenomena of the universe. On the other hand, if the teleologist assert that this, that, or the other result of the working of any part of the mechanism of the universe is its purpose and final cause, the mechanist can always inquire how he knows that it is more than an unessential incident—the mere ticking of the clock, which he mistakes for its function. And there seems to be no reply to this inquiry, any more than to the further, not irrational, question, why trouble one's self about matters which are out of reach, when the working of the mechanism itself, which is of infinite ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... d'Escouchy (ii., 222) gives all the vows as though made then, and differs in many unessential points ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... doubt he is the wiser for his experience, and for the lesson which Hewitt did not forget to rub well in: that it is useless and worse to place a confidential matter in the hands of a man of Hewitt's profession, and at the same time withhold particulars of the case, however unessential ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison

... growth. I knew that the pain I felt was the after effect of a craving now grown useless and that I should no longer be sensible of it as soon as I considered what had been attained, and desisted from the unessential and unattainable. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... long ago (the precise date is unessential) the lochs round the island of Lewis were invariably, at the herring season, visited by magnificent shoals of fish, while not a tail was ever seen to twinkle in the spacious waters of Loch Broom. Abundance on one ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... essentials of piano technic and piano playing? Surely they must know these things if any one can know them. They can tell, if they will, what to do and what to avoid, what to exclude as unnecessary or unessential and what ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower

... learned, much to his surprise, from Arthur Berkeley, that Ernest was angry at his treatment of the Schurzian leader: 'My dear Le Breton, I enclose cheque for eight guineas, for your two articles. I hope you didn't mind the way I was obliged to cut them up in some unessential details, so as to suit the policy of the paper. I kept whatever was really most distinctive as embodying special information in them. You know we are above all things strictly moderate. Please ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... a penetrating and sympathetic imagination that gave him his unerring grasp of character, that enabled him to seize upon the significant elements of a personality, to divine the attitude and the gesture that should reveal it, to eliminate the unessential, to present to us the man. This is the imagination of the portrait-painter, and Saint-Gaudens has shown it again and again, in many of his reliefs and memorial tablets, above all in his portrait statues. He showed it conclusively in so early ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox

... circumcised according to the Mosaic Law, and they insisted on the circumcision of the Gentile converts also, as a mark of Christian fraternity. Paul, emancipated from Jewish prejudices and customs, regarded this rite as unessential; he believed that it was abrogated by Christ, with other technical observances of the Law, and that it was not consistent with the liberty of the Gospel to impose rites exclusively Jewish on the Pagan converts. The elders at Jerusalem, good ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord

... first nor the only one in Greece who had taught "new gods." That he in particular was called on to drink the hemlock was due to reasons of State policy, which had but a very slight and unessential relation to the acts of sacrilege of which he was accused. It may be added that this Greek promulgator of new gods is among the German peoples fairly matched by John Huss and thousands of other ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... not the U-bars act with the horizontal and diagonal steel to form truss systems is relatively unessential; in all probability there is some such action, which contributes somewhat to the total strength, but at most it is of minor importance. Mr. Godfrey's points as to fallacy of truss action seem to be well taken, but his ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey

... this sense that Shakespeare's productions are most dramatic; he wins the reader by his mode of treatment, of disclosing man's innermost life; the demands of the stage appear unessential to him, and thus he takes an easy course, and, in an intellectual sense, we serenely follow him. We transport ourselves with him from one locality to another; our imagination supplies all the intermediate actions ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... the writer seizes on the one or two salient points of each game, omitting what is unessential. This requires judgment and the effort to do it is a good ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller

... reproduction of natural fact nor even of visual fact, but at the transference to another mind of his own mental condition—his inner judgment as to "things seen"—by means of necessarily imperfect pictorial mimicry. He must therefore avoid startling or abnormal truthfulness of observation of the unessential and even more strictly must he refuse to make his picture a scientific diagram demonstrating what "is" rather than what is "seen" or is "thought to have ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... of appreciation to be discussed is the appreciation of humor. Perhaps this does not belong with the other type, but it certainly has many of the same characteristics. Calkins defines a sense of humor as "enjoyment of an unessential incongruity.... This incongruity must be, as has been said, an unessential one, else the mood of the observer changes from happiness to unhappiness, and the comic becomes the pathetic. A fall on the ice which seemed to offer only a ludicrous ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy

... they are seldom aware what it is that constitutes the inspiring power of their beliefs. Generally, at least in the first instance, they take their creed in gross, without distinguishing between essential and unessential elements. They confuse, in one general consecration of reverence, its primary principles, and the local and temporary accidents of the form in which it was first presented to them, and they are as ready to accept battle a l'outrance for some useless outwork as for the citadel ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... particles still suspended in the air. But at present the term "smoke" is applied to solid particles produced by combustion only, and "dust" to particles owing their floating existence to some other cause. This is evidently an unessential distinction, and for the present I shall use either term without distinction, meaning by dust or smoke, solid particles floating in the air. Then "fog"; this differs from smoke only in the fact that the particles ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various

... essential that such demands should be cooerdinated, but that some central committee should be able to say how large was the total supply of any sort of materials, how soon they could be produced, and to prevent the waste of such materials in unessential production. If the army was decentralized, American industry as a whole was in a state of complete chaos, so far as any central organization was concerned. On the side of business every firm in every line of production was competing in the manufacture ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour

... that bind us together are so compelling, after all, that any new experiences brought by our freedom must seem absolutely unessential in comparison. Don't you realize that as I do? And we shouldn't have to consider what people may say. I think we have the right to place ourselves on a somewhat higher level. In the last instance, we must always belong together, even if a single tie should be severed among the hundreds that unite ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler

... essentials is but a part of it. The war has, of course, emphasized this, and this idea of saving has served the purpose of awakening an interest in the whole theory and purpose of work. There is a better understanding of values, and of the difference between the essential and the unessential, and we see that not all labor that commands pay is useful labor. Many things that the public knew but little about before are becoming better understood. Industry, finance, business, taxes, transportation, have all to some extent become popular subjects. The present high cost of living ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge

... fond of snuff, in "Kidnapped," and, in the "Master of Ballantrae," Sir William Johnson, the English Governor. They are the work of a mind as attentive to details, as ready to subordinate or obliterate details which are unessential. Thus Mr. Stevenson's writings breathe equally of work in the study and of inspiration from adventure in the open air, and thus he wins every vote, and pleases ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... write pulling letters weigh carefully every sentence, not only pruning away every unessential word but using words of Anglo-Saxon origin wherever possible rather than words of Latin derivation. "Indicate your selection" was written as the catch line for a letter in an important selling campaign, but the head correspondent with unerring decision re-wrote it—"Take your choice"—a ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous

... prompted it may be understood by all who love him and who stand every other music, so long as it is real music. Immediately after listening to "Tristan and Isolda" all other operas seem away from the point, to be concerned with the secondary issues of life, to babble without fervour or directness of unessential matters. This does not mean that "Tristan" is greater than "Don Giovanni" or the "Matthew" Passion—for it is not—but that it speaks to each of us in the most modern language of the most engrossing subject in the ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... be noted, however, of Nelson, that this accuracy of mental perception, this power of penetrating to the root of a matter, disregarding unessential details and fastening solely on decisive features, was largely dependent upon the necessity laid upon him for action; which is probably equivalent to saying that it was usually elicited by a sobering ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... making our extracts shall pursue the order of topics rather than of time. By the middle of April the question of the Church had presented itself so unmistakably to Isaac Hecker, as the necessary preliminary to further progress—to be settled in one way or another, either set definitely aside as unessential or else accepted as the adequate solution of man's problems, that his struggles for and against it recur with especial frequency. Faber has said somewhere that the Church is the touchstone of rational humanity, and that probably no adult passes out of life without having once, at least, ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... painting their own country beautifully, Claude was living in Rome, creating imaginary landscapes. He called his pictures by the names of Scriptural incidents, and placed figures in the foreground as small and unessential as those of Turner. These classical landscapes, with their palaces and great flights of steps leading down to some river's edge, and the sea in the distance covered with boats carrying fantastic sails, never for ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway

... go, and in case we did not happen on the narrow descent to the Hut, the food was apportioned to last for five days. Everything unessential was stripped off the sledge, including dip-circle, thermometers, hypsometer, camera, spare clothing and most of the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... taketh love Most simply, with the rind thereof; A boy's young fancy tasteth more The rind, than the deific core. Ah, Sweet! to cast away the slips Of unessential rind, and lips Fix on the immortal core, is well; But heard'st thou ever any tell Of such a fool would take for food Aspect and scent, however good, Of sweetest core Love's orchards grow? Should such a phantast please him so, Love where Love's reverent ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson

... themselves into a consistently organised scheme. Then became apparent the value of his knowledge of the details of so many different sides of Christian verity. Buried in the details, he had hitherto ignored the fact that they were only the unessential developments of certain component parts. Awakening to the perception of the whole after an intimate acquaintance with the details, he was able to realise the position and meaning of all that he had hitherto experienced in a way which has been vouchsafed to few, if any others. Thus he became ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler

... disillusioned because it is able to see, beneath the chaotic litter and unessential debris of "matter," the eternal idea of "matter" and because it is able to see, under the lamentable repulsiveness and offensiveness of so much actual flesh and blood, "the eternal idea ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... day, he earns the repute of artistic depravity in the eyes of the next generation. The novel may become a classic, because it represents human nature, or even the whimsicalities of a period; but the illustrations of the artist only provoke a smile, because he has represented merely the unessential and the fleeting. The interest in his work is archaeological, not artistic. The genius of the great portrait-painter may to some extent overcome the disadvantages of contemporary costume, but if the costume of his period is hideous and lacks the essential lines of beauty, his work is liable to need ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... believe. God forbid that we should rob our message of one tittle of its essential truth. But may He enable us to discriminate more and more, and lead us to cease encumbering our gospel to the East with such unessential thought and ritual as are suited to us ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones

... multifarious formation of the same organ in the Animal Kingdom, it furnishes us at the same time with the means, by the comparison of these various forms, of recognising the truly essential, the type of these organs, and separating therefrom everything unessential. In this, developmental history serves it as a check or test. Thus, as the idea of development is not that of mere increase of size, but that of progress from what is not yet distinguished, but which potentially contains the distinction in itself, ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller

... the way And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light. Our prison strong, this huge convex of fire, Outrageous to devour, immures us round Ninefold; and gates of burning adamant, Barred over us, prohibit all egress. These passed, if any pass, the void profound Of unessential Night receives him next, Wide-gaping, and with utter loss of being Threatens him, plunged in that abortive gulf. If thence he scape, into whatever world, Or unknown region, what remains him less Than unknown dangers, and as hard escape? But I should ill become ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... since strangeness is not in the nature of a thing, but in its relation to something extrinsic—in this case an unessential observer." ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... exist in the case of the suckling mother and her infant. The mother is indebted to the child for the pleasurable relief of her distended breasts; and, while in civilization more subtle pleasures and intelligent reflection render this massive physical satisfaction comparatively unessential to the act of suckling, in more primitive conditions and among animals the need of this pleasurable physical satisfaction is a real bond between the mother and her offspring. The analogy is indeed very close: the erectile nipple corresponds to the erectile penis, the eager ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... the ropes as well as far older men. You got just the right evidence out of your witnesses, and not a bit of superfluous rubbish. That's the mistake most young men make. They bury their testimony in unessential details, I tell you, those two children were worth all the rest put together. Did you send them to the country on purpose to get that kind ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford

... King of the Jews."—No two of the Gospel-writers give the same wording of the title or inscription placed by Pilate's order above the head of Jesus on the cross; the meaning, however, is the same in all, and the unessential variation is evidence of individual liberty among the recorders. It is probable that there was actual diversity in the trilingual versions. John's version is followed in the common abbreviations used in connection with Roman Catholic figures of Christ: J. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... Of one whom I had honored among men The least, and on regarding him again Would not have had him in another place, He fitted with an unfamiliar grace The coffin where I could not see him then As I had seen him and appraised him when I deemed him unessential to ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson

... retained a vital faith in the Christian religion. He reacted against the Calvinism of his youth to almost as great a degree as did some of the New England poets. He at times felt keenly the narrowness and bigotry of the church — the warring of the sects over the unessential points.* In his thinking he found no place for the rigid and severe creed which dominated his youth. He gave up the forms, not the spirit, of worship. He lived the abundant life, and all of the roads which he traveled led to God. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... The story of the wax tapers is related both by Asser and William of Malmesbury, differing a little in the unessential parts of it. It is this: Alfred commanded six wax tapers to be made, each 12 inches in length, and of as many ounces in weight. On these tapers he caused the inches to be regularly marked; and having found ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... is healthy in as far as it insists on truth, has become unhealthy, in as far as it confounds truth with familiarity, and predominance of unessential details. There are other truths besides coats and waistcoats, pots and pans, drawlng-rooms and suburban villas. Life has other aims besides these which occupy the conversation of "Society." And the painter who devotes years to a work representing modern life, yet ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes

... German plan of conjuring things up "from the depths of his inward consciousness." The moment our author quits this sure ground, her touch becomes uncertain and her colors inharmonious. Character-painting is unessential to a romance, belonging as it does properly to the novel of actual life, in which the romantic element is equally out of place. Fielding, accordingly, the greatest artist in character since Shakspeare, hardly admits sentiment, and never romance, into his master-pieces. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... succeeded. The interest of the play never ceases for a moment; the simple situation is exposed, developed, and closed with all the refinements of art; nothing is omitted that is essential, nothing that is unessential is introduced. Racine has studiously avoided anything approaching violent action or contrast or complexity; he has relied entirely for his effect upon his treatment of a few intimate human feelings interacting among themselves. The strain and press of the outer world—that outer world which ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... societies, and to a sort of natural exogamy produced by practically the same set of conditions as I have already described. Mr. Lang's totemism began in the primary groups, and began with exogamy as a necessary part of it. "Unessential to my system," says Mr. Lang, "is the question how the groups got animal names, as long as they got them, and did not remember how they got them, and as long as the names according to their way of thinking indicated ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... of the marine structures were throughout built of stone, as in Dr. Munro's theory, which is used as the fundamental assumption in this book; or whether they were of wood, as in the hypothesis of Mr. Donnelly, illustrated by him in the Glasgow Evening Times (Sept. 11, 1905). The point seems unessential. The author learns from Mr. Donnelly that experiments in shaping piles with an ancient stone axe have been made by Mr. Joseph Downes, of Irvine, as by Monsieur Hippolyte Muller in France, with similar results, a fact which should have ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang

... presentation of the complexity of life. On the other hand the Greeks are free from that dominance of the abnormal which is one danger of modern literature; they do not explore sexual and other aberrations or encourage their readers to explore them. They are also free from that dominance of the unessential, which, in life as in literature, is a more innocent but more subtle and perhaps equally ruinous vice. That is why their simplicity is refreshing and salutary. Porro unum necessarium. In life human beings return from a distracting variety ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... manifestation that Figure is an unessential variation in syllogistic form; and the consequent absurdity of Reducing the syllogisms of the other figures to ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... things is rendered possible by the fact that the duties of the police are not confined to matters affecting crime and public order—matters which the whole community consider essential, and in regard to which any police negligence is counted a serious charge—but are extended to unessential matters which a considerable section of the community, including many of the police themselves, view with complete indifference. It is impossible to regard seriously a conspiracy to defeat laws which a large proportion ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... he died, 1797, Prussia was riding to a fall; and disregarding plain measures for her own safety, she had reached the sad place where the sturdy old Prussian spirit of prudence and independence had become so compromised that Prussia almost deemed it unessential to preserve her ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... the age, and our contemporaries are the people, that bring into prominence the little worries, that cause the tempest in the teapot, that bring about the worship of the intangible, and the magnification of the unessential. If we had lived in another epoch we might have dreamt of the eternal happiness of saving our neck, but in this one we fret because our collar does not fit it, and because the button that holds the collar has rolled ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James

... her. Those awesome Archives! The reports of the Council of Ten alone stretch away through vasty halls of death. And then people talk of writing history! How fortunate that the exact details of royal, political and military events are as unessential as they are unattainable! Real history consists mainly of the things that haven't happened—the millions of everyday lives, sunrise and sunset, ships and harvests, the winds and the rain, and the bargains ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... all sketches will not bear elaboration if their merit depends on extreme licence, for instance. Next, that a man who had a standard of proportion could see wherein the deviations of his sketched figure were essential to the effect he wished it to produce, and wherein they were unessential. Then, if he drew the normal figure large, he would be able to deviate from it in exactly the right places and to the right degree to reproduce the desired effect. But to do this he must also have a general notion of how deviations from a normal proportion could be ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore



Words linked to "Unessential" :   nonessential, accessorial, essentiality, extrinsic, incidental, essential, expendable, adscititious, secondary, unimportant, unneeded, unnecessary, essentialness, dispensable



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