"Inconsequential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me about Mr. Blake, anyway? I don't want to hear a lot of inconsequential gossip. I am worried ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... they talked of trite and inconsequential things. It was very necessary that they become firmly grounded on their new footing of genuine friendship before departing into personalities; and so, for two days, they avoided any but the ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... children she has not wanted. Only the married woman who has been constantly loved by the most understanding and considerate of husbands has escaped these horrors. Besides the wrongs done to women in marriage, those involved in promiscuity, infidelities and rapes become inconsequential in nature and ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... inconsequential," said Miss Blair. "You cannot start upon a train of sequences in this world unless you go on to the bitter end. Besides, after all, why do you object to lying? I suppose you were brought up to tell the truth, and so was I, and I really think ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of the annual Fall Review seemed incredible to Roger Brevard. He was indifferent to the activities of the Common; but when he heard that the Nautilus was sailing in the middle of the afternoon he left his inconsequential affairs for Phillips' Wharf. ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Toomey saw herself as Kate saw her. Stripped of the virtues in which the girl had clothed her, she stood forth a scheming, inconsequential little coward in a weak ineffectual rack of a body—not strong enough to be vicious, without the courage to be dangerous. Thin-lipped, neutral-tinted, flat of chest and scrawny, without a womanly charm save the fragility ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... could withstand. It is easy to inveigh against the notion frivolous fribbles and trumpery trappings receive more attention than the fine music which ought to be recognized as the soul of the work, the vital spark which irradiates an inconsequential material body; but human nature has not yet freed itself sufficiently from gross clogs to attain ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... good-looking and more intelligent than you would believe," Louise rejoined carelessly. She had put Lawford Tapp aside as inconsequential. ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... years old, Brangwen sent her to the dames' school in Cossethay. There she went, flipping and dancing in her inconsequential fashion, doing very much as she liked, disconcerting old Miss Coates by her indifference to respectability and by her lack of reverence. Anna only laughed at Miss Coates, liked her, and patronized ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... gravity of any particular mineral has a considerable range, and a medium has been taken. The possible error is inconsequential for the purpose of ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... and the opening of the season; dogs and the training of dogs; and why some go gun-shy and why some ace blinkers. From sport and its justification, they became inconsequential; and she was beginning to enjoy the freshness of their chance acquaintance, his nice attitude toward things, his irrelevancy, ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... committed soon enough to have enabled her murderers to throw the body into the river before midnight; it is folly, we say, to suppose all this, and to suppose at the same time, (as we are resolved to suppose,) that the body was not thrown in until after midnight'—a sentence sufficiently inconsequential in itself, but not so utterly preposterous as ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... his time, has, in his Recollections, placed on opposite pages—all the more striking to me because unintentional—illuminating testimony to the difference between the Irish and the British temperament. And this testimony supports the point I am trying to make—that the "typical" logicless, inconsequential Irish mind, so winsome and so exasperating, is not the kind of brain ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... just shows how small a matter makes one famous. A few months ago I was an humble, inconsequential country doctor. My greatest delight and ambition at that time was to find the indicated remedy, and see the sick recover. And I declare to you now, that while I enjoy this racing through the skies, and the roar and acclamation ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... back in his chair, with his slow smile drawled in an inconsequential way: "I reckon, now that the financial obsequies of Mr. Jefferson Worth has been indefinitely postponed owin' to the corpse refusin' to perform, that Company bunch will wear mournin' because said funeral ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... even the rudiments of the trade. He didn't have any more idea of news values than a rabbit. He had the most amazing faculty for overlooking what was vital in the news, but he could always be depended upon to pick out some trivial and inconsequential detail and dress it up with about half a yard of old-point lace adjectives. He never by any chance used a short word if he could dig up a long, hard one, and he never seemed to be able to start a story without a quotation from one of the poets. It ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... This medley of inconsequential conversation and chatter continued for fully half an hour without one word being spoken on the all-important subject they had presumably been brought together to arrange. They touched on everything ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... a great babbling, half drunken. On the one hand the author fills a long and gloomy chapter with the story of the Borgias, apparently under the impression that it is news, and on the other hand he enters into intimate and inconsequential confidences about all the persons he meets en route, sparing neither the innocent nor the obscure. The children of his English host at Bridgely Level strike him as fantastic little creatures, even as a bit uncanny—and he duly sets it down. He meets an Englishman on a French train ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... betters were ushered in as the brats of beggars. So, too, we find men possessing clear judicial minds defending with all the fervor of fifteenth century fanatics, not the Christian faith per se, but some special interpretation thereof; not the philosophy of religion, but the inconsequential theorems of some sacerdotal "reformer" who has added to the world's discord by founding a new "faith." These various religious divisions have become little more than rival commercial establishments, each peddling its own peculiar brand of saving grace—warranted the only genuine—and ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... (1) sequel, sequence, consequence, subsequent, consecutive, execute, prosecute, persecute, sue, ensue, suitor, suitable, pursuit, rescue, second; (2) obsequies, obsequious, sequester, inconsequential, non sequitur, executor, suite. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... overcome them until life rings true and until all our acts and thoughts become the solid and inevitable expression of a healthy growing regard for the best in life, a call to right living that is no mean dictum of policy, but which is renewed every morning as the sun comes out of the sea. However inconsequential the habit of indecision may seem, it is really one of the most disabling of bad habits. Its continuance contributes largely to the sum of nervous exhaustion. Whatever its origin, whether it stands in the relation of cause or effect, it is an indulgence that insidiously ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... in view of the very apparent minuteness of the quantity of this compound present in one cup of coffee, together with the fact that it is not cumulative in its physiological action, the importance of its toxic properties becomes very inconsequential to even the most profuse ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... rosy light on the great glossy hedges and clipped foliage of the Boboli Gardens; far to the left the paved height of the Piazzale Michelangelo rose above the somber sweep of roofs and bridges; an aged bell rang harshly and mingled with the inconsequential clatter on the Lungarno. An overwhelming sense of the mystery of being stabbed, sharp as a knife, at her heart; a choking longing possessed her to experience all—all the wonders ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... interested party in her ruin; the man she had left, and Cy James, who was full of cowardly passion for her, and Patty Cannon, who, in her present frame of mind, would gloat to see Hulda's virtue sacrificed as something inconsequential and ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... trusted thoroughly and followed blindly by other men, ay, and by women too; for, after all, it is not the lady's man who is appreciated by true women, but the man's man. To such as these the best sort of women delight to do reverence. Add to this Brooke's abrupt manner, rather harsh voice, inconsequential talk, habit of saying one thing while thinking of something totally different, love of drollery, and dry, short laugh, and then you have Brooke complete, who is here described simply because there has ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... little while, glowering at the colonel. It enraged him to be blocked in that manner by a small and inconsequential man. This he felt Colonel Landcraft to be, measured against his own strength and importance in that country. Himself and the other two big cattlemen in that section of the state lorded it over an area greater than two or three of the old states where the slipping ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... a piece of silk-woven paper, she sent them to Jasmine by her faithful attendant. On looking over the paper, Jasmine said, smiling, "What a clever young lady your mistress must be! These lines, though somewhat inconsequential, are incomparable." ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... institution of practical psychology from whence there can be graduated fit and proper people whose efforts would be in the direction of the subconscious mental mechanism of the child or even the adult," this hypnotist proceeds: "Between the academician, whose specialty is an inconsequential cobweb, the medical man who has got it into his head that he is the logical foster-father for psychonomical matters, and the blatant 'professor' who deals with monkey tricks on a few somnambules on the music-hall stage, you are allowing to go unrecognized one of the ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... didn't like me any more than I liked him. He thinks I'm frivolous and inconsequential, and totally unfitted for this position of trust. I dare say Jervis has had a letter from him by now ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... Sage and Carnegie Foundations, which we rightly call munificent. Reading the index of private schools and colleges is important for their children and youth, but still more important for the community upon which unbridled passion, inability to work or to spend properly, inconsequential thinking, mediaeval ideals of caste, etc., can inflict greater injuries than can ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... of indifferent subjects during the meal, though once or twice it seemed to Westray that the organist gave inconsequential replies, as though he were thinking of something else. This was no doubt the case, for, after they had settled before the fire, and the lambent blue flames of the driftwood had been properly admired, Mr Sharnall ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... clamoring for action, and E.H.Q. was, instead, droning on through a mass of inconsequential detail, now while public sentiment was crystallizing, or could be crystallized into placing human welfare over science ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... for convenience sake, the fact of my social inferiority. Centuries of army tradition demanded it; and I discovered that it is absolutely futile for one inconsequential American to rebel against the unshakable fortress of English tradition. Nearly all of my comrades were used to clear-cut class distinctions in civilian life. It made little difference to them that some of our officers were recruits as raw as were we ourselves. They had money enough and ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... disciplinary aim. On the other hand, the controlling aim in any subject may be to develop the power to reason about natural phenomena, the power to observe, and the power to discriminate between vital and inconsequential details. If this be the aim, the assignment of subject matter must be reduced, the phenomena studied must be submitted in the forms of problems, first-hand observations must be made, and students must be led to see the errors in their observations ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... He employed an expert in each line of feminine endeavor, upon the distinct understanding that the most scrupulous attention should be given to her correspondence: that every letter, no matter how inconsequential, should be answered quickly, fully, and courteously, with the questioner always encouraged to come again if any problem of whatever nature came to her. He told his editors that ignorance on any question was a misfortune, not a crime; and he wished their ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... the rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures—an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts. ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... happiness. "There is no happiness," he said, "without participation; no participation without affection. There is, indeed, in affection a charm that leaves all things behind it, and renders even every calamity that does not interfere with it inconsequential and there is no difficulty, no toil, no labour, no exertion, that will not be endured where there is a ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... the father, but in the dreamy, inconsequential way of one whose thoughts were elsewhere. "I suppose I shall have to ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... conversations of church members often are pitiful in their concern for the trivial affairs of the local church and institution, about its building and organizations, its suppers and bazaars. What a pathetic and inconsequential way of serving Christ! He needs, instead, men and women who are out on the frontiers of modern life, representing His message to ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... backward, that evening seemed to Scott to stand out as a dream, unforeseen, yet not inconsequential. Nothing that had gone before appeared to him to be able to explain it. It just was, a fact without any planning or volition on his part. He had known Catia from his little boyhood, had been used to her, had counted on her in a sense; but always he had held ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... writer of 'slams.' He is as debonair and inconsequential as a young Hermes to whom only the serious lessons of life can teach sympathy and true insight, if ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... of the Council (says Knight) are elected by the same class as the aldermen, but in very varying and—in comparison with the size and importance of the wards—inconsequential numbers. Bassishaw and Lime Street Wards have the smallest representation—four members—and those of Farringdon Within and Without the largest—namely, sixteen and seventeen. The entire number of the Council is 240. Their ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... she possessed to the task of supporting her weakened limbs; but she managed it, with now and then a rest, leaning against a tree or a rock. Tommy had found her tongue again, to keep up a running fire of inconsequential chatter that served its purpose well, assisting Harriet in keeping her ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... thousand dollars. That, however, is not the greatest risk that I have in mind. On board this craft are five people without whom it would be rather hopeless for anyone to go on building the Pollard type of boat. Therefore, besides risking a valuable craft and our own rather inconsequential lives, we go further and put the United States Navy in danger of having only a couple of our boats. Now, the fact is, we want the Navy to have three or four dozen of our submarine craft, for we ourselves believe implicitly in the great worth ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... more desirable as a companion because he has died than he was before he died. And the objection to any of the ordinary seance phenomena is, that whatever manifestations are genuine proceed very largely, if not entirely, from this strata of the crude and inconsequential, if not the vicious, with whom the high-minded man or woman would not have associated in life, and after death their presence would be quite as much to be deplored. Granted all these exceptions. One may sweep them off and ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... now and then a little inconsequential in his generosity," Carroll rejoined. "I didn't know he was interested in that kind of thing; but as I don't like to be outdone by my partner, I'll subscribe the same. By the way, why do you people reckon ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... to the call of ROMANCE. And occasionally, in the twilight hour between afternoon study and the dressing bell, as they gathered in the window-seat with faces to the western sky, the talk would turn to the future—particularly when Rosalie Patton was of the group. Pretty, dainty, inconsequential little Rosalie was preeminently fashioned for romance; it clung to her golden hair and looked from her eyes. She might be extremely hazy as to the difference between participles and supines, she might hesitate on her definition of a parallelopiped, but when the subject under discussion ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... for one and the same man to fluctuate between the two attitudes, to alternate between them—possible, though inconsistent. The child, or even that larger child, the man, may beg and scold, almost in the same breath. The savage, as is well known, will treat his fetish in the same inconsequential way. That it is inconsequential is a fact; but it is a fact which, if learned, is but very slowly learned. The process by which it is learned is part of the evolution of religion; and it is a process in the course of which the ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... the incidents converge to one main incident will avoid tiresome enumerations of inconsequential events, which frequently fill the compositions of young pupils. Such essays generally start with "a bright, clear morning," and "a party of four of us." After recounting a dozen events of no consequence whatever, "we came home to a late ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... I made any remark in reply. If I did, it must have been inconsequential in the extreme, for my impression is of a long, heart-aching silence, during which I stared at my companion, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... the driver, would make four. He was still well guarded! The car itself was a closed car—not hooded, the sense of touch told him—therefore a limousine of some description. These facts, in a sense inconsequential, were absorbed subconsciously; and then Jimmie Dale's brain, remorselessly active, in spite of the pain from his throbbing head, was at ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... throat. Johnny quickly drowned the thought in a flood of inconsequential nonsense, a trick he had learned as a green pilot. He might sleep though, if sleep were a possible thing in this cold emptiness. No one, to his recollection, had ever done so outside a ship or station—the space psychology types would ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... be the very fewest needed, seeing the distance of their operations from home; while Great Britain, relying wholly on her navy for the integrity of her empire, equally cannot afford the hostility of a nation having twenty battleships, and with whom her points of difference are as inconsequential to her as they ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... is called, is so retrenched or abbreviated in many parts, as to be almost throughout inconsequential, and often so obscured by the unskilful abridgement of Purchas as to be nearly unintelligible. We have not therefore deemed it necessary or proper to insert it in our Collection, as not tending to any useful purpose, nor containing any valuable or even amusing information. Almost the only circumstance ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... cause for good spirits, the fact that Elizabeth Berry was to ride with him to the hall that evening. It was a very slight inconsequential reason surely, but somehow he found it sufficient. She was going with him merely because he and the Foam Flake and the buggy furnished the most convenient method of transportation for her and her packages, but she was going—and she was not going with George Kent. There was a certain wicked pleasure ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... as one may prefer; but not a few French and Russian writers have failed to accomplish in two volumes what Crane achieved in two hundred pages. In the same category is "George's Mother," a triumph of inconsequential detail piling up with a cumulative effect ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... confuse a perverted determinism of ends with a scientific determinism of means. And only the former determinism is truly fatalistic. This confusion is to be found equally central in Henry Oldenburg's inconsequential letters to Spinoza and in Bernard Shaw's shamelessly silly Preface to Back to Methuselah. Fundamental confusions remain ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... in the Cabinet and his well-known views on this question were strong reasons for watchful and careful prevision. It was obvious to Mr. Wilson from the outset that insurmountable difficulties lay in his path, but he brushed them aside as if they were inconsequential. ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... people, to ride to-day's new interest to death and put off yesterday's till another time, is nature itself. He ran up stairs and wrote glowingly, enthusiastically, to his mother about the hogs and the corn, the banks and the eye-water—and added a few inconsequential millions to each project. And he said that people little dreamed what a man Col. Sellers was, and that the world would open its eyes when it found out. And ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... A change, indeed!" he exclaims sadly. It is not alone in the features. The new man is growing meager. He is an inconsequential person. He is a character to be kept waiting in an ante-room while strutting personages walk into the ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... small middle nations were inconsequential. They simply adapted their politics or faith to the nation that for the time had them under its heel. What semi-original religion they possessed was an amalgamation of the religions of other nations, and their gods of ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... that at eight in the evening a calm, smooth, brilliant, affable man sat at Vuyning's right hand during dinner. And when the ones who pass their lives in city streets spoke of skyscrapers or of the little Czar on his far, frozen throne, or of insignificant fish from inconsequential streams, this big, deep-chested man, faultlessly clothed, and eyed like an Emperor, disposed of their Lilliputian chatter with a wink of ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... an inferior race. Indeed, he would have much preferred it should die out altogether and make room for better material. The truth was that his prolonged residence abroad had made the questions of American politics exceedingly vague and inconsequential. He believed them to be ephemeral to the last degree— in the main, mere struggles of parties and partisans for power and spoils; and for their hopes, schemes, and stratagems to gain temporary ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... few labored and inconsequential sentences, which seemed like crude ore instead of the molten, burning metal of thought left to cool in graceful molds, he threw aside ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... her kindness in turning back, he continued his ramblings, and she gathered the impression that he was a dull, inconsequential talker, that he considered young couples "kittle cattle," that artists were always absorbed in their work, that females had a habit of needless worrying, and that commuting in winter was distracting to a ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... the glass he held out to him. The glances of the company told him Zouche was 'on,' and that it was no good trying to stem the flow of his ideas, or check the inconsequential nature of his speech. Lotys had moved her chair a little back from the table, and with both arms encircling the child, Pequita, was talking to her in low and ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... of the turmoil that was fast rising in his, it was not outwardly manifested by any sign whatever. For that matter, MacRae knew that he himself was placid enough on the surface. Nor did he feel the urge of inconsequential speech. There was no embarrassment in that mutual silence, only the tug of a compelling desire to take her in his ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... through an adjoining window. And what did I see there?" Her eye turned on Frederick. His right hand had stolen toward his left, but it paused under her look and remained motionless. "Only an old man sitting at a table and—" Why did she pause, and why did she cover up that pause with a wholly inconsequential sentence? Perhaps Frederick could have told, Frederick, whose hand had now fallen at his side. But Frederick volunteered nothing, and no one, not even Sweetwater, guessed all that lay beyond that AND which was left hovering in the air ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... myself in a position to feel this, just this and no more, a sufficiently fortunate event ... but I must needs get up, or imitate, or ... what is it you fancy I do? ... an utterly distinct, unnecessary, inconsequential regard for you, which should, when it got too hard for shamming at the week's end,—should simply spoil, in its explosion and departure, all the real and sufficing elements of an honest life-long attachment and affections! that I should ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... not recall the conversation, but it was one of those inconsequential talks that Bohemians consider so brilliant and everybody else so vapid. As we skimmed from one subject to another, treating the big facts of life as if they were mere incidents and the little as if they overshadowed all else, I could see that Craig, who had a faculty of ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... the proverb that 'a known evil is preferable to an unknown good.' If I should find myself in China and get caught in such a difficulty, I would invoke the obscurest saint in the calendar before Confucius or Buddha. Whether this is due to the manifest superiority of Catholicism or to the inconsequential and illogical inconsistency in the brains of the yellow race, a profound study of anthropology alone will be able ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... favorable conditions has its limitations. But to-day—even though the rain had further interfered with his arrangements by making it necessary to cancel the trip he had planned for Marjory and Peter to Cannes—the weather was an inconsequential incident. It did not matter greatly to him whether it ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... make for ambition, for right living, for honor and position, but how pitifully small and inconsequential besides the mighty tomes which, circling the globe, comprise the lexicon of love. Love—the symbol and sequel of birth, the solace of death—the essence of divinity! Frozen indeed is the heart which has ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... time that the rookies had been detailed to guard duty since joining their regiment. No matter to what inconsequential posts they might be assigned both were full of determination to ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... laughter, the parting words, both grave and gay, which were spoken by those who had been her companions during the long journey, fell on ears which heard, but transmitted them to her mind vaguely, and her answers were inconsequential, so much so, that more than one friend regarded her with troubled surprise and whispered to another that Rose was either not well, or was dazed with happiness. And when Dorothy ventured to hint at the latter alternative, the girl acknowledged it with ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... chef busily at work, now, cleaning up. As Kennedy asked him a few inconsequential questions, his eye caught a row of books on a shelf. It was a most complete library of the culinary arts. Craig selected one and turned the pages over rapidly. Then he came back to the frontispiece, which showed a model dinner- table set for a number of guests. ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... into dinner, and this repast showed me that some of his curiosity is culinary. I observed, by the way, that for a victim of neuralgia, dyspepsia, and a thousand other ills, Mr. Sloane plies a most inconsequential knife and fork. Sauces and spices and condiments seem to be the chief of his diet. After dinner he dismissed us, in consideration of my natural desire to see my friend in private. Theodore has capital quarters—a ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... the best of his remembrance he had never but once seen this before.[1091] During the next reign the custom was more common, but was looked upon as a decided mark of High Churchmanship. There is an expressive, and amusingly inconsequential 'though' in the following note from Thoresby's Diary for June 17, 1722: 'Mr. Rhodes preached well (though in his surplice).'[1092] In villages, however, it was very frequently worn, not so much from any idea of its propriety as what Pasquin in the 'Tatler' is made to call 'the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... this utterly illogical, unreasonable, inconsequential character that gives the pursuit of the buttercup its charm. There is a pleasure in this irregular warfare, with its razzias and dashes and repulses and successes and skirmishes and flights, which we cannot get out of the regular operations of the sap and ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... over thirty. A dapper, exquisite little man. He was distraught at the sight of this tearful damsel and, very naturally attributed her distress to unpreparedness. Petty was a pretty, inconsequential little creature born to play upon the feelings of one man or another. It did not much matter who he happened to be so long as he could satisfy the sentimental element in her makeup, ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... was inconstant in my choice, I believe he must often have awaited me in vain. But often enough, he caught me; often enough, from some place of ambush by the roadside, he would spring suddenly forth in the regulation attitude, and launching at once into his inconsequential talk, fall into step with me upon my farther course. "A fine morning, sir, though perhaps a trifle inclining to rain. I hope I see you well, sir. Why, no, sir, I don't feel as hearty myself as I could wish, but I am keeping about my ordinary. I ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... revealed her as plainly as though he had known her all her days. She comprehended none of life's big problems; the relations of men to one another had not compelled her attention; the fine, deep impulses of sympathy had not touched her. She was selfish, self-centered, light, inconsequential—a woman who danced from under the burdens of life and laughed at those who were forced to bear them ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson of the curtain,—watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with a kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I do not see how any American can justify—legally, or logically, or morally—a discrimination in the expenditure of those funds as among our citizens. All are taxed to provide these funds. If there is any benefit to be derived from them, I think they must all share, regardless of such inconsequential factors ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... "loafer." She wandered around the streets of Dorfield in a seemingly aimless manner, shopped at the stores without buying, visited the houses of all sorts of people, on all sorts of gossipy errands, interviewed lawyers, bankers and others in an inconsequential way that amused some and annoyed others, and conducted herself so singularly that even Mary Louise ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... and determined of purpose, could not but profit by any confusion. He was always in a hurry—that is, he seemed to be. In this also there was deliberation. It does not follow because a man is in a hurry that he is an important and busy person; no more does it follow that a man is an inconsequential procrastinator if he is leisurely and dilatory. The significance of action lies in intent. Some men can best gain their ends by creating an impression that they are extremely lazy, others by creating the impression that they are exceedingly ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... one experience I had while touring through what we had learned to call the Dachshund District. Our route led us alongside a most inconsequential-looking little river. Its contents seemed a trifle too liquid for mud and a trifle too solid for water. On the nearer bank was a small village populated by short people and long dogs. Out in midstream, making poor headway ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... be the use of hunting for any more information regarding such an inconsequential individual as one Walker Farr? He wondered why this crank had impressed Colonel Symonds Dodd sufficiently to stir up all this trouble for himself, Peter Briggs. The fellow had come from somewhere—nobody in Marion seemed to know. He had been discharged from the employment of the Consolidated. ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... of questions, many of them intrinsically inconsequential yet important to the exile, had to be put by the officer and answered by the author. Finally came one which Stuart ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... gracious!" he exclaimed. "Dat suttinly am a most inconsequential mannah in which to project a transmigatory object ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... give a new enthusiasm and vitality to our better natures. The essential thing in such cases is to look out for the first tests, and not allow a single exception to the new resolutions. A slight lapse, that seems inconsequential, may serve to check the new momentum; as La Rochefoucauld says, "It is far easier to extinguish a first desire than to satisfy all those ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... horror and revealed itself the fair prize and ultimate reward of mankind, impartially awaiting the winners and losers in life. And the aged man pursued it for a year with patient resolution, undiverted by the inconsequential parade of ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... gaily satiric, so inconsequential, that he allowed a wondering, uncertain smile to banish the trouble from his eyes as he leaned back in the chair and studied the vivid, excited face of the girl who had created havoc with his senses. She was dressed as he had seen her on board the ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... mind, I doubt not but that I should achieve the same results as if I had started upon my journey with a dream. If this be true, and I firmly believe that it is, in the case of that universally used and apparently inconsequential word "the," to which the normal person can be expected to have such a large number of associations, of varying degrees of intimacy or remoteness, how much truer is it when we have such a definite mental fact or mental state as a dream ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... he was, with red face and black hair which seemed to scramble in all directions at once, and with a mustache which appeared to scamper in even more directions than his hair. Fairchild was a large man; suddenly he felt himself puny and inconsequential as the mastodonic thing before him swooped forward, spread wide the big arms and then caught him tight in them, causing the breath to puff over his lips like the exhaust of ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... his country must be honourable and zealous, he must develop the underlying virtues in private life. He must strengthen the individual character, and to do this he must deal with many things seemingly remote and inconsequential from a national point of view. Everything that crosses a man's path in his day's round of little or great moment requires of him an attitude towards it, and the conscious or unconscious shaping of his attitude is ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... writ of replevin? This whimsical view of the case only exasperated him the more as it presented the utter hopelessness of approaching her—of ever seeing her again—and, when the dogs came chasing an utterly inconsequential and useless butterfly in his direction, he pelted them with stones until they yelped. Hang the dogs, anyhow. It was ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... uncertain, and inconsequential the vital order seems in our own solar system—a mere incident or by-product in its cosmic evolution! Astronomy sounds the depths of space, and sees only mechanical and chemical forces at work there. It is almost certain that only a small fraction of the planetary surfaces is ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... President, I ask you! Here were eight rational beings, all standing at the threshold of life, all at a most impressionable age, who valued the chance to acquire such minor and inconsequential chattels as kid gloves above a period of pleasurable instruction in a magnificent treasure trove of the Old Masters. In my then spent condition the admission, so frankly vouchsafed, left me well-nigh ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... beauty. Before long I have a distinct impression of her. Sometimes, as with a woman, this first impression has to be revised; sometimes not. Sometimes, on acquaintance, a single feature, or trait, becomes so important in my eyes that all else seems inconsequential. A noble spirit may cover physical defects; beauty may seem to compensate for weaknesses of character. The spell of a beautiful city which is bad resembles the spell of such a city's ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... his hero, when he talks of his private virtues. His subjects are commonly such as require no great depth of thought or energy of expression. His Fables are generally stale, and therefore excite no curiosity. Of his favourite, "The Two Springs," the fiction is unnatural, and the moral inconsequential. In his Tales there is too much coarseness, with too little care of language, and not sufficient rapidity of narration. His great work is his Chase, which he undertook in his maturer age, when his ear was improved ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... his answer, Alaire was only too glad to give up the wheel, for her nerves were indeed unsteady and she was grateful for an opportunity to think out the best course to pursue in this unexpected difficulty. Later, as she listened to Law's inconsequential talk with Dolores and Jose, and watched the way he handled the car, she marveled at his composure. She wondered if this man could ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... the time when the consumers' leagues have been joined by the majority of the whole working class. Can anybody talk seriously of the working class turning its attention to a means which gives it no aid whatever as a class, and furnishes its individual members this inconsequential relief only until the time when the class as such has completely, or to a large extent, made use of it? If the German working class is willing to enter upon such a treadmill round, the time before the real improvement of its ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... events! Tragedies swing on such inconsequential hinges. It is so exasperating to look back over the path of a calamity and see how easily it might have been averted! If one man in the little town of Lawrence a generation ago had eaten two pieces ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... to see Sherlock Holmes impatient under this rambling and inconsequential narrative, but, on the contrary, he had listened with ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... so injured by the inconsequential nature of this charge, that it gave me courage to ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... is the inner camarilla, working for a speedy restoration of the monarchy, that is responsible for the certainly uncharacteristic reticence of Amerongen. Mr. TALBOT also interviewed HINDENBERG, whom he found a "broken-down, inconsequential, garrulous example of senility" LUDENDORFF, who was very stiff and proud and rude; and the fiancee of the man who sank the Lusitania. His general idea of Germany is summed up in the remark of Mr. MANDELBAUM, of New York: "All this talk about Fritz being down and out is all bunk!" Germany ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... Peep O'Day's direction in all the unremarked and unremarkable days of his life put together were focused upon him. Persons who theretofore had regarded his existence—if indeed they gave it a thought—as one of the utterly trivial and inconsequential incidents of the cosmic scheme, were moved to speak to him, to clasp his hand, and, in numerous instances, to express a hearty satisfaction over his altered circumstances. To all these, whether they were moved by mere ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... four weeks in this gipsy fashion, mayhap getting a peep at a moose, a wolf, or even a bear (to say nothing of such inconsequential fry as ermine, mink, beaver, and otter), the family arrive at their ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... found, as you would find if you had left youth behind and could see yourself in your own ink, that the first tracery of any controlling factor in your life was faint and inconsequential to you at the time, without presage of its importance until you saw other lines, also faint and inconsequential in their beginnings, drawing in toward it to ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... just succeeded in establishing to her own satisfaction the probability that her sponsor had been, if not active in, at least acquainted with the business of the signals—reasoning shrewdly upon that lady's high-handed treatment of Sally's insinuation as inconsequential—when Mr. Trego ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... fragments apparently. It goes backwards and forwards, up and down, in and out in a wumbled muddle, just anyhow, as it were. The fragments seem out of their proper place, the first ones often last, and vice versa. It seems inconsequential, because we only see the scraps that break through from below, from the true inner, deeper life that flows on steadily and dramatically out of sight. That's what he means by "out of the body" and "sleep" and "dreaming." ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... than Hick Scorner, shows no improvement in plot. Nor, perhaps, ought we to expect that it should. An Interlude, as its name implies, was originally only a kind of stop-gap, an entree of light entertainment between other events; and what so welcome for this purpose as the inconsequential dialogue, by-play, and mutual trickery of sundry 'lewd fellows of the baser sort'? When it extended its sphere from the castle banqueting-hall to the street or inn-yard no greater excellence was expected from ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... ramblingly, as usual. Yep, in a new Archer Seven, you could undo a few clamps, pull a foot up out of a boot, and actually change your socks... Inconsequential nonsense like that. He ended by telling her not to worry about any knicknacks he might send—that they came easy, out here. He microposted the letter, and mailed a square of soft glass-silk of ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... trifle sleepy, dreamily watching the fireflies, the ceaseless noise of the creek in her ears, inconsequential thoughts flitted through her brain—the vague, aimless, guiltless thoughts of a young ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... inconsequential, unsatisfactory action which ensued is as difficult to describe as it must have been to direct. The Boer front covered some seven or eight miles, with kopjes, like chains of fortresses, between. They formed a huge semicircle of which our advance ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Kennedy credit for a tactfulness that I didn't know the old fellow possessed. He carried through the preliminary questions very well for a pseudo-doctor, appealing to me as his assistant on inconsequential things that enabled me to "save my face" perfectly. When he came to the critical moment of opening the black bag, he made a very appropriate and easy remark about not having brought any sharp shiny instruments or ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... pratest, 'tis plain that they have willed on the very outset to inculcate this truth on the mind of every man,—no barren and inconsequential dogma, but an effectual, ever influencing and productive rule of life,—that he is born a debtor, lives a debtor—aye, friend, and when thou diest, will not some judicious bystander,—no recreant as thou to the bonds of nature, but a good borrower and true—remark, as did his grandsire ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Stratton; "but I found out all I wanted to know, nevertheless. You see, I shall have to ask what appears to be a lot of rambling, inconsequential questions because you can never tell in a case like this when you may get the key ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... that and the other thing, all inconsequential, and Helen had to admit that Sanchia had her charm, that she was vivacious and clever and pretty. Helen contented herself for the most part with a quiet 'Yes' or 'No,' and sat back and made her judgments. In the first ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... left the speaker. Through the other's inconsequential talk and apparently careless acceptance of the fact of arrest the engineer had noted the tense ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... appearance, or, if a novice at his trade, is hesitating in his replies, the pathological liar has a cheerful, open, free, enthusiastic, charming appearance, because he believes in his stories and wishes their reality. The inconsequential way in which such persons go to work is to be explained by the fact that consciousness of the real situation is partly clouded in their minds. In any special act it is impossible to say whether the consciousness ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... day Scattergood busied himself in searching out old friends and neighbors of the Newtons. Nothing seemed to interest him which happened later than eight years before, but no event of that period was too slight or inconsequential to receive his attention and to be filed away in his shrewd old brain. He was looking for the answer to a question, and the answer was piled under the rubbish of eight years of human activities—a hopeless quest to ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... Sir, could you suppose brought me hither? However, I by no means purpose any discussion. I have only a few words more to say to this gentlewoman, and as my time is not wholly inconsequential, I should not be sorry to have an ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... Well, certainly, at that age one loves to think of life as being implacable. But you will soon discover that she is merely inconsequential, and that none of her antics are of lasting importance; and you will learn to smile a deal more often than ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... and early eighties, and some who are not quite forgotten, such as the two Edgars, Fawcett and Saltus, and the days when every visiting Englishman, no matter what he might have done in real life, in fiction had to stay, while in New York, at the Brevoort House. All sorts of inconsequential novels flit through the mind in recalling that bygone period. There was a gentleman whose atrociously written, but marvellously constructed "thrillers" were to be found in every deck chair at the noon hour on transatlantic steamers ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice |
