"Pointless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... often use, is, or may be, a silent but salutary moral teacher. They all know that however good the eye of a needle may be, if it were rusted and pointless, it would be of little use. Let them also recollect, that though it may posses the finest point and polish in the world, if destitute of the eye, it would be of no use at all. The lesson we wish them to derive from hence, is this; that as it is the eye which holds the ...
— The Ladies' Work-Table Book • Anonymous
... respectability permit. And the idea being what it is, it follows that the play, after the drama once commences, is not only immoral, but also dispiriting and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and pointless. The first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was merely a hypochondriac, a stage Schopenhauer, imagining ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... been supposed that Rosamond had travelled too, since she had found the pointless conversation of Mr. Ned Plymdale perfectly wearisome; but to most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable—else, indeed, what would become of social bonds? Captain Lydgate's ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... same difficulty. To an English youth, unfamiliar with the language and shy as only English youths can be, a conversation with that redoubtable old lady must have been a grim ordeal indeed. One can almost hear the stumbling, pointless observations, almost see the imploring looks cast, from among the infinitely attentive company, towards the tutor, and the pink ears growing still more pink. But such awkward moments were rare. As a rule the days flowed on in easy monotony—or rather, not the days, but the nights. ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... called a Junior Optime; yet, notwithstanding his being in fact superior to them all, the very lowest of the [Greek: oi polloi], or gregarious undistinguished bachelors, think themselves entitled to shoot the pointless arrows of their clumsy wit against the wooden spoon; and to reiterate the stale and perennial remark, that "Wranglers are born with gold spoons in their mouths, Senior Optimes with silver, Junior Optimes with wooden, and the [Greek: ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... himself done. The ground for believing that Neville had any such purpose when he wrote the book is too slight to be accepted. In 1668 the author had no call to convey a lesson in government to his countrymen by any means so frankly vulgar and pointless as the "Isle of Pines." If Neville had intended such a political object, a phrase would have sufficed to indicate it. No such key can be found in the text, and there is nothing to show that, politician as he was, he realized that such an intimation could be drawn ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... after I'd come in from a disgusting and pointless expedition I expected to be called to the telephone. There was a dance at the hotel which I was unable to enjoy, as I have never learned any of the new dances, and some girls seem to have little appreciation of the higher ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... satisfied by hope and even by some degree of present fruition. Even vice would be in many ways sauceless and insipid in the absence of faith. Who does not remember the old cynic's testimony (in the "New Republic") to the piquancy lent by Christianity to many a sin, otherwise pointless. If the moralist distinguishes between actions that are evil because they are forbidden, and those that are forbidden because they are evil, the libertine has a counter-distinction between those that are forbidden because they are pleasant, and those that are pleasant because ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... the Tyger lead; The Steer and Lion at one Crib shall meet, And harmless Serpents Lick the Pilgrim's Feet. The smiling Infant in his Hand shall take The crested Basilisk and speckled Snake; Pleas'd, the green Lustre of the Scales survey, And with their forky Tongue and pointless Sting shall play. Rise, crown'd with Light, imperial Salem rise! [10] Exalt thy tow'ry Head, and lift thy Eyes! See, a long Race thy spacious Courts adorn; [11] See future Sons and Daughters yet unborn ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... neither young nor refined. But—neither are we. And your wit is somewhat coarse and pointless. But so are we. And your voice is a trifle tired and cracked and loud. But so is our laughter. We are even, quite even, madam. If you were better once, so were we. If you remember sweeter laughter, why we remember more charming jests. ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... passions. Where falls the balance of freedoms here? I pass for a time from Utopianising altogether, to ask the question that, after all, Schopenhauer failed completely to answer, why sometimes in the case of hurtful, pointless, and destructive things we want ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... visit more than one place where whisky was sold; and when at last he drove out of the town, he had but just enough power of self-control to keep himself from swaying about visibly as he sat in his sleigh. He was in boisterous spirits, and greeted every acquaintance he met with some rough jest—pointless but noisy—singing snatches of songs, and flourishing his whip with an air of tipsy bravado. At a small tavern near the sawmill he dismounted for ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... the meaning of human life, he wondered? Were men and women created to suffer, to bear crosses which were not of their own making, to suffer injustices which seemed pointless?... ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... Greece; Warriors of matchless might and wondrous birth, Jove's sceptred sons and demigods of earth. High on the sacred tree, the glittering prize Hangs o'er its guard, and tires the warriors' eyes; First their hurl'd spears his spiral folds assail, Their spears fall pointless from his flaky mail; Onward with dauntless swords they plunge amain; He shuns their blows, recoils his twisting train, Darts forth his forky tongue, heaves high in air His fiery crest, and sheds a hideous glare, Champs, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... hotel there happened to be a former Illinois River pilot named Ben Coon, a solemn, sleepy person, who dozed by the stove or told slow, pointless stories to any one who would listen. Not many would stay to hear him, but Jim Gillis and Mark Twain found him a delight. They would let him wander on in his dull way for hours, and saw a vast humor in a man to whom all tales, however trivial or absurd, ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... these details may seem pointless, but I am happy to recall them because the care I took of my men saved many of their lives and maintained the strength of the 23rd far above that of the other cavalry regiments in the corps, which earned me a token ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... and blasphemous. I was not easily shocked; the men with whom I had for years foregathered were much given to realism of speech, as well as to picturesquely lurid verbal illustration. But this was different; the language of these men was crammed with filth for filth's sake, and flat, pointless profanity. I have no doubt that my inability to avoid expressing disgust made them worse than they otherwise would ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... rumour avers, they gave her to us a virgin— They lie on her. A light lady! be sure, not alone 20 Clipp'd her an husband first; weak stalk from a garden, a pointless Falchion, a heart did ne'er fully to courage awake. No; to the son's own bed, 'tis said, that father ascended, Vilely; with act impure stain'd the facinorous house. Whether a blind fierce lust in his heart burnt sinfully flaming, ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... evidence of confusion in how the play has been compiled for printing, in particular, a cast list which omits several significant characters, the late appearance of two pointless characters (Signor No and Juanna) and the delayed identification of Alanzo as Captain of the Guard. These have been argued to be evidence of revision ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... jobs," said another; and Berea joined the laugh which followed this pointless joke. She appeared to be one of them, and it troubled Norcross a little. She had so little the sex feeling and demanded so few of the rights and privileges of a girl. The men all admired her, that was evident, almost too evident, and one or two of the older men felt the charm of her ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... waved his sword, and standing near, Where furious Ajax plied his ashen spear, Full on the lance a stroke so justly sped, That the broad falchion lopp'd its brazen head; His pointless spear the warrior shakes in vain; The brazen head falls sounding on the plain. Great Ajax saw, and own'd the hand divine; Confessing Jove, and trembling at the sign, Warn'd he retreats. Then swift from all sides pour The hissing brands; thick streams ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... officers, who were burdened with problems of discipline and inefficiency. On the other hand, the integrated infantry platoons in Europe, with which Collins had personal experience, worked well. His observations had convinced him that it was "pointless" to support segregated black units, and while the matter had "nothing to do with sociology itself," he reasoned that if integration worked at the platoon level "why not on down the line?" The best plan, he believed, was to assign two Negroes to each ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... has ever yet been written. I have not the patience for great length; nor the wit for brilliant satire; nor the imagination for te popular, spicy, impossible, ill-flavoured romance; so I have chosen the other line, adopted by the great majority, and aim at purposeless, pointless imbecility." ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... a man of fashion;" and it was hardly possible to say how much of Helbeck's first effect on her imagination had been produced by that proud unworldliness, that gently, cold courtesy in which he was commonly wrapped. These silly pointless stories that he had been telling with such relish disturbed and repelled her. They revealed a new element in his character, something small and ugly, that was like the speck in a fine fruit, or, rather, ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... one day a dauntless knight unhorsed it and clove thro' the massy helm, when forth from the wreck there came not a demon armed with the seythe of death, but a beardless boy scarce old enough to break a pointless lance upon the village green. So, too, when with the sword Excalibur of human sympathy you shear down thro' the helm and harness of some rough- spoken man who seems to hate all human kind, you find the soul of a woman and the ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... still a few streaks of gold far off to the east on the hills and the black fir-woods, all was cold and grey about our onward path. An infinity of little country by-roads led hither and thither among the fields. It was the most pointless labyrinth. I could see my destination overhead, or rather the peak that dominates it, but choose as I pleased, the roads always ended by turning away from it, and sneaking back towards the valley, or northward ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not whether to regard it as truth or fiction. How can you remedy this defect? I call it a defect, because it really impedes your popularity. People say of a chapter or of a character: 'This is very wonderful, IF TRUE; but if fiction it is pointless.'—Will your new volumes explain this and dissolve the mystery? If so, pray make haste and get on with them. I hope you have employed the summer in ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... hypothesis as lamentably retrograde, for it makes impossible any application of the facts that have been discovered in the course of the anatomical and embryological study of man and monkeys, and indeed prejudges investigations of that class as pointless. The whole method is perverted; an unjustifiable theory of descent is first formulated with the aid of the imagination, and then we are asked to declare that all structural relations between man and monkeys, and between the different groups of ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... the maid gave crafty answer, And in words like these responded: "As a man I will esteem you, And as hero will regard you, If you can split up a horsehair With a blunt and pointless knife-blade, And an egg in knots you tie me, Yet no knot is ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... from something they "were"; and unless I succeed in making it plain that, not as a mere figure of speech and loose hyperbole, but starkly and literally, Andriaovsky was everything he did, my tale will be pointless. ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... proclaimed the victor amid the joyous acclamations of the crowd, and retiring, left the field to the meaner combatants, who were afterwards to make sport for the people. Four English and as many French squires fought for some time with pointless lances, when the French gaining the advantage, the sports ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... by waiting. Mrs. DUDENEY can handle this situation with unfailing charm. Her confessed comedies are by far the weakest things in the book; there is one of them indeed that seemed to me amazingly pointless. But with this exception I can commend her volume whole-heartedly, and only hope that the author will continue to send out goods of such excellent workmanship, "as per" (whatever ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... than the trouble of instructing an awkward novice such as I; and in hopes of exhausting my patience, and inducing me to resign the rod, as I had done the preceding day, my friend contrived to keep me thrashing the water more than an hour with a pointless hook. I detected this trick at last, by observing the rogue grinning with delight when he saw a large trout rise and dash harmless away from the angle. I gave him a sound cuff, Alan; but the next moment was sorry, and, to make amends, yielded possession of the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... Pointless the shaft fell at David's feet. He had turned again to the beauties about him, and at that moment he spied the sundial—something he had ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... he knew that Miss Trim was on the point of delivering one of her parenthetical and pointless orations, "it was indeed an amazing time! Such boating on the plains, and such camping out! To say nothing of tumbling into the ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... done this, not under some specially favourable circumstances, but it has done it under all circumstances of life and in all nations of men. What has been done in unnumbered individual cases, can be done in whole communities when the communities want it done. It is quite pointless in times of great social distress to ask passionately, "why does not God make a better world?" The only question which is at all to the point is, "why has God not made me better?" The problem of God's dealing with ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... The love of all beneath, We find within our hearts, and dare The pointless darts ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... professional skill and successful [30] agricultural enterprise of Dr. Nichol, a medical officer of that Colony, with whom he became acquainted for the first time during his short stay there, our author travels out of his way to tack on a gratuitous and pointless sneer at the educational competency of all the elected members of the island legislature, among whom, he tells us, the worthy doctor had often tried in vain to obtain a place. His want of success, our author informs his readers, was brought about ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... commanded to change it under pain of death, and were forbidden to retain the appellations which they had been accustomed from their infancy to cherish. Those who had been at Glenfruin were also deprived of their weapons, excepting a pointless knife to cut their victuals. They were never to assemble in any number exceeding four; and by an Act of Parliament passed in 1617, these laws were extended to the rising generation, lest as the children of the proscribed parents grew ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... one edited by Mitford, but that followed the edition of 1673, which is comparatively uninteresting since it could not have had Milton's oversight as it passed through the press. We know that it was set up from a copy of the 1645 edition, because it reproduces some pointless eccentricities such as the varying form of the chorus to Psalm cxxxvi; but while it corrects the errata tabulated in that edition it commits many more blunders of its own. It is valuable, however, as the editio princeps of ten of the sonnets and it contains one important ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... searching criticism were earliest in declaring this, I think that few of us can have read the poem without being vaguely and discomfortably aware of it. From the moment of the direct introduction of Bluphocks[68:1] (whose very name, with its dull and pointless punning, is an offence), that sense of over-ingenuity, of "tiresomeness," which is the prime stumbling-block to whole-hearted Browning worship, becomes perceptible, and acts increasingly upon our nerves until the Day is over, and Pippa re-enters ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... said, "and I believe I can work! I know I have wasted my time, but it was not because I wanted to waste time, but because the sort of things I have always had to do—the classics—always seemed to me so absolutely pointless. No one who taught me ever distinguished between what was good and what was bad. Whatever it was—a Greek play, Homer, Livy, Tacitus—it was always supposed to be the best thing of the kind. I was always sure that much of it was rot, and some of it was excellent; but I didn't know why, and ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... show of carnations and refreshed them with new water. At dinner, her father, still in high spirits, observed that she had again "dressed up" in honour of his second descent of the stairs; and Walter repeated his fragment of objectionable song; but these jocularities were rendered pointless by the eventless evening that followed; and in the morning the carnations began to ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... New Haven church was Mr. Noyes, whom many of his parishioners thought too noncommittal, erroneous, or pointless in discussing the themes which the itinerant preachers loved to dwell upon. Moreover, Mr. Noyes had refused to allow the Rev. George Whitefield to preach from his pulpit while on his memorable pilgrimage through New England. Mr. Noyes had also forbidden the hot-headed James Davenport ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... faces turned to Mecca. But when they arose from the ground, the sun's rays, now strengthening fast, seemed to confirm the Lord of Gilsland's conjecture of the night before. They were flashed back from many a spear-head, for the pointless lances of the preceding day were certainly no longer such. De Vaux pointed it out to his master, who answered with impatience, that he had perfect confidence in the good faith of the Soldan; but if De Vaux was afraid of his bulky body, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... extraordinary, amusing, yet harmless ways. He never could pass by an old, bent, used-up nail, bit of string, pin or a straight stick without picking it up and putting it away. The collar of his coat and front of his gaudy flannel vest were stuck full of pointless pins and eyeless needles. The shed opposite the house was a museum of rubbish, odds and ends of the most worthless articles neatly sorted, tied up in small bundles and hung about the sides of the building. It was a well-developed mania ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... sitting still with one's fate; so that if he took a turn about or rested briefly elsewhere even foolish philanderers—though this would never have been his and Nan's way—ended soon by some adjournment as visibly pointless as their sprawl. Then, their backs turned, he would drop down on it, the bench of desolation—which was what he, and he only, made it by sad adoption; where, for that matter, moreover, once he had settled at his end, it was marked that nobody else ever came to sit. He saw people, along the ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... when Curtana will not do the deed, You lay the pointless clergy-weapon by, And to the laws, your sword of justice, fly. Dryden, The Hind and ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... is unreasonable to continue the stigma. In like manner, when the cloth belonged to the customer, it was allowable enough to suspect him of a little amiable weakness for cabbage; but now that he is himself the clothier, the joke is pointless and absurd. Tailors, however, can afford to laugh, as well as other people, at their conventional double—or rather ninth, for at least in our own day they have wrought very hard to elevate their calling into a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... unfrequent of all unions!) vivacity with grace, he was especially formed for that brilliant world from which his circumstances tended to exclude him. Under different auspices, he might have been—Pooh! we are running into a most pointless commonplace; what might any man be under auspices different from those by which his life has been guided? Music soon succeeded to conversation, and Clifford's voice was of necessity put into requisition. Miss Brandon had just risen from the harpsichord, as he sat down to perform his part; ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Ewing, Mr. Watkins Leigh, Mr. Rives, Mr. Choate, Mr. John M. Clayton, Mr. Berrien, were an altogether higher and abler class of men than those with whom Mr. Adams had his frequent wrangles in the House. The weapons which he so successfully employed against the young "fire-eaters" would have proved pointless and valueless in a contest with any one of the eminent men who in that long period gave character ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the crashing car, Cassy's thoughts went forward and back. Her father's question, that had succeeded in being both pointed and pointless, returned. She smiled at it. It would take another Don Juan than Mozart's to entice me, she serenely reflected. Yet, after all, would he have to be so remarkable? At any rate he would have to be fancy free and not engaged as was a certain person who had ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... poor Churchill! His satire now appears to be dull and pointless. Through his tedious page no modern student can labour. We look back, and wonder how the rage of party ever swelled this thing into a poet. Even the great constellation, from whose tribunal no prudent man ever appealed, has excluded him from ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... gathers in the street, there rises a babel of voices, a confused and pointless clamor, no matter what the purpose of the gathering, until some man who can think as well as shout begins to speak. Then the crowd murmurs a moment, and after a few seconds ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... study. Unable to speak, and her hands trembling with rage, she gave the girl one glance of hatred, and then tried to eat; and Viveash, who had the sense to do so, at once began telling her some idiotic and pointless story about himself when he sang in a cathedral choir until his voice ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... cunning of the pen, and the devotion of the unknown great men, his friends of the brotherhood. Dialogue, closely packed, nervous, pregnant, terse, and full of the spirit of the age, replaced his conversations, which seemed poor and pointless prattle in comparison. His characters, a little uncertain in the drawing, now stood out in vigorous contrast of color and relief; physiological observations, due no doubt to Horace Bianchon, supplied links of interpretations between human character and the curious ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... poor taste, but his wit was pointless, for when a man can go before a convention of fourteen hundred delegates and by one burst of eloquence capture the convention, secure the nomination for the presidency, and then with the press and the leaders of his party against him go up and ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... unintelligent, obtuse, stolid, loggerheaded, inapt, doltish, beetle-headed, blockish, sluggish; apathetic, unfeeling, insensate, callous; blunt, obtuse, dulled, pointless; dim, faint; tedious, uninteresting, prosaic, stupid, wearisome, jejune, depressing; lifeless, torpid, slow, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... to the poems at the beginning of "Lustra," and to the short epigrams, which some readers find "pointless," or certainly "not poetry." They should read, then, the "Dance Figure," or "Near Perigord," and remember that all these poems come out of the ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... intimate personal gossip, but the very rush of words which came from her served to create an atmosphere of merriment at dinner. A little later at the music hall she insisted upon talking to Adams in exaggerated whispers, until the pointless jokes she made about the arms or the legs of the dancers, sent her into convulsions of noiseless hysterical laughter. Through it all Adams sat patiently wondering whether he suffered more from the boredom ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... intimate record of his soul's doings as an exercise in cosmic irony; but the idea of publishing it could hardly have lived for a moment in the lambent flame of his own sardonic humor. He could be perverse, but perversity could not well go the length of perpetrating so pointless a joke as that ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... he had brought the gun along from the bed with him and was holding it without having been in the least aware of the fact. Grinning twistedly at the old and pointless precaution, he shoved the gun into his trousers pocket, brought out matches, a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and began to smoke. Very considerate of them to see to it he wouldn't run out of minor conveniences ... like leaving him liquor enough to drink himself ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... here enumerated, are not among the heaviest in the catalogue of human calamities. But evils take their rank, more from the temper of the mind that suffers them, than from their abstract nature. Upon a man of a hard and insensible disposition, the shafts of misfortune often fall pointless and impotent. There are persons, by no means hard and insensible, who, from an elastic and sanguine turn of mind, are continually prompted to look on the fair side of things, and, having suffered one fall, immediately rise again, to pursue their course, with the ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... minimum. Fully one-half of this limited space is usually occupied with advertisements and official announcements, while even the few remaining columns are often deplorably misused. One detestable custom, originally borrowed from France, is that of "padding" a journal with tenth-rate novels, pointless anecdotes and would-be humorous feuilletons, such as the weakest "comic annual" would decline without thanks. Another failing of Russian journalism is its fondness for the tu-quoque style of argument, retorting every mention of Poland by an allusion to Ireland. But, despite all ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... importance that one should speak and not declaim. There is, of course, a way of talking on the platform that is merely negatively good, a way that is fitting enough in general style, but weak. There should be breadth, and strength, and reach. But this does not mean any necessity of sending forth pointless successive sentences over the heads of an audience. A college president recently said, "Our boys declaim a good deal, though they're not so bad as they used to be. It seems to me," he added, "that the idea is to say something to your audience." That is what ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... varnished carriages and brown vans, green omnibuses and red cabs, pale loads of yellow straw, rusty-red iron cluking on pointless carts, high white wool- packs, grey horses, bay horses, black teams; sunlight sparkling on brass harness, gleaming from carriage panels; jingle, jingle, jingle! An intermixed and intertangled, ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... relations with any of her adorers. It was even known that the county-counsellor, desperate over her stern refusals, was urging her to get a divorce from her husband and marry him. No one suspected, of course, that she had herself spread this rumour in order to render pointless the possible ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... from the ships, and not pursue them. At this moment Aias was weary, so many spears smote his armour, and he could hardly hold up his great shield, and Hector cut off his spear-head with the sword; the bronze head fell ringing on the ground, and Aias brandished only the pointless shaft. So he shrank back and fire blazed all over his ship; and Achilles saw it, and smote his thigh, and bade Patroclus make haste. Patroclus armed himself in the shining armour of Achilles, which all Trojans feared, ...
— Tales of Troy: Ulysses the Sacker of Cities • Andrew Lang
... is pointless to follow the lost children of the party, Naigeon and Sylvain Marechal, Mably and Morelly, the fanatics that set atheism up as an obligatory dogma and a superior duty; the socialists who, to suppress ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... hesitate for a brief space of time before venturing close up to where the hunched shape lay. Then having circled and drawn in about the victim of the shooting they would for another brief period huddle together, asking excited and pointless questions of one another, some of them perhaps bending down and touching the victim to see whether he lived, some of them looking round for a policeman, some of them doing nothing at all—except confusedly to get in the way of everybody else. This would be true of ninety-nine ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... Burnand's "Betsy." "Betsy," of course, is adapted from the French, though, by an accepted practice which seems to me dishonest, in spite of its acceptance, that fact is not mentioned on the play-bill. But the form is undoubtedly English, very English. What vulgarity, what pointless joking, what pitiable attempts to serve up old impromptus rechauffes! I found it impossible to stay to the end. Some actors, capable of better things, worked hard; there was a terrible air of effort in these attempts to be sprightly in fetters, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Robertson. It differs but slightly from the version which I originally learnt from Sir Walter Runciman. Very few of the words were printable, and old sailors who read my version will no doubt chuckle over the somewhat pointless continuation of the verses concerning Kitty Carson and Polly Riddle. They will, of course, see the point of my having supplied a Chopinesque ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... leaf, is also invoked, and compared with Fr. fleuret, a foil, the idea being that the name was given to the "button" at the point. Now the earliest foils and fleurets were not buttoned; first, because they were pointless, and secondly, because the point was not used in early fencing. It was not until gunpowder began to bring about the disuse of heavy armour that anybody ever dreamt of thrusting. The earliest fencing was hacking with ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... very businesslike statement of my own unbusinesslike ways and lamentable position. I was depressed, however, to notice that my companion's eyes were vacant and his attention elsewhere. When he did occasionally throw out a remark it was so entirely perfunctory and pointless, that I was sure he had not in the least followed my remarks. Every now and then he roused himself and put on some show of interest, asking me to repeat or to explain more fully, but it was always to sink once more into the same brown study. At last ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... English, French, German, and Russian temperaments are analysed, perhaps with more cleverness than accuracy. The Englishman, Astley, is utterly unreal, Paulina is impossible, and the Slavophil attacks on the French are rather pointless. Some of the characters are incomprehensible, but none ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... paralyze energy, and to render all effort fitful and uncertain. He should have written scores of letters daily, and attended to each commission with the utmost promptness and care, but there were times when the writing of a single letter was a burden, and too often it was vague and pointless like the condition of his mind when it was written. Mildred did not dream of this, and his employers felt that they must give him time before expecting very much return for his effort. Since he attended to routine ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... of the other men I have mentioned, grounds his work firmly upon this sense of cosmic implacability, this confession of unintelligibility. The exact point of the story of Kurtz, in "Heart of Darkness," is that it is pointless, that Kurtz's death is as meaningless as his life, that the moral of such a sordid tragedy is a wholesale negation of all morals. And this, no less, is the point of the story of Falk, and of that of Almayer, and of that of Jim. Mr. Follett (he must be a forward-looker in his heart!) ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... Schneider lighting up his face with his perfect teeth, I thought with an immense admiration of the unpolished and loose-hung Stires amid the eternal smell of tar and dust. It was a mere discussion of her hair, incoherent and pointless enough. No scandal, even from Schneider. There had been some sense, of a dirty sort, in his talk to me; but more wine had ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... is hardly necessary to indicate that allusions to the "glorious but bloodless" revolution of 1688 are unwarranted and pointless when designed to tarnish, by the contrast they imply, the French Revolution of 1789. It was the bloody struggle of 1642-51 that made 1688 possible. The true comparison—if any comparison be possible between revolutions so widely different in their aims and results, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... beyond the grave. A small and threadbare sect of "liberals," as they call themselves,—men in whom want of skill, industry, and thrift has produced the usual results,—have erected an altar to Thomas Paine, and, on the anniversary of his birth, go through with a pointless celebration, which passes unnoticed, unless in an out-of-the-way corner of some newspaper. In this class of persons, irreligion is a mere form of discontent. They have no other reason to give for the faith which is not in them. They ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... dignity of appearing voluntary, as the excommunicating voice of society seemed to leave him no other resource. Had he been of that class of unfeeling and self-satisfied natures from whose hard surface the reproaches of others fall pointless, he might have found in insensibility a sure refuge against reproach; but, on the contrary, the same sensitiveness that kept him so awake to the applauses of mankind rendered him, in a still more intense degree, alive to their censure. Even the strange, perverse pleasures ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... anxious to end this pointless conversation, for the stranger had approached quite near and peered into his face, as though not free from suspicion. The darkness was deep, but on the other side of the ridge a small fire was burning, from fragments brought from the stables. Of this ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... to amuse a highbrow he will resent it as if the process were beneath him; or perhaps the intellectual jealousy and touchiness with which he is always overcharged will lead him to retaliate with a pointless story from Plato. But if the highbrow is right off his guard and has no jealousy in his mind, you may find him roaring with laughter and wiping his spectacles, with his sides shaking, and see him converted as by magic into the merry, clever little school-boy ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... Shafton's extravagances in The Monastery has an entirely false idea. It is much odder than Shaftonese, but also quite different from it. Lyly's two secrets are in the first place an antithesis, more laboured, more monotonous, and infinitely more pointless than Macaulay's—which antithesis seems to have met with not a little favour, and was indeed an obvious expedient for lightening up and giving character to the correct but featureless prose of Ascham and other "Latiners." The second was a fancy, which amounts ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... sidelight on human nature that the achievement of eminence brings with it the malice and spite of petty minds and no one of prominence can avoid becoming the target of stupid and unscrupulous attack. It would be pointless now to go into those carping and unjust accusations directed at me by irresponsible newspaper columnists. Another man might have ignored these mean assaults, but I am naturally sensitive, and while it was beneath my dignity to reply personally I thought it perhaps one of ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... far. Then Mopsus pray'd,—"O Phoebus! if thy rites "I e'er perform'd, if still I thee adore, "Grant my sure weapon what I wish to touch." The god consented, what he could he gave,— The boar was struck, but struck without a wound: Diana from the flying weapon snatch'd The steely head, and pointless fell the wood. More chafes the beast, like lightening fierce he burns, Fire from his eyeballs flashes, from his chest Clouds of hot smoke through his wide nostrils roll. Forc'd from the close-drawn string as flies a stone, Hurl'd at embattl'd walls, or hostile ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... in the blind pointless ring through which the steamer chugged and wallowed as though it were a superior sort of water beetle and the horizon a circle of its own making, he began to get sufficiently acquainted with his fellow passengers, to understand that they were most of them going abroad in the ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... other hand, lets it be seen that everything he has is second-hand; that his ideas are like the number and trash of an old furniture-shop, collected together from all quarters. Mentally, he is dull and pointless—a copy of a copy. His literary style is made up of conventional, nay, vulgar phrases, and terms that happen to be current; in this respect much like a small State where all the money that circulates is foreign, because it has no ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Stokes, No. 17, and Riviere, p. 79,—the animal-rogue meets with an unlucky end. The same is true of Steel-Temple, No. 2, "The Rat's Wedding." In another Indian story, however, "The Monkey with the Tom-Tom" (Kingscote, No. XIV, a rather pointless tale), the monkey, whose last exchange is puddings for a tom-tom, is left at the top of a tree lustily beating his drum and enumerating his clever tricks. A very similar story is to be found in Rouse, p. 132, ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... fertile in wit is only like saying that excellent wheat land is not rich pasture; to say that we do not enjoy German facetiousness is no more than to say that, though the horse is the finest of quadrupeds, we do not like him to lay his hoof playfully on our shoulder. Still, as we have noticed that the pointless puns and stupid jocularity of the boy may ultimately be developed into the epigrammatic brilliancy and polished playfulness of the man; as we believe that racy wit and chastened delicate humor are inevitably the results of invigorated and refined mental activity, we can also believe that Germany ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... so here you are!' I observed, with pointless cordiality, for I was bound I should do nothing to help him out. If he were, indeed, here running errands for my rival, he might have a fair field, but certainly ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spy-thrillers he had seen. If some nation had the secrets, and he had discovered them.... But the heat ray would never have been used openly, then; they wouldn't tip their hand. Anyhow, the cold war was still going on, and that would have been pointless when any ...
— Pursuit • Lester del Rey
... pretty pointless distinction," Selim von Ohlmhorst joined the conversation. "There no longer exists ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper
... himself out of place, outside the orbit of these people, very little in sympathy with them. He looked at the woman sitting at the next table, elegantly dressed, laden with jewels, whose laughter was incessant and speeches pointless—her companion found her interesting enough, but Douglas was conscious of nothing save her restless desire to please, her little bursts of frivolous mirth and an ugly twitch of her lips which every now and then revolted him. It was a chance, perhaps, or a mood, which made ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... rooms. A yellow sallow-faced, cadaverous, and dissatisfied looking "gentleman" went into the house eyeing me suspiciously as he passed. In a moment he was out again interrupting the old man with pointless remarks. In—out again—standing over me—peering on my paper in the offensive way that ill-bred people have. He straightened up with a disgusted look on his face. He ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... leopardess; Ithuriel's spear glances pointless from a rhinoceros' hide. To match what is low and beat it, you must stoop, and soil your hands to cut a cudgel rough and ready. She did not see this; and seeing it, would not have lowered herself to ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... when he asked himself the latter question, for his own knowledge rendered it pointless. He knew that the game was as limitless on one side of the Mississippi ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... a lengthened sermon? Think you, did Maclaurin's well-known Sermon on the Cross cost him little trouble? or the not less noble sermon of Sir Matthew Hale, on Christ and Him crucified? Look, we beseech you, to your New Testaments, and see if there be ought slovenly in the style, or loose and pointless in the thinking, of the model sermons given you there. The discourse addressed by our Saviour from the mount to the people was a sermon; as was also the magnificent address of Paul to the Athenians, where he chose as his text ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... for the purpose of repeating their devotions, with their faces turned to Mecca. But when they arose from the ground, the sun's rays, now strengthening fast, seemed to confirm the Lord of Gilsland's conjecture of the night before. They were flashed back from many a spearhead, for the pointless lances of the preceding day were certainly no longer such. De Vaux pointed it out to his master, who answered with impatience that he had perfect confidence in the good faith of the Soldan; but if De Vaux was afraid of his bulky body, he ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... there must be motivation involved in racial preservation. Yet we derived no pleasure out of the things that make the Builders wish to continue to live. We did not sleep; we did not eat, and we were not able to reproduce ourselves. (And, besides, this latter, as I have indicated, would have been pointless with us.) ...
— B-12's Moon Glow • Charles A. Stearns
... understanding the delicacies of life—the refined shades of emotion, the subtleties of human intercourse. He probably never read Jane Austen; but if he had he certainly would have considered her an utterly pointless writer; and he would have been altogether at sea in a novel by Henry James. The elusive things that are so important, the indecisive things that are so curious, the intimate things that are so thrilling—all these slipped through his rough, matter-of-fact grasp. ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... disingenuous fashion: "Mr. Seymour, our ex-artist, is much to be pitied for his extreme anguish at our having come to terms with the celebrated Robert Cruikshank in the supplying the designs of the caricatures in 'Figaro.' Seymour has been venting his rage in a manner as pointless as it is splenetic, and we are sorry for him. He ought, however, to feel, that notwithstanding our friendly wish to bring him forward, which we have done in an eminent degree, we must engage first-rate ability when public patronage is ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... knows what sort of exile!—from their present home? She would grumble and scold and become limply unhelpful, he knew, and none the less so because he could not help things. She would say he ought to have worked harder, and a hundred such exasperating pointless things. Such thoughts as these require no aid from undigested cold pork and cold potatoes and pickles to darken the soul, and with these aids his soul ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... It is pointless to condemn Federal spending in general, and the next moment condemn just as strongly an effort to reduce the particular Federal grant that touches one's ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... been the kids and their seemingly pointless argument on the street. There had been the curiously distant respect the Meloans had shown him, as if they guessed that only his exterior was similar. There were a lot of things Duke could use to justify believing the director. It made a fine picture—as it was ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... has observed, with something like a sneer, that the noblest utterances of Gospel morality may be paralleled from the writings of heathen philosophers. The sneer is pointless, and Christian moralists have spontaneously drawn attention to the fact. In this volume, so far from trying to conceal that it is so, I have taken pleasure in placing side by side the words of Apostles and of Philosophers. The divine origin of Christianity does not rest on its ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... become acutely ill, and for someone who started fasting while dangerously ill, loss of self control and impulsive eating could prove fatal. Even for those fasting to cure non-life-threatening illnesses it is pointless to go through the effort and discipline of a long fast without carefully establishing a correct diet after the fast ends, or the effort will have ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the entire ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... know the people—for they are the majority, and probably include our particular selves—who cannot carry on the ordinary business of everyday talk without the use of phrases containing a part that is appropriate, and another that is pointless or worse; the two parts have associated themselves together in their minds as making up what somebody has said, and what others as well as they will find familiar, and they have the sort of pleasure in producing the combination that a child has in airing a newly acquired ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... result, but was not conducted with the finesse that Mr. Eppington, who prided himself on his diplomacy, had intended. Indeed, so evidently ill at ease was that gentleman, when the moment came for talk, and so palpably were his pointless remarks mere efforts to delay an unpleasant subject, that Blake, always direct bluntly though not ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... heap upon you—you, the most pointless things imaginable, saucy apes, brewers of odious contrasts, haunting birds of ill omen, mocking echoes, unseasonable reminders, oft-returning vexations, skeletons in my morris-chair, jesters in the tomb, death's-heads at the wedding feast, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller |
