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More "Insignificant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with horror. All my adventures were insignificant compared to this terrible shadow which was creeping over ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... food of the common people in England. In some parts of Europe, India, and other Eastern countries, it is still largely consumed as the ordinary farinaceous food of the peasantry and soldiers. The early settlers of New England also largely used it for bread making. At the present day only a very insignificant quantity of barley is used for food purposes in this country, and most of this in the ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... a speech in proposing him, and Mr. Shortribs another in seconding him; and these were all the speeches that were required. The thing seemed to be so very easy that he was afterwards almost offended when he was told that the bill for so insignificant a piece of work came to L247 13s. 9d. He had seen no occasion for spending even the odd forty-seven pounds. But then he was member for Loughton; and as he passed the evening alone at the inn, having dined in company with ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... God are always loaded." Doubtless we must always pay for greatness by isolation, or some more bitter toll. And for our insignificance, in turn, come the Bobbies as reward. It behooves those of us, then, who are insignificant, to appreciate our blessing, to cherish our penguins, the more since we, when "the world is too much with us," when the tyranny of economic conditions oppresses and the wrongness of life seems almost more than we can bear, have not that inward strength, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter self,—"it isn't that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome, a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count 'em up: what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... dreams concern themselves rather, other things being equal, with the thoughts which we have passed through rapidly or upon objects which we have perceived almost without paying attention to them. If we dream about events of the same day, it is the most insignificant facts, and not the most important, which have the best ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Jackson and Blaine, and many others, under like accusations, I would have been content with answering as Washington and Jackson did, or by silent indifference, but my temperament led me to defy and combat with my accusers, however formidable or insignificant they might be. ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... himself and them; but their real income is their share of his corn, cattle, and hay, and it makes no essential difference whether he distributes it to them directly, or sells it for them and gives them the price. There can not, in short, be intrinsically a more insignificant thing, in the economy of society, than money; except in the character of a contrivance for sparing time and labor. It is a machine for doing quickly and commodiously what would be done, though less quickly and commodiously, without it; ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... I haven't the slightest doubt that he was. While he was still drifting amongst the islands, enigmatical and disregarded like an insignificant ghost, he told me so himself on a certain occasion. It was a long time before he materialized in this alarming way into the destroyer of our little industry—Heyst ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... from the stable yard, followed by Nicola. He is a cheerful, excitable, insignificant, unpolished man of about 50, naturally unambitious except as to his income and his importance in local society, but just now greatly pleased with the military rank which the war has thrust on him as a man of consequence in his town. The fever ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... allowing the Nepaulese the fertile portion of the Jurac, which then yielded only two lacs of rupees, but now yields thirteen, and will, ere long, yield twenty. Without this their military force would have been altogether insignificant; but it is not ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... said she, "I leave Naples to-night, and for ever. Before I did so, however, I wished to see and give you a piece of advice. Death menaces you from all sides, and your most insignificant actions are observed. Escape from the country, for here you will no longer find the faithful friends who ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... custodian's register, he was angry beyond measure, believing that they had dared on both sides to disobey his orders. Investigation was immediately made; and it was fortunately ascertained that the visitor was a most insignificant person, whose only fault was that of bearing a name which ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... fact that their reputations were at stake, and that the merest trifle might disclose the truth. A precaution neglected, the most insignificant detail, a word, a gesture might ruin ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... true character of what they see. In this way a shallow surface depression, possibly only a few feet below the general level of the neighbouring country, is often described as a "vast gorge," because, under very oblique light, it is filled with black shadow; or an insignificant hillock is magnified into a mountain when similarly viewed. Hence the importance, just insisted on, of studying lunar features under as many conditions as possible before finally attempting to ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... conveyance. We roar through a wonderful and exciting world, and all the while we sit with glazed eyes and cotton-wool in our ears, and think about ourselves. They were mostly men in Jay's 'bus at that moment; they were almost all alike, and all insignificant, but not one of them knew it. Such a lot of men could never be loved ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... something else capable of very many activities, and referable to a mind which is highly conscious of itself, of God, and of things; and we desire so to change it, that what is referred to its imagination and memory may become insignificant, in comparison with its intellect, as I have already said in the ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... esteemed as an amiable piece of still-life, now became so insipid, that I could hardly keep awake in her company: the daughter, too, whom I had regarded as a good-humoured, pretty sort of a girl, now seemed too insignificant for notice: and as to the Captain, I had always thought him a booby,-but now he appeared ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... but the stay I am making in this place is not altogether on account of my health. I have been trying to do a good turn to our little friend La Briere. The poor fellow has fallen in love with a certain Mademoiselle Modeste de La Bastie, a rather pale, insignificant, and thread-papery little thing, who, by the way, has the vice of liking literature, and calls herself a poet to excuse the caprices and humors of a rather sullen nature. You know Ernest,—he is so easy to catch that I have been afraid to leave him ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... have rendered more galling to Italy the deprivation of these two provinces, it was the tone adopted in France when speaking of the transaction. What were Savoy and Nice? A barren rock and an insignificant strip of coast! The French of thirty-four years ago travelled so little that they may have believed in the description. The vast military importance of the ceded districts has been already referred to. Some scraps on the Nice frontier were saved in a curious way: They were ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... not move in its orbit with a perfectly uniform velocity (see Chapter IV.). The consequence is that we now get a slight glimpse round the east limb, and now a similar glimpse round the west limb, as if the moon were shaking its head very gently at us. But it is only an insignificant margin of the far side of the moon which this libration permits ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... come. The great political concussion was not favourable to art. Abstract ideas united with the passions of the hour produced poetry which was of the nature of a declamatory pamphlet. Innumerable pieces were presented on the stage, but their literary value is insignificant. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... very helpless and insignificant object, whatever may have been the terror which he inspired while he was alive. As long as Henry continued to breathe, the attendants around him paid him great deference, and observed every possible form of obsequious respect, for they did not know but that he might ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... do not mean that in the matter of his genius Mr. Conrad is not entirely original. Henry James could no more have written Mr. Conrad's stories than Mr. Conrad could have written Henry James's. His manner of discovering significance in insignificant things, however, is of the school of Henry James. Like Henry James, he is a psychologist in everything down to descriptions of the weather. It can hardly be questioned that he has learned more of the business of psychology from Henry James than from any other ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... right to ask a poem or a picture to look manly or womanly, any more than you have any right to ask a man or a woman to look manly or womanly. There is no such thing as looking manly or womanly. There is looking beautiful or ugly, distinguished or commonplace, individual or insignificant. The one law of externals is beauty in all its various manifestations. To ask the sex of a beautiful person is as absurd as it would be to ask the publisher the sex of a beautiful book. Such questions ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... affectionate and generous people. I then bid my postilion drive on fast; and I never looked back, never once cast a lingering look at all I left behind. I felt proud of having executed my purpose, and conscious I had not the insignificant, inefficient character that had formerly disgraced me. As to the future, I had not distinctly arranged my plans, nor was my mind during the remainder of the day sufficiently tranquil for reflection. I felt ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... as trees, others uncurled snaky stems from masses of rusty-colored matting, and everywhere was spread the delicate lace of the uu-fenua, a maiden-hair beside which the florist's offering is clumsy and insignificant. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... heard good counsel," but was obliged to drive to the theatre to fetch my sister from rehearsal, and so, most reluctantly, came away. It seemed to me very good, and amiable, and humane, and condescending of Lord Dacre to spare so much of his time and attention to us young and insignificant folk; the courtesy of his reception was as deeply appreciated by me, I assure you, as the interest of his conversation; and so tell my lord, with my ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... considers this substitution as a necessity for the continued life of the Review. For, says he, "you will oblige the public much more by giving them an account of such books as are worthy of their regard than by filling your paper with all the insignificant literary news of the time, of which not an article in a hundred is likely to be thought of a fortnight after the publication of the work that gave occasion to it." He then proceeds to a review of contemporary continental literature, ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... resigned office; the law of censorship was repealed, and the Estates struck two millions from the civil list. The first chamber, however, refused its assent to these resolutions, the law of censorship was retained, and the saving in the expenditure of the crown was reduced to an extremely insignificant amount. In the autumn of 1832, Prince Otto, the king's second son, was, with the consent of the sultan, elected king of Greece by the great maritime powers intrusted with the decision of the Greek question, and Count Armansperg, formerly minister of Bavaria, was placed at ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... come to the Carsons in the fulfilment of an aspiration. Mrs. R. Gordon Carson bored him. Her fussy conscious manners bespoke too plainly the insignificant suburban society in which she had played a minor part. He came because Dr. Lindsay had told him casually that Louise Hitchcock was in town again. He arrived late, when the lecture was nearly over, and lingered in the hall on the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... or races I stem from, obviously more important, since in thousands of good Americans it is impossible to determine what races have gone to their making. There is no such thing as an Anglo-Saxon American—and so few English Americans that they are nationally insignificant. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... repaired to their respective quarters they had very different thoughts in their minds. Reimers was full of admiration: "What a man is that," thought he, "who, with all his heavy duties, yet occupies himself with the insignificant destiny of a poor ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... very important. I am about to set you a difficult task, my friend! no one else could do it, but then you are so wonderfully clever. Sit down and write a list of all those likely to have joined in this plot—men and women—the powerful and the insignificant; do not leave out one. And if you can make a guess what each has promised the other, put that in also. It will be interesting to see ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... to believe this stream was the same river which we came upon about a degree further to the eastward. The banks were low and water-worn, the southern or left bank being in general the steepest, its height about 14 feet, the breadth was insignificant, not more than 12 or 14 feet; the current slow but constant; and the water of a whitish colour. I at first supposed it might be only a branch of the river we had seen above, until I ascertained, by sending Mr. White ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... of the kingdom. The fact that it was forced from a reluctant king by those who spoke for the whole nation, that it placed definite limitations on his power, and that it was confirmed again and again by later kings, has done more to give it this position than its temporary and in many cases insignificant provisions, accompanied only by a comparatively few ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... and natural enough nervousness he had shown, for it was nothing more, turned his annoyance on the Major, who by such an insignificant display of coolness, had gained so great an advantage over him in the eyes of the ladies, and made up his opinion that in every word he said about the horse of the Rajah of Rumtool he was romancing—and that although there had been no slightest pretence to personal prowess ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Buddhism into Brahmanism the latter abandoned its sacrifices and accepted the Buddhistic emphasis upon Karma, and doomed every soul to the tread-mill of its own destiny. To every human word, deed or thought, however insignificant, there is fruit which must ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... all places. This shelter afforded to Gutenberg sheds everlasting lustre on Nassau and its prince. We meet in history with instances where a generous hospitality has given happiness and immortal fame to the most insignificant potentates and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... conceit. Wesley enjoyed the experience of having a conceited clerk at Epworth, who not only was proud of his singing and other accomplishments, but also of his personal appearance. He delighted to wear Wesley's old clerical clothes and especially his wig, which was much too big for the insignificant clerk's head. John Wesley must have had a sense of humour, though perhaps it might have been exhibited in a more appropriate place. However, he was determined to humble his conceited clerk, and said to him one ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... influences the mild governors of North Africa were powerless. They had so long enjoyed peace and friendship with the Mediterranean States, that they were in no condition to enforce order with the strong hand. Their armies and fleets were insignificant, and their coasts were long to protect, and abounded with almost impregnable strongholds which they could not afford to garrison. Hence, when the Moors flocked over from Spain, the shores of Africa offered them a sure and accessible refuge, and the hospitable ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... sweep the streets of pea-shells, lest old women might break their necks, would doubtless have good intentions; yet his office would only be that of a scavenger. Speak, but speak to the world at large, not to insignificant individuals. Speak in the tone of a benevolent and disinterested heart, and not of an inflamed and revengeful imagination! otherwise you ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... insignificant rumours. They say of her, as of all women not actually ugly, that she is more beautiful than Aphrodite or Helen; but no person could form even the most remote idea of such perfection. In vain have I besought Nyssia to appear unveiled at some public festival, ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... may be regarded as his or her representative, and those of dead people are believed to be endowed with the attributes of their former owners and actually to impart them to any one who happens to carry them about with him. Hence these apparently insignificant sticks and stones are, in the opinion of the natives, most potent instruments for conveying to the living the virtues and powers of the dead. For example, in a fight the possession of one of these holy sticks or stones is thought to endow the possessor with courage and accuracy ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... and twenty-five minutes old when a gentleman from Abilene, Texas, made the first UFO report of the year. What he saw, "a fan-shaped glow" in the sky, was insignificant as far as UFO reports go, but it ushered in a year that was to bring feverish ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... again to his uneasy pacing, but now with an irrational and supporting sense of duty done. He had dug his grave that morning; now he had carved his epitaph; the folds of the toga were composed, why should he delay the insignificant trifle that remained to do? He paused and looked long in the face of the sleeping Huish, drinking disenchantment and distaste of life. He nauseated himself with that vile countenance. Could the thing continue? What bound him now? ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... long in the country, sir," said Coja Solomon, with a shrewd look at Desmond, "and therefore you will find it hard to believe, perhaps, that these goods, so insignificant in bulk, are worth over two lakhs of rupees. A precious load indeed, sir. This delay is naturally a cause of vexation to my distinguished superior, but it is not due to any idleness or inattention on my part. It is caused ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... said by Sloane to make, in the West Indies, webs so strong as to catch birds. A small and pretty kind of spider, with very long fore-legs, and which appears to belong to an undescribed genus, lives as a parasite on almost every one of these webs. I suppose it is too insignificant to be noticed by the great Epeira, and is therefore allowed to prey on the minute insects, which, adhering to the lines, would otherwise be wasted. When frightened, this little spider either feigns death by extending its front legs, or suddenly drops from the web. A large Epeira ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... indestructible Union party. Three months after the close of the year there remained in the city no trace of Union sentiment. To show how this feeling was destroyed, sinking slowly, and with many reactions, under influences in themselves insignificant, and to narrate, as they fell under personal observation, that short train of events which make up the historic period of this first capital of the Southern confederacy, will be the object ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... certainly some sense which can relish the delights of sound and show, which I have not; for surely mankind would not labour so much, nor sacrifice so much for the obtaining, nor would they be so elate and proud with possessing, what appeared to them, as it doth to me, the most insignificant of all trifles." ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... blooming bride of to-day was saved by a lifeboat, and the brave man who steered that boat, and dived into the sea to rescue the child, now sits on my left hand. Again, years after, a lifeboat saved, not only the bride, but her father and her father's ship; which last, although comparatively insignificant, was, nevertheless, the means of preventing the fortunes of the family from being utterly wrecked, and the man who steered the boat on that occasion, as you all know, was the bridegroom? But—to turn from the particular to the general question—I am sure, Ladies and Gentlemen, that you will ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... privilege of an acquaintance with Friend Hopper. I shall always recur to his memory with pleasure, and I trust with that moral advantage, which the recollection of his Christian virtues is so eminently calculated to produce. How insignificant the reputation of riches, how unsatisfactory the renown of victory in war, how transient political fame, when compared with the history of a long life spent in services rendered to the afflicted ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... which he could neither judge of my good nor bad qualities. How, then, can I flatter myself, or do the Count Sobieski so great an injury, as to imagine that he could conceive any preference for so insignificant a being as I must ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... sunset. William and his little sister were playing hide-and-seek around the hill. There were thousands of light, delicate colors, hundreds of strong radiant ones. Mogens turned away from them and looked at the dark figure by his side. How insignificant it looked in comparison with all this glowing splendor; he sighed, and looked up again at the gorgeously colored clouds. It was not like a real thought, but it came vague and fleeting, existed for a second and disappeared; it was ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... an odd place for festivities. The people say that it is fear of fire which makes them separate their insignificant wooden houses by such disproportionately broad streets. Certainly it gives to the town a ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... Tourville's own fleet were insignificant, but its service to the commerce-destroying warfare of the French, by occupying the allies, is obvious; nevertheless, the loss of English commerce was not as great this year as the next. The chief losses of the ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... Charlemagne was no insignificant legislator. His Capitularies may not be equal to the laws of Justinian in natural justice, but were adapted to his times and circumstances. He collected the scattered codes, so far as laws were codified, of the various Germanic nations, and modified them. He introduced a great Christian ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... tea, or spend a few days in the family circle. But the place to which they repaired for the enjoyment of a complete rest, or for considering and maturing a plan for some very great and important object, was an insignificant little spot of the name ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... horizon's blue distance—the boundless deep spread afar, till, at the misty edge of vision it bends, in mingling threefold circles, to embrace the globe, the impenetrable below and the infinite above him, how slight and insignificant a creature he seems! like a fly that clings to the ceiling, or a mote that swims in the sunbeam, one of the mere mites of nature, easily lost by the way or a frail figure ready to be crushed by any stroke of the ponderous machinery mid which he moves. When ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... and others. Excepting the King's they all looked rather dark against so much marble-white wall space. Overhead, I am told, there was once a line of crystal chandeliers, which must have given a perfect finish to the room; but these have been improved away for rather insignificant modern lights, and all over the roof are these hideous whirling electric fans which spoil the whole effect of the classic Georgian style—the swinging punkah can at least be good to look at, and even tolerable, if it is far ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... reached the stage where he was keenly susceptible to external impressions from any source whatever. Those hurrying multitudes, that unending stir, the kaleidoscopic shifts of this human antheap made him at first profoundly lonely, immeasurably insignificant, just as the North had made him feel when he was new to it. But just as he had shaped himself to that environment, so he felt—as he had not at first felt in the North—that in time, with effort, he would become an integral part ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of France. He actually entered Burgundy, while the Spaniards from the Netherlands made progress in Picardy; and John De Werth, a formidable general of the League, and a celebrated partisan, pushed his march into Champagne, and spread consternation even to the gates of Paris. But an insignificant fortress in Franche Comte completely checked the Imperialists, and they were obliged, a second time, to ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... Summerling and Jarrold were mystified. She looked so little like laughter! And, as both had cause to regard the situation, there was so little call for laughter. But they could have no clue to Gloria's thoughts. Her wedding! With that insignificant little grey man in his cheap wrinkled clothes to officiate; with that unshaven, leering, dirty man to witness! Holy matrimony! Gloria Gaynor's wedding! She was near madness with the hideous, cruel travesty of such weddings as are dear to the hearts ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... woman has her own little circle and in it can use her influence for good, if she will. I do will heartily, and I'll prove that I'm neither proud nor fussy by receiving, here or at home, any respectable man you like to present to me, no matter how poor or plain or insignificant he may be." ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... peculiarly oppressive in being cooped within the confines of such narrow entries, and being compelled to reflect upon the immense mass of rock and earth resting above, and prevented from crushing him down into everlasting silence only by insignificant props of wood, whose melancholy groaning in the darkness bore evidence of the vast weight they upheld. There was nothing for me but to struggle onward, although I do not claim that it was without quaking heart, or many a start at odd noises echoing and re-echoing along that grim gallery. ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... the little six and had done the mischief before they were born. Let us double-column the twelve; then we shall see at a glance that each little reason is in turn answered by a retorting reason of a size to overshadow it and make it insignificant: ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... great service, without doubt. Verily as the illustrious Hari had slain the Nagas in the great lake, he, by sight alone, is capable of slaying those Asuras called the Nivatakavachas, along with their followers. But the slayer of Madhu should not be urged when the task is insignificant. A mighty mass of energy that he is. It swelleth to increasing proportions, it may consume the whole universe. This Arjuna also is competent to encounter them all, and the hero having slain them in battle, will go back to the world of men. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... hung directly above the river. The water twisted far below like a sinuous brown ribbon. The nooning sky was bronze blue and burning hot. The world seemed very huge, to Enoch; the three of them, toiling so carefully over the yellow plateau, very small and insignificant. He did not talk much during the rest intervals. He would light his pipe and smoke as if in physical contentment, but his deep blue eyes were burning and somber as they rested on the vast emptiness about them. Na-che always dozed during ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... flourished for an embrace. My immediate impression of her had been that she was dressed in mourning, but during the few moments she stood talking with our friend I made more discoveries. The figure from the neck down was meagre, the stature insignificant, but the desire to please towered high, as well as the air of infallibly knowing how and of never, never missing it. This was a little person whom I would have made a high bid for a good chance to paint. The head, the features, the colour, the whole facial oval and radiance ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... oscillate between these opposite poles of belief. Sometimes you will think that your house is remarkably comfortable, sometimes that it is unendurably uncomfortable; sometimes you will think that your place in life is a very dignified and important one, sometimes that it is a very poor and insignificant one; sometimes you will think that some misfortune or disappointment which has befallen you is a very crushing one; sometimes you will think that it is better as it is. Ah, my brother, it is a poor, weak, wayward ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... of a place I'd like," said Duncan impulsively. Then he laughed a little, uneasily. "I mean, I'm willing to take any position, no matter how insignificant. I mean it, honestly." ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... entire improvisation there ran in the middle voices, like a thread, or cantus firmus, the insignificant notes, wholly insignificant in themselves, which he found on the page of the quartet, which by chance lay open on the music-stand; on them he built up the most daring melodies and harmonies, in the most brilliant concert style. Old Pleyel could only give expression to his amazement by kissing ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... three of the strongest, which will form the crowns for cutting in the following year. At the same time take away any small blanched shoots that may have been left because they were too small or insignificant for table use. This proceeding will prevent the production of flower-stems, which is injurious to the plant, and there never need be any fear that the crop will be diminished, because plenty of buds around the crowns, ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... of the province, forty-five miles from the nearest town—which happened to be the village of Ainsley—dumped down on the crest of a far-reaching ocean-like swell of rolling prairie, bare to the blast of the four winds except for the insignificant shelter of a small bluff on its northeastern side, stood a large farm-house surrounded by a small village of barns and outbuildings. It was a typical Canadian farm of the older, western type. One of those places ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... others desiring to accumulate for the everlasting rainy day—there will, and necessarily must, arise stable methods of preserving values. Oh, pshaw! Who wants to make all men—and all women, too—in a single mental and physical mould?—and a mighty insignificant mould at that? The world is not made better by ease and plenty, but by hardship. Ease and plenty come not but as a reward of striving. When every man is like every other man, and all are too lazy to want anything, the reign of ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... fall upon the defenseless; of our catamounts, deer, wolves, bears, foxes—all these we killed without molestation from anybody; I told him how all American sportsmen were like the Nimrods of old. How galling, then, for a true shootist to be misunderstood, decried, denounced, and arrested for so insignificant a beastie as a rabbit! This indignity my very dear friend, Herr Wilhelm Fuedels-Shimmer, had suffered—a most estimable young man—careless, perhaps, in his interpretation of the law, but who would not be—that is, what sportsman would ...
— Fiddles - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... this occasion, when she had been so profoundly agitated by a seemingly insignificant cause, that her father and Old Sophy were sitting, one at one side of her bed and one at the other. She had fallen into a light slumber. As they were looking at her, the same thought came into both their minds at the same moment. Old Sophy spoke for both, as she said, ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... enough, for at that time pirates were by no means as scarce as they are at present. But it was not a favourite locality with pirates. The merchant-craft that traded along this part of the coast were usually small vessels with insignificant cargoes, and, when outward bound, carried only such bulky articles as salt, iron, and rum, with toys and trinkets; which, though sufficiently attractive to the black savages of Dahomey and Ashantee, were not the sort of merchandise that pirates cared to pick up. They were sometimes ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... including the four McGuffey Readers. When Mr. Truman arrived, Mr. Smith expressed the desire to dissolve the partnership, showed the two piles and offered Mr. Truman his choice. He pounced on the cash and the larger pile and left the insignificant schoolbooks for Mr. Smith, who thereupon became the sole owner of ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... Helicon); but the more general belief assigned to the fertility of his genius a variety of other works, some of which, if we may judge by the titles, aimed at a loftier vein [172]. And were he only the author of the "Works and Days"—a poem of very insignificant merit [173]—it would be scarcely possible to account for the high estimation in which Hesiod was held by the Greeks, often compared, and sometimes preferred, to the mighty and majestic Homer. We must either, then, consider ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... feeling that he had wounded his opponent, now on his side called out to halt. At first Fadrique would not acknowledge to the injury, but soon the blood began to trickle down, and he was obliged to accept his friend's careful assistance. Still this wound also appeared insignificant, the noble Spaniard still felt power to wield his sword, and again the deadly contest was renewed with ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... must also, by consequent, be their use and helpe, and no lesse all they that trust unto them. . . . How can religion or reason suffer men that are not void of both, to give such impious credit unto an insignificant and senseless mumbling of idle words contrary to reason, without president of any truly wise or learned, and justly suspected ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... in the parlor below; but, as we have seen, she had the faculty of arranging all future events to her mind. That matters had not turned out in the past as she had expected, counted for nothing. She was one who could not be taught, even by experience. The most insignificant thing in Holcroft's dwelling had not escaped her scrutiny and pretty accurate guess as to value, yet she could not see or understand the intolerable disgust and irritation which her ridiculous conduct excited. In a weak mind egotism and selfishness, ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... 165 pounds of meat a year; the Japanese, four pounds; the people of South China less—practically none at all. Taking the human race as a whole, meat fills only a very insignificant place in the world's bill of fare. Bread is the staff of life, and nuts, the real meat, are gradually recovering their old prestige. It is only in comparatively recent years that meat has entered so largely into the bill of fare of civilized nations. Major J. B. Paget, a writer in the English ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... less, and which should be preferred: namely, that matters should remain in their present and past condition until his Majesty, after thorough information, make suitable provision; or that, in order to remedy this insignificant evil, we should run the risk of ruining and depopulating all the islands. I, my Lord, have not the slightest inclination to go to hell merely because the encomendero collects one or two thousand. After all, whatever your Lordship may consent to, and whatever we resolve to do, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... Empire kept up its name and forms. Besides smaller sovereignties, as Saxony and Bavaria, there were two hundred and fifty petty principalities, fifty imperial cities, and several hundred knights, each with an insignificant domain subject to him. The empire was one body only in theory. National feeling had died out. The Diet had little to do, and no efficiency. Austria, which held the imperial office, and included in its extensive dominions Milan and Southern Netherlands, had sunk ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... that it should be an accident," said Desiree. "It must have been the work of fate—if fate has time to think of such an insignificant person as myself and so small an event as ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... spikes to his pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with the removal of the gods ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... began to wane, and he saw appearing the fatal hollow in its circle. His wife was exactly in that state of mind which we attributed at the close of our first part to every honest woman; she had taken a fancy to a worthless fellow who was both insignificant in appearance and ugly; the only thing in his favor was, he was not her own husband. At this juncture, her husband meditated the cutting of some dog's tail, in order to renew, if possible, his lease of happiness. His wife had conducted herself with such tact, that it would have been very ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... wilderness poured forth its savage population, till all the shores of the St. Lawrence seemed one vast aboriginal encampment. These massed at the rendezvous about the puny settlement of Montreal in such numbers that, in comparison, the white population seemed insignificant. Then, had there been a Pontiac or a Tecumseh, had there been one leader of the tribes able to teach the strength of unity, the white settlements of upper America had indeed been utterly destroyed. Naught but ancient tribal jealousies ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... and keen analytical powers for the grand episodes, the prolific crises, and the leading characters of history, instead of indiscriminately devoting them to a consecutive account of national incidents and persons, both great and small, illustrious and insignificant? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... his orders. Factions and sects, divided by mortal antipathies, had recognised him as their common head. Without carnage, without devastation, he had won a victory compared with which all the victories of Gustavus and Turenne were insignificant. In a few weeks he had changed the relative position of all the states in Europe, and had restored the equilibrium which the preponderance of one power had destroyed. Foreign nations did ample justice to his great qualities. In every Continental country where Protestant congregations met, fervent ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... purpose was eminently beautiful, from the small and comparatively insignificant ridge of hills which melt irregularly down into the plains stretching between the pass which we occupied and Laodicea. The town was about one hundred stadia distant, and some of our more sanguine warriors pretended that they could already ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... entire supreme body in order to bring to an external severance the practical disunion which existed between that member and Great Britain. This member—Ireland—as compared with other parts of the empire, was small and insignificant; measured against Great Britain, its population was five millions to thirty-one millions, and its estimated capital was only one twenty-fourth part of the capital of the United Kingdom. Measured against Australia, its trade with Great Britain was ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... shrink from the dizzy height of yonder magnificent pine? then climb it, and "throw down the top," as they do in the forests of Maine. Goethe cured himself of dizziness by ascending the lofty stagings of the Frankfort carpenters. Nothing is insignificant that is great enough to alarm you. If you cannot think of a grizzly bear without a shudder, then it is almost worth your while to travel to the Rocky Mountains in order to encounter the reality. It is said that Van Amburgh attributed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... any one about him. He never boasts of his achievements, or fishes for compliments by affecting to underrate what he has done. He is distinguished, above all things, by his deep insight and sympathy, his quick perception of, and prompt attention to, those small and apparently insignificant things that may cause pleasure or pain to others. In giving his opinions he does not dogmatize; he listens patiently and respectfully to other men, and, if compelled to dissent from their opinions, acknowledges his fallibility and asserts his own views in such ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... she was and he gazed at her with disfavour. Norman Douglas liked girls of spirit and flame and laughter. At this moment Faith was very pale. She was of the type to which colour means everything. Lacking her crimson cheeks she seemed meek and even insignificant. She looked apologetic and afraid, and the bully ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... same as if we should call the Scotch the Lord Douglases. Motape was the chief of the Bambiri, a tribe of the Banyai, and is now represented in the person of Katolosa. He was probably a man of greater energy than his successor, yet only an insignificant chief. Monomoizes was formed from Moiza or Muiza, the singular of the word Babisa or Aiza, the proper name of a large tribe to the north. In the transformation of this name the same error has been committed as in the others; and mistakes ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Elkins, W. Va. The prize for black walnut was awarded to J. G. Rush of West Willow, Pa. Mr. Rush returned his prize to be used for the purposes of the Association. No prize for hazels was awarded as only one or two insignificant specimens were ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... Accumulated hardship and disappointment had broken him down, and he died on Ascension day, May 20, 1506, at Valladolid. So little heed was taken of his passing away that the local annals of that city, "which give almost every insignificant event from 1333 to 1539, day by day, do not mention it."[616] His remains were buried in the Franciscan monastery at Valladolid, whence they were removed in 1513 to the monastery of Las Cuevas, at Seville, where ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... part of his life in those days was in his visits to his mother. These were agony to him, feeling as he did more and more how utterly insignificant and helpless he was; but he had one satisfaction to keep him going and make him look forward longingly for the next meeting—paradoxical as it may sound—so as to suffer more agony and despair, for he could plainly see that his ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... know. I do not think that MY HUSBAND"—the last two words certainly emphasized—"cares much about it. I suspect that music and painting, however much they delighted and employed our girlhood, form but a very insignificant part of our duties and enjoyments ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... his own preoccupation, neither deduced aught from the drift of her remarks nor saw the tender glances which attended them. While he was making some insignificant answer, the maid, in moving the candelabrum on the spinet, accidentally brushed therefrom his hat, which had been lying on it. She picked it up, in great confusion, ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the excitement before you of making a good speech in answer. You are in the fight. A poor woman, shut up in a cage, feels there more acutely than anywhere else how insignificant a position she fills ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... queer-looking little Italian boy who was thus studying French at Autun school. You would scarcely have looked at him twice; for his figure was small, his appearance insignificant, his face sober and solemn, his hair stiff and stringy, and his complexion sallow. The boys made fun of the way in which he talked, as boys are apt to make sport of those who do not talk ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... rather to indicate a confidence that the Governor General would punish as was fitting the impertinence of the intruders from Kaintock. He bestowed only a single glance upon them, as if his victory over such insignificant opponents were already assured. The blood slowly rose to the faces of Paul and Henry, but they were about to witness an extraordinary exhibition of Spanish ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... There were then no gorgeous cathedrals as nowadays. The Christians were instructed and sanctified in the Catacombs, and in poor private dwellings. So, in a country like ours, the kingdom of heaven is compared to a mustard seed. Churches and schools are insignificant in the beginning; but, by degrees, more life and splendor is infused into them, and ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... Disease, and Mutual Slaughter, fit nurses of the future lord of creation, have gradually evolved, after infinite travail, a race with conscience enough to know that it is vile, and intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant. We survey the past and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... one point on which she was exquisitely sensitive. The slightest encroachment of any other European power even on the outskirts of her American dominions sufficed to disturb her repose and to brace her paralysed nerves. To imagine that she would tamely suffer adventurers from one of the most insignificant kingdoms of the Old World to form a settlement in the midst of her empire, within a day's sail of Portobello on one side and of Carthagena on the other, was ludicrously absurd. She would have been just as likely to let them take possession ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 1664, the East India Company presented to the king, among other "raretyes," 2 lb. 2 oz. of "thea"; and in 1667, they desire their agent at Bantam to send "100 lb. waight of the best tey that he can gett."[B] From this insignificant beginning the importation has grown from year to year, until ninety million pounds went to Great Britain in 1856, forty million coming to the United States ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... fault with the insignificance of the Swiss cottage, because "it was not content to sink into a quiet corner, and personify humility." Now, had it not been seen to be pretending, it would not have been felt to be insignificant; for the feelings would have been gratified with its submission to, and retirement from, the majesty of the destructive influences which it rather seemed to rise up against in mockery. Such pretension is especially ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... of mountain-girt valleys, on the edges of which these hidden ranches lie, make even the largest fields seem comic in size. The smallest, however, are by no means insignificant in a pecuniary view. On the east side of the Toyabe Range I discovered a jolly Irishman who informed me that his income from fifty acres, reinforced by a sheep range on the adjacent hills, was from seven to nine thousand dollars per ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... under the stars, and gazing up into the field of suns, each the probable centre of a system, forming the Milky Way, a friend said to him, "What an insignificant creature is man in sight of so immense a creation as that!" "Yes!" was his reply; "but how wonderful a creature also is man, to be able to think and reason, and even in some measure to comprehend ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... East Anglians—became more powerful than that of Godwin; for, in that last House, Harold was now the only possessor of one of the great earldoms, and Tostig and the other brothers had no other provision beyond the comparatively insignificant lordships they held before. But if Harold had ruled no earldom at all, he had still been immeasurably the first man in England—so great was the confidence reposed in his valour and wisdom. He was ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that she hadn't, after all, awaited him in fond singleness, but had again just a trifle inconsiderately exposed him to the drawback of having to reckon, for whatever design he might amiably entertain, with the presence of a third and quite superfluous person, a small black insignificant but none the less oppressive stranger. It was odd how, on the instant, the little lady engaged with her did affect him as comparatively black—very much as if that had absolutely, in such a medium, to be the graceless appearance of any item not positively ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... him. His appearance was that of a very common man; and the anticipations of Colleton, as he was one of those persons apt to be taken by appearances, suffered something like rebuke. His figure was diminutive and insignificant; his shoulders were round, and his movements excessively awkward; his face was thin and sallow, his eyes dull and inexpressive, and too small seemingly for command. A too-frequent habit of closing them in prayer contributed, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... of periostitis is often difficult to determine. The signs of inflammation are so obscure, the swelling of the parts so insignificant, any increase of heat so imperceptible, and the soreness so slight, that even the most acute observer may fail to find the point of its existence, and it is often long after the discovery of the disease itself that its location is positively revealed by ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... denomination. My favourite ambition is to have those services acknowledged. I now appear before you to make trial, whether my earnest endeavours have been so wholly oppressed by the weakness of my abilities as to be rendered insignificant in the eyes of a great trading city; or whether you choose to give a weight to humble abilities, for the sake of the honest exertions with which they are accompanied. This is my trial to?day. My industry is not ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... diamonds, still to be seen about Cap Rouge, are rock crystals. The gold which he later on showed to Roberval, and which was tested, proved genuine enough, but the quantity of such deposits in the region has proved insignificant. It is very likely that Cartier would make the most of his mineral discoveries as the readiest means of exciting ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... the less I liked it. It was the knot from which sprang all the main routes to our Picardy front. If the Boche ever broke us, it was the place for which old Hindenburg would make. At all hours troops and transport trains were moving through that insignificant hamlet. Eminent generals and their staffs passed daily within sight of the Chateau. It was a convenient halting-place for battalions coming back to rest. Supposing, I argued, our enemies wanted a key-spot for some assault upon the morale or the discipline or ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... railway train, conveying the redoubtable genius, glid into the well-lighted, elegant little station of Laverick Wells, and out of a first-class carriage emerged Mr. Sponge, in a 'down the road' coat, carrying a horse-sheet wrapper in his hand. So small and insignificant did the station seem after the gigantic ones of London, that Mr. Sponge thought he had wasted his money in taking a first-class ticket, seeing there was no one to know. Mr. Leather, who was in ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... wrinkled like concertinas; his comparative self-assurance was quite unjustified. He had looked at her consistently since he entered the room, and Henrietta was angrily aware that Mrs. Batty was trying to make herself insignificant in her corner of the sofa. Henrietta could hear the careful control of her breathing. She was hoping to make the young people forget she was there. Henrietta frowned warningly ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... beginning of a mighty inundation is oft-times an insignificant-looking leak, and as the cause of a series of great events is not unfrequently a trifling incident, so the noteworthy circumstances which we have still to lay before our readers were brought about by a very small matter—by a baby—the ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... is an insignificant interest compared to what it is in some parts of Europe, in the United States, and in our Indian possessions. In these latter places it becomes a matter of importance to inquire what influence fungi exert on forest trees. ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... Montmartre, the roystering realism of the scene in a dressmakers' shop, the splendid acting of Miss Garden and Mme. Bressler-Gianoli, the fine singing of M. Dalmors, and the more than superb acting and singing of M. Gilibert—found their complement in the finish of a hundred little details, insignificant in themselves, but singularly potent in helping to create the atmosphere without which "Louise" would be little better than Bowery melodrama,—a play that would be a hundred times more effective if its hero and heroine were represented as living in Williamsburg, swelling at the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... amounting to five only—although two more died before they could receive proper surgical attention— while, of the wounded, seven had received injuries serious enough to completely disable them, the rest, amounting to no less than twenty-three, suffering from hurts ranging from such an insignificant prod as I had received in the leg, up to a cutlass-stroke that had all but scalped one ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... most convenient outlet of the West toward the sea. Those States, just as they are arriving at a controlling influence in the affairs of a great and powerful nation, are hardly likely to seclude themselves from the rest of the world in what would, from its position, be at best an insignificant republic. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... seen so much system and such equipment. The machine is certainly wonderful; and, no matter what is the final issue of the war, nobody can deny that so far as that part of the preparation went, the Germans were hard to beat. The most insignificant details were worked out, and all eventualities met with promptness. The horses were shod for a campaign in the country, and naturally there was a lot of slipping on the smooth cobble pavements. The instant a horse went down there was a man ready with a coarse cloth to put under his head, and another ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... Paul's Epistles, or in the Old Testament quotations in the Gospels, have a validity for the mind of the nineteenth century, when in truth they are the imperfect, half-childish products of the mind of the first century, of quite insignificant or indirect value to the historian of fact, of enormous value to the historian of ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that Mr Limpney allowed the littleness of his nature to come uppermost, and he laboriously explained the most insignificant portions of the lessons in a sarcastic manner which made Dexter writhe, for he was not slow to find that the tutor was treating ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... Street, Nassau Street, Merrion Square North, Lower Mount Street, and Northumberland Road to Ballsbridge. The men were dressed in civilian clothes, but wore their medals and other decorations, and many showed by their appearance that they, too, had played no insignificant part in the recent campaign. They were accompanied by the massed bands of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Battalions Royal Dublin Fusiliers. The 2nd Battalion of the regiment arrived from Buttevant by train at the Ballsbridge siding at 11.30 a.m., and marched across the roadway into the Royal Dublin ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... Hetty Gunn's comprehension before she was twelve years old, and it was a most important force in the growth of her nature. No one can estimate the results on a character of these slow absorptions, these unconscious biases, from daily contact. All precepts, all religions, are insignificant agencies by their side. They are like sun and soil to a plant: they make a moral climate in which certain things are sure to grow, and certain other things are sure to die; as sure as it is that orchids and pineapples thrive in the tropics, and would die ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... I have thought a creature so insignificant as that, had power to excite sensations such as I feel at present! I am, indeed, worse than he is, as much as the crimes of a man exceed those of ...
— Lover's Vows • Mrs. Inchbald
... permanently a large mass of interests and existences in the completest dependence upon itself; where the Government surrounds, controls, regulates, supervises and guards society, from its mightiest acts of national life, down to its most insignificant motions; from its common life, down to the private life of each individual; where, due to such extraordinary centralization, this body of parasites acquires a ubiquity and omniscience, a quickened capacity for motion and rapidity that finds an analogue only in the helpless lack of ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... that came in with a rush upon the discovery of a battery with insignificant weight, compact form, and great capacity, was the substitution of electricity for animal power for the movement of all vehicles. This, of necessity brought in good roads, the results obtainable on such being so much ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... to go to bed at night, a peculiarity in itself sufficiently great to individualize her. She greeted each new experience with enthusiasm and managed to extract the largest possible quota of happiness out of the smallest and most insignificant occasion. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... confessed, is not an exciting term, hardly a banner to carry in processions. Affections for old habit, currents of self-interest, and gales of passion are the forces that keep the human ship moving; and the pressure of the judicious pilot's hand upon the tiller is a relatively insignificant energy. But the affections, passions, and interests are shifting, successive, and distraught; they blow in alternation while the pilot's hand is steadfast. He knows the compass, and, with all the leeways he is obliged to tack toward, he always makes some headway. A small force, ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... terms of tenderness which experience had led him to believe were irresistible, yet to which he seldom had recourse, for hitherto he had not been under the degrading necessity of courting. He had dwelt with fondness on the insignificant past, because it was connected with her; he had regretted, or affected even to despise, the glorious present, because it seemed, for some indefinite cause, to have estranged him from her hearth. Yes! he had humbled himself before her; he had thrown with disdain at her feet all that dazzling fame ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... and looked about him as though to take counsel with his officers. But the best of these were away at the fight, and those with him were few and insignificant and inexperienced. ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... much grandeur in the view of the outer shores of these lagoon islands. The ocean, throwing its waters over the broad barrier-like reef, appears an invincible, all-powerful enemy. Yet these low, insignificant coral islets stand and are victorious; for here another power, as an antagonist, takes part in the contest. Organic forces separate the atoms of carbonate of lime, one by one, from the foaming breakers, and unite them in a symmetrical structure. Let the hurricane tear up its thousand ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... and between that town and Portslade-by-Sea, is Aldrington. Aldrington is now new houses and brickfields. Thirty years ago it was naught. But five hundred years ago it was the principal township in these parts, and Brighthelmstone a mere insignificant cluster of hovels. Centuries earlier it was more important still, for, according to some authorities, it was the Portus Adurni of the Romans. The river Adur, which now enters the sea between Shoreham and Southwick, once flowed along the line of the present canal and the Wish Pond, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... notes exchanged between the home offices instead of personal conferences. People blenched at the thought of war; stocks fell; the attention of the whole world was arrested. The innumerable and intimate bonds of friendship and interest which would thus have to be broken merely because of an insignificant jog in a boundary remote from both the nations made war between the United States and Great Britain seem absolutely inconceivable, until people realized that neither country could yield without an admission of defeat both galling to national pride and involving fundamental ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... that can hear a whisper in New Orleans, and legs that can walk six hundred miles in a day, and if, in consequence of any defect of rail or carriage, you should be so injured that your own very insignificant walking members must be taken off, I can make the surgeon's visit a pleasant dream for you, on awaking from which you will ask when he is coming to do that which he has done already,—what is the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... "means, to do what has to be done, no difference how insignificant it may be. What would you think of a lot of knights, who let tramps beat them over the heads because their code of honor did not allow them to fight with tramps? You are going into business now: come to me in a month and tell me if you have kept your word. Then we will speak ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... that some of the small arterial branches coming from the main supply-trunk are connected with other arterial branches coming from some other supply-trunk. Under normal conditions the main arterial trunks supply their respective organs, the little connecting arterioles playing an insignificant part. But let the main supply-trunk be cut off or stopped for whatever reason, and a remarkable thing takes place. The little connecting branches begin at once to enlarge and draw blood from the neighboring uninjured ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... impossible for you to take up the most insignificant pebble at your feet, without being able to read, if you like, this curious lesson in it. You look upon it at first as if it were earth only. Nay, it answers, "I am not earth—I am earth and air in one; part of that ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... days. Strength is the only sustaining force. And is the throne strong enough to resist a general uprising? I doubt it. And I, poor servant that I am, can arrest this movement, even now! I can betray the chiefs of this association. But I am an insignificant person. No matter how great the services may be that I render, a bone or two will be thrown to me to gnaw, and that will be deemed sufficient. But let the Marquis de Fongereues, peer of France, denounce at the Tuileries the formidable association that ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... of the fact that the present volume is but an intrusion at the best; however, I trust my readers will be pleased to overlook the many faults of a bagatelle as insignificant and ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... astonishing fatuity which marked their comments. Billy Fairfax had made the remark about the ship's cat a dozen times. And a dozen times, it had elicited from the others a clamor of similar chatter, of insignificant haphazard detail which began ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... can relish the delights of sound and show, which I have not; for surely mankind would not labour so much, nor sacrifice so much for the obtaining, nor would they be so elate and proud with possessing, what appeared to them, as it doth to me, the most insignificant of ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... revolutions, which were generally put down after much plundering and bloodshed. These bands of armed men went about like regular banditti, disturbing the peace of the whole country. They were not much heard of in Europe, because intercommunication and telegraphy did not exist then as they do now, and insignificant affairs of the kind were ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... little Italian boy who was thus studying French at Autun school. You would scarcely have looked at him twice; for his figure was small, his appearance insignificant, his face sober and solemn, his hair stiff and stringy, and his complexion sallow. The boys made fun of the way in which he talked, as boys are apt to make sport of those who do ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... was to be. The Aztecs, it seemed, had not originally established themselves on the spot where Mexico was built. When they came down from the north country, and across the hills into the valley of Mexico, they were but an insignificant tribe, and as yet mere savages. They settled down in one place after another, and were always driven out by the persecutions of the neighbouring tribes. At last they took possession of a little group of swampy islands in the lake of Tezcuco; and then at last, safe from their enemies, they ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... Lopez. Lopez, the former colonel of Dragoons, now commanded the Imperialist reserve, quartered in the monastery of La Cruz around the person of their sovereign. But Lopez had once condemned Murguia to death. A strange solicitude, thought Driscoll, in such a high and mighty person for a little, insignificant, useless warrior as poor Murgie. A strange, a very strange solicitude, and Driscoll could not get ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... mere precept), that a good education and sound bringing-up is of the first and middle and last importance; and I declare it to be most instrumental and conducive to virtue and happiness. For all other human blessings compared to this are petty and insignificant. For noble birth is a great honour, but it is an advantage from our forefathers. And wealth is valuable, but it is the acquisition of fortune, who has often taken it away from those who had it, and brought it to those who little expected it; and much ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... great satire, he bent all his energies, with the utmost seriousness, to writing 'The Dunciad' on the model of Dryden's 'Mac Flecknoe' and irresponsibly 'dealt damnation 'round the land.' Clever and powerful, the poem is still more disgusting—grossly obscene, pitifully rancorous against scores of insignificant creatures, and no less violent against some of the ablest men of the time, at whom Pope happened to have taken offense. Yet throughout the rest of his life Pope continued with keen delight to work the unsavory production over and to ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... this somewhat insignificant Book is, that certain parties, of the pirate species, were preparing to reprint it for me. There are books, as there are horses, which a judicious owner, on fair survey of them, might prefer to adjust by at once shooting through the head: ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... of deceit or of treachery on her part had never entered into his mind. This Ernest, his wife's lover, was a pretty boy of about three-and-twenty, with light hair, a turned-up nose, and a small moustache—probably the most insignificant of all his acquaintances. ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... many a rogue has done before him, and found half a hundred persons busy at a table of rouge et noir. Gambouge's five napoleons looked insignificant by the side of the heaps which were around him; but the effects of the wine, of the theft, and of the detection by the pawnbroker, were upon him, and he threw down his capital stoutly upon the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... people eating is understood to be a very interesting and "brilliant" spectacle, and however insignificant you may be in the social world, you get a reflex of its "brilliancy" when you allow people in their turn to see you eating likewise. A well-cooked, well-served supper is a "function," in which every man and woman who can move a jaw takes part, and though in plain parlance there ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... when applied to these tribes, are exactly the same as if we should call the Scotch the Lord Douglases. Motape was the chief of the Bambiri, a tribe of the Banyai, and is now represented in the person of Katolosa. He was probably a man of greater energy than his successor, yet only an insignificant chief. Monomoizes was formed from Moiza or Muiza, the singular of the word Babisa or Aiza, the proper name of a large tribe to the north. In the transformation of this name the same error has been committed as in the ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... The apparently insignificant event that initiated the extraordinary series of adventures, of which this is the narrative, occurred about the hour of 8 a.m. on a certain day of September in the year of our Lord 19—; and it consisted in the delivery by the ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... monastery presents the best specimen of Gothic architecture in England. The east window is a most magnificent affair, sixty-four feet high, and calls forth universal admiration. The very insignificant doorway was, no question, intended by the architect to form a strong contrast with the elevation of the roof. The abbey is cruciform; its ruins are perfect as to the grand outline; and I am sure we should like to pass the entire day within this venerable fane. ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... any other cause, the harmony of the glorious Union of our confederated States—that Union which binds us together as one people, and which for sixty years has been our shield and protection against every danger. In the eyes of the world and of posterity how trivial and insignificant will be all our internal divisions and struggles compared with the preservation of this Union of the States in all its vigor and with all its countless blessings! No patriot would foment and excite ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... you say is neither generous nor worthy of you, since you abuse your superiority. You see me at your feet pleading for an insignificant thing, puerile, childish, foolish, perhaps, but one which would give me pleasure, and you think it heroic not to yield. Do you want me to speak out, well? then, you ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... thirty, or a hundred candles at once; so that as one expires they may begin burning and spreading light which shall shine till Jesus comes. Get light from Christ, then share it; and remember that it is the glory of fire that one little candle may go on lighting hundreds of candles—one insignificant taper may light all the lamps of a cathedral church, and yet not be robbed of its own little glow of flame. Andrew was lit by Christ Himself, and passed on the flame to Simon Peter, and he to three thousand more ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... of the natives are so insignificant, when compared with ours, that I should not have thought of treating of them, if some persons of distinction had not desired me to say something of them, in order to shew the industry of those people, and how far invention could carry them, in supplying those wants which human ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... neglected. What we include in a biography and what we emphasize will be determined by the purpose for which it is written. For pure information, a short account is desirable, but a long account is of greater interest. If a man is really great, the most insignificant events in his life will be read with interest, but a good biographer will select such events with good taste and then will present them so that they will have a bearing upon the more important phases of the man's life and character. Hundreds ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... islands of the Mediterranean; but for the great towns of what is now Belgium and Germany what part might not be left for them to play in the history of the world? In England the towns were as yet insignificant communities compared with such mighty aggregates of population as were to be found in Bruges, Antwerp, or Cologne; but even the English towns were communities, and they were beginning to assert themselves somewhat loudly while clinging to their ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... their new business, compete at these places for slender purses, and often with the help of dishonest tricks. Accidents, as might be expected, are frequent, although the obstacles, with the exception of the river at La Marche, are insignificant. But the pace is pushed to such excess that the smallest fence becomes dangerous. This last objection, however, may be made even to the running at Auteuil, where the course is under the judicious and honorable ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... too insignificant to garrison for a permanent conquest for the English. Many of our officers, and all the men, wished very naturally to plunder it; but the captain of the other frigate, now the commander, would not listen to the proposal for a moment. However, we totally destroyed their ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... him, that he breaks away as I did from the life he knows, and ventures forth into the wonderful mystic twilight land where lie the great adventures and the great rewards. Behold me, then, at the office of the Daily Gazette, on the staff of which I was a most insignificant unit, with the settled determination that very night, if possible, to find the quest which should be worthy of my Gladys! Was it hardness, was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her own glorification? Such thoughts may come ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... two days our route continued to lie through the valley, which we entered upon leaving Gap, of the Durance. It is an apparently insignificant but treacherous stream, which by repeated floods has spread ugly devastation over a hill-girdled country that ought to be smiling with peace and plenty. At Guillestre we came in sight of the jagged double peak of Mont Pelvoux, and got a magnificent vista ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... study, each had had a chance to consider the Sanusian situation pretty thoroughly. All but Billie were convinced that the humans were deserving people, whose position was all the more regrettable because due, so far as could be seen, the insignificant little detail of ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... without her his drawing room would lack a great attraction. He had risen high in his profession, and now that he was rich and well known his chief ambition was to make of his house a centre of liberal and intellectual society. He was painfully conscious that the insignificant, overdressed little woman whom in his youth he had made the mistake of marrying was not fit, with her vapid talk and faded prettiness, to be the mistress of a great literary salon. When he could prevail upon Gemma to come he always felt that the evening would be a ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... Gaining the Grand Walk, I saw Mr. Marmaduke's insignificant figure dodging fearfully among the roughs, whose hour it was. He traversed the Cross Walk, and twenty yards farther on dived into an opening in the high hedge bounding the Wilderness. Before he had made six paces I had him by the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... at what he believed to have been base treason on the part of his mother,—all this rushed upon him with fearful force, and he stood again motionless, a picture of wild perplexity. His face betokened the state of his mind. Shyuote did not dare to inquire of him further than to ask a very insignificant question,—namely, who the ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... me nearly the whole evening, and talked all the time ... The words would seem insignificant and absurd, were I to write them down; but with him, tone, manner, expression, all speak and say more than words, and yet his very words signify more, depict better, and penetrate more deeply than those of others. I keep them in my ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... done Nothing, it becomes a Piece of Justice to enquire whether they have in Reality been such unconcernd or impotent Spectators of their Countrys Misery and Want. Dr Franklin has the Honor of being Mr Deans venerable Friend; Mr Lee, an insignificant or troublesome Colleague. And yet Mary Johnsons assiduous Applications procurd the sending a Ship loaded with Merchandise & Stores to the Value of twenty five Thousand Pounds Sterling; and this Negociation was settled before ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... and stormy years of battle, and led by a renowned general, bent on destroying the city and putting all its inhabitants—men and women, old and young—to the sword? Ambition and shame alike stimulated the Swedish general, as he thought how this insignificant country town had so long thwarted all his best efforts. His men, on the other hand, were inspired by thirst for plunder and a burning desire to avenge all the toils and troubles they had endured amid the severities of that ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous
... that this case is given only as an illustration of a principle which is applicable to all cases. The act of opening and shutting a door in a noisy manner is altogether too insignificant a fault to deserve this long discussion of the method of curing it, were it not that methods founded on the same principles, and conducted in the same spirit, are applicable universally in all that pertains to the domestic management of children. And it is a method, ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... passenger-ship Lusitania was torpedoed off the south coast of Ireland with the loss of 1100 souls, many of them women and children, and some of them Americans; and the news was hailed in Germany with transports of delight from ministers of religion and all but an insignificant section of the people; medals were officially struck to commemorate the deed. British lives had been lost through Russian action off the Dogger Bank in 1904 without provoking war, and the sinking of the Lusitania did not precipitate war between Germany and the United States. But it eased ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... province of history to record great influences, whether they come from the people, from great popular ideas, from literature and science, or from a single man. The lives of individuals are comparatively insignificant in the history of the United States; but the lives of such men as Caesar, Cromwell, and Napoleon, furnish very great subjects for the pen of the philosophical historian, since great controlling influences emanated from ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... the comparative critic becomes too much of a universal lover, and too little of an enthusiast, that he has an irritating and ungentlemanly habit of seeing blemishes in the greatest, a pottering and peddling fancy for discovering beauties in the most insignificant; that he lacks the exclusiveness and the fastidiousness of intellectual aristocracy, the fervour and rapture of aesthetic passion. To this, one can answer little more than, "It may be so." Certainly the critic of this kind will ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... his audience. However, he was a sport, and let them do as they liked; so they drank his health and sang: He's a Jolly Good Fellow! Several old boys came down, FitzMorris with an eyeglass and a wonderful tie; Sandham, as usual, quite insignificant; Armour wearing the blue waistcoat of a Wadham drinking club. Meredith had been expected, but at the last moment he had found his debts so much in excess of a very generous allowance that he would have to retrench a little. It was a pity; ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... all the carts and horses down into a hollow where there was a water-hole, and to wait there for further orders. Tugendheim was bidden come with us on foot; and without any explanation he led us all toward a low ridge that faced us, rising here and there into an insignificant hill. It looked like blown sand over which coarse grass had grown, and such it proved to be, for it was on the edge of another desert. It was fifty or sixty feet high, and rather difficult to climb, but he led us straight up it, cautioning us to be silent and not to show ourselves on the far side. ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... from under shaggy eyebrows. His age was scarcely beyond thirty, but one would have put it ten years later, for there were lines on his brow and threads of grey in his hair. His companion was slim and, to a hasty glance, insignificant. He wore a peaked grey beard which lengthened his long, thin face, and he had a nervous trick of drumming always with his fingers on whatever piece of furniture was near. But if you looked closer and marked the high brow, the keen eyes, and the very resolute ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... the age of forty, was nothing more than a respectable but unknown tradesman who had experienced no extraordinary crises, whose few existing utterances were dull and insipid, and whose life seemed destined to remain as insignificant and unsung as ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... and passing, I saluted him, which he pleasantly returned, without a murmur as to the justice of the fine. Subsequently, on several occasions, he placed me under obligations to him for favors. Personally, insignificant as I may have been to him, he recognized in me for the time being a custodian of the majesty of the law, which he knew he had violated. When it shall happen as a rule and not as the exception that men will esteem, applaud and sustain the honest administration of the law, irrespective of ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... lay below, hugging the river, a relic of the days when steamboats plied up and down the stream and railways were remote, a sleepy, insignificant, intensely rural hamlet of less than six hundred inhabitants. Its one claim to distinction was the venerable but still active ferry that laboured back and forth across the river. Of secondary importance was the ancient ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... looking back upon this scene conducted by candlelight in the front parlour, that my Mother was much baffled by the logic of my argument. She had gone so far as to say publicly that no 'things or circumstances are too insignificant to bring before the God of the whole earth'. I persisted that this covered the case of the humming-top, which was extremely significant to me. I noticed that she held aloof from the discussion, which was carried on with some show of annoyance by my Father. He had never gone quite ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... sold books with an assiduous devotion to business, never trusting to others what he could do himself. He was proud of his collection and its extent. He bought books and pamphlets at auction literally by the cart-load, every thing that nobody else wanted being bid off to Burnham at an insignificant price, almost nominal. He got a wide reputation for selling cheaply, but he always knew when to charge a stiff price for a book, and to stick to it. Once when I was pricing a lot of miscellaneous books picked out for purchase, mostly under a dollar a volume, we ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... moved. Her conceit, her abnormal all-embracing conceit was wounded—yes, even by so insignificant a creature as the Dean's Ernest; but she was also unexpectedly touched. She would have greatly preferred not to be touched, but there it was, she could not help herself. She did not know that, in all her life before, anyone had ever fought ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... from an insignificant province, from a despised race, proclaimed by a mere handful of ignorant workmen, demanding self-control and renunciation before unheard of, certain to arouse in time powerful enemies in the highly cultivated and critical society which it attacked, the odds against it were tremendous." (Ibid., ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... by thirty feet; in 1790 it missed the original mark at least sixty-five feet; in 1797, one hundred and fifty feet; and in 1806, nearly two hundred and fifty feet. These were "high-water" years. The "high waters" since then have been so insignificant that I have scarcely taken the trouble to notice them. Thus, you will perceive that the planters need not feel uneasy. The river may make an occasional spasmodic effort at a flood, but the time is approaching when it will cease ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... friendly, insignificant little Miss Murray was Miss Cottle, a large, dark, morose girl, with untidy hair, and untidy clothes, and a bad complexion. Miss Cottle was unapproachable and insolent in her manner, from a sense of superiority. She was ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... against Israel, for like a swarm of locusts he flew upon them; and the name furthermore designates the purpose of this enemy, who came to suck the blood of Israel. [137] This Amalek was a son of Eliphaz, the first-born son of Esau, and although the descendants of Jacob had been weaker and more insignificant in earlier times, Amalek had left them in peace, for he had excellent reasons to delay his attack. God had revealed to Abraham that his seed would have to serve in the land of the Egyptians, and had put the payment of this debt upon Isaac, and after his death, upon ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... golden valley meadows beside her peaceful little friend, she gathered a gradual resolution without sight of agencies or consequences, Lord Ormont was kept from her by the struggle to master his Charlotte a second time—compared with which the first was insignificant. And this time it was curious: he could not subdue her physique, as he did before; she was ready for him each day, and she was animated, much more voluble, she was ready to jest. The reason being, that she fought now on plausibly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... up to Mrs. Meldrum with arms flourished for an embrace. My immediate impression of her had been that she was dressed in mourning, but during the few moments she stood talking with our friend I made more discoveries. The figure from the neck down was meagre, the stature insignificant, but the desire to please towered high, as well as the air of infallibly knowing how and of never, never missing it. This was a little person whom I would have made a high bid for a good chance to paint. The head, the features, ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... swiftly. Hazel explained, "They were interested in different things," and "Milly doesn't care for ideas, you know." Mrs. Fredericks, who considered herself to be in the flood-tide of the modern intellectual movement, had few moments to spare for her insignificant friend. Milly realized this with a touch of bitterness. "I can't do anything for her in any way. I can't help on her game." She knew that these ambitious, modern, intellectual women, with whom she had been thrown, had no use for people "out ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... the dying city with the wall of living green, north, west, and south, towering ever higher and preparing to carry out the sentence already passed, and the victim becomes insignificant in the presence of the executioner. I was reminded of the well where Gootes died for here except on one small side the grass rose like the inside of a stovepipe to the sky; but I suffered neither the same despair nor the unaccountable elation I had upon ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... arrived at the junction of the rivers and proceeded some way down the Sabaki, beside which the Tsavo looks very insignificant. Several islands are dotted about in mid-stream and are overgrown with tall reeds and rushes, in which hippo find capital covert all the year round. As with the Tsavo, the banks of the Sabaki are lined with trees of various kinds, affording most welcome shade from the heat of the ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... that an Austrian force had been reported approaching from the south, moving on Krupanie, and that it had seemed so insignificant that a small detachment of third reserve troops had been sent to hold it back. But this enemy force now developed into three ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... is the coral-insect of the South," said the voice within; "insignificant in himself, he rears a giant structure—which will yet cause the wreck of the ship of state, should its keel grate too closely on that adamantine wall. 'L'etat c'est moi,' said Louis XIV., and that 'slavery is the South' is as true an utterance. Our staple—our ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... overpowered. This demigod had brought HER a gift. He had thought about her—insignificant her! True, she had talked with him, had even taken walks with him, but those things had not been significant. It had seemed he merely condescended to the daughter of a martyr to his cause. He had been paying a tribute to her father. But a gift—a personal gift ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... of our language is numerous prose.' JOHNSON. 'Sir William Temple was the first writer who gave cadence to English prose[742]. Before his time they were careless of arrangement, and did not mind whether a sentence ended with an important word or an insignificant word, or with what part of speech it was concluded.' Mr. Langton, who now had joined us, commended Clarendon. JOHNSON. 'He is objected to for his parentheses, his involved clauses, and his want of harmony. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the gloom from east to west, followed by one in the opposite direction. Without intermission, one blaze after another and thunder crashing until our eyes were blinded and our ears deafened, a thousand times ten thousand pieces of artillery thundered away. We seemed utterly helpless and insignificant. "How wonderful are Thy works," came to my mind. Still no wind; ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... of the girl was singularly compelling; there was something vividly impressive about her just now, though her pallid, prematurely mature face and the thin figure in the regulation black dress and white apron showed ordinarily only insignificant. "Tell me now," she repeated, with a monotonous emphasis that somehow moved Sarah to obedience against her will, greatly to ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... of the whereabouts of the treacherous hole in the drift, did I manage to keep on my legs. On gaining the opposite bank, I scooped up and drained off a helmetful of the precious fluid, and then urging on through the next ford—an insignificant one compared to the first—gained admission at Fermistone's hotel, after being duly cross-questioned through the keyhole of the door. Some hot tea and whisky was recommended by the host, and palatable ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... flightier substance notwithstanding her business talents, waved aside the remark as insignificant and without bearing upon ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Scavenger-Executioners in French costume, for Count Rothenburg's behoof, made haste to load Gundling with Rathships, Kammerherrships, Titles such as fools covet;—gave him tolerable pensions too, poor devil, and even functions, if they were of the imaginary or big insignificant sort. Above all things, his Majesty dressed him, as the pink of fortunate ambitious courtiers. Superfine scarlet coat, gold buttonholes, black-velvet facings and embroideries without end: "straw-colored breeches; red silk stockings," ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... faces, and into the nostrils and eyes of the horses, filling every crevice in the carts. Fortunately, comparatively few take flight on a windy day, otherwise it would be impossible to make headway against such an infinite host in rapid motion before the wind, although composed individually of such insignificant members. The portions of the prairie visited by the grasshoppers wear a curious appearance. The grass may be seen cut uniformly to one inch from the ground. The whole surface is covered with the small, round, green exuviae of these destructive invaders. They frequently ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... it suits me to a dot. I begin, to-day, to entirely recast and re-write the first two-thirds—new plan, with two minor characters, made very prominent, one major character cropped out, and the Twins subordinated to a minor but not insignificant place. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... cold moon of dawn hung over the westering snow fields but the golden fleeces of sunrise shone above the maples up at Ingleside. Joe took his pale little bride in his arms and she lifted her face to his. Rilla choked suddenly. It did not matter that Miranda was insignificant and commonplace and flat-featured. It did not matter that she was the daughter of Whiskers-on-the-moon. All that mattered was that rapt, sacrificial look in her eyes—that ever-burning, sacred fire of devotion and loyalty and fine courage that she ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... certain physical suffering. But of all agonies, none could approximate to that induced by Death. When that rumour reached her, she realized that hope had given her some measure of support, and how insignificant all other trouble is beside that awful blank, that mystery, whose single revelation is the houseless soul's unreturning flight from the only world we are sure of. When the contradicting rumour came, she clutched at hope and clung ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... herself what had she done to offend him; again and again she pondered over the smallest and most insignificant actions—the lightest words—of the past few weeks, in order to discover some clue to the mystery of ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... plant whose seed is much more beautiful than its flower. By the way, I have two, for the Spindle Tree is in seed, which has a quite insignificant blossom. But the plant I mean is a wild peony, which I dug up in a brake on the slopes of Helikon. It is a single white whose flower lasts, perhaps, three days. It makes a large seed-pod, which burst a short time ago, and revealed blue-black ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... a pioneer. He came to Victoria in 1859 and is one of the best informed men in the city concerning the history and material development of this portion of the province, and he himself has taken no insignificant part in affairs of a general public nature. He has written many reminiscences of early days in Victoria and is a recognized authority ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... need we affect surprise when the profounder domain of providence refuses to yield up its secrets? That the ways of God are mysterious is a logical necessity. The Infinite disparity between the human and the Divine intelligence involves it. Insignificant as a lady's finger ring may seem when compared to one of the mighty rings of Saturn, the human mind, in the presence of the Divine, is infinitely more so. Well hath the Scriptures said, "Far as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... world. "It can," he says, "not be charged as a crime upon natural science, that it has destroyed materials hitherto used by the poets. Such losses are of small consequence to the true poet, but may, indeed, be painful to the many dabblers in the poetic art, who think they have rendered the insignificant poetic by tricking it out in gewgaws from the poetic armory of a vanished era." The fifth, entitled, "The Existence of all things in the Domain of Reason," is the profoundest and most significant of these essays, and more than the others brings out in form as simple and popular as could ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... the inauguration were concluded, Genghis Khan returned, with the officers of his court and his immediate followers, to Karakorom. This town, though nominally the capital of the empire, was, after all, quite an insignificant place. Indeed, but little importance was attached to any villages or towns in those days, and there were very few fixed places of residence that were of any considerable account. The reason is, ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... why, but these peculiarities, which some people call insignificant details, and some never notice at all, are for me the very places themselves. They rise instantly before my eyes when the name of the country is mentioned; just as when I was away the mere mention of the word "home" brought a vision of Bessmoor and its mysterious ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... ferry was greatly exaggerated, as usual on such occasions, by the friends of the movement. It was called "a great concourse of citizens," but Hamilton, who was then in Philadelphia, and whose truthfulness has never been questioned, placed the number at an insignificant figure. In a letter to a friend, he said, "It is seldom easy to speak with absolute certainty in such cases, but from all I could observe, or have been able to learn, I believe the number would be stated high at a hundred persons." Of a meeting convened at evening to receive Mr. Genet, Hamilton ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... we reached our destination upon Christmas Eve, weary and homesick; yet our Christmas dinner in this insignificant town was choice and recherche, the quality and variety of the wines being worthy of the cellar of a connoisseur. Our business success here was greater than in ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... silvered, and his cheek rosy as a December apple. His hazel eyes twinkled with satisfaction as he remembered the family had now produced two privy councillors. Lord Pomeroy was there, the great lord who had returned William Ferrars to Parliament, a little man, quite, shy, rather insignificant in appearance, but who observed everybody and everything; a conscientious man, who was always doing good, in silence and secrecy, and denounced as a boroughmonger, had never sold a seat in his life, and was always looking out for able men of character to introduce them to public affairs. ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... all tourists in Switzerland naturally repair. Did it never occur to Mr Cooper that one young fool of an Englishman, during his tour, might have been the author of all these obnoxious remarks, and is the folly of one insignificant individual to be gravely commented upon in a widely disseminated work, so as to occasion or increase the national ill-will? Surely there is little wisdom and ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... not, for it does not often fall to the lot of mortal man to find in one little, insignificant figure, dwarfish alike in soul and body, such a compound of selfishness, duplicity, meanness, and vulgarity, as was centered in the object of ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... in the palm of his hand. Taken alone, each one was insignificant, proved nothing whatever. Taken all together, they assumed vast proportions, became convincing, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... man pitying his poor, dumb, unconscious companion, and the little dog that trots in to attend the morning prayers, because their life is so brief, and, more particularly, because it is so insignificant. He recognizes the feeble likeness between himself and them, and appreciates also the tremendous difference. He does not think that he would be glad to exchange his lot of labor and care for their carelessness and content, ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... supposed to be, and the prospect of its speedy evacuation. Karaiskakes refused to move, answering each appeal by unreasonable demands upon Lord Cochrane for supplies of ammunition and provisions, which it was no part of his duty to supply out of the residue of the insignificant sum of 8,000l. supplied to him out of the Greek loan for naval purposes.[4] It may be that Karaiskakes—a bold and shrewd man—was not personally responsible for his inactivity. His army was little more ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... with my section about two hundred yards in front of the centre square, and sat down. They were standing in perfect order and steadiness, and I knew they would not disturb that steadiness to pick a quarrel with an insignificant section. I alternately looked at them, at the regiment, and up the hill to my right (rear), to see who was coming to ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... makers of a merely nominal marriage. Their mutual feelings towards each other were a quantity unknown to either; but about a third person they were equally outspoken and unanimous. Thus they had fewer disagreements than many a loving couple, and perhaps more points of insignificant contact, while all the time there was not even the pretence of love between them. Their lives made a chasm ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... will probably maintain; but fleet steamers are giving more southern ports a chance. Charleston, South Carolina, is second only in importance. In the spring of '79, every week four steamers were loaded for New York, and strawberries formed no insignificant proportion of the freight. Indeed, the supply from Charleston was so large that the price in April scarcely repaid the cost of some shipments. The proprietor of a commission house, largely engaged in the Southern fruit trade, told me he thought that about one third as many ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... that he would resign his place to another for whom they had more respect. This motion put the Great Chamber all in a ferment, which was felt in the Fourth, where the gentlemen of both parties hastened to support their respective sides, and if the most insignificant lackey had then but drawn a sword, Paris would have been all in ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... here to-night stands at the bar to answer if chivalry or darkness inhabits his bosom. To judge us sits womankind in the form of one of its fairest flowers. In her hand she holds the prize, intrinsically insignificant, but worthy of our noblest efforts to win as a guerdon of approval from so worthy a representative ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... sisters were worshipers of soap and sand, and these two tutelary deities had kept every board of the house-floor white and smooth, and also every table and bench and tub of household use. There was a sacred care over each article, however small and insignificant, which composed their slender household stock. The loss or breakage of one of them would have made a visible crack in the hearts of the worthy sisters,—for every plate, knife, fork, spoon, cup, or glass was as ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... or notable cathedral, but its delightful Early English choir with its magnificent east window will ever redeem it from being insignificant or uninteresting. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... that his driver was always boss, and acted accordingly; but not so with Tuberculosis. He believed that his own judgment in certain matters of conduct was best. For instance, it was absolutely against his principles to ever cross a stream, no matter how well it was bridged or how insignificant its size. Yet, after many experiences, seasoned with a little strenuous persuasion from the end of an alder limb, he began slowly to change his views. However, he positively had no use for burned stumps, and when it came ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... from the coast one reaches the water-shed, or "divide" (an American term which South Africans have adopted), one finds that on the farther or northerly side there is very little descent. The peaks which when seen from the slopes towards the coast looked high and steep are on this inner side insignificant, because they rise so little above the general level of the plateau. This plateau runs away inland to the west and north-west, and occupies seven-eighths of the surface of South Africa. It dips gently on the north to the valley ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... provided her with money and necessaries. He had but few remaining hopes in his heart, but among them was the firmly implanted one that Petronelle was too insignificant to draw upon herself the terrible attention of the ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... best friend—an insignificant little lady who sat at the foot of the table—told, in spite, of Louison's protest, how the latter had taken three poor seamstresses up to her own rooms, and had them sew the whole of the night before the fete in the hippodrome. She had given the poor girls coffee and ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... had a fixed focus, and was designed for looking at stars. Consequently, the field of vision was extremely narrow at the short distance across the water, and Rick could only manage to get Merlin and his small, insignificant-looking companion into the frame. What's more, they were upside down, as is common in reflecting telescopes. The boy knew there was an erecting prism in the case, a device that would put the image upright, but it couldn't be used with the camera. Anyway, it wouldn't ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... Wanton; for she discovers not one pang of remorse till the last act, and that seems to arise more from the external distress to which she is then exposed, than to any compunctions of conscience. She still loves and doats on her base betrayer, though a most insignificant creature. In this character, Rowe has been true to the sex, in drawing a woman, as she generally is, fond of her seducer; but he has not drawn drawn a Penitent. The character of Altamont is one of those which the present ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... of God simply transforms and revolutionizes the entire scale of human experience. It simplifies all perplexities, it offers the solution for all problems. It illuminates the small and the apparently insignificant occurrences which, nevertheless, contrive to play so large and often so determining a part in our days, as well as places in high relief the great questions that beset one in his ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... That orbit, it tells us, passed through celestial spaces cold enough to chill this heated globe, and of course to consolidate it externally. We know, from the action of similar causes on a smaller scale and on comparatively insignificant objects immediately about us, what must have been the effect of this cooling process upon the heated mass of the globe. All substances when heated occupy more space than they do when cold. Water, which expands when freezing, is the only exception ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... of rifles and crash of shells, that I merely mechanically wake at the appointed hour, mechanically perform my duty and as mechanically fall asleep again. My ego has been crushed out of me, and I have become, doubtless, quite rightly so, an insignificant atom in a curious thing called a siege. No mortal under such circumstances, no matter how faithful to an appointed task, can put pencil to paper, and attempt to sketch the confusion and smoke around ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... however insignificant in the great world of politics and business, is one of pleasing interest to the friends of American science, and it has been thought proper that the following record of it should be preserved in a permanent form. I ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... on that point, Mr. Titmouse?" inquired Mr. Gammon, with a smile; "pray let us, my dear sir, at once proceed to your rooms—time is very short and valuable. I should vastly like to look at these same insignificant papers ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Coffee is of minor, almost insignificant, importance in the agriculture of Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina. In Uruguay the climate is altogether ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... to Paecilasma and Lepas: in habits, also, this genus agrees with Scalpellum, and if it had possessed a lower whorl of valves, it would have quite naturally entered that genus. It is unfortunate, that so insignificant and poorly characterised a form should require a generic appellation. In natural position, it appears to lead from ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... with admiration for the sound of their own lecturing voices, visionaries who waste their lives on fantastic impossibilities, or quacks whose ambition soars no higher than our corns. Thus Society escapes, and the illimitable power of Chemistry remains the slave of the most superficial and the most insignificant ends. ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... stricken patients. He was nevertheless guilty of a number of indiscretions which rendered him odious to a large proportion of the population. His pettiness of spirit was incessantly asserting itself. No person in the community, however insignificant, was beneath his wrath when his sense of personal dignity was wounded. On one occasion a wretched woman of intemperate habits and loose character was brought before him in the Mayor's Court. She was loquacious and abusive, and Mackenzie, in a rage, ordered her to be placed in the ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... say, the mighty empires of Babylon and Nineveh and Phoenicia and Elam failed, while a little territory including the valley of the Jordan, called Palestine, containing a small and insignificant branch of the Semitic race, called Hebrews, developed a literature, language, and religion which exercised a most powerful influence in all civilizations ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... miserable system, how superior was England, as a land for the traveller, to all the rest of the world, Sweden only excepted! Bad as were the roads, and defective as were all the arrangements, still you had these advantages: no town so insignificant, no posting house so solitary, but that at all seasons, except a contested election, it could furnish horses without delay, and without license to distress the neighboring farmers. On the worst road, and on a winter's day, with no more than a single pair of horses, you generally ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... escaped the grounds and the cattle; I could not escape the house. A lady with silver hair, a slender silver voice, and a stream of insignificant information not to be diverted, led me through the picture gallery, the music-room, the great dining-room, the long drawing-room, the Indian room, the theatre, and every corner (as I thought) of that interminable mansion. There was but one place reserved, the garden-room, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dear, if I bid you think of it. I think of it,—more I know than I ought to do. I have been so placed that I could do but little good and little harm to others than myself. The females of a family such as ours, unless they marry, are very insignificant in the world. You who but a few years ago were a little school girl in Brotherton have now been put over all ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... cows, Howe attempted no offensive operations. As already shown, the regulars returned from Lechmere's Point as soon as the provincials assembled in numbers, and no attempt was made to hold the little hill. Other skirmishes there were from time to time, but these were insignificant, ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. To pursue his secret has something of the fascination of a detective story. It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer. The most insignificant of Strickland's works suggests a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex; and it is this surely which prevents even those who do not like his pictures from being indifferent to them; ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... An apparently insignificant event happened about this time, that set in motion influences of great moment, the effects of which are still to be felt and seen. Robert Davis' sister in Michigan was a regular subscriber to a religious journal. At this time she felt led to send ...
— Around Old Bethany • Robert Lee Berry
... not been long in the country, sir," said Coja Solomon, with a shrewd look at Desmond, "and therefore you will find it hard to believe, perhaps, that these goods, so insignificant in bulk, are worth over two lakhs of rupees. A precious load indeed, sir. This delay is naturally a cause of vexation to my distinguished superior, but it is not due to any idleness or inattention on my part. It is caused by the surprising difficulty of getting ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... three moons; a big one, fifteen hundred miles in diameter, and two insignificant twenty-mile chunks of rock. The big one was fortified, and a couple of ships were in orbit around it. The Nemesis was challenged as she emerged from her last hyperjump; both ships broke orbit and ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... depended mainly upon Ferozepore for the supply of munitions of war. The fort had been allowed to fall into bad repair, and the mutineers had no difficulty in forcing their way inside; there, fortunately, they were checked by the wall which surrounded the arsenal, and this obstacle, insignificant as it was, enabled the guard to hold its own. Originally this guard consisted entirely of Native soldiers, but, as I have already recorded, after the outbreak at Meerut, Europeans had been told off for the charge of this important post; so strong, however, here as elsewhere, ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... to suppose that all the solar heat is wasted save that minute fraction which is received by the earth. Out of every twenty million dollars' worth of heat issuing from the glorious orb of day, we on this earth barely secure the value of one single cent; and all but that insignificant trifle seems to be utterly squandered. We may say it certainly is squandered so far as humanity is concerned. No doubt there are certain other planets besides the earth, and they will receive quantities of heat to the extent of a few cents ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... to say here that, contrary to the general idea which exists, Her Majesty always expressed her thanks for any present or service rendered, no matter how insignificant. ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... acquiring tropical dependencies, and improvements in the means of communication were bringing all the races of the world into close contact. The ordinary man now finds that the sovereign vote has (with exceptions numerically insignificant) been in fact confined to nations of European origin. But there is nothing in the form or history of the representative principle which seems to justify this, or to suggest any alternative for the ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... any public measure for helping on the education of the people, Government were to abstain from introducing the element of religion at all into their part of the scheme; and this not because they held the matter to be insignificant,—the contrary might be strongly expressed in the preamble of their Act,{13}—but on the ground that, in the present divided state of the Christian world, they would take no cognizance of, just because they would ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... to him, an enormous percentage of the bird—were perfectly useless. He was now beginning to understand that sheep and cows were also hollow as far as good meat was concerned; the flesh they had was only a mouthful in comparison with what they ought to have considering their apparent bulk: insignificant, mere skin and bone covering a cavern. What right had they, or anything else, to assert themselves as so big, and prove so empty? And now this discovery of woman's falsehood was quite too much for him. The ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... dancer are far from insignificant to the character he is representing. Their expression should be strictly conformable to his subject. The eye especially should speak. Thence it is that the Italian custom of dancing with uncovered faces, cannot but be more ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... another example of the immense strides accomplished in the art of seed-saving. Formerly the colours were few, and the blossoms comparatively insignificant. Now the single strains produce large flowers, beautiful in form, including self colours and others which are striped, blotched, and veined, in almost endless diversity. Some are plain-edged, others elegantly fringed. The double varieties also come so nearly true to their types that there ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... a brief account of Abraham bar Hiyya's teaching, he thinks it is the duty of rational man to know how it is that man who is so insignificant was given control of the other animals, and endowed with the power of wisdom and knowledge. In order to gain this knowledge we must investigate the origins and principles of existing things, so that we may arrive at an understanding of things as they are. This the wise ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... still another personage, a very young man still, but a deep-thinking, hard-working student, fagging steadily at mathematics and deep in the works of Stevinus, who, before long, might play a conspicuous part in the world's great drama. But, previously to 1590, Maurice of Nassau seemed comparatively insignificant, and he could be spoken of by courtiers as a cipher, and as an unmannerly boy just let loose ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
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