"Unimportance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... past. Even the Thames was a noiseless ghost. London at night gave me the illusion that I was really hidden from the monstrous trouble of Europe, and, at least for one sleep, had got out of the War. I felt that my suburban street, secluded in trees and unimportance, was as remote from the evil I knew of as though it were in Alaska. When I came to that street I could not see my neighbours' homes. It was with some doubt that I found my own. And there, with three hours ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... of an hour he sat with his back against a half buried mesquite log smoking, and now eying the magnificent sheer crimson wall which lay across the river, now wondering where Diana was and now contemplating curiously the sense of his own unimportance which the Canyon was thrusting into his consciousness more persistently every hour. Jonas joined him for the last part of his rest, but when Milton announced that they had finished the packing and must now portage the boats, Jonas was ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... pay visiphone. And again there were different levels of awareness in his mind—one consciously and defensively cynical, and one frightened at the revelation of his unimportance, and the third finding the ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... polite to the wakes; but now, with the least inflection in the world, he put the wakes at its proper level in the scheme of things as a local unimportance! She adored him for this; she was athirst for sympathy in the task of ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the play was over she was immediately surrounded by enthusiastic admirers eager to congratulate her, to dance with her. I too would have gone forward, but a sense of inadequacy, of unimportance, of an inability to cope with her, held me back, and from a corner I watched her sweeping around the room, holding up her train, and leaning on the arm of Bob Lansing, a classmate whom Ralph had brought home from Harvard. Then it was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... ten or twelve miles, you become aware that you are no longer noticed: nobody sees you; nobody hears you; nobody regards you; you do not even regard yourself. In fact, how should you, at the moment of first ascertaining your own total unimportance in the sum of things?—a poor shivering unit in the aggregate of human life. Now, for the first time, whatever manner of man you were, or seemed to be, at starting, squire or "squireen," lord or lordling, and however related to that city, hamlet, or solitary ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... significance of an individual life, or of the rapid years over which it extends, he had encountered, suddenly, the being who had coloured all his existence. He was reminded at once of the grand epoch of his life and of its utter unimportance. But these are the thoughts that would occur rather to us than him. Thought at that moment was an intolerable flash that burst on him for an instant, and then left all in darkness. He clung to the ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... car my removal from these mad activities would at least be dignified by a notice in the papers. The shrinkage to my self-importance added fire to my ambition. More carefully but resolutely I threaded my way up Cortlandt Street, and at every step my sense of my unimportance increased. Even my hotel seemed to be a hotel of no importance. Mr. Pound had stayed there in 1876, and his account of its magnitude and luxury had led me to believe that I could find it merely by asking. Three men met my simple inquiry with shakes of the head and hurried brusquely ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... an American admiral who scared England, and was only prevented from capturing London by the unimportance of the place. ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... hunger.... And suddenly all the schemes I was leaving appeared fine and adventurous and hopeful as they had never done before. How great was this purpose I had relinquished, this bold and subtle remaking of the English will! I had doubted so many things, and now suddenly I doubted my unimportance, doubted my right to this suicidal abandonment. Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted and favoured, who had turned aside by the way? Had I not, after all, stood for far more than I had thought; was I not filching from that dear great city of my ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... rarely that so large a number of constituents is absent, and it is much more frequent to find the deficiency restricted to one or two substances. They are illustrations of barrenness dependent on different circumstances. The first shows the unimportance of the organic matters of the soil, which are here unusually abundant, without in any way counteracting the infertility dependent on the absence of the other constituents. The second is that of a nearly pure sand; and the third, though it contains a greater number ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... that luncheon all three children thereafter declined to speak. To Genevieve Maud the only point worthy of mention was that she had what the others had. This compromise effected, the manner of eating it was to her a detail of indescribable unimportance. What were knives, forks, spoons, or their lack, to Genevieve Maud? The tin plate was merely a gratifying novelty, and that she had been in close communion with rice pudding was eloquently testified by the samples of that delicacy which ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... part nobly—and without being captured, for he did not agree with Ongoloo as to the unimportance of his own death! At the unexpected outcry in the rear the Raturans halted, and held a hasty ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... of supreme unimportance. To-night he was to face Rupert, to state, once and for all, that he had killed Carfax, to submit Margaret to a terrible test . . . even that of no importance. All life was insignificant beside something that was about to happen; before the gaze of that white dazzling cloud be felt that ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... she had been suddenly relegated to a position of utter unimportance. He was showing her that, as far as he was concerned, she was a person of not the slightest consequence, treating her like an inquisitive child. Their recent conversation, during which his mantle of reserve ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... Stephanie's youth and seeming unimportance, her lack of what might be called compelling rosy charm, Aileen had become reasonably friendly with the girl. Far subtler, even at her years, than Aileen, Stephanie gathered a very good impression of the former, of her mental girth, and how to take her. She made friends with her, made a book-plate ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... limp like wet silk. An individual called Kross, probably an insignificant, little man, felt his unimportance so deeply that he gave full licence to his penknife and carved his name in deep letters an inch high. I took a pencil out of my pocket mechanically, and I too scribbled on one of the columns. All that is irrelevant, however. . . You must forgive me —I don't ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the negative, eyed the young man sternly, and said that appearances were decidedly against him. He could not exactly commit him to jail without accusation, although the apple-core and his political unimportance subjected him to grave suspicion: but he should hold the Gospeler responsible for the youth's appearance at any time when his presence should be required. Mr. BUMSTEAD, whose eyes were becoming very glassy, then suggested that a handbill should be at once printed and circulated, to the effect that ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... Delcasse leaped to his feet and seized his hat. There was no longer in his mind any question as to the importance of this inquiry, and the comparative unimportance of that other one, opening with much pomp at the Prefecture. In fact, he had forgotten ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... Paris, and Berlin; one cannot take account of New York, which is merely the commercial metropolis of America, with a possibility of becoming the business centre of both hemispheres. Washington is still in its nonage and of a numerical unimportance in which it must long remain almost ludicrously inferior to other capitals, not to dwell upon its want of anything like artistic, literary, scientific, and historical primacy. It is the voluntary political centre of the greatest republic of any time and of a nation which is already ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... woman who had felt forced into acquiescing when Vincent Marsh had said so boldly and violently, that she loved her husband no more, that he was nothing to her now? It seemed to her at this moment that it was a matter of the utmost unimportance whether she loved him or not; but she could not live without believing him. That was all. She could not live without that. Life would be too utterly base . ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... of the Zambal people and their present comparative unimportance goes to show that they were the most indolent and backward of the Malayan peoples. While they have never given the governing powers much trouble, yet they have not kept pace with the agricultural and commercial ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... public opinion, though a moral object against which woman dares not often offend, is yet no standard for her government; that principles are determinable elsewhere; and that, whatever the world may think of them, and whatever may be their seeming unimportance under existing circumstances, are the only real moral securities of earth. She might fly from Charlemont, either into a greater world, or into a more complete solitude, but she would fly to no greater certainties than she now possessed. Her securities ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... significant folkways, standards of importance and unimportance, of the admirable and the despicable, the noble and the base, are determined by approvals and disapprovals that have become socially habitual. When we speak of a country being imperialistic or materialistic, we mean that most individuals in it, or at least those ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... numerous, for the L300 a year paid to every Victorian M.P. offers special facilities for the professional politician, but some light has recently been thrown on their misdeeds. The questions under discussion in Sydney are also less important. But the very unimportance of New South Wales politics leaves open a wide door for strong language. I have a vivid recollection of hearing one member talk about the 'effluvium which rises from that dung heap opposite,' alluding to another member, who ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... go, Solomon, with your inopportune mirth! What in God's name have I if I haven't hope? Take that from me and what would I be? Why, the very fate I have been fighting off with tooth and nail would overwhelm me. I'd sink into unimportance—my unparalleled misfortunes would degrade me to a level with the commonest! No, sir, I've never been without hope, and though I've fallen I've always got up. What Fentress has is based on money he stole ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... sense of relief. They visited in turn two red brick buildings placed at some distance beyond and below the sacred square, devoted to scientific and athletic pursuits. Leigh wondered whether their position symbolised their relative unimportance to the magnificent hall upon the hill, and indicated a grudging concession to the dominant scientific spirit of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... with all our interests. We care most about extremes of importance and of unimportance; but extremes of importance are tainted with fear, and a very imperfect fear casteth out love. Extremes of unimportance cannot hurt us, therefore we are well disposed towards them; the means may come to do so, therefore we do not love them. Hence we pick a ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... what he has done with what he has left undone, will feel the effect which must always follow the comparison of imagination with reality; he will look with contempt on his own unimportance, and wonder to what purpose he came into the world; he will repine that he shall leave behind him no evidence of his having been, that he has added nothing to the system of life, but has glided from youth to age among the crowd, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... family, girls were not valued so highly as boys, and were made to feel their unimportance in many ways that would be highly displeasing to little sisters of to-day. Girls were taught to wait upon their brothers and to treat them with respect. It was impressed upon them that the duty of a girl was to be useful and modest and quiet, ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips
... erected to his memory is lofty enough for every eye to behold; and thereupon may be read the things most deserving of being known. How long the subject of his beloved library had occupied his attention it is perhaps of equal difficulty and unimportance to know; but his determination to carry this noble plan into effect is thus pleasingly communicated to us by his own pen: "when I had, I say, in this manner, represented to my thoughts, my peculiar estate, I resolved thereupon to possess my soul ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of the church, her strife about matters of comparative unimportance, her magnification of points of difference, her materialism, her love of pelf and place and power, her accounting herself rich and increased in goods and needing nothing, when she was poor, and miserable, and blind, and naked—these things have ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... Priscilla nor Fritzing knew anything of Annalise's mind, and if they had they would instantly have forgotten it again, of such extreme unimportance would it have seemed. Nor would I dwell on it myself if it were not that its very vacancy and smallness was the cause of huge upheavals in Creeper Cottage, and the stone that the builders ignored if they did not actually reject behaved as such stones ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Christianity came too late—Small Number of Converts when Christianity was a renovating Power—Their comparative Unimportance in a political and social View for three Centuries—The Church constructs a Polity for Itself rather than seeks to change established Institutions—Rapid Corruption of Christianity when established, and Adoption of Pagan Ideas and Influences—No ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... in the essentials of living always comes the scarcely less momentous one of the utter unimportance of youth. He is untiringly disciplined in the veneration of age, whether it be in man or woman. He must listen with rapt attention to the opinions and advice of the older men. He mast keep an absolute silence ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... to this, talk about the unimportance, the futility of man and his destiny has left ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Irenaeus (iii. 14. 1) quotes these passages as proof that Luke, the author, was a companion of the apostle. The minute character of the narrative, the accurate description of the various journeyings, the unimportance of some of the details, especially some of the incidents of the shipwreck, are strong reasons for believing that the narrative is that of an eyewitness. If so, we can scarcely help coming to the conclusion that this eye-witness was the author ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Wicomico, with the coast between them, offered no strong temptation to a rapacious foe, and the inhabitants reposed in the fancied security of their isolation and unimportance. The business of life went on, faintly and sorrowfully, to be sure, but still went on. The village shops at B—— and C—— were kept open, though tended chiefly by women and boys. The academicians at the little college pursued their ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... perfectly serious and sincere in his belief that he and the world had been companions too long for the good of either. But the jar and din of the streets certainly served to make connected philosophical meditation upon the futility and unimportance of human existence decidedly unfruitful. By the time he reached the cattle-market the noise of this strange place drove all suicidal intentions from him. Butchers were slaughtering kine; drovers were driving oxen off of barges that had come down the Tiber; sheep ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... ignorance of the dark designs of the wardrobe dealer, had also gone home. He was only just beginning to realize the comparative unimportance of a retired shipmaster, and the knowledge was a source of considerable annoyance to him. No deferential mates listened respectfully to his instructions, no sturdy seaman ran to execute his commands or trembled mutinously at his wrath. The ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... personal experience made him share the sight of any eye that saw the world in fragments. I had been put into a rage by the followers of Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage, who not only asserted the unimportance of subject, whether in art or literature, but the independence of the arts from one another. Upon the other hand I delighted in every age where poet and artist confined themselves gladly to some inherited subject matter known to the whole people, for I thought ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... since his unfortunate speculation in Roumanian gold shares, and she half suspected that he had had to borrow money to make good his losses, yet his prospects were so excellent and the success of his last book so promising that she, probably seeing with a clearer vision the unimportance of those money worries, was less concerned about the problem ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... immediately dispatched to the washerwoman's; everybody is in a bustle; and you, yourself, with a feeling of dignity which you cannot altogether conceal, sally forth to the booking-office to secure your place. Here a painful consciousness of your own unimportance first rushes on your mind—the people are as cool and collected as if nobody were going out of town, or as if a journey of a hundred odd miles were a mere nothing. You enter a mouldy-looking room, ornamented ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... imagination a man may be, there are in our Western world, if his existence there be so much as noticed at all, three occasions on which he appears in print. His birth, his marriage, and his death are all duly chronicled in type, perhaps as sufficiently typical of the general unimportance of his life. Mention of one's birth, it is true, is an aristocratic privilege, confined to the world of English society. In democratic America, no doubt because all men there are supposed to be born free and equal, we ignore the first event, and mention only the last two episodes, about ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... enormous and required delicate manipulation when coats were put on; then their lavishness of material fell from the shoulder to the wrists and hung there swaying until some sudden development of skirt seemed to distract their attention from themselves and they shrank into unimportance and skirts changed instead. Afterwards, sometimes figures were slim and encased in sheathlike draperies, sometimes folds rippled about feet, "fullness" crept here or there or disappeared altogether, trains grew longer or shorter or wider or narrower, cashmeres, grosgrain silks and heavy satins ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was no longer visible. The disillusion and depression that overcame him suddenly were as complete as his previous expectations and hopefulness had been extravagant. For the first time his utter unimportance in the world and his inadequacy to this new life around him came upon ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... was met in a statute so sweeping as to justify the assertion that with its enactment the modern history of the English town begins.[254] Sixty-nine of the old corporate towns, by reason of their unimportance, were now deprived of the character of boroughs. The city of London was not touched, but elsewhere all municipal corporations were broadened so as to personify legally the entire population of the borough. The time-honored municipal oligarchy was broken down by the giving ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... necessary where time is unrecognised, and turbulence of emotion, whether of grief or gladness, is felt to be out of place in a dream-being, whose sole reality is its unreality. Their personal unimportance to the Universe, and remoteness from the Market-place of Life allow them to dawdle. Their experiences have no sharp edges, no abrupt precipices, no divisive gulfs, no defined beginnings and endings. The book ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... delicate and important occupation in life is stage-driving. It would be easier to "run" the Treasury Department of the United States than a four-in-hand. I have a sense of the unimportance of everything else in comparison with this business in hand. And I think the driver shares that feeling. He is the autocrat of the situation. He is lord of all the humble passengers, and they feel their inferiority. They may have knowledge and skill in some things, but they are of no use here. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Sanders; "the last time that happened, if I remember rightly, I had to burn crops on the right bank of the river for twenty miles to bring the Isisi to a sense of their unimportance." ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... considered one of the oldest churches in Europe. Long before the conquest of England by the Normans, before the time of Wallace and Bruce in Scotland, before England had planted its foot in Ireland, the Vaudois Church existed. Their remoteness, their poverty, and their comparative unimportance as a people, for a long time protected them from interference; and for centuries they remained unnoticed by Rome. But as the Western Church extended its power, it became insatiable for uniformity. It would not tolerate the independence ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... Pentecost, and Tabernacles, it is apparently only the avoidance of leaven on the first of the three that is regarded as unimportant. But even there Mr. Montefiore's own feeling is in favour of the rite. 'It is,' he says, 'a matter of comparative unimportance whether the practice of eating unleavened bread in the house for the seven days of the Passover be maintained or not. Those who appreciate the value of a pretty and ancient symbol, both for children and adults, will not ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... Boyle—perhaps the greatest of our men of science between Bacon and Newton—perpetually insists on the importance of individual experiments and the comparative unimportance of what ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... the town in order to avoid importunate visits, and to decide upon a course of conduct. The air and exercise invigorated him; the peace and solitude of the prairie, the beauty of earth and sky, the unconsciousness of nature consoled him, reduced his troubles to relative unimportance, and allowed him to regain ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... consulting Senators, Congressmen, politicians, financiers, and labor men. I consulted all who wished to see me; and if I wished to see any one, I sent for him; and where the consultation took place was a matter of supreme unimportance. I consulted every man with the sincere hope that I could profit by and follow his advice; I consulted every member of Congress who wished to be consulted, hoping to be able to come to an agreement of action with him; and I always finally acted ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... carry as heavy a staff as he once flourished. He takes less interest in conversation, and his flow of humor diminishes. He is not the tireless mathematician that he was, if only because his faith in his personal endowments slackens. He recognizes his limitations, and in consequence the unimportance of his opinions, and indeed he recognizes the probable unimportance of all fleshly matters. So he relinquishes trying to figure out things, and sceptres and candles appear to him about equivalent; and he is inclined to give up philosophical experiments, ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... lady who said to her friend, "My dear, it is impossible to exaggerate the unimportance of things," had learned what it meant to drop everything that interferes, and must have been truly on her way to the concentration which should be the very central power of all life,—obedience to the two ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... I laughed, as I bade the Australian lad, with the very Australian estimate of the unimportance of some things sacred to English minds, ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... that in this moment all doubt as to my attested worth went out of me, who had redeemed a kingdom, and begotten a king, and created a god. So you waste time, my friend, in trying to convince me of all human life's failure and unimportance, for I am not in sympathy with this modern morbid pessimistic way of talking. It has a very ill sound, and nothing whatever is to be gained ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell |
