"Inappropriate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quoted to me by my friend the Rev. Dr. Badger when he heard that I was translating "The Nights": needless to say that it is utterly inappropriate. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... me!' Then, turning to Mr. Ellsler, he lost his temper and only controlled it when he was told that there was no one else to take the part; if he would not play with me, the theater must be closed for the night. Then he calmed down and condescended to look the girl over who was to play such an inappropriate role. ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... not be inappropriate to the occasion to dwell for a few moments on the influences of honest trade in raising the standard of civilisation and elevating the character of men. The prosperity of commerce depends on intelligence, on industry, but ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... good doctor. And the doctor has really triumphed when the patient he condemned to death has revived to life. The threat is justified at the very moment when it is falsified. Now I have said again and again (and I shall continue to say again and again on all the most inappropriate occasions) that we must hit Capitalism, and hit it hard, for the plain and definite reason that it is growing stronger. Most of the excuses which serve the capitalists as masks are, of course, the excuses ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... was a tale of an eel in a garden-well, in Scotland, which would come to be fed out of a spoon when the children called him by his singularly inappropriate name of Rob Roy. This seems a more likely story than Lucian's; at all events it comes from a more orthodox atmosphere. But before giving it full credence, I should like to know whether the children, when they ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... to door]. And tell them I shall want the best bedroom got ready in case Mr. Newte is able to stay the night. I've done it. [She goes to piano, dashes into the "Merry Widow Waltz," or some other equally inappropriate but well-known melody, and then there enters Newte, shown in by Bennet. Newte is a cheerful person, attractively dressed in clothes suggestive of a successful bookmaker. He carries a white pot hat and tasselled cane. His gloves are large and bright. He is smoking ...
— Fanny and the Servant Problem • Jerome K. Jerome
... name—a most inappropriate one, I am sure," chimed in another voice, almost identical in tone. "Why Walter should have given him such a name I cannot tell. Ah! sister Judith, things are different from what they used to be when we ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... maneuvering. With her screws going she moved to the east at a speed of twelve yards a second. That is the speed of the whale—not an inappropriate comparison, for the balloon was somewhat of the shape of the ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... following unpublished poem, which I wrote some years ago, will not be inappropriate at this season; it will "go" to the tune of the old English ballad, "The dawning ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... arrival of the royal pair at my 'umble home, all its surroundings began to lose the charm of rustic simplicity, and appear shabby, inappropriate, and unendurable. It became evident that the entire place must be raised, and at once, to the level ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... is it always stormy. We think it necessary to make this latter observation because the succession of short-lived gales and squalls which have been prominently and unavoidably brought forward in our tale might lead the reader to deem the name of this ocean inappropriate. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... an inappropriate place for a few general observations on costume, considered with reference to art. It has never been more accurately observed than in the present day; art has become a slop-shop for pedantic antiquities. This is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... as I could, I left. The next day there was a funeral, and little Nelly was what they called "the chief mourner;" yet it seemed a very inappropriate name for one whose sorrow was so cheerful. There were but few of us who followed; and, when we reached the grave, and the face of the earthly form was exposed to the sunlight for the last time, little Nelly sung the following lines, which I had ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... over the hall—the maid to tell him dinner was served—brought him sharply to his feet, and he hurried down to where Fanny, who liked to do such things, had finished lighting the candles on the table. In reply to the glance of interrogation at his inappropriate clothes he explained that, trivially occupied, he had been unaware of the flight of time. Throughout dinner Fanny and he said little; their children had a supper at six o'clock, and at seven were ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... evident that Falieri was not a man used to the position of a lay figure, although at seventy-six the dignified retirement of a throne, even when so encircled with restrictions, would seem not inappropriate. That he was of a haughty and hasty temper seems apparent. It is told of him that, after waiting long for a bishop to head a procession at Treviso where he was podesta ("chief magistrate"), he astonished the tardy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the midst of uneasy rhymes, inappropriate imagery, vaulting sublimity that o'erleaps itself, and vulgar emotions, we have in this poem an occasional flash of genius, a touch of simple grandeur, which promises as much as Young ever achieved. Describing the on-coming of the dissolution ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... No such thing! Instead of making a suitable case, in which it could be preserved just as it was, it was placed in the hands of a well-known London binder, with the order, "Whole bind in velvet." He did his best, and the volume now glows luxuriously in its gilt edges and its inappropriate covering, and, alas! with half-an-inch of its uncut margin taken off all round. How do I know that? because the clever binder, seeing some MS. remarks on one of the margins, turned the leaf down to avoid cutting them ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... his caution. If he was patrolling a shallow on one side of an oyster-bar,—at the rate, let us say, of two steps a minute,—and took it into his head (an inappropriate phrase, as conveying an idea of something like suddenness) to try the water on the other side, he did not spread his wings, as a matter of course, and fly over. First he put up his head—an operation that makes another bird of him—and looked in all directions. How could he tell what enemy ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... had retired to the Grey Sisters, such scenes being inappropriate to her mourning, and besides her apartments being needed for the influx of guests. There, in early morning, before the revels began, Grisell ventured to ask for an audience, and was permitted to follow the Duchess when she returned from mass to ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was, in his wonted way, preaching the kingdom to a great multitude, one of the audience, taking advantage probably of some momentary pause in the discourse, broke in upon the solemn exercises with the inappropriate and incongruous demand, "Master, speak to my brother that he ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... vicar; wrote a neat hand, and was a good arithmetician, kept all the house accounts and farm accounts. She was a musician, too,—not profound, but very correct. She would take her turn at the harmonium in church, and, when she was there, you never heard a wrong note in the bass, nor an inappropriate flourish, nor bad time. She could sing, too, but never would, except her part in a psalm. Her voice was a deep contralto, and she chose to be ashamed of this heavenly organ, because a pack of envious girls had giggled, and said it ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... determine whether the expression of the inheritance is to be full or partial. It need hardly be said that the strength of an (inherited) individuality may be such that it expresses itself almost in the face of inappropriate nurture. History abounds in instances. As Goethe said, "Man is always achieving the impossible." Corot was the son of a successful milliner and prosperous tradesman, and he was thirty before he left the draper's ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... credible situation. He had no grasp on human nature, he had no conception of what character might be in men and women, he had no faculty of expressing emotion convincingly. Constantly you find the most beautiful poetry where it is absolutely inappropriate, but never do you find one of those brief and memorable phrases, words from the heart, for which one would give much beautiful poetry. To take one instance: an Arab slave wishes to say that he has caught sight of a sail nearing the coast. And ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... American basement-dweller of considerable renown. His peculiar whistling cry has won for him from the French the name of siffleur; and we sometimes call him by the very inappropriate name of ground-hog. He is a skilled weather prophet, and his appearance in the early spring signifies that the winter is over. He never shows himself ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... falling in love with her. Round this bright young creature (Owen, at the foot of the table, and Morgan and I on either side) sat her three wrinkled, gray-headed, dingily-attired hosts, and just behind her, in still more inappropriate companionship, towered the spectral figure of the man in armor, which had so unaccountably attracted her on her arrival. This strange scene was lighted up by candles in high and heavy brass sconces. Before Jessie stood a mighty china punch-bowl of the olden time, containing ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... probably aware in the depths of his soul that there was nothing to justify his vanity, and that others might perhaps look down on him ... but I, a boy of nineteen, put no constraint on him; the dread of saying something stupid, inappropriate, did not oppress his ever-apprehensive heart in my presence. He sometimes even chattered freely; and well it was for him that no one heard his chatter except me! His reputation would not have lasted long. He not only knew very little, but read hardly anything and confined himself ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... that would make a person stop and say—how could this be known? Without doubt it has the advantage of making one rely on the essential interest of a situation and not cocker up and validify feeble intrigue with incidental fine writing and scenery, and pyrotechnic exhibitions of inappropriate cleverness and sensibility. I remember Bob once saying to me that the quadrangle of Edinburgh University was a good thing and our having a talk as to how it could be employed in different arts. I then stated that the different doors and staircases ought to be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... own needs." Until the matter was settled on a "higher level," Thomas concluded, the services were not required to go further than had been their custom, and until Vandegrift decided on segregation or integration, setting quotas for the different branches in the corps was inappropriate. Thomas himself recommended that segregated units be adopted and that a quota be devised only after each branch of the corps reported how many Negroes it could use in segregated units.[6-57] Vandegrift approved Thomas's recommendation for segregated black units, and the Marine Corps ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... descanted in lawyer language when he had a forensic subject in hand, such as Shylock's bond, was to be expected, but the knowledge of law in 'Shakespeare' was exhibited in a far different manner: it protruded itself on all occasions, appropriate or inappropriate, and mingled itself with strains of thought widely divergent from forensic subjects." Again: "To acquire a perfect familiarity with legal principles, and an accurate and ready use of the technical terms and phrases not only of the conveyancer's office but ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... Guardians, or by similar local bodies, whatever the national system of unemployment relief may be. But for dealing with unemployment wholesale, for paying relief in accordance with a fixed scale and without regard to individual circumstances—for that work the Guardians are a most inappropriate body. They possess no qualification for it which the Central Government does not possess, while they have ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... penult, Mount Desert, and not on the last syllable, as we sometimes hear it. This principle cannot be violated without giving to the word a meaning which, in this connection, would be obviously inappropriate and absurd. ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... around, if we still are unable to rebuild the edifice in its pristine symmetry and beauty, yet we can at least discern and trace the ground plan and outlines of the fane it raised to God. Before leaving the field to the richer returns of more fortunate workmen, it will not be inappropriate to add a sketch of the ministers of these religions, the servants ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... gratification, Tancred had nevertheless been an unusual number of hours without food. He had made during the period no inconsiderable exertion, and was still some distance from the city. Though he resigned himself perforce to the care of his little attendants, their solicitude therefore was not inappropriate. He partook of some of their dishes, and when he had at length succeeded in conveying to them his resolution to taste no more, they cleared the kiosk with as marvellous a celerity as they had stored it, and then two of them advanced with a ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... tortoise-shell and ivory, washbowls and pitchers of Sevres, Dresden and Limoges, garnish vases, statuettes, music-boxes, mechanical toys, models of all ships and engines, and a thousand other useless and inappropriate articles, for, when the late Sultan paid his periodic visits to Europe, the shopkeepers of Paris, Amsterdam and The Hague seized the opportunity to unload on him, at exorbitant prices, their costliest and most unsalable wares. Opening a marquetry wardrobe, the Regent displayed with great ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... Raaff's last aria, I already mentioned that we both wish to have more touching and pleasing words. The word era is constrained; the beginning good, but gelida massa is again hard. In short, far-fetched or pedantic expressions are always inappropriate in a pleasing aria. I should also like the air to express only peace and contentment; and one part would be quite as good—in fact, better, in my opinion. I also wrote about Panzacchi; we must do what we can to ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... the grave silence which ensued on this remark with the singularly inappropriate air of 'A cobbler there was;' and checking himself, in some confusion, observed, that it was undoubtedly our own faults if we didn't improve such melancholy ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... by William Gardiner, now venerable but surviving by true merit, is not unlike "Azmon" in movement and character. Though less closely associated with the hymn, as a companion melody it is not inappropriate. But whatever the range of vocalization or the dignity of swells and cadences, a slow pace of single semibreves or quarters is not suited to Wesley's ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... downward tendency. I have elsewhere suggested, and the suggestion has already found some acceptance, that when the variation is not definitely downward, deviation and deviate be substituted for the unnecessarily opprobrious and often inappropriate ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... carried a little thermometer in her hand-bag. She had it by her and rose to put it under his tongue. He struck it from her, and she stared at him. He stood quivering like an overdriven horse. He called her a name highly proper in a kennel club, but inappropriate to the boudoir. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... herself, Shelley in hand, within the summer-house. The bench was narrow, hard, and broken; and there were some snails which discomposed her;—but, nevertheless, she would make the best of it. Her darling "Queen Mab" must be read without the coarse, inappropriate, every-day surroundings of a drawing-room; and it was now manifest to her that, unless she could get up much earlier in the morning, or come out to her reading after sunset, the knob of ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... is astonishing what slips are made, even by good writers, in the employment of an inappropriate word. In Gibbon's 'Rise and Fall,' the following instance occurs: 'Of nineteen tyrants who started up after the reign of Gallienus, there was not one who enjoyed a life of peace or a natural death.' Alison, in his 'History of Europe,' writes: 'Two great sins—one ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... feelings, and returned to the path of duty, which was rather "a hard road to travel" just then. The house had been a hotel before hospitals were needed, and many of the doors still bore their old names; some not so inappropriate as might be imagined, for my ward was in truth a ball-room, if gun-shot wounds could christen it. Forty beds were prepared, many already tenanted by tired men who fell down anywhere, and drowsed till the smell of food roused ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... bow. It is those things that make your garb inappropriate. I will, of course, provide you with an apron and cap. Will you come with me now to the dining-room, and I will show you about ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... earth," and "the true Church" were regarded as identical conceptions. In this way the concept "Catholic" became a pregnant one, and finally received a dogmatic and political content. As this result actually took place, it is not inappropriate to speak of pre-Catholic ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... there are no really Edvardian buildings, and there won't be any. Long before the close of the Victorian Era our architects had ceased to be creative. They could not express in their work the spirit of their time. They could but evolve a medley of old styles, some foreign, some native, all inappropriate. Take the case of Mayfair. Mayfair has for some years been in a state of transition. The old Mayfair, grim and sombre, with its air of selfish privacy and hauteur and leisure, its plain bricked facades, so disdainful of show—was it not redolent ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... single edifice here is that called the Governor's House. The only reason for giving it this name is its size. Being of large size, and located on a terraced pyramid, it has received a name which may be very inappropriate. We will first notice the pyramid on which the building stands. At Palenque the pyramid rises regularly from the ground. Here the pyramid is terraced. In order to understand clearly the arrangement of these various terraces, we introduce this drawing. The base is a somewhat irregular ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... 74 various effeminate inducements, making him offers of money or an influential position, or any retreat he liked to select for a life of luxury.[156] Vitellius made similar offers. At first both wrote in the mildest tone, though the affectation on either side was stupid and inappropriate. But they soon struck a quarrelsome note, and reproached each other with immorality and crime, both with a good deal of truth. Otho recalled the commission which Galba had sent out to Germany,[157] and, using the pretext ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... general silence. Dolly looked nervously round, fearing that she had been inappropriate. Paul continued to ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... sensitiveness and fine tact natural to her, felt that the trivial flattery of a courtier would but be a wretched and inappropriate return for so much goodness and loving-kindness; she felt that frankness and truth were the thanks due ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... The so-called god of love. This bastard creation of a barbarous fancy was no doubt inflicted upon mythology for the sins of its deities. Of all unbeautiful and inappropriate conceptions this is the most reasonless and offensive. The notion of symbolizing sexual love by a semisexless babe, and comparing the pains of passion to the wounds of an arrow—of introducing this pudgy homunculus into art grossly to materialize ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... so-called grey areas involving non-traditional Operations Other Than War (OOTW) and law enforcement tasks are growing and pose difficult problems and challenges to American military forces, especially when and where the use of force may be inappropriate or simply may not work. The expansion of the role of UN forces to nation-building in Somalia and its subsequent failure comes to mind as an example of this danger. It is also arguable that the formidable nature and huge technological ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... devoted a student of Shelley—a student to whom every lover of literature is indebted for his edition of Shelley's letters as well as for the biography—referring to Shelley again and again as "Bysshe." Shelley's family, it may be admitted, called him "Bysshe." But never was a more inappropriate name given to a poet who brought down music from heaven. At the same time, as we read his biography over again, we feel that it is possible that the two names do somehow express two incongruous aspects of the man. In his life he was, to a great extent, Bysshe; in his poetry he was Shelley. Shelley ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... very stern and lonely;—a man of such affectionate feelings, too; "a man with more sensibility than other men!" But so had his whole life been, stern and lonely; such the severe law laid on him. Nor was it inappropriate that he found his death in that poor Silesian Review; punctually doing, as usual, the work that had come in hand. Nor that he died now, rather than a few years later. In these final days of his, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... if anything in connection with you could hurt me,' she said with serene supremacy; but seeing that this plan of treatment was inappropriate, she tuned a smaller note. 'Ah, I know why you will not come. You don't want to. You'll go home to London and to all the stirring people there, and will never want ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... little rudely at times, and addressed in that profoundly respectful manner the poor sometimes use to uninvited visitors of a class higher than themselves, in which the words border on servility while the tone suggests resentment. How inappropriate and even unnatural this seemed to her! For these were her own people—the very poor, and all the privations and sufferings peculiar to their condition were known to her, and she had not outgrown her sympathy with them. Only she could not tell them that, and ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... will say; yet the delightful naturalness which Miss GLADYS COOPER and Mr. CHARLES HAWTREY bring to the situation gives it almost an air of possibility. But, once we are at Ostend, and have been introduced to Trotter's incredibly inappropriate fiancee (she is a niece of the same aunt and has followed under protection of a tame escort), we are prepared to launch freely and fearlessly into the rough and tumble ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... were her attire and surroundings, it seemed as inappropriate for any one to call the stately Susannah Grandiere "Sukey," as it is for some writers to refer to England's magnificent Elizabeth ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... inappropriate at this moment, when the newspapers are ringing with the Paris-Rome aviation contest and the achievements of Beaumont, Garros and their colleagues. I have purposely brought his biography with me, to re-peruse on the spot. But let me first explain how I became acquainted ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... think: 'It won't do, too lurid; it'll draw attention. Something quieter—better taste.' He did not care for dogs, or he would have named them; and it was in desperation at last—for his knowledge of charities was limited—that he decided on the blind. That could not be inappropriate, and it would make the Jury assess ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... family and had been reared in a home of refinement and taught to feel at ease under all circumstances. He accepted his nickname of "The Great and Only Matty" with some complacency, as being not inappropriate, especially since his pitching was the star feature of their baseball playing. A wise father had sent him to the scouts to "get acquainted with himself" but so far the process had not reached perfection. He began to talk with ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... "but what use would there be in it? I shall only say something inappropriate about boudoirs, about women, about what is honest or dishonest. What's the use of talking about what is honest or dishonest, if I must make haste to save my life, if I am suffocating in this cursed slavery and am ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... my part any general expression of political opinions or any announcement of the principles which would govern me in the discharge of the duties to the performance of which I had been so unexpectedly called. I trust, therefore, that it may not be deemed inappropriate if I avail myself of this opportunity of the reassembling of Congress to make known my sentiments in a general manner in regard to the policy which ought to be pursued by the Government both in its intercourse with foreign nations and its management ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... and her mother, who soon adopted the Paris style and fashions, easily obtained introductions to the best society. The golden key—eighteen hundred thousand francs—embroidered on Mademoiselle de Watteville's stomacher, did more for the Comtesse de Soulas than her pretensions a la de Rupt, her inappropriate pride, or even her ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... have met one. And this is the reason for his wide diversities of narrative: he had to make one story as rich as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a hoary monolith: for the story was the soul, or rather the meaning, of the bodily vision. It is quite inappropriate to judge "The Teller of Tales" (as the Samoans called him) by the particular novels he wrote, as one would judge Mr. George Moore by "Esther Waters." These novels were only the two or three of his soul's adventures that he happened to tell. But he died with a thousand stories ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... go further into detail, there is no doubt that, elaborate and magnificent as the 'Albert Memorial' may be, it is useless, inappropriate, and out of place in Hyde Park; and that the 'Hall of Science' at South Kensington (whatever its use may be) is not likely to attract foreign nations by the external beauty ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light, was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour. ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... garden to the carriage Mr. Vivian had sent to drive her to the Mill House, she found the banisters festooned with rings of coloured paper, and the garden ablaze with paper roses and flags. From every tree fluttered a flag, more or less inappropriate, and on every bush and plant, poppy and rose, sage and phlox, laurel and sweet briar, blossomed roses of a size and colour to make a florist's heart rejoice—had they been real. Suspended across the gateway hung ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... during many years have more than once appeared in print. They show that not only jewels, trinkets, rich robes, and every ornamental article of dress, were abundantly supplied to her from this source, but that sets of body linen worked with black silk round the bosom and sleeves, were regarded as no inappropriate offering from peers of the realm to the maiden-queen. The presents of the bishops and of some of the nobility always consisted of gold pieces, to the value of from five to twenty or thirty pounds, contained in embroidered silk purses. Her majesty distributed at the same season pieces ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... mind, should be one of our main sources of happiness; and under the inappropriate word art, I am obliged, as usual, to group all such activities of soul as deal with beauty, quite as much when it exists in what is (in this sense) not art's antithesis, but art's origin and completion, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... picture of the Iberian Mother, or St. George slaying the dragon, or the devil and all his imps; in short, you can get any thing that you don't want, and nothing that you do. If these people are utterly deficient in any one quality, it is a sense of fitness in things. They take the most inappropriate times for offering you the most inappropriate articles of human use that the imagination can possibly conceive. I was more than once solicited by the dealers in the markets of Moscow to carry with me a bunch of live dogs, or a couple of freshly-scalded pigs, and on ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... dryly thought that the term man was singularly inappropriate in any connection with the meticulously garbed figure before him. Essie would have a difficult time with that stony youth. She regarded him with eyes of idolatry, drawing her fingers over the sleeve impatiently held aside from her touch. "I'm going," he stated once more, impolitely; ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... unvarnished description of things. Even immortality and the idea of God are submitted, in liberal circles, to scientific treatment. On the other hand, it would be hard to conceive a more inveterate obsession than that which keeps the attitude of these same minds inappropriate to the objects they envisage. They have accepted natural conditions; they will not accept natural ideals. The Life of Reason has no existence for them, because, although its field is clear, they will not tolerate any human or finite standard of value, and will not suffer extant interests, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... man? In this idea we have perhaps discovered the true key to the ancient and modern history of poetry and the fine arts. Those who adopted it, gave to the peculiar spirit of modern art, as contrasted with the antique or classical, the name of romantic. The term is certainly not inappropriate; the word is derived from romance—the name originally given to the languages which were formed from the mixture of the Latin and the old Teutonic dialects, in the same manner as modern civilisation is the fruit ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... visible, the omens thickened, rumors spread, and hundreds collected on the spot, which, in Manhattanese parlance, would probably have been called a battery. Nor would the name have been altogether inappropriate, as a small battery was established there, and that, too, in a position which would easily throw a shot two-thirds of a league into the offing; or about the distance that the stranger was ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... there should be no delay. In this decision I have been strengthened by the thought that by speaking tonight there may be greater peace of mind and that the hope of Easter may be more real at firesides everywhere, and therefore that it is not inappropriate to encourage peace when so many of us are thinking of the ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... remark were one to which this response would be inappropriate he often went to the extent of observing, "I dare say!" seemingly ventured after careful consideration of the chances for and against ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... the Filipino women, consisting of the camisa, panuelo, and saya suelta, the latter a heavy skirt with a long train. The name mestiza is not inappropriate, as well from its composition as its use, since the first two are distinctly native, antedating the conquest, while the saya suelta was no ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... poetic literature. In comparing it, for its poetic beauty, with other sections, the reader must bear in mind that in a poem of a dramatic nature the dramatic proprieties must be dominant. It would be obviously inappropriate to make Count Guido Franceschini speak with the dignity of the Pope, with the exquisite pathos of Pompilia, with the ardour, like suppressed molten lava, of Caponsacchi. The self-defence of the latter is a superb piece of dramatic writing. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... elfin look of shrewd, hard, worldly wisdom in his face that marred the impression which his delicate regular little features would otherwise have conveyed. Indeed, I do not think he was quite of equal rank with the rest of the company, for his dress was inappropriate to the occasion (and he apparently was an invited, while I was an involuntary guest); and one or two of his gestures and actions were more like the tricks of an uneducated rustic than anything else. To explain what I mean: his boots had evidently ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... But I felt as though she had gone to heaven, and that the face I beheld enshrouded were merely her effigy. Commonplace words were inappropriate, yet it was to these ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... finish. Considering all that you have in your well-furnished brain beside your accumulated papers, half the contents of which you do not yourself know, your expression "aufraumen,"—to put in final order, is singularly inappropriate. There will always remain some burdensome residue,—last things not yet accounted for. I beg you, then, not to abuse your strength. Be content to finish only what seems to you nearest completion,—the most advanced of ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... attempt to rescue the shipwrecked must expose themselves, and the great need there was, thirty years ago, for some better provision than existed at that time for the defence of our extensive sea-board against the dire consequences of storm and wreck. It is not, we think, inappropriate to begin our chapter on lifeboats with a brief account of the heroic ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... passionate cries to God which ends with a sort of rhapsody of pleading prayer, entitled "Sagesse," begins—and one does not feel that it is in the least inappropriate—with ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... mind quickly translated them into the more prosaic English as I stood and gazed. Delle Josephine was a milliner and I had been recommended to try and get a little room "sous les toits" that she sometimes had to let, during my stay in the dismal Canadian village with the grand and inappropriate name of Bonheur du Roi. Bonneroi, or Bonneroy, it was usually called. Such a dismal place it seemed to be; one long street of whitewashed or dirty wooden houses, two raw red brick "stores," and the inevitable Roman Catholic Church, Convent and offices, still and orderly and gray, with the quiet ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... vaunting Israel! This conspicuous tree, nigh one of the frequented paths of Olivet, was no inappropriate type, surely, of that nation which stood illustrious amid the world's kingdoms—exalted to heaven with unexampled privileges which it abused—proudly claiming a righteousness which, when weighed in the balances, was found utterly wanting. It mattered ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... joined through the silent hours, in the seraphic promiscuousness of the shadows; such dreams as were possible to their age floated from one to the other; beneath their closed eyelids there shone, perhaps, a starlight; if the word marriage were not inappropriate to the situation, they were husband and wife after the fashion of the angels. Such innocence in such darkness, such purity in such an embrace; such foretastes of heaven are possible only to childhood, and no immensity approaches the greatness of little children. Of all gulfs ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the other, though right in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry, which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or admit of any summing-up of effects. A foundation was thus laid in my thoughts for the principal chapters of ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... off his senseless, pointless funny stories, is beyond me. Bunt is almost as bad. They understand the fix we are in, I know, but how they can take it so easily is the staggering surprise. I feel that I am as courageous as either of them, but levity seems horribly inappropriate. I ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... p. 335.).—An occasional contributor wishes the Editor to note down this Query. What could have led your correspondent J. G. FITCH to use so peculiarly inappropriate a synonym for Martin Luther as "the great Iconoclast?" Has he any historical evidence for ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... tawdry imitation of more expensive funeral observances. About the wasted face of the once beautiful girl were arranged, not the delicate white blossoms with which affection sometimes loves to surround what was lovely in life, but gaudy flowers of every hue. The dress, too, was fantastic and inappropriate. The mother and little brothers sat in one of the two small rooms; the mother in transports of grief, which was real, but not so absorbing as to be forgetful of self and scenic effect. The little boys sat by, in awkward consciousness of new black ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... grace, Agnes returned the Captain's and Mr. Clifford's respectful greeting, and resumed again her embroidery, disclaiming, however, as she did so, the epithet of dreary, as being quite inappropriate, in her estimation, to the place which had afforded ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert
... voice. I could not reproduce this voice, if I can call that a voice which had no sound. This voice formed words and presented them to my spirit." The Life of Saint Teresa abounds in similar descriptions, in which she tries to convey, by the inappropriate language of the senses, what she saw, not with her ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... balancing mass or spot (if required) in foreground. When looking for backgrounds he may feel quite sure he has one if it is the sort of thing he would never dream of photographing on its own account. Besides being too interesting, most backgrounds are inappropriate and distracting. The frequent commendations and prizes accorded to good subjects having these faults and therefore devoid of unity tell how little even photographic judges and editors think on the appropriate and ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... uncorrected. If he says a thing in one way, and while he is doing it thinks of a more telling form of expression, he doesn't erase the first statement; he merely says it over again more effectively. He is full of lapses and inappropriate passages—and it is that very thing which gives him ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... living. And in the newly-furnished sober drawing-room sat a very old lady, lively but infirm, who was the Rector's mother. Nobody knew that this old woman kept the Fellow of All-Souls still a boy at heart, nor that the reserved and inappropriate man forgot his awkwardness in his mother's presence. He was not only a very affectionate son, but a dutiful good child to her. It had been his pet scheme for years to bring her from her Devonshire cottage, and make her ...
— The Rector • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... advise you to try the formula given in our former Number (Vol. vii., p. 324.) for positives; 30 grains of nitrate of silver may do, but it is not very active. 2. A glass rod is inappropriate; it works up the albumen into a lather. 3. Towgood's paper will take the albumen very excellently. As we have often said before, when you may obtain certain excellent results from known good formulae, why ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 231, April 1, 1854 • Various
... not want you to think, sir, on account of what I have said, that I intend to drive you off my property at this hour of the evening, and in your inappropriate clothing. I have heard of you, sir, and you occupy a position of trust and, to a certain degree, of honor, in your village. Therefore, while I cannot depart from my rule—for I wish to make no precedent of that kind—I will ask you ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... pretty when left to its own proper Cabul pattern or other native design—aims too often at attracting the eye of the mighty hunter by introducing an inappropriate markhor's head. The old lacquer-work is difficult to get, and, when obtained, is high in price; but comparison between the old and the new shows the gulf that lies between the loving and skilful ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... possible our pre-existing stock of ideas. We always try to name a new experience in some way which will assimilate it to what we already know. We hate anything absolutely new, anything without any name, and for which a new name must be forged. So we take the nearest name, even though it be inappropriate. A child will call snow, when he sees it for the first time, sugar or white butterflies. The sail of a boat he calls a curtain; an egg in its shell, seen for the first time, he calls a pretty potato; an orange, a ball; a folding corkscrew, a pair of bad scissors. Caspar Hauser called the ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... less familiar and the departmental personality cannot deal with them, the position is reported through the nervous system to the central government which is frequently at a loss to know what feeling to apply. Sometimes it happens to discern the right feeling and apply it, sometimes it hits upon an inappropriate one and is thus induced to proceed from solecism to solecism till the consequences lead to a crisis from which we recover and which, then becoming a leading case, forms one of the decisions on which our future action is based. Sometimes it applies a feeling that is too inappropriate, ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... past him, and then he stood rooted as by a blast of magic. It is vain to say that he felt as if he had got into a dream; but this time he felt quite certain that he had got into a book. For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of a perfect chord. Something happened such as would have happened in such a place ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... mendacious umbrella is a sign of great moral degradation. Hypocrisy naturally shelters itself below a silk; while the fast youth goes to visit his religious friends armed with the decent and reputable gingham. May it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas that they go about the streets 'with a lie ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... remembrance of the Jewish colony that once lived here, the ruins of the fort still bear an Arab name which means The Palace of the Jew's Daughter. The term palace is not altogether inappropriate, for apparently the fort was occasionally used as a royal residence. Many wine-jars, bearing the seals of Psamtik, Hophra, and Amasis, have been found in the ruins. In the northwestern part of these ruins ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... agrees that "The Marshes of Glynn" is Lanier's greatest poem, and as this edition has no limitations of space, it would be inappropriate to exclude it. Therefore it has been inserted more or less in chronological order (in accordance with Callaway's plan), with some comments. — Alan Light, ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... matter for reflection to take Newgate in the way, and, touching its rough stone, to think of the prisoners in their sleep, and then to glance in at the lodge over the spiked wicket, and see the fire and light of the watching turnkeys, on the white wall. Not an inappropriate time either, to linger by that wicked little Debtors' Door—shutting tighter than any other door one ever saw— which has been Death's Door to so many. In the days of the uttering of forged one-pound notes by people tempted up from the country, how ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... phenomena are produced, do not thereby intend to assert that this Psychic Force may not be sometimes seized and directed by some other Intelligence than the Mind of the Psychic. The most ardent spiritualists practically admit the existence of Psychic Force under the very inappropriate name of Magnetism (to which it has no affinity whatever), for they assert that the Spirits of the Dead can only do the acts attributed to them by using the Magnetism (that is, the Psychic Force) of the Medium. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... party of banner-working young ladies before the member's wife or the mayor's family had authorized it; and she refused to join, both on the plea of want of time, and because she heard that Mr. Elvers, a real dragoon, declared colours to be inappropriate to riflemen. And so he did; but his wife said the point was not martial correctness, but popular feeling; so Mary gratified the party by bringing her needle, Dr. Spencer took care the blazonry of the arms of the old abbey was correct, and Flora asked the great lady of the county to ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be more unlike the reality. The voice was indeed quite peculiar, and I do not know where any parallel to it is likely to be found unless in Lancashire. Shelley had no ear for music,—the words that he wrote for existing airs being, strangely enough, inappropriate in rhythm and even in cadence; and though he had a manifest relish for music and often talked of it, I do not remember that I ever heard him sing even the briefest snatch. I cannot tell, therefore, what was the "register" of his singing voice; but his speaking voice unquestionably ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... class could describe themselves by the courtesy title of "Knights"—a description justified by the right which they possessed of serving on their own horses with the Roman cavalry instead of sharing the foot-service of the legionary. A common designation was not inappropriate to men who were in a certain sense public servants and formed in a very real sense a branch of the administration. The knight might have many avocations; he might be a money-lender, a banker, a large importer; but he was preeminently ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... mistress of the homestead where she now lived. There had, it is true, been a boy; but in his early youth he had shaken the New Hampshire dust from off his feet and gone West, from which Utopia he had for a time sent home to his sister occasional and peculiarly inappropriate gifts of Mexican saddles, sombreros, leggings, and Indian blankets. He had received but scant gratitude, however, for these well-intentioned offerings. It had always been against the traditions of the Websters to spend money freely and Ellen, a Webster ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... in right of whom he became chieftain of that clan, comprising many others. His motto, "Touch not the cat without a glove," and the coat-of-arms supported by two wild cats, with a cat for the crest, were not inappropriate. No suspicion had been entertained of Mackintosh's adherence to the Chevalier, with whom he became acquainted abroad, until he ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson |
