"Unimportance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to this, talk about the unimportance, the futility of man and his destiny has left ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... is but rarely that so large a number of constituents is absent, and it is much more frequent to find the deficiency restricted to one or two substances. They are illustrations of barrenness dependent on different circumstances. The first shows the unimportance of the organic matters of the soil, which are here unusually abundant, without in any way counteracting the infertility dependent on the absence of the other constituents. The second is that of a nearly pure sand; and the third, ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... had been suddenly relegated to a position of utter unimportance. He was showing her that, as far as he was concerned, she was a person of not the slightest consequence, treating her like an inquisitive child. Their recent conversation, during which his mantle of reserve had slipped a little aside, the music they had ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... circumstances, and Pisander was perfectly serious and sincere in his belief that he and the world had been companions too long for the good of either. But the jar and din of the streets certainly served to make connected philosophical meditation upon the futility and unimportance of human existence decidedly unfruitful. By the time he reached the cattle-market the noise of this strange place drove all suicidal intentions from him. Butchers were slaughtering kine; drovers were driving ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... had seen many things in those two years and had learned fairly well the lesson of his own unimportance in a world which misses no man, neither king nor clown, after the dark curtain falls and satiated humanity shuffles home ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... again and had nothing to say. It seemed to him that she was frightened. He came home that day in a cold fog of miserable despair. A letter from his publishers informing him of a tenth edition was of ironical unimportance. He lay awake ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... conscious of his own unimportance, was not a little disconcerted at this injunction, which it was not in his power to fulfil by any compulsive means. He therefore went home in a very pensive mood, and after mature deliberation, resolved to expostulate with Peregrine in the most familiar terms, and endeavour to dissuade ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... de Treymes being engaged with a venerable Duchess in a black shawl—all the older ladies present had the sloping shoulders of a generation of shawl-wearers—her American visitor, left in the isolation of his unimportance, was using it as a shelter for a rapid survey ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... accent any outer manifestations of the truth of GOD[32]." (p. 24.)—By this Essay, Dr. Temple comes forward as the open abettor of the most boundless scepticism. Whether or no his statements be such as Ecclesiastical Courts take cognizance of, is to me a matter of profound unimportance. In the estimation of the whole Church, it can be entitled to but one sentence. "We use the Bible," (he tells us,) "not to override, but to evoke the voice of conscience." (p. 44.) "The current is all one way,—it evidently points to the identification of the Bible with the voice of conscience. ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... visiphone. And again there were different levels of awareness in his mind—one consciously and defensively cynical, and one frightened at the revelation of his unimportance, and the third finding the others an ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... earth, man feels the significance of an individual life, or of the rapid years over which it extends, he had encountered, suddenly, the being who had coloured all his existence. He was reminded at once of the grand epoch of his life and of its utter unimportance. But these are the thoughts that would occur rather to us than him. Thought at that moment was an intolerable flash that burst on him for an instant, and then left all in darkness. He clung to the shattered corridor for support. Constance seemed touched and surprised by so overwhelming an emotion, ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Paris all had this air of extraordinary importance and unimportance at the same time. The decisions seemed charged with consequences to the future of human society; yet the air whispered that the word was not flesh, that it was futile, insignificant, of no effect, dissociated from events; and one felt most strongly the impression, described by ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... Manuel smiled gravely,—"still without boasting, friend, I must tell you that in this moment all doubt as to my attested worth went out of me, who had redeemed a kingdom, and begotten a king, and created a god. So you waste time, my friend, in trying to convince me of all human life's failure and unimportance, for I am not in sympathy with this modern morbid pessimistic way of talking. It has a very ill sound, and nothing whatever is to ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... compassion of her own sex that she chiefly expected sympathy) would engage in conference with so suspicious an object. Reasoning thus like a woman, to whom external appearance is scarcely in any circumstances a matter of unimportance, and like a beauty, who had some confidence in the power of her own charms, she laid aside her travelling cloak and capotaine hat, and placed them beside her, so that she could assume them in an instant, ere one ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... attain to happiness in that period of middle-age which still gives to assured success its real flavour. Youth is the time of hope; old age is the time for looking back on the pleasures and achievements of the past—when success or failure may seem matters of comparative unimportance. Successful middle-age stands between the two. Its calm is not the result either of senility or failure. It represents that solid success which enables a man to adventure into fresh spheres without any perturbation. New fields call to him—Art, or Letters, or Public Service. Success ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... the heed paid to what I said. So as to my meeting and consulting Senators, Congressmen, politicians, financiers, and labor men. I consulted all who wished to see me; and if I wished to see any one, I sent for him; and where the consultation took place was a matter of supreme unimportance. I consulted every man with the sincere hope that I could profit by and follow his advice; I consulted every member of Congress who wished to be consulted, hoping to be able to come to an agreement of action with him; and I always finally acted as my conscience ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... sense of his degradation. We are so apt, in our engrossing egotism, to consider all those accessories which are drawn around us by prosperity, as pertaining and belonging to our own persons, that the discovery of our unimportance, when left to our own proper resources, becomes inexpressibly mortifying. As the hum of London died away on my ear, the distant peal of her steeples more than once sounded to my ears the admonitory "Turn again," erst heard by her future Lord Mayor; and when I looked back from Highgate ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... thought. Nothing had ever before so startled and uplifted him. It constituted the supreme experience of his career as a human being. The delightful and stimulating experience of his evening in the house of the Orgreaves sank into unimportance by the side of it. The new avenues towards joy which had been revealed to him appeared now to be quite unexciting paths; he took them for granted. And he forgot the high and serious mood of complex emotion in which he had entered the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... paid to every Victorian M.P. offers special facilities for the professional politician, but some light has recently been thrown on their misdeeds. The questions under discussion in Sydney are also less important. But the very unimportance of New South Wales politics leaves open a wide door for strong language. I have a vivid recollection of hearing one member talk about the 'effluvium which rises from that dung heap opposite,' alluding to another member, who fortunately was well able to return the ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... the same with all our interests. We care most about extremes of importance and of unimportance; but extremes of importance are tainted with fear, and a very imperfect fear casteth out love. Extremes of unimportance cannot hurt us, therefore we are well disposed towards them; the means may come to do so, therefore ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... he suddenly exclaimed, in the tone of one newly awakened to the existence of a fact whose comparative unimportance had led to its forgetfulness by him. 'Let not my own losses make me indifferent to your pleasure, love, for I have not been so. For you, and you alone, I have reserved a gift fit for the ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... she had that night faced with him, any other girl Orme had ever met would have shown moments of weakness, impatience, or fear. But to her belonged a calm which came from a clear perception of the comparative unimportance of petty incident. She was strong, not as a man is strong, but in the way a woman should ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... dignified by a notice in the papers. The shrinkage to my self-importance added fire to my ambition. More carefully but resolutely I threaded my way up Cortlandt Street, and at every step my sense of my unimportance increased. Even my hotel seemed to be a hotel of no importance. Mr. Pound had stayed there in 1876, and his account of its magnitude and luxury had led me to believe that I could find it merely by asking. ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... the deeds of the aviators who were hurling bombs upon unguarded cities, destroying women and children—all this was causing the events of revolutionary terrorism which, years ago, used to arouse his wrath, to sink into relative unimportance. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... much; at least it matters, or may matter, very much in some relations. And however little it matters, yet it matters, and however much it matters yet it does not matter. In the utmost importance there is unimportance, and in the utmost unimportance there is importance. So also it is with certainty, life, matter, necessity, consciousness and, indeed, with everything which can form an object of human sensation at all, or of those after-reasonings which spring ultimately ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... which woman dares not often offend, is yet no standard for her government; that principles are determinable elsewhere; and that, whatever the world may think of them, and whatever may be their seeming unimportance under existing circumstances, are the only real moral securities of earth. She might fly from Charlemont, either into a greater world, or into a more complete solitude, but she would fly to no greater certainties than she now possessed. Her securities were still based ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... the first time whether Ingram's attitude to literature did not in truth sum up the whole man; whether that popular novelist and dramatist could really have a place in his heart for anything that was of unimportance to his own personal existence—for a poor devil of a ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... of her understanding of human nature, her stories are wearisome and unalluring, because she told them with labor, not with ease. She does not seem to have had a good time with them, as Stevenson had with "Treasure Island," a story in other ways of comparative unimportance. And surely it is not frivolous to state that the most profound and serious of thoughts are communicated best when they are communicated with ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... Boyle—perhaps the greatest of our men of science between Bacon and Newton—perpetually insists on the importance of individual experiments and the comparative unimportance of what we ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... the form of antipopery crusading. While Jacobite intrigues or wars with France were in progress it was easy for demagogues to cast upon the Catholics the suspicion of disloyalty and of complicity with the public enemy. The numerical unimportance of the Catholics of Maryland was insufficient to guard them from such suspicions; for it had soon become obvious that the colony of the Catholic lord was to be anything but a Catholic colony. The Jesuit mission had languished; the progress of settlement, and what there ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon |
