"Unessential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be disillusioned because it is able to see, beneath the chaotic litter and unessential debris of "matter," the eternal idea of "matter" and because it is able to see, under the lamentable repulsiveness and offensiveness of so much actual flesh and blood, "the eternal idea of ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... victorious Saxon or English heathen. But from the very beginning the Church of England has retained the traces of her early origin, when Gregory the Great was Pope, when the claim to be universal bishop was deemed untenable, when even the ritual of the Mass was still in unessential details flexible. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... died, 1797, Prussia was riding to a fall; and disregarding plain measures for her own safety, she had reached the sad place where the sturdy old Prussian spirit of prudence and independence had become so compromised that Prussia almost deemed it unessential to preserve her ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... friend the Captain, and then lay thinking of this cavalry business. It is a subject which thought does not simplify, but, like other great things, makes it complicate and recede from its votaries. To know essential details from unessential details is the study in all arts. Details there must be; they are the small things that make the big things. To apply this general order of things to this arm of the service kept me awake. There is first the riding—simple enough if they catch you young. There are ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... disciples, "The truth shall make you free." He was never afraid of truth, but accepted it reverently, even when it ran counter to accepted authority. Nor did Jesus ever lose time or opportunity in teaching trivial and unessential matters to his hearers; the knowledge he gave them was always of such fruitful nature that they could at once apply it to their living, Jesus's teaching carried over; it showed its effect in changed attitudes of ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... bear elaboration if their merit depends on extreme licence, for instance. Next, that a man who had a standard of proportion could see wherein the deviations of his sketched figure were essential to the effect he wished it to produce, and wherein they were unessential. Then, if he drew the normal figure large, he would be able to deviate from it in exactly the right places and to the right degree to reproduce the desired effect. But to do this he must also have a general notion of how deviations from a normal proportion could be made ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... going to tell," began Ned, "will include much more than I saw or knew myself, but it all comes from authentic sources. I shall omit names, since they are unessential. ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... a little way from him, as if she felt he might exact a husband's right of farewell, which the absence of witnesses made quite unessential. ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... remarkable fact to be observed in this picture and many Venetian works, and this is that the most accented edges are reserved for unessential parts, like the piece of white drapery on the lower arm of the girl with the cymbals, and the little white flower on the boy's head in front. The edges on the flesh are everywhere fused and soft, the draperies being much sharper. You may ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... them, or rejecting them, as they accord or disagree with his preconceptions. Indeed, this is what "essential Christianity" must always be. What each picker and chooser likes is "essential." What he does not like is unessential, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... for the sensible and the fitting really helped him over many dangers. His discrimination had none of the hair-splitting sophistry of the ancient teachers. He despised useless subtleties, and, with admirable tact, let go what seemed to him unessential; but, if he was not to lose his faith or his reason, he could do nothing, after all, but found the new doctrine on words and conditions of life fifteen hundred years old, and in some cases he became the victim of what his adversary ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... and propounds his own as due to the naming of savage societies, and to a sort of natural exogamy produced by practically the same set of conditions as I have already described. Mr. Lang's totemism began in the primary groups, and began with exogamy as a necessary part of it. "Unessential to my system," says Mr. Lang, "is the question how the groups got animal names, as long as they got them, and did not remember how they got them, and as long as the names according to their way of thinking indicated an essential and ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... the safe and attractive aspect of a single exceptional instance; there were always sardines enough for him. It will be imagined what pleasure Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin took in his visits, how he propped up their standard of behaviour in all things unessential, which was too likely to be growing limp, so far from approved examples. I think it was a real aesthetic satisfaction; I know they would talk of it afterward for hours, with sighing comparisons of the "form" of the young men of Elgin, which they called beside Hesketh's ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... after I returned to my normal state. And of course he laughed good-naturedly at what he called my foolery. Yet I could distinctly remember that in my Adam Strang adventure I had frequently played chess. The trouble was that whenever I came back to consciousness in solitary, unessential and intricate details faded ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... for the most part an unessential ornament; its songs are frequently wholly episodical, without reference to the action, and more distinguished for brilliancy than for sublimity and true inspiration. "The Chorus," says Aristotle, "must be considered as one of the actors, and as a part of the whole; it must co-operate in the action— ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... of natural fact nor even of visual fact, but at the transference to another mind of his own mental condition—his inner judgment as to "things seen"—by means of necessarily imperfect pictorial mimicry. He must therefore avoid startling or abnormal truthfulness of observation of the unessential and even more strictly must he refuse to make his picture a scientific diagram demonstrating what "is" rather than what is "seen" or is "thought ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... write pulling letters weigh carefully every sentence, not only pruning away every unessential word but using words of Anglo-Saxon origin wherever possible rather than words of Latin derivation. "Indicate your selection" was written as the catch line for a letter in an important selling campaign, but the head ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... of appreciation to be discussed is the appreciation of humor. Perhaps this does not belong with the other type, but it certainly has many of the same characteristics. Calkins defines a sense of humor as "enjoyment of an unessential incongruity.... This incongruity must be, as has been said, an unessential one, else the mood of the observer changes from happiness to unhappiness, and the comic becomes the pathetic. A fall on the ice which ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... describe that most turbulent afternoon. The details are unessential to the main point, which was our decision. Counsel was appointed by the court from among the numerous ex-lawyers. The man who took charge of the defence was from New York, and had served some ten years in the profession before the gold fever took him. I happen to know that ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... are not sick, are not good for nothing, are not childless, and, therefore, do not consult physicians; but the reasoning which shall judge and weigh the facts presented, assigning to each its proper value, and, discarding unessential elements, shall draw a just conclusion, is not ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... the history of Ezra's administration, the chief event of which was the putting away by the princes and people of the heathen wives whom they had married. That Ezra was the author of this book is generally acknowledged. The first three verses are a repetition, with some unessential variations, of the last two verses of Chronicles, of which he is also believed, on good grounds, to have been the author. In certain passages he speaks of himself in the third person; Ch. 7:1-26; ch. 10; but there is no ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the saint's apt choice of a text could have been mere accident. To Michael there was no such thing as chance. Nothing is unessential, nothing unforeseen by ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... play up. There was not, nor could there be—in Keith's mind—any harm in their relations. Nan was the woman for him; but that didn't mean that he was never to see anybody else, or that other women might not—of course in unessential and superficial ways—answer some of his ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White |
