"Immaterial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... immaterial who I am, but since the matter seems to interest you, Mr. Von Bork, I may say that this is not my first acquaintance with the members of your family. I have done a good deal of business in Germany in the past and my name ...
— His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... assumption may be made by any one, whatever his views may be with regard to the textual problems of the Hebrew Bible and the traditional authorship of the Pentateuch. And for our purpose at the moment it is immaterial whether we identify the compiler of these Hebrew narratives with Moses himself, or with some later Jewish historian whose name has not come down to us. Whoever he was, he has scrupulously preserved his ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... paying my own hotel and travelling expenses, and considering myself as engaged in case your wife should need my services. For that, you can pay me, if you like, some nominal retaining fee—five pounds or anything. The money is immaterial to me. I like to be useful, and I sympathise with nerves; but it may make your wife feel she is really keeping a hold over me if we put the arrangement on a business basis. As a matter of fact, whatever sum she chooses to pay, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... the last I shall tell of Bladesover. The dropscene falls on that, and it comes no more as an actual presence into this novel. I did indeed go back there once again, but under circumstances quite immaterial to my story. But in a sense Bladesover has never left me; it is, as I said at the outset, one of those dominant explanatory impressions that make the framework of my mind. Bladesover illuminates England; it has become all that is spacious, dignified pretentious, and truly ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... closer knowledge and study of the immaterial reality does not lead away from the earthly life and coperation with all striving humanity, as the fanatics and ascetics in the misconception of their idle and defective phantasy have believed ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... have seen that biology leads us to psychology, if we choose to follow the path; and thus the passage from the material to the immaterial has already unfolded itself at one point; and we now perceive that there are several large provinces of speculation which concern subjects belonging to man's immaterial nature, and which are governed by the same laws as sciences altogether physical. ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... form is an incidental and purposeless result. The meaning of the term "incidental" may be illustrated by the greater or less difficulty in grafting or budding together two plants belonging to distinct species; for as this capacity is quite immaterial to the welfare of either, it cannot have been specially acquired, and must be the incidental result of differences in their vegetative systems. But how the sexual elements of heterostyled plants came to differ from what ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... charged Burton the evidence with disingenuity in what she delivered on her oath against them, and yet Fitzpatrick could not absolutely deny having been guilty of a multitude of offences as to shoplifting, so that it is highly probable, even if the evidence erred a little in immaterial circumstances, that in the main ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... recognize as divine the principle within us which can be overthrown by a few glasses of rum? How conceive of immaterial faculties which matter can conquer, and whose exercise is suspended by a grain of opium? How imagine that we shall be able to feel when we are bereft of the vehicles of sensation? Why must God perish if matter can be proved to think? Is the vitality of matter in its innumerable manifestations—the ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... fractious, and in that particular mood when he wished to have his mind imperceptibly made up for him, while prepared to combat any direct suggestion. From what quarter the ignoble proposition that we should go home arose is immaterial. It is enough to say that Robert believed it to be his own, and that, before he had time to reconsider the question, the tactful Croppy had crammed the old white horse into the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Power is almost as varied as character, and the kind of power most desired or appreciated is a good measure of character. The pre-eminence furnished by thew and muscle is most generally recognized; but, as men reach levels above the animal, other qualities take the lead. It is seen that the immaterial spirit wins the greater triumphs,—that the brainless giant, compared with the dwarf of trained intelligence, can accomplish little. The scale runs on into the moral qualities, until at last humanity ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... should have alarmed all who saw me, and so I came to you only. The two worlds are so closely intermingled that men often live in one while their bodies are in another, and to those who are susceptible, the immaterial can be made more real than the other. I know these things, because, while at home in neither, I have been ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... decided against the proposition then before it on some other grounds, then it alleges that which is nothing at all to the purpose. The argument, then, either assumes for truth that which is not true, or else the whole statement is immaterial and futile. ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... ridiculous supposition to any one who considers the great and extensive largeness of hell, says a commentator; but not so to those who consider the great expansion of immaterial substance. Mr Banks makes one soul to be so expanded, that ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... says his Riv'rence, "the accidents is very essential too; for a man may be in the best ov good sperits, as far as his immaterial part goes, and yet need the accidental qualities ov good liquor to hunt the sinsible thirst out ov him." So he dhraws the cork in earnest, and sets about brewing the other skillet ov scaltheen; but, ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... bread and butter," said Constance; "eating is immaterial, with those perfect little things right opposite to me. They weren't like any you ever saw, Fleda—the sugar-bowl was just a little plain oval box, with the lid on a hinge, and not a bit of chasing, only the arms on the cover; like nothing I ever saw but an old-fashioned ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... person nonchalantly, as if the point was quite immaterial, looking the porter calmly and straight in the eyes unflinchingly, without turning a hair as ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... While the former desired a balance of power, the latter wished that the interests of their class should be enforced by its genuine representatives. Both knew that a participation in the executive power was immaterial, and that all that was needed might be gained by the possession of judicial authority alone. Gracchus's final decision, therefore, was to create a wholly new panel of judices which should be made up exclusively from the members of the titular ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... I must make a few preliminary remarks, to show how the struggle for existence bears on Natural Selection. It has been seen in the last chapter that amongst organic beings in a state of nature there is some individual variability: indeed I am not aware that this has ever been disputed. It is immaterial for us whether a multitude of doubtful forms be called species or sub-species or varieties; what rank, for instance, the two or three hundred doubtful forms of British plants are entitled to hold, if the existence of any well-marked varieties ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... are immaterial, madame, when their sense has been conveyed. You have rejected my brother, and ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... it be a true one, the possibility of it is unconceivable. And words whereby we conceive nothing but the sound, are those we call Absurd, insignificant, and Non-sense. And therefore if a man should talk to me of a Round Quadrangle; or Accidents Of Bread In Cheese; or Immaterial Substances; or of A Free Subject; A Free Will; or any Free, but free from being hindred by opposition, I should not say he were in an Errour; but that his words were without meaning; that ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... Commission of 1882-83, appointed by Lord Ripon, with Sir William Hunter as President, and the other the Public Service Commission of 1886-87, appointed by Lord Dufferin, with Sir Charles Aitchison as President. It is quite immaterial whether the steps taken by the Government of India during the subsequent decade were actually due to the recommendations of the Education Commission, or whether the Report of the Commission merely afforded a welcome opportunity to carry into practice the views that ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... lilies of the conservatory and busy with nail files and penknives. Thus displayed as a guarantee of good faith, they carried on an innocuous conversation in a 200-word vocabulary, to the casual observer as innocent and immaterial as that heard in clubs seven blocks to ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... it as immaterial whether we go quite the same lengths; and I suspect, judging from myself, that you will go further, by thinking of a population of forms like Ornithorhyncus, and by thinking of the common homological and embryological structure of the several ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... perhaps say: 'What type will you have? Shall it be Roman, Italic, Black-letter, Script, or any of the grotesque inventions of modern fancy?' You immediately become aware that your order is too indefinite to be acted on without some further specification. As, however, it is immaterial to you in a matter of mere experiment, you say at once 'Roman.' Does that settle it?—not at all: the question of form and shape is as wide open as ever. The Upper Case and Lower Case in a printing-office differ as much as the Upper House and Lower House in parliament or convocation. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... was gone, and Gen. Gage was now governor. He convened the General Court at Salem, in June, 1774. On the 10th of June the same bill that Gov. Hutchinson had refused to sign was introduced, with a few immaterial changes, and pushed to a third reading, and engrossed the same day. It was called up on the 16th of June, and passed. It was sent up to the Council, where it was read a third time, and concurred in. But the next day the General Court was dissolved! And over ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... afterwards in a faint voice as if he were ill. "I am happy near you, dear girl, but why am I forty-two instead of thirty? Your tastes and mine do not coincide: you ought to be depraved, and I have long passed that phase, and want a love as delicate and immaterial as a ray of sunshine—that is, from the point of view of a woman of your age, I am ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... all on board, to calculations based on tables of logarithms, knowing that there never was a set [of logarithms] computed, without machinery, that had not some error in it. The supposition, that to admit that there are immaterial and incidental mistakes in Sacred Writ would break the confidence of men in it, is contradicted by the uniform experience of life, and by the ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... sardonic eyes slowly round. "Seems to me this buildin' is chock-full of referees," said he. The people laughed and applauded, but their favour was as immaterial to him as their anger. "No applause, please! This is not a ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... complete polarisation seems to take place near the horizon; and, when the sun is near the meridian, towards the west and east. The depth of colour appears to be immaterial, as far as I have been able to ascertain with an instrument but rudely constructed for the purpose. The light is polarised in planes passing through the {410} eye of the observer, and arcs of great ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... this was now grown to be to the weary mind. Beyond question, if one had blown up Fermor's remaining gunpowder, and carried off or burnt his meal-sacks, he must have cowered away all the faster towards Landsberg to seek more. Or perhaps Friedrich now judged it immaterial, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... three are the blue, the yellow, and the red. The Trinity of the Deity, in one mode or other, has been an article in all creeds. He creates, preserves, and destroys. He is the generative power, the productive capacity, and the result. The immaterial man, according to the Kabalah, is composed of vitality, or life, the breath of life; of soul or mind, and spirit. Salt, sulphur, and mercury are the great symbols of the alchemists. To them man was ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... indicated the doctor will prescribe them. Late in the puerperium vaginal douches are unobjectionable, and patients may take them unassisted, for then the fluid will not penetrate the womb so long as it has a free escape from the outlet of the vagina. Moreover, it is immaterial if some of the fluid should pass into the womb, for its lining will have been largely restored by this time, and at points where restoration is incomplete defenses have ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... Cuvier, a Huxley, a Tyndall for the immaterial world,—the realm of spiritual existence, moral growth? Nature is one. The things which we have clumsily and impertinently dared to set off by themselves, and label as "immaterial," are no less ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... for it eternity seemed something incomparably truer and more real than the fleeting life which he had lived up to that time. His heart was overflowing with concentrated enthusiasm. Though yet alive, he had changed into a being almost immaterial, which desiring complete liberation for itself desired it also for another. He imagined that when free he and Lygia would each take the other's hand and go to heaven, where Christ would bless them, and ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... equally inspired by the hour and place. Color and line and form, although they happen to be the properties of things, have a value for the emotions as truly as musical sounds: they are the outward symbol of the inward thought or feeling, the visible bodying forth of the immaterial idea. ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... from meats, because he feared the Jews that came from James. Peter's weak attitude endangered the principle of Christian liberty. It is the deduction rather than the fact which Paul reproves. To eat and to drink, or not to eat and drink, is immaterial. But to make the deduction "If you eat, you sin; if you abstain you ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... it can hardly be doubted that C. livia, affinis, intermedia, and the forms marked with an interrogation by Bonaparte, ought all to be included under a single species. But it is quite immaterial whether or not they are thus ranked, and whether some one of these forms or all are the progenitors of the various domestic kinds, as far as any light is thus thrown on the differences between the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... How he knew is immaterial. There is an instinct that guides—some have it, some haven't it. You can't explain it. Doc Macnooder for instance could diagnose a pocket-book as keenly as a surgeon. It's a gift, that's ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... finish the story," said the Doctor to whom food was immaterial. He was indulging in the unusual luxury of loitering at the table after the meal was finished, a habit seldom tolerated in ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... she, when, from things particular, She doth abstract the universal kinds, 10 Which bodiless and immaterial are, And can be only lodg'd ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in the immaterial world suggested by the mysteries of woods and gardens, he has a dim conception that there is some life beyond the visible, he feels a power behind life and he reveals this in his early questions. He is keenly interested in questions ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... is located on the banks of the Eden, a pleasant river in Cumberland. It is founded on facts, but the names and some other immaterial points are imaginary. ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... make Webster its spokesman in Congress; a consolidation as definite and resolute as that of the slave-holders, and destined to be far longer-lived,—no change in legislation came till 1832, and then the change was immaterial; the "tariff of abominations" was substantially re-enacted. The South had been chafing bitterly, and now South Carolina broke into open revolt. The whole South felt itself aggrieved by the tariff. Its industrial system was not suited to develop manufactures; it lacked ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... suppose it makes any difference one way or the other, Mary. A few hours, perhaps, but whether it is to-day or to-morrow is immaterial." ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... thing hidden from the senses, whose phenomena alone are perceptible,—a thing, consequently, to which the idea of division and indivision is inapplicable; and from the presence of this force, from the hypothesis of an indeterminate and immaterial entity, is ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... the bearer of an old historic name. When my host at the lunch introduced a stately-looking gentleman as Sir Kenelm Digby, it gave me a start, as if a ghost had stood before me. I recovered myself immediately, however, for there was nothing of the impalpable or immaterial about the stalwart personage who bore the name. I wanted to ask him if he carried any of his ancestor's "powder of sympathy" about with him. Many, but not all, of my readers remember that famous man's famous preparation. When used to cure a wound, it was applied ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... belong to the regular course of events, are regarded as prodigies. The same delusion prevails as to moral phenomena, and many of these are ascribed to the intervention of demons, ghosts, witches, and other immaterial and supernatural agents. By degrees, many of the enigmas of the moral and physical world are explained, and, instead of being due to extrinsic and irregular causes, they are found to depend on fixed and invariable laws. ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakspeare and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music; he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners; he drew the man of England and Europe, the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... but it may not, perhaps, even now be too late to raise a generous incredulity as to an assertion of which no eye-witness attestation is recorded, and which might have been the invention of malignity. There are many statements of history which it is immaterial to substantiate or disprove. Splendid fictions of public virtue have often produced their good if once received as fact; but, when private character is at stake, every conscientious writer or reader will cherish his "historic doubts," ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... giving Russia an interest in preventing the severance of Holland and Belgium, that this country concluded the treaty; and that, therefore, to that treaty we were equally pledged. That Holland had refused to pay was immaterial: if one pledged himself to the payment of a debt to which there was also a third party, it would be dishonourable to take advantage of that third party having refused to fulfil his engagement, as a legal reason for also refusing to fulfil your engagement. With respect ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... inspired with the new wine of liberty and free creative thought, held that the rule of form should always be the mere expression of the vital, flexible thought. The one side argued that supreme perfection already reached left the artist hope only in imitation; the other, that the immaterial beautiful could have no fixed absolute form. Victor Hugo among the poets, Delacroix among the painters, and Berlioz among the musicians, led the ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... most resembles what is human and mortal, unreasonable, multiform, soluble, never the same nor remaining equal to itself.... If, therefore, this be so, the soul goes to what is like itself, to the immaterial, to the divine, immortal, reasonable. There it attains to bliss, freed from error and ignorance, from fear and undisciplined love and all other human evils. There it lives, as the initiates say, for the ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... Ford, puts it, 'to start something.' On Friday, two days after picking began, the practical agitators began working through the camp. Whether or not Ford came to the —— ranch to foment trouble seems immaterial. There are five Fords in every camp of seasonal laborers in California. We have devoted ourselves in these weeks to such questions as this: 'How big a per cent of California's migratory seasonal ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... enforce their rights by the simplest and most bloodless means, the Chinese have steadily cultivated the art of combining together, and have thus armed themselves with an immaterial, invisible weapon which simply paralyses the aggressor, and ultimately leaves them masters of the field. The extraordinary part of a Chinese boycott or strike is the absolute fidelity by which it is observed. If the boatmen or chair-coolies at any place strike, ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... a definition of divine magic, which is apparently another term for alchemy; and lays down the great doctrine of all mediaeval occultism, as of all modern theosophy—of a soul-power equally operative in the material and the immaterial, in nature and in ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... exclusively by such doctrines as—an independent and immaterial soul, a special moral faculty, and what is called free-will,—the metaphysician is a person of importance in the contest; he is powerful either to uphold or to subvert the fabric. But, if these were ever to constitute the chief stronghold of the faith, its tenure would ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... is done by all alike and by all equally ill, or nearly so, is gradually distributed among different classes of workers and executed more and more perfectly; and so far as the products, material or immaterial, of this specialised labour are shared by all, the whole community benefits by the increasing specialisation. Now magicians or medicine-men appear to constitute the oldest artificial or professional class in the evolution ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... present stage I regard that point as immaterial. What I am thinking of is the advertisement. A female candidate upon the platform will concentrate the whole attention of the country ...
— The Master of Mrs. Chilvers • Jerome K. Jerome
... and souls of the party for nearly three weeks. "You here, TOBY?" says he, when we met on first morning; "is House up, then?" "Not yet, Sir; but I've been all night. Doctor ordered me to be here at seven in morning; this an immaterial extension to us who have been sitting up at Westminster every night of week till three or four in morning. So had all-night sitting, and here I am punctually at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... to quiet the anxiety of the new proprietors, and to extinguish any wild hopes which the old proprietors might entertain. Whether, in the great transfer of estates, injustice had or had not been committed, was immaterial. That transfer, just or unjust, had taken place so long ago, that to reverse it would be to unfix the foundations of society. There must be a time of limitation to all rights. After thirty-five years of actual possession, after ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... exaggerated perhaps in places, but not far from the facts when the peculiar conditions surrounding them are fully considered. Many of them were doing their best to attract attention in a harmless way, and in most cases they succeeded, as there is really nothing so immaterial that it escapes ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... consequence of some duty voluntarily undertaken. But the whole and sufficient ground for such liabilities as he does incur outside the last class is supposed to be that he has voluntarily acted, and that damage has ensued. If the act was voluntary, it is totally immaterial that the detriment which followed from it was neither intended nor due to ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... interested with any particulars about her. The father—the names are immaterial, the young lady's was Elaine—asked me jocularly at what sum I estimated my fifth in Mammy. I had previously convinced him that we never had the remotest idea of parting with the old lady. Consequently we had never estimated her value, ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... into three classes: the ordinary shaver, the safety shaver, and the extraordinary-safety shaver, who buys each safety razor as soon as it is invented and is never so happy as when about to try a new one. To a shaver of this class, cost is immaterial. A safety-razor for a cent, with twenty gold-monogramed blades and a guaranty of expert surgical attendance if he cuts himself, would stir his active interest neither more nor less than a safety-razor for a hundred dollars, with one Cannotbedull blade and an iron-clad agreement to pay the makers ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... words are not what you are paying attention to—of course—if they were, yours wouldn't be so wonderful. It's the wind of the spirit that blows them into beautiful shapes for you, I suppose. To let that go, for it's immaterial—you think I might have a job? I? That I might do a real thing for anybody ever? If you only knew me. If you only could see the mountains of whipped cream and Maraschino cherries, the cliffs of French clothes ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... "That's immaterial to me." Lanko flicked switches and the ship rose from the ground, swung, and started westward. "I was merely describing the capabilities of ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... portraits of this kind have not been modernised to suit the taste of a later age, as has been done with King Arthur in Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King.' And when work of this sort has been finely executed, the question whether the details are untrustworthy or even fictitious is immaterial, particularly in cases where the precise facts can never be recovered. We do not know exactly how the battle of Marathon, or, indeed, the battle of Hastings, was fought, but we have in the chronicles something of great value—a true outline ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... drives. If, as is alleged, the world stands on a turtle, the turtle stands on money. No money no turtle. As for money, that stands on opinion, credit, trust, faith—things that, though highly material in connection with money, are still of immaterial essence. ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... be an artist, indeed, who could analyse and adequately describe the feelings of a man parading for his first night-attack. The magnitude or insignificance of the enterprise is immaterial. The feelings of the young soldiers from the New Cavalry Brigade as they paraded with the hard-bitten swashbucklers, Rimington's Tigers, were identical with those of the army advancing across the desert to the assault at Tel-el-Kebir; of Wauchope's Highland Brigade blundering to ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... fastened them securely upon his feet, he prepared to lower himself over the edge of the wharf. He asked the spectators to designate a point upon the thither shore at which they wished him to land. It was immaterial to him, he said, whether he went one mile or ten, up stream or down, because he should glide around upon the surface of the stream with the ease and grace of a swallow. Then they fixed a point for him; and when he had dropped ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... pure spirit, the Absolute that lies beyond and above all material conditioning, except through the medium of matter, through its figures, its symbols, its "phantasms." Says St. Thomas: "From material things we can rise to some kind of knowledge of immaterial things, but not to the perfect knowledge thereof." The way of life therefore, is the incessant endeavour of man sacramentally to approach the Absolute through the leading of the Holy Spirit, so running parallel to the slow perfecting of matter which is being effected by ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... sacrifices offered to ghosts are very economical; for if the offering is of food, the living eat it up after a decent interval; if it is a valuable, they remove it and resume the use of it themselves. The principle of this spiritual economy probably lies in the common belief that ghosts, being immaterial, absorb the immaterial essence of the objects, leaving the material substance to be enjoyed by men. When a man of mark dies in Santa Cruz, his relations set up a stock of wood in his house to represent him. This is renewed from time to time, till after a ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... needs to be said about that of Lazarus. In this part of the narrative he comes into view simply as the means of bringing out the rich man's heartlessness and self-indulgence. For the purposes of the narrative his disposition was immaterial; for it is not our duty to help only deserving or good people. Manhood and misery are enough to establish the right to sympathy and succour. There may be a hint of character in the name 'Lazarus,' which probably means 'God is help.' Since this is the only name ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... all other men should understand the subtle play of emotion and thought in which a work of art is conceived; and the artist rather than another should trace the intricacies and know the cunning of the magician processes by which the immaterial idea builds itself into visible actuality. In practice, however, the theory is not borne out by the fact. The artist as such is very little conscious of the workings of his spirit. He is creative rather than reflective, synthetic and not analytic. From ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... do not so readily comprehend how such persons as Napoleon and Talleyrand should have embraced a delusion which was utterly irreconcilable with their skeptical natures, and which necessarily presupposed an immaterial state of existence, and the providential superintendence of human affairs by a benevolent order of beings, whose powers must have been deputed to them by a superior and over-ruling Intelligence. It was ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... are too great, your anxieties exaggerate the indigence of our condition. Though we are prisoners, yet even the misfortunes of a prison have their compensations. The activity of the immaterial mind, will not indeed submit long without reluctance to confinement and restraint. But we have not yet experienced lassitude and disgust." "Alas, Edwin, how strange and foreign are thoughts like these! Whither do they tend? What would you ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... immortal. These bodies may perish. These living thoughts, these boundless aspirations, can never die. To-morrow, far away in other worlds, we shall think, and feel, and act and solve the problems of the immaterial destiny of the human mind." Immortality was the theme. The song was hushed upon these dying lips. The forced laughter fainted away. Standing upon the brink of that dread abyss from whence no one has returned with ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... Ledyard, who had accompanied him in many of his later travels, and had been the spectator of some of the last of his military exploits. This is a work of much higher authority, and contains much valuable information; but it is prolix, long-winded, and diffuse, filled with immaterial documents, and written throughout in a tone of inflated panegyric. III. Another life of Marlborough, written with more ability, appeared at Paris in 1806, in three volumes octavo, by Dutems. The author had the advantage of all the resources ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... that Japan went to the length of declaring war on the United States for this cause. While immaterial from the point of view of the United States, I cannot see that such a war would violate the Covenant in its letter; of course it would {95} violate its spirit of peace; but I do not think there is any specific provision of the Covenant ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller
... to us something more than intuitive glimpses into, the mysteries of man's character. Throughout his life he held up the steady light of an optimistic conception of the world, and by its means injected new vigour into English ethical thought. In his case, therefore, it is not an immaterial question, but one almost forced upon us, whether we are to take his ethical doctrine and inspiring optimism as valid truths, or to regard them merely as subjective opinions held by a religious poet. Are they creations of a powerful imagination, and nothing ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... where a State Supreme Court reversed a trial court and entered a final judgment for the defendant, a plaintiff who had never had an opportunity to introduce evidence in rebuttal to certain testimony which the trial court deemed immaterial but which the appellate court considered material, was held to have been deprived of his rights without ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... was ever likely to do in the whole of his experience. The mere possibility of a fresh awakening of feeling filled him with aversion. At the moment he had as profound a distrust as Sarah of the immaterial elements; and looking ahead, he saw his future stretching before him as firm and flat as the turnpike which he was approaching. Delight and despair were equally distasteful to him. He shrank as instinctively from the thought ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... way I found later I had arrived at Mars. When the spirits, thus shaped in light and otherwise almost immaterial and unclothed, emerge from the Hill of the Phosphori, they are taken along wide, white roads to some of the many chorus halls which fill the City of Light, where I am now, and from which I am sending this magnetic message. They remain for hours, even days and weeks in these halls listening in ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... future: how all pleasures and desires, all hopes and ambitions, had converged upon it as a focus; how it had stood out as the one great reality behind which the other circumstances of life were as a background, shimmering, half seen, immaterial, and unreal. And now it was gone—lost, as it seemed, beyond hope; and that which was left to me was but the empty frame from which the ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... they are beginning to make a grievance even of that—eat his dinners at the Middle Temple, and so qualify himself for the Bar. Certainly that student was in luck who found himself in the same mess with Burke; and yet so stupid are men—so prone to rest with their full weight on the immaterial and slide over the essential—that had that good fortune been ours we should probably have been more taken up with Burke's brogue than with his brains. Burke came to London with a cultivated curiosity, and in no spirit of desperate determination to make his fortune. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... conscience. Hence a myth has arisen that in order to punish Prajapati for his incest with his daughter the gods created Bhuta-pati (who is Pasu-pati or Rudra under a new name), who stabbed him. The rest of the myth is as immaterial to our purpose as it is unsavoury; what is important is that the conscience of the Brahmans was beginning to feel slight qualms at the uncleanness of some of their old myths and to look towards Rudra as in some degree ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... Quakers were enthusiasts, and therefore occasionally spoke and acted extravagantly; they also adopted some offensive customs, the most objectionable of which was wearing the hat; all this is immaterial. The question at issue is not their social attractiveness, but the cause whose consequence was a virulent persecution. This can only be determined by an analysis of the evidence. If, upon an impartial review of the cases of outrage which have ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... [134] "It is immaterial whether Mr. Shufflebottom preaches at Bungay, and Mr. Ringletub at Ipswich; or whether an artful vicissitude is adopted, and the ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... respiration indicate the appearance of the complication. Without the history it is frequently difficult to diagnose a case of influenza of several days' standing, complicated by pneumonia, from a case of severe pneumonia of five or six days' standing, but from a prognostic point of view it is immaterial, as the treatment of both are identical. The fact that other horses in the same stable or neighborhood have influenza ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... mince words, Georg Brende. Between men, that is not necessary. And we are isolated here—no one beyond Venia can listen. As you know, I am already Master of Venus. In Mars—that will shortly come. They will hand themselves over to me—or I shall conquer them." He shrugged. "It is quite immaterial." He added contemptuously: "People are fools—almost everyone—it is no great feat ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... emotion, Half enraptured, half dismayed, Just escaped her earthly vesture, Trembling greets thy glimmering shade: Where, O joy! no misty mantle Veils her primal purity; And her immaterial pinions, Like an ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... position had nothing to do with it. I made no claim to a special standing for my silent friendship. Removed by the difference of age and nationality as if into the sphere of another existence, I produced, even upon myself, the effect of a dumb helpless ghost, of an anxious immaterial thing that could only hover about without the power to protect or guide by as much as a whisper. Since Miss Haldin with her sure instinct had refrained from introducing me to the burly celebrity, I would have retired quietly and returned ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... unread. She just noticed that they were not in Noel Vanstone's handwriting; and, passing over them instantly, as immaterial to the object in view, turned the leaves of the letter, and transferred her attention to the opening sentences on the first ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... proceeding is preferable; since the conductor stretches his arm outwards, withdrawing it from his chest; and his stick, which he takes care to raise slightly above the level of his shoulder, remains perfectly visible to all eyes. When the conductor faces the players, it is immaterial whether he marks the second beat to the right, ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... the situation is distinctly eased by the remembrance of our stick. It gives us a support moral and physical, such as is supplied in a drawing-room by a cigarette. For this purpose size and shape are immaterial. Yet this much is essential—it must not be too slippery, or in our nervousness we may drop it altogether. My ebony stick with the polished ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... friendship that is true cannot flee; it is, by its very quality and nature, abiding. It may be silent forever; it may be invisible, inaudible, immaterial, impersonal; but once forged it is of the heavenly life, the heavenly language, and the Word of the Lord ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... confused, the mere shock of such an announcement had so confounded him that he was unable to penetrate the meaning of the sudden expansion of his blood. His attention strayed from the actuality of his wife to the immaterial shadow wavering on the wall. There Emmy's profile, grotesquely enlarged and sharpened, grimaced at him. August Turnbull's feelings disentangled and grew clearer, there was a conventional memory of his ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Sestos to See Bride of Abydos Abyssinia, Lord Byron's project of visiting Academical studies, effect of, on the imaginative faculty Acerbi, Giuseppe Acland, Mr., Lord Byron's school-fellow at Harrow Acting, no immaterial sensuality so delightful Actium, remains of the town of Actors, an impracticable race Ada See Byron, Augusta-Ada Adair, Robert, esq. Adams, John, the Southwell carrier Lord Byron's epitaph on Addison, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... got up quietly and left the room. Her manner was entirely unmoved. She had spoken from her inmost convictions. The fact that they were opposed to her father was immaterial. She loathed tyranny and his method of shutting the mouths of those who disagreed with him was particularly obnoxious to her. It was also most ineffectual with her. From childhood she had always spoken as she felt. ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... the religious formalism of the Eppings and their friends. They are High Church. They discuss with astonishing vigour and at dreadful length what seems to me the most immaterial points in the Church service, and just at present an impulse is given to their zeal by the fact of their favourite clergyman being threatened with a prosecution for ritualistic practices. Of course I have to feign a becoming interest in all this, and ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... English tongue, the country dialect of New England. Her New England morals and New England sense; in this instance, were put in the balance against her "bens," "an-gels," "doozes," "nawthings," "noans," and even her "virtooes," (in a family of children, no immaterial considerations,) and the latter prevailed. We had occasion to regret this decision. A few years later I met in Florence an Italian family of high rank, which had brought with them from Philadelphia two female domestics, whom they prized above all the ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... attempt to describe the indescribable. As for what you say your case is, the bizarre—that kind very seldom gets into print at all. In all our make-believe, all our pretence, how, honestly, could it? But there, this is immaterial. The real question is, may I, can I help? What I gather is this: You just trundled down into Widderstone all among the dead men, and—but one moment, I'll ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... They gazed upon the same heaven that those men saw who ages afterward led the world in knowledge. These latter were near-sighted, and absorbed [Page 245] in the pictures on the first veil of matter; the former were far-sighted, and penetrated a hundred strata of thickest material, and saw the immaterial power behind. The one class studied the present, and made the gravest mistakes; the other pierced the uncounted ages of the past, and uttered the profoundest wisdom. There is but one explanation. He that planned and made ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... paper lies in two statements, advanced with the utmost solemnity as "basic principles" and "basic reasons," whereas they might both be dismissed by sweeping legal exclusion as "incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial." ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Davie, in things immaterial," said he. "Bear ye this in mind, that, though gentle born, ye have had a country rearing. Dinnae shame us, Davie, dinnae shame us! In yon great, muckle house, with all these domestics, upper and under, show yourself as nice, as circumspect, ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... contents, was a name-tag which finally reached Mrs Cassin through Captain Crosbie, the welfare representative. Since there is no description of the contents and it has been held that the briefing material was left behind anyway, the fate of the bag itself would seem to be immaterial. ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... famishing man, who has been politely turned from the glittering, savory dining-room into the street—only his hunger, immaterial as light, was a thousand times keener than that of the one who lacks only bread and meat. He demanded her face, her voice, as one calls for sunlight, for air. He knew that this day, this night, marked a new era in his life. Old ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... spirit, that is, a simple, incorporeal, immaterial being, possessing higher capacities than man in his present state. Of created spirits, the human spirit, soul, after its departure from the body and as existing in a separate state. Hebrews xii, 23; that is, to the spirits of just men made perfect. Robinson renders it thus: "To ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... motive of its existence at all had nearly ceased. This is a moral phenomenon that I have often had occasion to observe, and which, there is some reason to think, depends on a principle of attraction that has hitherto escaped the sagacity of the philosophers, but which is as active in the immaterial, as is that of gravitation in the material world. Talents like his, so incessantly and unweariedly employed, produced the usual fruits. He grew richer hourly, and at the time of which I speak he was pretty generally known to the ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... figure as seen by the citizens of Richmond a few weeks ago. The right arm, however, should lie more at length upon the box, a chess-board should appear upon it, and the cushion should not be seen while the pipe is held. Some immaterial alterations have been made in the costume of the player since it came into the possession of Maelzel—the plume, for example, was not ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe |
