"Inane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she confided to him, on this occasion, "I get so very tired of young men sometimes. They can be so inane. I do declare, they are nothing more than shoes and ties and socks and canes strung together in some unimaginable way. Vaughn Greanelle is for all the world like a perambulating manikin to-day. He is just an English suit with a cane ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... evidences of a lack of mental equipoise. We find scattered throughout his works the most brilliant, irrefutable, and logical truths side by side with the most inane, illogical, and stolid crudities. Among other men of genius who showed signs of degeneration we may include Alexander Stevens, Joel Hart, Adams, Train, Breckenridge, Webster, Blaine, Van Buren, Houston, Grant, Hawthorne, Bartholow, Walt Whitman. We must not confound ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... And I have bent Regard on many a woman, who gave sign God willed her beautiful, when he drew the line That shaped each float and fold of beauty's tent: Her soul, alas, chambered in pigmy space, Left the fair visage pitiful—inane— Poor signal only of a coming face When from the penetrale she filled the fane!— Possessed of thee was every form of thine, Thy very hair replete ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... of Plato, and, through him, upon succeeding ages; and that, in some of its aspects, it now survives, and is more influential to-day than in any previous age; but this element of immutable and eternal truth was certainly not contained in the inane and empty formula, "that numbers are real existences, the causes of all other existences!" If the fame of Pythagoras had rested on such "airy nothings," it would have melted away before ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... indeed changed, so much so that her old friends who had not seen her for some time could scarcely have known her. She was no longer fat and inane. Her figure had become slim and graceful; her face had become expressive and remarkably pretty, and her manners were those of a well-bred and self-possessed lady. Gildart felt that he could no more have taken the liberties ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... diatribes, but a stalwart man of six feet, with a comely face bespeaking solid determination in every line. And when one comes to think of it, it is not the big blustering man or woman that rules, but the quiet, apparently inane specimens that look so meek that they are held up as models of propriety and gentleness. Miss Grosvenor immediately nailed him for her meeting, and politics being the only subject discussed, he aired his particular bug. This was his disgust at the top-heaviness of the Labour party's demands, ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... the blood out of a newspaper and leaves it colourless and inane; sometimes he leaves it undisturbed, and lets it talk out its opinions with a frankness and vigour hardly to be surpassed, I think, in the journals of any country. Apparently the censor sometimes revises his verdicts upon second thought, for several ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... graceful a faith the Greeks had their share; what was crude and inane in it becoming, in the atmosphere of their energetic, imaginative intelligence, refined and humanised. The oak-grove of Dodona, the seat of their most venerable oracle, did but perpetuate the fancy that the sounds of the wind in the trees may be, for certain ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the other, returning my laugh, "but I think it was you who finished him up as a symbol of elegance, a divinity of the respectable inane." ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... rescue. The horse, made sadder if not wiser by blows from his master, allowed himself to be backed for a certain distance, until it was safe for me to descend and take my postponed bath. I had but time to bow and murmur more inane thanks, to receive another bow and polite murmur in return (both murmurs being drowned by the sea) when the retrograde movement of the bathing-machine parted me and my living life-preserver. He stood in the water looking after us long enough to ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... Montenegro. Since the day when the Serbian State came into existence it has been, he says, the constant, burning desire of the Montenegrins to be joined to it. We may well rub our eyes at a letter in the same newspaper from Lord Sydenham, who makes the perfectly inane remark that this constant, burning desire was never probable. "Montenegro already is Serbia," says Mr. Leiper, "and Serbia Montenegro, in every way except verbally." But Lord Sydenham has set himself up as a stern critic of the Serbs in Montenegro; therefore he cannot countenance the Leiper ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my unfamiliarity with the language. For although two nations use the same words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the dictionary. The business of life is not carried on by words, but in set phrases, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... frigore sanguis. Tum lapis ipse, viri vacuum per inane volutus, Nec spatium evasit totum, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... at him curiously. Once he came across Marie and her father on the leeward side of the boat. For decency's sake he had to stop. He made an inane remark on the weather and said he thought they were going to have ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... see it quite often, The pictures are simply inane; The verses and jokes—they would soften An average Vassar girl's brain. Of course they are killingly comic; I laugh, but I feel like a loon!" And thus, with a fierceness atomic, She censures the ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... moments of our lives it is always the inane that first suggests itself. It was so likely that Macdonald would have ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... Bailey made various inane suggestions as to the sender. Phoebe said nothing. There was a frown on her face as she watched the captain get to work on the box with chisel and hammer. It contained a beautiful doll, fully and expensively dressed, and pinned to ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... sympathy. In her very conformity to type, she represented so naturally a real and living unit of humanity. Her poor commonplace prettiness was already on the wane, stamped out by the fear and trouble of the last few months. Yet inane though her features, lacking altogether strength or distinction, there was stamped into them something of that dumb, dog-like fidelity to some object which redeemed them from utter insignificance. Wrayson, as he watched her, found himself thinking more kindly of the dead man himself. In his ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... so angry when he read this book that he said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman. But he must have approved of the picture of the Petersburg group, who under a thin veneer of polished manners are utterly inane and cynically vicious. One of them had "an expression of constant irritability on his face, as though he could not forgive himself for ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... growing against the walls, and the almost deserted road beyond them, a somewhat lively and frivolous woman, accustomed to the amusements and stir of Paris, used to sit all day long, day after day, and for the most part of the time alone, though she received tiresome and inane visits which led her to think her loneliness preferable to empty tittle-tattle. If she permitted herself the slightest gleam of intelligence, it gave rise to interminable comment and embittered her condition. She occupied herself a great deal with her children, not so ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance, and death, and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... many other things for the pleasure-seekers. Let them go to the Falls, and Lake Nyassa, and the Himalayas, and those tourist treasures; but why come and chatter inane banalities about his ruins: his treasured, mysterious relic of perhaps the oldest civilisation ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... drawing-room. I was filled with a holy joy because Wells had stirred up the dregs again, and more violently than ever. I rapturously reflected, "How angry this will make them!" "Them" being the whole innumerable tribe of persons, inane or chumpish (this adjective I give to the world), who don't mind froth but won't have dregs. Human nature—you get it pretty complete in "Tono-Bungay," the entire tableau! If you don't like the spectacle of man whole, if you are afraid of humanity, if humanity isn't good enough for you, then ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... was thirty-five, and I had no more idea of marrying than I had of hanging myself. Young girls seemed to me to be inane, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... out the fact that she was not my niece at all; that I had no authority over her in any way. But what would be the use? It would lead only to explanations and I did not wish to make explanations. I wanted to get through with the whole inane business and ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... nothing so contemptuous or offensive as the word blackguard does. The emptiness of the person to whom it applies is very harmless. Its etymon blague (bladder, tobacco-bag), the pouch, which smoking voluptuaries use to deposit their tobacco, is perfectly symbolic of the inane, bombastic, windy, and long-winded speeches and sayings of the blagueur. Every French commercial traveller, buss-tooter, and Parisian jarvy is one. When he deports himself with modesty, and shows a gentlemanly tact in his peculiar avocation, we call him a craqueur (a cracker). ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... rhetoricians, intoxicated with the exuberance of their own verbosity; incompetent to administer the people; wasting time and money upon expensive funerals. Life is too short to waste in trying to get to the bottom of these inane studies." From this it will be seen that Lao-tsz was by no means alone in despising Confucius' conservative and ritualistic views, though it is quite possible that Yen-tsz may still have respected him as a man and a politician. Finally, Confucius, finding that the Ts'i ministers ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... and mental development had brilliantly attested the efficacy of the stern regiment he systematically imposed,—his emotional nature long discarded, had grown so feeble and inane from desuetude, that its very existence had become problematical. But to-day, deeply impressed by the intensity of love which Regina could not restrain at the sight of the portrait, strange softening memories began to ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... as wide, fierce, roving, struggling as ever. Horrible contradiction! The dreadful sense of helplessness, the crushing weight of necessity, seemed to choke me. The smooth white walls, the smooth white ceiling, seemed squeezing in closer and closer on me, and yet dilating into vast inane infinities, just as the merest knot of mould will transform itself, as one watches it, and nothing else, into enormous cliffs, long slopes of moor, and spurs of mountain-range. Oh, those smooth white walls and ceilings! If there had but been a print—a ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... Brard and Saint-Omer," caligraphist[TN-110] and sworn expert in the courts of law. Joseph Prudhomme is the synthesis of bourgeois imbecility; radiant, serene, and self-satisfied; letting fall from his fat lips "one weak, washy, everlasting flood" of puerile aphorisms and inane circumlocutions. He says, "The car of the state floats on a precipice." "This sword is the proudest day of my life."—Henri Monnier, Grandeur et ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... HOUR OF TIDE. "The fidgetings and shufflings, the subtleties, inane trickeries, and futile hitherings and thitherings of Newcastle may be imagined: a man not incapable of trick; but anxious to be well with everybody; and to answer Yes and No to almost everything,—and not a ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... apparitions.... Alas! no ghosts, no fantastic, unearthly powers are terrible; there are no terrors in the Hoffmann world, in whatever form it appears.... What is terrible is that there is nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting and degradingly inane. Once one is soaked through and through with that knowledge, once one has tasted of that bitter, no honey more seems sweet, and even the highest, sweetest bliss, the bliss of love, of perfect nearness, of complete devotion—even that loses all its magic; all its dignity ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... that resolves it into points of force will seem to many as doing away with matter no less effectually than the Berkeleyan Idealism. A universe of inane mathematical points, attracting and repelling each other, must appear to the ordinary mind a sorry substitute for the firm-set earth, and the majestically-fretted vault of heaven, with its planets, stars, and galaxies. It takes a special education ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... day he looked at her; and when Jennings looked, he saw—as must anyone who lives well by playing upon human nature. He did not like her expression. She did not habitually smile; her light-heartedness, her optimism, did not show themselves in that inane way. But this seriousness of hers was of a new kind, of the kind that bespeaks sobriety and saneness of soul. And that kind of seriousness—the deep, inward gravity of a person whose days of trifling with themselves and with the facts of life, and of ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... been so fierce as to be almost like a rap from a policeman's club, and there was an enforced and temporary suspension of the inane chatter. The attendant youth tried to assume the incensed and threatening look with which an ancient gallant would have laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. But some animals and men only become absurd when they try to appear formidable. It was ludicrous to see him weakly ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... rules and regulations for the benefit of all; it would be necessary to do so unless the individuals were not only perfect, but also absolutely of one mind on all subjects relating to their welfare. Can the imagination picture existence more inane? ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... so many curious animals, which he had not hitherto had an opportunity of studying. He looked with a naturalist's interest at their grimacing faces, in which he discerned traces of their occupations and appetites; he listened also to their inane chatter, just as he might have tried to catch the meaning of a cat's mew or a dog's bark. At this period he was occupied with comparative natural history, applying to the human race the observations which he had ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... party of fashionables at their residence, Scamperley." By the way, what an odd phrase that same "entertaining" always sounds to my ear. When I learn that the Marquis of Mopes has been "entertaining" his friends, the Duke of Drearyshire, Count and Countess Crotchet, Viscount Inane, Sir Simon and Lady Sulkes, the Honourable Hercules Heavyhead, etc., etc., at his splendid seat, Boudoir Castle, I cannot refrain from picturing to myself the dignified host standing on his bald head for the amusement of his immovable visitors, or otherwise, forgetful of his ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... methods, or by the favoritism of sovereigns; but it is in every instance always independent of any exertion, of any socially useful labor of the inheritor, who often squanders his property in idleness or in the whirlpool of a life as inane as it is brilliant ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... and even of these they speak obscurely. Nothing is said of an under world. They supposed the ghosts at death floated upward naturally, true children of the mist, and dwelt forever in the air, where they spent an inane existence, indulging in sorrowful memories of the past, and, in unreal imitation of their mortal occupations, chasing boars of fog amid hills of cloud and valleys of shadow. The authority for these views is Ossian, "whose genuine strains," Dr. Good observes, "assume a higher importance as ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... is always conceived as a perpetual holiday, and that whoever is not born to an independent income is striving for one or longing for one because it gives holidays for life. To which I reply, first, that heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside; and that the genuine popular verdict ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... an adjournment to the dining-room to play bagatelle, the most inane of games, to which the billiard-player goes with contempt, changed quickly to wrath when he cannot put the balls into absurd little holes. Mary was an adept, and took pleasure in showing James how the ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... of the more or less witty labels applied to Heyst during his aimless pilgrimage in this section of the tropical belt, where the inane clacking of Schomberg's tongue ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... he answered, and felt that the remark was as inane as if he had quoted it from a play. After a moment, as she seemed to be waiting for something, he continued with greater assurance, "I dare say they have a quality that the older generation missed. It isn't just commonness. The modern spirit means, I suppose, ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... beyond the veranda rail whistling the lively, lilting measures of "There's a Girl Wanted There," "the silly ass" seemed to become a thousand times sillier than ever. He set down his cup, and, turning to Anita, said with an inane sort of giggle, "I say, you know, here's a lark. Let's have a game of 'Slap Hand,' you and I—what? Know it, don't you? You try to slap my hands, and I try to slap yours, and whichever succeeds in doing it first gets a prize. Awful ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... that matter was infinite. Xenophanes had declared that everything was one whole, and that it was a god, everlasting, eternal, never born and never dying, but round in his shape! Parmenides thought that it was fire that moved the earth. Leucippus believed it to be "plenum et inane." What "full and empty" may mean I cannot tell; but Democritus could, for he believed in it—though in other matters he went a little farther! Empedocles sticks to the old four elements. Heraclitus is all for fire. Melissus imagines that whatever exists is infinite and immutable, and ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... it in a high degree for most of us) the scene on which we so freely bloomed does strike me, when I reckon up, as extraordinarily unfurnished. How came it then that for the most part so simple we yet weren't more inane? This was doubtless by reason of the quantity of our inward life—ours of our father's house in especial I mean—which made an excellent, in some cases almost an incomparable, fond for a thicker civility to mix with when growing experience ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... dislike. At the beginning one looks about anxiously for the object which could produce so grotesque a smile. There is nothing, for the conversation has been as lead, but the smile does not subside; it only passes through the endless variations that succeed each other from the inane grin to the affected simper which is meant to be tender. The whole face moves perpetually, as the facial muscles of a corpse, excited by an electric current, seem to parody all the ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... old parent stock. Well, the Boer is nothing of the kind. He is not in any way degenerate. He is a good fighting man, according to his lights. He does not wear a stand-up collar, nor an eyeglass, nor spats to his veldtschoon. He does not talk with a silly lisp or an inane drawl. Therefore, the useless fellows whom Britain trusted with the important task of watching him and sizing him up counted him as a boor as well as a Boer—a mere country clod. But now, from the rocky hills, these clods, these sons of semi-white savages, laugh at us derisively, and answer ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... by my permitting his attendance down the bank, found seat near me, and endeavored to converse; but, although I tried to prove cordial, realizing now that to anger the man would only add to my perplexity, his inane remarks tried me so that I ceased reply, and we finally lapsed into silence. Chevet, who held the steering oar, asked him some questions, which led to a brisk argument, and I turned away my head, glad enough to escape, and be permitted ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... more closely her neighbors on board, but found them scarcely more interesting. Several were playing cards, others moodily staring out of the windows, while a few were laughing and talking with the girls, their conversation inane and punctuated with profanity. One man was figuring on a scratch pad, and Hope decided he must be an engineer employed on the line; others she classed as small merchants, saloon-keepers, and frontier riff-raff. They would glance curiously ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... later the door is flung wide by a tall gentleman in plush, and Lady Portia Hampton sweeps in. She is a tall, slender lady, very like her sister: the same dully fair complexion, the same coiffure of copper-gold, the same light, inane blue eyes. The dull complexion wears at this moment an absolute flush; the light, lack-lustre eyes an absolute sparkle. There is something in her look as she sails forward, that makes them both look ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... futile, inane, incompetent creatures. You, John, with all your scientific training. I cannot expect anything else from Hale. A newspaper man lives on emotional sensations. They form his stock in trade, but you—" Harry ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... lives. You may, or may not, emerge from this experience a better writer than you were when you went in. Your style may become simpler and more forceful by newspaper training. Or it may become tawdry, sloppy and inane. ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... all alone here upon earth? O God! for which of my sins dost thou punish me in my children? For mercy's sake, call me home before she also leaves me, who is the joy of my life. And I can do nothing to turn aside this fatality—stupid inane old man that I am! And this Jacques de Boiscoran—if he were guilty, after all? Ah the wretch! I would hang him ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... he minded now! For more than a year after the publication of "Diadems and Faggots" the letters, the inane indiscriminate letters of condemnation, of criticism, of interrogation, had poured in on him by every post. Hundreds of unknown readers had told him with unsparing detail all that his book had been ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... slip of paper, or rather shouted its contents to the soldiery as they passed, while he flourished the paper above his head. Instantly the column was in an uproar. Caps were thrown into the air, voices grew hoarse with shouting; frantic gesticulation, tearful eyes and laughter, yells, inane antics, queer combinations of sacrilegious oaths and absurd embraces were everywhere to be seen ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... performance, is almost marvellous. It is, throughout, in the worst possible taste. The countenance of Cupid, who is sitting on the bed or couch with the vacant grin of an ideot, is that of a negro. It is dark, and of an utterly inane expression. The colouring is also too ruddy throughout. Near to this really heartless picture, is one of a woman flying; well drawn, and rather tenderly coloured. Opposite, is a picture of Venus supported in the air by ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... family to church in the morning, goes off himself to Mother Redcap's, a favourite tavern—suburban in those days—or house of call for City tradesmen. There he smokes half a pipe and drinks a pint of ale. In the evening at another tavern he smokes a pipe and drinks two pints of cider, winding up the inane day at his club, where he smokes three pipes before coming home at twelve to go to bed and ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... writings of Emerson the spirit of these orders manifests itself. His range of subjects is very wide, ascending to the highest sphere of spiritual contemplation, bordering on that "intense inane" where thought loses itself in breathless ecstasy, and stooping to the homeliest maxims of prudence and the every-day lessons of good manners, And all his work was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... understanding what his friend was driving at, and stupidly wondering if he ever had noticed any difference in Joe's ears, J.W. stared with inane bewilderment. "Is one really larger than the ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... discoverable to the writer, in the field of composition, have been by the photographers themselves—the best things as well as the most inane; but in the face of so many results that earnest workers with the camera produce and continue to put forth, which cannot find a place in the categories of Art, it would seem that these preachments have been unheeded, or were not sufficiently clear ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... advance. The book, with its delicious rhymes by Hamish Hendry, is one to treasure, as is also her "Adventures in Toy Land," designs marked by the diablerie of which she, alone of lady artists, seems to have the secret. In this the wooden, inane expression of the toys contrasts delightfully ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... practical, hard-headed training instead of worry. Bend your sense, your intellect, your time, your energy, to seeking how to train your children, instead of doing the senseless, foolish, inane, and utterly useless thing ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... life it was—feeble beyond expression, and ugly with the ugliness of savagery. She wriggled and screwed up her skinny features with inane ferocity. A motherless wallaby would have submitted to human solace and ministrations with daintier mien; but the whole household thrilled with excitement. Could the spluttering spark of life be made to glow? That was the all-absorbing topic for days. Gradually some ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... ago missed the faithful, inseparable pair—the pair who never spoke, who sat in the background listening with shy, earnest faces, with innocence that yearned, wide-eyed, after wisdom, while it followed, with passionate subservience, the inane. Arthur had proved himself powerless to keep it up. If an archangel's trump had announced a lecture for that evening, it would not have roused him from ...
— The Judgment of Eve • May Sinclair
... man can acquire merit de condigno. And yet they bid us doubt whether there be a habit present. How, therefore, do they know whether they acquire merit de congruo or de condigno [in full, or half]? But this whole matter was fabricated by idle men [But, good God! these are mere inane ideas and dreams of idle, wretched, inexperienced men who do not much reduce the Bible to practise], who did not know how the remission of sins occurs, and how, in the judgment of God and terrors of conscience, trust in works is ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... evening, slim and straight, and taller by half a head than your companions, in the lamp-lit room where the children were playing forfeits, and said, "There is not one boy here that DARES to kiss ME!" Then you ran out on the dark porch, where the honeysuckle vines grew up the tall, inane Corinthian pillars. ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... principles of unity (among all kinds of which teleological unity is the highest), while it ought not to attempt to soar above the sphere of experience, beyond which there lies nought for us but the void inane. The critical examination, in our Transcendental Analytic, of all the propositions which professed to extend cognition beyond the sphere of experience, completely demonstrated that they can only conduct us to a possible experience. If we were not distrustful ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... front antauxe. In place of, to put anstatauxi. In that manner tiamaniere. Inability neebleco. Inaccessible neatingebla. Inaccurate neakurata. Inaction senokupo. Inactive senokupa. Inadvertence malatenteco. Inane malplena. Inanimate senviva. Inappreciable netaksebla. Inappropriate nedeca. In as much as tial ke. Inattention neatenteco. Inaudible neauxdebla. Inauspicious nefavora. Incalculable nekalkulebla. Incapable ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... forge-worker with muscles of steel.[8] Among us, as usual, the divergence is less sharply marked; but when Browning calls Byron a 'flat fish', and Arnold sees the poet of Prometheus appropriately pinnacled in the 'intense inane', they are expressing a kindred repugnance to a poetry wanting in intellectual substance and in ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... more Kathryn might have said she was never to know, for Mary-Clare raised a hand as though to stay the inane torrent. ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... thinking at least, it hangs at one side and in too close proximity to the bold colouring of "The Ambassadors"; so that its own subtle, yet reticent superiority is well-nigh shouted down by its lusty neighbour. It is a picture to be seen by itself; as it must stand by itself in the usual inane ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... drinks are long. He affects a rowdy geniality and a swaggering gait, by which he seeks to overawe the inoffensive. Though he has but a small stock of intelligence, he passes for a wit amongst his associates by dint of perpetually repeating an inane catch-word. With this, and a stamp of the foot, he will greet a friend who may meet him before lunch. Amongst his intimates such a welcome is held to be intensely humorous. He scatters the same sort of stamp and the identical ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... I had written a prose story by request, when it was found that I had grown utterly inane over verse. It was written in the first person, and the style was modelled after De Foe's. The night before sending it off, when I had already packed it up, I was reading about the professional story-tellers ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... medical whites. Unnecessarily, to break the silence with any inane remark, Coffin said: "Going on vat ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... in her public servants. Presumably through a century-long contact with the races of the East, the English diplomat of the Sir Edward Grey type presents the bland, imperturbable, non-committal, almost inane expression of the Oriental that hardly gives one any criterion of the tremendous power of perception and concentration ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... of his character was in the clearing of the inward scene by his so preordained lack of imagination. If he was serene this was still further simplifying. After that I had time to meditate on the line that divides the serene from the inane, the simple from the silly. He wasn't clever; the fonder theory quite defied our cultivation, though Mrs. Pallant tried it once or twice; but on the other hand it struck me his want of wit might be a good defensive weapon. It wasn't the sort of density that would let him in, ...
— Louisa Pallant • Henry James
... ladies had retired for; the night, Adrien gave himself up to unaccustomed reverie. The tenor of his life had been changed. The inane senseless round of dissipation had begun to tire him; the homage and flattery cloyed on his palate. And now, with his newborn love for Constance filling his heart and mind, had come the overwhelming failure of his beloved horse, and the death of his jockey; the last causing him more pain than ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... from the most intelligent English journals, and the best-informed English politicians (men with one foot and two ears in the Cabinet) these true things written and repeated, and watched while they died out into the Vast Inane and Immense Absurd from which ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... 1984 appears to us to exhibit the contour of the lady's figure most generously, and to have certain agreeable and distinctive traits of its own which are not only lacking in the gentleman's apparel, but are absent from the inane conception which appears to have ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... to his speech, indeed, though it had the worth just ascribed to it and more, and though masses of it were deliberately put on paper by himself, in prose and verse, and continue to be printed and kept legible, what he spoke has pretty much vanished into the inane; and except as record or document of what he did, hardly now concerns mankind. But the things he did were extremely remarkable; and cannot be forgotten by mankind. Indeed, they bear such fruit to the present ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... remarkably good musician. If she wanted an orchestra, she would have wanted at least sixty, and probably more than a hundred. Perhaps they do these things with more limited resources in Heaven? Such an incongruity as this, and the inane dilution of the writing (which of course does not appear at its worst in the selected passages) make a genuine George Eliot control hard to predicate, and yet this control, like virtually every other one, is an individuality, and is less unlike George Eliot than is ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... and assimilates their essences. This cyclic pilgrimage it undertook, foreseeing pain, but "preferring free will to passive slavery, intellectual, self- conscious pain, and even torture, 'while myriad time shall flow,' to inane, imbecile, instinctual beatitude," foreseeing pain, but knowing that out of it all would come a nobler state of life, a divinity capable of rule, a power to assist in the general evolution of nature. It is true in the experience of many that going deep within themselves, an elemental consciousness ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... high office are always a trifle ponderous when conversing with ladies. Young lieutenants—or, at all events, officers not above the rank of captain—are far more successful at the game. How they contrive to be so God only knows. Let them but make the most inane of remarks, and at once the maiden by their side will be rocking with laughter; whereas, should a State Councillor enter into conversation with a damsel, and remark that the Russian Empire is one of vast extent, or utter a compliment which ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... claim on serious thought. It is indeed a pleasant tickling of the imagination, this leisurely enjoyment of looking over all those picturesque announcements; it is like passing along the street with its shopwindows in all their lustre and glamour. But this soft and inane pleasure has been crushed by the arrangement after to-day's fashion. Those pages on which advertising and articles are mixed helterskelter do not allow the undisturbed mood. It is as if we constantly had to ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... then, I betake myself,—to books, "the immortal children" of "the understanding, courage, and abilities" of the wise and good,—ay! and to inane, drivelling, doting books, the bastard progeny of vanity and ignorance,—books over which one dawdles in an amusing dream and pleasant spasm of amazement, and which teach us wisdom as tipsy Helots taught the Spartan boys sobriety. Montaigne "never travelled without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... memory, inarticulate and envious. He envies me because I am clever enough to laugh at my madness. However, I will consider him later, in his various guises, for of all the Mallares, dumb though he is and ludicrous with inane tears, he interests me ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... purport or significance and was unable to comprehend it. Beethoven should not have been surprised at this, since he knew himself to be in advance of his time. At the conclusion of the service the Prince made the rather inane remark, "but my dear Beethoven, what have you been doing now?" in allusion to the mass. Beethoven, deeply offended, left abruptly, and returned to Vienna. It may be said in passing that Beethoven frequently managed to ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... husband and wife seemed repulsive to Anna. The husband asked, would she allow him to smoke, obviously not with a view to smoking but to getting into conversation with her. Receiving her assent, he said to his wife in French something about caring less to smoke than to talk. They made inane and affected remarks to one another, entirely for her benefit. Anna saw clearly that they were sick of each other, and hated each other. And no one could have helped ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... made of. Nothing foolish or nervous or hysterical about her. And then, subsequently, when he had met her on her own ground, she had endeavoured to put him at his ease. Funny that, but he appreciated it, nevertheless. And she could talk. She didn't giggle and ask inane questions. Nor did she treat him as some sort of a natural curiosity, who might be expected to do something shocking but entertaining at any moment. She was sensible as—well—as ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... I do not know that? Do you think I did not feel that just now, when I sat by her side, talking inane rubbish about books and plays and pictures, while every stolen glance at my darling's face was like a dagger thrust into my heart? I will not alarm her. I will consult Mr. Sheldon—will do anything, everything, to save her! To save her! O my ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... umbram. Utque Iovis praepes, vacuo cum vidit in arvo Praebentem Phoebo liventia terga draconem, 715 Occupat aversum, neu saeva retorqueat ora, Squamigeris avidos figit cervicibus ungues, Sic celeri missus praeceps per inane volatu Terga ferae pressit dextroque frementis in armo Inachides ferrum curvo tenus ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... and, never being a fluent speaker upon casual subjects, he was not successful in his conversational efforts. When at last they reached the villa, he shook his shoulders disgustedly as he recalled some of his inane remarks. ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... city By lion comiques without pity, Provincial towns were not belated, But showed they, too, were educated; In many a rustic, quiet retreat, Bucolics, too, would not be beat; At last It crossed the mighty main, Did Britain's latest great inane, And we out here in deep despair, Have been informed that There ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... a sideboard. The chairs, ten straight-backed, and two easy by the fireplace, of which one was armless, were upholstered in saddlebag, yellow and green. In the bay of the red-curtained window was a huge terra-cotta bust of an ivy-crowned and inane Austrian female. There was a great fireplace in which a huge fire blazed cheerily, and on the broad, deep hearth stood little coloured plaster figures of stags, of gnomes, of rabbits, one ear dropping, the other ear cocked, of galloping hounds ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... before Michael Allcraft was ten miles on his journey to Lyons, she had prevailed upon her husband to draw his first cheque upon his house to the tune of L.500, and to prolong their holiday by visiting in succession the south of France, Switzerland, and Italy. The fool, after an inane resistance, consented; his cheque was converted to money—the horses ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... the temptation of flute soloists, he once said: "They have rarely been able to resist the fatal facility of the instrument, and have usually addressed themselves to winning the applause of concert audiences by the execution of those brilliant but utterly trifling and inane variations which constitute the great body of existing solos for the flute."* He fretted because "the flute had been the black beast in the orchestra." With his mastery of its technique and his own marvelous ability to bring new results ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... shadow which we feel might be consistent even with extreme old age. The forehead is wide and low, supported by regular eyebrows; the face beneath long and narrow, of a dark and dry complexion. In sleep, open-mouthed, the expression is rather inane; though we can readily imagine the waking face to be not devoid of a certain intensity and comeliness of aspect, marred, however, by an air of guarded anxiety which ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... of Universal Pity The Few The Great and the Really Great Love "Mush" Wives Children One of the Minor Tragedies The "Glorious Dead" Always the Personal Note Clergymen Their Failure Work In the East-end Mysticism and the Practical Man Abraham Lincoln Reconstruction Education The Inane and Unimaginative Great Adventure Travel The Enthralling Out-of-Reach The Things which are not Dreamed of in Our Philosophy Faith Spiritualism On Reality in People Life Dreams and Reality Love of God ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... significant being the triad of Fire, Wind, and Sun.[11] Not much weight is to be laid on the theological speculations of the time as indicative of primitive conceptions, although they may occasionally hit true. For out of the number of inane fancies it is reasonable to suppose that some might coincide with historic facts. Thus the All-gods of the Rig Veda, by implication, are of later origin than the other gods, and this, very likely, was the case; but it is a mere guess on ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... inane caricatures of himself, which he would present to us with a triumphant laugh of immoderate calibre. I have preserved some of these, but decidedly prefer du Maurier's rendering of our common friend. In the accompanying drawing he shows him at ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... call the vein political, read the speeches of some of our members of Parliament. Only read them, I wish no man so ill an to inflict upon him the torture of hearing them—read them, I say, and you will have taken the very highest degree in the order of inane flippancy. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... little veiled or adorned; the most undisguised arrogance; and the coarsest neglect of all kindly feelings and attentions haughtily assumed for the sake of shining in a false and despicable refinement; even more inane and intolerable to a healthy mind than the awkward stiffness of the declared Nobodies. It has been said that vice and poverty form the most revolting combination; since I have been in England, vice and boorish rudeness seem to me to form ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... despised herself now for the impulse that urged her to run as fast as she could from the man. Mentally upbraiding herself for her foolishness she forced a smile of greeting and in her haste to say something that would put the meeting on a commonplace basis, burst out with the inane and obvious: ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... behind him blazed with light. One or two of the big casements were open, and music and odd bursts of laughter drifted out. Somebody, it seemed, was singing an amusing song, but the snatches of it that reached Nasmyth struck him as pointless and inane. He had been at Bonavista a week, but, after his simple, strenuous life in the Bush, he felt at times overwhelmed by the boisterous vivacity with which his new companions pursued their diversions. There are not many men without an occupation in the West, but Mrs. Acton knew where to lay her hands ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... they should be said for the first time. To say them at all, I must blurt them out, but I believed that with them said the floodgates would be opened and the true lover-like appeal burst forth. Gladys Todd must have thought that I was angry, for she asked me what was the matter. Some inane reply forced its way through the press of unuttered avowals. Now, I said, I will tell her what the matter really is, and I have always believed that I should have done so at that moment had not the front door banged, heralding the coming of ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... and inhospitable even in the sunlight. The rock walls rose sheer, the roofs slanted rakishly, the signs scratched on the rock by facetious riders were pointless and inane. Lone picked his way through the crooked defile that was marked MAIN STREET on the corner of the first huge boulder and came abruptly into the road. Here he turned north and shook his horse into ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... sang it through, did Margaret and Billy—sang of the dimple in her chin and the ringlets in her hair, and of the cherry pies she achieved with such celerity—sang as they sat in the spring-decked meadow every word of that inane old song that is so utterly senseless and so ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... singers all other birds were not mute. But evidently the birds have not enthroned this thrush. Possibly, even, they do not share human admiration for his song. The redstart goes on jerking out his monotonous ditty; chippy irreverently mounts a perch and trills out his inane apology for a song; the vireo in yonder tree spares us not one of his never-ending platitudes. But the hermit thrush goes on with sublime indifference to the voices of common folk down below. Sometimes ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... brought a spruce partridge to Gray Wolf, but just as he was about to spring upon his feathered prey the soft chatter of a porcupine a few yards away brought him to a sudden stop. Few things could make Kazan drop his tail. But that inane and incoherent prattle of the little spiked beast sent him off at double-quick with his tail between his legs. As man abhors and evades the creeping serpent, so Kazan would hereafter evade this little creature of the forests that never in animal history has been known to ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... the same faces at the boarding house table, hearing the same stale jokes or caustic remarks about Mrs. Atterson's food from Fred Crackit and the young men boarders of his class, or the grumbling of Mr. Peebles, the dyspeptic invalid, or the inane monologue of ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... to descend THROUGH them as though they were mere conductors of sound; or those who, feebly imitating other composers, measure out crotchets and quavers by rule and line, and flood the world with inane and perishable, and therefore useless, ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... (imaginary) 515; immaterial &c. 137; spectral &c. 980; dreamy; shadowy; ethereal, airy; cloud built, cloud formed; gossamery, illusory, insubstantial, unreal. vacant, vacuous; empty &c. 187; eviscerated; blank, hollow; nominal; null; inane. Phr. there's nothing in it; " an ocean of dreams without ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... up over his knees. He was supposed to be one of the extinct Mauleverers; harmless and even benevolently disposed; given to plucking flowers in the garden at dusk; and to gliding along passages, and loitering on the stairs in a somewhat inane manner. The bolder-spirited among the girls would have given a twelve-month's pocket money to see him. Miss Pillby declared that the sight of that snuff-coloured stranger ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... artificial type. After Scott's outdoor romances appeared, Cooper discovered his talent, and wrote The Spy and the Leather-Stocking tales. Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen began to improve or naturalize the English novel before Scott attempted it.] That Scott was influenced by this inane fashion appears plainly in some of his characters, his fine ladies especially, who pose and sentimentalize till we are mortally weary of them; but this influence passed when he discovered his real power, which was to portray men ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... something very wrong about our Government—to warrant the step Pundit Motilal Nehru has taken. Post graduate students have given up their fellowships. Medical students have refused to appear for their final examination. Non-co-operation in these circumstances cannot be called an inane movement. ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... despair filled her. Numb, hungry, her vitality at low ebb, she doubted her ability to weather it. Was she being punished, she wondered, for protesting against the life the Fates appeared to have mapped out for her? Was this futile inane end coming to her because since that day when she had stood looking down upon Prouty and vowed to succeed she had fought and struggled and struck back, instead of meekly acknowledging herself crushed and beaten? Had she shaken her fist at the Almighty ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... example, I take this Square," and, at the word, I grasped a moveable Square, which was lying at hand—"and I move it, you see, not Northward but—yes, I move it Upward—that is to say, not Northward, but I move it somewhere—not exactly like this, but somehow—" Here I brought my sentence to an inane conclusion, shaking the Square about in a purposeless manner, much to the amusement of my Grandson, who burst out laughing louder than ever, and declared that I was not teaching him, but joking with him; and so saying he unlocked the door and ran out of the room. Thus ended my first attempt ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... at his head, knew that there were a dozen absurd wishes in her heart, none of which could possibly ever become facts. He was so different from the self-assertive young men she knew, with their silly flirtations, their inane small-talk, their capacity for Scotch whisky and long hours. For days she had studied him as through microscopic lenses; his guilelessness was real. It just simply could not be; her ears had deceived her that memorable ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... it life and truth. It was a period of religious and metaphysical delirium, when everything became everything, when Maya and Sophia, Mitra and Christ, Viraf and Isaiah, Belus, Zarvan, and Kronos were mixed up in one jumbled system of inane speculation, from which at last the East was delivered by the positive doctrines of Mohammed, the West by the pure Christianity of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... radical descends. Shall physical or chemical forces explain why the animalcule digs into the hard clay? I bow profoundly, without understanding or even trying to understand. The question is far above, our inane means. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... The desire of compensating for what had passed with Norman, led to great civilities from Dr. and Mrs. Hoxton, which nobody was at liberty to receive except Flora. Pretty, graceful, and pleasing, she was a valuable companion to a gentle little, inane lady, with more time and money than she knew what to do with; and Mrs. Hoxton, who was of a superior grade to the Stoneborough ladies in general, was such a chaperon as Flora was glad to secure. Dr. May's old loyal feelings ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... languages, its modes of thought and feeling, its business methods, its politics, its literature, its amusements, does he increasingly realize the gulf set between an Oriental and an Occidental. The inner life of the spirit of an Oriental would be utterly inane, spiritless to the average Occidental. The "old resident" accordingly knows from long experience what the tourist only guesses from a hasty glance, that the characteristic differences distinguishing the peoples of the East and ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... glad to say that I did not. I found my tongue by and by, and voiced some inane remark to the effect that she might most assuredly "come up," if she had the least inclination to do so, but, on the other hand, that I was more than willing to "come down." Which I did, when she made known her choice ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... down, he turned to me with an inane smile which occupied all his face. 'Good evening,' he said, in a baronial drawl. 'Miss Cayley, I gathah? I asked the skippah's leave to set next yah. We ought to be friends—rathah. I think yah know my poor deah old aunt, ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... placing of accent, in the utterance of words, is therefore not more important, than the right placing of emphasis, in the utterance of sentences. If no emphasis be used, discourse becomes vapid and inane; if no accent, words can hardly be ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... It is an inane town, filled with sham, and petty fraud, and snobbery, but the baths are good. I spoke with many people, and they were all agreed in that. I had the twinges of rheumatism unceasingly during three years, but the last one ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pickax, a spade, a military gas-mask, and six carboys of sulfuric acid, all to be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned house in Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep; and failing, passed the hours in reading and in the composition of inane verses to ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... recurrent duty, by repeating a daily prayer, by daily reading or re-reading some devotional book. With others constant repetition leads to a mental and spiritual deadening, until beautiful phrases become unmeaning, eloquent statements inane and ridiculous,—matter for parody. All who can, I think, should pray and should read and re-read what they have found spiritually helpful, and if they know of others of kindred dispositions and can organize these exercises, they should do so. ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... a portion of it, was again at work, playing an inane melody, and upon the small stage two remarkably well-developed and aquiline-featured women of mature age, dressed as very young children in white socks, short skirts which displayed frilled drawers, and muslin bonnets adorned with floating blue and pink ribbons, swayed to and ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... glasses deliberately, put them on the pile of papers beside him, and stood waiting. There was a courteous enquiry in his very attitude, although as yet he spoke no word. His head was tilted slightly backward, and his smile might have seemed almost inane in its width and in the impression of permanency which it conveyed, were it not for the intellectuality of the brow, the force of the fine aquiline nose, and the watchful perspicacity of the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... no dramatic point; it has no bearing on his salvation, for nothing happens until Senta jumps into the sea, and we feel sure nothing would have happened if she had not jumped. That lesson, at any rate—a childish, inept, inane, insane one at best—is not set forth in the Dutchman. The only other possible one is that self-sacrifice is a worthy and beautiful thing in itself. In itself, I say, for Senta's self-sacrifice is purely a fad: she knows nothing of Vanderdecken save a rumour shaped into ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... miles of Edelweiss. The bridges and tunnels are well along toward completion. Our funds are diminishing, simply because we have delayed so long in preparing for this loan. There has been too much bickering and too much inane politics. I still maintain that we have made a mistake in refusing to take up the matter with St. Petersburg or Berlin. Why should we ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... them. Pancks steamed out of his little dock at a quarter before six, and bore straight down for the Patriarch, who happened to be then driving, in an inane manner, through a stagnant account of Bleeding Heart Yard. Pancks instantly made fast to ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... nativity, God saw the end should be, When the world's infant horoscope He cast. Unshackled from the bright Phoebean awe, In leaf, flower, mould, and tree, Resolved into dividual liberty, Most strengthless, unparticipant, inane, Or suffered the ill peace of lethargy, Lo, the Earth eased of rule: Unsummered, granted to her own worst smart The dear wish of the fool— Disintegration, merely which man's heart For freedom understands, Amid the frog-like errors from the damp And quaking swamp Of the low ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... we rode comfortably here and there and looked at things. The things could not be spoiled, but their effect was very materially marred by the swarms of tourists. Sometimes they were silly, and cracked inane and obvious jokes in ridicule of the grandest objects they had come so far to see; sometimes they were detestable and left their insignificant calling-cards or their unimportant names where nobody could ever have any object ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... us some most ghastly tales. It is impossible to suppose for a second that Irene is a nice girl; but between Rosamund—who, I must own, is very plucky—and this mite Agnes, who is devoted to her, she is quite quiet and amenable, and she is no doubt passionately fond of that stupid, inane little Agnes. Now, I mean to get Agnes from her. You must help me, Phyllis. How are ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... gainsayed. But in America, at least, the injury to the young men is greater apparently than to the young women. At any evening party in New York, at any "Hop" in Newport or Saratoga, the faces of the men are of a lower type, their talk is more inane, their manners are more vulgar. The girls are empty enough, heaven knows! but they seem capable of better things, most of them. And they are not so wholly spoiled in character. I have found very ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... trouble of his own in explaining his frequent bursts of laughter while they ate their breakfast in the cabin. And Florrie found trouble in accepting his explanations, for they were irrelevant, incompetent, and inane. ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... and philosopher is somewhat higher up and more sublimated and etherealized than the Olympus of Homer and of the popular faith. In a flash of poetic inspiration, he says, "The walls of the universe are cloven. I see through the void inane. The splendor (numen) of the gods appears, and the quiet seats which are not shaken by storm-winds nor aspersed by rain-clouds; nor does the whitely falling snow-flake, with its hoar rime, violate their summery warmth, but an ever-cloudless ether laughs ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Pushing and buffeting; and in my brain Dark hurrying shapes beset my soul. In vain I struggled; as a fevered dreamer might; Or some spent, breathless swimmer, in despite Of desperate stroke, thrust headlong to the main. The waking nightmare, monstrous and inane, Whirled, rushed, and huddled in ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... Volodsky represent the only metamorphosis of this kind that I came across. It was as though there were something in the atmosphere which turned paupers into capitalists and inane milksops into ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... What inane small talk I uttered in the Leslies' big, over-furnished drawing-room I know not. All I remember is that I sat with some insipid girl whose hair was flaxen and as colourless as her mind, sipping my tea while I listened to her silly chatter ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... himself seem so insignificant when really he must have been a man of considerable character and attainments. Who would guess it who read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what he had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences—all the more interesting for their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is of some grotesque character in a play, fussy, self-conscious, blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud, trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Gautier's cafe. Then I hastened off across the intervening blocks and through the grounds of the White House, in which presently, having edged through the throng in the ante-chambers, I found myself in that inane procession of individuals who passed by in order, each to receive the limp handshake, the mechanical bow and the perfunctory smite of President Tyler—rather a tall, slender-limbed, active man, and of very decent ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... was a penny the worse for all that wretchedness. I had an idea that Dirk, a man of greater emotional reactions than depth of feeling, would soon forget; and Blanche's life, begun with who knows what bright hopes and what dreams, might just as well have never been lived. It all seemed useless and inane. ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... times more worthy than the other, yet even he does not deserve worship. Let the man do the crowning if you can, although a woman of your temperament would find even that difficult—that which the most inane of women could accept with calmness and a smile. You have the magnificent humility of the truly great. Still it is not appreciated in this world. Try resting for a while and let your husband ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... rocking your body in that inane way, and shaking your hand and your handkerchief, and saying those imbecile things, I shall go mad. I suppose this is the kind of sympathy a man gets from ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... sesquihoram. Deinde pactus cum auriga de manticis, rursus invitor ad cenam. Excuso, non proficio. Apparatus tum erat praelautus, sed mihi frustra. Ubi confovissem stomachum sorbitiuncula, 160 domum me confero; dormiebam enim apud cantorem. Egredior; ibi corpus inane mire ad nocturnum coelum ...
— Selections from Erasmus - Principally from his Epistles • Erasmus Roterodamus
... to speak, an atmosphere which it is sad to see imported into the theatre. They bring with them, not only their songs, which, when offensive in their wording, are sometimes made doubly dangerous by their tunefulness; not only their dances, which are usually vulgar, when they are not inane, but their style and manner and 'gags,' which are generally the most deplorable of all. The objection to music-hall artists on the stage is, not only that they take the bread out of the mouths of 'the profession,' which is a minor consideration for the ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... of so many apostrophes in verse and prose addressed to its greatness and its mystery by men who had never penetrated either the one or the other? The sea is uncertain, arbitrary, featureless, and violent. Except when helped by the varied majesty of the sky, there is something inane in its serenity and something stupid in its wrath, which is endless, boundless, persistent, and futile—a grey, hoary thing raging like an old ogre uncertain of its prey. Its very immensity is wearisome. At any time within the navigating centuries mankind might have ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... price of margarine— Occupy the hours of leisure that he snatches from the screen; But the works of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE he dismisses as inane, And he harbours no ambition to enact ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... me to-night in the midst of all those people and—— Oh yes! old Barking is very kind," he went on, with a change of tone. "Only I wish Lady Louisa would warn him he need not trouble himself to be amusing. He came and sat by me, towards the end of the evening, and told me the most inane stories in that inflated manner of his. Verily, they were ancient as the hills, and a weariness to the spirit. But that good-looking, young fellow, Decies, swallowed them all down with the devoutest attention and laughed ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... all his royal master's vices without any of his Majesty's meagre virtues. He imitated the king in dress, manner, cut of beard, and even in the use of Charles's favorite oath, "Odds fish!" an expletive too inane even to be wicked, being a distortion of the words "God's flesh." There was young Crofts, the king's acknowledged son, Duke of Monmouth by grace of his mother's frailties. He was a living example of the doctrine ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... tell me where my hotel is, officer?" Oliver began. "What hotel?" said the policeman uninterestedly. Oliver noticed with an inane distinctness that he had started to swirl his nightstick as a large blue cat might switch its tail. He wondered if it would be tactful to ask him if he had ever been a drum major. Then he realized that the policeman ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... smiled down to the colonel on one side, the general on the other, the ladies round them. Farther back still her eyes fell on all the uplifted moustaches, the light ones, the brown, the black, the dyed, the thin moustaches, the thick, the curved, and the inane, the drooping, the smartly curled. Among that melancholy and shaggy crowd a few clean-shaven faces looked ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... Aliss Grammont had disappeared. Miss Leeds walked straight across to the coffin and stood looking down on the waxen inexpressive dignity of the dead. Sir Richmond's brows and nose had become sharper and more clear-cut than they had ever been in life and his lips had set into a faint inane smile. She stood quite still for a long time. At length she ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... responded Hawkins. "Do make some attempt to subdue that inane wit. I fancy you'll feel rather cheap hearing that that thousand dollars is the first payment on something I ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... was barely loud enough for even Steve to hear, but hard upon its utterance she caught her breath in anger at herself for her own senseless confusion, which had led her into saying the one thing she least of all had wanted to voice. Even an inane remark concerning the weather would have been better than that girlish naivete which she felt seemed to force upon him, too, a recollection of the very letter of a promise which had, no doubt, long since become in his mind nothing but a quaint episode ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans |
