|
|
|
More "Trivial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fruitless efforts at conversation, I forgot the height of my collar, the stiffness of my shirt, the size of my hands and my feet. I forgot that I was a plain man, and remembered only that I was a man. The merely social, the trivial, the commonplace, dropped from my thoughts. My dignity,—the dignity that George Bolingbroke had called that of size,—was restored to me; and beyond the rosy lights and the disturbing music, we stood a man and a woman together. ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... without any incidents save trivial ones that did not count. Lance rode to the creek with his trout-rod and reel—more citified innovations which the ranch eyed askance—and spent four hours loitering along the bank, his fly floating uselessly over shallow pools where was never a fish. ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... recovered himself in an instant, letting go Fortune's hands and placing himself in front of her, between her and Mrs. Dalziel. Long afterward she remembered that trivial act—remembered it with the tender gratitude of the protected toward the protector, ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... a trivial, but terribly impressive manner, precisely the same thing that Daniel had been told by his captain? People do not resign when ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... by heart six verses. Some of my periods I have turned and returned in my head five or six nights before they were fit to be put to paper: thus it is that I succeed better in works that require laborious attention than those that appear more trivial, such as letters, in which I could never succeed, and being obliged to write one is to me a serious punishment; nor can I express my thoughts on the most trivial subjects without it costing me hours of fatigue. If I ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... native was shot by order of Mr. Gouger, the then Colonial Secretary, and the owner as soon as he became aware of the circumstance, speared his wife for not taking better care of it, although she could not possibly have helped the occurrence. If natives then revenge so severely such apparently trivial offences among themselves, can we wonder that they should sometimes retaliate upon us for ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... awoke only to attend to his immediate practical necessities. It was a happy inner world, peopled with his own friends, acquaintances, relatives, readings, ideas, and associations. Blessed is the man who has found the inner life more real than the trivial outer one. To him mere external annoyances are but as the little insects, which he may brush away at will. No man can be truly great who has not built up for himself a subjective world into which he may retire at will. The little child absorbed in a mythical land ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... turn appointed to all his offices. For nearly three centuries after the one-man power had become absolute, Rome continued to call itself a republic, to go through forms of election and ceremonial, which grew ever more and more meaningless and trivial. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... disguise the thought in his head with a forced laugh. Occasionally, he would turn toward them, as if he had just caught a lost idea that was peculiarly precious. The ladies drawing up to attend to the communication, had a most trivial matter imparted to them, and away he went. Several times he said to them "You don't make friends, as you ought;" and their repudiation of the charge made him repeat: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... themselves mere petty accessories to dress; and the use of them, except to define its chief terminal outlines, or soften their infringement upon the flesh, is a confession of weakness in the main points of the costume, and an indication of a depraved and trivial taste. When used, they should have beauty in themselves, which is attainable only by a clearly marked design. Thus, the exquisite delicacy of fabric in some kinds of lace does not compensate for the blotchy confusion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... hanged! It seems quite incredible now, but a hundred years ago the death sentence was given indiscriminately for offences of all sorts, some so trivial as hardly to deserve the name. For instance, the man of sixty, who stood first in the dock, had snatched a ham from a shop-door, to take to some starving children at home; and the country lad of some eighteen years or less, ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... superstitious reverence with which this prairie child kneeled before whatever she supposed to be learned or artistic. She took it for granted that Esther's painting was wonderful; her only difficulty was to understand how a man so trivial as George Strong, could be a serious professor, in a real university. She thought that Strong's taste for bric-a-brac was another of his jokes. He tried to educate her, and had almost succeeded when, in producing ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... pause, and meditate dispassionately on the importance of this interesting idea; if they will contemplate it in all its attitudes, and trace it to all its consequences, they will not hesitate to part with trivial objections to a Constitution, the rejection of which would in all probability put a final period to the Union. The airy phantoms that flit before the distempered imaginations of some of its adversaries would quickly give place to the ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... that he had been suddenly obliged to visit Saracinesca in order to see to some details connected with the timber question; but everybody wondered why he should have taken himself away in the height of the season for so trivial a matter. He had last been seen in the Astrardente box at the opera, where he had only stayed a few minutes, as Del Ferice was able to testify, having sat immediately opposite in the box of Madame Mayer. Del Ferice swore secretly that he would find out what was the matter; and Donna Tullia ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... a calamity doubly hard to bear when one looks back and sees by what a trivial chance it has come upon us, and how slight an effort would have averted it altogether; and Mr. Bultitude cursed his own stupidity as he stood there, rooted to the ground, and saw the hansom (a "patent safety" to him in sober earnest) drive ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... informed his wife vaguely that 'those fellows' had accepted his contribution. Whatever honorarium he received for his work was expended upon his menus plaisirs—or may be said rather to have dribbled from his waistcoat pocket in a series of trivial ex-travagances which won him a reputation for generosity among grooms and such small deer. To his wife he gave nothing: she was amply provided with money by her father, who would have lavished his newly-acquired wealth upon her if she had been disposed to spend it; but she ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... political events evoke a sympathy so wide and so disinterested, and it may be foretold with confidence that it never will again. Italy rising from the grave was the living romance of myriads of young hearts that were lifted from the common level of trivial interests and selfish ends, from the routine of work or pleasure, both deadening without some diviner spark, by a sustained enthusiasm that can hardly be imagined now. There were, indeed, some who asked what was all this to them? What were ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... mortals circumstanced as we were, I pointed out to Kitty that an engagement ring was the outward and visible sign of her dignity as an engaged girl; and that she must forthwith come to Hamilton's to be measured for one. Up to that moment, I give you my word, we had completely forgotten so trivial a matter. To Hamilton's we accordingly went on the 15th of April, 1885. Remember that—whatever my doctor may say to the contrary—I was then in perfect health, enjoying a well-balanced mind and an absolutely tranquil spirit. Kitty and I entered Hamilton's ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... the dark, and feeling that she was so, she knew that she could not give counsel as a friend or a sister. Lucy had begun by declaring—so Mrs. Robarts thought—that nothing had passed between her and Lord Lufton but words of most trivial import, and yet she now accused herself of falsehood, and declared that that falsehood was the only thing which ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... thoughtfulness about home matters, nothing being deemed too small or trivial to claim his attention and consideration, were really marvellous when we remember his active, eager, restless, working brain. No man was so inclined naturally to derive his happiness from home affairs. He was full of the kind of ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... wearily. "He attacks me, of course. He says he has lived forty years in India—as if that mattered! When will people recognise that the truths of democratic policy are independent of time and space? Liberalism is a category, an eternal mode of thought, which cannot be overthrown by any trivial happenings. I am sick of the word ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... Italian poet Marino, known for his sensuality and affectation, was in high favor with the later Silesians. 6: Brief, in allusion to the sensual Heldenbriefe of Hofmannswaldau. 7: Philomuschen, 'poetaster' (lover of the Muses). 8: Weisianer, partisans of the dull and trivial schoolmaster-poet, Christian Weise. 9: Hbneristen, mechanical rimesters; Hbner was the author of a dictionary of rimes. 10: Odermusen; 'muses of the Oder' and 'tongues of the Sudeti' are both names for the later Silesian ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... irritation, and Denham speedily woke to the situation of the world as it had been one hour ago. He had last seen Rodney walking with Katharine. He could not help regretting the eagerness with which his mind returned to these interests, and fretted him with the old trivial anxieties. He sank in his own esteem. Reason bade him break from Rodney, who clearly tended to become confidential, before he had utterly lost touch with the problems of high philosophy. He looked along the road, and marked a lamp-post at a distance of some hundred yards, and decided that he ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... interrupted Allerton, with great impatience, "it is not to prate to us of such trivial fables of Man, or such wanton sports of the Foul Fiend, that thou hast risked limb and life. Time is precious. I have been prevised that thou hast letters for ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is song, Nor aims at that clear-ethered height Whither the brave deed climbs for light: We seem to do them wrong, Bringing our robin's-leaf to deck their hearse 5 Who in warm life-blood wrote their nobler verse, Our trivial song to honor those who come With ears attuned to strenuous trump and drum, And shaped in squadron-strophes their desire, Live battle-odes whose lines were steel and fire: 10 Yet sometimes feathered words are strong, A gracious ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... of the week went on. Mr. Allewinde's eloquence, Mr. O'Malley's energy, and Mr. O'Laugher's wit, sounded equally monotonous to the anxious priest and his good-natured friend. Though they seemed to listen, and indeed endeavoured to do so, yet at the close of each trivial case that was tried, they had no idea impressed upon them of what had just been going on. One o'clock struck—two—three—four—five—and yet they remained in the same position; and still the jury who had been considering the ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... of the Yang-tse-Kiang, in China, paid great attention to the subject: he was fully in possession of all I had to say on the matter; and I gladly quote the method he adopted in North America, with slight modifications, according to the results of his experience, and with a few trivial additions of my own. For the purposes of memoranda and mapping data, he uses three sets of books, which can be ordered ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... the trivial character of these memories. He muttered something about the weight of the Lord, and the carnal hearts of the men in ships. Jeremy declared, "Stuff! He'll wink at a sailor man with hardly a free day on shore. It wasn't bad at Calcutta, either, with an awning on the quarter-deck, ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... words of love and to answer him with words as warm,—that could be allowed to her. As for the rest, it would be better that she should let it so pass by that there need be as little of contention as possible on a matter so trivial. ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... was a god." Miss Tita gave me this information flatly, without expression; her tone might have made it a piece of trivial gossip. But it stirred me deeply as she dropped the words into the summer night; it seemed ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... thing by an other that resembles it, and that is made to stand for it."—Blair's Rhet., p. 150. (8.) "Had he exhibited such sentences as contained ideas inapplicable to young minds, or such as were of a trivial or injurious nature."—L. Murray cor. (9.) "Man would have others obey him, even his own kind; but he will not obey God, who is so much above him, and who made him."—Penn cor. (10.) "But what we may consider ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... home, had been a sharp wrench, and she required long familiarity to reconcile her to new conditions. Though the first and greatest change from England to America would seem to have rendered all others trivial and not to be regarded, she had shrank from each as it came, submitting by force of will, but unreconciled till years had past. In Andover she had allowed herself to take firm root, certain that from this point she would never ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... and said artfully, "Mine was a thoughtless remark: of course a gentleman of your experience can test the mind on any subject, however trivial." He added piteously, "Still, if you would but leave the poets, who are all half crazy themselves, and examine me in the philosophers of Antiquity. Surely it would ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... then, Smith," says Captain Dyer, smiling, "and, no matter what it is—if it is the most trivial thing in any way ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... smile feel the grating of the wheels of life on the harsh bottom of things. But a man's manhood must not give way; there must be no triumph over him of these assaults and underminings of the enemy. Soul gazes at soul; but the talk is superficial and trivial. He is drowning in the gulf, and she stands yearning on the brink, but there shall be no vain outcries or outstretched arms. It is a condition wrought by men, not countenanced by God, and the spirit must ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... can see in a mental vision the whole murderous plot worked out! Certain parts of it flash on me at off moments, while I am reading a book or watching a play or talking with a friend, and every trivial detail comes out as clearly as if it were all being done over again in a motion picture. The night gloom in the hall brings back to me the 'tween-decks of the old tub of a boat; the green-plush seats of a sleeping-car remind me of the Kut Sang's dining-saloon, and even a bonfire in an adjacent ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... into futurity has given rise to an infinite variety of extravagant follies. The Romans, who were remarkably fertile in these sorts of demonological inventions, suggested numerous ways of divination. With them all Nature had a voice, and the most senseless beings, and most trivial things, the most trifling incidents, became presages of future events; which introduced ceremonies founded on a mistaken knowledge of antiquity, the most childish and ridiculous, and which were performed with ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... immortal, and waiting to be revealed—you and I may belong to-day. 'We have a strong city.' You may lay hold of life either by the side of it which is transient and trivial and contemptible, or by the side of it which goes down through all the mutable and is rooted in eternity. As in some seaweed, far out in the depths of the ocean, the tiny frond that floats upon the billow goes down and down and down, by filaments that bind it to the basal rock, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... malady which her Mother's death had occasioned; But it was not so easy to remove the disease of her mind. Her eyes were constantly filled with tears: Every trifle affected her, and She evidently nourished in her bosom a profound and rooted melancholy. The slightest mention of Elvira, the most trivial circumstance recalling that beloved Parent to her memory, was sufficient to throw her into serious agitation. How much would her grief have been increased, had She known the agonies which terminated her Mother's existence! But of this no one entertained the least ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... led to the conclusion that the Sarde aborigines were a giant race, the question remains whether the Nuraghe had the same origin as the Sepolture; and, passing by some trivial objections to this hypothesis, we are disposed to adopt Mr. Tyndale's conclusion, that—“the coincidence of two such peculiar monuments in the same island, their non-existence elsewhere, and their being both indicative of ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... through his fingers with almost ridiculous ease. So simple had it been, that the two messengers, gloating in the prospect ahead, now spoke of the experience as if it were the most trivial thing in their lives. They mentioned ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... had formerly given him true to his cost, which was, "That men, however fortune may smile upon them, could never be said to be happy, till they had been seen to pass over the last day of their lives, by reason of the uncertainty and mutability of human things, which upon very light and trivial occasions are subject to be totally chang'd into ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... scrupulously polite, but, at the same time, never give up a point of dispute, in which my interest may be concerned. Even in your walk be slow, and move, as much as the ground will allow you, as if you were in a drawing-room. Never remain silent; offer even trivial remarks, rather than appear distract. There is one point of great importance—I refer to choosing the ground, in which, perhaps, you will require my unperceived assistance. Any decided line behind me would be very advantageous ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... being learned or of appearing learned, he never judges hastily, but only from evidence. Knowing how easily appearances deceive us, as in the case of perspective, he is far from finding the evidence in the present case sufficient. Besides, knowing from experience that my most trivial question always has an object which he does not at once discover, he is not in the habit of giving heedless answers. On the contrary, he is on his guard and attentive; he looks into the matter very carefully before replying. He never gives me an ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... freedom of the soul in its inmost and deepest recesses. It prostrated all the instincts of human nature before it yielded all the ties which otherwise man held most sacred. A heretic forfeited all claims upon his race; the most trivial infidelity to his mother church divested him of the rights of his nature. A modest doubt in the infallibility of the pope met with the punishment of parricide and the infamy of sodomy; its sentences resembled ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... green rings Stained quaintly on the lea, To picture elfin glee; While through the grass a faint air sings, And swarms of insects revel Along the sultry level: No more will watch their brilliant wings, Now lightly dip, now soar, Then sink, and rise once more. My Lady's death makes dear these trivial things. ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... they had taken the brightness out of his childhood; from between them had sprung the visions that had clung about him and made night horrible. Adder-like thoughts had lifted their heads, had shot out forked tongues at him, asking mockingly strange, trivial questions that he could not ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... landscapes which create A fund for contemplation;—to admire Is a brief feeling of a trivial date; But something worthier do such scenes inspire: Here to be lonely is not desolate,[87] For much I view which I could most desire, And, above all, a Lake I can behold Lovelier, not dearer, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the unfortunate negroes, in inducing rebellious black citizens throughout the city to submit to overwhelming odds against them, and staking his own life upon the good character of this or that man or woman in danger of being killed for some trivial charge made by a white person, whether remote ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... opportunity, and your choice now would either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. Per contra, the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in the scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to spend a year in its verification: he believes ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... of the nature of the whole of life that these things should pass. "Look back on this bitterness a year hence and see how trivial it seems" was one of the little wisdoms that helped Peter's courage in after years. And to a boy of twelve years a beating is forgotten with amazing quickness, especially if it is a week of holiday and there have been other beatings not so ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... as trivial, and therefore practise it; do not consider any virtue as unimportant, and therefore ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... when our sensibility is affected by circumstances of a trivial character. It seems a fantastic emotion, but the gaze of this picture disturbed the serenity of Coningsby. He endeavoured sometimes to avoid looking at it, but it irresistibly attracted him. More than once during dinner he longed to ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... the meat they had secured; and when cutting up the carcass of the animal, they discovered it had been shot at by hunters not more than a week previously, as an arrow-head and a musket-ball were still in the wounds. Under other circumstances such a matter would have been regarded as trivial, but as they knew the Snake Indians had no guns, the presence of the bullet indicated that the elk could not have been wounded by one of them. They were aware that they were on the edge of the Blackfeet country, and as these ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself, To thousands upon thousands of her sons, Living amid the same perpetual whirl 725 Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity, by differences That have no law, no meaning, and no end— Oppression, under which even highest minds Must labour, whence the strongest are not free. [d] 730 But though the picture weary out the eye, By nature ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... different story there would have been to tell had someone had that thought only half an hour earlier! But it is often so. The most trivial miscalculation, the most insignificant mistake, seemingly, may prove to be of the most vital importance. Dick went to the telephone. It was one of the old-fashioned sort, still in almost universal use in the rural parts of England, that require the use of a bell to call the central ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... spring from trivial causes," she remarked, as she loosened a bracelet from her wrist. Then, unfastening her sleeve, and partially turning it up, "Look ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... these trivial occurrences?"—not, Heaven knows, from the interest I can now attach to them—but because, like a drowning man who catches at a brittle twig, I seize every apology for delaying the subsequent and dreadful part of my narrative. But, it must be communicated—I must have the sympathy of at least ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... total strangers, especially when by so doing I should run the risk of embroiling myself with the Spanish authorities, with whom I have no quarrel. No, Senor, you must pardon my seeming churlishness in refusing so apparently trivial a favour, but I decline to associate myself in any way with the quarrel between your country and Spain. I have the ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... of trivial incidents touched upon by Hennepin, while recounting his life among the Sioux, seem to me to afford a strong presumption of an actual experience. I speak on this point with the more confidence, as the Indians in whose lodges I was once domesticated for several weeks, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... shows how trivial an impression may be thus registered and preserved. But, if, on such an inorganic surface, an impression may thus be indelibly marked, how much more likely in the purposely-constructed ganglion! A shadow never falls upon a wall without leaving thereupon a permanent ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... a vein of conceit, it is generally both trivial and obvious, with none of the saving quality of Donne's remoter extravagances. In Donne they are hardly extravagances; the vast overshadowing canopy of his imagination seems to bring the most wildly dissimilar things together with ease. To his unfettered and ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... thought, 'or why should I prolong a life more shameful than the gallows? Or why should I have fallen to it? No pride, no capacity, no force. Not even a bandit! and to be starving here with worse than banditti—with this trivial hell-hound!' His rage against his comrade rose and flooded him, and he shook a trembling fist at ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... dear lord. Not for the trivial reason that fire warms the feet or cooks our soup, but because it has sparks. Sometimes I pass whole hours in watching the sparks. I discover a thousand things in those stars which are sprinkled over the black background of the hearth. ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Gentleness of Manner. In this term we include not simply external appearances, though these are of no trivial importance. If manner impress and accomplish much in the sterner sex, as we all have felt, it is in the other, almost omnipotent. Dr. Bowring informs us that, in his recent travels in the East, he found the Samaritan, ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... ideas and the need to interchange them came on the wanderers. Hemmed in by Nature's immensity, unconsciously oppressed by it, they felt the want of each other, of speech, of sympathy, and crouched about the fire telling anecdotes of their life "back home," that sounded trivial but drew them closer in the bond of ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... Emperor," he said. "I was near him night and day. I saw him shave himself in the morning, sponge his chin, pull on his boots, pinch his valet's ear, chat with the grenadier mounting guard over his tent, laugh, gossip, make trivial remarks, and amid all this issue orders, trace plans, interrogate prisoners, decree, determine, decide, in a sovereign manner, simply, unerringly, in a few minutes, without missing anything, without losing a useful detail or a second of necessary time. In this intimate and ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... Very trivial in Dr. Dunlap's eyes were the anxieties of some poor fellows whom he saw later in the day appealing to Colonel Menard. The doctor was returning to a patient. The speeches were over, and the common meadow had become a wide picnic ground under the slant of a low afternoon sun. Those outdwelling ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... to advance with much alacrity and cheerfulness of spirit; to show themselves gallant in the most dangerous attempt.... And now to sum up all: It is most apparent to every impartial and ingenuous judgment; That although His Majesty cannot expect to be secured from every trivial disaster that may befall his army, either by the too much Presumption, Ignorance, or Negligence of some particular Persons (which is frequently incident and unavoidable in the best of Armies), yet the several positions of the Heavens duly considered and compared ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... all only just that I wanted to see your face, hear your voice, and have you pick me up and take me in your arms when I was tired. That was when I almost quit writing. I couldn't say what I wanted to, and I wouldn't write trivial things, so I went on day after ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... of this Captain Orme. I liked the man; there was something about those brown eyes of his that appealed to me. Also it struck me as odd that he should happen to be present on this occasion, for I have always held that there is nothing casual or accidental in the world; that even the most trivial circumstances are either ordained, or the result of the workings of some inexorable law whereof the end is known by whatever power may direct our steps, though it be not ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... of the race as trivial, the natural sciences as unscientific, the evidence of the senses as a cheat, and matter as non-existent, Mrs. Eddy proceeds to propound her own curious theory of the Universe and man. She has ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... inappropriateness of expression which is very offensive to the cultivated taste. Such expressions as "perfectly awful," "perfectly beautiful," "too lovely for anything," "hateful," "horrible," may constantly be heard in conversation upon trivial and unimportant subjects in companies of young people whose educational opportunities and social advantages would lead us to expect a very different style of conversation. So of incongruous and inappropriate expressions. "My grandfather and grandmother died on the same day of the year? wasn't it ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... his engagements permitted him to accommodate his good friend Thompson, he decided to preach at the camp meeting. He little dreamed that all his future life was to be colored by that simple note. So often men's destinies turn upon apparently trivial events. ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... attribute a new predicate (i.e. 'good') to pleasures in general, when he cannot deny that they are different? What common property in all of them does he mean to indicate by the term 'good'? If he continues to assert that there is some trivial sense in which pleasure is one, Socrates may retort by saying that knowledge is one, but the result will be that such merely verbal and trivial conceptions, whether of knowledge or pleasure, will spoil the discussion, and will prove the incapacity of the two disputants. In order to avoid ...
— Philebus • Plato
... differences in the sins of men, launching on all whom it embraces one infinite penalty of undiscriminating damnation. The consistent advocates of the doctrine, the boldest creeds, unflinchingly avow this, and defend it by the plea that every sin, however trivial, is equally an offence against the law of the infinite God with the most terrible crime, and equally merits an infinite punishment. Thus, by a metaphysical quibble, the very basis of morals is overturned, and the child guilty of an ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... In which trivial remark the major explained his whole life and mental attitude. And if the world only listened, instead of thinking what effect it is creating and what it is going to say next, it would catch men ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... caverns circumscribed with roof and wall, Defend dark Night, though noon around her fall, From the fierce play of solar day-beams bright. But if she be assailed by fire or light, Her powers divine are nought; they tremble all Before things far more vile and trivial— Even a glow-worm can confound their might. The earth that lies bare to the sun, and breeds A thousand germs that burgeon and decay— This earth is wounded by the ploughman's share: But only darkness serves for human seeds; Night therefore is more sacred ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... Some of these were trivial, others were highly important. Among the latter was the question of commercial intercourse. The British Ministry had neglected to obtain any written assurance that trade relations should be resumed between the two countries; and the First Consul, either ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... tiny fact—trivial enough for the moment: the touch of his hand against the key upon ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... saw the trouble was not with the college, the trouble was with the young man. He had mentally dwelt on some trivial slights until he had got so out of harmony with the institution that he had lost the power to derive any benefit from it. No college is a perfect institution—a 5 fact, I suppose, that most college presidents and college men are quite willing to admit; but a college does ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... prevail on him to sign papers, &c. His greatest delight is to make those who have business to transact with him, or to lay papers before him, wait in his anteroom while he is lounging with Mount Charles or anybody, talking of horses or any trivial matter; and when he is told, 'Sir, there is Watson waiting,' &c., he replies, 'Damn Watson; let him wait.' He does it ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... when Jacobinism seemed about to sweep over the Continent? Here, as at so many points, France proved to be the worst foe to ordered liberty. Robespierre and Hebert were the men who assured the doom of Muir and Palmer. A trivial incident will suffice to illustrate the alarm of Englishmen at the assembly of a British Convention. In December 1793 Drane, the mayor of Reading, reported to his neighbour Addington (Speaker of the House of Commons) that the "infamous ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... what we have about the patrons of cheese factories, and the closer and more thorough co-operation among them, we have been actuated by no feelings of unkindness or ill will, nor have we arraigned them upon trivial or imaginary charges. The indictments we have found against them are all true bills, against which too many of them will be unable to sustain the plea of not guilty. We have been constrained to our present course ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... however trivial, that rouses disagreeable emotion, leaves an after-effect in our mind, which for the time it lasts, prevents our taking a clear objective view of the things about us, and tinges all our thoughts: just as a small object held close to the eye limits ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... duty. To have the best nations, the free and civilized nations, disarm and leave the despotisms and barbarisms with great military force, would be a calamity compared to which the calamities caused by all the wars of the nineteenth century would be trivial. Yet it is not easy to see how we can by international agreement state exactly which power ceases to be free and civilized and which comes near the line of barbarism or despotism. For example, I suppose it would be very difficult to get Russia and Japan to come to a common agreement ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... supposition that Mr. Eliot misunderstood the remarks made to him. Indeed, as Mr. William H. Whitmore points out in his clever monograph upon Mother Goose (Albany, 1889), it is very doubtful whether in 1719 a Boston printer would have been allowed to publish such "trivial" rhymes. "Boston children at that date," says Mr. Whitmore, "were fed upon Gospel food, and it seems extremely improbable that an edition could have ...
— Mother Goose in Prose • L. Frank Baum
... But fear lest that work will not yield you as much as you wish is a sort of irritating cocaine of character, numbing and deadening all of your powers and at the same time lashing your mind and nerves with the knotted thongs of unhappiness. Besides, fretting is so trivial, so little, so commonplace. Fail if you must, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... no excuse so trivial, that will not pass upon some men's consciences to excuse their attendance at the public worship of God. Some are so unfortunate as to be always indisposed on the Lord's day, and think nothing so unwholesome as the air of a church. Others have their affairs ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... bit of dingy black cloth—just that and nothing more—a thing as trivial as the band which clips a closed umbrella. Was it such a band, and would he presently be asked to find the umbrella from which it had fallen or been twisted away? No. Umbrellas are not carried about museum buildings. Besides, this strip of cloth had no ring on the ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... the great terror of the time, the daring ambition of France. He fought on the outposts of Europe. All his ideas were Continental. The singular constitution of his nature gave him the spirit of a warrior, combined with the seclusion of a monk. Solitary even in camps, what must he be in the trivial bustle of a court?—and, engrossed with the largest interests of nations, what interest could he attach to the squabbles of rival professors of licentiousness, to giving force to a feeble drama, or regulating the decorum of factions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... for that. A great deal depends on the safety of that boat. In fact, if you come to think about it, you will see that whatever grievance you may have, it is, after all, a very trivial one compared with the burden that weighs on me just now, and I should much prefer not to have anything to do with disputes between the passengers until we are out of ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... out of the conflict defeated but respected. She had received a check in the Black Sea and her frontier line had been readjusted. Still her political losses were trivial. The war most deeply affected Austria. She had played a false game and had lost. The sceptre of European leadership slipped from her. The situation afforded to Bismarck and Cavour the ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... terms as might encourage her to take me into her confidence. In a moment more I should have told her that my boyhood had been passed at Greenwater Broad—in a moment more, we should have recognized each other—when a trivial interruption suspended the words on my lips. The child ran out of the bed-chamber, with a quaintly shaped key in her hand. It was one of the things she had taken out of my pockets and it belonged to the cabin door on board the boat. A sudden fit of ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... one or two features of this canvass that leave a painful impression upon me. The first is that the opposition to me in Ohio was unreasonable, without cause, either springing from corrupt or bad motives, or from such trivial causes as would scarcely justify the pouting of ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... age of Milton the connection between Italy and England is interrupted. In the seventeenth century Italy herself had sunk into comparative stupor, and her literature was trivial. France not only swayed the political destinies of Europe, but also took the lead in intellectual culture. Consequently, our poets turned from Italy to France, and the French spirit pervaded English literature throughout the period of the Restoration ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... up to this were comparatively trivial—nothing more, indeed, at first than the sight of Miss Nowak and Cowperwood talking intimately in his office one afternoon when the others had gone and the fact that she appeared to be a little bit disturbed by Aileen's arrival. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... what regret he would feel, "if he had now to go to some trivial country of plains, where he would ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... acquainted with Matta saw very clearly that he would send the logician to the devil before he should arrive at the conclusion of his syllogism: for which reason, interposing as soon as they began to raise their voices, he told them it was ridiculous to quarrel about an affair in itself so trivial, and treated the matter in a serious light, that it might make the greater impression. Thus supper terminated peaceably, owing to the care he took to suppress all disputes, and to substitute plenty of wine ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... a sweet tooth, then?" Mr. Raleigh asked in return, as if there were any trivial thing concerning her in which he could yet ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... intimate, had known each other, and Fletcher was determined to show that he would not quarrel with a man because that man had been his favoured rival. In comparison with that other matter this affair of the candidature was of course trivial. But Lopez who had, as the reader may remember, made some threat about a horsewhip, had come to a resolution of a very different nature. He put his arms a-kimbo, resting his hands on his hips, and altogether declined the proffered civility. "You had better walk on," he said, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... which does not much suffer even if the Judge in his youthful, hard-hearted, cowardly crime and the victim in his aesthetic delicacy are both ineffective in making the impression the author aimed at. The real scene is the singularly trivial and barren life of the old house, where nothing takes place but the purchase of a Jim Crow, a breakfast of mackerel, a talk about chickens, gossip with Uncle Venner, and the passing of a political procession in the street; and one too easily forgets ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... and so much more they do that it may seem like insulting them even to think for a moment of their subordination to the general design, which is indeed a great deal less interesting than they. But Dickens's method is sound and good, and not the less so because he used it for comparatively trivial purposes. It is strange that he should have known how to invent such a scene, and then have found no better drama to enact on it—strange and always stranger, with every re-reading. That does not affect his handling of a subject, which is all that ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... resembling malaria. They paused at another place to teach the native doctors the use of some new surgical instruments that had been developed in Hospital Earth laboratories just for them. Frantic emergency calls usually proved to involve trivial problems, but once or twice potentially serious situations were spotted early, before they could ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... It is a trivial coincidence, though it may be noted in passing, that as it was the second astern of the commander-in-chief on whom fell the weight of the disgrace, so it was the second astern of the commander of the van who alone scored a distinct success, ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... dwelt in the bush' dwelt there in order to deliver; and, dwelling there, declared 'I have seen the affliction of My people, and am come down to deliver them.' So, then, if the goodwill of that eternal, delivering God is with us, we, too, may feel that our trivial troubles and our heavy burdens, all the needs of our prisoned wills and captive souls, are known to Him, and that we shall have deliverance from them by Him. Brethren, in that name, with its historical associations, with its deep revelations of the divine nature, with ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of its plain intention,—that is, by resigning to avoid removal; by which measure this provision of the act has proved as unoperative as all the rest. By this management a mere majority may bring in the greater delinquent, whilst the person removed for offences comparatively trivial may remain excluded forever. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... was in this novel far more of a realist than was at first admitted. He did not avoid the impulse to tell the happenings of life at the farm pretty nearly as he found them, and substantial as the characters may or may not be, the daily life and doings, the scenery, the surroundings, and even trivial details are presented with a well-nigh ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... encyclopaedias, or even in the marble Walhallas of Germany? The story and the songs of a miller's man who loves his master's daughter, and of a miller's daughter who loves a huntsman better, may seem very trivial, commonplace, and unpoetical to many a man of forty or fifty. But there are men of forty and fifty who have never lost sight of the bright but now far-off days of their own youth, who can still rejoice with those that rejoice, and weep with those that weep, and love ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... and so there is no need to go into the matter again. All I need do here is to recall the fact that, in the United States, alone among the great nations of history, there is a right way to think and a wrong way to think in everything—not only in theology, or politics, or economics, but in the most trivial matters of everyday life. Thus, in the average American city the citizen who, in the face of an organized public clamour (usually managed by interested parties) for the erection of an equestrian statue of Susan B. Anthony, the apostle of woman suffrage, in front of the chief railway station, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... my wish, we're private, I come not to make offer with my daughter A certain portion; that were poor and trivial: In one word, I pronounce all that is mine, In lands, or leases, ready coin, or goods, With her, my lord, comes to you; nor shall you have One motive to induce you to believe I live too long, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... true of the First Part of his great work. In the Second there was no longer room for such discussion. But he has supplied the place by garrulous reminiscences, personal anecdotes, incidental adventures, and a host of trivial details, - trivial in the eyes of the pedant, - which historians have been too willing to discard, as below the dignity of history. We have the actors in this great drama in their private dress, become ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... Cookie, too surprised to speak. Why had Captain Magnus been at pains to invent a lie about so trivial a matter? I recalled, too, that Mr. Shaw's question had confused him, that he had hesitated and stammered before answering it. Why? Was he a bad shot and ashamed of it? Had he preferred to say that he had taken the wrong ammunition rather than admit that he could get no bag? That must be the explanation, ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... stood, I happened to cast a glance from cover, first—then I took a step backward, and stood in the shelter and concealment of the foliage. For I had caught sight of Joan, and thought I would devise some sort of playful surprise for her. Think of it—that trivial conceit was neighbor, with but a scarcely measurable interval of time between, to an event destined to endure forever ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... at all a dangerous, but, on the contrary, a trivial complaint. It lasts only a few days, and requires but little medicine. The patient ought, for three or four days, to keep the house, and should abstain from animal food. On the sixth day, but not until ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... cherishing in them those Passions which will inevitably render them miserable? A thing which can never be otherwise whilst Women are bred up in no right Notions of Religion and Vertue; or to know any use of Reason but in the service of their Passions and Inclinations; or at best of their (comparatively trivial) Interests. ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... these peculiarities of his mind. In an event, indeed, which occurred about this time, he slightly resented a piece of marked incivility on the part of Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick, who had married the Princess Eliza of Denmark; but it is not likely that so trivial an affair, if it were known at court, could have called down upon him the hostility ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... there is every reason to believe that they cannot live for more than a certain fixed and relatively short time entirely without food or air. Dr. Buckland tried a number of experiments upon toads in this manner—experiments wholly unnecessary, considering the trivial nature of the point at issue—and his conclusion was that no toad could get beyond two years without feeding or breathing. There can be very little doubt that in this conclusion he was practically correct, and that the real fine old crusted antediluvian toad-in-a-hole ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... man, and abridging his natural freedom, is exactly the same, they have adjusted the means to that end in a way entirely similar. The divine thunders out his anathemas with more noise and terror against the breach of one of his positive institutions, or the neglect of some of his trivial forms, than against the neglect or breach of those duties and commandments of natural religion, which by these forms and institutions he pretends to enforce. The lawyer has his forms, and his positive institutions too, and he adheres ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Bologna met the astronomer, Novarra. This meeting was the turning-point of his life. Copernicus was then twenty-three years of age, but in intellect he was a man. He had vowed a year before that he would indulge in no trivial conversation about persons or things—only the great and noble themes should interest him and occupy ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... with ammunition, we struck into the deep wilderness, trusting to our own stout hearts and woodscraft for our food and safety. We journeyed merrily along, whiling away the hours in recounting to each other those trivial incidents of our lives which might be interesting, or in singing snatches of song, and listening to its solemn echo as it reverberated among the tall trees of the forest. Towards evening we reached our first ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... manly. Their sensuality might not be so boisterous, but it was more bestial and foul. Strength and manliness, and a blithe, cheery spirit, were ever the badges of the Teuton. But though originally gross and rough, he was capable of a smoother polish, of a glossier enamel, than a more superficial, trivial nature. He was ever deeply thoughtful, and capable of profounder moods of meditation than the lightly-moved children of the South. Sighs, as from the boughs of Yggdrasil, ever breathed through his poetry from of old. He was a smith, an artificer, and a delver in mines ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... the greatest authority, both on horses and horsemanship, now living in this country. Everything which he writes is lucidly expressed, and no detail is too trivial to be explained."—The Spectator. ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... glow came to them from the curtained glass door of the ell sitting room. "Just a little sermon to start us out right—back to work. It is a serious business, you know, Joe—reconstruction! It's a big task. Let's not fall down on it or be trivial—shirk any of the responsibilities. Good-night," she added suddenly, giving her hand. "It's been a glorious day. I'll ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... arbours where the light Might enter in at will. Companionships, Friendships, acquaintances, were welcome all. 250 We sauntered, played, or rioted; we talked Unprofitable talk at morning hours; Drifted about along the streets and walks, Read lazily in trivial books, went forth To gallop through the country in blind zeal 255 Of senseless horsemanship, or on the breast Of Cam sailed boisterously, and let the stars Come forth, perhaps without ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... language, flavoured here and there with the phraseology of the novel, is consistently appropriate. The fourth and last act is feeble. Nobody can sympathise with "the late remorse of love" in a nature so trivial as that of Thornhill, and the incident of the reconciliation between Olivia and her husband, therefore, goes for nothing. It is the beautiful relation between the father and his daughter that animates the play. It is paternal love that thrills its structure with ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... hired razor because God took the kings of Assyria, with whom He had no sympathy, to do the work, and paid them in palaces and spoils and annexations. These kings were hired to execute the divine behests. And now the text, which on its first reading may have seemed trivial or inapt, is charged with momentous import: "In the same day shall the Lord shave with a razor that is hired—namely, by them beyond the river, by the King ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... ill-natured and yet does harm. Idle gossiping, talking about things that are not worth while or speculating about affairs which are not our business and of which we know little or nothing. Akin to this is fashionably slangy conversation concerning the latest thing in books, magazine articles, trivial plays. For even the "tone" of school or college conversation a student is responsible. She can make her school seem cheap or cultivated. The remarks which visitors overhear as they go from room to room or from building to building are likely to indicate the "tone" of an institution. A catalogue ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... especially those which are bound by some logical sequence, are the only ones which enter into permanent association. Such a type of mind, therefore, in recalling the past, selects out of the mass of experiences the incidents which will constitute a logical revival, and leaves out the trivial and incidental. This type is usually spoken of as a logical memory. This type of memory would, in the above incident, recall only the essential facts connected with the arrest, as the cause, the ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... trivial that I gave him but scant attention till he let a name fall which caused me to prick up my ears and even to put in a word. "The Moore house," he ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... judgment on its diction. Yet I venture to remark that Marino only at rare intervals attains to purity of poetic style; even his best passages are deformed, not merely by conceits to which the name of Marinism has been given, but also by gross vulgarities and lapses into trivial prose. Notwithstanding this want of distinction, however, he has a melody that never fails. The undulating, evenly on-flowing cantilena of his verbal music sustains the reader on a tide of song. That ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the events of the next few weeks—events that culminated, as you know, by stirring the country profoundly. At that time, however, I was busy trying to keep my skirts dry, and paid little or no attention to what seemed then a most trivial remark. ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... grand, patriotic, heroic, and worthy of keeping in remembrance from generation to generation; but that to do all this merely as a piece of duty because one's particular regiment happened to be setting forth on probably hazardous service, but of a trivial nature as compared with the interests involved in the only war she heard much talked of, why, she never dreamed of such a possibility, and her ideas were no more vague than are those of the general public on precisely the ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... revelation when offered to them, are not such men as Socrates and Cicero were; but, under pretence of Deism, it is plain they are generally ridiculers of all that is truly excellent in natural religion itself. Their trivial and vain cavils; their mocking and ridiculing without and before examination; their directing the whole stress of objections against particular customs, or particular and perhaps uncertain opinions or explications of ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... Bowdler did. He does not Bowdlerise who uses pumice to a blot, but he who rubs the copy into holes wherever he can find an honest letter with a downstroke thicker than becomes a fine-nibbed pen. A trivial play of fancy in one of the pieces in this volume, easily removed, would have been as a dead fly in the pot of ointment, and would have deprived one of Lucian's best works of the currency to which ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... irksome forms of education in use, among the lower classes of people, or submitted to learn the mercantile and plebeian arts of writing and reading. I must own, that though I entirely agree with the notions of the uselessness of any such trivial accomplishments in the military profession, and of their inconsistency with more valuable attainments; though I am convinced, that a man who can read and write becomes, at least, a very disagreeable companion to his brother soldiers, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... approaching jaws. Furious he strives To wound the harden'd steel;—on the sharp point He grinds his teeth: now from his poisonous mouth, Began the blood to flow, and sprinkling ting'd The virid grass; but trivial still the hurt; For shrinking from the blow, and twisting back His wounded neck, the stroke he still prevents Deeper to pierce, by yielding to its force. But pushing arduous on, Agenor's son, Fix'd in his throat the steel;—and the sharp point Forc'd through his neck: an oak oppos'd ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... there has been great debate, what occasions are sufficient to justify the meditation of self-murder, which they call "A reasonable exit."—[ Diogenes Laertius, Life of Zeno.]—For though they say that men must often die for trivial causes, seeing those that detain us in life are of no very great weight, yet there is to be some limit. There are fantastic and senseless humours that have prompted not only individual men, but whole nations to destroy themselves, of which I have elsewhere given some examples; and we further read ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... restore his strength. Further, we are told that his mother and sisters never tired of recommending him to wrap up carefully in cold and wet weather, and that, like a good son and brother, he followed their advice. Lastly, he objected to smoking. Some of the items of this evidence are very trivial, but taken collectively they have considerable force. Of greater significance are the following additional items. Chopin's sister Emilia was carried off at the age of fourteen by pulmonary disease, and his father, as a physician informed me, died of a heart and chest complaint. Stephen ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... sum has been too small to save, so is no act too trivial to achieve some kind of conservation. People are urged to carry home their bundles from shops. This means saving time and labour in delivery and permits the automobile or wagon to be used in more important work. I could cite many other ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... creatures with talons and claws and hoofs. You may say the monkey tribe has thumbs. True; but compare an ape's thumb with a man's: could the biggest ape's thumb have built Westminster Abbey? But even thumbs are trivial evidence of man as compared with his teeth. Look at his teeth!"—here Kenelm expanded his jaws from ear to ear and displayed semicircles of ivory, so perfect for the purposes of mastication that the most artistic dentist ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... look into those pleading eyes, and resist them. Mrs. Farnham took out her portmonnaie again, rather ostentatiously, for vanity always mingled with the best feelings and most trivial acts of ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... sang while sweeping nor spoke ill of her fellow. Herein perhaps they provided some small ground for disappointment for, in company with many ladies of the older school, Mrs. Barraclough dearly loved bestowing an occasional rebuke in words calculated to improve and uplift. This, however, was a trivial concern weighed against the obvious advantages of loyalty, good ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... now turned to us again and commanded us to give him the history of our flight, without omitting the most trivial circumstance. We were obliged to tell him where we were each day, and make a sketch of several localities, concerning which he seemed to be in some doubt. After he had demanded of us whether some of the guards and servants had not been privy to and aided ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... quite capable of reflecting, Gwendolen. You are aware that this is not a trivial occasion, and it concerns your establishment for life under circumstances which may not occur again. You have a duty here both to yourself and your family. I wish to understand whether you have any ground for hesitating as to ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... oppression and licentiousness of the bailies, most of which have probably gained much color by constant repetition, even if they were not wholly created by imagination and hatred of the Austrian rule. According to these accounts, the local despots imposed exorbitant fines for trivial offences, and frequently sent prisoners to Zug and Lucerne to be tried by Austrian judges. They levied enormously increased taxes and imports on every commodity, and exacted payment in the most merciless manner; they openly violated the liberties ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... my dear child; nothing at all, this trivial incident by the way. If there are any more champions of your tribe about, let them come on while I am in the vein ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... of the American Commissioners, listened politely and patiently until the plea was presented. And then he quietly said, "The article will be signed as it reads." And the Spaniards protested, with much courtesy. The change asked for was trivial, merely in the language, not in the force of the words. And our men listened patiently and courteously. Then Mr. Day is said to have locked his little square jaw and replied very quietly, "The article will be signed as it reads." And the article ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... for the housekeeper, and gave various orders for the morning, desiring a few trivial additions to the breakfast, which would have made Agatha smile, but that she noted a slight hesitation in the voice ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... his compeers may still have flowed through his veins—certain at all events, that there hung about his person the traditions of the versatile colonists on the shores of Magna Graecia who, freed by legions of slaves from the trivial vexations which beset modern lives, were able to create in their golden leisure those monuments of beauty which are the envy and despair of our generation. On all that concerned the history and technique of ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... respect of unclean food and the like, and improper speeches, etc., they are of two classes, viz., those committed consciously and those that are committed unconsciously. All sins that are committed consciously are grave, while those that are committed unconsciously are trivial or light. There is expiation for both. Indeed sin is capable of being washed away by (observance of) the ordinances spoken of. Those ordinances, however, have been laid down only for believers (in God) and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... know what that would mean, Gray. There are thousands of veterans in the prisons now. Their offenses are mostly trivial, but the Prison Authority can't let them go, because they have no jobs, no homes, ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... Involuntary laughter. When the pleasure arising from new combinations of words and ideas, as in puns; or of other circumstances, which are so trivial, as to induce no voluntary exertion to compare or consider their present importance or their future consequence; the pleasure is liable to rise into pain; that is, the ideas or sensual motions become exerted too violently ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Stanfield, of Richard Doyle, of John Leech, of Sir Edwin Landseer. The charming little fairy tale, moreover, was inscribed to Lord Jeffrey. It was a favourite of his, as it still is of many another critic north and south of the Tweed, light, nay trivial, though the materials out of which the homely apologue is composed. It can hardly be wondered at, however, remembering how less than four years prior to its first publication, a literary reviewer, no ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... old story is to be repeated. Mary not only submits to the attentions of Mr. Clavering, but encourages them. To-day she sat two hours at the piano singing over to him her favorite songs, and to-night—But I will not put down every trivial circumstance that comes under my observation; it is unworthy of me. And yet, how can I shut my eyes when the happiness of so many I love ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... Duviquet; M. Daniel Salomon; then Paul Vence and Garain the deputy; Belleme de Saint-Nom; an unknown senator; and Dechartre, who was dining at the house for the first time. The conversation, at first trivial and insignificant, was prolonged into a confused murmur, above which rose ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... England and all Europe, saving only the Frenchmen, worshipt almost, had this of the god-like in him: that he was impassible before victory, before danger, before defeat. Before the greatest obstacle or the most trivial ceremony; before a hundred thousand men drawn in battalia, or a peasant slaughtered at the door of his burning hovel; before a carouse of drunken German lords, or a monarch's court, or a cottage table where his plans were laid, or an enemy's battery, vomiting flame ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... other apparently trivial acts in an uneventful life, it was decisive. As she expected, she met two or three of her late applauders, whom, she fancied, looked sheepish and embarrassed; she met, also, her companions looking ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... him a theory based on revelation vouchsafed thousands of years ago; it was now a system of stereotyped belief and conduct, strangely removed from the perplexities and anguish of the individual soul. His academic mind recoiled from the grotesque and trivial messages associated with seances and ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... is this condition that has overtaken thee as the consequence of thy sojourn here? Alas, how long shall we have to reside here? Hadst thou harboured any evil and sinful thought in thy mind? It cannot, I am sure, be any trivial sin of which thou hast been guilty." Thus addressed, Garuda replied unto the Brahmana, saying, "Indeed, O regenerate one, I entertained the thought of carrying away this lady crowned with ascetic success from this spot to where the Creator himself, the divine Mahadeva, the eternal Vishnu, and both ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... girl, to whom at this moment I hear some lad or other making love at the back of my house. Is it for a Transcendental Philosopher to feel any curiosity on such an occasion? Or can I, whose life is worth only eight and a half years' purchase, be supposed to have leisure for such trivial employments? However, to put this out of question, I shall say one thing, which will perhaps shock some readers, but I am sure it ought not to do so, considering the motives on which I say it. No man, I suppose, employs much of his time on the phenomena of his own body without some regard for it; ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... attention. Suddenly, however, this indifference gave place to the most marked admiration; and it became evident that he was seriously contemplating an alliance with the Princess who had been designed for him by his father. In so trivial and dissolute a Court as that of France at this period, it is needless to remark to how many fears and regrets such a resolution immediately gave birth; nor was it long ere two separate cabals were formed—the one favouring, and the other seeking to impede, the marriage. Passion ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... were not without foundation, summoned Histiaeus to his presence, and, under the pretext that he could not bear to be deprived of the company of his friend, carried him with the rest of the court to Susa. This apparently trivial circumstance was attended with important consequences to the Persian empire and to the whole ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... of late several disagreeable instances of pedantry. Among the number, I think we may reckon 'blank verse'. Nothing but the greatest sublimity of subject can render such a measure pleasing; however, we now see it used on the most trivial occasions'—by which last remark Goldsmith probably, as Cunningham thinks, intended to refer to the efforts of Akenside, Dyer, and Armstrong. His views upon blank verse were shared by Johnson and Gray. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... congregate, for the wife is head of the house; the accountant, the treasurer, the auditor, the chancellor of the exchequer; and though her husband does catch the fish for her to sell, that is accounted apparently as a detail too trivial for notice. ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Earl of Pembroke, was ordered by Edward to march against them at the head of a body of Welshmen; and he was joined by five thousand archers, under the command of Stafford, Earl of Devonshire. But a trivial difference about quarters having begotten an animosity between these two noblemen, the Earl of Devonshire retired with his archers, and left Pembroke alone ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... noble music which forbids unreality, rebukes frivolity into silence, subdues ignoble passions, soothes the heart's sorrow, and summons to the soul high and holy thoughts. It was difficult to begin the conversation; the trivial themes of the earlier part of the evening seemed foreign to the mood that had fallen upon the company. At length Mr. Sims ventured to remark, with a giggle: "It's awfully fine, don't you know, but a trifle funereal. Makes one think of graves and that sort of thing. ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... which Urquhart renders Ingle for Boulgre, an "indorser," derived from the Bulgarus or Bulgarian, who gave to Italy the term bugiardo—liar. Bougre and Bougrerie date (Littre) from the xiiith century. I cannot, however, but think that the trivial term gained strength in the xvith, when the manners of the Bugres or indigenous Brazilians were studied by Huguenot refugees in La France Antartique and several of these savages found their way to Europe. A grand Fete in Rouen on the entrance of Henri II. and Dame Katherine de Medicis ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... ordainers had been appointed by a baronial parliament, the three estates were summoned to hear and ratify the results of their labours. Thirty-five more ordinances, covering a very wide field, were then laid before them. Disorderly and disproportioned, like most medieval legislation, they ranged from trivial personal questions and the details of administration to the broadest schemes for the future. Many of them were simply efforts to get the recognised law enforced. There were clauses forbidding alienation of domain, the abuses of purveyance, the usurpations of the courts of the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... Hugh dreamily, "I have a few other little methods of work, though so trivial and so essentially personal I don't know whether you would ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... It was fortunate for her that she was quick-witted. These two flagrant blunders were sufficient for her. She grasped the principle that those who have a great love of power and little scope for it must necessarily exercise it in trivial matters. She extended the principle of the newspaper and the letter-bag over her entire intercourse with the Gresleys and never offended in ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... will of GOD, even in regard to matters which might appear trivial and unimportant. So, in the present day, GOD is willing to give to His people fulness of blessing, but it must be on His own lines. Though we are not our own, it is, alas! possible to live as though we were; devotion ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... and slowly pursued my way. An idea was forming in my mind to trap the enemy by seeming acquiescent. I wondered if my movements were being watched at that moment. Since it was more than probable, I returned to the bank, entered, and made some trivial inquiry of a cashier, and then came out again and walked on as ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... physical knowledge, to succeed very fairly and without any great difficulty. I was able to protect myself, therefore, against many small reprimands, which fell tolerably frequently on those who had thought this or that instruction might be lightly passed over as too trivial to be attended to. It came about in this way, when we were continually drilling, after the cessation of the armistice, that the military exercises we performed gave me genuine pleasure on account of their regularity, ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... Helen, became so overwhelming that he lost all hope, and, overcome by the most abject fear, sunk down, and would have fallen, had he not been supported. Recovering himself a little, he broke forth into earnest petitions that his life might be spared. He made the most trivial and weak excuses for his conduct, utterly unlikely to avail him anything. He declared that he had been led on by Myers; that his crew had forced him to consent to the piracy; that he had endeavoured to dissuade them from it, and that the fear ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... into overcrowded trains. On the roads of France were broken-down motor-cars which had cost large sums of money in New York and London. But because war's stupendous evil makes all other things seem trivial, and the gifts of liberty and life are more precious than wealth or luxury, so these rich folk in misfortune fraternized cheerfully in the discussion of their strange adventures and shared the last drop of hot tea in a Thermos flask with the generous instincts of shipwrecked ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... No wonder—To-day, a woman like that might not be a model for all the virtues, but she certainly would use her gifts and become famous, the while living her life too fully to have any place in it for yeomen and such, or even for the trivial business of breaking hearts." He put his finger under Blanche's chin, and raised her face, but he could not compel her gaze. "You are the exact image of that little girl," he said, "except that you are ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... Russian—is a nobleman to be at the beck of such vile little people? No, they must come to me, your Storri, my San Reve; and when they arrive, bah! I shall not see them. I shall tell them they must come again!" And Storri lifted his hand grandly, as though the Harleys were now disposed of and their trivial ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... True, he was growing more and more disinclined for active exercise, and he regretted he had led so sedentary a life. But though '64 piled itself up on '63, and '65 on top of that, these arbitrary divisions of time seemed to him but trivial. ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... rest, most vividly," he continued, vindictively. "We'll show him how we get under the hose in the morning. Oh, we'll have a bully time with him, and I'll wager that when we're through the honors of naval battles will seem too trivial for ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... uneasily and rolled to her scuppers, and it was as much as we could do to keep our legs. Holgate, too, must have been occupied by the duties of his position, for he was a good mariner, which was, perhaps, as well for us. Chance decides according to her fancy, and the most trivial accidents are important in the scheme of destiny. Mademoiselle had an attack of mal de mer and had recourse to me. Nothing in the world mattered save her sensations, which were probably very unpleasant, I admit. But the yacht might go to the bottom, and ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... dishonest witnesses, Sir William Follett exhibited unwavering calmness and self-possession; and withal a dignity of demeanour by which he was remarkably distinguished, and which lent importance to even the most trivial cases which could be intrusted to his advocacy. Perhaps no man ever defeated a greater number of important cases, by unexpected objections of the very extremest technical character, than Sir William Follett; but he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... which implies something of familiarity. Polonius, in his superstitious respect for ranks and degrees, provides four forms of address applying to four separate cases: such is the ponderous casuistry which the solemn courtier brings to bear upon the most trivial ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... manifest interest she displayed in both men, the concealment of her whereabouts from friends in London, her stiff lipped indifference to the opinion of other residents in the hotel,—these things, trivial individually, united into a strong ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... cheerfulness of spirit; to show themselves gallant in the most dangerous attempt.... And now to sum up all: It is most apparent to every impartial and ingenuous judgment; That although His Majesty cannot expect to be secured from every trivial disaster that may befall his army, either by the too much Presumption, Ignorance, or Negligence of some particular Persons (which is frequently incident and unavoidable in the best of Armies), yet the several positions of the Heavens duly considered and compared among themselves, as ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... not looked away as he spoke he might have observed that her fingers tightened their grip of the pearls almost convulsively, as if to break the rope. It was a gesture slight and trivial, yet arguing perhaps vexation. But Tremayne did not see it, and had he seen it, it is odds it would have ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... his wife, of the 'good hog's hars- let,' and the 'pleasant French fricassee of veal' that he loved to eat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his 'gadding after beauties,' and his reciting of Hamlet on a Sunday, and his playing of the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial things. Even in actual life egotism is not without its attractions. When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them up, when ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... view to which nothing needs to be added. This is truly the "lodge in some vast wilderness" for which one often sighs when in the midst of "a bustle at once sordid and trivial." In spite of Dr. Johnson, these "monstrous protuberances" do "inflame the imagination and elevate the understanding." This scenery satisfies my soul. Now, the Rocky Mountains realize—nay, exceed—the dream of my childhood. It is magnificent, and the air is life giving. I should ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... prognostication possess over every rank of society. Such scenes as that described in the Spectator, where so much unhappiness was created by spilling the salt, are still realized every day in nearly every family in Great Britain. All phenomena which cannot easily be accounted for, and hundreds of trivial incidents, are considered by the gravest as portentous signs of events to come. The coincidence of any event and its prognostic, though it might have been ten to one that it would happen, is received as evidence of their connexion, which it would be ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... man is transfigured. His thoughts, motives, desires, actions, are all inspired by the Divine Mind and framed after a Divine Pattern. The limitations of human nature are relaxed, and the man expands into newness of life; he soars into heavenly places; he is charged with holy influences. "The trivial round, the common task," become media to him, by which he can interpret and make known to all, the beauty of holiness as revealed to him by communion ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... usually a dwelling, acasino or amusement-house, and many minor edifices, summer-houses, arcades, etc., disposed in extensive grounds laid out with terraces, cascades, and shaded alleys. The style was graceful, sometimes trivial, but almost always pleasing, making free use of stucco enrichments, both internally and externally, with abundance of gilding and frescoing. The Villa Madama (1516), by Raphael, with stucco-decorations by Giulio Romano, though incomplete and now dilapidated, is a noted ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... freedom of it all! The perfect trust, each in the other. The absence of all coquetry and allurement, of all pretence or sham. Just chums, good fellows, born comrades; joining in the same laugh, stilled by the same thoughts; absorbed in the same incidents, no matter how trivial: the hiving of a swarm of bees, the antics of a pair of squirrels, or the unfolding of a new rose. He twenty-five, clean-souled, happy-hearted; lithe as a sapling and as graceful and full of spring. She twenty-two, soft-cheeked as a summer rose and as sweet and wholesome ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... The most trivial subjects are admissible for a call, and it is not in good taste to discuss deep interests, political questions ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... philosophical experimenter will entertain concerning his own researches, ought never to be considered as a reproach, when they are kept in view in examining the experiments of others. The minute circumstances and apparently trivial causes which lend their influence towards error, even in persons of the most candid judgment, are amongst the most curious phenomena of the ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... not strange that so many controversies about more or less trivial matters should have obscured in the minds of both Englishmen and Americans the fundamental identity of aim and purpose in the larger things of life. For notwithstanding the German influence in America which has had an undue ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... get that rock out," she began, looking at him with frank admiration, and then they talked for a few minutes. I need not tell you what they said—it would only sound trivial—but as they talked a bond of sympathy, of mutual interest, seemed gradually to wind itself around them. They smiled, nodded, looking approvingly at each other; and each felt that feeling of warmth and satisfaction which comes to the ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... of Lane's visit. But ask her if she will keep an eye out for that woman she heard talking—and the man, too. They may drop in again. And tell her that if she hears anything else, no matter how trivial, about Barnes, she ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... to the twentieth century, and from the disastrous collapse of the French Colonial Empire to my own infinitely trivial personal experiences, I regretted the business which had detained M. Des Etangs in Ceylon, and deprived me of the company of so ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... learned, so just, so brilliant an assembly of men to deal with delicate matters which have perhaps been too long left undealt with. Such differences of opinion as may perhaps be admitted to exist between madame the Princess de Gonzague and myself, however trivial in the beginning, have in a sense grown with the passing of time into an importance which calls imperatively for some manner or ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... was that things were to take their own course; he failed to grasp the significance of any other idea or its relative importance. He answered "Aye, indeed," with every appearance of interest and eagerness to some trivial remark about the weather, and was quite unconcerned about another and most important matter which should have interested him deeply. I soon saw what had happened; his mind, in which forces so evenly balanced had fought so strenuously, ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... shall be glad if papa has not yet had the works of Eberlin copied, for I have gotten them meanwhile, and discovered,—for I could not remember,—that they are too trivial and surely do not deserve a place among those of Bach and Handel. All respect to his four-part writing, but his clavier fugues are nothing but ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... cutting up the carcass of the animal, they discovered it had been shot at by hunters not more than a week previously, as an arrow-head and a musket-ball were still in the wounds. Under other circumstances such a matter would have been regarded as trivial, but as they knew the Snake Indians had no guns, the presence of the bullet indicated that the elk could not have been wounded by one of them. They were aware that they were on the edge of the Blackfeet country, and as these savages were supplied with ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... bent her brows, and it was clear that the name suggested only a trivial recollection to her mind. "There used to be some Blake children in the old overseer's ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... years ago, a lady clothed in garb of mourning, accompanied by a little bright-eyed girl of perhaps some nine summers, and her old nurse, alighted at the village inn. Now this seemingly trivial circumstance was in reality quite an event in our quiet community, and considerably disturbed the good people thereof from the "even tenor of their way." Indeed, there were many more curious eyes bent upon the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... collector in charge of the port. He knew what smuggling meant; but his views were very indefinite. According to the fishermen, and most of the traders, to whose conversation on this subject he had listened, smuggling was hardly to be regarded as a sin, or, if a sin, it was one of the most trivial character. ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... them—unless you admit the atoning nature of His sacrifice for sins. I cannot stop to enlarge, but I venture to say that any narrower interpretation evacuates Paul's words of their deepest significance. The explanation goes on, 'And that He was buried.' Why that trivial detail? Partly because it guarantees the fact of His Death, partly because of its bearing on the evidences of His Resurrection. 'And that He rose from the dead according to the Scriptures.' Great ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... relief to be alone. She had never known such a painful feeling of guilt as whilst she sat with Gilbert and Lydia regarding her. Yet why? Her secret, she tried to assure herself, was quite innocent, trivial indeed. But why had she been unable to come straight home? What had held her away, as forcibly as if a hand had ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... almost pathetic when one pronounced it without curtailment in his presence. His skinniness was also a matter of pride. And when you realize that he was an indefatigable gossip, and seemed always to be riding at large, gathering or imparting trivial news, you should know fairly ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... salon was exclusively literary, and although occasionally visited by a few persons of high birth, bourgeois in its tone, and enamored of madrigals, sonnets, stanzas, and bouts rimes. The affectation that decks trivial things in fine language belongs essentially to a class which sees another above it, and is uneasy in the sense of its inferiority; and this affectation is precisely the opposite of the original ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... as a man takes an interest only in himself, in his own fortune, in his own advancement, in his own success, his interests are trivial: all that is, like himself, of little importance and of short duration. Alongside of the small boat which he steers so carefully there are thousands and millions of others of like it; none of them are worth much, and his own is not worth ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... do not jest. I cannot couple with his noble name A trivial word! Look, how the setting sun Lights up Castel-a-mare and Sorrento, And changes Capri to a purple cloud! And there Vesuvius with its plume of smoke, And the great city stretched upon the shore ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... he said, regarding the three volumes with no very favorable air, "Mighty poor stuff, I should say; just about as weak as they make it. But harmless. Some of the conversation—between the women—is natural; trivial, but natural. The plain truth is, my dear Linn, it is a very foolish, stupid book, which should never have been printed at all; but I suppose your fashionable friend could afford to ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The injunctions issued at many of them are in existence: these deal only with what is blameworthy, not with that which calls for no reproof. Some of the things objected to seem to us very trivial. On one occasion the nuns were forbidden to keep pet animals, as the abbess was charged with giving her dogs and monkeys the food intended for the sisters. Sometimes the abbess was forbidden to take into the convent more than a certain number of nuns. In 1333 there were ninety-one, but after ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... story, and a commonplace one, if even the most trivial record of human effort and failure can be so styled. It was the story of half the subalterns in our Imperial Army—of small pay, engulfed by heavy expenses, avoidable and unavoidable; the upkeep of much needless ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... love of home, had been a sharp wrench, and she required long familiarity to reconcile her to new conditions. Though the first and greatest change from England to America would seem to have rendered all others trivial and not to be regarded, she had shrank from each as it came, submitting by force of will, but unreconciled till years had past. In Andover she had allowed herself to take firm root, certain that from this point she would never be dislodged, and the house had ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... All these trivial incidents belonged to the routine of life, and the return of morning. Surely, not so the ringing of the great bell of the chateau, nor the running up and down the stairs; nor the hurried figures on the terrace; nor the booting and tramping here and there and everywhere, nor the quick saddling ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... retaining through life trivial and transient incidents, in all the freshness of minute details, while of far more important events, where laborious effort has been expended to leave a fair and lasting record, but faint and illegible traces ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... whoiver she is. Did you see that old goat 'ating the best of me fairy-fingers that all bloomed the day?" she asked eagerly, afraid that the conversation might come to an end at any moment; but Mrs. Connelly took no notice of so trivial a subject. ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... did not move. Marguerite turned a smiling face upon Mead and met in his eyes the same look she always saw there. She glanced down again, blushing, and felt the silence embarrassing, but all the things she would ordinarily have said suddenly seemed trivial and out of place, so she turned to the child with a gentle, "Be a good boy, Paul." Mead looked at her in silence, smiling gravely. Many things were whirling about in his mind to say, but he hesitated before each one, doubting if that were the best. Paul kicked vigorously and shouted, "Come on! ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... treated him with personal indignity and violence, when he undertook to disperse them. On the other hand, Parma had been holding out hopes of pardon with more reasonable conditions than could well be expected, and had, with a good deal of art, taken advantage of several trivial circumstances to inspire the burghers with confidence in his good-will. Thus, an infirm old lady in the city happened to imagine herself so dependent upon asses milk as to have sent her purveyor out of the city, at the peril of his life, to procure a supply from the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to another; where the livery is all, the form cannot a second time be galvanized into life. Pastoral, relying for its distinctive features upon the accidents rather than the essentials of life, failed to justify its pretentions as a serious and independent form of art. The trivial toy of a courtly coterie, it attempted to arrogate to itself the position of a philosophy, and in so doing exposed itself to the ridicule of succeeding ages. Men with a stern purpose in life turned wearily ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... I shall abandon them in despair. The beauties of the earth, the golden sunlight, the crimson close of day, the leaping streams, the dewy grass will call in vain. Books and talk alike will seem trivial and ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and for two hundred years later, the matter of attributing a book to this man or that was considered a trivial affair. Piracies were prevalent. All printers revised the work of classic authors if they saw fit, and often they were specially rewarded for it by the Church. It was about this time that some one slipped ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... these of Wyoming and Vermont seem trivial, perhaps, when contrasted with the lurid tales of border warfare in older times between half-civilized peoples of mediaeval Europe, as we read them in the pages of Froissart and Sir Walter Scott. But their historic lesson is none the less clear. Though they lift the curtain but a little way, ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... had passed over the trivial matter of the journey, and all such minor details, to the grand result, when she had found their father, and would be living with him in a beautiful place, with all that heart could desire. But Duncan's imagination could put on no such seven-league boots. It stuck ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... the least disguise, The Papists at all times Still favour'd, and their robberies Look'd on as trivial crimes. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of so trivial a character, that the Parliament well knew they were not the ground of his arrest, but only a pretext for it—only a pretext, by which the king said to his pliant and trembling Parliament: "This man is innocent; but I will that you ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... the looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped, have grown cold; the eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday! Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... and lonely years at Charlock House, Lady Channice had, at first tentatively, then with a growing assurance in her limited sphere of action, moved away all the ugliest, most trivial things: tattered brocade and gilt footstools, faded antimacassars, dismal groups of birds and butterflies under glass cases. When she sat alone in the evening, after Augustine, as child or boy, had gone to bed, the ghostly glimmer of the birds, the furtive glitter ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Angelique, making some trivial excuse, hurried up to her room as quickly as possible. Then she gave free course to her tears. Ah, how intensely happy she was, yet how she suffered! Her poor, dear beloved; he was sad enough when he found he must leave her! But she must not forget that she had made a vow ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... been so massaged, rubbed, pressed and artistically corseted as to appear positively sylph-like. She danced like a fairy, she who had once been called "old" Lady Fulkeward; she smoked cigarettes; she laughed like a child at every trivial thing—any joke, however stale, flat and unprofitable, was sufficient to stir her light pulses to merriment; and she flirted—oh, heavens!—HOW she flirted!—with a skill and a grace and a knowledge and an aplomb that nearly drove ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... bear"—not a very specific appellation neither. The name has been given in reference to a peculiar characteristic of the animal—that is, its power of protruding or extending the lips to seize its food—in which peculiarity it resembles the tapir, giraffe, and some other animals. Its trivial name of "sloth bear" is more expressive: for certainly its peculiar aspect—caused by the long shaggy masses of hair which cover its neck and body—gives it a very striking resemblance to the sloth. Its long crescent-shaped claws strengthen this resemblance. A less distinctive ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... Patriotism was the mother of self-sacrifice, but also of murder, and Paul distrusted all forces which made for intolerance. The delicate word-painting of Pierre Loti, with its typically French genius for exalting the trivial, Paul studied carefully. He found it to resemble the art of those patient, impassive Japanese craftsmen who draw and colour some exquisite trifling design, a bird, a palm tree, and then cut the picture in half in order to ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... in Gertrude's room was suddenly extinguished; it is impossible to express how much that trivial incident affected him! It was like an emblem of what was to come; the light had been the only evidence of life that broke upon that hour, and he was now left alone with the shades of night. Was not this like the herald of Gertrude's own death; ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and execution. He was utterly regardless of obstacles, and seemed to have expunged their very name from his vocabulary. His designs were never nipped in their infancy by the contemplation of those trivial difficulties which often turn awry the current of enterprise; and, though the rapidity of his movements was sometimes arrested by a more formidable barrier, either naturally existing in the pursuit he had undertaken, or ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... hands on the keys; and across those little smarting, trivial personalities there struck the clear, assured dignity and worth of her old friend . . . was there ever such a friend as that rough old German who had died so long before she was born? No one could say the human race was ignoble or had never deserved to live, who ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... measures. But as a matter of fact this absolute authority, instead of being confined in its exercise to matters in which the public safety was really concerned, was wasted and compromised chiefly for the benefit of a trivial domestic policy and a merely dynastic foreign policy. At home the exercise of absolute authority was not limited to matters and occasions which really raised questions of public safety. In their foreign policies the majority of the states had little idea of the necessary and desirable ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... behaviour at this critical juncture did not throw oil upon the troubled waters. He took care that Jack should have every attention, and inquired as to his progress with punctilious regularity; but he plainly considered a sprained ankle a very trivial affair, which, needless to say, did not coincide with the invalid's views of the case; moreover, he absolutely refused to believe that the accident was responsible for ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... character of Mr. Marmozet with such severity, that I began to suspect him of some particular prejudice, and put myself upon my guard against his insinuations. I ought to crave pardon for this tedious narration of trivial circumstances, which, however interesting they may be to me, must certainly be very dry and insipid to the ear of one unconcerned in the affair. But I understand the meaning of your ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... to take anything?" he asked. And the trivial question cloaked so earnest an entreaty that her heart was filled with profound emotion. She knew well enough that each of his words was eloquent of another thing. The excitement springing from the gaiety which pulsed around her was slowly gaining on her. Some of the fever of all these ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... which the affection of women is based: that of being the source of all his pleasures, big and little. Love animates everything in life, and conjugal love has a peculiar right to descend to the most trivial details. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... ought not to pardon an affront offered by such a mean fellow, but insist upon his being dismissed; whilst he persuaded the King my husband that there was no reason for parting with a man so useful to him, for such a trivial cause. This was done by M. de Pibrac, thinking I might be induced, from such mortifications, to return to France, where he enjoyed the offices of president and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... really a stupendous problem! One old mountaineer said to me last summer, 'Them schools is the courtin'est places in the world.' I begin to think he was right, and it is not always the superficial flirting and love-making which is a part of your coeducational schools,—a thing simply trivial and naughty,—but often tragic passion instead, quite in harmony with the title of Dryden's play, 'All for Love, or ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... a mass inoculation program against a parasitic infestation resembling malaria. They paused at another place to teach the native doctors the use of some new surgical instruments that had been developed in Hospital Earth laboratories just for them. Frantic emergency calls usually proved to involve trivial problems, but once or twice potentially serious situations were spotted early, before they could develop ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... Nice two days, and his unsuccessful search began to tell upon his nerves. Realizing the need of relaxation of some sort—some diversion which might for the time being, turn his mind upon trivial things—he decided to spend an evening at ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... together; Talked—no doubt on trivial topics; Such as Blondin, or the weather, Which ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... myself in recalling every circumstance the most trivial of this the final morning of what merits to be called my life. Eleven o'clock, I remember, was striking when Agnes came into my study, and said that she would go into the city (for we lived in a quite rural suburb), that ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... passion the major penalty of guilt is borne not by the offenders themselves but by the first generation succeeding. This does need saying occasionally, I suppose, and to that extent The Victim redeems itself from the charge of trivial unpleasantness. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... of the vane in many different places, and the interchange of results by telegraph, would put the weather, as it were, in our power, by betraying its ambushes before it is ready to give the assault. At first sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial than the lives of those whose single achievement is to record the wind and the temperature three times a day. Yet such men are doubtless sent into the world for this special end, and perhaps there is no kind of ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... humiliated her repeatedly on both land and sea, that the authorities forgot their customary caution and encouraged the circulation of any story that told in favor of the American colonies. Little did they realize the impression that the statement of grievances—so trivial compared with the injustices that were being inflicted upon the Spanish colonials—was making upon their subjects overseas, who until then had been carefully guarded from all modern ideas of government. ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... out. If they missed him they must have thought him gone to the barn, or in the drive-shed sharpening his axe. But the day went on and the old mother forgot all the wrongs that she had suffered, and yearned over the trivial woman who was hurrying out into the Great Space. Her hours seemed numbered at noon, her moments measured as it came towards sundown, but with the passing of the sun the storm stopped, and a beautiful white peace fell on the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... from the region of Ranny's breast pocket, and he had peace in his pen. His fellow-clerks suspected him of a casual encounter and no more. A matter too trivial ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... cheese was brought, Mr. Jessup left them on a trivial pretext, and absented himself so long that at length she began to wonder what would happen if he had "done a bilk," and left them to discharge the score. The waiter hovered around, nicking at the side-tables with his napkin and brushing ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... during the height of the wet season, they grow with the haste of summer. And yet immediately on the dispersal of the mists of July the least observance could not fail to recognise that a certain and elaborate change had taken place. The mango-trees had been flowering for several weeks in a trivial, half-hearted way, but when the sun sent its thrills down into the moist soil the lemons and pomeloes began to sweeten the air; the sunflower-tree displayed its golden crowns among huge soft leaves, and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... individuals from S——, who came to solicit orders for their manufacturing establishments, also brought orders for an additional supply of the sacred volume. And the number of Bibles and Testaments which were introduced into a dense catholic population, in consequence of the apparently trivial circumstance of the opening of the case in the Diligence, will probably never be ascertained until the great day of account; nor will it be known to what extent they have been instrumental in reclaiming and saving the souls of ...
— The Village in the Mountains; Conversion of Peter Bayssiere; and History of a Bible • Anonymous
... hand and lifted her to her feet. There was shame in this tempest that swept through her veins, because he did not share it; for to her, though this meeting was an epoch, to him it was no more than a trivial incident. She would have keyed his emotions to hers, if she could, but since she had had years of preparation, he a single moment, perhaps she might have been consoled for the disparity, could she have read his eyes. They ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... went to trapping in the less settled parts of Nebraska, and for a while he lived in peace, until he fell into a saloon row over some trivial matter and invited four of his opponents outside to fight him with pistols; the four were to fire at the word, and Bill to do the same—his pistol against their four. In this fight he killed one man at first fire, but he himself was shot through the shoulder and disabled ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... thing I can say is, that thus far your misadventoors hain't turned out so bad as I have feared in each individdool case. In fact thar's allus ben what they call a anticlimax; that is, jest at the moment when thar'd ought to be a te-rific di-saster, thar's ben nothin' but some trivial or laugherble tummination. Now, I'm free to confess, boys, that thus far my fears hev ben gerroundless. I'm free to say that thus far thar hain't ben what we can conscuentionsly call a accident. But what of that? The incidents hev all ben thar. Every individdool thing ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... and failing, they fell out over some trivial thing and separated for good. One traveled north, the other south. Both struck fine mineral that promised to make their dreams come true. But neither was content. Each wanted the other's companionship ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... upon external things and, indeed, upon the whole of the great universe, Life, it was believed, would gain more breadth and truth; and in a noteworthy manner man undertook a struggle against the pettiness of his own nature and for the drawing out of all that was merely human and trivial. A great deal has been gained through such a change and new tendency of life. In fact we have discovered far more than we had hoped for. But, at the same time, we have lost something—a loss which at the outset occasions no anxiety, but which, however, through painful ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... virtually ignored by the other two, yet linked with them in a sort of casual camaraderie that was somehow established when she accepted the cocktail. Out of all that followed, no incident remained for her so sinister and at the same time so paradoxically trivial and absurd as ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... "original" if it is the result of the designer's creative endeavor that provides a distinguishable variation over prior work pertaining to similar articles which is more than merely trivial and has not been ...
— Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code, Circular 92 • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... in accordance with the regulations of his country's navy, which provided that "the place of honour for the flag of a foreign nation which we intend to distinguish, must be on the starboard of the main-yard arm." The fact that these two trivial incidents were the only recorded elements of misunderstanding during a period of nearly six months, at a time when animosities between English and French people—and especially sailors—were extraordinarily acute, testifies ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... not appear on the surface for some days, especially if the violence has been indirect. The joint is kept in the flexed position, and is painful only when moved. In haemophilic subjects, considerable effusion of blood into a joint may follow the most trivial injury. ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... art to be misunderstood. I am always grossly misunderstood—by every one. They call me fantastic, whereas I am but inevitably new; indecent, because I am unfettered by mere trivial personal restrictions; unwholesome." ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... how unconvinced we often are by the crises in the lives of other people? They seem to us trivial or unimportant; but the fact is, the crises in the life of a boy, for example, or of a poor man, are as commanding as the crises in the life of the greatest statesman or millionaire, for they involve equally the ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... on my return of the visit of MM.Schneider and Bourdon, but the circumstance of their having inspected the designs in my Scheme Book, and especially my original design of the steam hammer, was regarded by my partner as too ordinary and trivial an incident of their visit to be mentioned to me. The exhibition of my mechanical designs to visitors at the Foundry was a matter of almost daily occurrence. I was, therefore, in entire ignorance of the fact that these foreign visitors had taken with them to France a copy ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... had constantly to be on the defensive. Another time it was the publication of the proceedings of the Diet which the Austrians tried to make a weapon against Prussia. The whole intercourse became nothing but a series of disputes, sometimes serious, sometimes trivial. ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... Columbus at Barcelona in 1519, when they were waiting upon Charles V., just elected Emperor and about to start for Aachen to be crowned. And yet there are modern critics who are disposed to deny the whole story. (See Harrisse, tom. i. p. 298.) The grounds for doubt are, however, extremely trivial when confronted with Las Casas, Historia, tom. i. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... stake was the site of the new Court-House—two localities claiming the right undisputed, because they were the only two places in the county where there was enough level land for the Court-House to stand on. Let no man think this a trivial issue. There had been a similar one over on the Virginia side once, and the opposing factions agreed to decide the question by the ancient wager of battle, fist and skull—two hundred men on each side—and the women of the county with difficulty prevented the fight. Just ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... neighbours take him with the utmost seriousness. Again, your literary journalist professes to wriggle in his chair over the humour of Jane Austen; to me she is the dullest lady that ever faithfully photographed the trivial. Years ago I happened to be crossing Putney Bridge, in a frock-coat and silk hat, when a passing member of the proletariat dug his elbows in his comrade's ribs and, quoting a music-hall tag of the period, shouted "He's got 'em ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... microscopic focussings, and always with dignity and elegance. He was more American than Henry James, more even than Aldrich. He chose always distinctively American subjects—New York City was his favorite theme—and his work had more depth of soul than Stockton's or Aldrich's. The story may be trivial, a mere expanded anecdote, yet it is sure to be so vitally treated that, like Maupassant's work, it grips and remains, and, what is more, it lifts and chastens or explains. It may be said with assurance that Short Sixes ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... the link which holds them together. The government must be a patchwork between good and evil, abolishing only so much of the latter as is consistent with safety. But never must I appear in the light of a reformer, political or religious; for to the introduction of new customs, apparently trivial, and the institution of new forms, however beneficial, the disgust of the semi-barbarous races may be traced. People settled like myself too often try to create a Utopia, and end with a general confusion. ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... sale, including every trivial scrap of painting or engraving, realised an enormous sum, and Rembrandt was in ecstasy. The honest burgomaster, however, was nearly frightened into a fit of apoplexy at seeing the man whose death he had sincerely mourned standing alive and well at the door of his studio. Meinherr ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... all?" There was no time for explanation. She passed on into the jeweller's with another smile on her mobile face. He had to do his stammering to himself, annoyed at the quip of triumph, at the blithe sneer, over his young vaporings. This trivial annoyance was accentuated by the effusive cordiality of the great Lindsay, whom he met in the elevator. Sommers did not like this camaraderie of manner. He had seen Lindsay snub many a poor interne. In his mail, this same morning, came a note from Mrs. E. G. Carson, inviting him ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... India—as if that mattered! When will people recognise that the truths of democratic policy are independent of time and space? Liberalism is a category, an eternal mode of thought, which cannot be overthrown by any trivial happenings. I am sick of the word 'facts.' I long ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... meant, the Welshman, whose under jaw began to move violently, replied that he meant what he said. Here the matter ended, for the Lion, turning from him, looked at the writer. The writer, imagining that his own conversation hitherto had been too trivial and commonplace for the Lion to consider it worth his while to take much notice of it, determined to assume a little higher ground, and after repeating a few verses of the Koran, and gabbling a little Arabic, asked the Lion what he considered to be the difference between ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... with loud and general shouts of approval, for no Phoenician audience would have been willing to sacrifice its interests for a thing so trivial as the happiness of ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... tradition still has magic to set treasure-seekers exploring almost every beach, cove, and headland from Halifax to the Gulf of Mexico. Yet if truth were told, he never cut a throat or made a victim walk the plank. He was tried and hanged for the trivial offense of breaking the head of a mutinous gunner of his own crew with a wooden bucket. It was even a matter of grave legal doubt whether he had committed one single piratical act. His trial in London was a farce. In the case of the captured ships he alleged that they were sailing under ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... would fit their mental disturbance into any of the known psychoses, constantly evidence a sort of paranoid habitus, a paranoid trend which is exclusively directed against those who had anything to do with their conviction and safe-keeping. The most trivial occurrences in their environment are endowed by them with a personal note of prejudice. The delay of a letter, the refusal to grant some of their unusual requests, an attendant's accidental failure to sweeten their coffee sufficiently, the slightest ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing environment from influence upon mental habitudes. It establishes a purified medium of action. Selection aims not only at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable. Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse. The school has the duty of omitting such things from the environment which it supplies, and thereby doing what it can to counteract their influence in ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... apart, and has evidently no connection with Dr. Butler's own life. I cannot use these letters, therefore, for my book, but over and above the charm of their inspired spelling, I find them of such an extremely trivial nature that I incline to hope the reader may derive as much amusement from them as I have done myself, and venture to give them the publicity here which I must refuse them in my book. The dates and signatures have, with the exception of Mrs. Newton's, been ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... admiration only of weak minds Led captive. Cease to admire, and all her plumes Fall flat and shrink into a trivial toy, At every sudden slighting quite abashed. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... faith in the justice of things by saying: "It's no fair Dr. Inglis is a woman; if she'd been a man, she'd ha' been a millionaire!" The doctor in whose memory these incidents live says of her friend: "No item was too trivial, no trouble too great to take, if she could help a human being, or if she could push forward or help a ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... and available intelligence on almost every subject. Mr. Bowen, although deferential in his deportment towards the captain, and ever treating him with a good show of respect, was in reality master of the brig; his advice being solicited on the most trivial occasion, and every suggestion he made in relation to the management of the vessel was eagerly seized upon by the captain. Indeed, Bowen was a model of a mate; industrious, economical, and faithful, treating the crew with kindness and consideration, yet ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... preposterous, and excited contempt and laughter only. Eight hundred Degrees of one kind and another were invented: Infidelity and even Jesuitry were taught under the mask of Masonry. The rituals even of the respectable Degrees, copied and mutilated by ignorant men, became nonsensical and trivial; and the words so corrupted that it has hitherto been found impossible to recover many of them at all. Candidates were made to degrade themselves, and to submit to insults not tolerable to a man ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... commission of jurists and privy counsellors, who, after a summary and informal investigation, pronounced on him the sentence of death on a specification of charges either general and indeterminate, or of the most trivial import. "If the king," says Garibay, "had dispensed similar justice to all his nobles, who equally deserved it in those turbulent times, he would have had but ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... matches. It was a time in which the world outside was seething with the ferment which had been cast into it by Germany and by those in England whom Germany had influenced, but not a fragment of it had dropped within our walls. I cannot call to mind a single conversation upon any but the most trivial topics, nor did our talk ever turn even upon our religion, so far as it was a thing affecting the soul, but upon it as something subsidiary to chapels, "causes," deacons, and ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... is an instance of that happy power of applying old stories, for which Mr. Windham, no less than Sheridan, was remarkable, and which, by promoting anecdote into the service of argument and wit, ennobles it, when trivial, and gives new youth ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... precise references to the source from which its contents have been derived; consequently, if a document has been analysed upon fifty different slips, the same references must be repeated fifty times. Hence a slight increase in the amount of writing to be done. It is certainly on account of this trivial complication that some obstinately cling to the inferior note-book system. Again, in virtue of their very detachability, the slips, or loose leaves, are liable to go astray; and when a slip is lost how is ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... an old Greek or Roman might, with simple distaste and horror. Glover, ignorant and limited as he was, received far more of its inspiration. Even while "chirking up" his companions with trivial talk and jests he was in his secret soul thinking of Bunyan's Dark Valley and Milton's Hell, the two sublimest landscapes that had ever been presented to his imagination. Thurstane, gifted with much of the sympathy of the great ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... conservative in politics, and at first had little sympathy with "those small-minded men who refused to pay a trivial tax on their tea; and who would plunge the country into war, and ruin all for a matter of stamps." John was born and lived at the village of Braintree. He did not really center his mind on politics until ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... bush' dwelt there in order to deliver; and, dwelling there, declared 'I have seen the affliction of My people, and am come down to deliver them.' So, then, if the goodwill of that eternal, delivering God is with us, we, too, may feel that our trivial troubles and our heavy burdens, all the needs of our prisoned wills and captive souls, are known to Him, and that we shall have deliverance from them by Him. Brethren, in that name, with its historical associations, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was known of her until dawn when they found her body by the lock gate. She had been dead some hours. It was a mysterious affair, upon which no light was thrown at the inquest. No one save myself had observed any sign of depression, and her half-bantering talk with me was trivial enough. No one could adduce a reason for her midnight walk on the tow-path. The obvious question arose. Whom had she gone forth to meet? What man? There was not a man in the neighbourhood with whom her name could be particularly associated. Generally, it could ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... I begged. "Indeed, I mean what I say! There is no cause to be anxious. Your uncle spoke of stopping at a chemist's. They may be making up his prescription. A hundred trivial things may have ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as though nothing had happened; St. Vincent gave Bella a wide berth and seemed to have forgotten her existence. But the Swedes went back to their end of the island, laughing at the trivial happening which was destined ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The injunctions issued at many of them are in existence: these deal only with what is blameworthy, not with that which calls for no reproof. Some of the things objected to seem to us very trivial. On one occasion the nuns were forbidden to keep pet animals, as the abbess was charged with giving her dogs and monkeys the food intended for the sisters. Sometimes the abbess was forbidden to take into the convent more than a certain ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... it, I've tried every sort of appeal to each of them, but trouble keeps on smoldering." Milton shook his head. "That's one of the trivial things that can wreck an expedition like this; just incompatibility among the men. What would you do about ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... notwithstanding this, under her foresail. We were gradually shoaling our water—sixteen fathom, twelve, ten, six, four had been announced. I drew my breath faster and faster. It was not a moment I should have liked anyone to put a trivial question to me; still I could make out a channel of clear water ahead, and ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... man so interested in his country's art as to go to an out-of-the-way English provincial town merely to see a small knife, must surely be able to decide such a trivial matter as the use ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... where he tethered his horse, and sat down upon the ground to smoke. Inwardly he swore at Gernois for the trick he had played upon him. A mean little revenge, thought Tarzan, and then suddenly it occurred to him that the man would not be such a fool as to antagonize him through a trivial annoyance of so petty a description. There must be something deeper than this behind it. With the thought he arose and removed his rifle from its boot. He looked to its loads and saw that the magazine was full. Then he inspected his revolver. After this preliminary precaution he scanned ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... stupendous difficulties; and it is not too much to say, that there never was a man who was not resolved that his theory must stand, who pretended to attach any importance to them. They are most gratuitously assumed, and even then are most trivial alleviations; a mere plaster of brown paper for ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When all I was to all men's sight Shares the erasure of the day; Then do I cast my cumbering load, Then do I gain ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... a way to modify this somewhat extravagant position by reintroducing the common-law test, viz.: Whether the contract is done with the purport (or effect) of making a monopoly for destroying competition, or whether such result is trivial and incidental to a reasonable and lawful business arrangement. The earliest statutes, those of Michigan, Kansas, and Nebraska, in 1889, denounce the following principles: "All contracts, agreements, understandings, and combinations ... the purpose or object of which ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... lots, whence also the saying, 'marriage is a lottery.' Then he would describe their way of life after marriage; how they monopolize one another's affections to the exclusion of friends and relations: how they pass their days in unmeaning fondness or trivial conversation; how the inferior of the two drags the other down to his or her level; how the cares of a family 'breed meanness in their souls.' In the fulfilment of military or public duties, they ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... boots in this age of earnest activity more than a trivial reference to the selfish splendor of a superstitious past? To-day is to-day, and the nails on the coffin-lid of the last Hanoverian would scarcely be of silver, so many hungry mouths ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... them to try every mode of adding to their attractions,—their whole thought is how to be most lovely in the eyes they would fill so as to keep out all other images. Poor darlings! We smile at their little vanities, as if they were very trivial things compared with the last Congressman's speech or the great election sermon; but Nature knows well what she is about. The maiden's ribbon or ruffle means a great deal more for her than the judge's wig or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... slightest attention, Polycarp did not pursue the subject further. Instead, with both ears open to catch all that was said, he trailed after the others to the corral. It was a matter of instinct, as well as principle, with Polycarp Jenks, to let no sentence, however trivial, slip past his hearing ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... could." That was high praise. She had brought her best to her Lord. Perhaps some of us make too much of our little acts and trivial sacrifices. Little things are acceptable if they are really our best. But Mary's deed was not a small one. The ointment she brought was very costly. She did not use just a little of this precious nard, but poured it all out on the head and feet of Jesus. "What she could" ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... depends, and if by any slackness we loosen the girdle of truthfulness, and admit into our religious life any taint of unreality, if our prayers say just a little more than is quite true, and our penitence a little less, we shall speedily find that hypocrisy and trivial insincerity are separated by very narrow limits. God's truth in the Gospel cleanses the inner man, but not without his own effort, and, therefore, we are commanded to 'cleanse ourselves from all filthiness ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... replied, "Tell your lady I shall be most happy to wait upon her," so saying, he set off once more to the professor, and reported the progress of the affair. But this time the master looked a little more serious; for, from some trivial circumstances put together, he began to entertain suspicions that the lady was (as it really turned out) no other than his own wife. So he rather anxiously inquired of Bucciolo whether he intended to accept the invitation. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... to me within himself remorseful; O noble conscience, and without a stain, How sharp a sting is trivial ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... the same tendency. And yet it may not follow from this consideration that Dr Adam Smith's definition is not just. It seems in many respects improper to exclude the clothing and lodging of a whole people from any part of their revenue. Much of it may, indeed, be of very trivial and unimportant value in comparison with the food of the country, yet still it may be fairly considered as a part of its revenue; and, therefore, the only point in which I should differ from Dr Adam Smith is where he seems to consider every increase of the ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... soil, which can easily be entered, so that it may immediately obtain a suitable shelter. The cold days are coming; soon the frosts will be here. To wander on the surface would expose it to grave perils. It must contrive without delay to descend into the earth, and that to no trivial depth. This is the unique and imperative condition of safety, and in many cases it is impossible of realisation. What use are the claws of this tiny flea against rock, sandstone, or hardened clay? The creature must perish if it cannot find a subterranean ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... hinted, are treated in a horribly cruel manner, judged from our standpoint; but in reality they know not what cruelty is, because they are absolutely ignorant of kindness. They are the beasts of burden, to be felled to the earth with a bludgeon when they err in some trivial respect; and when camp is moved each woman carries virtually the whole household and the entire worldly belongings of the family. Thus it is a common sight to see a woman carrying a load consisting of one or two children ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... Australia should likewise, as far as possible, bear uniform names. He stated that he had met wines in various vineyards grown from the same grape, and called by different names; and though this might seem a trivial matter, yet it led to endless confusion. Moreover, it should not be permitted to continue, especially as it ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... request, and is it the real language he would use? No, we are glad to say that it is not. Simply it is a libel, in every particular, on any boy, however fondly and exactingly trained by parents however zealous for his overdecorous future. Better, indeed, the dubious sentiment of the most trivial nursery jingle, since the latter at least maintains the lawless though wholesome spirit of ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... failed to interest and excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, I committed to memory its external appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also fell, at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I might have entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when a stiff paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... that, in a trivial, but terribly impressive manner, precisely the same thing that Daniel had been told by his captain? People do not resign when ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... add that none of the letters were intended for publication; they were written to near relatives and friends currente calamo, and are full of familiar expressions and allusions which may seem trivial and uninteresting to ordinary readers. Those, however, who care to study my sister's character I think cannot fail to trace in these records some of its strongest features; her keen enjoyment of the beauties ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... in the lines of Caleb's face, and his absorbed and dreamy manner, which would have sat well on some alchemist or abstruse student, were at first sight an odd contrast to his occupation, and the trivialities about him. But, trivial things, invented and pursued for bread, become very serious matters of fact; and, apart from this consideration, I am not at all prepared to say, myself, that if Caleb had been a Lord Chamberlain, or a Member of Parliament, or a lawyer, ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... United States have demanded from time to time during the last twenty years earnest remonstrance on the part of our Government. In the immediate past exorbitant penalties have been imposed upon our vessels and goods by customs authorities of Cuba and Puerto Rico for clerical errors of the most trivial character in the manifests or bills of lading. In some cases fines amounting to thousands of dollars have been levied upon cargoes or the carrying vessels when the goods in question were entitled to free entry. Fines have been exacted even when the error ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... as a strange coincidence that these two extreme types of luxury and labor should meet in this furnace on the Sargasso and fight for the trivial reason that one offended ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... and be yourself! As hard, and lacking in feeling, as you really are! (The LADY tries to put her arm round his neck. The STRANGER taps her gently on the fingers.) You mustn't touch me. When your words and glances weren't enough, you always wanted to touch me. You'll excuse a rather trivial question: are ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... that," says Dowd. "It was a remarkable experience. Weird, you might say. You see, it was the last day of our stay in Florida; our last foursome of the season. We had been losing steadily for several days, Ellins and I. Not that the stakes were high. Trivial. Dollar Nassau, with side bets. I'd been off my drive again and Ellins had been putting atrociously. ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... violet soutane which fitted them as gracefully as a royal vesture draping the figure of a king. One disproportionate point, however, about his attire was, that the heavy gold crucifix which depended by a chain from his neck, did not, with him, look so much a sacred symbol as a trivial ornament,—whereas the simple silver one that gleamed against the rusty black scarlet-edged cassock of Cardinal Bonpre, presented itself as the plain and significant sign of holiness without the aid of jewellers' workmanship to emphasize its meaning. This was a trifle, no doubt;—still ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... vehicles of communication. Instead of the old-time masses of metal, or bands of leather, which moved stiffly through ranges comparatively short, there is to-day employed a medium which may traverse 186,400 miles in a second, and with resistances most trivial in contrast with those ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... might soon drive many of our fellest diseases out of our breed; but the law of personality, of ultroneousness, of free will, that which in a great measure makes us what we are, steps in and forbids anything but the convincement and force of reason. Much in the same way, though it be a more trivial matter, pleasure, in order to please, must be that which you yourself choose. You cannot make an Esquimaux forswear train oil, and take to tea and toast like ourselves, still less to boiled rice like a Hindoo; neither can you ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... popularity of the small full-length portrait-photographs owing to the predominance they give to this passive imprint of the mind's past action upon externals over its momentary and elusive presence? It is to the fillip received from the startling likeness of trivial details, exciting us to supply what is deficient in more important points, that is to be ascribed the leniency to the photograph on the part of near relatives and friends, who are usually hard to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... with a tray. The trivial jingle of the cups and plates was another suffering added to the ever increasing stress of mind, and now each memory was accompanied by sensations of physical ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (Portulaca Oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the addition of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... Author's Sense is clear and discoverable, (tho', perchance, low and trivial;) I have not by any Innovation tamper'd with his Text; out of an Ostentation of endeavouring to make him speak better than ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... the unpretentious country lane that the advent of the electric car had found it. When Carrados had taken in these details there seemed little else to notice. He was on the point of giving Harris the order to go on when his ear caught a trivial sound. ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... obliged to approach him; and where they do not observe that conduct, it is a proof they are not sensible of his superiority. From hence too it proceeds, that any great difference in the degrees of any quality is called a distance by a common metaphor, which, however trivial it may appear, is founded on natural principles of the imagination. A great difference inclines us to produce a distance. The ideas of distance and difference are, therefore, connected together. Connected ideas are readily taken for each ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... at labor, and abroad in war, for the glory of the rulers. Hence, wars of conquest were frequent, always accompanied with the desire for plunder of territory, the wealth of temples, and the coffers of the rulers. Many times wars were based upon whims of kings and rulers and trivial matters, which can only be explained through excessive egoism and vanity; yet in nearly every instance the idea of conquest was to increase the wealth of the nation and power of the king by going to war. There was, of course, jealousy of nations and rivalry for supremacy, as the thousand years ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... opportunity Erskine had ever enjoyed of speaking to Gertrude at leisure and alone. Yet their conversation had never been so commonplace. She, liking the game, played very well and chatted indifferently; he played badly, and broached trivial topics in spite of himself. After an hour-and-a-half's play, Gertrude had announced that this game must be their last. He thought desperately that if he were to miss many more strokes the game must presently end, and an opportunity which might never ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... had taken place the very remembrance seemed to have floated away to an immeasurable distance, and only wonder remained that any interest could have been felt on so trivial a subject. From morning to night, and from night till morning, the same incessant grind went on, for of what rest was sleep when it opened the door for fresh torture, as, for instance, when a Cambridge Examiner condescended to the unfair expedient of kidnapping ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Orme. I liked the man; there was something about those brown eyes of his that appealed to me. Also it struck me as odd that he should happen to be present on this occasion, for I have always held that there is nothing casual or accidental in the world; that even the most trivial circumstances are either ordained, or the result of the workings of some inexorable law whereof the end is known by whatever power may direct our steps, though it ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... taken the blow hard. That a son of his, one so strong and robust, a youth on whom so much time and thought and care and money had been lavished to fit him for the world, should go down and go out (and in such a sudden, trivial fashion)—oh, it was more than he felt he could endure. But he was built on a broad plan; his nature, when the test came, opened a wide door to the assimilation of experiences and offered a wide margin for adjustment to their jars. His ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... almost trivial and yet contained a sweet and touching quality. It was, indeed, of a piece with the work of Miss Jewett only more humorous, and the action of Katharine and James Herne was in key with the text. The ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... achieved, and would prefer rather to forget than emulate him; a man who found his great empire a blot upon the earth—a degraded, poverty-stricken, miserable, infamous agglomeration of ignorance, crime, and brutality—and will idle away the allotted days of his trivial life and then pass to the dust and the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... remonstrances and reproach. His horror of sin was equal to his love of virtue, so that his mind, from the first dawn of reason, shrunk like a delicate plant from the very shadow of guilt, and was all-imbued with zeal for God's glory. Idleness, levity, vanity, and falsehood, even in trivial matters, were censured by him as faults severely reprehensible. And when his efforts to check sin drew upon him the hostility of others, he was so far from losing patience, that he therein only discovered a fresh opportunity of practising virtue. Towards the poor he overflowed with tenderness, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... convalescent's wild story, only a fool would have clung to a conviction that the menace on Z-40 was a trivial one. There was something on that asteroid, something larger and more deadly than Harley had ever heard of before in all ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... and plunder unprecedented even in those days of military license. Merit was rewarded with princely munificence, and the highest offices were within the reach of every common soldier who distinguished himself;—trivial breaches of discipline were punished with death. The dark and ambitious spirit of Wallenstein would not allow him to rest satisfied with the rewards and dignities heaped upon him by his imperial master. He temporised and entered into negotiations with the enemy; and during ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... Mr. Jones. Brewster had used his own form of receipt for every purchase. The little stub receipt books had been made to order for him and not only he but every person in his employ carried one everywhere. No matter how trivial the purchase, the person who received a dollar of Brewster's money signed a receipt for the amount. Newsboys and bootblacks were the only beings who escaped the formality; tips to waiters, porters, cabbies, etc., ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... it seemed to argue but poor remuneration for the services rendered by him in the office of Messrs. Percival & Peel. It was a parlour on the second floor of a lodging-house in Chelsea; Scawthorne's graceful person and professional bearing were out of place amid the trivial appointments. He lived here for the simple reason that in order to enjoy a few of the luxuries of civilisation he had to spend as little as possible on bare necessaries. His habits away from home were those ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... system of divorce for every trivial flaw of temper which prevails in the society he depicts; but he no doubt realizes that his doctrine as a satirist is hostile to his interest as a dramatist. Restrict the facilities of divorce and you at once restrict the possibilities of matrimonial comedy. Marriage becomes ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... considered the invitation and, as his engagements permitted him to accommodate his good friend Thompson, he decided to preach at the camp meeting. He little dreamed that all his future life was to be colored by that simple note. So often men's destinies turn upon apparently trivial events. ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... ultimately a spiritual one. We cannot walk with another unless we are agreed. The lapse of friendship is often due to this, that one has let the other travel on alone. If one has sought pleasure, and the other has sought truth; if one has cumbered his life with the trivial and the petty, and the other has filled his with high thoughts and noble aspirations; if their hearts are on different levels, it is natural that they should now be apart. We cannot stay behind with the camp-followers, and at the ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... the effervescence of character which bursts forth on every trivial occasion; but when any powerful cause awakened the slumbering inmates, of his breast, they blazed with an uncontrolled fury that defied all opposition, and overleaped all bounds of ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... uncongenial; he must have joy of some kind, or he will fall into despair. The company and the joy can best be supplied by the wife to the husband, and by the husband to the wife. If the woman is dull and trivial, then her husband soon begins to neglect her; if she is meek and submissive, the neglect does not rouse her, and there are no violent consequences; but it is awful to think of the poor creature who sits at home and dimly wonders in the ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... the satirist say everything was nearly perfect. As a result, satire tended toward personal whines, like The Curate, toward attacking tiresomely obvious objects, like the superficial chit-chat of Lloyd's Conversation, toward trivial quarrels, like Churchill's Rosciad, toward broadly unimpeachable morals, like Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes. It is understandable that many writers, such as Joseph Warton and Christopher Smart, abandoned satire for various kinds ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... understand what I mean, Doctor, though you would not admit it for the world. I don't suppose I feel very deeply on the subject, else I would not advance so trivial an excuse; but this is honestly my state of mind. Whenever I think about the matter at all, this thing comes up for consideration. I think it would be very foolish for me to argue against dancing, for I don't know much about the ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... done,—as I should have done. My going away to the city at the very moment when my presence was most necessary seemed base desertion. While she had been suffering, longing and lonely, I had been feasting. All my honors, all my writing, seemed at this moment too slight, too trivial to counter-balance my mother's need, my ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... immortality is the most momentous that the mind is capable of conceiving. If it is a fact that the dead live, all other facts are in comparison trivial and without interest. The prospect of obtaining certain knowledge with regard to this stupendous matter is not encouraging. In all countries but those in barbarism the powers of the profoundest and most penetrating ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... assiduously to newspapers, magazines, and suchlike reading. If you read at all, why not read good healthy stuff, which will be of permanent use to you in your journey through the world? Why devour garbage when rich meats are constantly about you? 'To stuff our minds with what is simply trivial, simply curious, or that which at best has but a low nutritive power, this is to close our minds to what is solid and enlarging and spiritually sustaining.'[27] Look at it which way you will, the man who purposely neglects the great books deliberately closes the channels of ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... said coldly, "that it was through such an apparently trivial question that I found out Why Paul Ferroll Killed His Wife, and What Happened ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... Le Moyne undertook when he assumed the care and protection of Eliab Hill, was no trivial ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... conceived that the caution of Butler, if he was deceiving him, must be lulled asleep, the magistrate suddenly and artfully returned to former parts of his declaration, and required a new recapitulation of the circumstances, to the minutest and most trivial point, which attended each part of the melancholy scene. No confusion or contradiction, however, occurred, that could countenance the suspicion which he seemed to have adopted against Butler. At length the train of his interrogatories reached Madge Wildfire, at whose name the magistrate ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... let us briefly review this mass of evidence. You will see that it consists of a multitude of items, each either trivial or speculative. Up to the time of the actual discovery I had not a single crucial fact, nor any clue as to motive. But, slight as the individual points of evidence were, they pointed with impressive unanimity to one person—Mr. ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... hatred, and finding that money scarcely compensated for that? Or was there some reaching out towards some undefined good, and a dissatisfaction with a very defined present, though unnamed, evil? Probably so. Like some of us, he put the trivial motive uppermost because he was half ashamed ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... which, if not now collected, must soon have been totally forgotten. By such efforts, feeble as they are, I may contribute somewhat to the history of my native country; the peculiar features of whose manners and character are daily melting and dissolving into those of her sister and ally. And, trivial as may appear such an offering, to the manes of a kingdom, once proud and independent, I hang it upon her altar with a mixture of feelings, which I shall not ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... in this observation. At least, according to Mr Coxe's account, it would appear, that it was the island of St Laurence, which we shall immediately find Captain Cook afterwards fell in with, and not the bay so named, which Beering passed on the 10th August. This, however, is a trivial correction, if even the imperfect relation we possess of Beering's progress could ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... wages, instead of increasing like capital, barely keep pace with the rise of rent and prices, in which men occupy dwellings all alike in the same mean streets, pursuing the same routine of labour and same trivial round of relaxation, and in which there seems no possibility of securing for the individual adequate opportunities for that development of his individuality by which alone he can render his ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... Mademoiselle Cecile, the butcher's daughter, a girl that no one will marry because she's scrofulous." In this way she could have continued jerking out biographical scraps for days together, deriving extraordinary amusement from the most trivial, uninteresting incidents. However, as soon as eight o'clock struck, she only had eyes for the frosted "cabinet" window on which appeared the black shadows of the coterie of politicians. She discovered the secession of ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... intercrossed, scenes that were trivial ousted others that were grave; the purple limpets of Sidon, the shrine of Ashtaroth, the invective at Bethsaida, the transfiguration on the mountain height, the cure of lepers, and the presence that coerced. Yet ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... remembered that in those days the gallows was a very popular institution. They punished severely even trivial offences, and this case would have been considered a very serious one; while a sentence of seven years' transportation was almost as good as ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... them," interrupted Marjorie with dry contempt. "You might be able to make a child of nine years believe you. I doubt even that. I have heard of this foolishness. Malicious as it is intended to be, it is too trivial to be deceiving. You will kindly unlock the front ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... is a not less exquisite piece of fooling:—"For, in the statistical view of life and manners which I occasionally present, my clerical profession has taught me how extremely improper it would be by any allusion, however slight, to give any uneasiness, however trivial, to any individual, however foolish or wicked." It might perhaps be inferred from such effusions as are here parodied that Crabbe was lacking in a sense of humour. This would certainly be too sweeping an inference, ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... said Madame Max Goesler, "that when any of you gentlemen resign,—which you usually do on some very trivial matter,—the resigning gentleman becomes of all foes the bitterest. Somebody goes on very well with his friends, agreeing most cordially about everything, till he finds that his public virtue cannot swallow some little detail, and then he resigns. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... civilization. If France in the sixteenth century be tried by this criterion, the conclusion is inevitable that for her the age of barbarism had not yet completely passed away. The catalogue of crimes to which death was affixed as the penalty is frightfully long; some of them were almost trivial offences. A boy less than sixteen years of age was hung for stealing jewelry from his master.[74] On the other hand, with flagrant inconsistency, a nobleman, Rene de Bonneville, superintendent of the ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... where our prisoners were landed, and we three lads had more than one spell on shore before we left that port, notably being in the city on the night of the Feast of Lanterns; but though we had several more brushes with pirates, they were all trivial affairs with small junks, the destruction of the last three being the crowning point of our achievements. Indeed, this and the sinking of another in search of which, upon excellent information, Captain Thwaites had suddenly gone after we had set out on our shooting ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... all forgive me,' I returned, 'if for the greater convenience of the story, and for its better introduction, that adventure was fictitious. I had my share, indeed, - no light or trivial one, - in the pages we have read, but it was not the share I feigned to have at first. The younger brother, the single gentleman, the nameless actor in this little drama, ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... bush, and told him to murder several thousand innocent people; when you are told that he created a vast universe and filled it with people upon all of whom he placed a never-ending curse because of a trivial disobedience of one; give him the benefit of a reasonable doubt and save your ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... anchor there until Mr. Morland came aboard with his friends, and we left on the turn of the tide about midnight. I did not see Mr. Morland arrive, as I was busy in the forecastle with a man who had met with a trivial accident. It was Lane who informed me that the "butterflies were come" and we might spread our wings. Lane I had encountered for a few minutes in the afternoon, ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... while methods which strike us as preposterously unnatural appear to be their birthright. From the standing of a wet umbrella on its handle instead of its head to dry to the striking of a match away in place of toward one, there seems to be no action of our daily lives, however trivial, but finds with them its appropriate reaction—equal but opposite. Indeed, to one anxious of conforming to the manners and customs of the country, the only road to right lies in following unswervingly that course which his inherited instincts ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... Mrs. Mackintosh, with marked disapproval in her tones. The Bishop had a trivial, not to say frivolous, strain in his nature which seemed to her hardly in accord ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... present of money, which is usually made upon the conclusion of any sort of treaty; but although the people of the tribe were so miserably poor, they seemed to look upon the pecuniary part of the arrangement as a matter quite trivial in comparison with the teskeri. Indeed the sum which Dthemetri promised them was extremely small, and not the slightest attempt was made to ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... O my loved master's heir, and his next joy, I came not here on such a trivial toy As a strayed ewe, or to pursue the stealth Of pilfering wolf; not all the fleecy wealth That doth enrich these downs is worth a thought To this my errand, and the care it brought, But, oh! my virgin Lady, where is she? How chance she ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... whether the needle prick him by accident or blunder or design, he will burst all bounds, and establish again the old truth that each of us will prove himself a fool given perfect opportunity. Nor need the occasion of this revolution be a great one; the most trivial event may produce the great fire which burns ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Clay rising from it, silvered with moonlight, out where the picket fires gleamed and converging on toward the Capital, unchallenged for the moon showed the blue of Chad's uniform and his face gave sign that no trivial business, that night, was his. Over quiet fields and into the aisles of sleeping woods beat that musical rhythm ceaselessly, awakening drowsy birds by the wayside, making bridges thunder, beating on and on up hill and down until picket fires ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... very much like another, and what are a few thousand yards this way or that in a war of world-wide dimensions? Gentlemen, let us not be trivial," said our Albert Edward to the red-hatted people who came weeping to his O. Pip. Nevertheless some unpleasantness resulted, and our Albert Edward came home to shelter in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... historical facts, how very trivial all these "reminiscences" appear! How egotistical the pen that presumes upon anything like a popular interest in their perusal! But to the social and political reformer, as to the Kanes and Livingstons, trifles teach the relations of things, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... am content to risk it—having first laid the whole matter and its trivial cause before the American Minister, so that he could make it hot for this whole caboodle of a country if they happened to 'down me.' By Jove! I shouldn't mind being the martyr of an international episode if they'd spare me long enough to let me get the first 'copy' over to the other ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... native be in want of a trivial thing, which by plain asking he could readily obtain, he will come with a long tale, often begin by telling a lie, and whilst he invariably scratches his head, he will beat about the bush until he comes to the point, with a supplicating tone and a saintly countenance hiding ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... treating," she said absently. Blair laughed. The primitive emotions are always naked; but how inevitably most of us try to cover them with the fig-leaf of trivial speech—a laugh, perhaps, or a question about the weather; somehow, in some way, the nakedness must be covered! So now, Love and Hate, walking side by side in Mercer's murky noon, were for the ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... an imperfect age imperfectly. At any rate, it is clear that a shrinking fastidiousness excluded from her world much of the raw material from which great art is made. Stray reflections on Greek life and thought, though in themselves trivial, are interesting for what they betray of a state of mind familiar and always slightly distressing to people who take art seriously. She was a fair scholar Miss Sichel tells us; certainly she studied under an excellent master—the author of "Ionica"; yet she could ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... boy blushed with sudden shyness before the stately girl, whose fur collar alone had cost far more than his whole year's expenses. Beatrix met him cordially, for she had seen him standing ignored in his corner by the piano, and she liked the friendly way in which the singer had included him in the trivial talk. It was not until afterwards that she suddenly recalled the fact that she herself and her cousin were apparently the only ones to whom Thayer had introduced his companion. She pondered over the reason for this until, as she slowly ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... a commonplace remark, and the conversation kept in that vein by mutual consent. For, when the inner life is throbbing fast and strong, intimate expression becomes impossible. And above these two men, chatting about the trivial things of their existence, hung a black shadow of dread: a strain of waiting which, minute ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... republican dreams to a "fitter season." The time now approached when the leader of the Northern insurrection was to be brought to trial; and hostile as I was to the effects of his enthusiasm, I took no trivial interest in the individual. Still, to set him at liberty was palpably impossible; and my only resource was, to give him such aid in this extremity of his career as could be given by lightening the severities of his prison, and providing him with the means of securing able counsel. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... had not taken much, and that it was very hard that I should suffer so much inconvenience for so trivial a meal, when the weight on my chest moved, and I felt something ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... only three things on the Tree were left uninterpreted; the tinsel, the masks, and the dolls. He told her that he had left these to the last for a reason: seemingly they were the most trivial but really the most grave; for by means of them most clearly could be traced the presence of great law running through the progress ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... can give him a simple or even a not-so-simple explanation of something he hears on the radio, dealing with it as a general theme in sociology, and he seems to grasp the broad outline with little difficulty, but in trivial matters of social behavior and human relations he's frequently uncertain, as likely as not to pull a howling bloomer. Seems unusually baffled and exasperated by some of the social mores he runs into, such as the many tabu subjects for conversation, or taking your clothes off whenever or ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... Paris; that nothing is more frequently observed; that hundreds of thousands of more or less hypocritical or more or less cynical persons annually visit the place for the sake of the probable catastrophe, and that I came late in the day to work myself up about it. There was in fine the TRIVIAL association, one of the vulgarest in the world; but which give me pause no longer, I think, simply because its vulgarity is so advertised. The revolution performed by Strether under the influence ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... old and failing, they fell out over some trivial thing and separated for good. One traveled north, the other south. Both struck fine mineral that promised to make their dreams come true. But neither was content. Each wanted the other's companionship and yet each feared that pride would keep his poor partner from accepting his advances. ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... readers say: "What a tempest in a teapot?" To many this may seem a very trivial affair, but how small a thing can influence our lives! A breath, the passing of a summer shower, may help or hinder plans which alter our entire lives. And Miss Preston was wise enough to understand ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... far as San Diego; and, as all uniforms were bugbears to him, he watched for the new passenger with a certain amount of anxiety; taking care, by the way, to say nothing of him to Clara. About eight in the evening, as the girl was playing some trivial game of cards with Garcia in the cabin, a splashing of oars alongside called Coronado on deck. It was already dark; a sailor was standing by the manropes with a lantern; the captain was saying in a grumbling tone, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... constable's trial was referred to a commission of jurists and privy counsellors, who, after a summary and informal investigation, pronounced on him the sentence of death on a specification of charges either general and indeterminate, or of the most trivial import. "If the king," says Garibay, "had dispensed similar justice to all his nobles, who equally deserved it in those turbulent times, he would have had but few ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... question the serious promise of her present comedy, and I trust that in any future production she may be assisted by as excellent a cast. For they all played their parts, however trivial in detail, with great sincerity. Miss GOODALL was the only disappointment, though the fault was not altogether her own. At first she was very effective, but later her entries came to be a signal for gloom, like those of a skeleton ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... not very easy to define rigorously. In the most typical form some moral precept is set forth by means of a conception purely fantastic, and usually somewhat trivial into the bargain; there is something playful about it, that will not support a very exacting criticism, and the lesson must be apprehended by the fancy at half a hint. Such is the great mass of the old stories of wise animals or foolish men that have amused our childhood. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he was and became, Bonaparte always called the other Consuls about him before proceeding with the most trivial measure. The Legislative Corps did not exercise much influence during his reign, but he signed no decrees of any kind without first discussing them with the Council of State. This Council, composed ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... slavery as degrading and brutalizing to its victims. He said it was "to pay the highest compliment to the institution of slavery," and "stultify ourselves." But this was belittling a great national question, by the side of which all considerations of party consistency were utterly trivial and contemptible. The ballot for the negro was a logical necessity, and it was a matter of the least possible consequence whether the granting of it ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... to sell them in those markets where slaves were known to fetch the highest price. This was a recognised trade, but it exposed the Phoenicians to the danger of reprisals, and made them objects of an undying hatred. When on these distant expeditions they were subject to trivial disasters which might lead to serious consequences. A mast might break, an oar might damage a portion of the bulwarks, a storm might force them to throw overboard part of their cargo or their provisions; in such predicaments they had ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Dey's drawing-room, in a wide circle, about the fire. The old merchant's sympathetic glances sustained the mistress of the house through this ordeal; with wonderful strength of mind, she underwent the curious scrutiny of her guests, and bore with their trivial prosings. Every time there was a knock at the door, at every sound of footsteps in the street, she hid her agitation by raising questions of absorbing interest to the countryside. She led the conversation on to the burning topic of the quality of various ciders, ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... that it has neither imagination, nor fancy, nor sentiment, nor feeling, nor knowledge to recommend it; but it appears to me, even as regards manner and expression, inferior in refinement and phraseology; in short, trivial, uninteresting, stupid, really vulgar. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... and his pleasure was almost pathetic when one pronounced it without curtailment in his presence. His skinniness was also a matter of pride. And when you realize that he was an indefatigable gossip, and seemed always to be riding at large, gathering or imparting trivial news, you should ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... this district have been preserved by Crofton Croker in his "Walk from London to Fulham," but his work suffers from being too minute; names which are now as dead as their owners are recorded, and the most trivial points noted. Opposite Brompton Square there was once a street called Michael's Grove, after its builder, Michael Novosielski, architect of the Royal Italian Opera House. In 1835 Douglas Jerrold, critic and dramatist, lived here, and whilst ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... the evil lies, as I think, in training. The female sex is prone to be inaccurate and careless of apparently trivial detail, because that is the general tendency of mankind. In men destined for a business or a profession, the proclivity is harshly discouraged at an early stage. In women, who usually are not destined for anything whatever, it enjoys ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... him in impetuosity and stubbornness. They became engaged, they made preparations for a marriage which was never consummated and for years was never definitely abandoned; mutual devotion is ever and anon interrupted by serious or trivial quarrels, and the imperfect relation drags on to the vexation of both, until Grillparzer as an old man of sixty takes lodgings with the Froehlich sisters and, finally, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... belong'd to the same Army in which I serv'd, we set out with all Expedition. I don't remember to have been better diverted upon the Road, since I first knew what it was to Travel; one of our Company was a Provincial, and the very Quintessence of Wit and Gaiety. There was not the most trivial Occurrence but he dexterously made use of it to divert us, particularly at a small Village within a Days Journey of Lions. The Bailiff of the Village coming to our Inn to gather a kind of Tax (as it happen'd to be a Day pitch'd ...
— Memoirs of Major Alexander Ramkins (1718) • Daniel Defoe
... of their effect, obtained from very scanty material, are distinguished by a sort of simplicity, and even by a solidity and conciseness, which one only meets with in Beethoven.... One may find here and there harmonies that are commonplace and trivial, and others that are incorrect—at least according to the old rules. In some places his harmonies have a fine effect, and in others their result is vague and indeterminate, or it sounds badly, or is too elaborate ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... "Allow me, in turn, to make a suggestion, Mr. Wyatt. Put the money in your billbook, hand it to the stakeholder, and let him give it, unopened, to the winner. Of course, you will first take out your other money. There is no need for them to know that more than a trivial sum is at stake. We do not want ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... knew the country far too well; for he would pertinaciously tell me endless Indian names for every little point, rivulet, and creek. In the same manner as in Tierra del Fuego, the Indian language appears singularly well adapted for attaching names to the most trivial features of the land. I believe every one was glad to say farewell to Chiloe; yet if we could forget the gloom and ceaseless rain of winter, Chiloe might pass for a charming island. There is also something very attractive ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... thought that oftentimes Isabella had selected these gifts, if indeed she had not prepared them with her own hands. A certain delicacy of feeling prevented him from saying as much to her brother, or of even questioning him upon any point, however trivial, as to any matter of a peculiar nature concerning Isabella. Sometimes he longed to ask the boy about the subject, but he could not bring himself to do so; he felt that it would be indelicate and unpleasant to ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... had made the same objection in my first publication. Mr. Everett, in his elaborate view of my arguments upon the 53d. of Isaiah, has not thought proper to notice this objection: possibly he thought it a trivial one.] ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... saw her so clearly that the thought struck him that he had never seen her before. She appeared in that instant as a toy, a trivial toy made of coloured glass; and as a maleficent toy, for he felt if he played with it any longer that it would break and splinter in his fingers. 'As brilliant, as hard, and as dangerous as a piece of broken glass.' He wondered why he had been attracted ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... sacrifice and neglect the individual. Men have, to be sure, sought, in characteristic modern fashion, "to make of history a natural science." This was the case with the so-called philosophy of history of positivism. What has been the net result of the laws of history which it has given us? A few trivial generalities which justify themselves only by the most careful consideration of their ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... him that once in childhood, having been pecked in the leg by a gander, he was found weeping rather at the aggressive insolence of the fowl (with which he had good-naturedly endeavoured to make friends) than at the trivial hurt received by his own ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... developed on the north-western corner of the Reservation, in the direction of the explosives magazines. It turned out to be relatively trivial. Remnants of the mob that had been broken up by air attack on the road had gotten together and were making rushes in small bands, keeping well spread out. Beating them off took considerable ammunition, but it was accomplished with negligible casualties to the ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... upon him. The dinner hour at this time was six o'clock. He complained that the hour was too late, and made a resolve to dine at home at four. He wanted his mornings for composition, and if visitors must see him they would have to wait till afternoon. Obviously he was beginning to tire of "the trivial round." ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... turn out only "the latest novelties" of the season. Or perhaps a newspaper would be a still better simile. First there is the 'interpellation,'[C] once at least every day; that corresponds to the leading article. Then there are questions for ministers on this, that and the other trivial occurrence; that is the serial or short story. Then there is a bill brought in about something that happened the night before, that is the special article. Then some deputy assaults his neighbour, this is ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... trial of impeachments, of persons wholly distinct from the other departments of the government? There are weighty arguments, as well against, as in favor of, such a plan. To some minds it will not appear a trivial objection, that it could tend to increase the complexity of the political machine, and to add a new spring to the government, the utility of which would at best be questionable. But an objection which will not be thought by any ...
— The Federalist Papers
... looked, but had not listened. The matter of her father's talk was too trivial, it's interest was too remote. As they drove, she kept glancing seaward and asking ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... and licentiousness of the bailies, most of which have probably gained much color by constant repetition, even if they were not wholly created by imagination and hatred of the Austrian rule. According to these accounts, the local despots imposed exorbitant fines for trivial offences, and frequently sent prisoners to Zug and Lucerne to be tried by Austrian judges. They levied enormously increased taxes and imports on every commodity, and exacted payment in the most merciless manner; they openly violated the liberties of the people, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the blood," says she, "you must be purged." But what are these humors, or are there any humors at all? On this subject she troubles herself but little. This good old woman comes into my mind, whenever I hear an attempt made to account for all the maladies of the social body, by some trivial form of words. It is superabundance of produce, tyranny of capital, industrial plethora, or other such nonsense, of which, it would be fortunate if we could say: Verba et voces praetereaque nihil, for these are errors from which fatal ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... "That men, however fortune may smile upon them, could never be said to be happy, till they had been seen to pass over the last day of their lives, by reason of the uncertainty and mutability of human things, which upon very light and trivial occasions are subject to be totally chang'd into a ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... and hear, and be with her I languish'd for, my Antipho!—was that An idle reason, or a trivial good? —To Thais I'm deliver'd; she receives me, And carries me with joy into her house; Commits ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... incidentally, how one should address and converse with a duke, and whether you call him, "Your Grace," or "His Grace," or just "Grace," or "Duke," or what. All of which things would seem to a director of the People's Bank and the president of the Republican Soda Co. so trivial in importance that he would scorn ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
