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More "Inutility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... highly worthy of observation, that Howard, before he entered on his grand projects of Public Benevolence, was subject to those little, but depressive variations of health which have betrayed many a valetudinarian into habits of inaction and inutility. Happily for himself, and for mankind, this excellent person surmounted a constitutional bias to indolence and retirement. The consequence sequence was, he became a singular example of activity and vigour. His powers, and ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... its members. They are separately given up as of no value, and yet one is always to be defended for the sake of the other; but I cannot agree with the noble lord, nor with the pamphlet from whence he seems to have borrowed these ideas concerning the inutility of the trade laws. For, without idolizing them, I am sure they are still, in many ways, of great use to us; and in former times they have been of the greatest. They do confine, and they do greatly narrow, the market ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... fowling-pieces, medicines, European foods, sewing-machines, and, what is more extraordinary, stoves: all that ever caught his eye, tickled his appetite, pleased him for its use, or puzzled him with its apparent inutility. And still his lust is unabated. He is possessed by the seven devils of the collector. He hears a thing spoken of, and a shadow comes on his face. 'I think I no got him,' he will say; and the treasures he has seem worthless in comparison. If a ship be bound for Apemama, ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of October, 1854, intended as a diversion of the attention and strength of the garrison from the land side, where the real struggle for predominance was going on between the besieged and the besiegers. The inutility of this attempt was so manifest that no serious naval attack was undertaken, notwithstanding that the allies were ready to bring to bear upon the antiquated and ill-armed Russian works the most powerful naval armaments the world ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... she pays annually to her most implacable enemies! (Bravo.) Why have we these phalanx of priests, who have abjured their ministry? these legions of canons and monks; these cohorts of abbes, friars, and beneficed clergy of all sorts, who were not remarkable otherwise, except for their pretensions, inutility, intrigues and licentious life; and are only so to-day by their vindictive interference, their schemes, their unwearied hatred of the Revolution? Why should we pay this army of dependents from the funds of the nation? What do they do? They preach emigration, they send coin from ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... takes good care not to quit England, for the life of patience and self-devotion of the founder of a colony would have no attractions for him. He gives up and sells his patent as soon as he perceives the inutility of his efforts, while he does not forget to reserve for himself the fifth part of any profit arising eventually ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... am always disposed to admit that it can find thousands more zealous, more active, and in every respect more adapted to transact its affairs and watch over its interests; yet, with this consciousness of my own inutility, I must be permitted to state that, linked to a man like Graydon, I can no longer consent to be, and that if the Society expect such a thing, I must take the liberty of retiring, perhaps to the wilds of Tartary or the ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... if Mr. Spencer's theory accounts for anything, it accounts not for the deepening of a sense of utility and inutility into right and wrong, but for the drying up of the sense of utility and inutility into mere inherent tendencies, which would exercise over us not more authority but less, than a ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... incongruity—requires everything to be in keeping with its natural surroundings—and which therefore, for one thing, makes an American garden the best possible sort of garden to have in America; second, that twin art law, against inutility, which demands that everything in an artistic scheme serve the use it pretends to serve; third, a precept of Colonel Waring's: "Don't fool with running water if you haven't money to fool away"; and, fourth, that best of all gardening ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... his inclinations or interfere with his projects, extolled the delights of an autumnal tour with his wife and mother-in-law before returning to Holland; in short, was so plausible in his arguments, so specious and pressing, pleading so eloquently the violence of his love and inutility of delay, and overruling objections with such cogent reasoning, that he achieved a complete triumph, and it was agreed that in one week Van Haubitz should lead his adored Emilie to the hymeneal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... find it possible, and my constitution will sometimes get the better of my reason. Human nature itself, without any additional misfortunes, furnishes disagreeable meditations enough. Life itself to make it supportable, should not be considered too near; my reason represents to me in vain the inutility of serious reflections. The idle mind will sometimes fall into contemplations that serve for nothing but to ruin the health, destroy good humour, hasten old age and wrinkles, and bring on an habitual melancholy. 'Tis a maxim with me to be young ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... upon the ancient proscenium walk in buskins and look upon us out of masks whose significance has been intensified by remoteness in time. This view of the case yields an ample refutation of those arguments frequently adduced of late, in certain quarters, to prove the inutility of classical studies. Thus, it is urged, that, in every department of human knowledge, we transcend the most splendid acquirements of the ancients, and therefore that it is so much time wasted which we devote towards keeping up an acquaintance ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... distinguished men of that day. She fascinated them all without encouraging the pretensions of any; and notwithstanding the jealousy which so great a superiority necessarily excited among her own sex, and despite the rancour to which the inutility of their efforts to please her gave birth in the bosoms of certain of the men, she preserved a reputation for discretion beyond all suspicion. One circumstance of her life might indeed have cast a slur upon her ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... It would be dreary for the great logs to see new verdure springing all around them, while they lay idly rotting or sprouting with uncouth funguses, not unsuspect of poison. But they will not be wasted. Lumbermen, foes to idleness and inutility, swarm again about their winter's trophies. They imprint certain cabalistic tokens of ownership on the logs,—crosses, xs, stars, crescents, alphabetical letters,—marks respected all along the rivers and lakes down to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... death, judges who have been constantly sentencing to death;—I contend that for the reasons I have stated alone, a judge, and especially a criminal judge, is a bad witness for the punishment but an excellent witness against it, inasmuch as in the latter case his conviction of its inutility has been so strong and paramount as utterly to beat down and conquer these adverse incidents. I have no scruple in stating this position, because, for anything I know, the majority of excellent judges now on the bench may have overcome them, and may be opposed ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... his young master disappeared. In spite of his terror, I launched the dog into the air; he struggled, howled, and nearly evaded l'Encuerado's friendly grasp; the latter, as he again let him down, tried to explain the inutility of his struggles, and the danger of breaking loose. At length, having for the last time examined the stakes and the cross-piece, I also descended. I then shook the lasso, and at once succeeded in ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... properly arranged] will tell both natives and strangers exactly what they want to know, and possess great scientific interest and importance. Whereas the ordinary lumber-room of clubs from New Zealand, Hindu idols, sharks' teeth, mangy monkeys, scorpions, and conch shells—who shall describe the weary inutility of it? It is really worse than nothing, because it leads the unwary to look for objects of science elsewhere than under their noses. What they want to know is that their 'America is here,' as Wilhelm Meister has ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... inherent birthright of every freeman. My proposition, and the whole of the arguments I used in its support, were received by a very large majority of the delegates with enthusiastic approbation; so much so, that it convinced Mr. Cobbett of the folly as well as the inutility of persisting in his motion. My amendment having been seconded by Mr. Hulme, from Bolton in Lancashire, and being supported by a very ingenious argument of my brave friend and fellow prisoner (now in Lincoln Castle) Mr. Bamford, Mr. Cobbett rose and begged to ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... public building has a spiritual, a ritual meaning far beyond its immediate political results. It is a religious service. If, for instance, the Socialists were numerous or courageous enough to capture and smash up the Bank of England, you might argue for ever about the inutility of the act, and how it really did not touch the root of the economic problem in the correct manner. But mankind would never forget it. It would change ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... corrosive dews on the multitude who are to rest beneath its shade. It need not, however, be doubted, that Sir Alexander Ball would exert himself to preclude any such intention, by stating and evincing the extreme impolicy and injustice of the plan, as well as its utter inutility in the case of Malta. With the exception of the governor and of the public secretary, both of whom undoubtedly should be natives of Great Britain and appointed by the British Government, there was no civil office that could be of the remotest advantage ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to reform the world: had an all-wise Being planned it, nothing is more improbable than that it should have failed: omniscience would infallibly have foreseen the inutility of a scheme which experience demonstrates, to this age, to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... of the governments of Europe, the slave-trade (more cruel from having become more secret) has dragged from Africa, within ten years, almost the same number of negroes as before 1807; but we must not from this fact infer the inutility, or, as the secret partisans of slavery assert, the practical impossibility of the beneficent measures adopted first by Denmark, the United States and Great Britain, and successively by all the rest of Europe. What passed from 1807 till the time when France recovered ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... agility, When he near'd the leafy forest, dark sanctuary divine; By unearthly fury frenzied, a bewildered agony, With a flint of edge he shatter'd to the ground his humanity. 5 Then aghast to see the lost limbs, the deform'd inutility, While still the gory dabble did anew the soil pollute, With a snowy palm the woman took affrayed a taborine. Taborine, the trump that hails thee, Cybele, thy initiant. Then a dainty finger heaving to the tremulous hide o' ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... possible. This, however, it was useless to discuss. Yesterday I saw Dedel, who has lately been at Walmer, and he told me the Duke of Wellington's opinion exactly coincided with ours, coincided both as to the impossibility of our making any concession in Syria, and to its perfect inutility if we did. We might degrade ourselves, weaken our own cause, but we should neither strengthen Guizot nor satisfy the cravings of French vanity and insolence, still less silence that revolutionary spirit which, not strong enough in itself, seeks to become ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... king inhaled, his eyes half-closed and his nostrils distended. Save for these brief moments, however, there rested on his countenance an expression of disenchantment which came of the knowledge of a part ill-played, an expression which described a consciousness of his unfitness and inutility, of lethargy ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... M. Rizoff hopes to be transferred soon to Belgrade. M. Rizoff having met M. Milakoff (PMilukoff) at Abbazia, has decided to continue the preparations for the organization until public opinion is convinced of the inutility of the (Turkish) reforms or until the term fixed—October 1905." Rizoff, in his talk with me, seemed ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... More than once had he essayed to remove the ligatures which confined his waist; but his unsuccessful attempts only drew an occasional smile of derision from his enemy, as he glanced his eye rapidly towards him. Conscious at length of the inutility of efforts, which, without benefiting her for whom they were principally prompted, rendered him in some degree ridiculous even in his own eyes, the wretched Valletort desisted altogether, and with his head sunk upon his chest, and his eyes closed, sought at least to shut out a ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... the impolicy of this decree. The royal audience listened to the representations of the colonists, and appointed Villagran to resume the command, but only granted him the title of corregidor, and gave him orders to rebuild the city of Conception. Although convinced of the inutility of this measure in the present conjuncture, Villagran, in obedience to the orders, proceeded immediately to that place with eighty-five families, whom he established there, and erected a strong ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... bills and a handful of jewelry he transferred to the pockets of his coat. Some papers which his hand brushed within the safe he pushed aside as though preadvised of their inutility to one of his calling. Then he closed the safe door, closed the tapestry upon it and turned toward a dainty dressing table. From a drawer in this exquisite bit of Sheraton the burglar took a small, nickel plated automatic, which he slipped into an ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the great logs to see new verdure springing all around them, while they lay idly rotting or sprouting with uncouth funguses, not unsuspect of poison. But they will not be wasted. Lumbermen, foes to idleness and inutility, swarm again about their winter's trophies. They imprint certain cabalistic tokens of ownership on the logs,—crosses, xs, stars, crescents, alphabetical letters,—marks respected all along the rivers and lakes down ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... promoters of learning, Reuchlin, Erasmus, and Faber Stapulensis, who afterwards make their appearance, and the discussion becomes general, but no impression can be made upon the stupid and prejudiced monks. The theme is, of course, the inutility of the new learning, Hebrew and Greek and correct Latinity. One short passage seems to ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... things in order he thought of the inutility of decorated rooms. He had spent all his money at Paris in buying ornaments and books, for till now he had ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... born in a family-society, at least; and are trained up by their parents to some rule of conduct and behaviour. But this must be admitted, that, if such a state of mutual war and violence was ever real, the suspension of all laws of justice, from their absolute inutility, is a ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... intended to reform the world: had an all-wise Being planned it, nothing is more improbable than that it should have failed: omniscience would infallibly have foreseen the inutility of a scheme which experience demonstrates, to this age, to have ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... with all its weary sinews—that we probably will never do anything at all for it and for the world in return, but will simply eat our way through life aimlessly, and die forgotten in the end like the beasts that perish. It ought to make us, as a class, terribly ashamed of our own utter and abject inutility.' ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... service, utilization, exploitation; necessity, need; utility, avail, advantage, usefulness, service; custom, usage, practice. Antonyms: disuse, obsolescence, desuetude, inutility. Associated Words: obsolescent, obsolete, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... exists in motion, every immaterial being in action and in passion; rest exists not any where; nor is it found in any other way, except among the parts of space. Surely it is contrary to every species of philosophy, whether ancient or modern, to found a system on the inutility of repose, or place perfection in the vacuity of rest, when every thing that truly exists, exists in motion; when every real information which we have is derived from a change; and when every excess in nature is compensated, not ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... some slight interchange of shots took place, during which a troop of the 18th Hussars, reconnoitring too boldly, was cut off, and was seen no more that day.[98] With the enemy in this attitude upon strong ground, General Yule saw the inutility of further efforts of this kind, and gave the order for retirement. At 1 p.m. the force was again below Indumeni, as it had been in the morning, having effected nothing. As the men climbed the last few yards of the precipitous ascent, the fog, rolling for a short time from the ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... grass. 'There was never a more desperate castaway—to fall from polite life, fortune, a shrine of honour, a grateful conscience, duties willingly taken up and faithfully discharged; and to fall to this— idleness, poverty, inutility, remorse.' He seemed to have forgotten her presence, but here he remembered her again. 'Nance,' said he, 'would you have a man sit down and suffer ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... listened to the representations of the colonists, and appointed Villagran to resume the command, but only granted him the title of corregidor, and gave him orders to rebuild the city of Conception. Although convinced of the inutility of this measure in the present conjuncture, Villagran, in obedience to the orders, proceeded immediately to that place with eighty-five families, whom he established there, and erected a ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... Roman matrons of old. They are not so primitive as that. You may have at any restaurant a smaller morsel than an ox or even an ox's shoulder; and as to ladies' finery, there is no article de Paris, no indispensable inutility, no crinoline, hoop, or cage, of impossible materials, shape, and dimensions, which you may not find under the Portici, or in Vianuova, a facility of which the Turinese beauties give themselves the benefit rather freely. What I meant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... theory accounts for anything, it accounts not for the deepening of a sense of utility and inutility into right and wrong, but for the drying up of the sense of utility and inutility into mere inherent tendencies, which would exercise over us not more authority but less, than a rational sense ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... universe piecemeal to his critical analysis. Duncan Macmorrogh cut up the creation, and got a name. His attack upon mountains was most violent, and proved, by its personality, that he had come from the Lowlands. He demonstrated the inutility of all elevation, and declared that the Andes were the aristocracy of the globe. Rivers he rather patronised; but flowers he quite pulled to pieces, and proved them to be the most useless of existences. ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... and shabbiness, and at the first opportunity to take their ease in the new world they had won from nature they sank down, too nerveless for passion or violence, into the easy vices: idleness, whining, gossip, drunkenness, sodden inutility. Against such qualities Mr. Howe has from the first proceeded with the doctrines of another Franklin, but of a Franklin without whimsical persuasions or elegant graces. Having apparently come to the conclusion ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... Men are walking about with live fowls, cocks, hens, turkeys, which they hold, head downwards, in a bunch, tied together by the legs. They are the quietest animals in the street. They seem to have been touched by the utter inutility of their loudest exclamations, and therefore to have resigned themselves in silence; only when some cart-wheel grazes that head of theirs, which they naturally hold up as high as possible, lest they should die of apoplexy, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... seeking an entrance; but the thought of admitting them never once crossed my imagination. At last, one among the number suggested the inutility of any further attempt; and, abandoning their original design, they all marched off to the grave-yard, where they remained till dawn as it seemed in some grand carousal. They then, as I was afterwards told, returned to the dwelling of the deceased, laid him in his ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... middle of the century that men's minds were fairly turned toward the reform of the criminal law. Yet eminent writers had long pointed out the inutility of torture. "Torture-chambers are a dangerous invention, and seem to make trial of patience rather than of truth," says Montaigne; but he thinks them the least evil that human weakness has invented under the circumstances. Montesquieu advanced a step farther. He pointed out ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... to suspend the operation of this sentiment. Many of their leaders were prisoners; and the brilliant successes of the British arms had filled numbers with despair. Others were sensible of the inutility of present resistance; and a still greater number, fatigued and harassed with militia duty, were willing to withdraw from the conflict, and, as spectators, to await its issue. To compel these men to share the burdens of the war, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... of rooms where the venerable Abbe de Sponde had his abode. The garrets offered fine quarters to the rats and mice, whose nocturnal performances were related by Mademoiselle Cormon to the Chevalier de Valois, with many expressions of surprise at the inutility of her efforts to get rid of them. The garden, about half an acre in size, is margined by the Brillante, so named from the particles of mica which sparkle in its bed elsewhere than in the Val-Noble, where its shallow waters are stained by the dyehouses, and loaded ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... of Condivi's show the grief and discouragement which the capriciousness of Leo, and the inutility of the work the master was employed on, caused Michelangelo. "On his return to Florence he found Leo's ardor entirely cooled. He continued a long time weighed down by grief, unable to do anything, having hitherto, to his great displeasure, been driven from one project to another." It was, however, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... death;—I contend that for the reasons I have stated alone, a judge, and especially a criminal judge, is a bad witness for the punishment but an excellent witness against it, inasmuch as in the latter case his conviction of its inutility has been so strong and paramount as utterly to beat down and conquer these adverse incidents. I have no scruple in stating this position, because, for anything I know, the majority of excellent judges now on the bench may have ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... 1909 the same vivisector published stll another volume recording experiments upon haemorrhage and the transfusion of blood. To many of these experiments we should take no exception on the ground of inutility or excessive production of pain. Others, however, are to be criticized, particularly when studied in connection with the claim put forth of complete absence of animal sensation. In his introduction the experimenter seems to assert ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... whatever to fit himself for a throne, or to cultivate qualities that would render himself popular among a high-spirited people. And, as he came to understand James more thoroughly, he had found his visits increasingly irksome, all the more so, as he felt their inutility. ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... Convinced of the inutility of his own presence at Vicksburg, and preoccupied with the risks threatening his squadron from the unguarded state of the river and its dangerous navigation, it is not wonderful that Farragut, who was the senior of the two flag-officers, ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... of no value, and yet one is always to be defended for the sake of the other; but I cannot agree with the noble lord, nor with the pamphlet from whence he seems to have borrowed these ideas concerning the inutility of the trade laws. For, without idolizing them, I am sure they are still, in many ways, of great use to us; and in former times they have been of the greatest. They do confine, and they do greatly narrow, the market for the Americans; but my perfect conviction of this does not help me in ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... persuaded of the inutility of making fresh applications, gave up for the present all farther solicitation for what he had so well deserved by his courage and his services. The change in the ministry has revived his hopes: a letter from that department informs him that his Excellency would willingly ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... preservation of the individual, which is shown first in the form of play. Then, through transformation and complication, play becomes primitive art, dancing, music, and poetry at the same time, closely united in an apparently indissoluble unity. Although the theory of the absolute inutility of art has met some strong criticism, let us accept it for the present. Aside from the true or false character of inutility, the psychological mechanism remains the same here as in the preceding cases; we shall ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... phalanx of priests, who have abjured their ministry? these legions of canons and monks; these cohorts of abbes, friars, and beneficed clergy of all sorts, who were not remarkable otherwise, except for their pretensions, inutility, intrigues and licentious life; and are only so to-day by their vindictive interference, their schemes, their unwearied hatred of the Revolution? Why should we pay this army of dependents from the funds of the nation? ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... To perceive the inutility of religious notions, we have only to open our eyes and contemplate the morals of those nations, who are the most under the dominion of religion. We there find proud tyrants, oppressive ministers, perfidious courtiers, shameless extortioners, corrupt ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... some of the southern tribes. I heard a characteristic anecdote of what took place some time ago in the south. A missionary found a chief and his tribe in preparation for war;—their muskets clean and bright, and their ammunition ready. He reasoned long on the inutility of the war, and the little provocation which had been given for it. The chief was much shaken in his resolution, and seemed in doubt: but at length it occurred to him that a barrel of his gunpowder was in a bad state, and that it would not keep much longer. This was brought ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... autumnal tour with his wife and mother-in-law before returning to Holland; in short, was so plausible in his arguments, so specious and pressing, pleading so eloquently the violence of his love and inutility of delay, and overruling objections with such cogent reasoning, that he achieved a complete triumph, and it was agreed that in one week Van Haubitz should lead his adored Emilie to the hymeneal altar. In ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... to God, Canadians, that ye Have not been cursed with nobility. And, as you love your country, keep it free From those whose utter inutility For any good is proven by their pride Of blood; they have ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... my studies. I need no observatory high in air to aid my perceptions or enlarge my prospect. I do not want a costly apparatus to give pomp to my pursuit or to disguise its inutility. I do not desire to travel and see foreign lands and learn all knowledge and speak with all tongues, before I am prepared for my employment. I have merely to go out of my door; nay, I may stay at home at my chambers, and I shall have enough ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... and it lay like a waxen image before me, I turned my eyes to its moaning mother, and sighed out my few words of comfort. But I am a beggar in grief. I can feel and sigh and look kindly, I think; but I have nothing to give. My tongue deserts me. I know the inutility of too soon comforting. I know that I should weep were I the loser, and I let the tears have their way. Sometimes a word or two I can muster: a 'Sigh no more!' and 'Dear lady, do not grieve!' but further I am mute ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... principle of inheritance at corresponding ages have been inherited from a remote period to the present day. On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility, such as the teeth in the embryonic calf or the shrivelled wings under the soldered wing covers of many beetles, should so frequently occur. Nature may be said to have taken pains to reveal her scheme of modification, by means of rudimentary organs, of embryological and ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... the survival of an antiquated form. In the province the body had a use, for it was a regular upper chamber; but when, in 1779, a senate was added, it became an anomalous and meaningless third house; yet it is still regularly elected, though its inutility is obvious. So long ago as 1814 John Adams had become very tired of it; he then wrote: "This constitution, which existed in my handwriting, made the governor annually elective, gave him the executive power, shackled with a council, that I now ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... the leafy forest, dark sanctuary divine; By unearthly fury frenzied, a bewildered agony, With a flint of edge he shatter'd to the ground his humanity. 5 Then aghast to see the lost limbs, the deform'd inutility, While still the gory dabble did anew the soil pollute, With a snowy palm the woman took affrayed a taborine. Taborine, the trump that hails thee, Cybele, thy initiant. Then a dainty finger heaving to the tremulous hide o' ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... strangers exactly what they want to know, and possess great scientific interest and importance. Whereas the ordinary lumber-room of clubs from New Zealand, Hindu idols, sharks' teeth, mangy monkeys, scorpions, and conch shells—who shall describe the weary inutility of it? It is really worse than nothing, because it leads the unwary to look for objects of science elsewhere than under their noses. What they want to know is that their 'America is here,' as Wilhelm Meister has it." During this period, also, he began his lectures to ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... exhaled by a numerous company of smokers prevented them from at first recognizing the persons with whom they were thrown; but after sitting awhile near the table, with the patience practised by philosophical travellers who know the inutility of making a fuss, they distinguished through the vapors of tobacco the inevitable accessories of a German inn: the stove, the clock, the pots of beer, the long pipes, and here and there the eccentric physiognomies of Jews, or Germans, and the weather-beaten faces of mariners. ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac
... certainly was in a state of complete oblivion to everything but a dreamy fanaticism, and yet that term is too harsh, and it would be impiety to call it holiness, seeing that it was in a state of inutility,—and yet, many well-meaning persons will think, no doubt, that my infant and almost sinless hand had hold of a blessed link of that chain of ineffable love, which terminates in the breast of that awful Being, who sits at the right-hand of the throne of the Eternal. I give, myself, no opinion. ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... executed." Bossuet held his tongue. "He had tried every thrust; had acted like a pontiff of the earliest times, with a freedom worthy of the earliest ages and the earliest bishops of the Church," says St. Simon. He saw the inutility of his efforts; henceforth, prudence and courtly behavior put a seal upon his lips. It was the time of the great king's omnipotence and highest splendor, the time when nobody withstood his wishes. The great Mademoiselle had just attempted to show her independence: tired of not ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... an entirely orthodox father I should raise merry hell about your debts and utter inutility, at the same time disinheriting you, but instead I am going to urge you to come home and run in debt here where the cost of living is not so high as in the East—meanwhile praying that your awakening may come while I am on ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... on the latter place on the 17th of October, 1854, intended as a diversion of the attention and strength of the garrison from the land side, where the real struggle for predominance was going on between the besieged and the besiegers. The inutility of this attempt was so manifest that no serious naval attack was undertaken, notwithstanding that the allies were ready to bring to bear upon the antiquated and ill-armed Russian works the most powerful naval armaments ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... distinct than this of the departure that evening from the Hall. A dozen negroes were about the steps, two or three mounted ready to escort us home, others bearing horn lanterns which the moonlight darkened into inutility, still others pulling the restive horses about on the gravel. Mr. Stewart swung himself into the saddle, and Daisy stepped out to mount behind him. She wore her own garments once more, but there was just a trace of powder on the hair ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... that the Government was engaged in negotiations with other countries in order to obtain treaties of reciprocity. The utter failure of these efforts Sir Robert Peel has repeatedly confessed, accompanied with a sigh over the inutility of the attempt; and the last time that he adverted, in the House of Commons, to the authority of Colonel Torrens (he was citing the Postscript to the Letter addressed to himself) it was with the kind of manner which indicated want of confidence in the guide who had misled him. Whether or ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
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