"Infelicitous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the view of the house from the park, just after we passed the bridge, particularly fine,' said Miss Assher, interposing rather eagerly, as if she feared her mother might be making infelicitous speeches, 'and the pleasure of the first glimpse was all the greater because Anthony would describe nothing to us beforehand. He would not spoil our first impressions by raising false ideas. I long to go over the house, Sir Christopher, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... did he foresee, I trust, that some of his doings would further all this coming misery. In these chains Columbus is of more interest to us than when in full power as governor of the Indies; for so it is, that the most infelicitous times of a man's life are those which posterity will look to most, and love him most for. This very thought may have comforted him; but happily he had other sources of consolation in the pious ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... singular specific levity to the Deacon, who, to the astonishment of everybody, incontinently sailed up into a tree! When he was succored and cut down from the demoniac kite, he was found to have sustained a dislocation of the shoulder, and the constable was severely shaken. By that one infelicitous stroke the two outcasts made an enemy of the Law and the Gospel as represented in Trinidad County. It is to be feared also that the ordinary emotional instinct of a frontier community, to which they were now simply abandoned, was as ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... States, p. 3. Ludlow and Hughes; Macmillan, London, 1862. The title of this work is singularly infelicitous, for it is merely a sketchy and not very clear account of the late war ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... Chrestomathia of the best Arabian jurists—a succedaneum for their complete works—an illustration of Arabic legal literature. Again, he is often loose and vacillating in the use of the English words he has selected as corresponding to the technical phraseology of the Arabian jurists, and sometimes infelicitous in the selection of his English terms. It has occurred to us that he would have succeeded better in rendering the exact meaning of his originals, had he availed himself more of technical phrases of the Roman law which are familiar to all European jurists. ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... hard cut lines, and rigid settings, and wasted hollows, that speak of past effort and painfulness of mental application, which are inconsistent with expression of moral feeling, for all these are of infelicitous augury; but not the full and serene development of habitual command in the look, and solemn thought in the brow, only these, in their unison with the signs of emotion, become softened and gradually confounded with a serenity and authority of nobler origin. But of the ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... because he "remembered what the right quotations are—Omne tulit punctum, and that sort of thing." And certainly an apt quotation is one of the most effective decorations of a public speech; but the dangers of inappositeness are correspondingly formidable. I have always heard that the most infelicitous quotation on record was made by the fourth Lord Fitzwilliam at a county meeting held at York to raise a fund for the repair of the Minster after the fire which so nearly destroyed it in 1829. Previous speakers ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... thousands of infelicitous homes in America no one will doubt. If there were only one skeleton in the closet, that might be locked up and abandoned; but in many a home there is a skeleton in the hallway and a skeleton ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... to entertain her in this somewhat confidential fashion she looked occasionally at Madame Merle, who met her eyes with an inattentive smile in which, on this occasion, there was no infelicitous intimation that our heroine appeared to advantage. Madame Merle eventually proposed to the Countess Gemini that they should go into the garden, and the Countess, rising and shaking out her feathers, began to rustle toward the door. "Poor Miss Archer!" she exclaimed, surveying ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... history of man—the subject of education. He was created in the image of his Maker. It was his delightful employment, in innocency, to dress the beautiful garden in which he dwelt. Presently we learn he transgressed. His subsequent career becomes infelicitous. In the earlier history of the human race, the days of his pilgrimage were protracted several hundred years. In process of time, because of the prevalence of sin, a universal deluge swept away the entire family of man, save one—a preacher of righteousness—and those ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew |
