"Pointless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... high-flown abstractions, and in Shelley fear, famine, tyranny, and the rest, sometimes have all the emptiness of the classical manner. They appear now as brothers, now as parents, now as sisters of one another; the task of unravelling their genealogy would be as difficult as it is pointless. If Shelley had been merely the singer of revolution, the intensity and sincerity of his feeling would still have made him a better poet than Byron; but he would not have been a great poet, partly because of the inherent drawbacks ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... readers remember one brief letter of Henry Clay (clarum et venerabile nomen!), who, when a candidate for the Presidency, wrote many excellent letters, and too many—so many, indeed, that his adversaries indulged in pointless ridicule, and called him 'The Complete Letter Writer.' We allude, of course, to that brief letter to certain importunate individuals in Alabama, which lost for him the decisive and final vote of New York, and made Mr. Polk ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... particular version was sung to me by Capt. R.W. Robertson. It differs but slightly from the version which I originally learnt from Sir Walter Runciman. Very few of the words were printable, and old sailors who read my version will no doubt chuckle over the somewhat pointless continuation of the verses concerning Kitty Carson and Polly Riddle. They will, of course, see the point of my having supplied a Chopinesque accompaniment to such ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... streaks of gold far off to the east on the hills and the black fir-woods, all was cold and grey about our onward path. An infinity of little country by-roads led hither and thither among the fields. It was the most pointless labyrinth. I could see my destination overhead, or rather the peak that dominates it, but choose as I pleased, the roads always ended by turning away from it, and sneaking back towards the valley, or northward along the margin of the hills. The failing light, the waning ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... more imbecile than has ever yet been written. I have not the patience for great length; nor the wit for brilliant satire; nor the imagination for te popular, spicy, impossible, ill-flavoured romance; so I have chosen the other line, adopted by the great majority, and aim at purposeless, pointless imbecility." ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... above all what beauties are often missed, what forces lost, through this assumption that the present of a word is always equivalent to its past. How often the poet is wronged in our estimation; that seeming to us now flat and pointless, which at once would lose this character, did we know how to read into some word the emphasis which it once had, but which now has departed from it. For example, Milton ascribes in Comus the "tinsel-slippered feet" to Thetis, the goddess of ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... prison of ice. He told himself that when the spring came he would feel more settled; but when on one of his morning rides he came upon the first crocus, lifting its golden cup toward the sun, it only gave to his pointless restlessness a poisoned barb. Involuntarily his first thought was, "It would look like a spark of fire in the dusk of her hair." When he realized what he had said, he planted the great fore-foot of his horse squarely on the innocent ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... take Pontifex in the sense of "builder of bridges" the thought is true, but pointless; consequently, for there to be a point the word Pontifex must be taken in the sense of "Bishop", and in this sense it will be false that the Pontifex is happy. Similarly, in ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole |
