"Inane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that a "taste" for shirt-tags had been created by this exciting bit of experience, and other men, who had been loudly laughing and cheering over the discomfiture of Chickering and his inane friends, found themselves suddenly on the ground, with wicked-looking knives flashing before their eyes, and their shirts being mutilated by the ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... The result was that Prince Esterhazy failed to see its purport or significance and was unable to comprehend it. Beethoven should not have been surprised at this, since he knew himself to be in advance of his time. At the conclusion of the service the Prince made the rather inane remark, "but my dear Beethoven, what have you been doing now?" in allusion to the mass. Beethoven, deeply offended, left abruptly, and returned to Vienna. It may be said in passing that Beethoven frequently managed to disappoint the persons for whom he wrote. This did not lead him ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... it possible for George Alison to lift a man of your inches and carry him single-handed right from the front door. I know he rowed for Cambridge, but, all the same, it was the act of a fool. And I told him so. Of course, he only grinned. You know that inane, irresistible grin of his when he's done something he ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... pretty ladies, and the ladies looked gloomily across many rows of vacant seats at the bright proscenium where jocularities of an exacerbating tedium were being enacted. Not that the jocularities were inane beyond the usual, but failure made them seem so. None had the slightest idea why the revue had failed; for precisely similar revues, concocted according to the same recipe and full of the same jocularities executed by the same players at the same salaries, had crowded the theatre for many ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... which I knew brood darker than Babylons long desolate, and in place of its ancient noising, heard, my God, a shocking silence, rising higher than I had ever heard it, and blending with the silence of the inane, eternal stars ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... exposed to the hot rays of the sun all day, and the change into the shadow of the cathedral was refreshing. Service was going forward as we entered; we sat down, therefore, and joined our voices with those of the choristers. Dickens, with tireless observation, noted how sleepy and inane were the faces of many of the singers, to whom this beautiful service was but a sickening monotony of repetition. The words, too, were gabbled over in a manner anything but impressive. He was such a downright enemy to ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... voyage into the inane. Again I found myself sitting in the little hotel parlor, by the side of a man with glittering eye, with a third somebody on the other side ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... this," he added, speaking to Desmond O'Connor, to whom he unburdened himself, "'Gifford will never learn. He believes himself to be a journalistic planet. I don't mind an ordinary honest fool that knows it is a fool, but a fool that regards its own inane folly as the final thing in wisdom is hopeless. Gifford ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... blurt out the fact that she was not my niece at all; that I had no authority over her in any way. But what would be the use? It would lead only to explanations and I did not wish to make explanations. I wanted to get through with the whole inane business and ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... not feared as the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats. What France set out to prove France has proved; not that common men are all angels, or all diplomatists, or all gentlemen (for these inane aristocratic illusions were no part of the Jacobin theory), but that common men can all be citizens and can all be soldiers; that common men can fight and can rule. There is no need to confuse the question with any of those escapades of a floundering ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... my permitting his attendance down the bank, found seat near me, and endeavored to converse; but, although I tried to prove cordial, realizing now that to anger the man would only add to my perplexity, his inane remarks tried me so that I ceased reply, and we finally lapsed into silence. Chevet, who held the steering oar, asked him some questions, which led to a brisk argument, and I turned away my head, glad enough to escape, and be permitted the luxury of ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... Garnache, scanning the youth's face with foolishly smiling eyes, noted the flush on his cheek, the odd glitter in his handsome eyes, and even caught a whiff of wine upon his breath. Alarm grew in Garnache's mind, but his face maintained its foolish vacancy, its inane smile. He bowed again and, with a wave of the ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... in medical whites. Unnecessarily, to break the silence with any inane remark, Coffin said: "Going ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... once, but he had not had the least intention of doing so, and had come back to Paris as soon as he was sure that the Contessa was gone. But he had made a mistake in his calculations. He had counted on Regina for the love of excitement, display, and inane dissipation which women in her position very often develop when they find that a man will give them anything they like; and he had counted very little on her love for Marcello. Folco was still young ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... an easier house to enter. I used to feel that keenly as a boy, when, by a prophetic irony, burglars were my bugbear, and I looked under my bed every night in life. The bow-windows on the ground floor finished in inane balconies to the first-floor windows. These balconies had ornamental iron railings, to which a less ingenious rope-ladder than ours could have been hitched with equal ease. Raffles had brought it with him, round his waist, and he carried the telescopic stick for fixing it in place. The one ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... puzzle out her mathematical problems; and going through life by the side of her jealous, brutal, sickly, drunken husband, in a kind of somnambulistic indifferentism, perhaps not feeling her miseries very acutely, and probably not envying other women their meaningless liberty, their inane lovers, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... performance, is almost marvellous. It is, throughout, in the worst possible taste. The countenance of Cupid, who is sitting on the bed or couch with the vacant grin of an ideot, is that of a negro. It is dark, and of an utterly inane expression. The colouring is also too ruddy throughout. Near to this really heartless picture, is one of a woman flying; well drawn, and rather tenderly coloured. Opposite, is a picture of Venus supported in the air by a group of Cupids. The artist is ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... inarticulate and envious. He envies me because I am clever enough to laugh at my madness. However, I will consider him later, in his various guises, for of all the Mallares, dumb though he is and ludicrous with inane tears, ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... chairs, ten straight-backed, and two easy by the fireplace, of which one was armless, were upholstered in saddlebag, yellow and green. In the bay of the red-curtained window was a huge terra-cotta bust of an ivy-crowned and inane Austrian female. There was a great fireplace in which a huge fire blazed cheerily, and on the broad, deep hearth stood little coloured plaster figures of stags, of gnomes, of rabbits, one ear dropping, the other ear cocked, of galloping hounds unknown ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... of us who keep the faith, who do not bow the knee to Baal, who hold fast to what is high and good in the doctrine of political equality; in whose hearts the altar-fires of rational liberty are kept aglow, beaconing the darkness of that illimitable inane where their countrymen, inaccessible to the light, wander witless in the bogs of political unreason, alternately adoring and damning the man-made gods of their own stature. Of that bright band fueling the bale-fires of political consistency I can not profess myself a member in good ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... development to allow of a less vivid or a more expansive delineation. Fiction, to judge from a multitude of recent specimens, seems at present on the decline, with some threatenings of a precipitate descent into the inane. History, on the other hand, is only at the outset of its career. Its highest achievements are in all probability reserved for a still distant future, when loftier points of view shall have been attained, and the haze that now hangs over ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... a gentle, well-bred sort of way in their eagerness to get into the saloon. They were mostly silent, as is the way of the English among strangers, but a few, here and there, who seemed to have already made each other's acquaintance, passed the usual inane remarks about the absurdly inconvenient arrangements generally of the ship. Some half a dozen stewards were showing the passengers to their places at table, as they passed in through the doorways; and ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... things for the pleasure-seekers. Let them go to the Falls, and Lake Nyassa, and the Himalayas, and those tourist treasures; but why come and chatter inane banalities about his ruins: his treasured, mysterious relic of perhaps the oldest civilisation the ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... imagination, and the verse seems to go on of itself, like the enchanted boat in Alastor, with no one at the helm. Vision succeeds vision in glorious but bewildering profusion; ideal landscapes and cities of cloud "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." These poems are like the water-falls in the Yosemite, which, tumbling from a height of several thousand feet, are shattered into foam by the air, and waved about over the valley. Very beautiful is this descending spray, and the rainbow dwells ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... been spent in trying to produce human speaking-machines. Words are built up out of letters; short words are grouped into inane sentences such as are never used; and sentences are arranged into unnatural and insipid discourse. To grasp the thin ghost of the thought, the little human spirit must reverse its instinct to reach toward the ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... The picture! That inane and seemingly worthless drawing over the fireplace in The Colonel's Own, whose presence in so rich a room has ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... sake talk like a man," I said, sternly. "Do you think it is manly to use those mushy and inane forms of address? That man is neither dear nor old nor ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... Paris, in the whole country. Our popular type of beauty proclaims itself, in its fullest material development, at every shop in which an illustrated periodical is sold. The same fleshy-faced girl, with the same inane smile, and with no other expression whatever, appears under every form of illustration, week after week, and month after month, all the year round. Those who wish to know what Mrs. Glenarm was like, have only to go out ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... Hawkins. "Do make some attempt to subdue that inane wit. I fancy you'll feel rather cheap hearing that that thousand dollars is the first payment on ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... neighbour sat down, he turned to me with an inane smile which occupied all his face. 'Good evening,' he said, in a baronial drawl. 'Miss Cayley, I gathah? I asked the skippah's leave to set next yah. We ought to be friends—rathah. I think yah know my poor deah old ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... of the more or less witty labels applied to Heyst during his aimless pilgrimage in this section of the tropical belt, where the inane clacking of Schomberg's tongue ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... I was thirty-five, and I had no more idea of marrying than I had of hanging myself. Young girls seemed to me to be inane, and ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... wondered whether there might not be some way through which this deluded mother might be shown what a terrible error she was making in bringing up her boy to be so inane and useless. He needed physical development more than any other fellow in Scranton High. Constant feeding upon lofty ideas, and never given a chance to develop his muscles, was wrecking his health. Mr. Leonard had even gone to Mrs. Jardine and ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... duties that Makes any life inane and flat, Without diversion sandwiched in, The drudgery, the overplus Of toil and trouble ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... matter of display and ostentation. Many despise wealth, and contented with little take pleasure in slender diet and inexpensive living. Though some are inflamed with desire for office, many there are who hold it in so low esteem that they can imagine nothing more inane or worthless. Other things too, which seem to some admirable, very many regard as of no value. But all have the same feeling as to friendship,— alike those who devote themselves to the public service, those who take delight in learning and philosophy, those who manage their own ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... you were on your last legs?" she murmured, and then wondered how she could have uttered anything so inane. Somehow, she was beginning to fear that he was not the ordinary person she had judged him to be. "You are to be discharged from the hospital to-morrow," ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Allcraft was ten miles on his journey to Lyons, she had prevailed upon her husband to draw his first cheque upon his house to the tune of L.500, and to prolong their holiday by visiting in succession the south of France, Switzerland, and Italy. The fool, after an inane resistance, consented; his cheque was converted to money—the horses were ordered—and on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... note of the king of singers all other birds were not mute. But evidently the birds have not enthroned this thrush. Possibly, even, they do not share human admiration for his song. The redstart goes on jerking out his monotonous ditty; chippy irreverently mounts a perch and trills out his inane apology for a song; the vireo in yonder tree spares us not one of his never-ending platitudes. But the hermit thrush goes on with sublime indifference to the voices of common folk down below. Sometimes he is answered from afar by another of ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... mental development had brilliantly attested the efficacy of the stern regiment he systematically imposed,—his emotional nature long discarded, had grown so feeble and inane from desuetude, that its very existence had become problematical. But to-day, deeply impressed by the intensity of love which Regina could not restrain at the sight of the portrait, strange softening memories began to stir in their frozen sleep, and to hint of earlier, warmer, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... grimness and sombre hatred very different from the half affectionate derision which he directed against the old tyrants or humbugs of the earlier nineteenth century—the pompous Dedlock or the fatuous Nupkins, the grotesque Bumble or the inane Tigg. In those old books his very abuse was benignant; in Hard Times even his sympathy is hard. And the reason is again to be found in the political facts of the century. Dickens could be half genial with the older generation of oppressors because it was a dying generation. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... said Mr. Vyner at last, and comforted himself with the reflection that the most eminent K.C.'s often made inane remarks with the idea of throwing people ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... heart. Hard and vigorous, her sentences came forth in eternal appeal to the reason, or address to the sterner passions in which love has no share. Beside this strong thinker, poor Susan's sweet talk seemed frivolous and inane. Her soft hold upon Mainwaring loosened. He ceased to consult her upon business; he began to repine that the partner of his lot could have little sympathy with his dreams. More often and more bitterly now did his discontented glance, in his way homeward, rove to the rooftops of the rural member ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... aequore summo Umbra viri visa est, visam fera saevit in umbram. Utque Iovis praepes, vacuo cum vidit in arvo Praebentem Phoebo liventia terga draconem, 715 Occupat aversum, neu saeva retorqueat ora, Squamigeris avidos figit cervicibus ungues, Sic celeri missus praeceps per inane volatu Terga ferae pressit dextroque frementis in armo Inachides ferrum ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... reached the house she found that she had just received a package by special messenger. She tore off the outer wrapper and on the inner was written in red ink: "Danger." Murmuring some inane thing about its being her shoes, she ran with the package to her room. For a young woman who had all her life received packages of all kinds she ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... their applause and admiration. Neither of the prisoners stirred. The pig's head grinned at the world with its inane, painted leer. A ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... your tender daughter and are laughed at as inane; Vain you face the snow, oh mirror! for it will evanescent wane, When the festival of lanterns is gone by, guard 'gainst your doom, 'Tis what time the flames will kindle, and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... of it, was again at work, playing an inane melody, and upon the small stage two remarkably well-developed and aquiline-featured women of mature age, dressed as very young children in white socks, short skirts which displayed frilled drawers, and muslin bonnets adorned with floating blue and pink ribbons, swayed to and fro ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... towering over him in monstrous height against a tree trunk, now suddenly falling backward and darting swiftly down a forest aisle in panic fear, only to spring forth with gigantic leaps and grotesque waxings and wanings and inane caperings at his heels as the firelight ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... condition. Indeed, the character of his speech cannot be explained in any other way. He descended to the lowest tone of partizan stump speaking. He bandied epithets with some of his hearers who interrupted him. The whole speech was a mixture of inane drivel and reckless aspersion. His visit at Chicago passed without any particular scandal. But the speech he made at St. Louis fairly capped the climax. He accused the Republicans in Congress of substantially ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... some inane response. She was struck by a change in his appearance. His eyes looked a little bloodshot to her; his face had lost something ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... beyond the verandah rail whistling the lively, lilting measures of "There's a Girl Wanted There"—the "silly ass" seemed to become a thousand times sillier than ever; for he forthwith set down his cup, and, turning to Anita, said with an inane sort of giggle, "I say, you know, here's a lark. Let's have a game of 'Slap Hand,' you and I—what? Know it, don't you? You try to slap my hands, and I try to slap yours, and whichever succeeds in doing it first ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... antauxe. In place of, to put anstatauxi. In that manner tiamaniere. Inability neebleco. Inaccessible neatingebla. Inaccurate neakurata. Inaction senokupo. Inactive senokupa. Inadvertence malatenteco. Inane malplena. Inanimate senviva. Inappreciable netaksebla. Inappropriate nedeca. In as much as tial ke. Inattention neatenteco. Inaudible neauxdebla. Inauspicious nefavora. Incalculable nekalkulebla. Incapable nekapabla. Incapacity nekapableco. Incarnate ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... if you could tell me where my hotel is, officer?" Oliver began. "What hotel?" said the policeman uninterestedly. Oliver noticed with an inane distinctness that he had started to swirl his nightstick as a large blue cat might switch its tail. He wondered if it would be tactful to ask him if he had ever been a drum major. Then he realized that the policeman had asked him a ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... 'tis a fearful plunge! Now think of Death— There is an angel merciful and strong, Hovering ever o'er the weary world, That foldeth in his arms the weak, whose feet Totter upon the brink of the Inane, And, like a mother, wafts them from Earth's strife Into the bosom of eternal rest; Is he not merciful who spares so long The guilty for repentance, and the pure Transplants in all their purity to heaven? Death harms not aught that's lovely, that poor ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... consider it to be more than likely, sir," said Britton, with a perfectly straight face. He must have been sorely tried in the face of my inane maunderings. "Pardon me, sir, but wouldn't it be a tip-top idea to have it out with the Schmicks to-night? Being, sir, as you anticipate a rather wakeful night, I only make so bold as to suggest it in the hopes you may 'ave some light on the subject before you close your eyes. In ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... of the villages Hotham and Dickens lodged, I did not learn or inquire; nor are their copious Despatches, chronicling these sublime phenomena from day to day for behoof of St. James's, other than entirely inane to us at this time. But one thing we do learn from them: Our Crown-Prince, escaping the paternal vigilance, was secretly in consultation with Dickens, or with Hotham through Dickens; and this in the most tragic humor on his side. In such ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... father's, but he looked much older than ever the hale old mountaineer had done, or than his real age; so worn and lined was his face, his skin tanned, his eyelids and temples puckered by burning sun, his hair and beard white as the inane of his old mare, the proud Adlerstein port entirely gone. He stooped even more without his staff than with it; and, when he yielded himself with a sigh of repose to his wife's tendance, she found that he had not ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... girl was made of. Nothing foolish or nervous or hysterical about her. And then, subsequently, when he had met her on her own ground, she had endeavoured to put him at his ease. Funny that, but he appreciated it, nevertheless. And she could talk. She didn't giggle and ask inane questions. Nor did she treat him as some sort of a natural curiosity, who might be expected to do something shocking but entertaining at any moment. She was sensible as—well—as sensible as ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... tamen NIHIL est, et puro clarius igne. Tange NIHIL, dicesque NIHIL sine corpore tangi. Cerne NIHIL, cerni dices NIHIL absque colore. Surdum audit loquiturque NIHIL sine voce, volatque Absque ope pennarum, et graditur sine cruribus ullis. Absque loco motuque NIHIL per inane vagatur. Humano generi utilius NIHIL arte medendi; Ne rhombos igitur, neu Thessala murmura tentet Idalia vacuum trajectus arundine pectus, Neu legat Idaeo Dictaeum in vertice gramen. Vulneribus saevi NIHIL auxiliatur amoris. Vexerit et quemvis trans moestas portitor undas, Ad superos imo NIHIL ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... Prince-Bishop of Montenegro. Since the day when the Serbian State came into existence it has been, he says, the constant, burning desire of the Montenegrins to be joined to it. We may well rub our eyes at a letter in the same newspaper from Lord Sydenham, who makes the perfectly inane remark that this constant, burning desire was never probable. "Montenegro already is Serbia," says Mr. Leiper, "and Serbia Montenegro, in every way except verbally." But Lord Sydenham has set himself up as a stern critic of the Serbs in Montenegro; therefore ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... his care? Why, ROBERTSON NICOLL, of course— A man of colossal force, With a perfectly splendid gift For soaring and moral uplift. For, though nobody so uniquely Can hearten The British Weekly, His readers will cheerfully spare Him to go and remain in the air, Careering along the inane In a Nicoll-plated plane With, to lend him additional fervour, Mr. G*RV*N as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... witty remarks by the same lips, of the same jokes on the same themes, of the same scandals about the same women, disgusted him so much as to make him feel at times a veritable inclination to commit suicide. He could no longer lead this life regular and inane, so commonplace, so frivolous and so dull at the same time, and he felt a longing for something tranquil, restful, comfortable, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... good for me," said he to himself swaggeringly. No doubt about it—no, indeed, not the slightest. But—well, everybody wouldn't realize this, as yet. And it must be admitted that those mere foppish, inane nothings did produce a seeming of difference. Indeed, it must even be admitted that the way Margaret had been brought up would make it hard for her, with her sensitive, delicate nerves, to bear with him if she really knew him. A hot wave passed over ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... to say that I did not. I found my tongue by and by, and voiced some inane remark to the effect that she might most assuredly "come up," if she had the least inclination to do so, but, on the other hand, that I was more than willing to "come down." Which I did, when she made known her choice by sitting down in the settle Stodger and I had occupied ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... dealers, the marquis and the commander even, appeared to him so many curious animals, which he had not hitherto had an opportunity of studying. He looked with a naturalist's interest at their grimacing faces, in which he discerned traces of their occupations and appetites; he listened also to their inane chatter, just as he might have tried to catch the meaning of a cat's mew or a dog's bark. At this period he was occupied with comparative natural history, applying to the human race the observations which ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... three tales already republished in this pleasant edition, Ravenshoe has always seemed to me the best in every respect; and in spite of its feeble plot and its impossible lay-figures—Erne, Sir George Hillyar, and the painfully inane Gerty—I should rank The Hillyars and the Burtons above the more terrifically imagined and more neatly constructed Geoffry Hamlyn. But this is an opinion on ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... makes men in Alpine travel-books write as men never write elsewhere? What is the origin of a style unique in literature, which misses both the sublime and the ridiculous, and constantly hops from tall-talk to a mirth feeble and inane? Why is it that the senior tutor, who is so hard on a bit of bad Latin, plunges at the sight of an Alp into English inconceivable, hideous? Why does page after page look as if it had been dredged with French words through a pepper-castor? ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... de l'elegance naturelle. She had that; he could see it as he hadn't seen it hitherto. It must have given what value there was to her poor little roles in motion pictures. Now that his eye had caught it, it surprised, and to some degree disturbed, him. It was more than the show-girl's inane prettiness, or the comely wax-work face of the girl on the cover of a magazine. With due allowance for her Anglo-Saxonism and honesty, she was the type of woman to whom "things happen." Things would happen to her, Allerton surmised, beyond anything she could ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... interesting of all are the small bone and ivory figures of men and women which are also found. These usually have little blue beads for eyes, and are of the quaintest and naivest appearance conceivable. Here we have an elderly man with a long pointed beard, there two women with inane smiles upon their countenances, here another woman, of better work this time, with a child slung across her shoulder. This figure, which is in the British Museum, must be very late, as prehistoric Egyptian antiquities go. It is almost as good in style ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... superior rebuff, Helen came to the inane Lily Pearl's support in a manner she knew would hit loyal ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... friends, searched his memory in vain for the name of a single friend whom he regretted to part from. The past seemed to him like a faithful mirror; he was surprised, startled at the folly of the pleasures, the inane delights, which had been the end and aim of his existence. For what had he lived? ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... so much so that her old friends who had not seen her for some time could scarcely have known her. She was no longer fat and inane. Her figure had become slim and graceful; her face had become expressive and remarkably pretty, and her manners were those of a well-bred and self-possessed lady. Gildart felt that he could no more have taken the liberties he had ventured on ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... nothing by the yard, talked over George's halting but gallant attempts to make things easy like any Clubwoman, and in an ultra-scrupulous endeavor to treat Joan as if she were a woman of the world, long emancipated from maternal apron strings, said things to her, inane, insincere things, that she would not have said to a complete stranger on the veranda of a summer hotel or the sun deck of a transatlantic liner. She hated herself ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... the habit of "playing 'possum" on the part of our opossum, the trick would seem to be particularly inane. The truth of the matter is, what is attributed to an unusual brilliancy on the part of the creature is positively unusual witlessness. The animal has an exceedingly small brain, as compared with that of a dog of similar size, and to anyone who knows brains at ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... Menadic Insurrection did. Much more let prior, and as it were, rehearsal scenes of Federation come and go, henceforward, as they list; and, on Plains and under City-walls, innumerable regimental bands blare off into the Inane, without ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... cleverly calls these simagrees, as if ashamed to "play their fantastic tricks" before the god of nature, when so forcibly reminded of his presence; and more than once on these occasions I have been surprised to find how much intellect lurked behind the inane mask of fashion. But in America the effect of fine scenery upon this class of persons is different, for it is exactly when amongst it, that the most strenuous efforts at elegant nonchalance are perceptible among the young exquisites of the western world. It is true that they have little leisure ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... being rainy, made the Doctor's dull house seem more inane than ever to the girl's restless humour. In the evening, at his old-accustomed hour, Major Harper "dropped in," and Agatha forgot his sins of omission in her cordial welcome. Very cordial it was, and unaffected, ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... tired, Frances?" and the "No" was accompanied by a little laugh, which spurred more questioning for no other purpose than to hear the music of her voice. Now, what was there in those replies to cause happiness? Why have inane answers to inane, timorous questions transformed earth into paradise and mortals ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... tunc documenta futuri? Quae voces avium? quanti per inane volatus? Quis vatum discursus erat? Tibi corniger Ammon, Et dudum taciti rupere silentia Delphi. Te Persae cecinere Magi, te sensit Etruscus Augur, et inspectis Babylonius horruit astris; Chaldaei stupuere senes, Cumanaque ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... his convictions as a woman-hater and genuinely despising Hilma both as a girl and as an inferior, the idea of her worried him. Most of all, he was angry with himself because of his inane sheepishness when she was about. He at first had told himself that he was a fool not to be able to ignore her existence as hitherto, and then that he was a greater fool not to take advantage of his position. Certainly he had not the remotest ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... for nothing but valor, and threatened punishments for nothing but cowardice; and even of these they speak obscurely. Nothing is said of an under world. They supposed the ghosts at death floated upward naturally, true children of the mist, and dwelt forever in the air, where they spent an inane existence, indulging in sorrowful memories of the past, and, in unreal imitation of their mortal occupations, chasing boars of fog amid hills of cloud and valleys of shadow. The authority for these views is Ossian, "whose genuine strains," ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... deceive its relatives. As the panorama of the past life is etched into the shells they have a memory of incidents in connection with these relatives, which facilitates the deception. But as the intelligence has fled, they are of course unable to give any true counsel, and that accounts for the inane, goody-goody nonsense of which these things ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... a really fine character in the Duke of Hurstbourne, at once unconventional and very true to the conventionalities of life, weak and strong in a breath, capable of inane follies and heroic decisions, yet not so definitely portrayed as to relieve a reader of the necessity of ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... away his face for a moment, so that Beatrice should not see its evil expression. He cursed himself for his inane folly. But he was quick to rise ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... him. In a self-tormenting mood he allowed the corners of his mouth to droop as if he were playing the part of pantaloon on the stage; disarranged his hair yet more wildly; put out his tongue at his own image in the mirror; croaked a string of inane invectives against himself; and finally, like a naughty child, blew the leaves of his manuscript from the table on ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... hours later he would have brought a spruce partridge to Gray Wolf, but just as he was about to spring upon his feathered prey the soft chatter of a porcupine a few yards away brought him to a sudden stop. Few things could make Kazan drop his tail. But that inane and incoherent prattle of the little spiked beast sent him off at double-quick with his tail between his legs. As man abhors and evades the creeping serpent, so Kazan would hereafter evade this little creature of the forests ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... has shut us out from the stars. It tells us the time; but behind the dial of the hours is now for us no vision of the solemn wheeling spheres, of spirit flames and that ultimate point of light "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." "America is a clock," I said; and then I remembered the phrase, "America is Niagara." And like a flake of foam, dizzy and lost, I was swept away, out into ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... uti magnum per inane coacta Semina terrarumque animaeque marisque fuissent Et liquidi simul ignis; ut his exordia primis Omnia et ipse tener mundi concreverit orbis; Tum durare solum et discludere Nerea ponto Coeperit, et rerum paulatim sumere formas; Iamque novum terrae stupeant lucescere ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... may hiss and rage. Yes, the Roman antichrist in his frantic blusterings may bite off his own tongue, may fulminate all kinds of evils, bans, excommunications, wars, desolations, and burnings, as long and as much as he likes. But if we take refuge with the Lord God, what can this inane, worn-out man and water-bubble do to us?" With more in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... again and watched her as she hurried out the door. The moment she disappeared the place seemed curiously empty—curiously empty and inane. He stared at the white-tiled walls, at the heaps of pastry upon the marble counter, prepared as for wholesale. Yet, as long as she sat here with him, he had noticed none of those details. For all he was conscious of his surroundings, ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... it has no bearing on his salvation, for nothing happens until Senta jumps into the sea, and we feel sure nothing would have happened if she had not jumped. That lesson, at any rate—a childish, inept, inane, insane one at best—is not set forth in the Dutchman. The only other possible one is that self-sacrifice is a worthy and beautiful thing in itself. In itself, I say, for Senta's self-sacrifice is purely a ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... to make the operation of teaching interesting to the teacher. It struck me very forcibly that a continuance of a few years in the present inane performances called kindergartening would infallibly send to our lunatic asylums a number of women, more or less young, with more or less depleted intellects. The various games and exercises I devised were very interesting, and I am sure I had scholars who never intended ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... around him for assistance, he naturally selected those men whom he could control. The first that recommended himself was one Harold, a youth of inane and plastic character, carried away by the example of an actor, and full of execrable quotations, going to show that he was an imitator of the master spirit both in text and admiration. This Harold was a gunner, and therefore versed in arms; he had traversed ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... whence she smiled down to the colonel on one side, the general on the other, the ladies round them. Farther back still her eyes fell on all the uplifted moustaches, the light ones, the brown, the black, the dyed, the thin moustaches, the thick, the curved, and the inane, the drooping, the smartly curled. Among that melancholy and shaggy crowd a few clean-shaven faces looked like those of ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... common-sense, practical, hard-headed training instead of worry. Bend your sense, your intellect, your time, your energy, to seeking how to train your children, instead of doing the senseless, foolish, inane, and utterly useless thing of worrying ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... unsoldierly; it is fussy and inflated; a full blown specimen of the pompously inane. How can Burnside venture to say that after the repulse, during three days he expected the enemy to leave his stronghold and attack him—Burnside? The rebels never did anything to justify such a supposition. They are neither idiots ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... dragged down, by artificial necessities. Was he himself to become a victim of this social disease? Was he, resistless, to be drawn into the muddy whirlpool, to spin round and round among gibbering phantoms, abandoning himself with a grin of inane conceit, or clutching in desperation at futile hopes? He remembered his tranquil life between the mountains and the sea; his earlier freedom, wandering in the sunlight of silent lands. Surely there needed but a little common-sense, a little decision, to save himself from this rushing current. One ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... who were deluding them; so that a large portion of the throng in the hall of trial, not venturing to change their judgment, though upon the manifest evidence just given them, awaited in painful suspense the return of the judges, interchanging with an air of mystery and inane importance the usual remarks prompted by imbecility ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... meeting the same faces at the boarding house table, hearing the same stale jokes or caustic remarks about Mrs. Atterson's food from Fred Crackit and the young men boarders of his class, or the grumbling of Mr. Peebles, the dyspeptic invalid, or the inane monologue of ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... life, and assimilates their essences. This cyclic pilgrimage it undertook, foreseeing pain, but "preferring free will to passive slavery, intellectual, self- conscious pain, and even torture, 'while myriad time shall flow,' to inane, imbecile, instinctual beatitude," foreseeing pain, but knowing that out of it all would come a nobler state of life, a divinity capable of rule, a power to assist in the general evolution of nature. It is true in the experience ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... How inane and silly their conversation is! Sometimes a whim comes upon them, and one runs for a few yards; the whim takes possession of others, and they do exactly the same. One seizes another round the body and wrestles with him. Immediately the others begin to ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... loss of paint, in the small hours of a dark and drizzling morning. Boisterous little tugs sorted us into parties, and half lost under the massive bulwarks of the Johannes we were carried off into a black inane. If any doubt remained as to the significance of our change of cruising-grounds, dawn dispelled it. View there was none from the deck of the Dulcibella; it was only by standing on the mainboom that ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... when he read this book that he said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman. But he must have approved of the picture of the Petersburg group, who under a thin veneer of polished manners are utterly inane and cynically vicious. One of them had "an expression of constant irritability on his face, as though he could not forgive himself for ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... in the courts of law. Joseph Prudhomme is the synthesis of bourgeois imbecility; radiant, serene, and self-satisfied; letting fall from his fat lips "one weak, washy, everlasting flood" of puerile aphorisms and inane circumlocutions. He says, "The car of the state floats on a precipice." "This sword is the proudest day of my life."—Henri Monnier, Grandeur et D['e]cadence de ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... is in a sense a further development of The Tale (Class I.), though it has a more definite plot. It is the most favored form of the short story to-day, and its popularity is responsible for a mess of inane commonplace and bald realism that is written by amateurs, who think they are presenting pen pictures of life. For since its matter is gathered from our everyday lives, it requires some degree of skill to make such narratives individual ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... quo sospite solo, Libertas patriae salva fuisse tuae: Te moriente, novos accepit Scotia cives, Accepitque novos, te moriente, deos. Illa nequit superesse tibi, tu non potes illi, Ergo Caledoniae nomen inane, vale. Tuque vale, gentis priscae fortissime ductor, Ultime Scotorum, ac ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... really care. Mrs. Hilary found that women were better listeners than men. Women are perhaps better trained; they think it more ill-mannered not to show interest. They will listen to stories about servants, or reports of the inane sayings of infants, they will hear you through, without the flicker of a yawn, but with ejaculations and noddings, while you tell them about your children's diseases. They are well-bred; they drive themselves on a tight ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... who had been possessed of health, riches, and all fair prospects. No one warned him; none of those who swilled expensive poisons for which he paid ever refused to accept his mad generosity; he was cheered down the road to the gulf by the inane plaudits of the lowest of men; and one who was evidently his companion in many a frantic drinking-bout could find nothing to say but "He was a fool!" At this moment there are thousands of youths in our great towns and cities who are ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... through my soul, and make it strong to love; Wither with gracious cold what demons dare Shoot from my hell into my world above; Let them drop down, like leaves the sun doth sear, And flutter far into the inane and bare, Leaving my middle-earth calm, wise, ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... tit-bit or provocative; one seemed to be in converse with Mr. Copley, who was not beyond converse yet, though Rupert saw he had been some time drinking. His face was flushed a little, his eyes dull, his features overspread with that inane stupidity which comes from long-continued and purely sensual indulgence of any kind, especially under the fumes of wine. To the side of this man, Rupert saw Dolly go. She went in, as I said, with a light, quick step, looked at nobody else, made straight to her father, and ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... talking to me, and nobody else has seen anything of him." And so Mr. Harrison, inwardly anathematizing the rest of the company, was compelled to go through a long series of handshakings, and finally to be drawn into a group of young persons whose conversation seemed to him the most inane he had ever heard in ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... the uppermost class, rather than the mere wish to appear as one of its members, often belongs to the artistic temperament, and many artists are unjustly disliked by their fellows and pointed at as snobs because they prefer, as an atmosphere, inane elegance to inelegant intellectuality. It is often forgotten by those who calumniate them that hereditary elegance, no matter how empty-headed, is the result of an hereditary cultivation of what is thought beautiful, and that the vainest, silliest ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... drinks are long. He affects a rowdy geniality and a swaggering gait, by which he seeks to overawe the inoffensive. Though he has but a small stock of intelligence, he passes for a wit amongst his associates by dint of perpetually repeating an inane catch-word. With this, and a stamp of the foot, he will greet a friend who may meet him before lunch. Amongst his intimates such a welcome is held to be intensely humorous. He scatters the same sort ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... What inane small talk I uttered in the Leslies' big, over-furnished drawing-room I know not. All I remember is that I sat with some insipid girl whose hair was flaxen and as colourless as her mind, sipping my tea while I listened to her silly ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... stared at him for a long moment, then gave an inane giggle. He stepped back and flicked Joe Mauser a salute. "Very well, captain. As a matter of routine, I shall report this use of an aircraft for reconnaissance purposes, and undoubtedly a commission will meet to investigate the propriety ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... Saeculum mundi istius, secundum principem potestatis aeris spiritus, qui nunc operatur in filos diffidentiae (Eph, ii,2). Haec autem omnium doctorum opinio est, quod aer iste qui coelum et terram medius dividens, inane appellatur, plenus sit contrariis fortitudinibus." See also his Com. in Isaiam, lib. xiii, cap. 50 (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. xxiv, p. 477). For Augustine, see the De Civitate ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of witness, assembled at will like seagulls out of the blue inane, would come about her in after years. That madly exhilarating rush to Westgate, for instance, on a keen March morning; and that sudden question of hers to Urquhart, "What made you think of asking me?" And his laconic answer, given without a turn of the head, "Because I knew you would like it. You ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... a beautiful Philanthropist, eulogized by Burke, and in most men's minds a sort of beatified individual. How glorious, having finished off one's affairs in Bedfordshire, or in fact finding them very dull, inane, and worthy of being quitted and got away from, to set out on a cruise, over the Jails first of Britain; then, finding that answer, over the Jails of the habitable Globe! "A voyage of discovery, a circum-navigation ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... beyond example. The Reich, with a Kaiser reduced to such a pass, has its potentialities of help or of hindrance,—its thousand-fold formulas, inane mostly, yet not inane wholly, which interlace this matter everywhere, as with real threads, and with gossamer or apparent threads,—which it is essential to attend to. Wise head, that could discriminate the dead Formulas of such an imbroglio, from the not-dead; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle |
