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More "Insignificance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Santo Domingo had passed the zenith of its glory. The vast and wealthy countries discovered and conquered on the mainland of America absorbed the attention of colonists and of the government, and Santo Domingo quickly sank to a position of economic and political insignificance. So little importance was given the island by chroniclers during the ensuing two hundred and fifty years and so few are the records remaining, that not even the names of all the governors and the periods of their rule can be accurately determined. The colony barely existed, the monotony of ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... preferred that he should have returned with him to England, but Harold finally decided upon remaining. In war men's passions become heated, the original cause of quarrel sinks into comparative insignificance, and the desire for victory, the determination to resist, and a feeling of something like individual hatred for the enemy become ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... this unfortunate period sinks into insignificance compared with the destruction of the greater part of the Greek race by the savage incursions of the Seljouk Turks in Asia Minor. Then followed the Crusades, the first three inflicting permanent ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... the kind with which providence endows millions of foolish people, apparently by way of preventing them from realising their insignificance, or, at the worst, making their smallness tolerable. It arose from knowledge of the great and inexhaustible treasure of love which was hers to bestow; so convinced was she of the value of this wealth, that she ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... inwardly with the desire to find out something, but obviously intimidated by the little man's overwhelming air of unconcern. When talking with this comrade—which happened but rarely—the big Ossipon suffered from a sense of moral and even physical insignificance. However, he ventured another question. "Did you walk ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... with a pie's nest to maintain it withal."—STOWE: Edward IV.—Warkworth Chronicle.] The politic king, in thus depriving Montagu of the wealth and the retainers of the Percy, reduced him, as a younger brother, to a comparative poverty and insignificance, which left him dependent on Edward's favour, and deprived him, as he thought, of the power of active mischief; at the same time more than ever he insisted on Montagu's society, and summoning his attendance at the court, kept his ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... these beings faded into insignificance compared with the first sight of the genuine Lunatics, or men in the moon, "four feet high, covered, except in the face, with short, glossy, copper-colored hair," and "with wings composed of a thin membrane, without ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... pause to muse upon Dunolly, with its dreams of other days. As we sweep round the base of the promontory, a scene bursts on our view so wildly grand that any single feature of the imposing landscape shrinks abashed and owns its insignificance. We are making direct for the entrance to the Sound of Mull; but behind and to the north of us is stretched out a panorama of rock and hill and deeply indented coast of incomparable grandeur. To the left of us rise the rugged and desolate shores of Mull, while far away to the northeast ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... not attempt to describe these paltry productions in detail; there is necessarily a great variety throughout the island, but their insignificance does not entitle them to a description which would raise them ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... had he seen that small-featured, conscientious little face? He seemed to associate it with some agreeable and not very distant episode; yet its intelligent insignificance was so overshadowed by the pleasantness of the episode itself, that he now tried in vain to identify it with a searchlight of recognition. "I give up," he said to himself discontentedly. "Maybe it'll come to me later." And then, suddenly, ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... immersion he was revealed to be a dog weighing about one-fourth of what an observer of Duke, when Duke was dry, must have guessed his weight to be. His wetness and the disclosure of his extreme fleshly insignificance appeared to mortify him profoundly. He wept. But, presently, under Penrod's thorough ministrations—for the young master was inclined to make this bath last as long as possible—Duke plucked up a heart and began a series of passionate attempts to close the interview. As this ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... black and red ones; we shall not measure the white; not sweep our glance along it as we do along the red and the black. And as ceteris paribus our tense awareness of active states always throws into insignificance a passive state sandwiched between them; so, bent as we are upon our red and black extensions, and their comparative lengths and directions, we shall treat the uninteresting white extensions as a blank, a gap, as that which separates the objects of ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... go into the woods and live in misery. I instilled courage into your hearts in order that this Bhima who is possessed of the strength of ten thousand elephants and whose prowess and manliness are widely known, might not sink into insignificance and ruin. I instilled courage into your hearts in order that this Vijaya, who was born after Bhimasena, and who is equal unto Vasava himself might not be cheerless. I instilled courage into your hearts in order that Nakula and Sahadeva, who are always devoted to their seniors, might ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... hardly worth mentioning. It was a sort of threat wrapped up, I believe, in genuine anxiety as to what might happen to my youthful insignificance. If I hadn't been rather on the alert just then I wouldn't even have perceived the meaning. But really an allusion to 'hot Southern blood' I could have only one meaning. Of course I laughed at it, but only ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... as to situation, surroundings, and general charm and grace. This no one would attempt to deny; but, in another environment, how different might it not appear,—as for instance placed beside Amiens, where in one particular alone, the mere height of nave and choir, it immediately dwindles into insignificance. Under such conditions its graceful spire becomes dwarfed and attenuated. Need more be said?—The writer thinks not, since the present work does not deal with the comparative merits of any two cathedrals or of national types; ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... ministers, then, and then only, I shall be inclined to bestow on him the praises he will have merited, and I shall even in that case deem that every good citizen in this assembly is his equal. The people only is great, is worthy in my eyes; the toys of ministerial power fade into insignificance before it. It is out of respect for people, for the minister himself, that I demand that his presence here be not marked by any of those homages that mark the decay of public feeling. He asks us to counsel the ministers; I ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... been capable of. Giving the nurse some directions in regard to the child, she hastily descended the stairs, and seizing a hat and jacket from the rack in the hall, ran immediately with Dinah to the scene of the tragedy. Before the thought of this violent death all her aunt's faults faded into insignificance, and only her good qualities were remembered. She had reared Olivia; she had stood up for the memory of Olivia's mother when others had seemed to forget what was due to it. To her niece she had been a second mother, and had never been ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... much less hands, on the princess. Count Zerbst's smooth pink face flushed rose-pink all round his fierce little mustache, which in some inexplicable, but unfortunate, fashion accentuated the extraordinary insignificance of his nose; his small eyes sparkled; and he muttered fiercely something about "sdradegy." He looked at Miss Lambart very unamiably. He felt that she was not impressed by him as were the maidens of Cassel-Nassau; and he resented it. He resolved to capture ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... she has the brains they have not, although she conceals her superiority from them admirably: her pride and love of power demand that she shall be La Favorita, although her caballeros must weary her. If she made them feel their insignificance for a moment they would fly to the standard of her rival, Valencia Menendez, and her regalities would be gone forever. A few men have gone honestly wild over her, but I doubt if any one has ever really loved her. Such women receive a surfeit of admiration, but little ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... production and adheres to the real. In the artist is a double tendency, toward the perfection of the type and toward the representation of natural reality. He should not fall into the abstraction of the type, nor into the insignificance of empirical reality. Schleiermacher feels all the difficulty of such a problem as whether there be one or several ideals of the human figure. This problem may be transferred to the sphere of art, and we ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... thought it needful to solicit the prayers of the Churches that "the word of the Lord might run, and have free course," how earnest ought our entreaties to be of all friends of missions to "pray for us," who, if we feel aright, must feel our own insignificance, in our labours among the heathen, and in our services to the Christian church, when compared with the labours of the Apostles, or with those of a Swartz, ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... now at hand before which the Public Worship Regulation Act and the Slave Circular paled into insignificance. ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... [Footnote: "The Jesuits in America."] Throughout a wide semicircle around their cantons they had made the forest a solitude,—destroyed the Hurons, exterminated the Neutrals and the Eries, reduced the formidable Andastes to a helpless insignificance, swept the borders of the St. Lawrence with fire, spread terror and desolation among the Algonquins of Canada; and now, tired of peace, they were seeking, to borrow their own savage metaphor, new nations to devour. Yet it was not alone their homicidal fury that now ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... trial which would bring acquittal to her humpbacked father, and he was interested in her own welfare, but her thankless words checked his inquiry. The professor did not realize what love meant to Tessibel, for every desire within her paled into insignificance beside her ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... perpetual feud betwixt them and the Aberginians, as the Indians on Massachusetts Bay were styled, who, in consequence of wars with their northern neighbors, as well as of the pestilence which had desolated their wigwams, had become reduced from the condition of a powerful people to comparative insignificance. These Taranteens had, at the beginning of the settlement of the colony, occasionally done some mischief, descending these rivers in canoes in small bands, plundering the cabins of exposed settlers, and sometimes murdering the inmates. As the power of the whites ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... disobeyed the Company's orders under color that no deputy was necessary immediately appoint another deputy. This independent prince, who, as Mr. Hastings said, "had an incontestable right to his situation, and that it was his by inheritance," suddenly shrunk into his old state of insignificance, and was even looked upon in so low a light as to receive a severe reprimand from Mr. Hastings for interposing in the duties of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... territory, the Norfolk dockyard, and the mouth of the James River. The Confederates would gain little by its capture; the Federals would hardly feel its loss. It was most improbable that a single man of Hooker's army would be detached to defend a point of such comparative insignificance, and it was quite possible that Longstreet would be unable to get back in time to meet him, even on the North Anna. General Lee, however, anxious as ever to defer to the opinions of the man on the spot, as well as to meet the wishes of the Government, yielded to Longstreet's ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... measured the trees, and rode on horseback nearly one hundred feet through one of the fallen monsters. We also attempted to form a ring with hands and arms extended around one of these trees, but our party was not numerous enough to encircle it. I felt a sense of insignificance when I realized the long life of some of these trees, estimated to span forty generations of men, and still in health and strength. We returned to the stage station and again mounted our horses and mules for the perilous adventure of a descent into the Yosemite valley. It so happened ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... pity at those days of want and poverty, as though she were bidding farewell to them forever. Everything that surrounded her, even Wladek, paled into insignificance before her fascinated eyes. ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... gray suit and simple cloth hat could not disguise her charm or grace. It seemed to him that she was putting herself a little further away from him, that she was approaching the business of life with a determination, a spirit, a zest, that dwarfed to insignificance his own preoccupation with far less important matters. She turned to glance back at a group of children they had passed audibly speculating as to the character of teacher the day held in store ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... content. True it is that some few acres of jungle have been cleared and various sorts of fruit-trees planted, that corn and potatoes are grown, and that there are evidences of work; but no one is better qualified than I to realise the insignificance of the results of my labours in comparison with what they might have been, had the accomplishment of them been undertaken with harder hands ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... doing and how mortified she must feel over her fiasco, and to laugh good-naturedly or sarcastically at the pricked soap-bubble of her pretensions. But the newer and present excitement of the campaign was forcing her into the comparative insignificance of all receding phenomena—when, one late September Sunday morning, Westville, or that select portion of Westville which attended the Wabash Avenue Church, was astonished by the sight of Katherine West walking very composedly up the church's left aisle, looking in ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... had little effect on the national politics. This alliance, they said, extinguished Spain by destroying all its energy, without adding anything to the real power of France in the accession of the forces of its great rival. In Italy, the same family accommodation, the same national insignificance, were equally visible. What cure for the radical weakness of the French monarchy, to which all the means which wit could devise, or nature and fortune could bestow, towards universal empire, was not of force to give life, or vigour, or consistency,—but in a ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... tradition of his gifted youth when he was dedicated to the church and forsook her service at the altar for her service in the field, remains unquestioned, and he is safe in the refuge of his family who can offer mainly their insignificance for his protection. The logic of the fact is perfect, and Gabriel's emergence from the quiet of his retreat inevitably follows from the nature of the agitator as the logic of his own past and has the approval at least of the perrero and the allegiance ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Henry III., not so dull as to doubt that the true object of the Guise party was to reduce him to insignificance, and to open their own way to the throne, was too impotent of purpose to follow the dictates which his wisest counsellors urged and his own reason approved. His choice had lain between open hostility with his Spanish enemy and a more terrible combat with that implacable ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... inches which he wants by the dignity with which he carries those which he has. It is no fault of his own if he has not a commanding eye, for he studies hard to assume it. His features are well formed, though perhaps the sharpness of his nose may give to his face in the eyes of some people an air of insignificance. If so, it is greatly redeemed by his mouth and chin, of which ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... intriguers every little detail, every commonplace insignificance is used—and must be used by them alone—to further their dark causes. They cannot trust their projects to brave lieutenants, to faithful subordinates. They cannot say, "Here is the end; this is the work to be done; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... them dying unknown, a fellow of his college, the other a country clergyman), had something to do in taming his fiery spirit. To see the two lads with such blood in their veins in the tame security and insignificance of an existence so different from his own, looking at their famous father with wonder, perhaps not unmixed with youthful disapproval, as a Presbyterian and a firebrand, must have given that absolute soul a curious lesson. And how strange is his appearance altogether, first and last, in the midst ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... Providence is so mere a matter of 'conceit and imagination,' a faith so absolutely irrational as Hume considered it? A candid examination of God's works will warrant us in coming to a widely different conclusion. Among those works is man—a being who, in spite of the utter insignificance of his greatest performances, is capable of forming most exalted conceptions of justice, benevolence, and goodness in general, and of feeling the most eager desire to act up to his own ideal. If the divine notions of goodness in its several varieties be not identical with the human, it can only ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... reign of Augustus; view them all, powerful as enemies, patterns of virtue and science, bold and intrepid in war, free and independent; and now see them sacrificed at the shrine of luxury, and dwindled into insignificance. When in power, they usurped the authority of God, they stretched out their arms to encompass their enemies, and bound their captives in iron ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... the consummation of one already concluded. When there was a solemn public betrothal and then a wedding after an interval of time, the latter was plainly a repetition which had no significance. What happened finally was that the betrothal fell into insignificance, or was united with the wedding as in the modern Anglican service, and concubitus was allowed only after the wedding. The wedding then had importance, and was not merely a blessing on a completed fact. It ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... an evil to mankind.' With this thought, we may lift our faces once more, and as we dry our tears, forget the problems, the sorrows and the triumphs of earth as we ask ourselves the question, 'What shall we be in the coming ages?' Compared with this question, all others sink into insignificance. Science, discovery, commercial achievement, social problems, the rise and fall of nations—all come to us and claim attention, but we brush them aside as we repeat, with passionate earnestness: What shall we be—we, ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... superior woman" is usually much to be pitied, but surely the reason is that the woman is not superior enough. She has capabilities and knowledge, and has learnt to value them, and is right in so doing, but she has not learnt the next page of Life's Lesson Book, which is, the relative insignificance of her own acquirements, and the value of the qualities she has not got,—qualities which her husband very likely possesses, only he has not the feminine power of expression. How often a woman's seeming superiority lies in this gift of words, which, as George Eliot says, is in her, ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... repeating the prayer to Allah and some words from the Koran, and touching the ground with his forehead no less than thirty-eight times during the day. This must be done every day, Saturday and Sunday alike. The prayers are simple exclamations reciting the greatness of God and the insignificance of his servants, and ask for nothing. How very close to their daily lives must this constant appeal at short intervals, through each day, bring the Unknown, unless, as is said to be the case, it becomes a more matter of form, ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... her return to town—it was her first apparition that year—failed to arouse Ann Eliza's interest. All the small daily happenings which had once sufficed to fill the hours now appeared to her in their deadly insignificance; and for the first time in her long years of drudgery she rebelled at the dullness of her life. With Evelina such fits of discontent were habitual and openly proclaimed, and Ann Eliza still excused them as ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... disgraced a frigate. Poor Courtenay was so completely overwhelmed with admiration that I really felt quite sorry for him; hitherto there had been nothing approachable in his opinion to the felucca—which, by the bye, I have forgotten to say was called the Esmeralda—but now she was dwarfed into insignificance in every respect by the Dolphin, and her young skipper quite put out of conceit with her. However, I consoled myself, if not him, with the reflection that, the Dolphin once out of sight, he would forget all about her. Having given the craft a thorough overhaul, ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... one arm of Lugano Lake. Sullenly outstretched asleep it lay beneath us, coloured with the tints of fluor-spar, or with the changeful green and azure of a peacock's breast. The depth appeared immeasurable. San Salvadore had receded into insignificance: the houses and churches and villas of Lugano bordered the lake-shore with an uneven line of whiteness. And over all there rested a blue mist of twilight and of haze, contrasting with the clearness of the peaks ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... risking the life of her baby. They should be shown how to prepare special articles of diet when they are needed. If every mother were educated to the extent as indicated in the above outline the appalling infant mortality would fall into insignificance. It is not a difficult task, nor would it take a long time to carry out; it is the work for willing women who have time and who perhaps spend that time in less desirable but more dramatic ways. It is education that is needed, and it is education ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... then goes on to speak of how "the heroic fighting at Suvla Bay, and even the valorous defence of Verdun, fades into insignificance side by side in Dublin by the Citizen Army, and describes how Liberty Hall is being guarded by day and by night," and then goes on to point out the danger which such open disregard of authority may lead ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... mountain does not seem a very important thing. One should not, in theory, be able to dominate from its height, nor to feel the world small below one, nor to hold a whole countryside in one's hand—yet one does. The mountains from their heights reveal to us two truths. They suddenly make us feel our insignificance, and at the same time they free the immortal Mind, and let it feel its greatness, and they release it from the earth. But I say again, in theory, when one considers the exact relation of their height to the distances one views from them, they ought to claim no such ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... seemed to be held in no esteem. They had not, indeed, been so fortunate as to return home with such valuable acquisitions of property as we had bestowed upon Omai; and, with the advantages he reaped from his voyage to England, it must be his own fault if he should sink into the same state of insignificance. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... Rabbies to the bar of the public; he makes them "hold up their culprit paws," and pinches their ears to make them say what he pleases. His pages are crowded with their names; unutterable names; names which reduce "arms! and George! and Brunswick!" into tameness and insignificance. If such means of defending Christianity are successful, I shall no longer doubt that it was possible for the Devil Asmodus to have been corked up in a bottle by the hard words ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... thousand ways; or as she expresses it, "I will tell you what I am, a silly goose, who, far from wishing to stand forward to assert myself in any way, now that I am alone in the world have but the desire to wrap night and the obscurity of insignificance around me. This is weakness, but I cannot help it." Neither does Mary consider that the time has come to write Shelley's life, though she her-self hopes to do ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... night in the year paled to insignificance before this. Distracted crowds everywhere were cheering and blowing horns. Now a series of wild shouts broke forth from the dense mass of people before a newspaper bulletin board. Now came sullen groans, hisses, and catcalls, or all together ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... Assyria, and Rome, though in their case we look far back into the vista of history to recall the change, whereas in the instance of Spain we are contemporary witnesses. From a first-class power, how rapidly she has sunk into comparative insignificance! She has been shorn of her wealthy colonies, one after another, in the East and in the West, holding with feeble grasp a few inconsiderable islands only besides this gem of the Antilles, the choicest jewel of her crown. ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... groups and invaded the rival edifice until it was crowded as it had seldom been before. Scattergood in prayer meeting! Scattergood, who had never been inside a church since the day of his arrival in Coldriver, forty years before.... Even Yvette Hinchbrooke and her affairs sank into insignificance. ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... sacrifices for them just for the pure joy that it brings him. Once you have tasted this joy, no carping sneer of the cynic can cause you to lose faith in your calling. Material rewards sink into insignificance. You no longer work with your eyes upon the clock. The hours are all too short for the work that you would do. You are as light-hearted and as happy as a child,—for you have lost yourself to find yourself, and you have found yourself to ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... inevitably be found, when the great rhythmic concentration of the apex-thought is brought to bear upon such a feeling as this, that it either melts completely away, or is relegated to unimportance and insignificance. Such a feeling, ecstatic and intense though it may have been, has been nothing more than a disproportioned activity of the attribute of intuition; intuition misled in favour of the immortality of the soul, even as the pure reason ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... but seems to have spared the city. Thereafter Kanauj declined in importance, though still the capital of a Rajput dynasty, and the final sack by Shihab-ud-Din in A.D. 1194 reduced it to desolation and insignificance ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... leave to retire. A burst of applause and congratulation hailed her appearance; and in a very few minutes she had forgotten all but the music and the whirl of intoxication. Even partners sank into insignificance, and became only so many facilities for so much delight. Not so easily could her partners forget her,—the girlish face, sometimes grave with its own enjoyment, and then—'bright as a constellation!'—declared ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... revolves; there is nothing worthy of a moment's devotion one hundred yards from the green-room. It is amusing to perceive how blind, how dead, is our real Actor to the stir and turmoil of politics; he will turn from a Salamanca to admire a Sir John Brute's wig; Waterloo sinks into insignificance before the amber-headed cane of a Sir Peter Teazle. What is St. Stephen's to him—what the memory of Burke and Chatham? To be sure, Sheridan is well remembered; but then ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... of him that he lacked humor; but this was only so far true that he was apt to throw into small matters a force and moral earnestness which ordinary people thought needless, and to treat seriously opponents whom a little light sarcasm would have better reduced to their insignificance. In private he was wont both to tell and enjoy good stories; while in Parliament, though his tone was generally earnest, he would occasionally display such effective powers of banter and ridicule as to make people wonder why they were so rarely put forth. A great deal of what passes in London ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... fastnesses of pines towards the little valley overlooked in its remoteness and purely pastoral simplicity by the gold-seeking immigrants,—its seclusion as one of the furthest northern Californian missions still preserved through its insignificance and the efforts of the remaining Brotherhood, who used it as an infirmary and a school for the few remaining Spanish families,—he remembered how he once blundered upon it with the boy while hotly pursued by a hue and cry from one of the larger towns, and how he found sanctuary there. ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... been in the employment of this red-faced, well-fed man, and that he had been brutally rude to me. It is true that he put his arm round my waist, slapped me on the shoulder in a friendly way, approved my manner of life, but I felt that, as before, he despised my insignificance, and only put up with me to please his daughter, and I couldn't now laugh and talk as I liked, and I behaved unsociably and kept expecting that in another minute he would address me as Panteley as he did his footman Pavel. How my pride ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... new taxes should be imposed without the consent of Parliament. Edward II had gone farther and accepted the representatives of the people as his advisers in all important matters touching the welfare of the realm. While the French Estates gradually sank into insignificance, the English Parliament soon learned to grant no money until the king had redressed the grievances which it pointed out, and thus it insured its influence over the ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... be only the beginning of trouble. In any case what was sought was revolution, and those who preached it ought to contemplate all the possibilities of such a course. They might be the fathers and founders of a new nationality, but they might also be simply mischief-makers, whose insignificance and powerlessness were their sole protection, who were not important enough for "either a traitor's trial ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... not a little Lord John, who yet made his point. "A fine old Moretto, you know, was exactly what he declined at Dedborough—for its comparative, strictly comparative, insignificance; and he only thought of the picture when the wind began to ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... other than the Goncourts, whose insignificance approached at times imbecility, and in addition, Alphonse Daudet, with the air of a cheap comedian and an armful of mediocre books—a truly French diet, feeble, but well seasoned. These poor Giants, of whom Zola would talk, have become so weak and shrunken with ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... all when their landlord died, and they were left to the tender mercies of a factor. The name of this man we do not know, nor need we seek to know it. We know the man himself, and he will live for ever a type of tyrannous, insolent insignificance. ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... attractive. One bystander thought that the very splendour of his dress, wherein cloth of gold and pearls played a part, only brought into high relief the severity of his features. His great black eyes, his proud and determined air failed to cast into oblivion a certain effect of insignificance given by his square figure, broad shoulders, excessively stout limbs, and legs rather ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... knowledge of balls, dresses, faux pas, marriages, and gossip of all sorts—and still more I admired his bulk. I have an instinctive feeling of reverence towards "Stout Gentlemen;" and, while contrasting my own puny form with his, I laboured under a deep consciousness of personal insignificance. From being five feet eight, I seemed to shrink to five feet one; from weighing ten stones, I suddenly fell to seven and a half; while my portly rival sat opposite to me, measuring at least a foot taller than myself, and weighing good thirty stones, jockey weight. If ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... the forenoon, a little too early for me, unfortunately, we already go to table; we dine together,—the two temporal and spiritual valets, Mr. the Controller, Mr. Zetti, the Confectioner, Messrs. the two cooks, Ceccarelli, Brunetti and my insignificance. N.B. The two valets sit at the head of the table; I have at least the honor of sitting above the cooks. Well, I simply think I am at Salzburg. At dinner a great many coarse and silly jokes are cracked, but not at me, because I do not speak a word unless of necessity and then always ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... holes in the upper bed of lava to the height of sixty feet, resembling much the spouting of a whale, but with a noise and force infinitely greater. The sound indeed was tremendous, hollow, and awful. I could not help mentally adoring the works of the Creator, and my heart sunk within me at my own insignificance, folly, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... all!" replied Charles firmly. "He only is truly great who in his soul feels his own insignificance and deems trivial all the splendour and the highest honours which life can offer; and to this genuine greatness, Luis, I intend to rear this young human plant whose existence is due ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of this unfortunate being, and his forlorn piece of self-history, with that smile of half-interest which the annals of insignificance excite, till I came to where he says, "I was bound apprentice to Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathematics," etc.; when I started as one does on the recognition of an old acquaintance in a supposed stranger. This, then, was that Starkey of whom I have heard ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... did she remember her own private embarrassment. And, by then, the incident had taken its proper place in her mind—had sunk to the level of insignificance to which ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... of his rooms. Punctuality might have been achieved by taking a cab, had she not wished the open air to fan into flame the glow kindled by Mary's words. For among all the impressions of the evening's talk one was of the nature of a revelation and subdued the rest to insignificance. Thus one looked; thus one spoke; ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... income, and the massive gateway with its supporting walls and fence of closely woven, sharp pointed, bamboo retiring into the distance now were ready to shut in Shu[u]zen to the privacy of his share in the suzerain's defence. Plainly Shu[u]zen Dono put more confidence in his own prowess, or insignificance, than in the strength of outer defences against sudden attack of those at feud with him. Part of his tract inclosed a shrine of the Inari goddess. This had still its worshippers. On his inspection Shu[u]zen noted the loneliness of the building, its desolation. Yet it ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... in epic poetry what the stage fails to offer us. Yet the chief reproach made against the heroic poetry of Italy is precisely on the score of the insignificance and imperfect ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... the windows and lit the lamp on the table. The red glow behind the panes of the stove door faded into insignificance as the yellow radiance brightened. The ugly portraits and the stiff old engravings on the wall retired into a becoming dusk. The old-fashioned room became ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... countrymen, but at the same time to the defects of the Russians, to whom it is more unpardonable; because they know what is right, have grown up among good examples, and here, as if they have forgotten their mission, and their active nature, they sink, little by little, into the insignificance of the beasts." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... Tuskegee. This race-loving spirit gives it a largeness of view and purpose that saves both its teachers and pupils from being narrow and self-centered. Take from Tuskegee all this "vision splendid," and it will at once shrink into common-place insignificance. "Set your ideals high," says the distinguished man who here is Principal as he was founder, "and in your efforts to reach them you become strong for greater things." It is but truth to say that no institution in all the land, whether ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... J.J. Gurney in study, &c., has stimulated me to renew the reading of the Greek New Testament, but I sink into the dust when I see what he accomplished in comparison of my own insignificance. It is, however, a comfort to know that I have a merciful Lord, who will not require of me the exercise of gifts that I have not received. O that I may he more faithful in the employment of the capacity which has ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... form than a complete manuscript written by the very hand of Isidor Werner! I came strangely into possession of it, and it relates a story of interest and wonder, compared with which the mystery of his disappearance pales into insignificance. But the reader may judge for himself, for here follows the story exactly as he wrote it. Upon his manuscript I have bestowed hardly more than a proof-reader's ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... schoolboy at the tall, stately figure, clad in shimmering pale green satin that rippled about her feet as she walked, brought out a bit of colour in her cheeks and lips, deepened the brown of her eyes, and, like the stalk and leaves of a tiger-lily, faded into utter insignificance before the burnished masses ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... our quiet mansion where nothing but affluent plenty and literary ease should abound.—Howard's House, Howard's House, or where the Parylitic descended thro' the sky-light (what a God's Gift) to get at our Savior. In this perplexity such topics as Spanish papers and Monkhouses sink into comparative insignificance. What shall we do?—If she died, it were something: gladly would I pay the coffin maker and the bellman and searchers—O Christ. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... were immediately before them, the result is almost assured; and, even if they do succumb, they have the blessed knowledge that they have failed gallantly. Half the misfortunes which crush the children of men into insignificance are more or less magnified by imagination, and the swollen bulk of trouble dwindles before an effort of the human will. Read over the dismal record of a year's suicides, and you will find that in nine cases out of ten the causes which lead unhappy men and women to quench their own light of life ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... the parted lips and narrow eyes of hate. The man had discovered some spring of life within his listless body. It lasted only while one might draw a full breath; then he saw her scrutiny, and sank again to his still dreariness. It was a startling thing to see that flabby little insignificance strengthen to such a force of feeling, and Mary was conscious of a sort of alarm. But before she could frame a thing to say the Professor was back again, and the atmosphere of his vigour had ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... before Sir Humphry Davy discovered oxygen), sees and hears—all most difficult and complicated operations, involving a knowledge of the facts concerning optics and acoustics, compared with which the discoveries of Newton sink into utter insignificance? Shall we say that a baby can do all these things at once, doing them so well and so regularly, without being even able to direct its attention to them, and without mistake, and at the same time not know how to do them, and never have ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... to the throne in 1760, the great families which had thus governed England for half a century belonged to the party known as Old Whigs. Under their rule the power of the crown had been reduced to insignificance, and the modern system of cabinet government by a responsible ministry had begun to grow up. The Tory families during this period had been very unpopular, because of their sympathy with the Stuart pretenders ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... times. We silenced their guns at the first broadside, and shut them up so sudden that envious folks like the British now swear they had none, while we lost only one man in the engagement, but he was drunk and fell overboard. What is the cannonade of Sebastopool to that? Why it sinks into insignificance." ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... in the course of every thoughtful childhood an event takes place, by the side of which, to the child himself, all other events sink into insignificance. It is not one that is recognized and chronicled by the world, for it is wholly unconnected with action. No one but the child is aware of its occurrence, and he never speaks of it to others. Yet to that child it marks an epoch. So intensely ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... to face without a tremor the queer world of nerves and unfulfilled expectation in which he found himself. In the first place, Petrograd was so very different from anything that he had expected. Its size and space, its power of reducing the human figure to a sudden speck of insignificance, its strange lights and shadows, its waste spaces and cold, empty, moonlit squares, its jumble of modern and mediaeval civilisation, above all, its supreme indifference to all and sundry—these things cowed and humiliated him. He was sharp enough to realise ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... torment would intensify her glory in Heaven—all this struck him as a revelation, before which the antics of spiritualists, and the foreknowledge of Brahmins, and the blank agnosticism of science paled into contemptible insignificance. ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... awakening us to a proper sense of our insignificance, pulpit orators sometimes make an unfair use of the grave and its worms. Let us put no faith in their doleful rhetoric. The chemistry of man's final dissolution is eloquent enough of our emptiness: there is no need to add imaginary horrors. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... contact,—and the black puffs of smoke from the bursting shells add a weird and startling brilliancy to the surroundings. No matter how many times a man may fly at night the immensity of the heavens above him, crowded with unknown worlds, cannot fail to impress him with his own insignificance in the general scheme of the universe, and Death itself appears of small importance compared to the way in which he ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... was agreed, and great was the sensation that ensued. "The Arleigh Romance," as it was called, was carried from one end of the kingdom to the other. Every newspaper was filled with it; all other intelligence sank into insignificance when compared with it. Even the leading journals of the day curtailed their political articles to give a full account of the Arleigh romance. But it was noticeable that in no way whatsoever was the name of the Duchess ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... father and his father's associates. The firm name meant to him big things in the past history of Michigan's industries, and big things in the vague, large life of the Northwest. Therefore, he was considerably surprised, on finding the firm's Adams Street offices, to observe their comparative insignificance. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... discovered that the old system which Copernicus upset was true after all, and that we had to think ourselves back into a strictly limited universe of which the earth is the centre. The loss of its privileged position by our own planet; its degradation, from a cosmic point of view, to insignificance; the necessity of admitting the probability that there may be many other inhabited worlds—all this had consequences ranging beyond the field of astronomy. It was as if a man who dreamed that he was living ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... published objectionable passages have been much commented upon, but certainly have been rather strongly interpreted. I am no Bigot to Infidelity, and did not expect that, because I doubted the immortality of Man, I should be charged with denying the existence of a God. It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in competition with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... name of Thomas Jefferson, supposed to be a Democrat—a man whose principles and policy are not very prevalent amongst Democrats to-day, it is true; but that man did not exactly take this view of the insignificance of the element of slavery which our friend Judge Douglas does. In contemplation of this thing, we all know he was led to exclaim, 'I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!' We know how he looked upon it when he thus expressed himself. There was ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... into insignificance before the grave decision which a war involves. The common danger unites all in a common effort, and the man who shirks this duty to the community is deservedly spurned. This union contains a liberating power which produces happy and permanent results in the national life. We need only ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... still stood aloof. It had towered there ahead of them as they jerked and toiled across the interminable flat in their accompanying cloud of dust. The great circle of the world had dwarfed them to a bitter insignificance: a team of crickets, they seemed, driven by a gnome. The hushed tone of Thatcher's voice made unconscious ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... military expeditions against the "Turks," of captured cities and spoils. Now, after what he had heard from el-Tadhil, he began to fear whether in the presence of far greater events, all his acts would not fade into insignificance, just as a drop of rain disappears in the sea. "Perhaps," he thought with bitterness, "nobody will pay attention to what I have accomplished, and Smain will not even be pleased that I have brought those children to him;" ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... more depressing than the knowledge that this latter condition must be endured with no other companion than a hypochondriacal papa, whose ailings so monopolized his time and attention that a daughter's happiness sunk into insignificance? Little wonder that she should melt into tears at so undesirable a prospect, that she should pity herself and her luckless fate, and that, when fully realizing the depths of loneliness into which she was to be precipitated for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... in his new guise, Helwyse felt an embarrassment which he fancied everybody must remark. But, in fact (as he was not long discovering), he was no longer remarkable; the barber had wiped out his individuality. It was what he had wished, and yet his insignificance annoyed him. The stare of the world had put him out of countenance; yet when it stopped staring he was still unsatisfied. What can be the solution ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... watched, I thought, as every one must surely think, with strange paradoxical feelings, of one's own utter insignificance in creation, mingled with the delightful consciousness of our individual importance in the eyes of the Maker and Father of all. An atom among worlds, as one feels, sitting there at such an hour and in such a spot, still we remember with love and ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... enough, all to be commended when viewed in their just relation to other themes and interests, but actually pernicious when separated from the homely and useful things of daily life, and made so to overshadow these as to warp them into comparative insignificance. Here lay the evil. It was this elevation of her ideas above the region of use and duty into the mere aesthetic and reformatory that was hurtful to one like Irene—that is, in fact, hurtful to any woman, for it is always hurtful to take away from the mind its interest in common life—the life, ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... power of the master of legions, Philip, Louis, Napoleon, and shall we say William, crumbles and melts; his ambitions are too costly to endure, his people chafe under his lash, and his kingdom falls into insignificance or is transformed by ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... sin sinks into insignificance beside the lawlessness of George. The bicycle incident had thrown us all into confusion, with the result that we lost George altogether. It transpired subsequently that he was waiting for us outside the police court; but this ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... day courtship, in which the discrepancy in ages vanished into insignificance before the convincing ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... have you given a little thought to the great mass of human suffering? Have you raised your eyes above our earth and seen the immensity of the universe?—the worlds beyond worlds which crush our vanity into insignificance, and with our ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... and conversation as I felt them—but let us stick to Blackbeard, if you please. We were all comfortably seated at breakfast; I had finished my sixth egg, had concealed a beautiful dried snapper, before which even a rizzard haddock sank into insignificance, and was bethinking me of finishing off with a slice of Scotch mutton—ham, when in slid Mr Bang. He was received with all possible cordiality, and ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... was as familiar to him as it had been of yore to Zoroaster or Nostradamus; graves yawned at the beck of his potent finger; their ghostly habitants, appeared at his preternatural bidding. The necromantic achievements of Doctor Dee and William Lilly dwindled into insignificance before those attributed to a man who, although apparently in the bloom of manhood, was believed to have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... he would abandon Lewis. When the imperial ambassador, in July 1677, complained of the No Popery cry, they replied that there was no question of religion, but of liberty. In the case of Oates and his comrades, the political motive faded into insignificance beside the religious. At first the evidence was unsubstantial. Oates was an ignorant man, and he obtained credit only by the excitement and distrust caused by the discovery of the premeditated coup d'etat. Godfrey, the magistrate who ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... never spoke to a soul." How freely they coursed through him, how fluid they were, how vaporous, how easy to breathe! And yet, a moment later, he was telling himself that Odette must find him very dull if those were the pleasures that she preferred to his company. And their very insignificance, though it reassured him, pained him as if her enjoyment of them had been an act ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... attraction, while his chaplain was simply nowhere. He had his innings for one brief hour in the cathedral, where the judges were compelled to sit as meekly as so many jurymen under a lengthy summing-up; but after that one bright flash he sank into insignificance, and dragged out the remainder of the assize like the stick of a burnt-out rocket, ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... events of our war with such a predetermined pessimist spirit, that at a distance it is impossible to form a correct estimate of the state of the country. For the last year I have read in the papers statements to this effect:—"The theatres are closed; the terrorism of Robespierre sinks into insignificance, compared to the excesses of the Americans; the streets of New York are deluged with blood" (I very nearly had a duel in Puerto Rico for venturing to question the authenticity of this last assertion, propounded by a Spanish ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... himself with his usual care, in a smart blue coat with metal buttons, buff waistcoat, blue stocking-netted tights, and Hessian boots, he turned into the main street of Newmarket, where he was lost in astonishment at the insignificance of the place. But wiser men than Mr. Jorrocks have been similarly disappointed, for it enters into the philosophy of few to conceive the fame and grandeur of Newmarket compressed into the limits of the petty, outlandish, Icelandish place that bears the name. "Dash my vig," ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... door, and fancying himself secured from observation, either by his position or his insignificance, was glowering on the pair in a manner that at another time must have cost him a rebuke. As it was, I found something friendly, as well as curious, in his fixed frown; and ignorant of his name, though I knew him ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... ruled when once it began to show signs of solid prosperity. Cheverus was not wrong in counting with assurance upon American love for and understanding of true liberty, but he doubtless owed more than he thought at the time to the insignificance and scanty numbers of his flock. There came a period, even in the career of his immediate successor, when liberty itself seemed but a feeble sapling which a strong wind of stupid bigotry might avail to root out and cast away; while the chronicle of ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... earthly Paradise of Mayall. Not all the halls of state, with their artificial splendor; not all the retinue of kings, with golden crowns, surrounded with warriors glittering with burnished gold and ornamented with diamonds—all these faded into insignificance, when compared with ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... Russia. Siberia, Central Asia or immense tracts of Africa, the differences of temperature which prick and stimulate national endeavor in small climatic districts here lose much of their force. Their effects flatten out into insignificance, overwhelmed by the encounter with too large a territory. All the southern continents are handicapped by the monotony of their zonal location. The map of annual isotherms shows Africa quite enclosed between the two torrid lines of 20 deg. Centigrade, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... says: "India is the greatest and most awful instance of the cruelty, greed, and short-sightedness of the capitalist class of which history gives any record. Even the horrors of Spanish rule in South America are dwarfed into insignificance in comparison with the cold, calculating, economic infamy which has starved, and is still deliberately starving, millions of people to death in British India."[490] "I charge it against the British Government, at this moment, that the economic condition ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... who had been proved to have received bribes, and to punish the borough itself, by extending the right of voting at future elections to all the freeholders in the rape of Bramber, the district of Sussex in which New Shoreham lies, an arrangement which reduced the borough itself to comparative insignificance. Mr. Fox opposed the bill, on the ground that the offence committed could be sufficiently punished by the ordinary courts of law. But he stood alone in his resistance; the bill was passed, and a salutary precedent was established; the penalty inflicted on New Shoreham being for many ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... universal cheer from the masses of all the loyal States. The stern realities of actual war have produced unanimity among our soldiers in the army. With them the paltry contests of men for political power dwindle into insignificance before the mightier question of the preservation of the national life. Coming into closer contact with Southern men and society, the sentiments of those who looked favorably upon Southern institutions have shifted round. They have now formed their ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Mitford. It was the same, as we take elsewhere occasion to show, in the West of England, in the Midlands, in the Northern counties, and in the South of Scotland. The absence of ready communication with the metropolis and the relative insignificance of provincial centres kept libraries together. Their owners, while the agricultural interest was flourishing, had no motive for sale, and the inducement to part with such property was far less powerful, while ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... half-believed the fanciful suggestion made by Teddy, with reference to Captain Kidd, and was wildly hoping to discover some positive sign that would stamp this fairy story with truth. All the previous adventures that had befallen himself and chums would sink into utter insignificance, could they go back home and show evidences of having made such a romantic discovery up there in the ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... find in epic poetry what the stage fails to offer us. Yet the chief reproach made against the heroic poetry of Italy is precisely on the score of the insignificance and imperfect representation of ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... attempt to deny; but, in another environment, how different might it not appear,—as for instance placed beside Amiens, where in one particular alone, the mere height of nave and choir, it immediately dwindles into insignificance. Under such conditions its graceful spire becomes dwarfed and attenuated. Need more be said?—The writer thinks not, since the present work does not deal with the comparative merits of any two cathedrals or of national types; but the suggestion should serve ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... and Bruges are each the point of junction of two or more completed roads. Brussels has slept while this network has been woven over the country, and will awake to discover herself shorn of her trade and sinking into insignificance if she does not immediately bestir herself. Her location is a fine one, on a ground which rises very gradually from the great plain to a modest hill southward, and she is among the best built of modern cities. But already she is off the direct line from either London or Paris to Germany; I would ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... welcome that immense letter was. Your writing is good, and in the whole letter I have not found one mistake in spelling. But one thing I don't like: why do you style yourself "your worthless and insignificant brother"? You recognize your insignificance? ... Recognize it before God; perhaps, too, in the presence of beauty, intelligence, nature, but not before men. Among men you must be conscious of your dignity. Why, you are not a rascal, you are an honest man, aren't ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... have nothing to do with Croesus; my character, by its insignificance, is safe from any slanders of ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... time of Cyrus, and Rome in the reign of Augustus; view them all, powerful as enemies, patterns of virtue and science, bold and intrepid in war, free and independent; and now see them sacrificed at the shrine of luxury, and dwindled into insignificance. When in power, they usurped the authority of God, they stretched out their arms to encompass their enemies, and bound their captives ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... "here I had no continuing city;" and, but for the consolation of a few solid guineas, could almost lament the time that a momentary acquaintance with wealth and splendour put me so much out of conceit with the sworn companions of my road through life—insignificance and poverty. ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... is so big, so mighty, so soul-stirring. It allures with its vastness, it dazzles with its beauty; it makes one feel closer to the Creator, even while pressing home a disquieting sense of one's own insignificance. ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... was hardly kindness, for you were quite sure that some day I should win more honor from that, than from the service; but you were particularly anxious that I should not win such honors, for fear your own insignificance would be emphasized by it. In consequence of all this I have intercepted letters ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... glass with the greatest care, and having finished, put on his sword, placed the parchment in his bosom, took up his hat, and went forth with his ordinary air of ease and command. Passing along the street and across the Place d'Armes—at the insignificance of which, comparing it with that of Versailles, he laughed almost aloud—he entered the gate ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... the duration of ontogeny shrinks into insignificance when we compare it with the enormous period that has been necessary for phylogeny, or the gradual development of the ancestral series. This period is not measured by years or centuries, but by thousands and millions of years. Many millions of years had to pass before the ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... Ballou, P. Gallaudet & Co., had failed in New York, the North River Bank of that city had been thrown into a receivership, and in Philadelphia the failure of Messrs. Barker Brothers, had been followed by a number of others. This was all bad enough, but sinks into insignificance when we recall the financial terror inspired by the great and historic house of Baring Brothers proving unable to meet its engagements, amounting to about, L28,000,000. The Bank of England received notice of its difficulties on September 7th, and by the 15th had secured from a syndicate, ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... unexpectedly, from near the fire. She was tending the baby now, and Osborn looked across at it in the subdued light. What a little mottled pink thing! What creases! What insignificance to have brought ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... read your account of this unfortunate being, and his forlorn piece of self-history, with that smile of half-interest which the annals of insignificance excite, till I came to where he says, "I was bound apprentice to Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathematics," etc.; when I started as one does on the recognition of an old ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Canterbury would be so stimulating, the presence of a Live Person at the head of the Church instead of a glorified Penny-in-the-Slot Machine would be so far-reaching in its results, that all questions of agreement and disagreement would sink into insignificance. ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... abandon Lewis. When the imperial ambassador, in July 1677, complained of the No Popery cry, they replied that there was no question of religion, but of liberty. In the case of Oates and his comrades, the political motive faded into insignificance beside the religious. At first the evidence was unsubstantial. Oates was an ignorant man, and he obtained credit only by the excitement and distrust caused by the discovery of the premeditated coup d'etat. Godfrey, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... science that, by demonstrating the insignificance of this globe in the vast scale of creation, has led to this ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... after did she remember her own private embarrassment. And, by then, the incident had taken its proper place in her mind—had sunk to the level of insignificance to which it belonged. ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... chapel down beyant near Ballybrosna. Some people, it is true, said that she was "just a fairy of a crathur, and too little for anythin'," and she was, no doubt, diminutive in size. Nor had she any brilliancy of colouring to make amends in a humming-bird's fashion for the insignificance of her proportions, resembling rather, with her dark eyes and hair, one of those filmy white blossoms which look the paler and frailer for their knots of ebon stamens, or the delicate moth who shows ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... Dives. But after the horses and the rabbits and poultry have been served, there will remain a residuum of eatable matter, which can only be profitably disposed of to the voracious and necessary pig. I foresee the rise of a piggery in connection with the new Social Scheme, which will dwarf into insignificance all that exist in Great Britain and Ireland. We have the advantage of the experience of the whole world as to the choice of breeds, the construction of sties, and the rearing of stock. We shall have the major part of our food practically for the cost of collection, and be able ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... probably not so uncommon, after all? Foolish, he thought, to leave a record of any sort, unless you were a heaven-accredited genius, entrusted with the leaves of life. Better to recognize your own atomic insignificance, and sink willingly into the predestined sea. He opened it and took a comprehensive glance over the first page: an oblong of small neat handwriting. Many English hands were like that. He was accustomed to call it ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... wives of a village doctor and a village dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial brawl over paying a servant a dollar more a week. Yet this insignificance echoed cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and the orators who deemed themselves international leaders were but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas denouncing a million ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... is decidedly interesting. One sees what a complicated machinery is now employed for the convenience of the public, what wonders—to speak of letters alone—can be done for a penny, and how thousands of miles can be reduced to insignificance by the ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... known in regard to the relations which existed between Shakespeare and Jonson. Praise and blame both are recorded on Jonson's part when writing of Shakespeare, yet the praise shows such undisguised admiration that the blame sinks into insignificance. Jonson's "learned socks" to which Milton refers probably tripped the critic up occasionally by reason ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... signs of solid prosperity. Cheverus was not wrong in counting with assurance upon American love for and understanding of true liberty, but he doubtless owed more than he thought at the time to the insignificance and scanty numbers of his flock. There came a period, even in the career of his immediate successor, when liberty itself seemed but a feeble sapling which a strong wind of stupid bigotry might avail to root out and cast away; while the chronicle of Bishop Fitzpatrick's ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... that Pompey whom history has handed down to us. But, of all matters which interested Cicero, the governance of men interested him the most. How should the great Rome of his day rise to greater power than ever, and yet be as poor as in the days of her comparative insignificance? How should Rome be ruled so that Romans might be the masters of the world, in mental gifts as well as bodily strength, in arts as well as in arms—as by valor, so by virtue? He, too, was an oligarch by strongest conviction. ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... the very nature of his functions, the coroner acquired in the eyes of all men a mysterious interest and influence beside which the governor of the Territory, the mayor, and even the chief of the fire department felt themselves dwarfed into insignificance. For four years Mr. Perkins had been a busy man. He dispensed far more patronage than the delegate to Congress, as he was constantly besieged by a class of impecunious patriots to "put 'em on the next one." A stranger arriving by ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... order. In this cosmical dust-cloud we inhabit, whose each speck is a sun, man's destiny plays a microscopic part. The vexed question whether ours is the best possible or the worst possible world, drops into startling insignificance. Religion has taught the abnegation of self; science is first to teach the humiliation of the race. Not for man's behoof were created the greater and the lesser lights, not for his deeds will the sun grow dark or the stars fall, not with any reference to his pains or pleasure was this universe ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... liberation from the bodily senses were actually within its grasp; but it will inevitably be found, when the great rhythmic concentration of the apex-thought is brought to bear upon such a feeling as this, that it either melts completely away, or is relegated to unimportance and insignificance. Such a feeling, ecstatic and intense though it may have been, has been nothing more than a disproportioned activity of the attribute of intuition; intuition misled in favour of the immortality of the soul, even as the pure reason is often misled ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... estimation. Somehow, encounters of this kind leave me dejected. The gloomiest past is dearer than the brightest present. In my case there seems to be a special reason for feeling this way. My sense of triumph is coupled with a brooding sense of emptiness and insignificance, of my lack of anything like a ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... country cleared and stocked with the reasonable returns of so great a trade; the forests are stripped and nothing left in prospect, but the gloomy apprehension when the timber is gone, of sinking into insignificance and poverty. Formerly the woods swarmed with American adventurers who cut as they pleased. These men seeing the advantages that were given them, and wishing to make the most of their time, cut few but prime trees, and manufactured only the best part of what they felled, leaving the tops to rot; ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... said a word about her to the landlady with whom he had lodged for nearly a year, or to any of his new acquaintances and friends—should have deliberately hidden the very fact of his marriage—could a husband give a wife any more humiliating proof of his indifference, or of her insignificance ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... vanishing-point was reached, and horse and rider rounded the bend. And immediately the reason was made plain. But even the reason sank into insignificance before the splendor of the scene ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... interval was filled up by the bursts of song from the small finches, thrushes, and other denizens of the wooded hill. In one fir tree there was a pair of tiny gold-crested wrens, beautiful little birds, which seemed to consider that their insignificance was quite enough to keep them from harm. So tame were they that they could have been struck down by a stick, which would have been their fate but for the interposition of Philip, who seized his brother's arm as he was raising his hand to deal the blow. In a box-tree they found the ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... always will, even to their own obvious ruin. Also he knows that every time and place have had their few good men and women who have honored God, and whom God has honored. Nothing so teaches a person his own insignificance and the small part that he plays in the world as does the reading of history. Nor is history to be found only in the book called history. If you want to know the life of the ancients, as you know the life of your own community, read ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... to dominate from its height, nor to feel the world small below one, nor to hold a whole countryside in one's hand—yet one does. The mountains from their heights reveal to us two truths. They suddenly make us feel our insignificance, and at the same time they free the immortal Mind, and let it feel its greatness, and they release it from the earth. But I say again, in theory, when one considers the exact relation of their height to the distances one views from them, they ought to claim no such effect, and that they ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... conditions under which few would remain content. True it is that some few acres of jungle have been cleared and various sorts of fruit-trees planted, that corn and potatoes are grown, and that there are evidences of work; but no one is better qualified than I to realise the insignificance of the results of my labours in comparison with what they might have been, had the accomplishment of them been undertaken with harder hands and more ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... Sefton Falls she surrendered herself to the distaste she felt toward her aunt and her surroundings. Could she stay, she asked herself. The narrowness of the environment raised an issue vital enough; nevertheless, grave as it was, it sank into insignificance when weighed against the vastly more potent factor of Ellen's personality. The girl had come east with the intention of nursing and caring for her father's sister. She felt he would have wished her to come; and casting every other inclination aside, she had ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... looked like a pleasant place dwindled into charmlessness and insignificance as we approached. There was neatness—of a kind. The round huts were confined to certain streets, and all inhabited by natives. Arabs, Swahili, Indians, Goanese, Syrians, Greeks and so on had to live in rectangular huts and keep to other streets. On one street, chiefly of stores, ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... circulars, which had to do with a certain electric company offering gold bonds at a price to net four and a half. He read it through once and then read it through again. It contained a great many figures—figures running into the millions, whose effect was to make twenty-five dollars a week shrink into insignificance. On the whole, it was decidedly depressing reading—the more so because ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable. Gabriel lately, for the first time since his prostration by misfortune, had been independent in thought ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... alive," said she, "this is what she would say." And then she spoke to me of God, who alone can determinate man's trials, either by the end He ordains, or the resignation He inspires. I felt myself carried with her into the regions where our sorrows shrink into insignificance as the horizon broadens around them. And I remember she uttered this fine thought, "See how my son has suffered! It makes one believe, Monsieur Fabien, that the elect of the earth are the hardest tried, just as the stones that crown the building are more ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Squire and Pamela for laughing in church, or emerging unstained from adventures with hogs-wash and worse, the accident of his social position as a poor curate, contentedly drinking ale in the squire's kitchen, falls into its true insignificance. ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... proof of the outlaw's sweep and grasp of the country from Pecos to Rio Grande, that Duane was stunned. Compared to this Cheseldine of the Big Bend, to this rancher, stock-buyer, cattle-speculator, property-holder, all the outlaws Duane had ever known sank into insignificance. The power of the man stunned Duane; the strange fidelity given him stunned Duane; the intricate inside working of his great system was equally stunning. But when Duane recovered from that the old terrible passion to kill consumed him, and it raged fiercely ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... the previous prediction of Soeur Ange; an argument which, coupled with the probability that the august infant beside her might in its turn ascend a European throne, was in all likelihood the most efficacious one which could have been adopted to reconcile her to its present comparative insignificance. ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... Town to gather what news they could. One of them came in and reported that the squadron of horse which had gone up with the officers to bring back Morgan had come back without him and without the officers. The spy's insignificance prevented him from learning why this was, but hope instantly sprang up in Hornigold's breast upon receipt of this news. Knowing Morgan as he did, he was convinced that he had found some means to dispose of the two officers ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... castle which remained in the hands of the Scotch, and King Edward prepared to lay siege to this. Save for the band of Wallace there was no longer any open resistance in the field. A few holds like those of Archie Forbes still remained in the hands of their owners, their insignificance, or the time which would be wasted in subduing them, having protected them from siege. None of the ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... illusionist. He must approach his task in the spirit of a psychical inquirer who seeks to trap a bogus medium. The great Robert Houdin, one of the master wizards of modern times, quitted Petrograd by two gates at the same hour according to credible witnesses; but his performance sinks into insignificance beside that of a Chinese predecessor who flourished under one of the Ming emperors. The palace of this potentate was approached by gates, each having twelve locks, and each being watched by twelve guards. Nevertheless a distinguished member of the wizard family not only gained access to the ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... words as these, binding these States together as one nation, whose integrity nothing but treason would seek to destroy or weaken, the fierce invective of the Southern, and the feeble sophistry of the Northern traitor shrink to insignificance. They are at once the record and the prophecy of our success, declaring the foundation on which the Government is based, and pointing to yet greater glories to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... were the tables turned, that, whereas in the fifteenth century her chief superiority over Christendom had been in the three points of artillery, discipline, and fixed revenue, precisely in these three she had sunk into utter insignificance, whilst all Christendom had been continually improving. Selim and Mahmoud indeed had made effectual reforms in the corps of gunners, as we have said, and had raised it to the amount of sixty thousand men; so that at present they have respectable field-artillery, whereas previously they had ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... see Yule, op. cit., II, App. H, p. 558. The book is preserved in the Colombina at Seville. I must, however, frankly admit that modern research, iconoclastic as ever, not content with white-washing Lucrezia Borgia and Catherine de Medicis, and with reducing Catherine of Siena to something near insignificance, is also making it appear more and more probable that Columbus originally set sail in 1492 to look for the islands of the Antilles, and that, although on his return after his great discovery in 1493 he maintained that his design had always been ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... reason that we shall see in a moment. The only old Roman deity with whom Dionysos could be identified was the god Liber, who had had a rather interesting history, and who had done enough along the line of self-development to deserve a better fate than to be crushed to insignificance under the prominence of his new namesake. Liber was at this time a flourishing god of fertility and, since the introduction of the grape into Italy, especially the patron of the fruit of the vine, but he had made ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... life in poverty, and will work, and will do your duty. And now forget," she says, "how you lived here, because not for you I did all this; I was merely diverting myself, but you must never even think of such a life; always remember your insignificance, and of what station you are." And all this so feelingly that there are tears in her ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... thrown off in the waste-weir of our great commercial and manufacturing cities and towns, whose population, without the infusion—and that continually—of the strong, substantial, and vigorous life blood of the country, would soon dwindle into insignificance and decrepitude. Why then should not this first, primitive, health-enjoying and life-sustaining class of our people be equally accommodated in all that gives to social and substantial life, its due development? It is absurd to deny them by others, or that they deny themselves, ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... mind to the prophecy in Isaiah xi. 1, where Messiah is called 'a branch' or more properly, 'a shoot' for which the Hebrew word is netzer. The name Nazareth is probably etymologically connected with that word, and may have been given to the little village contemptuously to express its insignificance. The meaning of the prophecy is that the offspring of David, who should come when the Davidic house was in the lowest depths of obscurity, like a tree of which only the stump is left, should not appear in royal pomp, or in a lofty ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... of those vulgar details," pursued he, "whose very insignificance makes them terrible, when they are attended by certain circumstances. Now imagine the Count de Tremorel, pale, covered with his wife's blood, shaving himself before his glass; rubbing the soap over his face, in that room ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... unto you!'—the well-worn salutation that was bandied to and fro in every market-place and scene where men were wont to meet. Thus He indicates the divine tranquillity of His nature; thus He minimises the fact of death; thus He reduces it to its true insignificance as a parenthesis across which may pass unaffected all sweet familiarities and loving friendships; thus He reknits the broken ties, and, though the form of their intercourse is hereafter to be profoundly modified, the substance of it remains, whereof He giveth assurance unto them in these His first ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... for a great day. Neat rows of olive drab vehicles curved along the water's edge. Jeeps and half-tracks shouldered close by weapons carriers and six-bys, all of them shrinking to insignificance beside the looming Patton tanks. A speakers' platform was set up in the center of the line, near ...
— Navy Day • Harry Harrison
... the germs of all art and science are found connected with theology; and later, the germs of all poetry and history with the epic. The expression: non defuit homini, sed scientiae, quod nescivit Salmasius, is a clear proof of the insignificance of the science of the time. Think of the increase during the last hundred years of the branches of study in our German universities. There are now thirty-four regular professors in the Leipzig philosophical faculty, where then there were only nine. But here also the principle ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... despite his inflated leaders, was a thoroughly sensible man, who fully recognised the potentialities of the port, and yet saw that it was doomed to sink into comparative insignificance, and that the "collection of humpies on a mud bank" was to be the future capital of the Far North. But he struggled on gamely. He was a genial, merry-hearted old bachelor, who had once loved his paper as a mother loves her one child, and had spent his capital of two thousand pounds in trying ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... his men with talk of the glory they had earned by their actions that night, and predicted a reputation for them beside which the reputation of every other gang of bushrangers Australia had known would fade into insignificance. ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... announced its approach by a mingled clanging and whistling that sent startled cattle galloping for the shelter of the thickets, came to a dead stop at the station; but, as though to show its realization of the insignificance of Spencer's, continued to snort and throb impatiently. Certain important-appearing trainmen, with sleeves rolled to the elbows, hastily throwing open the door of the baggage-car, ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... were sacred beings in Miss Ainley's eyes; no matter what might be the insignificance of the individual, his station made him holy. The very curates—who, in their trivial arrogance, were hardly worthy to tie her patten-strings, or carry her cotton umbrella, or check woollen shawl—she, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... it came into my mind, and for the first time I thoroughly understood what it meant. Base, indeed, would be the man who could look upon that mighty snow-wreathed pile — that white old tombstone of the years — and not feel his own utter insignificance, and, by whatever name he calls Him, worship God in his heart. Such sights are like visions of the spirit; they throw wide the windows of the chamber of our small selfishness and let in a breath of that air ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... devoted priest, eager to save the souls of the heathen, supplemented by the paternal care of a monarch solicitous for the welfare of his subjects. The political exigencies of the day are forgotten; military commanders and civil governors sink into insignificance and become mere executives of the priestly will, while the heroic efforts of Junipero Serra to convert the natives, his courage in the face of danger, his sublime zeal, and his unwearied devotion, make him the impelling factor in the ...
— The March of Portola • Zoeth S. Eldredge
... it was all the work of insects so tiny that millions of them were working at my feet, and I could not see them, I have compared my own littleness in the universe with the wonderful work of the least of them, and have felt my own insignificance. ...
— Eric - or, Under the Sea • Mrs. S. B. C. Samuels
... National Debt; and when applied to private proprietorship, it secures deference for lowness of mind, birth, habits, and pursuits.... Ambition and money-love, if they tend to ennoble a country, reduce to insignificance the human particles of which the nation is composed. In their pursuit of riches, the English are gradually losing sight of higher characteristics; ... our pursuit of railway bubbles and every other frantic speculation of the hour, affords sufficient evidence of the ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... into the gates of distance in its vast expanse, glitters the Lake of Scutari. Round a small dim spur of land running into the lake, lies Scutari itself, which is, however, not visible. To the left a forbidding chain of magnificent mountains, dwarfing the intervening hills into insignificance, fascinate him by their repellent grandeur. Snow-clad, except in the height of summer, these mountains seem symbolical of the land they border, that savage and unknown Albania. A glimpse of a green valley ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... ground with his forehead no less than thirty-eight times during the day. This must be done every day, Saturday and Sunday alike. The prayers are simple exclamations reciting the greatness of God and the insignificance of his servants, and ask for nothing. How very close to their daily lives must this constant appeal at short intervals, through each day, bring the Unknown, unless, as is said to be the case, it becomes a more matter of ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... diction, to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity, is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great, and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly. It is the perfection of the mock-heroic! I will give only the two following passages in illustration of these remarks. Can any thing be more elegant and graceful ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... and obtain pardon for the efforts of the meanest understanding. Struggling a good while with these thoughts, by degrees I felt myself more firm. I derived, at length, some confidence from what in other circumstances usually produces timidity. I grew less anxious, even from the idea of my own insignificance. For, judging of what you are by what you ought to be, I persuaded myself that you would not reject a reasonable proposition because it had nothing but its reason to recommend it. On the other hand, being totally destitute of all shadow of influence, natural or ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in the Cook's Straits district took longer to end. It was a series of isolated murders, trifling skirmishes, night surprises, marchings and counter-marchings. Their dreary insignificance was redeemed by the good-tempered pertinacity shown by our troops in enduring month after month of hardship and exposure in the rain-soaked bush and the deep mud of the sloughs, miscalled tracks, along which they had ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... settled, such as Tonquin, Cochin China, Cambodia, Siam, the Philippines, Borneo, and the various settlements within the Straits of Malacca. In comparison with such an enormous quantity, the 54 million lbs. consumed in the United Kingdom sink into insignificance. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... about our Lord's Divinity. But I only wish to point out to you why I called this miracle the crucial experiment, which proved God's goodness to be identical with that which we call (and rightly) goodness in man. It is by the seeming insignificance thereof, by the seeming non-necessity, by the seeming humbleness of its circumstances, by the seeming smallness of its results, issuing merely (as far as Scripture tells us, and therefore as far as we need know, or have a right to imagine) in the giving of a transitory and unnecessary physical ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... station in it. Private men may be wholly neutral, and entirely innocent: but they who are legally invested with public trust, or stand on the high ground of rank and dignity, which is trust implied, can hardly in any case remain indifferent, without the certainty of sinking into insignificance; and thereby in effect deserting that post in which, with the fullest authority, and for the wisest purposes, the laws and institutions of their country have fixed them. However, if it be the office of those who are thus circumstanced, to take a decided part, it is no less ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... making a rapid tour through the chief countries of Europe to see for ourselves how the people lived. The first thing that will strike us on our journey is the contrast between the grandeur of the churches and public buildings and the insignificance of most of the houses. Some of the finest churches in England, built in the style of architecture called 'Norman,' one or more of which you may have seen, date before the year 1200, as for example, Durham Cathedral, and the naves of Norwich, Ely, and Peterborough Cathedrals. The great ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... become stone; and—listen to this, Carmina—the explosion itself would be frozen, and produce no sound. Think of serious people looking up in that dreadful direction, and talking of going to Heaven. Oh, the insignificance of man, except—I am going to make a joke, Ovid—except when he pleases his old mother by going away for the benefit of his health! And where are you going? Has sensible Carmina advised you? I agree with her ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... once. England was one election. Godolphin remained almost alone. For the first time a sense of littleness crept over him; a feeling of insignificance, which wounded and galled his vain nature. In these beat struggles he was nothing. The admired—the cultivated—spirituel—the splendid Godolphin, sank below the commonest adventurer, the coarsest brawler—yea, the humblest ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had dreamed of military expeditions against the "Turks," of captured cities and spoils. Now, after what he had heard from el-Tadhil, he began to fear whether in the presence of far greater events, all his acts would not fade into insignificance, just as a drop of rain disappears in the sea. "Perhaps," he thought with bitterness, "nobody will pay attention to what I have accomplished, and Smain will not even be pleased that I have brought those children to him;" and ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... solemn pledges, and it was upon this select class of securities that it was now proposed to start anew the process of repudiation. But public opinion displayed itself so hostile to such perfidy that the party of repudiation in Congress soon dwindled to insignificance and the struggle finally settled upon two ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... letter and the spirit of the Constitution, and in behalf of all that its attainment implies, all so-called party interests lose their apparent importance, and party lines may well be permitted to fade into insignificance. The question we have to consider for the immediate welfare of those States of the Union is the question of government or no government; of social order and all the peaceful industries and the happiness that ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... imagining that her large business would be a sufficient compulsory influence; but now Hawkeye was frightened; and before Col. Sellers knew what he was about, Hawkeye, in a panic, had rushed to the front and subscribed such a sum that Napoleon's attractions suddenly sank into insignificance and the railroad concluded to follow a comparatively straight coarse instead of going miles out of its way to build up a metropolis in the ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... past two years we have lived in a state of extraordinary and unnatural excitement, beside which the jog-trot existence of the former days, with all its periodical excitements, its hebdomadal heavings of the waves of society, pales into insignificance. Like the grave, with its eternal 'Give! give!' our appetites, stimulated to a morbid degree by their daily food of marvels, cry constantly for more; and a lull of but a few brief months in the storm whose angry pinions are constantly bringing new wonders to our view, begets an ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... her husband's family in France and came to him as an heirloom. The contrast between it and the mulberry set which mother gave me struck me as singular, but the flowers and figures of the mulberry ware did not fall into insignificance. They were to me the embodiment of beauty. Among my earliest disappointments was the giving of grandmother's china to Hal, and I cried for "just one saucer," and this was a fac-simile and met a hearty appreciation. I bedewed ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... would make good his word; and, having given it, I would stick to mine. But my tempter out of the way, I writhed and groaned under my folly and weakness. I grabbed up my hat, and hurried back to court as in a nightmare. The Hawley case went against me, but it paled into insignificance by the side of ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... up a new cause of quarrel, before which every other cause sank into insignificance. Now, though the village of Devonshire could boast but one public schoolhouse, said house being divided into two departments, the upper and lower divisions, there were in the town several district schools; and for the last few ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... against Alexander bear all this in mind, and then let him reflect on his own insignificance, the pettiness of his own circumstances and affairs, and the blunders that he makes about these, paltry and trifling as they are. Let him then ask himself whether he is a fit person to censure and revile such a man as Alexander. I believe that there was in his time ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... an agricultural county. With the exception of its share in Bristol, it has no large manufacturing centre. Its commercial insignificance, however, is quite a modern characteristic. It once took a leading place in the manufacture of cloth, and its productions were held in high esteem. Dunster, Watchet, and Shepton were especially noted for their fabrics. Many quaint country villages ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... biped animal already alluded to, actuated by an overweening desire of notoriety, and in order to catch the applause of some one, grovelling in the morasses of insignificance and vice, like himself, leaves his native obscurity, and indulges in falsehood, calumny, and defamation. I am convinced that none of the highly respectable Teachers of ———— has had any participation in this scurrilous transaction, as I consider them to be sober, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... is the ascent of a large body of water into the clouds—one of those gigantic operations by which nature, apparently without effort, accomplishes her will, pointing out to man the insignificance of his ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... that she was afraid of losing her job as that she came to see herself as part of a chain. The others, beyond, were waiting for her; she mustn't hold them up. That was her first impression of the office system, that and the insignificance of herself in the presence of the office-hierarchy—manager above manager and the Mysterious Owner beyond all. She was alone; once she transgressed they would crush her. They had no personal interest in her, none of them, except her classmate, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the stables withdrew reluctantly, consumed by curiosity, and the young peasant in his rough brown dress stood alone before the prince. One seemed the very personification of power and pride, the other of obscurity and insignificance, and yet so strangely does fate play with the fortunes of men that the fickle goddess was inclined toward the peasant in the matter that was nearest to ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... course, everything will have to be remodelled for the Viscount Maurice de Gramont! Nothing will be good enough for him! Every one will sink into insignificance at his coming! We, poor, forlorn damsels, will henceforth be of no account,—no one will waste a thought on us!" ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... she sat, and a look into her eyes that divorced her at a stroke from anything that could have spoken to him of too general an accessibility, too unthinking a largesse. She went on smoking, but almost immediately her cigarette took its proper note of insignificance. Alicia, speaking of it once afterwards to Arnold, found ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... secretly by divine wisdom, from the first discovery of those countries. Previously we had learned of this, in truth, from the letters of many persons and from report; now however, that the divine goodness has raised our insignificance to the summit of apostolic dignity, we have heard it also from the ambassador, our beloved son Alphonsus Sanchez, a professed priest of the Society of Jesus—sent in your name first to Sixtus V, pope, of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair
... Cagayan to the utmost, and if fault could be found with our numerous visits there, it was that we had too good a time, so good that the undoubted local interest of the place quite faded into insignificance beside its purely social side. There were luncheons and dinners given us on shore; and dinners and luncheons given by us on the ship; there was a delightful tea on the gunboat, and a concert by the infantry band in our honour; there were horseback rides for those who cared for them, though ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... replied Charles firmly. "He only is truly great who in his soul feels his own insignificance and deems trivial all the splendour and the highest honours which life can offer; and to this genuine greatness, Luis, I intend to rear this young human plant whose existence is due to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... possessed of it as a whole without perceiving that the mirror is held up to nature, that it reflects spots and blemishes which, on a survey of the vast and various orb, dwindle into natural and so comparative insignificance. Byron was under no delusion as to the grossness of Don Juan. His plea or pretence, that he was sheltered by the superior grossness of Ariosto and La Fontaine, of Prior and of Fielding, is nihil ad ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... legislate on Irish subjects so frequently commit, would excite feelings of ridicule, if the observations in which they see fit to indulge were not calculated to produce mischief in quarters where their insignificance is not known, and where their flippant fallacies may be mistaken for facts. Thus, Mr Poulett Scrope exclaims,—"What! are 130 work-houses, capable of containing 100,000 people, to be considered sufficient to supply accommodation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... incurably old. His flaxen wig heightened the tone of a complexion much ravaged by gout and its antidotes. His nebulous eyes with twitching lids were not improved by the gold-rimmed glasses which magnified their insignificance. He possessed a striking nose and chin, but, as these features were more characteristic than delightful, they offered his wife no occasions for serious anxiety. Whenever His Excellency required feminine advice, it was considered quite en regle that Lady Sara should be consulted. The Princess ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... cost of laying tiles is so trifling as hardly to be worth estimating, except to show its insignificance. The estimate, by English engineers, is two cents per rod for "pipe laying and finishing." What is included in "finishing," does not appear. From the personal observations of the writer, it is believed that an active man may lay from 60 to 100 rods of tiles ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... war with such a predetermined pessimist spirit, that at a distance it is impossible to form a correct estimate of the state of the country. For the last year I have read in the papers statements to this effect:—"The theatres are closed; the terrorism of Robespierre sinks into insignificance, compared to the excesses of the Americans; the streets of New York are deluged with blood" (I very nearly had a duel in Puerto Rico for venturing to question the authenticity of this last assertion, propounded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... great machine which mowed them down in broad swaths like the grass of a meadow, but by a single arm and a single axe. Talk about the Pyramids, the Chinese Wall, the great canals of the earth! They sink into utter insignificance when compared with the prodigious labor of clearing away the American forests, and spreading out green fields where our fathers found only a limitless wilderness of woods. The sons of these men who performed that labor, in my judgment, have a better patent to preferment and honors than ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... secret did tremble on the lips of Zany. She was not only greatly aggrieved that Chunk had "runned away" after all, without her, and had become a sort of hero among his own kind on the plantation, but she also felt keenly her own enforced insignificance when she knew so much more than that Chunk had merely decamped. Her mistress little dreamed, as the girl waited stolidly and sullenly on the table, that she was so swelling with her secret as to be like ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... myself a few moments' rest, and threw myself upon the sofa. The old outlook, the old ideas had been torn up by the root. The things which had seemed to be of life itself only a few hours ago seemed now to have lapsed into the insignificance of trifles. I thought of myself and my old life with the tolerance of one who watches a child at play. Sport and all its kindred delights—the whole glorification of the physical life—I viewed as a Stock ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the Sarratts cavalierly to begin with, just because they were outsiders, and because 'Willy' was making such a fuss with them; for she was almost as easily jealous in her brother's case as in Marsworth's. But now Nelly's sad remoteness from ordinary life, her very social insignificance, and the lack of any links between her and the great Farrell kinship of relations and friends, made her company, and her soft, listening ways specially welcome and soothing to Cicely's ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Romana, with a small body of cavalry, left Toabado, crossed the Minho, descended into the valley of the Tamega, and took refuge close to the Portuguese frontier line. Here he was, for a time, safe from the pursuit of the French, the insignificance of his force being his best protection. Soult lost no time. As soon as the English army had left, Corunna opened its gates to him, as did Ferrol, although neither of these towns could have been taken without a siege, and Soult must have been delayed until a battering-train ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... his wife from the parlor floor and his daughter to boarding-school. So absorbed is he in his work that he can talk and think of nothing else. He neglects the social forms from sheer abstraction and becomes almost a boor, because all the world outside of his book pales into insignificance, and all persons and events are merely interesting in so far as they can stimulate inquiry or furnish information bearing upon the immortal opus. The inevitable consequence follows. The professor alienates ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... in the background, at a window opposite the door, while the others were grouped together more in the foreground; and what I saw was a very tall man (so tall that he could dwarf Eagle March's five foot ten almost to insignificance), six foot two, perhaps, and—not stout yet, but showing signs that one day he might become so. I noticed that he held himself magnificently, his broad shoulders thrown back, his head up; and that he walked with a slight swagger, more like a ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... small wares was, in truth, a dangerous rival, from his very insignificance. Had he been a man of spirit or corporal consideration, Terence would have pistolled or thrashed him out of his audacious notions; but the creature was so smiling and submissive that he could not, for the life of him, dirty his fingers with such a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... complaints to care what their fellow-sufferers looked like, it shows the fallacy of a popular superstition that women only care to dress for men. Believe me, no—they dress for critics, the critics of their own sex, who with one contemptuous glance can sweep a toilette into insignificance, and make its wearer miserable, or, by some envious approbation, are reluctantly compelled to bestow on ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... since he had met the Member for Vauxhall. Looking upon the politician's well-knit frame, his well-coloured face with its expression of shrewd earnestness, he for a moment seemed to himself to shrink into insignificance. After sitting opposite Dalmaine for an hour at the dinner-table, he was able to regard the man again in what he deemed a true light. But the impression made upon one by an object suddenly presented when the thought is busy with far other things will as a rule embody ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... ignore without wilfully risking the life of her baby. They should be taught to prepare special articles of diet when they are needed. If every mother were educated to the extent as indicated in the above outline the appalling infant mortality would fall into insignificance. It is not a difficult task nor would it take a long time to carry it out; it is the work for willing women who have time and who perhaps spend that time in less desirable but ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... surprising that when I stepped on deck I was looked upon as an intruder, and instead of being greeted with smiles and words of encouragement, of which I was greatly in need, received looks which would have chilled an icicle, and frowns which made me feel all my insignificance. ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... vain, they were empty; that they had been even a practical joke on the part of some weak-minded gentleman of leisure, the former possessor of the confounded davenport. The longer I hovered about them with such precautions the longer I was taken in, and the sooner I exposed their insignificance the sooner I should get back to my usual occupations. This conviction made my hand so uncontrollable that that morning before breakfast I broke one of the seals. It took me but a few minutes to perceive that the contents were not rubbish; ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... article published by Professor Knight of St. Andrews in the September number of the 'Nineteenth Century,' amid other free utterances, we have this one: 'If matter is not eternal, its first emergence into being is a miracle beside which all others dwindle into absolute insignificance. But, as has often been pointed out, the process is unthinkable; the sudden apocalypse of a material world out of blank nonentity cannot be imagined; [Footnote: Professor Knight will have to reckon with the English Marriage Service, one of whose Collects begins thus: 'O God, who by thy mighty power ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the young officer of the watch. "Hard a-port! Midships! Hard a-starboard! Port 20! Steady as she goes!" And ceaselessly the engine-room telegraph tinkled, and the handy little craft, with death and terror written in her workmanlike lines for the seaman, for all her slim insignificance to the landlubber on the towering decks of the great liner, swung smartly through the crowded water-way out to the perils lurking 'neath the seeming smile of the open sea: the guardian angel of our commerce it went, to meet—what Heaven ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... later Emperors; and the earliest Teutonic Kings naturally fixt their royal seat in the city of their Imperial predecessors. When this immediate need had passed away, the city naturally fell into insignificance, and it plays hardly any part in the history of Medieval Italy. Hence it is that the city is crowded with the monuments of an age which has left hardly any ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... not our intention to enumerate all the peculiarities of Father Uria. But there was one, before which all the rest sank into insignificance, and that was his excessive fondness for cats. The love of cats is more particularly a feminine trait; and this, together with his strength of mind, marked though it was usually by his geniality, makes it the more surprising in Father ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... be the lair of a bear which he had found. Was this most remarkable day in all his experience to be wound up with an encounter that might dwarf the other into insignificance? ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... to Edison. In a sense this is true, for no one is more impatient or intolerant of interruption when deeply engaged in some line of experiment. Then the caller, no matter how important or what his mission, is likely to realize his utter insignificance and be sent away without accomplishing his object. But, generally speaking, Edison is easy tolerance itself, with a peculiar weakness toward those who have the least right to make any demands on his time. Man is a social animal, and that describes Edison; but it does not describe accurately the inventor ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... judgment, "that by transferring the same ridicule (not the same) from one to another, he destroyed its efficacy; for, by showing that what he said of one he was ready to say of another, he reduced himself to the insignificance of his own magpye, who from his cage calls cuckold at a venture." We love and honour the sage, but here he is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... head. He saw before him, in the speaker, a person of almost indescribable insignificance, in white spats and a shirt cut indecently low. A little behind, a second and more burly figure offered little to criticism, except ulster, whiskers, spectacles, and deer-stalker hat. Since he had decided to call up devils from the underworld of London, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... neither money nor brains, and on my passport you may read that I am simply a citizen of Kiev. So was my father, but he was a well-known actor. When the celebrities that frequent my mother's drawing-room deign to notice me at all, I know they only look at me to measure my insignificance; I read their ...
— The Sea-Gull • Anton Checkov
... he gazed at it the more simple it became, so that he was on the point of folding it and replacing it in his pocket, sadly disconcerted at its insignificance. He had hoped that he might have stumbled across something of real value, not only some secret information concerning the designs of the enemy, but also some evidence of an incriminating nature against his ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... mot, I only wanted to say that he is one of those administrators who begin to have power at forty, who, till they're forty, have been stagnating in insignificance and then suddenly come to the front through suddenly acquiring a wife, or some other equally desperate means... . That is, he has gone away now... that is, I mean to say, it was at once whispered in both his ears that I am a corrupter of youth, and a hot-bed ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... found myself narrating the insignificance of my visit to Arizona—the Bishop must have been a hard inquisitor for even the deeply skilful to elude—and for the first time my word was believed. He quickly took my measure, saw that I had nothing to hide, and after telling me I could find good ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... a growing consciousness of insignificance that was as painful as it was novel. Adding to all the humiliations of this day here was a man, not so very much older than herself, trying to come down to her level, as he would accommodate his language to a child. No labored argument could have revealed her ignorance to her so ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... First, which was painted some few years later than the time at which we have now arrived, and at about the same period as the Isabella d'Este. Though as a portrait d'apparat it makes its effect, and reveals the sovereign accomplishment of the master, does it not shrink into the merest insignificance when compared with such renderings from life as the successive portraits of Charles the Fifth, the Ippolito de' Medici, the Francesco Maria della Rovere? This is as it must and should be, and Titian is not the less great, but the greater, because he cannot convincingly ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... of no other writer, that his language and versification adapt themselves to every phase of sentiment, and sound every note in the scale of felicity. Some defects are to be acknowledged, but they sink into insignificance when measured by the magnitude of his achievement. Sudden transitions, elliptical expressions, mixed metaphors, indefensible verbal quibbles, and fantastic conceits at times create an atmosphere of obscurity. The student is perplexed, too, by obsolete words and by some ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... chiefly employed in mining. Formerly, vast quantities of silver were obtained here. But most of the mines are now either under water or exhausted, and the village, with its mine works, has dwindled into insignificance. Beyond Cashapalca there is a tract of marshy ground, which being passed, a narrow winding road of about two leagues leads up the acclivity. The soil is clayey, and thinly bestrewed with alpine grass, intermingled with syngenesious and cruciferous plants. ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... was the authority of the king generally superseded. Contrary, too, to the course of events in the West, the religious element in the East tended to get the better of the military and political. Military and civil aristocracies disappear, annihilated or crushed into insignificance between the kings and the sacerdotal order; and the ultimate result at which we arrive is, a monarch enjoying great power, but circumscribed by the privileges of a caste of priests. With these differences, however, that in the East ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... teeth it was to fight back the tears. The world was so cold and stern and brutal; this man was so much like the environment; she was so woefully, desperately heart-sick. On this lofty crest of a devil-tossed land she felt the insignificance of a fly clinging to ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... some young girl in love. In everything he said, thought, and did, she saw something particularly noble and elevated. Her adoration of him alarmed her indeed; she sought and could not find in him anything not fine. She dared not show him her sense of her own insignificance beside him. It seemed to her that, knowing this, he might sooner cease to love her; and she dreaded nothing now so much as losing his love, though she had no grounds for fearing it. But she could not help being grateful to him for his attitude to her, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... sense that Bossuet was a philosophical historian. Each of these seeks to subject history to a dogma. The dogma of Bossuet is Papal Catholicism; that of Dr. Draper is the creative supremacy of "Situations" and "the insignificance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
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