"Triviality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that she was not, and Mr. Alwynn and Charles departed together, Charles ruefully remembering that he had still to ask advice on a subject the triviality of which would hardly ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... language sounds to me like a hysterical outcry from a person whose family is already tottering. It is at least certain that a great many of these cornerstones of society are tottering, and why? Because there dwell in them triviality and vacuity, which prepare the way of the devil. Who can think that intellectual divergence, disagreement upon great public questions, would disrupt a family worth holding together? On the contrary, nothing save a community of great interests—whether in agreement or disagreement—can ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... a serious handicap to both happiness and efficiency. Nor is self-discussion the only exhibit of restlessness the American woman gives. To an unaccustomed observer she seems always to be running about on the face of things with no other purpose than to put in her time. He points to the triviality of the things in which she can immerse herself—her fantastic and ever-changing raiment, the welter of lectures and other culture schemes which she supports, the eagerness with which she transports herself to the ends ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... oppression that has not until now been confessed by those who suffer from it or who are participants, as mere witnesses, in its tyranny. It is the obsession of man by the flower. In the shape of the flower his own paltriness revisits him—his triviality, his sloth, his cheapness, his wholesale habitualness, his slatternly ostentation. These return to him and wreak upon him their dull revenges. What the tyranny really had grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in country lodgings, where the most ordinary things of design and decoration have ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... rivals. But the author of "Gulliver's Travels" was a keen observer; his maxims have always a basis in fact; and it is undoubtedly true that women of exceptional cleverness prefer the wit, wisdom, and earnestness of the more cultivated members of the other sex to the too frequent ignorance and triviality of their own. Undoubtedly, in most societies, women of unusual genius and accomplishments can more easily find congenial companionship with men than with women. But to infer from this any natural incompatibility for friendships between women is to draw a monstrous inference, wholly unwarranted by ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... Dobson squatted like an Eskimo, and trees dancing like a witch-wood in the gale. All the vigour of the morning seemed to have gone out of his blood; he felt lonely and apprehensive and puzzled. He wished he had Dickson beside him, for that little man's cheerful voice and complacent triviality would be a comfort.... Also, he was abominably cold. He put on his waterproof, and turned his attention to the fire. It needed re-kindling, and he hunted in his pockets for paper, finding only the ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... spirit hardly to be looked for in such a primeval daughter of Eve. Her imagination and her reading had saved the girl's sweet modesty. A certain detachment made it possible for her to ignore the squalor of the actual and see it only as a surface triviality, to let her mind dwell in inner concepts of goodness and beauty while bestiality crossed the ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... royale, a pu reussir a m'ennuyer', shows how little he had realised the fatiguing effect of theatrical splendour too persistently displayed. St. Evremond finds juster cause for his bored state of mind in the triviality of the subject-matter of operas, and his words are worth quoting at some length: 'La langueur ordinaire ou je tombe aux operas, vient de ce que je n'en ai jamais vu qui ne m'ait paru meprisable dans la disposition du sujet, et dans les vers. Or, c'est vainement que l'oreille ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... want of earnestness at the core of his being. Not but that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that sort, and make his love for her save him from himself. Now perhaps the miracle was already wrought in him. In the presence of the tremendous fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have gone out of him; she began to feel that. He sank down on the top step, and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, while she poured out upon him her question of the origin and authenticity ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... nigher it is to the flame, the more remote (there's a word, remote!)—the more remote it is from the frost." Shakespeare and Scott have condescended to caricature the style or the manner of the inventor of euphuism: I cannot think their burlesque of his elaborate and sententious triviality so happy, so humorous, or so exact as this. But it is not on his capacity as a satirist or humorist, it is on his occasionally triumphant success as a serious or tragic poet, that the fame of Marston rests assuredly established. His intermittent power to rid himself for a ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... present humble friend, now talking in this candid fashion with your readership, has been every where, seen every thing, and done his touristic devoirs like every body else about him: also, as a like circumstance of etymological triviality, that he has severally, and from time to time, recorded for self-amusement and the edification of others all such matters as holiday-making school-boys and boarding-misses, and government-clerks in their swift-speeding vacation, and elderly gentlemen vainly striving to enjoy their ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... health and vigour. I have had to learn by experience that attention to very small details is the road to success in keeping pets as well as in other things, and the desire to pass on that experience must be my excuse to more scientific readers for seeming triviality. ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... who deeply discredit it. Offenses against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that the demand must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were advanced ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... serve as a model; and the fact that in the shifting architectural life of New York the actual original scenes of the incidents had been demolished and built upon by new apartment-houses, or new railroad stations, or new factories seventy-five stories high, was an unobstructing triviality. Accounts of his manner of conducting himself in European courts to which he had supposedly been bidden, of his immense popularity in glittering circles, of his finely democratic bearing when confronted by emperors surrounded by their guilty splendors, ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... rhyme frequent and never forced, while the entire poem should be marked by tasteful moderation, high finish, and completeness: for, however trivial the subject-matter may be, indeed, rather in proportion to its triviality, subordination to the rules of composition, and perfection of execution, are of the utmost importance." Among the enviable versifiers who can satisfy these requirements Praed and Locker both hold a high place. ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... gentlemen—all that I have said so far you may indeed very reasonably reckon as having an appearance of triviality. And, to be sure, had the matter gone no further than the humouring of a poor silly girl by a young gentleman of quality, it had been very well. But to proceed. We shall make it appear that after three or four weeks the prisoner became contracted to a young gentlewoman of ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... is to be found among the earliest productions. There we see earnestness of purpose combined with heavenly aspiration and deep searching after truth. Subsequent to this we see the light vanishing and earnestness giving place to triviality of thought, to the ravings of superstition, to the inanities of ceremonialism and to the laws of social and religious bondage. All this progress downward is in direct ratio to our ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... This, it appears, is the language of the dead; its purport is taken down progressively by one of the experts, writing, I was told, 'as fast as a telegraph operator'; and the communications are at last made public. They are of the baldest triviality; a schooner is, perhaps, announced, some idle gossip reported of a neighbour, or if the spirit shall have been called to consultation on a case of sickness, a remedy may be suggested. One of these, immersion in scalding water, not long ago ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... little island home has its history. The land is small, but the changes among the inhabitants, and the achievements of its heroes, have redeemed it from triviality, and made it among nations great and important. The deeds Englishmen have done, the afflictions they have suffered, the victories they have won, and the results that they have brought about, conspire to make every ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... to the florist, my lord. She has had a loss in her family lately, which perhaps accounts for the lack of triviality your lordship complains ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... inherently undignified, as evidence of our sheep-like, ape-like nature. But complete independence in the universe is simply unthinkable. If we could not take practically everything for granted, we should spend our lives in utter triviality. The nearest thing to a wholly independent adult is a hermit, and the range of a hermit's action is very short. Acting entirely for himself, he can act only within a tiny radius and for simple ends. If he has time to think great thoughts we can be certain that he has accepted without ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... If the utter triviality of the pretext were left doubtful in the debate, if its towering absurdity were not plainly apparent, if its simple wickedness did not already stand before us, we should find all these characteristics glaringly manifest in that unjust ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... comes from its expression in the exquisitely carven marble. When this is grayed with age it is indeed of the effect of old silver work; but the plateresque in Valladolid does not suggest fragility or triviality; its grace is perhaps rather feminine than masculine; but at the worst it is only the ultimation of the decorative genius of the Gothic. It is, at any rate, the finest surprise which the local architecture has to offer ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... little of vital import—is, in fact, only a passing reference to one or two by-incidents that came about in the half-year that followed. He cannot complain that they are superfluous if we give him fair warning of their triviality, and enable him to skip them without remorse. But they register, to our thinking, what little progress events made in six very nice months—a period Time may be said to have skipped. And whoso will may follow his example, and lose but little ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... blast that boulder, what would happen? Follow it—use the eyes God has given you—can you not see that a great deal of land would be reclaimed upon this side?' It was to me like school in holidays; but to him, until I had worn him out with my invincible triviality, a delight. Thus he pored over the engineer's voluminous handy-book of nature; thus must, too, have pored my ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... madam, supplies me with but one advice,—be patient; say little; do as little as possible; and endeavor to appear insensible to their insults. I would say to you, if you will excuse the triviality of the comparison, imitate those feeble insects who simulate death when they are touched. They are defenceless; and that is their ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... moon and all those shining swarms of stars, and that far star-dust in the Milky Way, whether he, Jerome Edwards, had shoes to close or not? Whether he and his mother starved or not, they would shine just the same. The triviality—even ludicrousness—of the sorrow of man, as compared with eternal things, was over the boy. He was maddened at the sting and despite of his own littleness in the face of that greatness. Suddenly a wild impulse of rebellion that was almost blasphemy ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... were soon to take definite shape in the publication of the famous Lyrical Ballads (September, 1798), to which Coleridge contributed The Ancient Mariner, and Wordsworth some characteristic lyrical, reflective, and narrative poems. The excessive simplicity and alleged triviality of some of these poems long continued to give offence to the conservative lovers of poetry. Even to-day we feel that Wordsworth was sometimes the victim of his ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... I've accomplished the objects—or no-objects—I came for," he said, with dreary triviality, "and I must hurry away to other fields of activity." He kept his eyes on her face, which he saw full of a passionate intensity, working to some sort ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... of the principles of dramatic art, and of the mission of the artist. He told me that to have the right to call one's self an artist one must add honest work to talent, and he put before me the example of certain actors who had risen to fame, but who were repulsed by society on account of the triviality of their conduct; of others who were brought by dissipation to die in a hospital, blamed by all; and of still others who had fallen so low as to hold out their hands for alms, or to sponge on their comrades ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... yet unblurred by the expediencies, compromise and experimental contacts of life, Neville was stabbed by a sharp pang of fear and hope for them. Fear lest on some fleeting impulse they might founder into the sentimental triviality of short-lived contacts, or into the tedium of bonds which must out-live desire; hope that, by some fortunate chance, they might each achieve, as she had achieved, some relation which should be both durable and to be endured. ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... free, he had nothing but his aim to consider, and he reached it. But tie yourself up with a woman and, like a chained convict, you lose all freedom! And all you have of hope and strength merely weighs you down and torments you with regret. Drawing rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, and triviality—these are the enchanted circle I cannot escape from. I am now going to the war, the greatest war there ever was, and I know nothing and am fit for nothing. I am very amiable and have a caustic wit," continued Prince Andrew, "and at Anna ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... is a revelation of the beauty of the English language, and it profoundly influenced Ruskin and other prose writers of the Victorian Age. It has two chief faults,—diffuseness, which continually leads De Quincey away from his object, and triviality, which often makes him halt in the midst of a marvelous paragraph to make some light jest or witticism that has some humor but no mirth in it. Notwithstanding these faults, De Quincey's prose is still among the few supreme examples of style in our ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... interfered with the reflections which he ought to have offered upon her altar. That is what struck me as odd; not his neglecting to remember her in a moment of danger, since then we often forget everything except some triviality of the hour. But, of course, this is all nonsense, which I oughtn't to write here even, as most people have their own ways of being fond of each other. Also, it is ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... have been making a good deal of fuss about your being a young lady, now I think of it. Peter especially has been rather a nuisance about it, breaking into my most precious moments of triviality with the sweetly solemn thought that our little girl has grown to be ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... be a trifle unsympathetic; in particular in its patronizing way of dwelling upon the thinness of the American social environment and the consequent provincialism of Hawthorne's books. The "American Note Books," in particular, seem to Mr. James a chronicle of small beer, and he marvels at the triviality of an existence which could reduce the diarist to recording an impression that "the aromatic odor of peat smoke in the sunny autumnal air is very pleasant." This peat-smoke entry has become proverbial, and is mentioned ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... the world of New York. I very soon came to the conclusion that the professional, paid mediums were, in many cases, the worst kind of impostors, and, in all cases, so far as any intellectual evidence was concerned, of an absurd triviality. Even in the private circles, where no trace of fraud could be suspected, the good faith of all entering them being assured, I found sometimes such extraordinary credulity that the subject would have been offensive to any dispassionate investigator who was not, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... home something about their life and the great things of which they are a part. But the great things are too great for them. They cannot put them into words. And they ought not to try, for the secret of letter-writing is intimate triviality. Bill could not have described the retreat from Mons; but he could have told, as he told me, about the blister he got on his heel, how he hungered for a smoke, how he marched and marched until he fell asleep marching, ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... sober but full of archaisms, which he much affected (he gives, therefore, no quotations from post-Augustan writers). His style shows the defects of an age in which men had ceased to feel the full meaning of the words they used, and strove to hide the triviality of a subject under obscure phrases and florid expression. Yet, on the whole, he is a very interesting writer, and the last that can in ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... there is more in this tinge of off-hand refinement, the atmosphere, the enthusiasm shown and in the little personal touches, than in formidable arguments and logical reasons. What is triviality to a man is frequently the clinching statement with a woman. And so a fixed set of rules can not be formulated for writing letters to women. Instead of a hard and fast rule, the correspondent must have in mind the ideas and the features that naturally appeal to the feminine ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... to Mrs. de Tracy, it must be made plain that with all her faults, small spite was not a part of her character. Yet to-day, her anger had been stirred by an incident so small that its very triviality annoyed her pride. It was Mark Lavendar's custom, when his visits to Stoke Revel included a Sunday, cheerfully to evade church-going. His Sundays in the country were few, he said, and he preferred to enjoy them in the temple of nature, generally taking ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... journey are clear enough, and we all know that the secret of breakdown and wreck is seldom so much an insufficient knowledge of the route, as imperfect discipline of the will. The truism, however, and the commonplace may be stated in a form so fresh, pungent, and free from triviality, as to have all the force of new discovery. Hence the need for a caution, that few maxims are to be taken without qualification. They seek sharpness of impression by excluding one side of the matter and exaggerating another, and most aphorisms are to be read as subject to ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... suddenly said, cutting across some little triviality of hers with which she was striving to cover his silence—"sorry you did not have even one of the roses I walked ten miles ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... also with the adventitious position of woman referred to in another paper,[277] the feminine interests and habits are set so strongly toward dress and personal display that they are not readily diverted. Women may and do protest against the triviality of their lives, but emotional interests are more immediate than intellectual ones, and human nature does not drift into intellectual pursuit voluntarily, but is forced into it in connection with the urgency of practical activities. The women who are obliged to work are of ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... Fairfield, at the man's look of astonishment, remembered that he was unshaven, and that his clothes had been thrown on haphazard. It was a queer thought to intrude at such a time. But he was usually a scrupulously dressed man, and the triviality worried him. ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... truism to say that we ought to look at life in the light of eternity. Only then does the true significance of the meanest action in life appear. Life is redeemed from triviality and vulgarity. So far from worldly possessions losing their value, and ordinary occupations appearing insignificant, their importance is realised as never before. If man does not live for ever, his character and actions seem of comparative unimportance. If he does live for ever, it is rational for ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... smile was somewhat wistful. "Nothing but silly imaginings." She laughed and when she spoke again her voice was as light as if her world held only triviality and laughter. "Yet there be important things to decide. What shall I wear ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... these Romans d'aventures is surprising, and they very seldom display the flatness and triviality which mar by no means all but too many of their English imitations. Some of the faults which are part cause of these others they indeed have—the apparently irrational catalogues of birds and beasts, stuffs ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the one consummation to be desired; but that is not the normal attitude of normal people. Such would still fain believe that the grave is not the end, but many of them are in a state of bewilderment and insecurity. On the one hand men have never grown reconciled to the heart-breaking triviality of death, never accepted this dispensation without a question, a hope, or, failing hope, a sense of rebellion; on the other, we have to recognise that we live in an age when multitudes have ceased to ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... had had a considerable surprise that afternoon. He had told Robert Black to find William Roper and bring him to him. He wished to hear the story he had told Lord Loudwater the evening before, for it might be of a triviality to make the hypothesis that Lord Loudwater had committed suicide yet less worthy of serious consideration. Black was a long while finding William Roper, for he was at work in the woods. Indeed, he had not yet heard that Lord Loudwater had been murdered, ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... of science. Most of his writings, which are very voluminous, are naturally of a technical character and therefore do not properly belong to literature; but his Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects (1665), a strange mixture of triviality and seriousness, was germinal in this sense that it led to two celebrated jeux d'esprit, namely, Butler's Occasional Reflection on Dr. Charlton's feeling a Dog's Pulse at Gresham College and Swift's Pious Meditation upon a Broomstick, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... life of the winds and rains. Such churches as this, anything but swept and garnished, correspond in a way to Browning's poetry; there is the high solemnity brought home to you, not disturbed, by the very triviality of the details; mysteries and wonders overarching the real living life of ex-votos and pictures of runaway horses and houses on fire; the life worn like the porphyry discs of the pavement, precious bits trodden into the bricks, the life of the present filched ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... worlds and two orders of reason. That distinction issued in a new theory of knowledge. It laid a new foundation for an idealistic construing of the universe. In one way it was the answer of a profoundly religious nature to the triviality and effrontery into which the great rationalistic movement had run out. By it the philosopher gave standing forever to much that prophets and mystics in every age had felt to be true, yet had never been able to prove by any method which the ordered reasoning ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... the true seeds and roots of cruelty, tyranny, and treason; they bud and put out there, and afterwards shoot up vigorously, and grow to prodigious bulk, cultivated by custom. And it is a very dangerous mistake to excuse these vile inclinations upon the tenderness of their age, and the triviality of the subject: first, it is nature that speaks, whose declaration is then more sincere, and inward thoughts more undisguised, as it is more weak and young; secondly, the deformity of cozenage does not consist nor ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... whole of the story. We must not forget the superficiality of thinking, the uncritical, loose, and flabby use of the reasoning power which shows itself in so many spheres of American mass life. It is sufficient to see the triviality of argument and the cheapness of thought in those newspapers which seek and enjoy the widest circulation. It is difficult not to believe that fundamentally sins of education are to blame for it. The school may bring much to the children, but no mere information can be a substitute ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... language of the dead; its purport is taken down progressively by one of the expert, writing, I was told, "as fast as a telegraph operator"; and the communications are at last made public. They are of the baldest triviality; a schooner is perhaps announced, some idle gossip reported of a neighbour, or if the spirit shall have been called to consultation on a case of sickness, a remedy may be suggested. One of these, immersion in scalding ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cheap theology for the solace of their public. To men and women excited by the details of the last murder they discourse of the existence of God in short, crisp sentences,—and I know not which is worse, the triviality of the discourse or its inappositeness. They preface one of their most impassioned exhortations with the words: "If you read this, you will probably think you have wasted time." Though this might with propriety stand for the motto of all the columns of ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... But however good the evidence, we shall fail to make out a case unless dream experiences are conceded to be as real as any other. The reluctance we may have to make this concession comes first from the purely subjective character of dreams, and secondly from their triviality and irrationality—it is as though the muddy sediment of daytime thought and feeling and that alone were there cast forth. In answer to the first objection, advanced psychology affirms that the subconscious mind, from which dreams arise, approaches ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... which appears to have been a gross calumny so far as his private life was concerned, and is certainly a gross exaggeration as regards his writing. But he was rather too much given to dally about voluptuous subjects with a sort of chuckling epicene triviality. He is so far from being passionate that he sometimes becomes almost offensive. He is terribly apt to labour a conceit or a prettiness till it becomes vapid; and his "Criticism on Female Beauty," though it contains some extremely sensible remarks, also ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... pennilessness is itself a hindrance; the fear haunts me. With such terrible real things pressing upon me, my imagination can shape nothing substantial. When I have laboured out a story, I suddenly see it in a light of such contemptible triviality that to work at ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... sorrow to Jesus at the supper. Some of the Twelve had fallen into muttering dispute among themselves over the matter of individual precedence,[1191] possibly as to the order in which they should take their places at table, over which triviality scribes and Pharisees as well as the Gentiles often quarreled;[1192] and again the Lord had to remind the apostles that the greatest of them all was he who most willingly served his fellows. They had been taught before; yet now, at this late and solemn hour, they were suffused ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... American ships, or to import many articles from the United States, and given special privileges in the West Indies, had more than doubled their imports from the mother country; the amount rising from L379,411 to L829,088. These sums are not to be regarded in their own triviality, but as harbingers of a development, which it was hoped would fill the void in the British imperial system caused by the loss of the former colonies. The West Indies showed a more gradual increase, though still ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... laid before him for comment and signature by Idiaquez or Moura, would be sometimes covered with a few awkward sentences, which it was almost impossible to read, and which, when deciphered, were apt to reveal suggestions of astounding triviality. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of his displeasure, but to go through again the tale of the wager and letter. She was moistening her dry lips as she finished, her eyes on his face wide with apprehension. But he answered amiably, half absently, as if the whole affair were a triviality: ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... I do not say you are wrong. I will consider your suggestion. Certainly it would be the straightest course. But first a complete explanation is due to the Queen. She must know all,—and if her interest can be awakened by such a triviality as her son's love- affair—" and he smiled somewhat bitterly,—"perhaps she may agree to your plan as the best way out of the difficulty. In any case"—here he extended his hand which the Professor deferentially bowed over—"I respect your honesty and plain speaking, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... province," he writes, "would seem to be the exhibition of fanciful power by the artist; not beauty or truth in the literal sense at all, but inventive affluence of unreal yet absurdly comic forms, with just a flavour of the terrible added, to give a grim dignity, and save from the triviality of caricature."[38] With the exception of The Heretic's Tragedy, Caliban upon Setebos is probably the finest piece of grotesque art in the language. Browning's Caliban, unlike Shakespeare's, has no active part to play: if he has ever seen Stephano and Trinculo, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... of recitation, and in evening hours when the home was particularly united in some glow of visitors or birthday celebration, she would be persuaded to recall some of those old songs and simple apologues, with such charm that even her husband, to whom verse was naturally an incomprehensible triviality, was visibly softened, and perhaps, deep in the sadness of his silent nature, moved to a passing realisation of a certain something kind and musical in life which ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... serious impression by the jingling of his harlequin's cap, as he himself styles it,[211] he does not succeed,—with the few exceptions just referred to,—in convincing us very deeply of the reality of his feelings. They are either trivially or extravagantly stated. Sometimes this sense of triviality is caused by the poet's excessive fondness for all sorts of diminutive expressions, giving an artificial effect, an effect of "Taendelei" to ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... Collection has it (No. 382). In this the equal delicacy of the sentiment and of the painting combine to effect a little masterpiece of Louis Quinze art. It is simple and natural, and entirely free from the besetting sins of so slight a picture triviality, affectation, empty prettiness, or simply silliness. In its way it is perfect, and for that perfection is for ever reserved the popularity which we find temporarily accorded to pictures like Frith's Dolly Varden or ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... were averted, and her bosom rose and fell too swiftly to lend colour to that mask of indifference she hurriedly put on. Yet, as I drew nigh, she was the first to speak, and the triviality of her words came as a shock to me, and for all my knowledge of woman's way caused me to doubt for a moment whether perhaps her calm were not real, ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... how much of the interest of Old London centred round its port. Here were to be heard those tales of far-sought adventure and peril which gave even to the boisterous life of Elizabethan London an air of triviality and security. Hereby came in "the variety of fashions and foreign stuffs," which Fynes Moryson, writing in Milton's childhood, compares to the stars of heaven and the sands of the sea for number. All sorts of characters, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality at the head of the present war. Not the slaughter of ten million men can make the quality of the German Kaiser other ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... more uneasy than usual. In the beginning of dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from the mass of a magistrate's mind fell too noticeably. She wondered how a man like Mr. Casaubon would support such triviality. His manners, she thought, were very dignified; the set of his iron-gray hair and his deep eye-sockets made him resemble the portrait of Locke. He had the spare form and the pale complexion which became a student; as different as possible ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... wood-wind, have the very accent of Isolda's '"Tis I, belov'd," and the solemn phrase that follows, in Tristan's death-scene. Apart from its influence on later composers, there is surely no more passionate, powerful, and moving drama in the world than "Don Giovanni." Despite the triviality of Da Ponte's book, the impetus of the music carries along the action at a tremendous speed; the moments of relief occur just when relief is necessary, and never retard the motion; the climaxes are piled up with incredible strength and mastery, and have an emotional ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... jist naething, jist a—a triviality, like; but Ah see there's a great crood frae the Oa, the day, an' jist as many Murphys an' Connors; an' Ah heerd a lot o' wild talk aboot Fenians, an' the like. They would be sayin' Pat Murphy was a Fenian; an' that Tam ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... or a tower that was meant to be ornamental. It was erected, I believe, to commemorate the reign of Abdul Hamid; and it seems perfectly adapted to its purpose, like one of Sir William Watson's sonnets on the same subject. But this object only adds a touch of triviality to the much more tremendous negative effect of the gap by the gate. That remains a parable as well as a puzzle, under all the changing skies of day and night; with the shadows that gather tinder the ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... was a "lucid paradise of air." But "only as souls we saw the folk thereunder," and our spirit was stirred within us. There is something very solemn in such a scene—something that must be experienced to be understood. The pitiful triviality, the sense of tremendous forces at work among these trivialities; the people, these crowds of people, absorbed in the interests of the moment—and Eternity so near; all this and much more presses hard upon the spirit till one understands the old ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... the veil, do not touch on this incident at all. The whole representation, it is argued, lacks the sobriety which is characteristic of the authentic miracles of the Gospels and broadly separates them from the ecclesiastical miracles, about which there is generally an air of triviality and grotesqueness. ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... motive. Already he dreamed of having women in his arms. He looked shyly at the ankles of women crossing the street, and listened eagerly when the crowd about the stove in Wildman's fell to telling smutty stories. He sank to unbelievable depths of triviality in sordidness, looking shyly into dictionaries for words that appealed to the animal lust in his queerly perverted mind and, when he came across it, lost entirely the beauty of the old Bible tale of Ruth in the suggestion of intimacy between man and woman that ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... turned out that I am a most ordinary official, a cardplayer, and have no partiality for ideas of any sort. I am a worthy representative of the rotten world from which you have run away because you were revolted with its triviality and emptiness. Recognise it and be just: don't be indignant with me, but with yourself, as it is your mistake, and ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... glorified, with a sequence of puny, spiritless imitations. Simplicity has been extolled, and we find the word interpreted in clumsiness and crudity. Delicacy of outline has been urged, and we triumph in the further accomplishments of flimsiness and hopeless triviality. ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... a step towards verisme; both, subject and music are terribly realistic, though without the last shade of triviality. The music is often of brilliant dramatic effect, {159} and the fantastic text, well matching the music, is as rich in thrilling facts as any modern Italian opera. Indeed this seems to be by far the best opera, which the ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... — N. unimportance, insignificance, nothingness, immateriality. triviality, levity, frivolity; paltriness &c. Adj.; poverty; smallness &c. 32; vanity &c. (uselessness) 645; matter of indifference &c. 866; no object. nothing, nothing to signify,, nothing worth speaking of, nothing particular, nothing to boast of, nothing to speak of; small matter, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... ill-timed and useless. But his gallant work of the coming night and morrow, when Hooker left him almost alone to resist the fierce assaults of our victorious and elated foe, was ample compensation for his subordinate share in the triviality and fatal issue of Saturday's manoeuvring. Nor can blame fall upon him in as full measure as upon Hooker; although he seems illy to have construed what was transpiring in his front, and what he reported may have seriously ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... America, so in England, a surfeit of materialism had produced a lack of high spiritual purpose in the nation at large; there was much confusion of ideas and ideals; and also much triviality, which was especially offensive when it masqueraded under some high-sounding name. An unhealthy sentimentality—the antithesis of morality—has gone hand in hand with a peculiarly sordid and repulsive materialism. The result was a soil in which ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gaunt bed, the poor walls plastered with religious prints cut from journals, even the ordinary furniture of everyday use—the little washhandstand with the common delf ewer, the chest of drawers that might have been bought for thirty shillings—lost their coarseness; their triviality disappeared, until nothing was seen or felt but this ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... longer necessary to bring them about: a gesture, a look, a remark of his unanswered, was enough to arouse the most violent scenes. Hitherto they had been restrained by the presence of others, but now it was the same whether they were alone or not. Very soon, as far as brutality of expression or the triviality of the question was concerned, he was as bad or ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... be formed in the mind". There is perhaps no word in the whole compass of English, so seldom used with any tolerable correctness; in none is the distance so immense between the frequent sublimity of the word in its proper use, and the triviality of it in its ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... feelings. That this is a part-cause is true. Doubtless very often, as Mr. Bain says, "it is the coerced form of seriousness and solemnity without the reality that gives us that stiff position from which a contact with triviality or vulgarity relieves us, to our uproarious delight." And in so far as mirth is caused by the gush of agreeable feeling that follows the cessation of mental strain, it further illustrates the general principle above set forth. But no explanation is thus afforded ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... ghostly fingers of reproach! Still Amy is engaged. To whom at the particular moment I cannot say, but I fancy to an early one who has lately become a widower. After more exact knowledge I do not care to enquire; for to confess ignorance on the subject, implying that one has treated as a triviality and has forgotten the most important detail of a matter that to her is of vital importance, is to hurt her feelings; while to angle for information is but to entangle oneself. To speak of Him as "Tom," when Tom has belonged for weeks to the dead and buried past, to ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... evident. In repudiating this Rousseau was certainly right.[350] Both the assailants and the defenders of the stage, however, commit the double error, first of supposing that the drama is always the same thing, from the Agamemnon down to the last triviality of a London theatre, and next of pitching the discussion in too high a key, as if the effect or object of a stage play in the modern era, where grave sentiment clothes itself in other forms, were substantially anything more serious than an ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... birds, and not particularly well dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk stockings, he has nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an impression of almost perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a beau. He affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a china figure of insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded everything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not be helped. He warmed into humanity in his friendships ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... very active intellectually; it is studious, empirical, inventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite openness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has gained a sense of possible depths in all directions. Under these circumstances, some triviality and great confusion in its positive achievements are not unpromising things, nor even unamiable. These are the Wanderjahre of faith; it looks smilingly at every new face, which might perhaps be that of a predestined friend; it chases after any engaging stranger; it even ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... College, Oxford, originally founded as "St. Maries' College of Winchester at Oxenford", marks a very decided epoch in the development of English architecture. His works, in an architectural style found nowhere but in England, are the outcome of a mind free from triviality, and full of common sense. His buildings are admirably suited to their purpose, and at first sight they appear to be so simple in design that it has been suggested that Wykeham cared more for the constructive than the artistic side of building. It is true ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... be deemed a compliment. It is perhaps a triviality on my part, but I feel prompted to say that I have at no time discussed your position or prospects with Mrs. Frothingham, and that I have neither offered advice on the subject nor have been requested to do so. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... "that the Peasant does, is lifted above vulgarity by ancient, and often sacred, associations." There is, indeed, hardly any business or occupation with reference to which the same might not be said. The triviality or vulgarity does not depend on what we do, but on the spirit in which it is done. Not only the regular professions, but every useful occupation in life, however humble, is honourable in itself, and may be pursued ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... cleverness in small things are quite as noticeable as the singular inconsistencies in his character, and the childish triviality of his ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... marriage was like a dream of romance to her, untrue, incredible. Then there was the terrific episode of Julian on the previous night. One would have supposed that after that the sensationalism of events would cease. But, no! The unforeseeable had now occurred, something which reduced all else to mere triviality. ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... regard himself by the more vinous and more hilarious of the old graduates who annually come back to a college to offer themselves—though this is not their conscious purpose—as an object lesson in the loud triviality peculiar and traditional to such hours of reunion. Adolescence, however, when left to itself, has other and very different hours which Mr. Tarkington shows almost no signs ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... the charms of a perfect face, a low and modulated voice and a mind that never mistook flippancy and triviality for wit, he met her everywhere on common ground, and she wondered why she had not seen the attractions of this grave, quiet young man long before! Surely such a conquest—and she was not certain yet that it was achieved—was ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... success as yet affected their boyish simplicity and the frankness of old frontier habits; they played with their new-found riches with the naive delight of children, and rehearsed their glowing future with the importance and triviality ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... old gray room dimly lighted by two tallow candles; this laughter, accompanied by the whirr of Nanon's spinning-wheel, sincere only upon the lips of Eugenie or her mother; this triviality mingled with important interests; this young girl, who, like certain birds made victims of the price put upon them, was now lured and trapped by proofs of friendship of which she was the dupe,—all these things contributed to make the scene a melancholy comedy. Is it not, moreover, ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... Chapuys' remark on the triviality of its business, more than a score of acts were passed, some limiting such abuses as the right of sanctuary, some dealing in the familiar way with social evils like the increase of beggars and vagabonds. ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... moment the beautiful and profoundly moving representations of the subject due to the Florentines and the Sienese—both sculptors and painters—south of the Alps, and to the Netherlanders north of them, during the whole of the fifteenth century, the essential triviality of the conception in the Treviso picture makes such a work as Lorenzo Lotto's pathetic Annunciation at Recanati, for all its excess of agitation, appear dignified by comparison. Titian's own ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... fool for letting her go—a boy's trick. But then the whole affair did not desperately engage him. He sat in the comfortable chair, and lit a cigarette, shielding it with his hand so that she would not see it, recognize in its triviality his detachment. A wave of weariness swept over him; the night was like a blanket on the land. Minutes passed without her return; soon he would go in search of her; he would find her ... in the dark house.... He shut his eyes for a moment, and opened them with an effort. The ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Swann in some bewilderment. "The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don't ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... asserting that the position of Addison and of Steele is necessarily the sole result of individual desert. They mark a special moment in the vital growth of language, if only by revealing the Charm of Triviality, and they stood among a crowd—Defoe, Temple, Swift, and the rest—who at various points surpassed them. A magnificent growth had preceded them. The superb and glowing weight of Bacon had become the tumultuous splendour ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... effect of a good dinner, that dwindling away of pleasant emotions; perhaps it was the very triviality of the offense for which he was thus suddenly arraigned; at any rate, he lost his temper, and he was rather formidable ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... as is shown by the noble figure of her Zenobia. This figure I saw in clay in her studio during our second season in Rome. Miss Hosmer's talk was quick, witty, and pointed; her big eyes redeemed her round, small-featured face from triviality; her warm heart glowed through all she said and did. Her studio was a contrast to the classicality of Gibson's, whose influence, though she had studied under him during her six years' residence in Rome, had affected her technique only, not her conceptions ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion rules the world. The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments, while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the present outcry against the triviality and meanness both of thought and language, which some of my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical compositions; and I acknowledge that this defect where it exists, is more dishonorable to the Writer's ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... Again, by way of climax, what will the Western world think of a country that permits a mistress to beat a slave girl to death for eating a piece of watermelon—as reported by your correspondent from Hankow? The triviality of the provocation reminds us of the divorce of a wife for offering her mother-in-law a dish of half-cooked pears. The latter, which is a classic instance, is excused on the ground of filial duty, ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... was that? But don't you see it is the triviality of the offence which makes the penance necessary. Had he knocked me over the head with a pickaxe, or burned the house down, I should have had a right to be angry. But I was angry because he wanted a horse on Sunday;— and therefore I ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... been said of the folly and triviality of all messages coming, or purporting to come, from the Unseen. I think here, as elsewhere, like clings to like, and we get very much what we deserve; or rather, to put it in a more philosophical and Emersonian way, we receive what belongs ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... English workers, "Prussian" must compare the first manifestation, the beginning of the English and French Labour movement, with the German movement which has just begun. He neglects to do this. His reasoning therefore runs upon a triviality, such as that industry in Germany is not yet so developed as in England, or that a movement in its beginnings looks different from a ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... first place," said Quinny, preparing to annex the topic, "whether the situation actually happened or not, which is in itself a mere triviality, Peters has constructed it in a masterly way, the proof of which is that he has made me listen. Observe, each person present might have taken the ring—Flanders, a broker, just come a cropper; Maude Lille, a woman on the ragged side of life in desperate means; either Mr. ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... is the case much better, if instead of waiting for the actual application of coercion, I act in obedience to authority from the hope and fear of the State's rewards and punishments. For virtue has ceased, and I am acting from self-interest. It is a triviality to distinguish, as Whig thinkers do, between matters of conscience (in which the State should not meddle) and my conduct in the civil concerns of daily life (which the State should regulate). What sort of moralist can he be, who makes no conscience of what he does ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... she was wealthy. I merely conjectured it when I discovered she looked upon fifty thousand pounds as a triviality.' ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... well of the desk, and laughed again. The sheer folly of the thing offended him, and he was ashamed of his own eager speculation, as one who pores over the high-sounding announcements in the agony column of the daily paper, and finds nothing but advertisement and triviality. He walked to the window, and stared out at the languid morning life of his quarter; the maids in slatternly print-dresses washing door-steps, the fishmonger and the butcher on their rounds, and the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... investigated Mrs. Piper had to admit that her case was full of mystery. But if one reads the reports through from beginning to end one cannot help feeling that her spirit messages are filled with nonsense, at least of triviality. Here is a specimen—and a fair specimen, too—of the kind of communication Pelham gave. He wrote out the message. It referred to a certain famous man known in the reports as Mr. Marte. Pelham is reported to have written by ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... things, when we remember that Puritanism, which means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be left over, by ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... out of the universe and accident accepted as a sufficient cause for all the majesty and glory of physical nature, then there is no crime or violence, however abominable in its circumstances and however cruel in its execution, which cannot be justified by success, and no triviality, no absurdity of Fashion which deserves a censure: more—there is no act of disinterested love and tenderness, no deed of self-sacrifice and mercy, no aspiration after beauty and excellence, for which a single reason ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... our Universities to see the subdivision of labor carried out as never before. The movement is irresistible; it brings with it exactness, exhaustive knowledge, a narrow but complete self-satisfaction, with such accompanying faults as pedantry, triviality, and the kind of partial blindness which belong to intellectual myopia. The specialist is idealized almost into sublimity in Browning's "Burial of the Grammarian." We never need fear that he will undervalue himself. To be the supreme authority on anything is a satisfaction ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... had impoverished the mind of man and starved his moral nature. The scanty, slashed, ridiculous garments of the nobles and the wealthy betray an absurd poverty of taste and weakness of intellect.[49] One of the most striking characteristics of these small minds is their triviality; they are incapable of attention; they retain nothing. No one who reads the writings of the period can fail to be struck by this ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... callous and capricious; therefore, he told himself that there was no need to take her seriously now. The thing was to get rid of her as soon as possible. He smothered the instinct that had warned him of his danger, and persuaded himself that dry things would meet the triviality of her case. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... electric flashlight on him and found his face averted; so rising and crossing to the other side of the cot, I again flashed the light to see if he seemed in any pain. What I saw unnerved me most surprisingly, considering its relative triviality. It must have been merely the association of any odd circumstance with the sinister nature of our location and mission, for surely the circumstance was not in itself frightful or unnatural. It was merely that my uncle's facial expression, disturbed no doubt by the ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... destroyed all that he found there? What sense of justice can any Queen have in her bosom who will send such a one back, to heap sin upon sin, to fasten the bonds of iniquity on the soul of my child?' Postage-stamps and postmarks and an old envelope! The triviality of the things as compared with the importance of everlasting life made her feel that they were unworthy to be even noticed. It did not occur to her that the presence of a bodkin might be ample evidence of murder. Post-marks indeed,—when her daughter's everlasting life was ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... its base, and though the throat of the pass be narrow, it has room for us to get through and up to the sunny uplands beyond. From a mountain top the country below seems level plain, and what looked like an impassable precipice has dwindled to be indistinguishable. The triviality of death, to those who look upon it from the heights of eternity, is well represented by these brief words which tell of the first breach thereby in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... would have recognized in my uncle the man who was the leader of all the fops of London. In the presence of this old friend and of the tragedy which girt him round, the veil of triviality and affectation had been rent, and I felt all my gratitude towards him deepening for the first time into affection whilst I watched his pale, anxious face, and the eager hops which shone in his eyes ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... streak of triviality in them, which you don't see in cats. They won't have fine enough characters to concentrate on the things of most weight. They will talk and think far more of trifles than of what is important. Even when they are reasonably civilized, this will be so. ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... to an examination of The Vikings, the first point which demands notice is that Ibsen has gained a surprising mastery over the arts of theatrical writing since we met with him last. There is nothing of the lyrical triviality of the verse in The Feast at Solhoug about the trenchant prose of The Vikings, and the crepuscular dimness of Lady Inger is exchanged for a perfect lucidity and directness. Whatever we may think ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... she did not feel qualified for the work, but Mrs. Bunker was most kind; she would consider her offer and let her know, and left. She had decided already. The memory of her work for Eleanor Kemp,—the humiliation and the triviality of this form of disguised charity,—had convinced her, and Eleanor Kemp was a lady and a friend and a competent person, all of which Mrs. Howard Bunker was not. "I'd scrub floors first," Milly said stoutly, and ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... His business dealings with the Carrolls had been limited to sundry spools of thread and kitchen towellings and buttons, but they were as lead in his estimate of wrong, although he had a grave, introspective expression, out of proportion to the seeming triviality of the matter in his mind. He held in one long hand a slip of paper, and eyed ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... tenderness in his nature, but the exhibition of it was repressed on principle,—a man of high character and probity, greatly esteemed by his associates. He endeavored to bring up his children in sound religious principles, and to leave no room in their lives for triviality. One of the two weekly half-holidays was required for the catechism, and the only relaxation from the three church services on Sunday was the reading of "Pilgrim's Progress." This cold and severe discipline at home would have ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... thought took hold of me with an overwhelming power—I saw the truth as I had never seen it before in my life. I saw how we live in society; and how social convention and triviality have us in such a grasp that it never even dawns upon us that the laws it dictates are not eternal and necessary! "You must be dignified, and calm, and commonplace," say social ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... I had chosen to stand between me and the world, and how much I owed him. I had not time to think a great deal, for the torture of brick-making is partly in the tact that while it wrenches the body, it joins the mind to its infinite triviality. If you think, you do not pack the mud as it must be packed, and the sun crumbles your bricks to dust. It is no task for a real man at all; even for a woman, it debases, it unmakes, ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... thunderbolt, by the height of the Waterworks Tower on Campden Hill. I don't know whether Londoners generally realise how high it looks when one comes out, in this way, almost immediately under it. For the second it seemed to me that at the foot of it even human war was a triviality. For the second I felt as if I had been drunk with some trivial orgie, and that I had been sobered by the shock of that shadow. A moment afterwards, I realised that under it was going on something more enduring than stone, and something wilder than the dizziest height—the ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... ring, the card room, and the night club, or, at any rate, that a certain number of them may find their highest happiness in knowledge and wisdom rather than in amateur theatricals and fancy-dress balls. The human mind, after all, cannot find rest in triviality, and after so long a period of the most sordid and vulgar self-indulgence it is reasonable to hope that our ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... there is a great deal of symbolism; there is, I think, too much. It is overdone at times, and becomes mechanical; it ceases to be impressive, and grazes triviality. The idea of the mystic A which the young minister finds imprinted upon his breast and eating into his flesh, in sympathy with the embroidered badge that Hester is condemned to wear, appears to me to be a case in point. This suggestion should, I think, ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... a match, and the pleasant twang of cigar-smoke greeted her nostrils. The two men seemed splendidly masculine, important, self-sufficient. The triviality of feminine atoms like herself, Rose, and Millicent, occurred to her almost as a new fact, and she was ashamed ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... There was, indeed, no lack of literature on all subjects; Kant speaks sarcastically of "the deluge of books with which our part of the world is inundated every year." But the fatal defects of the poetry then produced was triviality and the "wateriness" of its style. Yet it was during the years that Goethe spent in Leipzig that there appeared a succession of works which mark a new departure in German literature. In 1766 Herder, who was subsequently to exercise such a profound influence over Goethe, published his Fragments ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... food and medicine for the dying wife he adored. The art failure that cast him into the depths of poverty unified with marvellous intensity all the finer elements of his nature. This rare spiritual unity, this purging of all the dross of triviality as he passed through the furnace of poverty, trial, and sorrow gave eloquence to his brush and enabled him to paint as never before,—as no ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan |
