"Inessential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... principles are involved, where great movements are under way which promise much for the welfare of humanity by reason of the very fact that many other nations have given such movements their actual support, we ought not to withhold our own sanction because of any small and inessential difference, but only upon the ground of the most important and compelling fundamental reasons. We can not barter away our independence or our sovereignty, but we ought to engage in no refinements of logic, no sophistries, and no subterfuges, to argue away ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... in addition to the convictions which all mystics share, we find, in many of them, other convictions of a more local and temporary character, which no doubt become amalgamated with what was essentially mystical in virtue of their subjective certainty. We may ignore such inessential accretions, and confine ourselves to the beliefs which all ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. And making some deductions for a child's morbid attraction to tombstones, and a child's natural interest in children, it seems to me even now that this innocent impression is the true one. It eliminates the inessential and preserves the proportions; above all, it preserves the figure of ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... stated; neither turns upon any disclosure of bygone events or emotions. We are, indeed, afforded brief glimpses into the past both of Stensgaard and of Stockmann; but the glimpses are incidental and inessential. It is certainly no mere coincidence that if one were asked to pick out the pieces of thinnest texture in all Ibsen's mature work, one would certainly select these two plays. Far be it from me to disparage An Enemy of the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... All in all, however, the Keys are singularly shallow and agreeably bland. Curll simply agrees with Gulliver-Swift, and reinforces the meaning by practically repeating the text, as he does at this point when deploring inessential differences in ritual as needless causes of cruel conflict. Although Curll was aware of the presence of politics and religion in Swift's allegories, his annotations do not reflect ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... with a shining falchion it affrights into their natal darkness the monstrous forms of despair, and lends to all work a secret charm of chivalry. It sustains that high anticipatory mood to which life is but a preparation, and the bees buzzing round the honey-flowers seem poor things toiling for an inessential gain. Because it is mystic and transcendental it is the predestined guide of all whom fate holds removed from earthly love. This is the old device of the world's failures, you say, to trick themselves out in Plato's mantle or the schoolman's ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith |
