"Trivial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a calamity doubly hard to bear when one looks back and sees by what a trivial chance it has come upon us, and how slight an effort would have averted it altogether; and Mr. Bultitude cursed his own stupidity as he stood there, rooted to the ground, and saw the hansom (a "patent safety" to him in sober earnest) drive off and ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... recognize the sterling worth of his adversaries, and it was borne in upon him more and more that in this crisis he had a clever and beautiful woman to deal with, and what antagonist could be more powerful? He began to rearrange his thoughts upon this basis, passed in review all the seemingly trivial incidents with which Frida Mavrodin had been connected, and found many new meanings in them. The possibility that her influence might be paramount in Sturatzberg dawned upon him. Such a subtle power at work would explain many things, and the Ambassador determined to watch her ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... all times natural; but at a distance from home the mind is doubly anxious for the details of what is going on there, and attaches an interest to particulars which, under other circumstances, it would consider as too trivial to be worthy of attention. During my stay on the Continent, I felt very forcibly the truth of Dr. Johnson's observation, "that it is difficult to conceive how man can exist without a newspaper." I was, however, for a considerable time, forced to be satisfied with the ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... preserved. High prices have been offered for copies of the Hannibal journal containing them, but without success. The Post sketches were unsigned and have not been identified. It is likely they were trivial enough. His earliest work showed no special individuality or merit, being mainly crude and imitative, as the work of a boy—even a precocious boy—is likely to be. He was not especially precocious—not in literature. His literary career would halt and hesitate and trifle along ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of a life so as to show what its individual and characteristic significance may have been in the midst of all the other human beings which surrounded it, he ought to know how to eliminate from among the numberless trivial incidents of daily life all which do not serve his end, and how to set in a special light all those which might have remained invisible to less clear-sighted observers, and which give his book caliber and value ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... strokes of fate we have curiously trivial demonstrations. Lorne met Hesketh's eye with the steadiness of a lion's in his own; the unusual thing he did was to take his hands out of his pockets and let his arms hang loosely by his side. It was ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... once the deep roll of the drum roused the country, only to discover that it was a false alarm. But these constant alarms were trying indeed, especially on the timid and nervous, and women became almost hysterical on the most trivial occasions. ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... if I had read it only the day before, I recalled the description of a wild and stormy night when the heroine placed a lighted lamp in the window of her sea-bound cottage, to guide her lover home in safety. Gentlemen, the reading of that book in my boyhood days was but a trivial thing. I had read a thousand others, and of them all it was possibly the least significant; but the Supreme Arbiter ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... in the least interested in them," interrupted Marjorie with dry contempt. "You might be able to make a child of nine years believe you. I doubt even that. I have heard of this foolishness. Malicious as it is intended to be, it is too trivial to be deceiving. You will kindly unlock the front door and ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... party, having not had any since the 20th ultmo.; I say most of the party, for my friend Capt. Clark declares it to be a mear matter of indifference with him whether he uses it or not; for myself I must confess I felt a considerable inconvenience from the want of it; the want of bread I consider as trivial provided, I get fat meat, for as to the species of meat I am not very particular, the flesh of the dog the horse and the wolf, having from habit become equally formiliar with any other, and I have ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... Mrs. Tracy, thrown upon her own resources, has been continually tasting dear Julian's store, and finding out excuses for his trivial peccadilloes. And when, from the recesses of his desk, she had routed out (in company with sundry more, rather contrasting with a mother's pure advice) a few of her own letters, which had not yet been destroyed, she would doat by the hour on these proofs of his affection. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... intelligence on almost every subject. Mr. Bowen, although deferential in his deportment towards the captain, and ever treating him with a good show of respect, was in reality master of the brig; his advice being solicited on the most trivial occasion, and every suggestion he made in relation to the management of the vessel was eagerly seized upon by the captain. Indeed, Bowen was a model of a mate; industrious, economical, and faithful, treating the crew with kindness and consideration, yet exacting their full quota of ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... that you have had leave granted you: you then receive, in some way or another, directions to go to some place or another.... You go there ... you meet people you do not know, who ask you questions, sometimes seemingly trivial, sometimes obviously of the gravest importance.... It is up to you to find out whether you are face to face with your spy chiefs, or if, on the contrary, you have not fallen into a trap set by the police to catch spies.... You cannot go to a rendezvous with a quiet mind: how do you know that ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... most correct habits, yet in the old army he was in frequent trouble. As a subordinate he was always on the lookout to catch his commanding officer infringing his prerogatives; as a post commander he was equally vigilant to detect the slightest neglect, even of the most trivial order. ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... Irish! How frequently do circumstances, at first sight the most trivial and unimportant, exercise a mighty and permanent influence on our habits and pursuits!—how frequently is a stream turned aside from its natural course by some little rock or knoll, causing it to make an abrupt turn! On a wild road in Ireland I had heard Irish spoken for ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... been carried only with the help of the Social Democratic party. The speaker then once more rehashed the incidents of the Zabern matter, referred to the attitude of the Emperor, who, he said, had evidently been too busy with hunting and festivities to devote time to such trivial matters as the Zabern Affair, and also said that, if the Chancellor had refused to withdraw, the only possible conclusion from the vote of the two hundred and ninety-three Reichstag members, who were certainly ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... another kind of needlework in which more is made of the stuff than of the stitching. In applique the craft to the needleworker is not carried to its limit, but, on the other hand, it calls for great skill in design. Effective it must be: coarse it may be: vulgar it should not be: trivial it can hardly be: mere prettiness is beyond its scope: but it lends itself to dignity of design and nobility of treatment." The foregoing quotation is from "Art in Needlework" by Louis F. Day and Mary Buckle. It is of interest because it explains ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... see the officer, but that also was impossible, although he lodged in the inn. Monsieur Follenvie alone was authorized to interview him on civil matters. So they waited. The women returned to their rooms, and occupied themselves with trivial matters. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... makes me proudest. It will be attended with proeme, prolegomena, testimonia scriptorum, index authorum, and notes variorum. As to the latter, I desire you to read over the text, and make a few in any way you like best; whether dry raillery, upon the style and way of commenting of trivial critics; or humourous, upon the authors in the poem; or historical, of persons, places, times; or explanatory, or collecting the parallel passages of the ancients. Adieu. I am pretty well, my mother not ill, Dr. Arbuthnot vexed with his ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... off the talent of her pupils to the friends she invited; while, in a word, Hortense was thus being trained up to the accomplishments of a distinguished woman of the world, she did not dream how useful all these little details, so trivial, apparently, at the time, would one day be to her, and how good a thing it was that she had learned to play parts at Madame Campan's, and to appear in society as ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... to choose for every trivial noise but mine, and in so full a time? Away! You wrong me, Master Shrieve: dispose of him At your own pleasure; send the ...
— Sir Thomas More • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... said Loring. "Allow me, in turn, to make a suggestion, Mr. Wyatt. Put the money in your billbook, hand it to the stakeholder, and let him give it, unopened, to the winner. Of course, you will first take out your other money. There is no need for them to know that more than a trivial sum is at stake. We do not want to ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... what he would say, but was disappointed to find that it was a merely trivial conversation about some inconsequential thing, as though Kennedy had merely wished to get in touch with the "Silent Boss." Next he called up the sanitarium to which Murtha had been committed, and after posing as Murtha's personal physician managed ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... still, and beyond the far-away echoes of a policeman's patrol on the hard pavement outside, nothing, absolutely nothing, broke the universal, and as it seemed to her, unnatural silence. Generally at night-time there are sounds one likes to assure oneself are too trivial to be heard during the day—the creaking of boards, stairs (nearly always stairs), and the tapping of some leaf (of course some leaf) at the windows. Who has not heard such sounds, and who in his heart of hearts has not been only too ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... gossip she had heard, but it suddenly seemed small and not worth while. She had already told her that Aunt Susan had her promise to come in time for dinner; it occurred to her to tell her of Nathan's attitude toward them for their unfriendly neglect, but that too seemed unnecessary and trivial since they were going. On that point Elizabeth did not intend to give in an inch: she was going, even if John was cross ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... means to that end in a way entirely similar. The divine thunders out his anathemas with more noise and terror against the breach of one of his positive institutions, or the neglect of some of his trivial forms, than against the neglect or breach of those duties and commandments of natural religion, which by these forms and institutions he pretends to enforce. The lawyer has his forms, and his positive institutions too, and he adheres to them with ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... was a born idealist and a Utopian, Paul Deroulede had never for a moment had any illusions with regard to his own popularity. He knew that at any time, and for any trivial cause, the love which the mob bore him would readily turn to hate. He had seen Mirabeau's popularity wane, La Fayette's, Desmoulin's—was it likely that he alone would survive the inevitable death of so ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... at length arrived at my destined haven, and, what is very unusual for me, have been successful in several trivial circumstances, such as getting over the ferry (which is difficult at this season), finding temporary quarters for my chevaux without difficulty or delay. I cannot help regarding these as harbingers of good luck. I am, however, not fortunate in finding Judge Yates. He is from ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... had been a conspiracy to circulate false rumours, merely to abuse public credulity, it would not have been a trivial offence; but if the object of the conspiracy be not merely to abuse public credulity, but to raise the funds, in order that the conspirators may sell out of those funds for their own advantage, and, consequently, to the injury of others, in that case the offence assumes ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... the road as Callender's Consolidated Spectacular Colored Minstrels. On all the bills appeared the inscription "Gustave and Charles Frohman, Proprietors." As a matter of fact, Charles had very little to do with the company, although he made a number of its contracts. His financial interest was trivial. Gustave used his name because Charles had been prominently associated with the Mastodons and he had achieved some eminence as a ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... trivial incidents belonged to the routine of life, and the return of morning. Surely, not so the ringing of the great bell of the chateau, nor the running up and down the stairs; nor the hurried figures on the terrace; nor the booting and tramping ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... trivial love-affair is of staggering import. Who are we to question this, when nine-tenths of us owe our existence to a summer flirtation? And while our graver economic and social and psychic "problems" (to settle some one of which is nowadays the object of all ponderable ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... because of all this, he is lonely, morose, and secretive. Here is a girl of great ability and charm but subject to fits of deep depression. Another young man loses his temper very easily and cherishes resentment for a long time over trivial matters. The girl whom he is interested in is extremely self-conscious and thinks that she is being purposely slighted unless she is the center of everything. Others, both boys and girls, are excessively ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... Some apparently trivial entries have been copied, such as the payment of a sexton's salary for a number of successive years, but the name of the sexton in such cases has an important bearing upon the subject, when it is not improbable that the churches indicated as ...
— A Virginia Village • Charles A. Stewart
... the first step in the theory, the Supreme Being is reduced to the function of a motive power, a mainspring, a corner-stone, or, if a still more trivial comparison may be allowed me, a constitutional sovereign, reigning but not governing, swearing to obey the law and appointing ministers to execute it. But, under the influence of the mirage which fascinates him, the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... and President Wilson several times sharply criticised the actions of the Mexican dictator. But Huerta did not reform and nothing sufficient happened to him; it began to look as if watchful waiting might continue indefinitely when a trivial incident furnished ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... have made a newspaper man; and now he was too far along in life to pick up even the rudiments of the trade. He didn't have any more idea of news values than a rabbit. He had the most amazing faculty for overlooking what was vital in the news, but he could always be depended upon to pick out some trivial and inconsequential detail and dress it up with about half a yard of old-point lace adjectives. He never by any chance used a short word if he could dig up a long, hard one, and he never seemed to be able to start a story without a quotation from one of the poets. It never ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... trivial accident with indifference. Her husband tried in vain to persuade her to remain at home. On one of her charitable visits she was overtaken by a heavy fall of rain; and a shivering fit seized her on returning to the house. At her age ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... trouble, an inundation of vanity and vexation, of confusion and disappointment. While we enjoy ourselves, neither the joy not sorrow of other men affect us: We are then at liberty with the voice of our soul, to speak to God. By this we shun such frequent trivial discourse, as often becomes an obstruction to virtue: and how often do we find that we had reason to with we had not been in company, or said nothing when we were there? for either we offend God by the impiety of our discourse, ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... failed, ignominiously failed, and through what appeared a trivial accident. More such "accidents" at critical periods will appear before this history ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... retirement into Hertfordshire in 1864 as a gentleman farmer, and above all the undeniable gift for creating such pure melodies as his songs "When other Hearts" and "I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls," it is idle to refuse him a prominent place in the history of music. He wrote much that was trivial, but also much that was enduring. He died on the 20th of October 1870, and was buried at Kensal Green. In 1882 a medallion portrait of him was unveiled ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... know that Mr. Graham had a daguerreotype which looked just like 'Lena, and that Mrs. Graham had no doubt whatever that she was in the habit of writing to him. This of course was repeated, notwithstanding the promise of secrecy, and many of the neighbors suddenly remembered some little circumstance trivial in itself, but all going to swell the amount of evidence against poor 'Lena, who, unconscious of the gathering storm, did not for a time observe the sidelong glances cast toward her ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... but which, loosely construed, had been applied to punish socialism, pacifism, and left-wing ideologies, the charges often resting on far-fetched inferences which, if true, would establish only technical or trivial violations. They proposed 'clear and present danger' as a test for the sufficiency of evidence in particular cases. I would save it, unmodified, for application as a 'rule of reason' in the kind of case for which it was devised. When the issue is criminality of a hot-headed speech ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... those years, old and failing, they fell out over some trivial thing and separated for good. One traveled north, the other south. Both struck fine mineral that promised to make their dreams come true. But neither was content. Each wanted the other's companionship and yet each feared that pride would keep his ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... fascination a good puzzle has for a great many people. We know the thing to be of trivial importance, yet we are impelled to master it; and when we have succeeded there is a pleasure and a sense of satisfaction that are a quite sufficient reward for our trouble, even when there is no prize to be won. What is this mysterious charm that many find irresistible? Why do we ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... reminded him of a heroine of Meredith's—but a heroine at the end of the book. All had been written about her. She had played her mighty part, and knew that it was over. He and he alone was not content, and wrote for her daily a trivial ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... probably gained much color by constant repetition, even if they were not wholly created by imagination and hatred of the Austrian rule. According to these accounts, the local despots imposed exorbitant fines for trivial offences, and frequently sent prisoners to Zug and Lucerne to be tried by Austrian judges. They levied enormously increased taxes and imports on every commodity, and exacted payment in the most merciless manner; they openly violated ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... quarters in England and Ireland, to the extent of upwards of ten thousand miles yearly; and it was amidst this incessant and laborious travelling, that he contrived to commit to paper his fast-growing generalizations on what he rightly regarded as a new science. No observation, howsoever trivial it might appear, was neglected, and no opportunity of collecting fresh facts was overlooked. Whenever he could, he possessed himself of records of borings, natural and artificial sections, drew them to a constant scale of eight yards to the inch, and coloured them up. ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... foundations. From dawn till night every centre of public traffic and intercourse was the scene of hostile meetings between Christians and heathen, with frequent frays and bloodshed, only stopped by the intervention of the soldiery. Still, as we see that the trivial round of daily tasks is necessarily fulfilled, even when the hand of Fate lies heaviest on a household, and that children cannot forego their play even when their father is stretched on his death-bed, so the minor interests of individual ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... old patriarch seems to have been a great traveler in his day, and to have passed under a different name in every country that he visited. The Chaldeans, for instance, give us his story, merely altering his name into Xisuthrus—a trivial alteration, which to an historian skilled in etymologies will appear wholly unimportant. It appears, likewise, that he had exchanged his tarpaulin and quadrant among the Chaldeans for the gorgeous insignia of royalty, and ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Revolutionists were many surgeons, and in vivisection they attained marvellous proficiency. In Avis Everhard's words, they could literally make a man over. To them the elimination of scars and disfigurements was a trivial detail. They changed the features with such microscopic care that no traces were left of their handiwork. The nose was a favorite organ to work upon. Skin-grafting and hair-transplanting were among their commonest ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... definite, lucid and shiningly practical soul,—with such a power of always expectorating himself into clearness again. If he do frankly wager his life in that manner, beware, ye Soubises, Karls and flaccid trivial persons, of the stroke that may chance to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... Mr Pilkington was entirely dormant this morning. The matter of the ten thousand dollars seemed trivial to him in comparison with the weightier ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... cried, appealing to her husband, and even to Hortensia, who sat apart, scarce heeding this trivial matter of which so much was being made, "you see that he evades the point, avoids a direct answer to the question that ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... him in a cruel dispersal of hope. He avoided, and then he tenderly solicited a regret that he had not thrown her into the lock. To end on that hour by the sea would have been better than the trivial and wretched conclusion of a broken promise, and everything, even murder, were better than that a brute should have her woman's innocence to sully and destroy. His love of the woman disappeared in his desire to save, the idea which she represented at that moment; and lost in sentiment he stood watching ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... throughout Australia should likewise, as far as possible, bear uniform names. He stated that he had met wines in various vineyards grown from the same grape, and called by different names; and though this might seem a trivial matter, yet it led to endless confusion. Moreover, it should not be permitted to continue, especially as it could be so ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... interrogation and exclamation points for which we have no symbol. She tried to look surprised at the unimaginable suggestion of Cheever's being in her environs. She succeeded as well as Dyckman did in pretending that his errand was trivial. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... is a trivial breach of the criminal law, and is punishable on summary conviction before a magistrate or justices only, while the more serious crimes (indictable offences) must be tried before ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... about the room, attending to those details of forethought of which mothers have the secret. He watched her putting everything in place with silent pleasure. He noted her deft, clever ways, the exquisite neatness of her dress, her small feet so trigly shod, her lovely face bending over the most trivial duty with a smile of sweet contentment; and he could not help thinking hopefully of Harry. Indeed her atmosphere was so afar from whatever was evil or sorrowful that John wondered how he was to begin a conversation which ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... trivial circumstance will serve to exemplify this. Suppose you go into a fruiterer's shop, wanting an apple,—you take up one, and, on biting it, you find it is sour; you look at it, and see that it is hard and green. You take up another ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... made a recovery by the twelfth day, and the fetal sounds were plainly audible. Cullingworth speaks of a woman who, during a quarrel with her husband, was pushed away and fell between two chairs, knocking one of them over, and causing a trivial wound one inch long in the vagina, close to the entrance. She screamed, there was a gush of blood, and she soon died. The uterus contained a fetus three or four months old, with the membranes intact, the maternal death being due to the varicosity of the pregnant ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... mutterings. On the other side sat Mr. Cameron, his head bowed upon his hands, his mind going back to the years of Guy's childhood and youth. How vividly he recalled many little incidents, seemingly trivial when they occurred, but carefully treasured among the most precious memories in the long, sad years that followed! With the memory of his son, his heart's pride and joy, came also that of the beautiful daughter, with her golden hair and starry eyes, the ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... now that poor Aline was gone. True, he was growing more and more disinclined for active exercise, and he regretted he had led so sedentary a life. But though '64 piled itself up on '63, and '65 on top of that, these arbitrary divisions of time seemed to him but trivial. ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... that this will satisfy His Imperial Majesty concerning the puerile and trivial sophistry with which the adversaries have perverted our article. For we know that we believe aright and in harmony with the Church catholic of Christ. But if the adversaries will renew this controversy, there will be no want among us of those who will ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... applying come I," he says, "outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters." Indeed, the character which speaks throughout "Leaves of Grass" is raised to the highest degree of personal exaltation. To it nothing is trivial, nothing is mean; all is good, all is divine. The usual distinctions disappear, burned up, the poet says, for religion's sake. All the human attributes are heightened and enlarged; sympathy as wide as the world; love ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... I carried with me to my work a note book and during the noon hour I set down everything which I thought might be of any possible use to me. I missed no opportunity for learning even the most trivial details. A great deal of the information was superficial and a great deal of it was incorrect but down it went in the note book to be revised later when I became ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... anecdotes, to let you know in some measure what manner of man my father was. Anecdotes, if true and alive, are always valuable; the man in the concrete, the totus quis comes out in them; and I know you too well to think that you will consider as trivial or out of place anything in which his real nature displayed itself, and your own sense of humor as a master and central power of the human soul, playing about the very essence of the man, will do more than forgive anything of this kind which may crop out here and there, like ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... landmark I passed was noted down as one step nearer to my object. At Umvelos' I had not the leisure to do more than glance at the shell which I had built. I think I had forgotten all about that night when I lay in the cellar and heard Laputa's plans. Indeed, my doings of the past days were all hazy and trivial in my mind. I only saw one sight clearly—two men, one tall and black, the other little and sallow, slowly creeping nearer to the Rooirand, and myself, a midget on a horse, spurring far behind through the bush on their trail. I saw the picture as continuously and clearly as if I had ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... this suggestion was an overwhelming opposition. The President, Congress, the Army, Navy and public opinion generally agreed that the weapon was too terrible to use in so comparatively trivial a cause. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... sort of complaining you hear from British soldiers is over minor discomforts in the field. Tommy and Jock will grouse when they are so disposed. They will growl about the food and about this trivial trouble and that. But it is never about a really serious matter that you hear ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... material, which inspired the native Americans with such awe, which raised in their winds such wonder, are to be ascribed to the junction of the apparently harmless substances of nitre, charcoal and sulpher, set in activity by the accession of trivial scintillations, produced from the collision of steel with flint, merely because some bigoted Priest of the Sun, who is ignorant of the composition, chooses to think it is not possible such a striking phenomenon could be the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... faculty not always given to the waking self. Compared with my own waking self, for instance, my half-asleep self is almost a personality of genius. He can create visions that the waking self can remember, but cannot originate, and cannot trace to any memory of waking impressions. These apparently trivial things thus point to the existence of almost wholly submerged potentialities in a mind so everyday, commonplace, and, so to speak, superficial as mine. This fact suggests that people who own such minds, the vast majority of mankind, ought not to make themselves ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... traffic. In point of practical operation this ghastly business was characterized by a more fierce and flagrant dishonesty than any of its kindred pursuits. To such lengths of robbery did the managers go that at last the patience of the public was exhausted and a comparatively trivial occurrence fired the combustible elements of popular indignation to a white heat in which the entire insurance business of the country was burned out of existence, together with all the gamblers who had invented and conducted it. The ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... of Pharisees come up from Jerusalem to press the fighting. They at once bring a charge against Jesus' disciples of being untrue to the time-honored traditions of the national religion. Yet it is found to be regarding such trivial things as washing their hands and arms clear up to the elbows each time before eating, and of washing of cups and pots and the like. Jesus sharply calls attention to their hypocrisy and cant, by speaking of their dishonoring teachings and practices in matters of serious moment. ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... tongues, had brought their sorrows there and their joys—and gone; yet it seemed to him that they had not so surely gone. The great have their individual day and disappear, but the poor, in their corporate indistinguishableness remain. The multitude, petty in their trivial wants and griefs, find no historian and leave no monument. Yet, ultimately, it was because of the Christian faith in the compassion of God for such that Notre-Dame lifted her towers to the sky. The stage for the ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... writing, go straight to the point from the opening—make the wheels of the plot actually commence to revolve in the first scene—plunge into your action, don't wade timidly in inch by inch. To use up two or three scenes in showing trivial incidents which may happen to the characters while they are, so to speak, standing in the wings ready to make their entrances, is as tiresome as it is useless. If the hero of the Western story makes his first appearance by dashing ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... a preface, and to superintend the printing of one of the volumes. We may also add, that we believe we have notices of all the letters in the Macclesfield collection. We judge this because several which are too trivial to print are numbered and described; and those would certainly not have been noticed if any omissions had {305} been made. And we know that every letter was removed from ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... nursery was not without its annoyances, though as yet of a comparatively trivial kind. Sometimes, at night, the handle of the door was turned hurriedly as if by a person trying to come in, and at others a knocking was made at it. These sounds occurred after the children had settled to sleep, and ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... strange, Rome's a place of that general Intelligence, methinks thou might'st have News of such trivial things as Women, amongst the Cardinals Pages: I'll undertake to learn the Religion de stato, and present juncture of all affairs in Italy, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... friend. God keeps showing me by the strangest of surprises that He is all about us. This very incident, so seemingly trivial, is yet a part of my life already, it has set its mark upon me. All his life he has been led, from bad to worse, into drink, and haunted by all the other devils of sin, and piloted across the country thus, so that ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sick, broke bread at his own house, Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know, And yet was ... what I said nor choose repeat, And must have so avouched himself, in fact, In hearing of this very Lazarus Who saith—but why all this of what he saith? Why write of trivial matters, things of price Calling at every moment for remark? I noticed on the margin of a pool Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort, Aboundeth, very nitrous. ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... futile process, Tarzan bridged the dangerous gulf by distracting their attention from their altercation to a consideration of their plans for the immediate future. Accustomed to frequent arguments in which more hair than blood is wasted, the apes speedily forget such trivial encounters, and presently Chulk and Taglat were again squatting in close proximity to each other and peaceful repose, awaiting the moment when the ape-man should lead them into ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... come to warn me of Volney's latest move, he was also the bearer of a budget of news which gravely affected the State at large and the cause on which we were embarked. The French fleet of transports, delayed again and again by trivial causes, had at length received orders to postpone indefinitely the invasion of England. Yet in spite of this fatal blow to the cause it was almost certain that Prince Charles Edward Stuart with only seven companions, of whom one was the ubiquitous O'Sullivan, ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... to some to have acted precipitately, and built much on small foundations. I answer that I had the life of the King my master to guard, and in that cause dared neglect no precaution, however trivial, nor any indication, however remote. Would that all my care and vigilance had longer sufficed to preserve for France the life of that great man! But ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... no trivial matter for the high-souled maiden to devote herself, with sweet self-sacrifice, to those whose roughness and uncouth manners wounded her. The women, it is true, gladly accepted her aid, but the men, who had grown up under the rod of the overseer, knew neither reserve ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... first—then I took a step backward, and stood in the shelter and concealment of the foliage. For I had caught sight of Joan, and thought I would devise some sort of playful surprise for her. Think of it—that trivial conceit was neighbor, with but a scarcely measurable interval of time between, to an event destined to endure ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sin too often view the matter in a somewhat narrowly ecclesiastical spirit, and make use of forms of self-examination which mix up real and serious moral offences with "sins" which are merely ceremonial, trivial, or imaginary, as though the two stood precisely upon the same level. "One must abstain from sexual sin and not go to dissenting places of worship; one must not steal and must be sure to abstain from ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... feeble humanity. This subject leads me on to the last of the opinions of Confucius which I shall make the subject of remark in this place. A commentator observes, with reference to the inquiry about recompensing injury with kindness, that the questioner was asking only about trivial matters, which might be dealt with in the way he mentioned, while great offences, such as those against a sovereign or a father, could not be dealt with by such an inversion of the principles of justice [5]. In the second Book of the Li Chi ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... melancholy go hand in hand; both are born of an extreme sensitiveness, and the man who smiles at the trivial misfits of life realizes also that all men who tread the earth are living under a sentence of death, and that Fate has merely allowed them ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... reason he had himself unveiled to Commines, no doubt with a set purpose. Behind the King's most trivial act there was always a set purpose. In a boy's feeble hands, a puppet as he had called him, a king in legal age and yet a child in years and ignorance, this great France he had built up so laboriously would ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... As it stood there, lifting its proud roofs and gables to the sky, it might have been its own funeral monument. "Tombs in the chapel? The whole place is a tomb!" I reflected. I hoped more and more that the guardian would not come. The details of the place, however striking, would seem trivial compared with its collective impressiveness; and I wanted only to sit there and be penetrated by the weight of ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... my mark on him. He was a sneaking, cold-blooded fellow, with his white hair and pale face, and always fawning round the girls. I hated him, and gave it to him good." Joe spoke musingly and complacently as though it was a trivial thing to compass the killing of ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... Carlisle Heth and her cousin Henrietta the day after Canning left, was no doubt a trivial and obscure occurrence. Not an earthly thing could be said for it, except that it was a bubble on the surface of an unrest which would one day change ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the jury,—I should be sorry to treat with levity any charge which I see that you treat with solemnity. The charge of treason is here, I find, a very grave one: though elsewhere I have known it as common and as trivial as assault and battery. However, be that as it may, I trust there can be no offence in my noticing without much gravity the attempt of the learned gentleman who opened the case for the crown to aggravate ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... from these circumstances, trivial as they are, that those writers, whoever they were, and in whatever time they lived, were not present at the scene. The only one of the men called apostles who appears to have been near to the spot was Peter, and when he was accused of being one of Jesus's ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... smell departed gradually from the region of Ranny's breast pocket, and he had peace in his pen. His fellow-clerks suspected him of a casual encounter and no more. A matter too trivial ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... angrily, and the evil thought slunk away. But it came again—it kept coming. One by one, little trivial circumstances built themselves into suspicions, until the little brown freckles on Jemmy Three's face came to spell "Dishonesty" to Judith Lynn. If it had not been for the terrible need of lobster-money—Judith would have fought harder against ...
— Judith Lynn - A Story of the Sea • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... statements, and opposing each other's opinions, which, though mutually understood and allowed for in private, was most trying to the bystanders in public. If one related an anecdote, the other would break in with half a dozen corrections of trivial details of no interest or importance to any one, the speakers included. For instance: Suppose the two dining in a strange house, and Mrs. Skratdj seated by the host, and contributing to the small ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... with me a guide who knew the country far too well; for he would pertinaciously tell me endless Indian names for every little point, rivulet, and creek. In the same manner as in Tierra del Fuego, the Indian language appears singularly well adapted for attaching names to the most trivial features of the land. I believe every one was glad to say farewell to Chiloe; yet if we could forget the gloom and ceaseless rain of winter, Chiloe might pass for a charming island. There is also something very attractive ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... and Turgy, a cook, who, by an act of faithful boldness, had obtained a surreptitious entrance into the Temple, and whose services seemed to have escaped notice, though at a later period they proved of no trivial importance. ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... of inaccuracy and negligence which, however trivial in themselves, tend to prove that the author is not always very scrupulous in speaking of things he has not studied. A purist so severe as to write "Kelt" for "Celt" ought not to call Mercury, originally ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... became so overwhelming that he lost all hope, and, overcome by the most abject fear, sunk down, and would have fallen, had he not been supported. Recovering himself a little, he broke forth into earnest petitions that his life might be spared. He made the most trivial and weak excuses for his conduct, utterly unlikely to avail him anything. He declared that he had been led on by Myers; that his crew had forced him to consent to the piracy; that he had endeavoured ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... indulgently. "Storm and calm are to me alike! I am affected by neither. Life is so exceedingly trivial an affair, and is so soon over, that I have never been able to understand why people should ever trouble ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... abundantly supplied with ships, provisions, battering engines, and military stores. But we may rest assured, from the love of glory, and contempt of danger, which formed the character of Julian, that he was not discouraged by any trivial or imaginary obstacles. [75] At the very time when he declined the siege of Ctesiphon, he rejected, with obstinacy and disdain, the most flattering offers of a negotiation of peace. Sapor, who had been so long accustomed to the tardy ostentation ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... it occurred to the Duke that there could be no better channel through which to communicate his views upon the situation to political circles at home. Apparently it did not occur to him that Mr. Creevey was malicious and might keep a diary. He therefore sent for him on some trivial pretext, and a ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... deal taken up," she said rather stiffly; "but Signora Grassini overrates the importance of my occupations. They are mostly of a very trivial character." ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich |
