"Unimportance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... counts for everything. At first he "hates" this, and "can't see the point of" that. But by the time his training is complete he has realized that whether he hates a thing or not, sees the point of a thing or not, is a matter of the uttermost unimportance. If he is wise, he keeps his likes ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... a little sadly, as I sat at home that night; and not without some self-questioning as to my own place in the world. Most of us, I think, are a little saddened when we realise our unimportance; most of us, no doubt, would be a little shocked could we return a day or two after our death and see how merrily the world wags on! I would be missed, I knew, scarcely more than Vantine. It was not a pleasant thought, for it seemed to ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... visiphone. And again there were different levels of awareness in his mind—one consciously and defensively cynical, and one frightened at the revelation of his unimportance, and the third finding the others ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... year there was a continuation of diplomatic action against the British Government's interference with neutral commerce and with neutral mails. But, aside from the comparative unimportance of these issues beside the submarine assassinations, the Lusitania and similar episodes had stirred up so much indignation that not many Americans were seriously interested in action against England which could only work ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... only European capitals comparable with her are London, Paris, and Berlin; one cannot take account of New York, which is merely the commercial metropolis of America, with a possibility of becoming the business centre of both hemispheres. Washington is still in its nonage and of a numerical unimportance in which it must long remain almost ludicrously inferior to other capitals, not to dwell upon its want of anything like artistic, literary, scientific, and historical primacy. It is the voluntary political ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... in the present one, who regarded the Sovereign, in political life at least, as little more than a figure-head or a cipher, absolved from all responsibility, but also divested of all power, and fulfilling functions in the Constitution which are little more than mechanical. This view of the unimportance of the Monarchy will now be held by few really intelligent men. Those take but a false and narrow view of human affairs who fail to realise the part which sentiment and enthusiasm play in the government of men; and no one who knows England will ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... supreme unimportance. To-night he was to face Rupert, to state, once and for all, that he had killed Carfax, to submit Margaret to a terrible test . . . even that of no importance. All life was insignificant beside something that was about to happen; before the gaze of that ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... lady who said to her friend, "My dear, it is impossible to exaggerate the unimportance of things," had learned what it meant to drop everything that interferes, and must have been truly on her way to the concentration which should be the very central power of all life,—obedience to the ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... the same way Boyle—perhaps the greatest of our men of science between Bacon and Newton—perpetually insists on the importance of individual experiments and the comparative unimportance of what ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... Bim-bi palaver," said Sanders; "the last time that happened, if I remember rightly, I had to burn crops on the right bank of the river for twenty miles to bring the Isisi to a sense of their unimportance." ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... diplomats had least reason to complain, since they were more sought for there than they would ever be elsewhere. For young men Washington was in one way paradise, since they were few, and greatly in demand. After watching the abject unimportance of the young diplomat in London society, Adams found himself a young duke in Washington. He had ten years of youth to make up, and a ravenous appetite. Washington was the easiest society he had ever seen, and even the Bostonian became simple, good-natured, almost genial, in the softness of a Washington ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... again and had nothing to say. It seemed to him that she was frightened. He came home that day in a cold fog of miserable despair. A letter from his publishers informing him of a tenth edition was of ironical unimportance. He lay ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation, and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to explain, whether I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance, in which I have lived, both from the literary and political world. Most often it has been connected with some charge which I could not ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... been perverted by materialistic imaginations so far from their original meaning,—"This is my body which is given for you." But the date of the origin of false opinions is a matter of comparative unimportance.] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... this, the young reader may skip without disadvantage—by way of explanation of a peculiarity which has lately been much remarked as characteristic of those records of human history contemptuously called fiction, i.e., the unimportance, or ill-report, or unjust disapproval of the mother in records of this description—that it is almost impossible to maintain her due rank and character in a piece of history, which has to be kept within certain limits—and where her daughter the heroine must have the first place. To lessen ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... he announced at length in French. For intimate things, he always used that language; his English, being uncertain, was kept for matters of unimportance. 'A gentle man.' ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... decide upon a course of conduct. The air and exercise invigorated him; the peace and solitude of the prairie, the beauty of earth and sky, the unconsciousness of nature consoled him, reduced his troubles to relative unimportance, and allowed ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... are deposits from the whole course of human history. Veblen says it is a matter of habit to what particular nationality a man will become attached on arriving at years of discretion. That is true, and it is of course the whole secret of loyalty. But it is not a matter of unimportance whether a man shall become attached to any country. It is the dynamic power of loyalty that is in question, if we consider its practical value. Loyalty grows because it has a use, which is related to the most basic feelings. It is not a product ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... fine and adventurous and hopeful as they had never done before. How great was this purpose I had relinquished, this bold and subtle remaking of the English will! I had doubted so many things, and now suddenly I doubted my unimportance, doubted my right to this suicidal abandonment. Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted and favoured, who had turned aside by the way? Had I not, after all, stood for far more than I had thought; was I not filching from that dear great ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... conscious of his own unimportance, was not a little disconcerted at this injunction, which it was not in his power to fulfil by any compulsive means. He therefore went home in a very pensive mood, and after mature deliberation, resolved to expostulate with Peregrine in the most familiar terms, and endeavour to ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... till they shall have had time to frame rules of order. Their funds continue stationary, and at the level they have stood at for some years past. We hear so little of the parliaments for some time past, that one is hardly sensible of their existence. This unimportance is probably the forerunner of their total re-modification by the nation. The article of legislation is the only interesting one on which the court has not explicitly declared itself to the nation. The Duke d'Orleans has given instructions ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... fears lest the spirit of heresy which, alas! is abroad in our fair city, shall manifest itself in such disturbances as may force us to abandon these religious exercises in future. I need not point out the serious nature of these demonstrations. Nor need I suggest that their relative unimportance last year was due solely to lack of strong leadership. Already our soldiers begin to refuse to kneel during the Mass. The Holy Church is not yet called upon to display her weapons. But who shall say to what measures she may not be forced when an able and fearless leader shall arise among the heretics? ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... place where he has gone. Her genius has done with him, but her ghost, like some malign and awful destiny, pursues him. No sooner does he sink back quiet in his grave than somebody unearths him. Why cannot he be allowed to rest, once for all, in his amiable unimportance? He became, poor man, important only by the use that Charlotte's genius made of him. It seized him as it would have seized on any other interesting material that came its way. Without him we might have had another Rochester, and we should not have had any Paul Emanuel, which ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... antipopery crusading. While Jacobite intrigues or wars with France were in progress it was easy for demagogues to cast upon the Catholics the suspicion of disloyalty and of complicity with the public enemy. The numerical unimportance of the Catholics of Maryland was insufficient to guard them from such suspicions; for it had soon become obvious that the colony of the Catholic lord was to be anything but a Catholic colony. The Jesuit mission had languished; the progress ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... exceptional cases, as it is but rarely that so large a number of constituents is absent, and it is much more frequent to find the deficiency restricted to one or two substances. They are illustrations of barrenness dependent on different circumstances. The first shows the unimportance of the organic matters of the soil, which are here unusually abundant, without in any way counteracting the infertility dependent on the absence of the other constituents. The second is that of a nearly pure sand; and the third, though ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... she was of considerable means, had not altered the old house, had not made it pretty as her friends' houses and rooms were pretty; but to-day he no longer wondered at this. His knowledge of the fleetingness of life, and of the unimportance of all he had once thought so important, ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... very modern poets, they are even worse than the Victorians. Masefield, for instance, is jejuneness enthroned. How can you expect the bulk of sane mankind to read poetry, when they repeatedly encounter this vacuity, this unimportance of thought and emotion, presented with all the pomp and circumstance of ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici |
