"Immaterial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me. The name is perfectly immaterial. But since he escapes me and she is irresponsible—and punished—I regard as an accomplice of their infamy any man who makes allusion to it with either tongue or pen. And, my dear Varhely, I wish to act alone. Don't be angry; I know that in your hands my honor would be as ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... songs, the landscapes, and the faces are of a kind that have come in by the senses, nor have I ever understood what could be higher than these pleasures, nor indeed how in anything formless and immaterial there could be pleasure at all. Yet the wisest people assure us that our souls are as superior to our minds as are our minds to our inert and merely material bodies. I cannot understand ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... The organ for reception of the Gospel is the heart, not the head. To receive it by faith is a spiritual, not an intellectual process. Ignorance is no qualification nor no disqualification. Ignorance or knowledge is immaterial. The one condition is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... conceptions. I will, and the muscles of my vocal organs shape my speech. God wills, and the universe articulates His power, wisdom, and goodness. That is all I know. There is no bridge my mind can throw from the "immaterial" cause to the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... it is they, in truth, who make two and two equal four, while you make them five or seven. Is it not so, when you think virtue the only good, and the Epicureans pleasure; when you hold all things to be material, while the Platonists admit something immaterial? As I said, you resolve offhand, in favour of the Stoics, the very point which needs a critical decision. If it is clear beforehand that the Stoics alone make two and two equal four, then the others must hold their peace. But so long as that is the very point of debate, we must listen ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... bed was some inches higher than the other. This was immaterial, and he felt satisfied that even the craftiest ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... that world's blowing foul on him? Princes have their obligations to teach them they are mortal, and the brilliant heir of a tributary world is equally enchained by the homage it brings him;—more, inasmuch as it is immaterial, elusive, not gathered by the tax, and he cannot capitally punish the treasonable recusants. Still must he be brilliant; he must court his people. He must ever, both in his reputation and his person, aching though he be, show them a face and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... lover of argumentation. "His principle seemed to be, if a man cannot understand without talking to him, it is useless to talk, because it is immaterial whether such a man understands or not." And the same ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... while we talked over school matters. The dinner bell rang, and he insisted on my staying for dinner with him. Well, he gave me a better school than I had asked for—better neighborhood, he said—and told me to board with a certain family who had no children; he gave his reasons, but that's immaterial. They were friends of his, so I learned afterwards. They proved to be fine people. The woman was one of those kindly souls who never know where to stop. She planned and schemed to marry me off in spite of myself. The first month that I was with them she ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... not, perhaps, even now be too late to raise a generous incredulity as to an assertion of which no eye-witness attestation is recorded, and which might have been the invention of malignity. There are many statements of history which it is immaterial to substantiate or disprove. Splendid fictions of public virtue have often produced their good if once received as fact; but, when private character is at stake, every conscientious writer or reader will cherish his "historic doubts," when he reflects on the facility with which calumny is ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... Hsi Jen explained; "whether you really like to study or whether you only pretend to like study is immaterial; but you should, when you are in the presence of master, or in the presence of any one else, not do nothing else than find fault with people and make fun of them, but behave just as if you were genuinely fond of study, so that you shouldn't besides provoke your father so much to anger, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... nonchalantly, as if the point was quite immaterial, looking the porter calmly and straight in the eyes unflinchingly, without turning a hair as ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... him not to take any trouble about so immaterial an affair, and assured him I should not myself. He was so officious, that he would not be prevailed upon to return home, till he had walked with us to ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... in which the Constitution is said to recognize slavery. To our view the clause is perfectly immaterial in this sense, making the simple provision that so long as a State shall choose to keep a portion of her people in this subordinate condition, she shall enjoy only this limited degree of representation. To us, it appears to be ...
— New York • James Fenimore Cooper
... deal, as you will see if you listen patiently. Lloyd's at that time had not been invented, and the Sarkese were consequently unpopular with the trading community, and in the reign of Henry the—well, the particular Henry is immaterial—an irate band of merchants sailed from Winchelsea on a trip. They depopulated Sark in a single night, as they thought. But they were mistaken. One family escaped their attention,—the Le Mesuriers, who were the custodians of the silver mines—' ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... Davie, in things immaterial," said he. "Bear ye this in mind, that, though gentle born, ye have had a country rearing. Dinnae shame us, Davie, dinnae shame us! In yon great, muckle house, with all these domestics, upper and under, show yourself as nice, as circumspect, ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... observes, 'Give me leave, my dear Miss Heywood, to assure you that the intelligence has given me a degree of pleasure which I have not terms to express, and it is even increased by knowing what you must experience on the event. Nor is it an immaterial reflection, that although your brother was unfortunately involved in the general calamity which gave birth to the charge, he is uncontaminated by the crime, for there was not a credible testimony of the slightest fact against him that can make the strictest friend ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... never realised Agatha Verrall. She used to say that she had never seen anything in Agatha, which amounted, as he once told her, to not seeing Agatha at all. Still less could she have compassed any vision of the tie—the extraordinary, intangible, immaterial tie ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... the counterparts are probably not preserved. One-sided as they are, the little packet in my hand, of letters from the great Statesman to the rural clergyman is not without interest. The correspondence has been friendly, frank and confidential, the writers often differing in immaterial things, but showing the same liberality in "Church and State;" so that we are not surprised to find, when the time came, that of the friends, the churchman approved of Irish disestablishment as heartily as the layman ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... say, however, that in some five instances there will occur sentences rather crutched by my own guess-work; and in two instances the characters were so impossibly mystical, that I had to abandon the passage with a head-ache. But all this will be found immaterial to the general narrative.] ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the western wilderness: other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a rather immaterial point by now. In any event, Chard's information was that an important 'five-year-plan' of the association made it necessary to restrict him for that length of time. We shall observe him closely. If the indications are that ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... phenomena, was able to evolve; then, for the reception of those gods who overthrew him from his supremacy, because of their greater freedom from physical restraints, there is opened a logical and historical path—until that god comes who in turn follows these half-embodied ones, and stands as the first immaterial author of the universe—and so one may walk straight from the physical beginning of the Rig Vedic religion to ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... "That's immaterial. Besides, I forget. The important fact is that when I've paid all my bills I shall have thirteen pounds eleven shillings ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... judge of the object and meaning of that chapter of Magna Carta which secures the trial by jury, it is to be borne in mind that, at the time of Magna Carta, the king (with exceptions immaterial to this discussion, but which will appear hereafter) was, constitutionally, the entire government; the sole legislative, judicial, and executive power of the nation. The executive and judicial officers were merely his servants, appointed ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities—a God that made all things—man's immaterial and immortal nature—and a world of weal or woe beyond death ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... my post as peacemaker," he writes; "for which I am naturally not well adapted. . . . I am quite in the dark as to how my mission has been fulfilled, but it is really immaterial to me, for I will not accept other work of such an ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... about "raising" himself into some other class, so long as he could live on peasant lines. And it is in the virtual disappearance of this civilization that the main change in the village consists. Other changes are comparatively immaterial. The valley might have been invaded by the leisured classes; its old appearance might have been altered; all sorts of new-fangled things might have been introduced into it; and still under the surface it would have retained the essential village characteristics, ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... wish to appear, not as men, like the spirits of other earths, but as crystalline globes. Their wanting to appear so, although they do not, arises from the circumstance that the knowledges of immaterial things are in the other life ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the last I shall tell of Bladesover. The dropscene falls on that, and it comes no more as an actual presence into this novel. I did indeed go back there once again, but under circumstances quite immaterial to my story. But in a sense Bladesover has never left me; it is, as I said at the outset, one of those dominant explanatory impressions that make the framework of my mind. Bladesover illuminates England; it has become all that is spacious, dignified pretentious, and truly conservative in English ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... this ticklish business of the dovetailing of two lives accomplished without some small mutual effort? No more could be said than that Carlisle felt, in rare and weak moments, a certain sense of strain. An immaterial subtlety this, properly out of the range of mamma's concrete observations. But papa's heart was tender: did he possibly suspect that his darling might feel herself just a ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... a while only. Rooted strong and fast, Soon will they lift towards the summer sky Their mountain-mass of clotted greenery. Their immaterial season quickly past, They grow opaque, and therefore needs must die, Since every earth to ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... restraining from it; and any motive may come in conflict with any other motive. It will be found hereafter that in the case of some offences the motive is material in the highest degree, and in others wholly immaterial; in some cases easy, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... a thing which can be conceived to exist by itself. All bodies are material substances. The soul, as a thinking subject, is an immaterial substance. ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... spiritual signification of the Word so enlarges our sense of God that it makes both sense and Soul, man and Life, immaterial, though still individual. It removes all limits from divine power. God must be found all instead of a part of being, and man the reflection of His power and goodness. This Science rebukes sin with its own nothingness, and thus destroys sin quickly and utterly. It makes disease ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... grocery, which he thinks indispensable for my due establishment. He has also been good enough to recommend to me many tradesmen who are ready to supply these articles in any quantities; each of whom has been here already a dozen times, cap in hand, and vowing that it is quite immaterial when I pay-which is very kind of them; but, with the highest respect for friend Perkins (my scout) and his obliging friends, I shall make some enquiries before "letting in" with any of them. He waits on me in hall, where we go in full fig of cap ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... isolation and departure from this planet touched not only the functions and feeling of every organ of the body, but indeed also the very fabric of the mind, with strange and unanticipated disturbances. All through the major portion of that vast space journey I hung thinking of such immaterial things as these, hung dissociated and apathetic, a cloudy megalomaniac, as it were, amidst the stars and planets in the void of space; and not only the world to which I was returning, but the blue-lit caverns of the Selenites, their helmet faces, their gigantic and wonderful machines, ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... understand me. Of course I shall speak with your father, for I want to be correct; but what good will it do?—your father hates me. I have always had to fight for my happiness, and that is what I want and you must want the same. Everything is immaterial, do you hear?—everything: only one thing matters, that you and I may be united. I see only you, and you must see only me, and what comes of it must not affect us, only you and I, you and I." He was still speaking softly, but his voice resumed its passionately singing tone. He intoxicated ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Articulate or inarticulate, something like this is what every one thinks when he first sees Tahoe, and the oftener he sees it, and the more he knows it the more grand and glorious it becomes. It is immaterial that there are lakes perched upon higher mountain shelves, and that one or two of them, at equal or superior altitudes, are larger in size. Tahoe ranks in the forefront both for altitude and size, and in beauty ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... fact, merely flower of author true to himself? So long as the scent, colour, form of that flower is strong and fine enough to affect the senses of our spirit, then all the rest, surely, is academic—I would say, immaterial. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... is but a composite of things Babylonian fused in an effort to show a link between a god and a people, is conjectural. But it is also immaterial. The one instructive fact is that, in a retrospect, the god, immediately after the ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... household condiment. It is made by soaking the seed in good vinegar for a few days before using. The quantity of ingredients to use is immaterial. Only a certain amount of the flavor can be dissolved by the vinegar, and as few samples of vinegar are alike, the quantities both to mix and of the decoction to use must be left to the housewife. This may be said, however, that after one lot of seed has been treated ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... a positive, permanent, specific principle, maintained generation after generation with all its essential characteristics. Individuals are the transient representatives of all these organic principles, which certainly have an independent, immaterial existence, since they outlive the individuals that embody them, and are no less real after the generation that has represented them for a time has passed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... are immortal. These bodies may perish. These living thoughts, these boundless aspirations, can never die. To-morrow, far away in other worlds, we shall think, and feel, and act and solve the problems of the immaterial destiny of the human mind." Immortality was the theme. The song was hushed upon these dying lips. The forced laughter fainted away. Standing upon the brink of that dread abyss from whence no one has returned with tidings, every ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... organization made under his call was the only regular one. Nothing can be determined as to which is the true story from the records kept of the two bodies, because they are each made up to show strict regularity, and as it is utterly immaterial in any substantial point of view, I will not venture any opinion, although I was one of the actors in the drama,—or farce,—as the reader may see fit to ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... presented the facts. Now and then Kahn would rise to object to something as incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial. But there was lacking something in his method. It was not the old Kahn. In fact, one almost felt that Carton was disappointed in his adversary, that he would have preferred a stiff, straight from the ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... work? Work is energy applied to the creation of either material or immaterial products. The digging of the soil preparatory to raising a corn-crop is work; the making of brooms; the writing of fugues. There is no one who does not work, at one time or another, and a man's social value depends largely upon the amount of work ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... whom these men pray are incapable of being seen or touched. They are believed to exist in subtile forms. (Really, if a belief in deities divested of gross material forms does no violence to their reason, why should the existence of an immaterial Soul alone do their reason such violence)? Another argument against the sceptic is that his proposition implies a destruction of acts (for if body and Soul die together, the acts also of this life would perish,—a conclusion ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... mixture of pleasure and annoyance, that, for the first time in his life, he was so dependent upon another person that his happiness was in her keeping. The days were completely wasted upon trifling, immaterial things, for after three weeks of such intimacy and intensity all the usual occupations were unbearably flat and beside the point. The least intolerable occupation was to talk to St. John about Rachel's illness, and to discuss every symptom and its meaning, and, when this subject was exhausted, ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... last, his patience was exhausted. Whether the enslavers of Germany thought, in that crass ignorance of other men's minds they have so often displayed, that America meant to keep out of the war at all costs, or were merely careless of consequences so long as the immediate end was attained, is now immaterial. From the welter of Teutonic misdeeds and lies arises the vital, the soul-inspiring spectacle of a union of all ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... philosophic France, as well as of England and Germany in the eighteenth century, was charged with inquiries into the origin of things material, though more especially of things immaterial. It was a period of energetic thinking. Whether Lamarck had read the works of these philosophers or not we have no means of knowing. Buffon, we know, was ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... for himself, has a material as well as an immaterial world with which he must be concerned. To transpose Bagehot's profound little saying,—Each man dines in a room apart, but we all go down to dinner together. And though Holbein knew the pinch of narrow means, he had no lack of good cheer as ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... expecting an answer, much used by orators to express a strong negation of the sentiments apparently contained in the question. But I have not yet learned which girl it was who asked the question. It is entirely immaterial and I don't think I shall try to find out, even after I am married, for of course you have surmised I am to be married, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... somebody when he shall have ceased, practically, to be anybody, such tardy recognition is scarcely timely enough to be properly appreciated. Human nature is so earth-tied, after all, that a post-mundane existence is very apt to seem immaterial ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... are too great, your anxieties exaggerate the indigence of our condition. Though we are prisoners, yet even the misfortunes of a prison have their compensations. The activity of the immaterial mind, will not indeed submit long without reluctance to confinement and restraint. But we have not yet experienced lassitude and disgust." "Alas, Edwin, how strange and foreign are thoughts like these! Whither do they tend? What would you infer ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... are immaterial, madame, when their sense has been conveyed. You have rejected my brother, and have reduced ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... tell us "Matter is (though it may seem paradoxical to say so) the less important half of the material of the physical universe."[29] And even Mr. Huxley, though in a different sense, assures us, with Descartes, "that we know more of mind than we do of body; that the immaterial world is a ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... the teacher, "it is immaterial to me whether you sit together or apart, if you are only good boys. So you may take your seats and try it a little while. If you find it too hard work to be studious and orderly together, I can make a change hereafter. ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... character. In the crucible of the facile and successful CHRETIEN DE TROYES, who wrote towards the close of the twelfth century, they assumed a new complexion; their mystical strangeness became transmuted into the more commonplace magic of wizards and conjurers, while their elevated, immaterial conception of love was replaced by the superfine affectations of a mundane gallantry. Nothing shows more clearly at what an early date, and with what strength, the most characteristic qualities of ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the parliament.' [Footnote: Public Archives, Canada. Nova Scotia A, vol. lviii, p. 380. Opinion of Chief Justice Belcher.] What the instructions to Cornwallis had to do with it is not clear. There is no clause in that document contemplating the forcible removal of the people. But even this is immaterial, since the instructions to Cornwallis were not then in force. Hopson, who had succeeded Cornwallis, had been given new instructions, and the Council was governed by them, since, legally at any rate, ...
— The Acadian Exiles - A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline • Arthur G. Doughty
... outer ovolemma and the greater part of the vesicle, and concentrate our attention on the germinative area and the four-layered embryonic disk. It is here alone that we find the important changes which lead to the differentiation of the first organs. It is immaterial whether we examine the germinative area of the mammal (the rabbit, for instance) or the germinal disk of a bird or a reptile (such as a lizard or tortoise). The embryonic processes we are now going to consider are essentially the same in all members of the three higher classes ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... imaginations into a Shape, a Visibility; and reasoned of as if it had been some composite, divisible and reunitable substance, some finer chemical salt, or curious piece of logical joinery,—began to lose its immaterial, mysterious, divine though invisible character: it was tacitly figured as something that might, were our organs fine enough, be /seen/. Yet who had ever seen it? Who could ever see it? Thus by degrees it passed into a Doubt, a Relation, some faint Possibility; and at last into a highly-probable ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the shepherd of Banbury was, we know not; nor indeed have we any proof that the rules called his were penned by a real shepherd. Both these points are, however, immaterial; their truth is their best voucher.... Mr. Claridge published them in the year 1744, since which time they are become very scarce, having ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... There remain others which are more doubtful, but which in one detail or another are alleged to be un-Donatellesque, and have therefore been fearlessly attributed to other sculptors from whose authenticated work they often dissent. That, however, was immaterial, the primary object being to disinherit Donatello without much thought as to his lawful successor in title. A critical discrimination between these busts was an admitted need; everything of the kind had been conventionally ascribed to Donatello just ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... wedding—namely a wedding for love and love alone—had mustered in force for the occasion. One or two had stayed away from a certain sense of discrepancy in themselves, to which it is needless to refer. Sir Morton Pippitt was among these. He felt,—but what he felt is quite immaterial. And so far as his daughter was concerned, she, as Bainton expressed it, had 'gone a' visitin'.' The Ittlethwaites, of Ittlethwaite Park, in all the glory of their Magnum Chartus forebears were ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... of that—eat his dinners at the Middle Temple, and so qualify himself for the Bar. Certainly that student was in luck who found himself in the same mess with Burke; and yet so stupid are men—so prone to rest with their full weight on the immaterial and slide over the essential—that had that good fortune been ours we should probably have been more taken up with Burke's brogue than with his brains. Burke came to London with a cultivated curiosity, and in no spirit of desperate determination to make his ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... experience, the projected figures of four-dimensional geometry would lend themselves to these uses with an especial grace. Color without form is as a soul without a body; yet the body of light must be without any taint of materiality. Four-dimensional forms are as immaterial as anything that could be imagined and they could be made to serve the useful purpose of separating colors one from another, as lead lines do in old cathedral windows, than which nothing more ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... clearness, covered and closed in the deity, or in the godhead, should shine upon us, if it were not by the diversities of holy covertures. Also it is not possible, that our wit or intendment might ascend unto the contemplation of the heavenly hierarchies immaterial, if our wit be not led by some material thing, as a man is led by the hand: so by these forms visible, our wit may be led to the consideration of the greatness or magnitude of the most excellent beauteous clarity, divine and invisible. Reciteth this also the blessed apostle Paul in his epistles, ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... where he had breakfasted, nor who had spoken to him; he had songs in his ears which rendered him deaf to every other thought; he only existed at the hours when he saw Cosette. Then, as he was in heaven, it was quite natural that he should forget earth. Both bore languidly the indefinable burden of immaterial pleasures. Thus lived these somnambulists who are ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... you back; and I desire No utterance of my immaterial voice. I cannot even turn my face this way Or that, and say, "My face is turned to you"; I know not where you are, I do not know If Heaven hold you or if earth transmute, Body and soul, you into earth again; But this I know:—not ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... ignorance I belong to them and not to the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend! Jo's ideas of a criminal trial, or a judge, or a bishop, or a government, or that inestimable jewel to him (if he only knew it) the Constitution, should be strange! His whole material and immaterial life is wonderfully strange; his death, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... common mind of Quaker Hill is the practice of inner and immaterial religion. It looks for the effects of certain dogmas, effects expressed in emotions, convictions, experiences. The ideal contains no thought of the community or of its welfare. It is purely individual, internal ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... (May) a new subsidy bill was enacted providing for the continuance of the arrangement under the measure of 1900, with a few immaterial modifications.[DT] Early in 1911 the Government was reported to have in readiness ten bills looking to the support of domestic shipping and shipbuilding. Eight of these had relation to the increase of subsidy on the Italian mail and cargo service of the Mediterranean. Other ...
— Manual of Ship Subsidies • Edwin M. Bacon
... came nearer, attention was diverted from military events. Anti-slavery societies began to hold meetings urging their friends in America to vote for Lincoln[1235]. Writing from Washington, Lyons, as always anxious to forestall frictions on immaterial matters, wrote to Russell, "We must be prepared for demonstrations of a 'spirited foreign policy' by Mr. Seward, during the next fortnight, for electioneering purposes[1236]." Possibly his illness made him unduly nervous, for four days later he was relieved to be asked by Seward to "postpone ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... American continent, however disfigured their creeds may have been in other respects by a childish superstition, had attained to the sublime conception of one Great Spirit, the Creator of the Universe, who, immaterial in his own nature, was not to be dishonored by an attempt at visible representation, and who, pervading all space, was not to be circumscribed within the walls of a temple. Yet these elevated ideas, so far beyond the ordinary range of the untutored intellect, ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... yourselves," he no doubt had said, "it is quite immaterial to me. You are so much alike, it is impossible that a fellow loving one should not love the lot of you. So long as I marry into the ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... confirm the wavering, it is certain that he would have dwelt on these details, if he had thought them of value to the argument. As he wholly suppresses them, we must infer that he held them to be immaterial; and therefore that the evidence with which he was satisfied, in proof that a man was risen from the dead, was either totally different in kind from that which we should now exact, or exceedingly inferior in rigour. It appears, that he believed in the resurrection of Christ, ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... three are the blue, the yellow, and the red. The Trinity of the Deity, in one mode or other, has been an article in all creeds. He creates, preserves, and destroys. He is the generative power, the productive capacity, and the result. The immaterial man, according to the Kabalah, is composed of vitality, or life, the breath of life; of soul or mind, and spirit. Salt, sulphur, and mercury are the great symbols of the alchemists. To them man ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... taken in the euphemistic sense which the term has under the code duello governing "affairs of honour." It carries no connotation of honesty, veracity, equity, liberality, or unselfishness. This national honour is of the nature of an intangible or immaterial asset, of course; it is a matter of prestige, a sportsmanlike conception; but that fact must not be taken to mean that it is of any the less substantial effect for purposes of a casus belli than ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... "That's immaterial to me." Lanko flicked switches and the ship rose from the ground, swung, and started westward. "I was merely describing ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... dead man of whom she thought with tenderness (because he was Charley's father) and with some impatience (because he had been weak), must be put completely in the wrong. Nothing else would do to keep their prosperity without a stain on its only real, on its immaterial side! ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... nerve fibre conveys from the organ of hearing to the brain must travel through my brain as an actual and material process before it can reach the nerves which will act upon my organs of speech. It cannot, on reaching a given place in the brain, change then and there into an immaterial something, and turn up again some time afterwards in another part of the brain as a material process. The traveller in the desert might as well hope, before he again goes forth into the wilderness of ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... perplex me more than this question between Governor Gamble and the War Department, as to whether the peculiar force organized by the former in Missouri are State troops or United States troops. Now, this is either an immaterial or a mischievous question. First, if no more is desired than to have it settled what name the force is to be called by, it is immaterial. Secondly, if it is desired for more than the fixing a name, it can only be to get a position from which to draw practical inferences; ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... of it is unconceivable. And words whereby we conceive nothing but the sound, are those we call Absurd, insignificant, and Non-sense. And therefore if a man should talk to me of a Round Quadrangle; or Accidents Of Bread In Cheese; or Immaterial Substances; or of A Free Subject; A Free Will; or any Free, but free from being hindred by opposition, I should not say he were in an Errour; but that his words were without meaning; that is ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... viget, caeleste et divinum, ob eamque rem aeternum sit necesse est." And in the concluding words he hints strongly at the divinity of the soul, which is of the same make as God himself,—of the same immaterial nature as the only Deity of whom we mortals can conceive. His daughter, therefore, is not only still living in a spiritual life, but she is in some vague sense divine; that word apotheosis, which he twice uses ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... parliament, judges, juries, witnesses, prosecutors, have all their respective, though certainly not equal, shares. Witnesses, of such a character as not to deserve credit in the most trifling cause, upon the most immaterial facts, gave evidence so incredible, or, to speak more properly, so impossible to be true, that it ought not to have been believed if it had come from the mouth of Cato; and upon such evidence, from such witnesses, ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... before he begins. He has his pains for his labour. He can find no such expression as "immortal soul" in the Bible nor any such doctrine taught there. Above all, he is guilty of excuseless philological blundering. The soul is immaterial. Immortal is applied to that which is material. The words, "immortal," and "immortality" are never applied in the New Testament to the soul—never! but always ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... delightful as Caliban is entirely detestable, but neither the standard of Mamilius nor the standard of Caliban is my standard. No artist recognises any standard of beauty but that which is suggested by his own temperament. The artist seeks to realise, in a certain material, his immaterial idea of beauty, and thus to transform an idea into an ideal. That is the way an artist makes things. That is why an artist makes things. The artist has no other object in making things. Does your reviewer imagine that Mr. Shannon, for ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... affections in Philip, who had made her his especial favourite, was even more prejudicial to his interests in that quarter. Hitherto, indeed, Sylvester's vague dislike had been so undemonstrative and immaterial that he would hardly have owned to it as such, and far less would he have acknowledged that he was, however unconsciously, feeling for a peg on which to hang it, for ground to support it; and yet ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... emotion, Half enraptured, half dismayed, Just escaped her earthly vesture, Trembling greets thy glimmering shade: Where, O joy! no misty mantle Veils her primal purity; And her immaterial pinions, Like ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... is often referred to as "frankly admitting that the doctrine of the evolution of species is accepted by three-fourths of the scientific men," and that this doctrine has, in their minds, "rendered nugatory the hypothesis of a vital immaterial principle as a causal factor in the phenomena of life and mind." Allowing this statement its full force, it is still true that none but Atheists can possibly be included in the "three-fourths." So much the worse for them. But it is an Atheistic ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... settlement, and, in fact, indispensable to its existence. The river Mudiboo is deep and rapid, and said to swarm with alligators, though I have heard but of three being seen at one time, and none of those above eighteen feet long: this, however, is immaterial, as we do not use the river fluid, which is thick and dirty, but draw all our water from natural wells and tanks. Poisonous springs are rather common, but are easily distinguished by containing no fish or living animal. Those, however, which swarm with frogs, toads, newts, efts, &c., ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... Shakespeare's genius did not deter him, any more than Ducis was deterred by his more subdued veneration, from working havoc on the English text. Shakespeare's blank verse was necessarily turned into Alexandrines. That was comparatively immaterial. Of greater moment is it to note that the denouement of the tragedy was completely revolutionised by Dumas. The tragic climax is undermined. Hamlet's life is spared by Dumas. The hero's dying exclamation, "The rest is silence," disappears from Dumas's ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... time that the old material superstitions about force were eradicated from men's minds, and as far as possible from their language. It is already more than half a century since Count Rumford demonstrated the immaterial nature of heat, and Young established the undulatory theory of light,—ideas which had germinated two hundred years ago in the lofty minds of Huygens and Hooke. Since then have been discovered the polarization ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... be decided in accordance with my views, the other questions become immaterial; if the second be decided adversely to my views, the first and third become immaterial. The two first are questions of law to be decided by the court, the other is a question ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... party, the most experienced and accomplished public men of the day, were made to stand aside; were sent to the rear, whilst this fantastic figure was led by unseen hands to the front and given the reins of power. It is immaterial whether we were for him, or against him; wholly immaterial. That, during four years, carrying with them such a weight of responsibility as the world never witnessed before, he filled the vast space allotted ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... men form an Association (If possible, all Peers and Baronets), The start off with a public declaration To what extent they mean to pay their debts. That's called their Capital; if they are wary They will not quote it at a sum immense. The figure's immaterial—it may vary From eighteen million down to eighteenpence. I should put it rather low; The good sense of doing so Will be evident at once to any debtor. When it's left to you to say What amount you mean to pay, Why, the lower you can put it ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react on man,—as there is something in the mountain-air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... to his goal, can only be denied by those who refuse to acknowledge life as apart from matter. Their mental position is so absolutely arbitrary that it is useless to encounter or combat it. Through all time the unseen has been pressing on the seen, the immaterial overpowering the material; through all time the signs and tokens of that which is beyond matter have been waiting for the men of matter to test and weigh them. Those who will not do so have chosen the place of pause arbitrarily, and there is nothing to be done but let ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... speaking of seal brindles, said: "If this color is so very desirable it seems strange that so few were seen, and that so many of the leading terriers were black and white, and some white entirely," then follows his deduction, viz., "the tendency evidently is that color is immaterial with the best judges, so that a breeder is foolish to waste his time on side issues which are not material." I can only state in passing that if he had a number of dogs on hand that were of the colors he specifies, "black and white, and some white entirely," it would doubtless "seem ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... a very vindictive man. In his opinion, his wife had wronged him and the law had wronged him. The merits and morals of the case are immaterial. The meat of the matter is that she had obtained a separation, and he was compelled to pay ten shillings each week for the support of her and the five children. "But look you," said he to me, "wot'll 'appen to 'er if I don't py up the ten shillings? S'posin', now, just s'posin' a accident ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... violent anger. She was not the kind of woman to resent the new affections of a rejected lover, but she had, through her own folly, attached herself to Francis Sales, as, less unreasonably, his tears had once attached him to her, and the immaterial nature of the bond composed its strength. Consciously foolish as her thoughts had been, they became at that breakfast table, with the water bubbling in the spirit kettle and the faint crunch of Caroline eating toast, intensely real, and she was angry both with ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... saw him they thought that they did see a mere specter, an apparition, a spirit, just as many persons have thought, even to the present day; but to forever dispel such a false impression, Jesus, by every possible appeal to the senses, made it evident that he possessed not an "immaterial," or "spiritual," or "celestial" body, but the identical body of flesh and blood which on Friday had been crucified and laid in the tomb; in that actual body, scarred by the cruel nails, a body capable of eating food, a material body which could be touched and felt, he appeared to his ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... but those who have say that it is the surroundings and its continuous night singing that make it even the equal of our Hermit; for, while the Nightingales sing in numbers in the moonlit groves, the Hermit tunes his lute sometimes in inaccessible solitudes, and there is something immaterial and immortal ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... concerns of the financial district. To be sure, the mine need not be more than the mere beginning of a shaft, if even that; the oil-well might have ceased to flow; the timber land might be only an acre or so in extent; but at any rate they existed. Their value was immaterial, since the intending purchaser was not informed in the advertisement as to the amount of gold, silver, or copper mined in any specific period, the number of gallons of oil per minute that flowed from the well, or the precise locality of the timber forests, but merely as to the glorious ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... had come as suddenly as a blow between his eyes—to half stun him. What ... what was it? Not any physical impact—no, something which was dazing but still immaterial. He braced his whole body, awaiting its return, trying frantically to understand what had happened in that instant of vertigo and seeming disembodiment. Never had he experienced anything like it—or had he? Two years or more ago when he had gone through the time transfer to enter ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... roasting ears, cucumbers and potatoes. A log cabin, and occasionally a stable and corn crib, and a field of a dozen acres, the timber girdled or "deadened," and fenced, are enough for his occupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil. He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent, and feels as independent as the "lord of the manor." With a horse, cow, and one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... had occasion to observe, and which, there is some reason to think, depends on a principle of attraction that has hitherto escaped the sagacity of the philosophers, but which is as active in the immaterial, as is that of gravitation in the material world. Talents like his, so incessantly and unweariedly employed, produced the usual fruits. He grew richer hourly, and at the time of which I speak he was pretty generally ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... pleases. This is the fact, but he who presumes to speak of it has his windows broken by opinion, for his pains! NOTE BY THE EDITOR] As to our purely social imitation and social follies, absurd as they are, they are necessarily confined to a small and an immaterial class; but the Indoctrinated spirit is a much more serious affair. That unsettles confidence, innovates on the right, often innocently and ignorantly, and causes the vessel of state to sail like a ship with a drag ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... your neglect, or connivance at a thing imagined so perilous, can attribute it to nothing more justly than to the deep and quiet stream of your direct and calm deliberations, that gave not way either to the fervent rashness or the immaterial gravity of those who ceased not to exasperate without cause. For which uprightness, and incorrupt refusal of what ye were incensed to, Lords and Commons— though it were done to justice, not to me, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... frequent source of doubt was whether others would not think this or that was a God-created Barnacle, and surely deserved a name. Otherwise I should only have thought whether the amount of difference and permanence was sufficient to justify a name: I am, also, surprised at his thinking it immaterial whether species are absolute or not: whenever it is proved that all species are produced by generation, by laws of change, what good evidence we shall have of the gaps in formations. And what a science ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... property or behavior (as of a program). Whether it was intended or not is immaterial. 2. An intended property or behavior (as of a program). Whether it is good or not is immaterial (but if bad, it is also a {misfeature}). 3. A surprising property or behavior; in particular, one that is purposely ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... usual impudence, my companion then made some attempts to get up a conversation; but the monosyllables 'yes,' or 'no' or 'humph,' were the utmost her several remarks could elicit from me. At last, on her asking my opinion upon some immaterial point of discussion, I answered,—'Why do you wish to talk to me, Lady Lowborough? You must know what ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Commission was, with slight immaterial modifications, in favor of the United States. Lord Alverstone voted against his Canadian than colleagues. It was a just decision, as most well-informed Canadians knew at the time. The troublesome question ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... is set down as produced by heat! In the other we read the following propositions: "Matter is eternal." "The action of a First Cause is useless and irrational—it is chimerical!" Again: "It is absolutely impossible to explain the existence of a creative power"; and "an immaterial being is not necessary for the production of life." And, "to attribute the phenomena of life to an immaterial soul, is to substitute a chimerical being for the hypothesis of machinists." "Materialists have done good service to physiology by eliminating ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... seems to imagine that most Protestants think it possible for the same doctrine to be at once true and false; or that they think it immaterial whether, on a religious question, a man comes to a true or a false conclusion. If there be any Protestants who hold notions so absurd, we abandon them ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... took various exceptions to the evidence given in by this witness; but his exceptions were set aside by the magistrate as vexatious and immaterial. ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... one heart beat with but a single thought, and the other took motto candy and valentines and red apples and picture cards and other tokens of esteem from other boys, and beat on with any number of thoughts, entirely immaterial to the uses of this narrative." This "showing-off" in the boy lover is the forerunner of the skillful, purposive and elaborate means of self-exhibition in the adult male and the charming coquetry in the adult female, in ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... soul of the old Bishop of St. Praxed's, the devoted and heroic soul of Napoleon's young soldier, the weary and despairing soul of Andrea del Sarto,—and a host of others stand before us cleared of the veil of habit and convention. The souls of men appear as the victors over all material and immaterial obstacles. Human affection transforms the bare room to a bower of fruits and flowers; human courage and resolution carry Childe Roland victoriously past the threats and terrors of malignant nature, and the despair ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning |
