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More "Insignificance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an enemy. Of the two fragments, the smaller was militarily important only as a feeder to the other. Severed from the body to which they belonged, the seceded States west of the Mississippi sank into insignificance; the fire that had raged there would smoulder and die of itself, now that a broad belt which could not be passed interposed between it and the greater ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... 17 degrees 37 minutes. These rivers, although streams of extreme grandeur during the period of the Abyssinian rains, from the middle of June until September, are reduced during the dry months to utter insignificance; the Blue Nile becoming so shallow as to be unnavigable, and the Atbara perfectly dry. At that time the water supply of Abyssinia having ceased, Egypt depends solely upon the equatorial lakes and the affluents of the White Nile, until the rainy season shall again have flooded the ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... The cost of laying tiles is so trifling as hardly to be worth estimating, except to show its insignificance. The estimate, by English engineers, is two cents per rod for "pipe laying and finishing." What is included in "finishing," does not appear. From the personal observations of the writer, it is believed that an active ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... whether we regard them as a reconquest by Christendom or a conspiracy of Jews or a part of the lingering quarrel with Moslems, are alike the effect of forces gathered and loosened in that one mysterious moment in the history of the city. They equally proclaim the paradox of its insignificance ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... right one for God's Alps and God's ocean. How puny we were in that awful Presence, and how painless it was to be so! How fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the sense of our unspeakable insignificance! And Lord, how pervading were the repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the invisible Great Spirit ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Unions.*—The actual growth of trade unionism has been irregular, interrupted, and has spread from many scattered centres. Hundreds of unions have been formed, lived for a time, and gone out of existence; others have survived from the very beginning of the century to the present; some have dwindled into insignificance and then revived in some special need. The workmen in some parts of the country and in certain trades were early and strongly organized, in others they have scarcely even yet become interested or made the effort to form unions. In the history of the trade-union movement as a whole there have ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... professor in a Western college, and with his smooth face, hair reached up from his high forehead, standing collar, and general dignified air, is no mean-looking figure, though dwarfed into insignificance by the side of his spouse, the ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... where I now rarely visit. I am on these sad terms (and blush to confess it) with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns and Hazlitt. Last of all, there is the class of book that has its hour of brilliancy - glows, sings, charms, and then fades again into insignificance until the fit return. Chief of those who thus smile and frown on me by turns, I must name Virgil and ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Emma, we'll have room for a thirty-fourth girl, if she happens along. I never thought of that. In the face of all that a college education will mean to this girl our personal comfort rather pales into insignificance." ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... author may indeed be smitten at first by a sense of his own insignificance—as we were—but on a second and a third perusal he finds a power and beauty therein which stirs him to a desire to do more and better things. It fulfils the right end of criticism: without absolutely crushing, it corrects and rouses. I again thank you heartily, and beg to subscribe ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... of the Intellectual over the Material. But as nations, resembling individuals, do not become illustrious from their mere physical proportions; as in both, renown has its moral sources; so, in examining the causes which conduced to the eminence of Greece, we cease to wonder at the insignificance of its territories or the splendour of its fame. Even in geographical circumstance Nature had endowed the country of the Hellenes with gifts which amply atoned the narrow girth of its confines. The most southern part of the continent of Europe, it contained within itself all the advantages ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... faded into insignificance compared with the first sight of the genuine Lunatics, or men in the moon, "four feet high, covered, except in the face, with short, glossy, copper-colored hair," and "with wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs from the top of their shoulders ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... policemen with cross chains on their caps, nor sheriffs' servants with dirty, tawdry liveries. The assizes were over; and till next July—when the judges, barristers, jury, &c., would all return, Carrick was doomed to fall back to its usual insignificance as a ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... gentleman said he should sink into insignificance if he condescended to gainsay the principles of these resolutions. For the sentiments he has uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... yet had held in over high esteem; but of a sudden, in the presence of this harsh-featured dog of war, this grim, fierce-eyed ruffler, he seemed to fade, despite his comeliness of face and form, into a poor and puny insignificance. And when, presently, he unwisely related how, when in the boat he had fainted, the maiden ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... in the structure of this Cathedral, as it strikes me, is, that the nave and transepts do not seem to belong to such a western front. They sink into perfect insignificance. Nor is the style of their exterior particularly deserving of description. Yet there is one feature in the external architecture of this Cathedral—namely, a series or suite of DROLLERIES ... of about four or five feet high ... which cannot fail to attract the antiquary's especial notice. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... home he finds a brigade of those literary drummers, known as reporters, sitting on his doorsteps, from beneath whose classic foreheads there glares a wild and hungry eye, to be pacified only by a satisfactory interview. The last exploit of the "Champion Nine" sinks into insignificance beside this great, this momentous event, and the man who walked a hundred miles in twenty-four hours is nowhere. He realizes the cruel fact that Fame is fickle, and he makes one desperate effort to grasp it, by offering determinedly to walk around the world ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... a-port! Midships! Hard a-starboard! Port 20! Steady as she goes!" And ceaselessly the engine-room telegraph tinkled, and the handy little craft, with death and terror written in her workmanlike lines for the seaman, for all her slim insignificance to the landlubber on the towering decks of the great liner, swung smartly through the crowded water-way out to the perils lurking 'neath the seeming smile of the open sea: the guardian angel of our commerce it went, to meet—what Heaven ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... and the conquest of Grenada—which owed their origin to the enterprise of the two famous personages whose ashes were inclosed in the heavy leaden cases at my feet; and I never felt more profoundly the insignificance of earthly renown, or the vanity of individual glory. "The paths of glory lead but to the grave." Coming from the tomb, we were next shown a sceptre and crown which had been used by the illustrious dead. Also a sword which ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... the veriest schoolboy at the tall, stately figure, clad in shimmering pale green satin that rippled about her feet as she walked, brought out a bit of colour in her cheeks and lips, deepened the brown of her eyes, and, like the stalk and leaves of a tiger-lily, faded into utter insignificance before the burnished masses of ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... afternoon, with its steady, even flow, and its tranquil, many-voiced murmur, it made an impression upon my mind distinct and peculiar, fraught in an eminent degree with the charm of seclusion and remoteness. The solitude was perfect, and I felt that strangeness and insignificance which the civilized man must always feel when opposing himself to such a vast scene of silence and wildness. The trout were quite black, like all wood trout, and took the bait eagerly. I followed the stream till the deepening shadows warned ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... cynicism and unscrupulousness, most undoubtedly he would have become the most remarkable individual in his generation. Unfortunately, he found himself surrounded by creatures absolutely inferior to himself, whose deficiencies he was the first to notice, whom he despised either for their insignificance or for their mental and moral failings, but to whose influence he ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... apparently ruins of some mighty pile, formerly raised to religion or royalty, were scattered about; regularity and perfect design were strangely mixed up with ruin and disorder, and nature had done it all. Niagara has been considered one of her wildest freaks; but Niagara falls into insignificance when compared with the wild grandeur of this awful chasm. Imagination carried me back to Thebes, to Palmyra, and the Edomite Paetra, and I could not help imagining that I was ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... their assistance, to abolish slavery, and link her destiny with theirs in the bonds of a perpetual Union. And shall we hesitate for a moment, on such a question? The money consideration is far less than a month's cost of the war, and sinks into insignificance compared with the momentous results and consequences. Emancipation in Missouri, with her consent and the aid of Congress, is the first grand decisive victory of the Union in this contest, insures eventual success, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... with a certain electric company offering gold bonds at a price to net four and a half. He read it through once and then read it through again. It contained a great many figures—figures running into the millions, whose effect was to make twenty-five dollars a week shrink into insignificance. On the whole, it was decidedly depressing reading—the more so because ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... cannot reasonably expect to eclipse or even to equal, you crush him beneath the weight. If a poet were called John Milton or William Shakspeare, he could not dare to publish even a sonnet. No: the choice of a name lies between the two extremes of ludicrous insignificance and oppressive renown. For this reason I have ordered the family pedigree to be suspended on yonder wall. Let us examine it with care, and see whether, among the Chillinglys themselves or their alliances, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the vast and endless background of the sea, throwing every intervening detail of the landscape into insignificance. There it was, steel blue in the brightening sunlight and glimmering here and there in changing white, where perhaps some treacherous rock or bar lay just submerged. And upon it, looking infinitesimal in the limitless ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... enforced, but no licence came of it; new rules had to be made, which might seem vexatious and not very intelligible restrictions, but there was no tendency to break them. Of course wrong things were done at Borth as elsewhere; but if we were to record the few misdeeds which occur to us, their insignificance would provoke a smile; while we have good evidence for the belief that the rate of ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... father's arm, conversed in friendly fashion with the doctor, always watching him, I noticed, as a cat watches a dog that she knows is waiting an opportunity to spring, and for the rest associated with us as much as she could. Particularly did she seem to take refuge behind my own insignificance, having, I suppose, come to the conclusion that I was a harmless person who might possibly prove useful. But all the while I felt that the storm was banking up. Indeed Marnham himself, at any rate to a great extent, played the part of the cloud-compelling Jove, for soon it ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... origin. Can we in any way fix its date? Firstly, it is certainly not later than the beginning of the sixth century, for it makes no mention of Iacchus, and the Dionysiac element was introduced at Eleusis at about that period. Further, the insignificance of Triptolemus and Eumolpus point to considerable antiquity, and the digamma is still active. All these considerations point to the seventh century as the probable ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... ditto those on Friedrich the Great. "This could be done," I often said to myself; "this could perhaps; and this would be a real satisfaction to me. But who then would march through Coventry with such a set!" The extreme insignificance of the Gift, this and nothing else, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... immeasurable elevation, and of the seclusion in which we were wandering on that height, whence we beheld immensity, infinity, in which our weakness was lost: for the higher we ascend, the more the horizon expands, and the more conscious we become of our own insignificance. ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... own capital—Pella—or to Europe. The remainder of his life, eleven years and two months, was spent in Asia, in continued and increasing conquests; and these were on such a gigantic scale that Greece dwindled into insignificance. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Chichester family received the second shock they had experienced that day—one compared with which the failure of the bank paled into insignificance. When they saw the strange, shabby, red-haired girl slouch into the room, with her parcels and that disgraceful-looking dog, they felt the hand of misfortune had indeed ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... passages have been much commented upon, but certainly have been rather strongly interpreted. I am no bigot to infidelity, and did not expect that, because I doubted the immortality of man, I should be charged with denying the existence of a God. It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in comparison with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... strange if children were quite incapable of doing what is so plainly required of them. It is true that they can be taught to reach the extreme of foolishness in the insignificance of the details that they mention. But it is also true that a fair amount of wise guidance will lead them to exercise good judgment in their selection. In other words, thoroughness as a relative and qualitative matter, rather ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... range. As the Emden neared the Jemtchug again both ships were actually spitting fire. The range was practically point-blank. Less than 150 yards away the Emden passed the Russian, and as she did so torpedoed her amidships, striking the magazine. There was a tremendous detonation, paling into insignificance by its volume all the previous din; a heavy black column of smoke arose and the Jemtchug sank in less than ten seconds, while the Emden steamed behind the ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... III. came to the throne in 1760, the great families which had thus governed England for half a century belonged to the party known as Old Whigs. Under their rule the power of the crown had been reduced to insignificance, and the modern system of cabinet government by a responsible ministry had begun to grow up. The Tory families during this period had been very unpopular, because of their sympathy with the Stuart pretenders who had twice attempted to seize the crown and given the ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... next Abbot, had been the Conqueror's chaplain, and was a man of great strength of character, and of quite a different stamp. He was buried in the abbey church, which he had raised "from meanness and insignificance to a ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... port in Asiatic Turkey, on the Shatt-el-Arab; a place of great commercial importance when Bagdad was the seat of the caliphate; for a time sank into insignificance, but has ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... reply, after warm thanks, declined the personal praises bestowed on him, and sketched the series of events by which the Austrian tyranny had converted him from insignificance into a man of importance. He then proceeded to comment on France[*] as follows:—I hope that the great French nation will soon succeed to establish a true republic. But I have come to the conviction, that for freedom there is no duration in CENTRALIZATION, which is ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... that it has long assumed so hostile a position with respect to the Medical Profession, that any trouble I, or any other member of that profession, may choose to bestow upon it may be considered merely as a matter of self-defence. It began with an attempt to show the insignificance of all existing medical knowledge. It not only laid claim to wonderful powers of its own, but it declared the common practice to be attended with the most positively injurious effects, that by it acute diseases are aggravated, and chronic ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... understand no eternal verity until he has freed himself from pretensions. The human mind, bared to a centuried slime, is teeming with repulsive life of countless world-delusions. Struggles of the battlefields pale into insignificance here, when man first contends with inward enemies! No mortal foes these, to be overcome by harrowing array of might! Omnipresent, unresting, pursuing man even in sleep, subtly equipped with a miasmic weapon, these soldiers of ignorant lusts seek ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... that "Polly" was a real girl scout, but faithful as she unconsciously was to the then unwritten laws of the sisterhood, she faded into insignificance when my absolutely true-to-type Scout appeared in the guise of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Rebecca did not reform, convert or uplift her seniors, her parents, grandparents, neighbors and constituents, but she could never keep her hands off things that needed to be done, and whatever ...
— The Girl Scouts: A Training School for Womanhood • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... man was there—the same genius who even now could have mastered all the enemies of France and saved her from her present subjection and European insignificance, but the men round him were not the same. He, the guiding hand, was still there, but the machinery no longer worked as it had done in the past before disaster had blunted and stiffened the temper ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... kissing him, but soon fell fast asleep in my arms, sobbing at longer and longer intervals, until he was quiet. I was so occupied with Peepy that I lost the letter in detail, though I derived such a general impression from it of the momentous importance of Africa, and the utter insignificance of all other places and things, that I felt quite ashamed to have thought ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... the interests of industry and capital were, long equally represented. Yet the system of administration with which all this is connected, is common to the thousand hamlets of Thessaly that have not emerged from their insignificance; but Ambelakia for twenty years ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... outside the great offices of The Morning World and looked across the valley at the great dome that squatted above the moving threads of living figures. He was absurdly upset by this unfortunate interview. What could he have expected? Of what use was it that he should fling his insignificance against that kind of wall? Moreover he must try many times before his chance would be given him. It was absurd that he should mind that rebuff. But the hatchet-faced young man pursued him. He seemed to see now as he looked up and down the street, a hostility in the faces ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... the mightiest nobles of the greatest courts of Mars marched down the broad Aisle of Hope bearing a splendid car upon their shoulders, and as the people saw who sat within, the cheers that had rung out for me paled into insignificance beside those which thundered through the vast edifice now, for she whom the nobles carried was Dejah ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... guess. What of him? I'm not likely to forget him easily. There is just one desire I have in life which dwarfs all others to insignificance, and that is to stand face to face with Mr. Zachary Smith," Grey finished ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... It was the same, as we take elsewhere occasion to show, in the West of England, in the Midlands, in the Northern counties, and in the South of Scotland. The absence of ready communication with the metropolis and the relative insignificance of provincial centres kept libraries together. Their owners, while the agricultural interest was flourishing, had no motive for sale, and the inducement to part with such property was far less powerful, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... When the insignificance of the American party is remembered, there was something amusing in this; but the Mexican officer not only gave his promise, but entertained his visitors until the gale was over. Then the Truxton was fired and ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... fulness of my health and strength, with my work but begun, and all my happiness in the future, and even to a less sanguine man it would seem that his course had many years to run, still have I seen as much as any man of the inconsequence of life, of the insignificance of the individual, his hopes, ambitions, happiness, and even usefulness, in the complicated machinery of natural laws. It may be that I shall not come back. But I wish to take with me your promise that if ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... spared neither money nor violence to carry his election, it seemed secured. For the regents it would have been not only a new and keenly-felt defeat, but also a real danger; for it was to be foreseen that the bold partisan would not allow himself as consul to be reduced to insignificance so easily as Domitius and other men of the respectable opposition. It happened that Achilles and Hector accidentally encountered each other not far from the capital on the Appian Way, and a fray ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... even at school, though they all hated me. I knew, of course, that they must despise me now for my lack of success in the service, and for my having let myself sink so low, going about badly dressed and so on—which seemed to them a sign of my incapacity and insignificance. But I had not expected such contempt. Simonov was positively surprised at my turning up. Even in old days he had always seemed surprised at my coming. All this disconcerted me: I sat down, feeling rather miserable, and began listening to what ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... adoption, along with a proposal for an elective Council, in the Reform party's programme in 1834. Delay in affecting this reform, Baldwin told the Governor a year later, was "the great and all absorbing grievance before which all others sank into insignificance." The remedy could be applied "without in the least entrenching upon the just and necessary prerogatives of the Crown, which I consider, when administered by the Lieutenant. Governor through the medium of a provincial ministry responsible ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... use of his eyes, was their home, not a thousand feet away. George brushed his way out, and he stood there, not knowing whether to run or to shout or to cry. Every emotion appealed to the boys for mastery. All previous experiences during the past year paled into insignificance in comparison with the hour just spent in ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... despite the height to which her insignificance had risen, had yet her troubles. Her brother, who was called the Comte d'Aubigne, was of but little worth, yet always spoke as though no man were his equal, complained that he had not been made Marechal of France —sometimes said ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Peterborough and itself. At Peterborough the great portico stands indeed, as here, in advance of a west front with two towers. But it may be said to have supplanted that front. One tower was never finished; the other was thrown into insignificance. The portico is of the full height, and became the real west front. Here at Saint-Evroul the portico was not the whole of the west front, but only part; the towers must have risen a long way above it. One would like to be able to judge of the effect ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... Sulla commanded him to divorce his wife, and on his refusal he was included in the list of the proscription. The Vestal virgins and his friends with difficulty obtained his pardon from the Dictator, who observed, when they pleaded his youth and insignificance, "that that boy would some day or another be the ruin of the aristocracy, for that there were ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... important one. Brewster was seated at his writing-table, deep in thought. The exclamation that followed Rawles's cough of announcement was so sharp and so unmistakably fierce that all other evidence paled into insignificance. The butler's interruption came at a moment when Monty's mental arithmetic was pulling itself out of a very bad rut, and the cough drove it back ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... perhaps worth while remarking that this Antiprognosticon was directed against Anthony Ascham, Roger's brother, which may perhaps account for some of the bitterness in the above passage from the Scholemaster. These slight productions, however, sink into insignificance in comparison with his chief ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... head. "You must not rely on Dr. Suaby too much. In a prison or an asylum each functionary is important in exact proportion to his nominal insignificance; and why? Because the greater his nominal unimportance the more he comes in actual contact with the patient. The theoretical scale runs thus: 1st. The presiding physician. 2d. The medical subordinates. 3d. The keepers and nurses. The practical scale runs thus: 1st. The keepers and nurses. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... knowest thou thine own insignificance in this great world. No mortal eye but mine has traced thee. Go quietly to thy bed, foolish man, and on the morrow, if thou wilt be wise, get thee home to good Mrs. Wakefield and tell her the truth. Remove not thyself even ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of his successor. "They are in great haste," said he; "what will you gain by carrying matters to extremities? Send me to the Levant; I promise you never to return. What have you to reproach me with?" "With nothing," answered his escort, "but your insignificance. However, a man cannot live as a mere private man, after having been Dey of Algiers." And the unfortunate man perished by ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... the Swedish nation, which was and continued to be an integral part of the Swedish body-politic, Christian III. on his accession had crushed the middle and lower classes in Denmark and reduced them to political insignificance. Yet it was not the king who benefited by this blunder. The Danish monarchy since the days of Margaret had continued to be purely elective; and a purely elective monarchy at that stage of the political development of Europe was a mischievous anomaly. It signified ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... the son of the desert, who saw that He was actually with them already. John had eyes that pierced the husk of things. He looked on this son of the carpenter and a thousand years of prophecy sank into insignificance beside its fulfillment; the multitude became as nothing beside the all glorious Son of Man. He alone knew his Lord, because he alone looked with ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... which remained in the hands of the Scotch, and King Edward prepared to lay siege to this. Save for the band of Wallace there was no longer any open resistance in the field. A few holds like those of Archie Forbes still remained in the hands of their owners, their insignificance, or the time which would be wasted in subduing them, having protected them from siege. None of the nobles ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... convinced that if Cook was not an accomplice in the train robbery, he was involved in something criminal, and Sam regretted that he had not been more thorough in his investigations. Now that Chip was in the hands of his enemies, all others sank into insignificance; so with keen eyes and sharp ears, Sam kept ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... not a little Lord John, who yet made his point. "A fine old Moretto, you know, was exactly what he declined at Dedborough—for its comparative, strictly comparative, insignificance; and he only thought of the picture when the wind began to ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... to keep it in the place where a bonnet is least required. I have seen a farmer, whose worth, intelligence, and manly dignity found fitting expression in the dress that he daily wore, sacrifice this harmonious outward seeming in an hour, and sink into insignificance, if not vulgarity, by putting on a dress-coat and a shiny stove-pipe hat to go to meeting or to "York." A dress-coat and a fashionable hat are such hideous habits in themselves, that he must be unmistakably a man bred to wearing them, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... misery. I instilled courage into your hearts in order that this Bhima who is possessed of the strength of ten thousand elephants and whose prowess and manliness are widely known, might not sink into insignificance and ruin. I instilled courage into your hearts in order that this Vijaya, who was born after Bhimasena, and who is equal unto Vasava himself might not be cheerless. I instilled courage into your hearts in order that Nakula and Sahadeva, who are always devoted to their seniors, might not be weakened ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... will be deflected towards the right, and the result, clearly, is a whirl opposite in direction to that of the cyclone. But here there is a tendency to dissipation rather than to concentration of energy, hence, considered as a storm-generator, the anti-cyclone is of relative insignificance. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... great victory was approaching. Who amongst us would be spared to see it? How would it be brought about? What great and fierce battle would lay the Germans low? The supreme idea in the mind was consecration to a sublime sacrifice, which dwarfed into insignificance all previous events in life. We had our fun, we had our jokes, we met our friends, we saw battalions go on a route march, we watched men play their games in the fields; but to me it seemed that a new and mysterious light that ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... by any insignificance of their personal estate. Familiarity does not breed contempt, it breeds conceit. Those who dwell close to the hub of government, even though they build departmental fires, sweep departmental floors, and empty departmental waste baskets, from nearness of contact and a daily perusal of ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... between them, on his side partly by the poisonous words of his brother, partly by the phantom of that old love of which the new had at first been but an eluding reflex, and on hers, by the chilly disillusion which had fallen so soon upon her ardent nature; these sank into insignificance, contrasted to the whirl of baulked passion which had passed over her life, to leave it utterly blasted, to ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... never set eyes, much less hands, on the princess. Count Zerbst's smooth pink face flushed rose-pink all round his fierce little mustache, which in some inexplicable, but unfortunate, fashion accentuated the extraordinary insignificance of his nose; his small eyes sparkled; and he muttered fiercely something about "sdradegy." He looked at Miss Lambart very unamiably. He felt that she was not impressed by him as were the maidens of Cassel-Nassau; and he resented ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... his eyebrows. "If I tell you that, it would be bad policy. I may have discovered it so easily that my services as a solver of mysteries would sink to insignificance, or again I may have had to commit a crime; in either case, it is best to 'draw a veil of silence,' shall we say; sufficient be it that Melba sings, and ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... the delicate fretting and inlaying of flat surface pattern, having gained only, perhaps, in being drawn more clearly by dust and damp upon a softer colour of marble. I have mentioned these first, because their apparent insignificance—tiny flat facades, with very little decoration—makes it in a way easier to grasp the special delicate austerity of their beauty. But they are humble offshoots, naturally, of two great and complex masterpieces, and very modest sisters of a masterpiece only a degree less marvellous: Pisa Cathedral, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... scarcely reached the upper deck when something happened which dwarfed all the other experiences of their marvellous voyage into utter insignificance. ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... bolstered her actions with the assurance that she did not want his love, that he was not the man she had ever cared for seriously, could ever care for. She told herself that the insignificance of his character, his personality, were beneath contempt. She desired a man of strength for her partner, a man who could make himself of some account in ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... and ignorance and not from the intrusion of politics. President Wilson guaranteed to General Pershing complete immunity from the pleas of politicians and in no war fought by the United States have political factors played a role of such insignificance. ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... Calender we have the one pastoral composition in English literature which can boast first-rate historical importance. There are not a few later productions in the kind which may be reasonably held to surpass it in poetic merit, but all alike sink into insignificance by the side of Spenser's eclogues when the influence they exercised on the history of English verse is taken into account. The present is not of course the place to discuss this wider influence of Spenser's work: it is with its relation to pastoral tradition and its influence ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... heard, unseeing, unseen. While he sat still and looked and listened it seemed to him as if he had been engaged in foolish games with children all his life. He sat as it were in the dust, scorning his own insignificance. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... Otto and the Netherlandish lords were encouraged, by substantial English help, to carry out a combined attack on France from the north. The opposition of the English barons reduced to comparative insignificance the expedition to Poitou, but a very considerable army gathered together under Otto, and took up its position in the neighborhood of Tournai. Among the French King's vassals, Ferrand, Count of Flanders, long hostile to his overlord Philip, and the Count of Boulogne fought strenuously on Otto's ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... his other brothers and some prominent officials to murder him. The plot was discovered, and recoiled upon its authors, who were promptly arrested and executed. Then Lichimin was formally proclaimed heir to the throne; but the event sinks into comparative insignificance beside the abdication of the throne by Kaotsou in the same year. The real cause of this step was probably not disconnected with the plot against Lichimin, but the official statement was that Kaotsou felt the weight of years, and that he wished to enjoy rest and the absence ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... prevent her from expressing herself as frankly as she had done. When a blessing appears to be lost its value is greatly enhanced, and all the comforts, and privileges, and opportunities, of his present situation, that he had made such an effort to give up, seemed to shrink into insignificance, compared with the domestic happiness that was now ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... equality of the sexes. All well enough, all to be commended when viewed in their just relation to other themes and interests, but actually pernicious when separated from the homely and useful things of daily life, and made so to overshadow these as to warp them into comparative insignificance. Here lay the evil. It was this elevation of her ideas above the region of use and duty into the mere aesthetic and reformatory that was hurtful to one like Irene—that is, in fact, hurtful to any woman, for it is always hurtful ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... stopping-place on a right line, while Liege, Namur, Ghent and Bruges are each the point of junction of two or more completed roads. Brussels has slept while this network has been woven over the country, and will awake to discover herself shorn of her trade and sinking into insignificance if she does not immediately bestir herself. Her location is a fine one, on a ground which rises very gradually from the great plain to a modest hill southward, and she is among the best built of modern cities. But already she is off the direct line from either London or Paris to Germany; ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... dominate from its height, nor to feel the world small below one, nor to hold a whole countryside in one's hand—yet one does. The mountains from their heights reveal to us two truths. They suddenly make us feel our insignificance, and at the same time they free the immortal Mind, and let it feel its greatness, and they release it from the earth. But I say again, in theory, when one considers the exact relation of their height ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... but it came as near to it that morning, doubtless, as it ever had or ever will. Not since the cashier of The Merchants and Farmers Bank committed suicide three years past had Oakdale been so wrought up, and now that historic and classical event paled into insignificance in the glaring brilliancy of a series of crimes and mysteries of a single night such as not even the most sanguine of Oakdale's thrill lovers could have ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... for Esther and me in the Chester waggon, I pass over a very immaterial scene of leave-taking, at which I droped a few tears betwixt grief and joy; and, for the same reasons of insignificance, skip over all that happened to me on the road, such as the waggoner's looking liquorish on me, the schemes laid for me by some of the passengers, which were defeated by the valiance of my guardian Esther; who, to do her justice, took a motherly care of me, at the same ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... of Hamlet's conduct, and the process of his fortunes, not a single utterance from the lips of the King, Polonius, or Laertes can be spared. In ordinary acting versions these three parts sink into insignificance. It is only in the full text that they assume their just and illuminating rank as ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... French and Indian War were out of all proportion to the scale of its military operations. Contrasted with the campaigns which were then shaking all Europe, it sank into insignificance; and the world, its eyes strained to see the magnitude and the issue of those European wars, little surmised that they would dictate the course of history far less than yonder desultory campaigning ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... let us imagine ourselves in the year 1200 making a rapid tour through the chief countries of Europe to see for ourselves how the people lived. The first thing that will strike us on our journey is the contrast between the grandeur of the churches and public buildings and the insignificance of most of the houses. Some of the finest churches in England, built in the style of architecture called 'Norman,' one or more of which you may have seen, date before the year 1200, as for example, Durham Cathedral, and the naves of Norwich, ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... probabilities and set afloat in a sea of the wildest romance. The Duchess Emilia's repentance, however, seems to have ended the interest of her career, and her good deeds are appallingly dull; in fact, her whole personality thins away into insignificance. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... the buccaneers of the next century in the Spanish Main sink into comparative insignificance when compared with what was accomplished by such a man as Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa, who was known, and rightly known, by his contemporaries, and for many generations of Moslem seamen yet to come, as "the King of the Sea." The capture of Panama by Sir Henry Morgan in January 1671 was possibly ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... Ossipon, gazing earnestly and quivering inwardly with the desire to find out something, but obviously intimidated by the little man's overwhelming air of unconcern. When talking with this comrade—which happened but rarely—the big Ossipon suffered from a sense of moral and even physical insignificance. However, he ventured another question. "Did you walk ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... applause of the good at your departure resemble the waves of the ocean beating musically upon rocky caverns. Thy servant, inexperienced in oratory, retires abashed at the greatness of his subject, and the insignificance of his expressions.' So then he cut ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... if they saw more of one another," suggested May timidly. It was her first intervention. She felt its insignificance. She would not have complained if Quisante had followed Morewood's example and taken no notice of it. He stopped, turned to her with exaggerated deference, and greeted her obvious little carrying out of the metaphor as though it were a heaven-sent light. Somehow in doing this he seemed to fall all ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... corrupt and criminal practices which made those of the Warmoth regime pale into the utmost insignificance, the tide was turned. Another party came into power and the lily-white government was established. Out of such conditions as Miss Lonn has depicted the government of all the Southern States sprang. This book ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... many minor duties may be appointed you to fulfil, on a path that before seemed a useless as well as an uninteresting one. For you would have now learned to estimate the small details of daily life, not according to their insignificance, not as they may influence your worldly fate, but as they may have a tendency to mould your spirit into closer conformity to the image of the Son.[10] You will now no longer inquire whether you have any work to do which you might ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... It is the one that involves most of good or evil in the time to come. All others are, for the present, dwarfed by it into insignificance. A human soul has been committed to our care, capable of the highest enjoyments or the deepest misery. An error on our part may prove fatal to that soul. Think of this, Edward! What are wealth, honour, eminence, in comparison ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... slowly, and walked in a dejected manner in the direction of the Palmer House. He began to think that he was a failure. When he was a student of Euclid College he was in his own estimation, a person of importance. Now he felt his insignificance. If the world owed him a living, it seemed doubtful if it was inclined to pay ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... deal about the heroism of the battle-field. What is it? Compare it with the heroism of the woman who stands up for the right, and it sinks into utter insignificance. To stand before the cannon's mouth, with death before him and disgrace behind, excited to frenzy by physical fear, encouraged by his leader, stimulated by the sound of the trumpet, and sustained by the still emptier sound ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... is confined to the treatment of subjects of morally unimportant nature, would infallibly adopt the form of frivolity, and be deprived of all poetic dignity, were it not that the substance is ennobled by the form, and did not the personal dignity of the poet compensate for the insignificance of the subject. Now, it is only given to mind imbued with beauty to impress its character, its entire image, on each of its manifestations, independently of the object of its manifestations. A sublime ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... found his way. He too could serve England. He sacrificed all but his bare necessities, and grew actually thinner and even less obtrusive. His outer insignificance shrank, but inwardly he was as happy as a warrior. Every week a postal order went to this relief-fund or to that. It was regularly acknowledged to ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... was isolated, I had no sense of smallness or of utter insignificance in face of the Universe. I did not feel myself a miserable, fortuitous atom, a grain of cosmic dust. I felt, though, again, I am interpreting rather than recording, that I was fully equal to my fate. As a human being I was not only immortal, but capax imperii,—a creature worthy ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... were lost to France. Her trade in India soon dwindled into insignificance before the powerful and wealthy British East India Company. "French India" to-day consists of Pondicherry, Karikal, Yanaon, Mahe, and Chandarnagar—196 square miles in all,—while the Indian Empire of Britain spreads over ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Great Diderot and Philosophes have lain in durance here; great Mirabeau, in disastrous eclipse, for forty-two months. And now when the old Bastille has become a dancing-ground (had any one the mirth to dance), and its stones are getting built into the Pont Louis-Seize, does this minor, comparative insignificance of a Bastille flank itself with fresh-hewn mullions, spread out tyrannous wings; menacing Patriotism? New space for prisoners: and what prisoners? A d'Orleans, with the chief Patriots on the tip of the Left? It is said, there runs 'a subterranean ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... this, in order to reconsider Article 4, Section 4, and to limit the number of Representatives to be allowed to the large States. Unless this were done, the small States would be reduced to entire insignificance, and encouragement given to the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... one isolated case sinks into insignificance beside the condition in which some of the sick were left by commands returning to the United States. All cases of yellow fever suspects were left behind, and in the mad scramble to embark for the return voyage many of these were left ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... repeatedly met and deliberated, but never brought the question to any definitive conclusion. Still, when the new authorities looked around the house, and observed the empty benches, they were admonished of their own insignificance, and of the hollowness of their pretensions. They claimed the sovereign authority, as the representatives of the people; but the majority of those representatives had been excluded by successive acts of military violence; and the house had been reduced from ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... for a great day. Neat rows of olive drab vehicles curved along the water's edge. Jeeps and half-tracks shouldered close by weapons carriers and six-bys, all of them shrinking to insignificance beside the looming Patton tanks. A speakers' platform was set up in the center of the line, ...
— Navy Day • Harry Harrison
... troubles and anxieties were still many, and the least thing might upset every hope she entertained, but there was always with her the remembrance that George Iredale was innocent, and in that thought she felt a wonderful security. That he was a smuggler was a matter of insignificance. She loved him too well to let such knowledge narrow her estimation of him. She was too essentially of the prairie to consider so trifling a matter. Half the farmers in the country were in the habit of breaking the ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... day courtship, in which the discrepancy in ages vanished into insignificance before the ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... adjoining valleys, one of which, commencing at the foot of the mountain where we stood, extended in a continual line towards the north, as far as the eye could reach—mountain rising above mountain, until by distance they dwindled into insignificance, the whole contrasted by a cloudless canopy of deepest azure, and enlightened by the rays of a blazing sun, and the effect, aided by a feeling of danger, seated as we were on the pinnacle of a rock almost surrounded by tremendous precipices—all united to constitute ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... king, hold a very much higher place in the public regard than the book on which he so prided himself. To foreigners, whose judgments are unhampered by his recorded opinion, his character as an original historian sinks into insignificance, and he is known only ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... sentiment, he thus adroitly managed to get appointed to some offices of minor importance, under the new state government, yet, becoming every year better and better understood, and consequently more and more distrusted, he finally sunk into utter insignificance and contempt; and, falling into pecuniary embarrassments, brought about by a long course of secret fraud in selling wild lands, of which he had no titles, he was confined for debt in the very building ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... things as cards, plays boldly at his daring game at winning position, and risks—honor. The bright-eyed girl throws heart and soul into the enchanting game of love, and risks—virtue. Charity, esteem, honor, virtue,—are not these great stakes to offer, beside which my modest risk sinks into very insignificance? Ah, we all play, and with what varied success! How many poor, unlucky wights turn up deuces all their life, while others, born under luckier stars, hold a fistful of kings and queens! How many eyes grow dim over ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... was at an end, and the great achievements of Gustavus Vasa had been done. Though not yet thirty-two, the youthful monarch had already secured a place among the foremost leaders of the world. We have watched the Swedish nation rise from insignificance, through a series of remarkable developments, till its grandeur cast a lengthened shadow across the face of northern Europe. In some regards this revolution stands pre-eminent above all others known in history. Few political upheavals have ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... blended with the green shutters of the house, and made it seem part and parcel of the grove. Upon its front no veranda had dared encroach, but at one side could be seen a vine-covered stoop that might have been called a veranda had it not been dwarfed to insignificance by the size of the house. The front door, which alone in that country-side boasted two leaves, was wide open, and on the steps leading up to it, resplendent in fresh gingham, stood ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... restore his offices if he would abandon Lewis. When the imperial ambassador, in July 1677, complained of the No Popery cry, they replied that there was no question of religion, but of liberty. In the case of Oates and his comrades, the political motive faded into insignificance beside the religious. At first the evidence was unsubstantial. Oates was an ignorant man, and he obtained credit only by the excitement and distrust caused by the discovery of the premeditated coup d'etat. Godfrey, the magistrate who conducted ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... by the imprudence of the same noble, who, presuming upon his newly-acquired importance, uttered the most violent and menacing expressions against the Protestants, declaring that they had been tolerated too long, and that it would soon become necessary to reduce them to a proper sense of their insignificance; an opinion which he had no sooner uttered than the Marquis d'Ancre in his turn assured the Regent that if she desired to secure a happy and prosperous reign to her son, she had no alternative but to forbid the exercise of the reformed religion, to ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... who were also the special friends and allies of Grant, were radicals, and generally of a more materialistic class than the earlier leaders. Fessenden had died in 1869; Sumner was alienated, and died in 1874; Wilson had passed into the insignificance of the Vice-Presidency; Trumbull was in opposition. At the front were Chandler, of Michigan; Oliver P. Morton, War Governor of Illinois, powerful and partisan; Roscoe Conkling, of New York, showy and arrogant. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... however, very few circumstances are recorded after Henry of Monmouth had ceased to resist the rebels in person: the war gradually dwindled, and sunk at last into insignificance. A few embers of the conflagration still remained unquenched, and called for the watchfulness of government; but the flames had been so far subdued, that all sense of danger to the general peace of the realm had been removed from the people of England. ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... of sentences, to accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place, beyond the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time, that everlasting solace of humanity which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task. Vergil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and lodging sink, however, into insignificance before the moral and social unpleasantness of an establishment such as this. All ages, all conditions, and all creeds are promiscuously huddled together. It is impossible to choose whom one shall know or whom avoid. A horrible burlesque of family life is enabled, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... simplicity and homeliness of its expression gave additional weight to this first avowal of a strong conviction that the time had come when the Labour party must have separateness and a leader if it were to rise out of insignificance; to this frank renunciation of whatever personal claims his own past might have given him; and to the promise of unqualified support to the policy of the younger man, in both its energetic and conciliatory aspects. He threw out a little not unkindly indignation, if one may be allowed the ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to put Zadig to death by the bowstring. The orders were given to a merciless eunuch, who commonly executed his acts of vengeance. There happened at that time to be in the king's chamber a little dwarf, who, though dumb, was not deaf. He was allowed, on account of his insignificance, to go wherever he pleased, and, as a domestic animal, was a witness of what passed in the most profound secrecy. This little mute was strongly attached to the queen and Zadig. With equal horror and surprise he heard the cruel orders given. But how to prevent the fatal sentence that in a few hours ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... things in nature except the mistletoe, which, on account of its frailty and insignificance, was scornfully neglected. Asa Loke, the evil principle of the Norse faith, taking advantage of this fatal exception, had a spear made of mistletoe, and with it armed Hodur, a strong but blind god. Freya, rejoicing in fancied security, to convince Balder of his charmed ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the east end. It was built partly of bricks and partly of flint stones, the walls bowed and bent, and the roof waved and broken. Its old age had gathered none of the graces of age to soften its natural ugliness, or elevate its insignificance. Except a few lichens, there was not a mark of vegetation about it. Not a single ivy leaf grew on its spotted and wasted walls. It gave a hopeless, pagan expression to the whole landscape—for it stood on a rising ground, from which ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... but now Hawkeye was frightened; and before Col. Sellers knew what he was about, Hawkeye, in a panic, had rushed to the front and subscribed such a sum that Napoleon's attractions suddenly sank into insignificance and the railroad concluded to follow a comparatively straight coarse instead of going miles out of its way to build up a metropolis in the muddy ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... "that by transferring the same ridicule (not the same) from one to another, he destroyed its efficacy; for, by showing that what he said of one he was ready to say of another, he reduced himself to the insignificance of his own magpye, who from his cage calls cuckold at a venture." We love and honour the sage, but here he is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... one of the most familiar in folk- tales amusingly parodied by Mr. Lang in his Prince Prigio. The taboo against taking food in the underworld occurs in the myth of Proserpine, and is also frequent in folk-tales (Child, i. 322). But the folk-tale parallels to our tale fade into insignificance before its brilliant literary relationships. There can be little doubt that Edgar, in his mad scene in King Lear, is alluding to our tale when he breaks into ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... The Puritans had power to subdue the wilderness, to overcome whatever obstacles interposed to the founding of a state and the establishing of the truth as they conceived it, because all these difficulties were accidents, outward and of comparative insignificance when set against the real life, which was within. If a heritage of self-consciousness has come down with the noble gifts which the forefathers have left to their children, it is at least part of the ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... every little detail, every commonplace insignificance is used—and must be used by them alone—to further their dark causes. They cannot trust their projects to brave lieutenants, to faithful subordinates. They cannot say, "Here is the end; this is the work to be done; upon your ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... end of the evening, I recognized the correctness of Casorans's information. Among all the gentlemen present I found only two professed admirers: Monsieur de Mauleon, whose insignificance was notorious, and Monsieur d'Arzenac, who appeared at first glance as if he might be more to be feared. D'Arzenac, thanks to an income of ten thousand livres, beside being a man of rank, occupies also one of the finest positions that one could desire; he is not unworthy of his name and his fortune. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... composers as Nicolo Piccinni (1728-1800), a composer who is now known principally to fame as the unsuccessful rival brought forward by the Italian party in Paris in the year 1776 in the vain hope of crushing Gluck. Piccinni sinks into insignificance by the side of Gluck, but he was nevertheless an able composer, and certainly the leading representative of the Italian school at the time. He did much to develop the concerted finale, which before his day had ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... the baronet. "A geyser! and of such grandeur that the Great Geyser of Iceland, which I have seen, sinks into the utmost insignificance ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... king! What a stupendous field for philosophy to expatiate in! What an endless material for thought! What humiliation to the pride of mere human greatness! How are the mighty fallen! Of all that was great in Napoleon, what remains? Despoiled of his usurped power, he sinks to insignificance. There was no moral greatness in the man. The meteor dazzled, scorched, is put out,—utterly, and for ever. But the power which rests in those who have delivered the nations from bondage, is a power that is delegated to them from heaven; and the manner in ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... stand there as a sort of guest and share in the pleasure with my eyes, and yet, on the other hand, I was unhappy, because I was merely an onlooker instead of a participator in the dance. My personal insignificance weighed heavy upon me, doubly heavy because of the gastric condition I was regularly in at this reason, and it continued so until the nightwatchman, wrapped in his long blue cloak, came into the hall at midnight and, after blowing a preliminary signal on his horn, wished ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... now and then as the waves and wash of the steamer rolled ashore, churning up the mud, they startled the dull, heavy alligators into activity, sending them scurrying off the muddy banks into deep water, to await the passing of the, to them, large water monster, whose great bulk dwarfed them into insignificance the most extreme. ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... nothing secret about his action. The firm pressure of his fingers, even, seemed as though they might have been the kindly, encouraging touch of a sympathetic friend. But upon Julia his touch was magical. The rest of the evening faded into insignificance. She understood feelings which had come to her that afternoon in the park with absolute completeness for the first time. From that moment she took her place definitely amongst the women who walk through life but whose feet seldom touch ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... some of those enthusiastic men who undertake to legislate on Irish subjects so frequently commit, would excite feelings of ridicule, if the observations in which they see fit to indulge were not calculated to produce mischief in quarters where their insignificance is not known, and where their flippant fallacies may be mistaken for facts. Thus, Mr Poulett Scrope exclaims,—"What! are 130 work-houses, capable of containing 100,000 people, to be considered sufficient to supply accommodation for 2,800,000 destitute paupers?" If the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... man alive upon the wheel, would be nothing to breaking his rest, his peace, his heart—everything but his fast—upon four; and the punishment of Ixion (the only practical person, by-the-bye, who has discovered the secret of the perpetual motion) would sink into utter insignificance before the one we have suggested. If we had been a powerful churchman in those good times when blood was shed as freely as water, and men were mowed down like grass, in the sacred cause of religion, we would ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... with the new emotion, indifferent, now assume importance. A look, a tone of the voice, a pressure of the hand, are events to dream about and feast upon. In the presence of the beloved object all things else are either unheeded or dwindle into comparative insignificance. ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... impossible not to wonder at its superb effrontery. It depends for its effect, not upon ornament, which perforce appears trivial and inapposite, but upon its mass. Whatever approaches it of another scale and kind is dwarfed to insignificance. The Sub-Treasury of the United States, for instance, looks like a foolish plaything beside its august neighbours. Where sky-scrapers are there must be no commemorative statues, no monuments raised to merely human heroes. The effigy of Washington in Wall Street has no more dignity than ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... something personal, beautiful, fatherly, pure, something which is unwillingly tied to earth and would be free if it could. The sense that we are ourselves wholly separate and distinct, with experience behind us and experience before us, seems to me a fact beside which all other facts pale into insignificance. And next in strength to that seems the fact that we can recognise, and draw near to, and be amazingly desirous of, as well as no less strangely hostile to, other similar selves; that our thought can mingle with theirs, pass into theirs, as theirs into ours, forging ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... operations over the sea in connection with wars on land. The war between Japan and China, between America and Spain, between England and the Transvaal, and finally the Chinese Expedition, have largely demonstrated the methods of transporting troops over the sea. Whilst Moltke has shown the insignificance of the land forces for such operations, the military authorities must in the future reckon on the important problem of preparing for and conducting ...
— Operations Upon the Sea - A Study • Franz Edelsheim
... later, one morning when a gentleman whose portrait he was painting canceled his appointment, Renovales remembered his promise and went to the Museo del Prado, feeling, as he entered, the same sensation of insignificance and homesickness that a man suffers on returning to the university where he has ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... town, were brought and distributed among them. The most disaffected were purchased with the largest presents. Even Malatchee himself seemed fully contented with his share, and the savages in general perceiving the poverty and insignificance of the family of Bosomworth, and their total inability to supply their wants, determined to break off all connection with them ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... Intellectual over the Material. But as nations, resembling individuals, do not become illustrious from their mere physical proportions; as in both, renown has its moral sources; so, in examining the causes which conduced to the eminence of Greece, we cease to wonder at the insignificance of its territories or the splendour of its fame. Even in geographical circumstance Nature had endowed the country of the Hellenes with gifts which amply atoned the narrow girth of its confines. The most southern part of the continent of Europe, it ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... listened to see if he could understand what they said. He had studied French himself for a year or two, and could say a great many things. In fact, he had been accustomed to consider himself quite a good French scholar. But he now found that all his acquisitions dwindled into utter insignificance, when compared with the power over the language possessed by those ...
— Rollo in Paris • Jacob Abbott
... first voyage of Columbus, which brought together two streams of human life that had been disjoined since the glacial period. But as an achievement in ocean navigation that voyage of Columbus sinks into insignificance beside it.... When we consider the frailness of the ships, the immeasurable extent of the unknown, the mutinies that were prevented or quelled, and the hardships that were endured, we can have no hesitation in speaking of Magellan as the ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... never rest, and the hurricane only slumbers to bring forth the worse dangers of the fog-bank and the iceberg. Fierce as has been during the four centuries the fight for the fisheries by European rivals, their petty racial quarrels sink into insignificance before the general struggle for the harvest. The Atlantic roar hides all minor pipings. The breed of fisher-folk from these deep-sea voyagings consist of the toughest specimens of human endurance. All other dangers which ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... remained in the hands of the Scotch, and King Edward prepared to lay siege to this. Save for the band of Wallace there was no longer any open resistance in the field. A few holds like those of Archie Forbes still remained in the hands of their owners, their insignificance, or the time which would be wasted in subduing them, having protected them from siege. None of the nobles now ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... freedom of production and adheres to the real. In the artist is a double tendency, toward the perfection of the type and toward the representation of natural reality. He should not fall into the abstraction of the type, nor into the insignificance of empirical reality. Schleiermacher feels all the difficulty of such a problem as whether there be one or several ideals of the human figure. This problem may be transferred to the sphere of art, and we may ask whether the poet is to represent only the ideal, or whether he should also deal with ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... not seem a very important thing. One should not, in theory, be able to dominate from its height, nor to feel the world small below one, nor to hold a whole countryside in one's hand—yet one does. The mountains from their heights reveal to us two truths. They suddenly make us feel our insignificance, and at the same time they free the immortal Mind, and let it feel its greatness, and they release it from the earth. But I say again, in theory, when one considers the exact relation of their height to the distances ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... been the dirigibles: their second was a blow which paled the other into insignificance. ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... anything half so gorgeous, and though she did not know yet whether she liked or disliked the bewildering decorations of mermaids and sea animals and flowers, she was struck by their magnificent audacity into a sense of her own insignificance. Before she could dare to walk here as by right, or seat herself in one of those great gilded and brocaded chairs, she must buy clothes which suited Monte Carlo as all this florid splendour of ornamentation ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... di Tenda wonderful, and the way down to Bellagio over the mountains still more thrilling; but here, they were dwarfed into utter insignificance. I could have imagined nothing like this feat of engineering, nothing so wild, so majestic as the ever-changing views from ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... clear, belongs ultimately to those who are slowly building up sounder traditions into the structure of life. The "problem of sexual abstinence" will more and more sink into insignificance. There remain the great solid fact of love, the great solid fact of chastity. Those are eternal. Between them there is nothing but harmony. The development of one involves the development of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... could not amend; they might indeed reject it; but to reject it was to shake the foundations of public credit and to leave the kingdom defenceless. Thus one branch of the legislature was systematically put under duress by the other, and seemed likely to be reduced to utter insignificance. It was better that the government should be once pinched for money than that the House of Peers should cease to be part of the Constitution. So strong was this feeling that the Bill was carried only by sixty-five to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... differing in construction from that of ours, with billions of miles of interstellar space intervening between each; yet so vast are the dimensions of the celestial sphere that those distances when measured upon it sink into utter insignificance. As the receding depths of space are penetrated by powerful telescopes, they are found to be pervaded with stars and starry archipelagoes, distributed in profusion over the circular immensity and extending away into ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... sank into insignificance beside a more definite sound—the crackle of dry leaves and the snapping of twigs beneath a heavier footfall than that of any marauding Tom, and through a clearing in the woods slouched the figure of a ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... willing to suffer even unto death. The mercy that could stoop to ransom such a transgressor, claimed an affection before which poor Derry's deep love for his earthly darling paled, as the things of time fade into insignificance ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... America and the conquest of Grenada—which owed their origin to the enterprise of the two famous personages whose ashes were inclosed in the heavy leaden cases at my feet; and I never felt more profoundly the insignificance of earthly renown, or the vanity of individual glory. "The paths of glory lead but to the grave." Coming from the tomb, we were next shown a sceptre and crown which had been used by the illustrious dead. Also a sword which Ferdinand himself wore in his battles ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... to live in San Francisco. A sense of a loss of independence—of a change of circumstances that left him no longer his own master—began to perplex him, in the midst of his brightest projects. Certain other relations with other members of his family, which had lapsed by absence and his insignificance, must now be taken up anew. He must do something for his sister Jane, for his brother William, for his wife's poor connections. It would be unfair to him to say that he contemplated those things with any other instinct than that of generosity; yet he ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... Unimportance. — N. unimportance, insignificance, nothingness, immateriality. triviality, levity, frivolity; paltriness &c. Adj.; poverty; smallness &c. 32; vanity &c. (uselessness) 645; matter of indifference &c. 866; no object. nothing, nothing to signify,, nothing worth speaking of, nothing particular, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... responsibility had made a man of him. His father would have preferred that he should have returned with him to England, but Harold finally decided upon remaining. In war men's passions become heated, the original cause of quarrel sinks into comparative insignificance, and the desire for victory, the determination to resist, and a feeling of something like individual hatred for the enemy become predominant motives of ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... Lesbia had felt in the advent of a stranger dwindled to nothing after Mr. Hammond's frank avowal of his insignificance. At the very beginning of her career, with the world waiting to be conquered by her, a high-born beauty could not be expected to feel any interest in nobodies. Lesbia shook hands with her brother, honoured the stranger with a stately bend of her beautiful throat, and then ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... dice of God are always loaded." Doubtless we must always pay for greatness by isolation, or some more bitter toll. And for our insignificance, in turn, come the Bobbies as reward. It behooves those of us, then, who are insignificant, to appreciate our blessing, to cherish our penguins, the more since we, when "the world is too much with us," when the tyranny of economic conditions oppresses ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... four and a half. He read it through once and then read it through again. It contained a great many figures—figures running into the millions, whose effect was to make twenty-five dollars a week shrink into insignificance. On the whole, it was decidedly depressing reading—the more so because he ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... combined refusal to repay. The Exchequer was empowered to retain grants due for various purposes in Ireland and to recoup itself in proportion to the defalcation in any county. It should be added that individual failures have been rare to the point of insignificance, and that no combined refusal has been attempted, or advocated, even ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... had fully recovered the use of his eyes, was their home, not a thousand feet away. George brushed his way out, and he stood there, not knowing whether to run or to shout or to cry. Every emotion appealed to the boys for mastery. All previous experiences during the past year paled into insignificance in comparison with the hour just ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... seven day courtship, in which the discrepancy in ages vanished into insignificance before the ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... couldn't believe you'd slipped your cable for good an' there she was, a-waitin' an' a-waitin' for her king to come back. Gib, I'm free to tell you that piracy, barratry, murder an' homicide pales into insignificance compared with what you went an' done, for you broke an innercent an' trustin' heart an' hell's too good for a man that'll pull ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... assurances, another member of the family appeared at the door, little Geoff, in a little black dress, which showed his paleness, his meagre, small person, insignificance, and sickliness more than ever. He had been there, it would seem, looking on while his uncle spoke. At this moment he came down deliberately, one step at a time, till his head was on a level with the carriage window. "It is quite true," he said. "Mother's in her own room. She's ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... onto the ground, were as fine a body of youths as one could easily encounter in the course of a long day's march. The picture of health and physique, they seemed almost like some of those heroes of old beside whom poor everyday man was wont to shrink into insignificance. Among the blues towered Jim, among the reds Charlie, two by no means the ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... some respects too wide and in others too narrow, are inquiries which, though important in themselves, need hardly detain us. The question in comparison with which all matters of detail sink into insignificance is not what are the limitations which the Constitution imposes on the competence of the Irish Parliament, but what is the efficacity of the means provided by the Constitution for compelling the Irish Parliament to respect these limitations? This is the one ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... noticed Natalie's withdrawal from Graham and himself. When she was around he was his old punctilious self, gravely kind, more than ever considerate. Beside his failure to her, her own failure to him faded into insignificance. She was as she was, and through no fault of hers. But he was what he had ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... helped Mrs. Bal out of the blue car (also big, in proportion to the size of the owner and his fortune) was Morgan P. Bennett of New York, the Tin Trust millionaire. Somerled's puny horde of millions dwindle into humble insignificance beside Morgan Bennett's pile. If Somerled has made two millions out of his mines and successful speculations, and a few extra thousands out of his pictures, M. P. Bennett has made twenty millions out of tin—and unlimited cheek. He is so big that his pet name in Wall Street ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the ages confronted her. Her own insignificance, her humbleness, accentuated and betrayed her. Who would listen? How dared she speak! Who would ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... your account of this unfortunate being, and his forlorn piece of self-history, with that smile of half-interest which the annals of insignificance excite, till I came to where he says, "I was bound apprentice to Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathematics," etc.; when I started as one does on the recognition of an old acquaintance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... and watched, I thought, as every one must surely think, with strange paradoxical feelings, of one's own utter insignificance in creation, mingled with the delightful consciousness of our individual importance in the eyes of the Maker and Father of all. An atom among worlds, as one feels, sitting there at such an hour and in such a spot, still we remember with love and pride, ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... and the desire to provide for a respectable burial, we can see another motive which brought the weak and lowly together in these associations. They were oppressed by the sense of their own insignificance in society, and by the pitifully small part which they played in the affairs of the world. But if they could establish a society of their own, with concerns peculiar to itself which they would administer, and if they could create positions ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... fiery-faced quintessence of all that is abominable!—thou—thou-" here standing upon tiptoe, seizing her by the throat, and placing my mouth close to her ear, I was preparing to launch forth a new and more decided epithet of opprobrium, which should not fail, if ejaculated, to convince her of her insignificance, when to my extreme horror and astonishment I discovered that I had ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... that has prevented a revolution on this same subject long ago. One hundred thousand such fire-eaters as Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the land, could raise a rumpus which would cause the late unpleasantness to pale into insignificance. Armed and equipped, what a sight would be presented by an army of strong-minded women! There would be no considering the question of whether the cavalry should ride side-saddle, or a la clothes-pin. Such detail would be of too small importance to receive ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... feeding-time would be a paradise of tranquillity and repose. The rattle and rumble of carts and carriages, which drive the professors and possessors of milder music to the side-streets and suburbs, sink into insignificance when these cataracts of uproar begin to peal forth; and their owners would have no occasion to seek an appropriate spot for their volcanic eruptions, were it not that the police, watchful against accident, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... arm stretched out. It was a large stout arm, and the possessor was large and stout, with pale golden hair and many sparkling jewels. Her glance roamed lazily from place to place. It rested for an instant on Peter, and then moved on, and Peter felt the comment upon his own insignificance. ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... unmarked with insolence. He knew what was due to the station which he filled, and he exacted the respect to which it was entitled. He crushed assumption and forward impudence by a look, and brought them down to the level of their own insignificance. I recollect an instance of this on one occasion, when I attended him as counsel on a summons. The Attorney on the opposite side was a Mr. Tomlinson, a man then in extensive practice, but forward, assuming, and self-sufficient. He made some observation which offended the learned ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... Romana, with a small body of cavalry, left Toabado, crossed the Minho, descended into the valley of the Tamega, and took refuge close to the Portuguese frontier line. Here he was, for a time, safe from the pursuit of the French, the insignificance of his force being his best protection. Soult lost no time. As soon as the English army had left, Corunna opened its gates to him, as did Ferrol, although neither of these towns could have been taken without a siege, and Soult must have been delayed until ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... decidedly belonged to that class of men whom that witty writer, Balzac, so delightfully calls les hommes predestines in his Physiologie du Mariage. Without doubt, he was a very good-looking man, but he bore that stamp of insignificance which so often conceals coarseness and vulgarity, and was one of those men who, in the long run, become unendurable to a woman of refined tastes. He had a good private income, but his wife understood ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... as we know, far less brilliant and less extravagant than those supplied by popular imagination. It would be a mistake, however, to neglect or despise them on account of their tedious monotony and the insignificance of the characters who appear on the stage. It was by dint of fighting her neighbours again and again, without a single day's respite, that Rome succeeded in forging the weapons with which she was to conquer the world; and any one who, repelled by their ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... toward the railway, imagining that her large business would be a sufficient compulsory influence; but now Hawkeye was frightened; and before Col. Sellers knew what he was about, Hawkeye, in a panic, had rushed to the front and subscribed such a sum that Napoleon's attractions suddenly sank into insignificance and the railroad concluded to follow a comparatively straight coarse instead of going miles out of its way to build up a metropolis in the muddy ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... Lygia felt guilty, but not to that degree. She had judged even that withdrawal from Miriam's house would be her victory over temptation, and would lessen her fault. Crispus rubbed her into the dust; showed her all the misery and insignificance of her soul, which she had not suspected hitherto. She had judged even that the old presbyter, who from the moment of her flight from the Palatine had been to her as a father, would show some compassion, console her, give ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... away into all but complete insignificance. After two or three abortive efforts to again bring forward reform, Grattan gave up the hopeless attempt, and retired broken-hearted from public life. The "United Irishmen," in the first instance an open political body, inaugurated and chiefly supported by Protestants, now rapidly ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... awakening us to a proper sense of our insignificance, pulpit orators sometimes make an unfair use of the grave and its worms. Let us put no faith in their doleful rhetoric. The chemistry of man's final dissolution is eloquent enough of our emptiness: there is no need to add imaginary horrors. The worm of the sepulchre is an invention of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... uproariously—secure in their employment by a foreign tourist agency from the disgust of the Muslim population, whose scowls shadowed them. Elias Abdul Messih was one of them. The other, who boasted a very large hooked nose, like a parrot's beak, which reduced the rest of his face to insignificance, was Yuhanna Mahbub, ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... worth enumeration as an example of the utter insignificance of the production, which should be an important item in the agricultural wealth of the island. The greater portion of the tobacco consumed in Cyprus is imported in bales from Salonica, and is consigned to manufacturers who ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... of laying tiles is so trifling as hardly to be worth estimating, except to show its insignificance. The estimate, by English engineers, is two cents per rod for "pipe laying and finishing." What is included in "finishing," does not appear. From the personal observations of the writer, it is believed that an active man may lay from ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... one small room, and when the three girls followed Mr. Ashby to the place, they were amazed at the insignificance of their exhibition. ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... pale blueness of his eyes, made them more vivid by contrast; they were like pools of blue light amid the brownness of his face. Peter always ran about his work with eager alacrity. A simple and willing old man, he affected the quick readiness of youth to atone for his insignificance. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... followed the example of the Butlers. The Earl of Clancarty sued for pardon and delivered up his eldest son as a hostage for his good faith; the Earl of Thomond—more suspected than compromised—yielded all his castles, with the sole exception of Ibrackan. But the next year, mortified at the insignificance to which he had reduced himself, he sought refuge in France, from which he only returned when the intercession of the English ambassador, Norris, had obtained him full indemnity for the past. Sir James Fitzmaurice, thus ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... and that I am unimportant. For I would have you know I am a monstrous clever fellow. As for you, you are either a delusion or a god or a degraded Realist. But whatever you are, you have lied to me, and I know that you have lied, and I will not believe in the insignificance of Jurgen." ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... the shoguns. One reason operating to produce this result was that, in an age when lineage or military prowess was the sole secular step to fortune, men of civil talent but humble birth had to choose between remaining in hopeless insignificance or entering the priesthood where knowledge and virtue were sure passports to distinction. It was thus that in nearly every monastery there were found men of superior intellect and erudition. The fact was recognized. When Ashikaga Takauji desired to take counsel of Muso Kokushi, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... true that the tendency of this Bill will be to throw power into the hands of the landed interest, we shall have a great Tory party, which will be selfish, bigoted, and ignorant, and a Radical party, while the Whig party, who will have carried the measure, will sink into insignificance. Such present themselves to my mind as possible alternatives, as far as it is practicable to take anything like a view of probabilities in the chaos and confusion that mighty alterations ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... him, and she was unconscious of the influence his rank and wealth had exercised upon her feelings. She had thought of herself so often as the Marchioness of Strishfogel, had so completely projected her mind into that brilliant future, that to descend from this giddy height to the insignificance of unwedded girlhood was as sharp a fall as if she had worn a crown and ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... unfulfilled expectation in which he found himself. In the first place, Petrograd was so very different from anything that he had expected. Its size and space, its power of reducing the human figure to a sudden speck of insignificance, its strange lights and shadows, its waste spaces and cold, empty, moonlit squares, its jumble of modern and mediaeval civilisation, above all, its supreme indifference to all and sundry—these things cowed and humiliated him. He was sharp enough to realise that here ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... few articles, which pleased him highly: a small shawl, a razor, three bunches of beads, some buttons, and a powder-horn. Apologizing for the insignificance of the gift, I wished to know what I could bring him from Loanda, saying, not a large thing, but something small. He laughed heartily at the limitation, and replied, "Every thing of the white people would be acceptable, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... sits still, or reposes himself upon a couch, no more deceives himself than he deceives others; he knows that he is doing nothing, and has no other solace of his insignificance than the resolution, which the lazy hourly make, of changing his ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... seen that small-featured, conscientious little face? He seemed to associate it with some agreeable and not very distant episode; yet its intelligent insignificance was so overshadowed by the pleasantness of the episode itself, that he now tried in vain to identify it with a searchlight of recognition. "I give up," he said to himself discontentedly. "Maybe it'll come to me later." And then, suddenly, ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... should directly link together Milan with the Netherlands, and so give the Spanish policy a necessary preponderance in the affairs of Europe." Richelieu spoilt this fine prospect just as it seemed about to become a reality, and the Spanish Hapsburgs gradually sank into insignificance, and their line disappeared in 1700, on the death of Charles II., the most contemptible creature that ever wore a crown, and scarcely man enough to be a respectable idiot. Such was the termination of the great Austro-Burgundian dynasty that was founded by Charles ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... recalled his impressions on first meeting the girl a week before, and his own outspoken surprise at the insignificance of the sister of his beautiful hostess. A plain, odd little creature, that had been the involuntary verdict, but almost immediately it had been amended. Plain, but charming; distinctly the little thing had charm! Now, at the expiration of six days it had come to this, ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... the greatest deluge which can be imagined sinks into insignificance beside that of the slowly floating, slowly melting iceberg, or the glacier creeping along at its snail's pace of a yard a day. The study of the deltas of the Nile, the Ganges, and the Mississippi has taught ...
— Time and Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... restlessly. The sight of his working face brought a quick hand to Tessibel's lips, and her white teeth set deeply into the upraised knuckles to help stifle the groans. Every trouble of her own sank into insignificance before the calamity facing her. Many times Tess had viewed death afar off, but not until the past three days had it threatened her own loved ones. In that hour she was experiencing the extremity of sorrow, and each aching nerve in her body seemed ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... person's pleasure to come without parade or attendants—this was indifferent to her. It was their conversation, their characters, their merit, she looked to; and many a lord and lady of showy dress and equipage, and vast importance in their own opinions, shrunk into insignificance in the company of Mrs. Hungerford; and, though in the room with her, passed before her eyes without making a sufficient sensation upon her organs to attract her notice, or to change the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... showed Las Cases a great scar on his thigh which he said had been received in a bayonet charge at Toulon. "Men wondered at the fortune which kept me invulnerable; I always concealed my dangers in mystery." The hypothesis of his insignificance appears unlikely when we examine the memoirs written by his contemporaries, and consider the precise traditions of a later generation; it becomes untenable in view of what happened on the next day, when the commissioners nominated ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... primary importance on our planet; but the Grecian name, represented by Greece considered as a territory, or as the original seat of the Hellenic people, ceased to have much importance, in the eyes of historians, from the time when it became a conquered province; and it declined into absolute insignificance after the conquest of so many other provinces had degraded Hellas into an arithmetical unit, standing amongst a total amount of figures, so vast and so much more dazzling to the ordinary mind. Hence it was that in ancient times no complete history of Greece, through all her phases and stages, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... considerable period without further excitement. Closely associated with him in the present adventure is La Belle Chasseuse. Neither would endeavour to procure safety by flight to a foreign country. They will seek insignificance by living in a normal and commonplace manner. What more easy, for instance, for Mademoiselle than to return to the life of the circus, whilst her lover—granted that he wished to remain in her company—will obtain some suitable employment in the same circle. There is ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... expeditions against the "Turks," of captured cities and spoils. Now, after what he had heard from el-Tadhil, he began to fear whether in the presence of far greater events, all his acts would not fade into insignificance, just as a drop of rain disappears in the sea. "Perhaps," he thought with bitterness, "nobody will pay attention to what I have accomplished, and Smain will not even be pleased that I have brought ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... their case we look far back into the vista of history to recall the change, whereas in the instance of Spain we are contemporary witnesses. From a first-class power, how rapidly she has sunk into comparative insignificance! She has been shorn of her wealthy colonies, one after another, in the East and in the West, holding with feeble grasp a few inconsiderable islands only besides this gem of the Antilles, the choicest jewel of her crown. Extremely poor ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... with the street, but just large enough to permit a pigmy ale-house or eating-house, still allowed by the rich to their stable-servants, to stand in the angle. There is something cheery in its very dinginess, and something free and elfin in its very insignificance. At the feet of those grey stone giants it looks like a ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... concentration: it was as though for an instant the boy was able to give one a glimpse of the wonderful force of his intellect. When he looked one in the face with intention, and suddenly allowed one to realise, as it were, all the dominating power of his brain, one shrank into insignificance, one felt as an ignorant, intelligent man may feel when confronted with some elaborate theorem of the higher mathematics. "Is it possible that any one can really understand these things?" such a man might think with awe, and ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... more rhetorical. "Yes, it's their only salvation from their rotten insignificance." He meditated. "And yet—hnn!" He was about to say something much kindlier when suddenly he laughed down from a side window upon the twins ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... for Agelastes and the Caesar, and when they observed the condition of Achilles Tatius, it seemed such as rather to express doubt and consternation, than to give encouragement to the hopes they had entertained. Many of the lower classes, however, felt too secure in their own insignificance to fear the personal consequences of a tumult, and were desirous, therefore, to provoke the disturbance, which ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the necessary intercourse of civility, and fill up the vacuities of actions by agreeable appearances. It had therefore been of advantage, if such of our writers as have excelled in the art of decorating insignificance, had supplied us with a few sallies of innocent gaiety, effusions of honest tenderness, or exclamations ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... lawsuit.' There was a rush to Rome, where, for several ensuing years, the hostile English parties were to wage a furious battle in the antechambers of the Vatican. But the dispute over the Oblates now sank into insignificance beside the rage of contention which centred round a new and far more deadly question; for the position of Dr. Errington himself was at stake. The Cardinal, in spite of illness, indolence, and the ties of friendship, had been brought at last to an extraordinary step— he was petitioning ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... MURILLO (1617-1682) has always been accounted the most popular of the Spanish painters, and it is only in recent times that his popularity has faded into comparative insignificance on the fuller recognition and understanding of the genius of Velasquez. The intensely Anglican feeling in this country during the eighteenth and ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... the thought help us to the conviction of the relative insignificance of all that can change. That will not spoil nor shade any real joy; rather it will add to it poignancy that prevents it from cloying or from becoming the enemy of our souls. But the thought will wondrously lighten the burden that we have to carry, and the tasks ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... has. It is no fault of his own if he has not a commanding eye, for he studies hard to assume it. His features are well formed, though perhaps the sharpness of his nose may give to his face in the eyes of some people an air of insignificance. If so, it is greatly redeemed by his mouth and chin, of which he ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... these discoveries, his tenure of the chair would have been an illustrious one. It happens, however, that in the gigantic mass of his intellectual work these researches, though intrinsically of such importance, assume what might almost be described as a relative insignificance. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... initial character of the war changed within a few weeks: it developed into a conflict between international democracy on the one hand and international autocracy on the other hand. It was then when the question of Serbia sank into comparative insignificance that the Russian autocrats realized that they had enlisted on the wrong side. But with the whole populace of the country enthusiastically united behind it, the Government was swept onward; it was too late to make an abrupt ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... attempt a review of the topics discussed in the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth Congresses. The day was fast coming when contests for the Speakership and battles over appropriation bills, ay, even the fierce struggle over Kansas, would sink into insignificance, and Mr. DAVIS, with that political prescience for which he was always remarkable, seemed to discern the first sign of the coming storm. The winds had been long sown, and now the whirlwind was to be reaped. The thirty-sixth Congress, which ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... Valley with the exception of Dayton, Hamilton was hardest hit. Many persons killed, a thousand houses wrecked by the rushing torrent and 15,000 homeless was the toll of the flood in this city and environs, and the harrowing scenes attending flood disasters in the past decade faded into insignificance when compared with the havoc ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... way to the front hall. Evelyn, considerably piqued at being ignored, took advantage of his disappearance in search of his sister, to open up a broadside of inconsequential chatter before which her previous efforts paled into insignificance. And it was in the midst of her verbal barrage that Gresham appeared at the far end of the hall with ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... and the country cleared and stocked with the reasonable returns of so great a trade; the forests are stripped and nothing left in prospect, but the gloomy apprehension when the timber is gone, of sinking into insignificance and poverty. Formerly the woods swarmed with American adventurers who cut as they pleased. These men seeing the advantages that were given them, and wishing to make the most of their time, cut few but prime trees, and manufactured ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... and make their presence felt in Western Asia. But when once the organization broke down, either on account of internal rivalries or the influence of an outside power, they lapsed back again into a state of political insignificance in the affairs of the ancient world. It is possible that about 1800 B.C. the Hittite confederacy was controlled by an ambitious king who had dreams of a great empire, and was accordingly pursuing ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... himself—and that they had all gone behind the curtain forever out of her sight. Of all the white men Jorgenson alone was left, that man who had done with life so completely that his mere presence robbed it of all heat and mystery, leaving nothing but its terrible, its revolting insignificance. And Mrs. Travers was ready for revolt. ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... clearing with a few trees dotted about, upon which in former times the skins of the sacrificial victims were hung. The central point of the grove, at least among the tribes of the Volga, was the sacred tree, beside which everything else sank into insignificance. Before it the worshippers assembled and the priest offered his prayers, at its roots the victim was sacrificed, and its boughs sometimes served as a pulpit. No wood might be hewn and no branch broken in the grove, and women were generally ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... of insignificance making its way into his mind. He had been vain of his looks, but what did looks amount to down there? He had been proud of his money, but what privilege did money give him on that flood? He had rejoiced in his popularity and the attention women paid him, but the indifferent gaze of that smoking ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... ditch with a bank on the outside, both usually very regular and well constructed. Within, at the centre, is a mound not more than a foot high containing the sepulchral deposit. Occasionally there are more than one of these minute mounds, which often escape notice by reason of their insignificance. ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... strength or the weakness of States according as they are able or unable to hold them against an enemy. Of the two fragments, the smaller was militarily important only as a feeder to the other. Severed from the body to which they belonged, the seceded States west of the Mississippi sank into insignificance; the fire that had raged there would smoulder and die of itself, now that a broad belt which could not be passed interposed between it and the greater ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... a projected marriage and not the consummation of one already concluded. When there was a solemn public betrothal and then a wedding after an interval of time, the latter was plainly a repetition which had no significance. What happened finally was that the betrothal fell into insignificance, or was united with the wedding as in the modern Anglican service, and concubitus was allowed only after the wedding. The wedding then had importance, and was not merely a blessing on a completed fact. It was then a custom in all ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... unique design was brought out by Clara for the occasion. It belonged to her husband's family in France and came to him as an heirloom. The contrast between it and the mulberry set which mother gave me struck me as singular, but the flowers and figures of the mulberry ware did not fall into insignificance. They were to me the embodiment of beauty. Among my earliest disappointments was the giving of grandmother's china to Hal, and I cried for "just one saucer," and this was a fac-simile and met a hearty appreciation. I bedewed it with tears, and Aunt Hildy said it was dretful dangerous to ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... were the chief beauty of the old masks, but the best of them sink into {117} insignificance before such a masterpiece of art as this. Perhaps nothing in a modern language comes nearer to giving the peculiar effect which is the glory of Pindar. Of course there is in it more of the fanciful, and more of the romantic, ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... this the political disintegration of Poland proceeded rapidly, and when that unhappy country fell to pieces Russia naturally took for herself the lion's share of the spoil. Sweden, too, sank to political insignificance, and gradually lost all her trans-Baltic possessions. The last of them—the Grand Duchy of Finland, which stretches from the Gulf of Finland to the Polar Ocean—was ceded to Russia by the peace of ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... dear fellow. Carnes, doesn't the sight of the glowing orb of night influence you to pious meditation upon the frailty of human life and the insignificance of human ambition?" ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... of the greatest movement now taking place on the face of the globe. In comparison with it, the agitation in Russia shrinks to insignificance; for it is not political, but social. Its object is not a changed dynasty, nor a revolution in the form of government; but, with higher aim and deeper motive, it promises nothing short of the complete renovation of the oldest, most populous, and most conservative of empires. ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... eyes disturbed me. They were unusually large, the iris golden like Felipe's, but the pupil at that moment so distended that they seemed almost black; and what affected me was not so much their size as (what was perhaps its consequence) the singular insignificance of their regard. A look more blankly stupid I have never met. My eyes dropped before it even as I spoke, and I went on my way upstairs to my own room, at once baffled and embarrassed. Yet when I came there and saw ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 1613, and the establishment of a more regular government than had previously been known. We only read occasionally of embassies being sent to Moscow, in general for the purpose of arranging commercial relations. From this state of insignificance, Peter, the first Emperor of Russia, raised his country, by introducing into it the arts of peace, by establishing a well-organized and disciplined army in the place of a lawless body of tumultuous mutineers, by creating a navy, where scarce ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... must be supposed to be the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the applications of their inferiors. While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy. The conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its original state of white paper. A sucking babe ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... proportion as it is variable and indefinite. A circumstance, apparently of no value, shall alter the whole interpretation to be put upon an expression or action and it shall alter it thus powerfully because in proportion to its very insignificance it shows a strong general principle at work that extends in its ramifications to the smallest things. This in fact will make all the difference between minuteness and subtlety or refinement; for a small or trivial effect may ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... was the stream of his lively imagination, of his inexhaustible interest in every form of beauty and strangeness and folly. On this stream, sitting in the stout little craft of his poverty, his insignificance and his independence, he had made some notable voyages.... And so, when Susy Branch, whom he had sought out through a New York season as the prettiest and most amusing girl in sight, had surprised him with the contradictory revelation ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... patiently until they have re-formed some habits of study and rediscovered the pleasures of systematic thinking. The best stimulus will be a teacher so convinced of the supreme importance of the subject to be studied as to lead the members to recognize its importance and the insignificance of any price they may pay for ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... were now at hand before which the Public Worship Regulation Act and the Slave Circular paled into insignificance. ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... citizens who died in their struggle for liberty. Amid quiet by-ways, for instance, I discovered a tablet with the name of a young soldier who fell at that spot, fighting against the Bourbon, in 1860: "offerse per l'unita della patria sua vita quadrilustre." The very insignificance of this young life makes the fact more touching; one thinks of the unnumbered lives sacrificed upon this soil, age after age, to the wild-beast instinct of mankind, and how pathetic the attempt to preserve the memory of one boy, so soon to become a meaningless ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... trouble. In any case what was sought was revolution, and those who preached it ought to contemplate all the possibilities of such a course. They might be the fathers and founders of a new nationality, but they might also be simply mischief-makers, whose insignificance and powerlessness were their sole protection, who were not important enough for "either a traitor's ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... reading of sentences, to accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place, beyond the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time, that everlasting solace of humanity which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task. Vergil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind. But ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... animal who hasn't known enough to die. His undeveloped senses have permitted him to survive in the manner of the oyster. The mysteries, dangers, and delights of the sea do not exist for the oyster. Its senses are not stirred by typhoons, impressed by earthquakes or annoyed by its own insignificance. ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... pile, formerly raised to religion or royalty, were scattered about; regularity and perfect design were strangely mixed up with ruin and disorder, and nature had done it all. Niagara has been considered one of her wildest freaks; but Niagara falls into insignificance when compared with the wild grandeur of this awful chasm. Imagination carried me back to Thebes, to Palmyra, and the Edomite Paetra, and I could not help imagining that I ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... discovery Santo Domingo had passed the zenith of its glory. The vast and wealthy countries discovered and conquered on the mainland of America absorbed the attention of colonists and of the government, and Santo Domingo quickly sank to a position of economic and political insignificance. So little importance was given the island by chroniclers during the ensuing two hundred and fifty years and so few are the records remaining, that not even the names of all the governors and the periods of their rule can be accurately determined. ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... credit upon a writer, few have ever better illustrated these traits than 'A COLORED BALTIMOREAN,' or deserved a nobler tribute of praise. He who would be ashamed to acknowledge such a man as his countryman and brother, has yet to learn his own insignificance and what constitutes ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... quite out of tone with the original work. Jean de Meung abandoned entirely the refined and aristocratic atmosphere of his predecessor, and wrote with all the realism and coarseness of the middle class of that day. Lorris's vapid allegory faded into insignificance, becoming a mere peg for a huge mass of extraordinarily varied discourse. The whole of the scholastic learning of the Middle Ages is poured in a confused stream through this remarkable and deeply interesting work. Nor is it merely as a repository of medieval erudition that Jean ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the great public throne-room had always overwhelmed me with a sense of my own insignificance. On that morning, chagrined at my reception by Vedius and Satronius, weak, ill and tottering on my feet, needing all my will power to stand steadily and not reel, with my head buzzing and my ears humming, feeling large and light and queer, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day had so largely and variously coloured Browning's work. It occurred to none of those worldly bishops to justify their worldliness,—it was far too deeply ingrained for that. But Blougram's brilliant defence, enormously disproportioned as it is to the insignificance of the attack, marks his tacit recognition of loftier ideals than he professes. Like Cleon, he bears involuntary witness ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... socialistic thinkers at all, but have been drawn by them from the evolutionary philosophy of the nineteenth century generally, in so far as it was applied to historical and sociological questions. The dominant idea which distinguished this school of thought was the insignificance of the individual as compared with society past and present. Thus Herbert Spencer, who was its most systematic exponent, opens his work on the Study of Sociology with an elaborate attack on what he calls "The Great Man Theory," according ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... insignificance of the means employed, the effects were absolutely miraculous. The explosion of the fulminate on striking either the hard cordage of the net or one of the steel ribs used to give the gas-holder rigidity, broke the two tubes full of liquid. Then came another far more violent explosion, ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... strength in fighting against the iron gates of destiny. No one, whose esteem is worth having, will respect us less because we dress according to our means, even if those means should have dwindled into insignificance. But if we toil unduly to make ourselves appear to be something that we are not, we shall earn contempt and reap disappointment. It is far more noble-minded to bid farewell to all our greatness, than to catch greedily at any of the outlying tinsel that may remain here and there. This indicates ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... me, and slanted round his best ear, and once, when I was speaking of some trifling, tender reminiscence, drew a long breath, with such a tremor in it that a little more and it would have been a sob, why, then I felt there must be something of nature in them which redeemed their seeming insignificance. Tell me, man or woman with whom I am whispering, have you not a small store of recollections, such as these I am uncovering, buried beneath the dead leaves of many summers, perhaps under the unmelting snows of fast-returning winters,—a few such recollections, which, if you should write ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... among the dead, emasculated by the sense of his own insignificance, crushed by the passive mastery of the slumbering ages. The magnitude of all things appalled him. Everything partook of the superlative save himself—the perfect cessation of wind and motion, the immensity of the snow-covered wildness, the height of ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... life, and gave dignity to men who would otherwise have been insignificant. The example of men who rejoiced to part with their lives for the sake of their religion, became to the world the most impressive voice which it yet heard of the insignificance of this life when compared with the life to come. "What will it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" became thus one of the most stupendous inquiries which could be impressed on future generations, and affected all the relations of society. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
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