"Irrelevant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to one who, discarding as irrelevant all theories and observances bearing upon the other world and its interests, holds that we ought to confine our attention solely to the immediate problems and duties of this, independently of all presumed dependence on revelation and communications ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Version reads it) 'is in all goodness and righteousness and truth.' Now, it is obvious that the alteration of 'light' instead of 'spirit' brings the words into connection with the preceding and the following. The reference to the 'fruits of the spirit' would be entirely irrelevant in this place; a reference to the 'fruit of the light,' as being every form of goodness and righteousness and truth, is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... . . Art is universal. This remark is not so irrelevant and Horace Greeley-like as it may appear. I have just had a demonstration of its truth on the coach coming down here. Two very nice little French boys of cropped hair and restless movements were just in front of us and my pater having discovered ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... irrelevant; a question to the point cut short his speech, like a pang of pain, and he felt extremely discouraged and weary. He was coming to that, he was coming to that—and now, checked brutally, he had to answer by yes or no. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... hastily jotted down, carelessly edited. One of the chief reasons for the eternal misunderstandings! Often the author fails to state the quantities to be used. He has a mania for giving undue prominence to expensive spices and other (quite often irrelevant) ingredients. Plainly, Apicius was no writer, no editor. He was a cook. He took it for granted that spices be used within the bounds of reason, but he could not afford to forget them in ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... the actual sensation whose effect he is to render with their aid, the artist has one main and necessary resource which he must, in every case and upon any theory, employ. He must, that is, suppress much and omit more. He must omit what is tedious or irrelevant, and suppress what is tedious and necessary. But such facts as, in regard to the main design, subserve a variety of purposes, he will perforce and eagerly retain. And it is the mark of the very highest order of creative ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... moved as if she were sleep-walking in it. Little needles of nervousness were out all over her, and, absurdly enough, there walked across her vision the utterly irrelevant spectacle of old black Willie with her feet bound in gunny sacks and the pencil nubs in her hair, and just as irrelevantly her mind began to pop with a little explosive ejaculative prayer: "O God, make him take me! O ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... an iron staircase of unreality. Fantastic stairs. Wisps of gloom. Singing pains in her climbing legs like a piano key hit very hard and held down with a pressing forefinger. She could listen to her pain. That was her thought as she climbed. How the irrelevant little ideas would slide about in her sudden chaos. She must concentrate ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... replied the smoker of the cigar. "What are you doing here, in God's name? I imagined you at Mohamera, by this time, or even in the Gulf." This remark, it may not be irrelevant to say, was in German—as spoken in the trim town ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... introducing in this work any evidence irrelevant to my subject, or of supporting any conclusions not immediately flowing from it; but I cannot overlook nor disregard here the close connection there is between the facts ascertained by scientific investigations, and the discussions now carried on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... believed Aeschines to have been bribed, and could himself see no other explanation of his conduct, need not be doubted; and although the speech contains some of those misrepresentations of fact and passages of irrelevant personal abuse which deface some of his best work, it also contains some of his finest pieces of oratory ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... convey something that he felt, and he created them with that intention alone. He did not hesitate to simplify or to distort if he could get nearer to that unknown thing he sought. Facts were nothing to him, for beneath the mass of irrelevant incidents he looked for something significant to himself. It was as though he had become aware of the soul of the universe and were compelled ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... turned his hand. Possessed of a charming style; precise and clear instead of verbose; completely conscious of what he intends to convey and perfectly competent to convey it; and dowered with a perspicacious breadth of view which dwells on all that is important and passes over all that is irrelevant, Captain Mahan has given us two ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... ever seen. I think she kept these latter organs purely for ornament—apparently looking at things with her nose, her sensitive ears, and, sometimes, even a slight lifting of her slim near fore-leg. On our first interview I thought she favored me with a coy glance, but as it was accompanied by an irrelevant "Look out!" from her owner, the teamster, I was not certain. I only know that after some conversation, a good deal of mental reservation, and the disbursement of considerable coin, I found myself standing in the dust of the departing emigrant-wagon ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... bow. Far down the quay a band was playing the eternal Stella Confidente, which has become a sort of national air in Turkey. The strains floated in through the window, and the young girl struggled hard to concentrate her thoughts, which somehow wound themselves in and out of the music in a very irrelevant manner. ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... long and presumably instructive homily on the duties and prerogatives of the lowly, lasting quite up to the moment when the carriage stopped before the door of Mrs. Van Deuser's residence, it fell upon ears which heard not. Indeed, her next remark was so entirely irrelevant that her august kinswoman stared in displeased amazement. "I am going to purchase some—some necessaries to-morrow, Cousin Maria; I should like Fifine to go ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... long time the man continued to gaze in silence, and, when at length he spoke, it was to ask an entirely irrelevant question. ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... up in the centre with the rose, portcullis, and fleur de lis, repeated so as to occupy the whole circumference of the bell. We have been thus particular in our description, as it may not be uninteresting to pursue this inquiry, connected as it is with some important historical facts, not irrelevant ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... complexion light, rather reserved in her manners, affable in address, very sensitive in her physical and mental constitution. Much of Anderson's service in Detroit must go to the account of his sainted wife. And it may not be irrelevant to remark that every minister of Christ's influence and success is perceptibly modified by his wife—much ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... arguments cited to support it, changes his tactics from the subject-matter to the opponent himself and delivers an attack upon his character, principles, or former beliefs and statements. This is called the argumentum ad hominem. In no sense is it really argument; it is irrelevant attack, and should be answered in a clear accurate demonstration of its unsuitability to the topic under consideration. It is unworthy, of course, but it is a tempting device for the speaker who can combine ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... he knew absolutely nothing about, and this was the duties of a private secretary to a retired admiral who had riches, a yacht, a hobby, and a beautiful, though impulsive daughter. His thought became irrelevant, as is frequent when one faces a crisis, humorous or tragic; here indeed was the coveted opportunity to study at close range the habits of a man who spent less than ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... morality is, it will be safest to consider first what the morals of men actually have been, how they came into being, and what function they have served in human life. Thus we shall be sure that our theory is in touch with reality, and be saved from mere closet-philosophies and irrelevant speculations. Our task in this First Part will be not to criticize by reference to any ethical standards, but to observe and describe, as a mere bit of preliminary sociology, what it is in their lives to which men have given ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work; going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle but his ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... interruption, but the audience appear to have tolerated, and even enjoyed the gag. As Reynolds himself leniently writes: "Many performers before and since the days of Edwin have acquired the power, by private winks, irrelevant buffoonery and dialogue, to make their fellow-players laugh, and thus confound the audience and mar the scene; Edwin, disdaining this confined and distracting system, established a sort of entre-nous-ship (if I may venture to use the expression) with the audience, and made them ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... his brows, conscious of a humane but very faint interest in Mr. Timson's affairs. Mr. Harum got out a cigar, and, lighting it, gave a puff or two, and continued with what struck the younger man as a perfectly irrelevant question. It really seemed to him as if his ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... become a serious problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that honourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of workmanship which gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The time has passed when William Morris was conceived to be irrelevant to be described as a designer of wall-papers. If Morris had been a hatter instead of a decorator, we should have become gradually and painfully conscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had been a tailor, we should ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... reinforced fact with fiction, and given us art for truth, then his character of Samuel Johnson is the most vividly conceived and deeply etched in all the realm of books. But if he gives merely the simple facts, then Boswell is no less a genius, for he has omitted the irrelevant and inconsequential, and by playing off the excellent against the absurd, he has placed his subject among the few great wits who have ever lived—a man who wrote remarkably well, but talked ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... did more than silence them; he answered them. His question was no irrelevant riddle by which he met a difficulty and delayed the necessity of a reply. He definitely implied that the authority of John was divine and that his own authority was the same; but as they were afraid to deny the divine authority of John they were also powerless to deny that of Jesus; and ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... circumstances and prospects of the Indian tribes, and neither their number nor condition can be ascertained with much accuracy. We have endeavoured to make the present edition as correct as possible, and have omitted some parts of the original work which seemed irrelevant, or not well authenticated. We have also made such changes in the phraseology as its ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... that were to be, by selecting heredity as the principle by which the succession was to be determined for ever and ever. This ordinance, being divine, was beyond the power of man to alter. The fitness of the king to rule, the justice or efficiency of his government, were irrelevant details. Parliament could no more alter the succession, depose a sovereign, or limit his authority than it could amend the constitution of the universe. From this premiss James deduced a number of conclusions. Royal power was absolute; the king ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... may think that all this is irrelevant to him, that the natural sciences will solve all his problems. He would be wise to recall that the great Roman republic in which Polybius lived more than 2200 years ago, did indeed become transformed into tyranny and, in the end, into anarchy and oblivion. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the bear steak over the gasoline "plate," Sandy told the story of the fishing trip, while Will listened with a grin on his face, now and then interrupting with what Sandy declared to be an entirely irrelevant remark. ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... Shakspeare would probably have done) such strong specialties of character as would compel, and therefore excuse, his mistress's affection. He has plenty of time to do this in the first scenes,—time which he wastes on irrelevant matter; and all that we gather from them is that Antonio is a worthy and thoughtful person. If he gives promise of being more, he utterly disappoints that promise afterwards. In the scene in which the Duchess tells her love, he is far smaller, rather than greater, than the Antonio ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... an open Bible in his hand, and was reading aloud a passage taken at random—an extract from the Apocalypse, if I remember right. The words were entirely irrelevant and without the smallest bearing upon the scene before him, but he plodded on with great unction, waving his left hand slowly to the cadence ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Pinacium, the servus currens, finally succeeds in "arriving" out of breath (he has been running since 274), bursting with the vast importance of his news, he postpones the delivery of his tidings till 371 while he indulges in irrelevant badinage. This is pure buffoonery. And we can instance scene upon scene where the self-evident padding can either furnish an excuse for agile histrionism, or become merely tiresome in its iteration[161]. The danger of the latter was ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... Only details, irrelevant for readers in America, have been eliminated. Little Perrine's loyal ideals, with their inspiring sentiments, are preserved by her through the most discouraging conditions, and are described with the simplicity for which Hector Malot is famous. The building up of a little girl's life is ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... the irrelevant violence of tongues, the broken, half-comprehensible tumult was smitten and divided by a wave of rhythmic sound. It pushed aside the cries of the sweetmeat sellers, and mounted above the cracked bell that proclaimed the continual ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... seems to me as irrelevant as the first," said Joscelyn, "but I observe that you cuckooed so loudly as to startle our mistress out of her inattention. So if you mean to tell us another story, by all means tell it now. Not that I ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... under way with professional training for business; but if students fail to get the general educational foundation for it, it will not accomplish the best results. If the two, three, or four years of college study is regarded as something purely ornamental and irrelevant, while they are getting it, if it fails to arouse an appreciation both of scientific method and of human values, or if these values are thought of as something to forget when the student comes to the analysis of practical problems, the university ...
— Higher Education and Business Standards • Willard Eugene Hotchkiss
... a nice—ah—cool day, isn't it?" observed Galusha, backing from the gateway in order to give Horatio egress. Mr. Pulcifer's answer was irrelevant ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... indeed, the only matter of importance for him and for me. His voice brought up before me our student years in Paris, and remembering the magnetic power ne had once possessed over me, a little fear mingled with much annoyance at this irrelevant intrusion, as I led the way up the wide staircase, where Swift had passed joking and railing, and Curran telling stories and quoting Greek, in simpler days, before men's minds, subtilized and complicated by the romantic movement ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats
... art, all scales and standards disappear except that of the purely aesthetic beauty which consists in harmony of line and tone; the most perfect human form has no more value than a splash of mud; or rather both mud and human form disappear as irrelevant, and all that is left for judgment is the arrangement of colour and form originally suggested by those ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... that it may work too easily and get out of control. Where the central control does not suffice to keep a strong hand upon this easy-running mental machinery, it may quickly merge into eccentricity and possibly into madness. The insane show this same tendency to rapid, but irrelevant, association which lands them in incoherency: they make, or indulge in, associations which no normal person would allow. A genius is only a genius while the necessary selection and control over these ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... hadn't come when you did," he said, "I'd likely had to eat 'em, thanks to Reynolds. Now I'll send 'em up to H. B." He peered disgustedly into the bag and removed an irrelevant ace of spades. Its hibernation there seemed for an instant to annoy him as well it might. There had been a furore in whist about it barely a week before. Then he used it irresponsibly for an I.O.U. and impaled it upon a strange looking spike that seemed to ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... said for the sake of them. I make these remarks, because I want you to get rid of any impression that our discussion about weaving and about the reversal of the universe, and the other discussion about the Sophist and not-being, were tedious and irrelevant. Please to observe that they can only be fairly judged when compared with what is meet; and yet not with what is meet for producing pleasure, nor even meet for making discoveries, but for the great end of developing the dialectical method and sharpening the wits of the ...
— Statesman • Plato
... conception of the Druidic view of the future life is furnished us by an old mythologic tale of Celtic origin.2 Omitting the story, as irrelevant to our purpose, we derive from it the following ideas. The soul, on being divested of its earthly envelop, is borne aloft. The clouds are composed of the souls of lately deceased men. They fly over the heads of armies, inspiring courage or striking ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... would be a waste of time, Kenworthy pressed the committee members to tackle the services on their own ground—efficiency.[14-41] After seeing the Army so effectively dismiss in the name of military efficiency and national security the moral arguments against segregation as being valid but irrelevant, Kenworthy asked Chairman Fahy: ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... and either a refusal to answer, or an answer accompanied with irritating language, endangered the peace of the town." On Sundays, especially, the Boston mind found something irreverent, something at the very least irrelevant, in the presence of the bright colored and highly secular coats; while the noise of fife and drum, so disturbing to the sabbath calm, called forth from the Selectmen a respectful petition to the general requesting him to "dispense with ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... in the midst of Madame Bertrand's effusive benevolence, seemed quite irrelevant to the matter in hand, but nevertheless ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... began to make a rough calculation. For several minutes he worked industriously, used the rubber at the end of his pencil, tried again, and then scratched out. "That humming confuses me so that I cannot work correctly," said he, "while the most irrelevant things enter my mind in spite of me, and mix up my figures." "I found the same thing," said Bearwarden, "but said nothing, for fear I should not be believed. In addition to going blind, for a moment I almost forgot what I was trying to do." Changing their ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... of salt wind, rain, and sun, Jacob Flanders had put on a dinner jacket. The discreet black object had made its appearance now and then in the boat among tins, pickles, preserved meats, and as the voyage went on had become more and more irrelevant, hardly to be believed in. And now, the world being stable, lit by candle-light, the dinner jacket alone preserved him. He could not be sufficiently thankful. Even so his neck, wrists, and face were exposed without cover, and his whole person, whether exposed or not, tingled and glowed so as ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Take that essay of Elia called Old China, and, when you have recovered from its charm, analyse it. You will see that, in its apparent lawlessness and wandering like idle memories, it is constructed with the minute care, and almost with the actual harmony, of poetry; and that vague, interrupting, irrelevant, lovely last sentence is like the refrain which returns at the end of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... are pounding your favorite brass tack," Paula smiled. "And Dar Hyal, with a few arm-wavings and word-whirrings, will show that all brass tacks are illusions; and Terrence, that brass tacks are sordid, irrelevant and non-essential things at best; and Hancock, that the overhanging heaven of Bergson is paved with brass tacks, only that they are a much superior article to yours; and Leo, that there is only one brass tack in the universe, and that it is ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... problem which is never solved. Criticism is to him a perpetual Presence: or perhaps a ghost which he will not succeed in laying. If he could satisfy his mind that Criticism was a certain thing: a good thing or a bad, a proper presence or an irrelevant, he could psychologically dispose of it. But he can not. For Criticism is a configuration of responses and reactions so intricate, so kaleidoscopic, that it would be as simple ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Then, with easy nonchalance, turning to an apparently irrelevant topic as he gazed over the railing, "I heard just before coming from my office this evening that the doors of the Mercantile Trust would not open to-morrow. Too bad! A lot of my personal friends are heavily involved. Bank's been shaky for some time. Ames ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... no idea. He ought to have plenty, but I haven't had a minute all week to send the laundry out." Then, dismissing the subject as irrelevant—"I must ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... on any irrelevant data as to equinoxes or bluebirds or bock-beer signs, but is derived from the deepest authority we know anything about, our subconscious self. We remember that some philosopher, perhaps it was Professor James, suggested that individuals are simply peaks of self-consciousness ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... some of the matter was, there ran through it a continuous thread of brooding, tenacious horror and preternatural malevolence which impressed me even more than it had impressed the good doctor. Separate events fitted together uncannily, and seemingly irrelevant details held mines of hideous possibilities. A new and burning curiosity grew in me, compared to which my boyish curiosity was ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... logarithms, with the request, "Please explain." Mr. Dodgson told him that he was much too young to understand anything about such a difficult subject. The child listened to what his father said, and appeared to think it irrelevant, for he still insisted, ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... is, of course, unnecessary for me to dwell upon the part played by the home in the standard of living, especially amongst a rural community. But it may not be irrelevant to note that M. Desmolins, who, in his remarkable book, A quoi tient la superiorite des Anglo-saxons? hands over the future of civilisation to the Anglo-Saxons, ascribes to the English rural home much of the success of ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... his father before him, then the relation of cause and effect is obvious enough; but if, on the contrary, the former exhibits only extraordinary outbreaks of passion, remarkable inequalities of spirit and disposition, irrelevant and inappropriate conduct, strange and unaccountable impulses, nothing of this kind is charged ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... "That is irrelevant. It is not any question of shame or conscience, which are abstract things. It is merely one of fact—that is, whether you did or did not help Miss Catherwood, the spy, to escape. I am convinced that you helped her—not that I ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Pale and persistent and intolerably meek, she hammered hard facts into the brain with a sort of muffled stroke, hammered till the hardest stuck by reason of their hardness, for she was a teacher of the old school. Thus in her own way she made her mark. Among the other cyphers, the irrelevant and insignificant figure of Miss Quincey was indelibly engraved on many an immortal soul. There was a curious persistency ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... Odd Girl had developed such improving powers of catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed with unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would address the servants in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had painted Master B.'s room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.'s bell away and balked the ringing, and if they could suppose that that confounded boy had lived ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... and yet I never felt bored or wearied by his long discourses, but really looked forward to them. This was because his sermons, instead of consisting of a string of pious platitudes, interspersed with trite ejaculations and irrelevant quotations, were one long chain of closely-reasoned argument. Granted his first premiss, his second point followed logically from it, and so he led his hearers on point by point, all closely argued, to an indisputable conclusion. I suppose ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... he could know the situation as it presented itself here. Even vengeance for Jill should be put aside, if it called for action irrelevant to this state of things. But it did not. A full and terrible revenge for her required exactly the action the coolest of cold-blooded resolutions would suggest be taken now. And Lockley moved on ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... The irrelevant retort puzzled him, and her tone increased his annoyance. But why, he asked himself, should he trouble to lift her to a higher level of thought? ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... son. Her father caught her at it and smiled. This made her flush and to even up matters she deliberately put salt instead of sugar into her father's after-dinner cup of coffee. Whereupon he, tasting the salt, made an irrelevant remark ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... works at the Court. She understood they were doing grand things, and that the work would last all the winter. Minta answered hurriedly and with a curious choice of phrases. "Oh! he didn't have nothing to say against it." Mr. Brown, the steward, seemed satisfied. All that she said was somehow irrelevant; and, to Marcella's annoyance, plaintive as usual. Wharton, with the boy inside his arm, turned his ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... been the case, if theory in simple language, and by natural treatment of those things which constitute the Art of making War, had merely sought to establish just so much as admits of being established; if, avoiding all false pretensions and irrelevant display of scientific forms and historical parallels, it had kept close to the subject, and gone hand in hand with those who must conduct affairs in the field ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... discussed among the exercises of the masters of Paris in the full assembly of the Sorbonne[86],) or on the motives which influenced Henry the Eighth, I intend not to say one word: those points belong not to our present inquiry. It may not, however, be thought irrelevant here to quote a passage {227} from the ordinance of this latter monarch for erasing Becket's service out of the books, and his name from the calendar ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... direction, and arrived on the scene as promptly as his short legs and shorter breath permitted him. In a fever of fright and flurry he approached, the crowd making way for him as he snapped out a cannonade of irrelevant questions. ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... the instances adduced by our author, to show similarity of action in the organic and the inorganic world, are irrelevant. The analogies are not merely imperfect; they are no analogies at all. Crystals increase by the aggregation of new particles on the external surfaces of the parts already formed; there is no consentaneous operation of the parts ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... humbly and with docility at the feet of this girl from Domrmy, that tore your webs of cruelty into shreds and dust. "Would you examine me as a witness against myself?" was the question by which many times she defied their arts. Continually she showed that their interrogations were irrelevant to any business before the court, or that entered into the ridiculous charges against her. General questions were proposed to her on points of casuistical divinity; two-edged questions, which not one of themselves could have answered, without, on the one side, landing himself ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... sand and masks and anti-asphyxiation mixtures—which are not viewed with much sympathy in the trenches. There the men meet the most disconcerting situations—as, for example, the problem of spending a night in a flooded meadow occupied by a thunderstorm—with irrelevant songs ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... stands out alone. That he did not know natural history as did Aristotle, who lived a thousand years later, is not to his discredit, and to emphasize the fact were irrelevant. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... very conditions which bring the phenomenon into closer correspondence with the optical illusion, both as to the stimuli and the subjective experience. Then, aside from this, such an objection will be seen to be quite irrelevant if we bear in mind that when the end points in the filled distance were replaced by metallic points, metallic points were also employed in the open distance. The temperature factor, therefore, entered into both spaces alike. By approaching the problem from still another point ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... Edith like one of the detached generalities he was fond of uttering, and if she had learned that beneath his seemingly irrelevant words always lay a connecting thread of thought, she had learned also that she could seldom hope to discover what this cord might be. To understand his words, now, it would have been necessary for her to be aware of the net spread for him by Irons, the struggle in his mind as ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... a paved way, with or without houses, has been extended to roads lined with houses, whether paved or unpaved. 'Impertinent' signified at first irrelevant, alien to the purpose in hand: through which it has come to mean, meddling, intrusive, unmannerly, insolent." (Logic, ii., ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... soldier, and sustained by nobility and originality of style. All that was strongest in Wilfred Owen survives in his poems; any superficial impressions of his personality, any records of his conversation, behaviour, or appearance, would be irrelevant and unseemly. The curiosity which demands such morsels would be incapable of appreciating ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... we have always come down to the point, here we are, where do we go from here and what do we do next? There, in a word, "Here we are." Lots of discussion, much of it irrelevant. I will just propose, along the lines I spoke before, that what comes out of this is that We recommend to the incoming president to organize a survey and testing campaign along the lines that seem to meet ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... other men go wrong. At that moment I felt vividly how men might go wrong, even unto dynamite. If one of those huddled men under the trees had stood up and asked for rivers of blood, it would have been erroneous—but not irrelevant. It would have been appropriate and in the picture; that lurid grey picture of insolence on one side and impotence on the other. It may be true (on the whole it is) that this social machine we have made is better than anarchy. Still, it ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... that Dame Lovell would ask an irrelevant question, which might lead to conversation—that Friar Andrew would awake—that Cicely would rush in with news of the cows having broken into the garden—or that anything would occur which would put a stop ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... acquainted with Randal said he had not a vice! The fact being that his whole composition was one epic vice, so elaborately constructed that it had not an episode which a critic could call irrelevant. Grand ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... answered the young man, with a laugh, but a good deal surprised in his turn, for the question seemed irrelevant and absurd in the extreme. "But I'm not good at sums," he added. "I was an awful idiot at school. They used to call me Log. That was short for logarithm, you know, because I was such a log at arithmetic. A fellow gave me the nickname one day. It wasn't very funny, so I punched ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... irrelevant to the critical exposition of this verse; but the consideration may help to clear up an apparently obscure passage in the New Testament, namely, Matt. xvi. 16-19. When Simon made the declaration in verse 16., "Thou art ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... irrelevant. For example, after being wrapped in silence for over half an hour, he suddenly flung out the question, 'How many people do you know ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... the talk mainly to himself, and he thought that anything not obscene was tame. By the way, these abrupt and insolent remarks are characteristic of public-house wit. A favourite joke is to ask a friend a serious question. When he fails to answer, then the joker shouts some totally irrelevant and indecent word, and the questioned man is regarded as "sold." I cannot repeat the interlude with which Billy Preston favoured us, but it was very spicy indeed, and referred to some of those sacred secrets which are known to all. For a pillar of the Church, ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... scientific problems with which the iron-master is not concerned, and which he cannot be expected to understand, much less to solve. We regret the more this unnecessary introduction of comparatively irrelevant matters, when we find, at the close of the volume, that the unexpected length of the discussion of the ores has prevented the publication of several chapters on the machinery now in use, the hot-blast and anthracite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... interesting light on these complicated relations, but we cannot write of them, either in prose or poetry, in the grand style, because the whole discussion is ephemeral; because, with all its gravity, it is irrelevant to the things ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... this will be proved and established with true and sufficient evidences and proofs, at any and all times, as it shall prove necessary. And I do not feel bound to reply to many of the things contained in his rejoinder, inasmuch as they are utterly irrelevant, and have nothing to do with the business here concerned—tending, as they do, to attribute fault, and cause for slander, where there is none; many of them, also, being untrue, and unworthy of a person in so serious and important a station, and of so illustrious and Christian ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... who abhor and resist authority, who hardly know how I am to bring myself to obey my friend the Commandant, am enamoured of this Power and utterly submissive. I realize with something like a thrill that we are in a military hospital under military orders; and that my irrelevant former self, with all that it has desired or done, must henceforth cease (perhaps irrevocably) to exist. I contemplate its extinction with equanimity. I remember that one of my brothers was a Captain in the Gunners, that another of them ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... GIOVANNI SGAMBATI,[A] IN D MAJOR, the form flows with such unpremeditated ease that it seems all to the manner born. It may be a new evidence that to-day national lines, at least in art, are vanishing; before long the national quality will be imperceptible and indeed irrelevant. ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... of things quite irrelevant, by way of reproach, is an argument in universal request: and it often happens that the argument so produced really tells against the producer. So common is it that we forget how boyish it is; but we are strikingly reminded when it actually comes from ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... certain—the self-proved and amazing inability of one of her professors of philosophy to give an honest or intelligent reception to a thoughtful, closely reasoned, and earnest plea for philosophical reform in this very direction, or to criticise it with anything better than irrelevant and unparliamentary personalities, studied and systematic misrepresentation both of the plea and of the pleader, and a demoralizing example of libel, so bitter and so extreme as to furnish abundant ground ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... of such men as Swift and Defoe, who composed works of fiction with all the simplicity and circumstantial detail of those who write authentic history as eye-witnesses. But, unless the design be to class the books of Samuel with "Gulliver's Travels" and "Robinson Crusoe," the argument is wholly irrelevant. With Swift and Defoe simplicity and minuteness of detail were a matter of conscious effort—a work of art, for which they naturally chose the region of fiction; and here they, and other men of ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... me, please, with irrelevant remarks," Nan cried, laughing in spite of herself. "Seriously, Jim—you must listen to me. I'm in dead earnest. There's no virtue in riding behind a donkey if you can own a carriage. There can be no virtue in ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... of fact, she was watching the girl from her one eye with a wistful tenderness she had not dared as yet to express in words. Twice Mary had turned suddenly and seen her thus. Each time Ella had started as if caught in some act of mischief and asked an irrelevant ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... inescapable truths, a discussion of which would interest me deeply but which would be irrelevant in this narrative. ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... irrelevant here, but the command to collect from the Egyptians jewels, which might be bartered for necessaries, may well have been given to Moses simultaneously with the assurance that he would lead forth the people after the next plague, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Persis' answer was irrelevant. "Joel, seems to me that so far my life's been for all the world like a checked gingham, if you ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... violent controversy; but the statement of Sir Charles Metcalfe seems in itself the fairest and most probable account of what took place. "On Friday, Mr. La Fontaine and Mr. Baldwin came to the Government House, and after some irrelevant matters of business, and preliminary remarks as to the course of their proceedings, demanded of {169} the Governor-general that he should agree to make no appointment, and no offer of an appointment, without previously taking the advice of the Council; that ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... M. Gunsbourg materializes the ghostly flames and presents them as a mob of hopping figures, he throws douches of cold water on the imagination of the listeners. Later he spoils enjoyment of the music utterly by making it the accompaniment of some utterly irrelevant pantomime by Marguerite, who goes into the street and is seen writhing between the conflicting emotions of love and duty, symbolized by a vision of Faust and the glowing of a cross on the facade of ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... comment or question with the atmosphere we have made round the story, or else, in the future, that story will become blurred and overlaid with the remembrance, not of the artistic whole, as presented by the teller of the story, but by some unimportant small side issue raised by an irrelevant question ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... determined to be void by the Committee of Privileges. The Parliament, however, being prorogued the following month without the House's coming to any vote on the subject, Pepys was permitted to retain his seat. A most irrelevant matter was introduced into the inquiry, and Pepys was charged with having a crucifix in his house, from which it was inferred that he was "a papist or popishly inclined." The charge was grounded upon reported assertions of Sir John Banks and the ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... then with quick decision stepped to a writing table, snatched a sheet of paper and wrote rapidly, while he filled in the interval by talking of irrelevant things to guard against the chance that the Governor might be on his way down and ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... emotion on our side the ocean than on the other, and long ago we saw the events of the Revolution in a fair perspective. In truth, this insistence on the past is not wholly creditable to Boston's sense of humour. The passionate paeans which Otis and his friends sang to Liberty were irrelevant. Liberty was never for a moment in danger, if Liberty, indeed, be a thing of fact and not of watchwords. The leaders of the Revolution wrote and spoke as though it was their duty to throw off the yoke of the foreigner,—a yoke as heavy as that which Catholic ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... assiduity that lasted while he lived. Thus when he was sent by the Journal to Jefferson City to report the proceedings of the Missouri State Legislature, what his paper got was not an edifying summary of that unending grist of mostly irrelevant and immaterial legislation through the General Assembly hopper, but a running fire of pungent comment on the Idiosyncrasies of its officers and members. He would attach himself to the legislators whose personal qualities afforded most profitable ammunition for sport in ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... still an acute party question, not merely in Ireland, but in Great Britain. Party passion invariably discourages patient constructive thought, and all legislation associated with it suffers in consequence. Tactical considerations, sometimes altogether irrelevant to the special issue, have to be considered. In the case of Home Rule, when the balance of parties is positively determined by the Irish vote, the difficulty reaches its climax. It is idle to blame individuals. We should blame the Union. So long as one island democracy ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... aggregated facts stored up by man's patient study of this universe are irrelevant here, in a sketch of the progressive advance of his knowledge of creation. Those who desire to examine the evidence which has led to this verdict must go over the records themselves, or accept, out of their own convictions, the result of the examination. To entirely comprehend the Darwinian idea, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... perhaps grown weary of seeing Edison's name in articles of a sensational character, it may sound strange to say that, after all, justice has not been done to his versatile and many-sided nature; and that the mere prosaic facts of his actual achievement outrun the wildest flights of irrelevant journalistic imagination. Edison hates nothing more than to be dubbed a genius or played up as a "wizard"; but this fate has dogged him until he has come at last to resign himself to it with a resentful indignation only ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... such modifications. Nor will I press the question—What is the nature of the effect registered in the reproductive elements, and which is subsequently manifested by variations?—Is it an effect entirely irrelevant to the new requirements of the variety?—Or is it an effect which makes the variety less fit for the new requirements?—Or is it an effect which makes it more fit for the new requirements? But not pressing these questions, it suffices to point out the necessary implication that changed ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... now. Blaine held fast to the girl as they felt their way along the smooth tunnel wall, and Tom Farley, behind them there in the darkness, kept up a running fire of small talk that was utterly irrelevant. Nothing ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... mushroom, only it was much laxer in texture, and, as one swallowed it, it warmed the throat. At first we experienced a mere mechanical satisfaction in eating; then our blood began to run warmer, and we tingled at the lips and fingers, and then new and slightly irrelevant ideas came bubbling up ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... you stick to the subject?" I cried; "you have the most irrelevant mind! How do you expect to rise ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... life, stands in his eyes in the forefront of ethics. 'Let it be your earnest endeavour to use words coinciding as closely as possible with what we feel, see, think, experience, imagine, and reason;' 'remove by plain and honest purpose false, irrelevant and futile ideas.' 'The truest liberality is appreciation.' 'Love of truth shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... the meaning of the characters and sentences. The entire educational effort was to develop the powers of observing and memorizing accidental, superficial, or even purely artificial relations. This double faculty of observing trifling and irrelevant details, and of remembering them, ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... "the Earl of Slumgold's cousin?" She knew he was; it was an entirely irrelevant and unnecessary remark, but ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... first few days of my stay at Okehurst, I imagined that Mrs. Oke was a highly superior sort of flirt; and that her absent manner, her look, while speaking to you, into an invisible distance, her curious irrelevant smile, were so many means of attracting and baffling adoration. I mistook it for the somewhat similar manners of certain foreign women—it is beyond English ones—which mean, to those who can understand, "pay court to me." But I soon found I was mistaken. Mrs. Oke had not the faintest ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Joan on the subject of fairies appear to the modern reader to be entirely irrelevant, though much importance was evidently attached to her answers by the Court. She could not disprove, though she denied, the popular rumour that 'Joan received her mission at the tree of the Fairy-ladies' (Iohanna ceperat factum ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... so irrelevant that one could make no answer to it. But the sense of the absurdity was beginning at last to exercise its well-known fascination. I felt I must not let the man talk to me any more. I got up, observing curtly that he was too much for me—that I ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... an irrelevant gesture. "The man wrote—to inquire if I would buy his title. I declined." Then he turned to my father. "Pendleton," he said, "you know about this matter. You know that every step I took was legal. And with pains and care how I got an order out of chancery to make ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... fortnight with me at Oldmoxon house, and I wanted never to let her go. Often our talk was as irrelevant to patency as are wings. That day I had been telling her some splendid inconsequent dream of mine. It had to do with an affair of a wheelbarrow of roses, which I was tying on my trees in the garden directly the ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... authoritative vehicle for the utterance of average English opinion, and an index, in its general tone, of the prevailing sentiment of that people, is a question which, so far from wishing to decide, we must decline to entertain, as mainly irrelevant to our present purpose. As a matter of fact, however, if we did accept that print as an authority and a standard in English opinion, we should throw more of temper than we hope to prevent escaping through our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... this Preface one or two caustic reviews of our late work, from an Agnostic source, but have been deterred from so doing, for the reason that we deem it in bad taste as well as irrelevant at this late day. We shall be pardoned, however, in alluding to The National Quarterly Review, for the captious manner in which it treated us after we had courteously replied to several inquiries made of us in its two- or three-page review. ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... may be in other directions, whether he is kind to his wife, whether he is loving towards his children, whether he is generous in a charitable way, whether he is politically stanch or corrupt, do you not see that these questions are entirely irrelevant, have nothing whatever to do with the question of success in the money field? He sows according to the laws of the product which he wishes to raise, ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... such grim matters may take the finer edge from a man's sympathy. To Douglas Stone this was already an interesting case, and he brushed aside as irrelevant the feeble ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... He did not shake it in the abashed fashion of one confronted with a question for which he has no answer, but with the frank manner of one brushing aside a trivial and irrelevant question. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... is based upon the fact—or assumption—that the forms of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be appropriated have no interest on their own account: in other words, they are supposed to be irrelevant to the normal activities of the pupils. The remedy is not in finding fault with the doctrine of interest, any more than it is to search for some pleasant bait that may be hitched to the alien material. It is to discover objects and modes of action, which are ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... the fatal defect that, in a very great number of questions, only a fraction of the nation have any direct interest or knowledge, yet the others have an equal voice in their settlement. When people have no direct interest in a question they are very apt to be influenced by irrelevant considerations; this is shown in the extraordinary reluctance to grant autonomy to subordinate nations or groups. For this reason, it is very dangerous to allow the nation as a whole to decide on matters which concern only a small section, whether that section ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... supreme things possible to man. No flying machine can ever better it. It is to pass extraordinarily out of human things. It is to be still and alone to an unprecedented degree. It is solitude without the suggestion of intervention; it is calm without a single irrelevant murmur. It is to see the sky. No sound reaches one of all the roar and jar of humanity, the air is clear and sweet beyond the thought of defilement. No bird, no insect comes so high. No wind blows ever in a balloon, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... do you mean to say that this reward was put on publicly?" to which my friend answered with an air of gentlemanly boredom at being interrupted to gratify my thirst for irrelevant detail:— ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... point out to this young man how silly and irrelevant such talk was to a sick man like himself, how impertinent and uncivil it was to him, an older man occupying a position in the official world of extraordinary power and influence. He insisted that a doctor was paid ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... by Geo. E. Davenport because of its similarity to a form of the lady fern. It may be identified by its thin texture and particularly by its simple veins. On account of its close resemblance to the marsh fern, Clute would call it "The lance-leaved Marsh Fern," instead of the irrelevant name of Massachusetts Fern. Woodland swamps usually in deep shade, New England to Maryland and westward. Often found growing with the ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... coast, and that his course indeed had led him in an entirely different direction. Although John professed himself satisfied with the explanation, he soon after despatched an ambassador to Barcelona, who, after dwelling on some irrelevant topics, touched, as it were, incidentally on the real object of his mission, the late voyage of discovery. He congratulated the Spanish sovereigns on its success; expatiated on the civilities shown by the court of Lisbon to Columbus, on his late arrival there; and acknowledged ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... philosophy, art—and the stylistic expression of such beliefs—formal verse satire and epistle, mock-poem, heroic or Hudibrastic couplet, diction of polite conversation, ironic metaphysical conceits, fantastic fictional situations—become irrelevant to the satirist writing when the past seems lost. In his later works, Pope took Augustan satire about as far as it could go. The Epilogue to the Satires becomes an epilogue to all Augustan satire and the conclusion of The New Dunciad declares the death of its own tradition. ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd |
