"Inane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... frozen silence, excepting for his inane laughter. He made a few more irritating remarks which he seemed to think were very funny, and then he disappeared inside his tank and prepared to follow us. We had gone ahead a couple of hundred yards when we heard bombs exploding, and looking back we saw the tank standing still, with ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... for myself, I determined resolutely to crush out my senseless infatuation. I threw myself into such society as we had; I assumed an interest in that inane Miss Augusta; I read and studied far into the night; I walked until sheer fatigue gave me tranquillity; but all I gained was lost in that encounter at the arch: you remember it? When I saw her on that narrow bridge, my love burst its ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... without any claim on serious thought. It is indeed a pleasant tickling of the imagination, this leisurely enjoyment of looking over all those picturesque announcements; it is like passing along the street with its shopwindows in all their lustre and glamour. But this soft and inane pleasure has been crushed by the arrangement after to-day's fashion. Those pages on which advertising and articles are mixed helterskelter do not allow the undisturbed mood. It is as if we constantly had to alternate between ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... general on the other, the ladies round them. Farther back still her eyes fell on all the uplifted moustaches, the light ones, the brown, the black, the dyed, the thin moustaches, the thick, the curved, and the inane, the drooping, the smartly curled. Among that melancholy and shaggy crowd a few clean-shaven faces looked ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... versifier's tongue! And perchance it will not be considered out of my line of duty if I venture to remind my most illustrious and renowned MASTER—" this with a withering sneer,—"that if he has any more remarkable nothings to dictate concerning this particularly inane creation of his fancy 'Nourhalma,' 'twill be well that we should proceed therewith, for the hours wax late and the sun veereth toward his House ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... till destruction should arrange itself on falsehood? Have I not read and heard from the most intelligent English journals, and the best-informed English politicians (men with one foot and two ears in the Cabinet) these true things written and repeated, and watched while they died out into the Vast Inane and Immense Absurd from ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... has been spent in trying to produce human speaking-machines. Words are built up out of letters; short words are grouped into inane sentences such as are never used; and sentences are arranged into unnatural and insipid discourse. To grasp the thin ghost of the thought, the little human spirit must reverse its instinct to reach toward the ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... was concluded by an adjournment to the dining-room to play bagatelle, the most inane of games, to which the billiard-player goes with contempt, changed quickly to wrath when he cannot put the balls into absurd little holes. Mary was an adept, and took pleasure in showing James how the thing should be done. He noticed that she and the curate managed the whole affair between ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... think I do not know that? Do you think I did not feel that just now, when I sat by her side, talking inane rubbish about books and plays and pictures, while every stolen glance at my darling's face was like a dagger thrust into my heart? I will not alarm her. I will consult Mr. Sheldon—will do anything, everything, to ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... coursing down his spine. The eyes into which he gazed had a strange, ironical twinkle in them, a kind of good-humoured arrogance, whilst through the firm, clear-cut lips, half hidden by a dirty and ill-kempt beard, there came the sound—oh! a mere echo—of a quaint and inane laugh. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... Some philosophers have declared that truth lies at the bottom of a well;—the well in which the truth in regard to these matters lies would seem to stretch far enough down—reaching, in fact, almost to the kingdom of the Inane. The beautiful simplicity of Bible truths has often become so perverted—so overloaded by the vain works (and words) of man's device—as barely to escape total extinction. Witness 'repentance'; in what a farrago of endless absurdities and palpable ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... rather than the mere wish to appear as one of its members, often belongs to the artistic temperament, and many artists are unjustly disliked by their fellows and pointed at as snobs because they prefer, as an atmosphere, inane elegance to inelegant intellectuality. It is often forgotten by those who calumniate them that hereditary elegance, no matter how empty-headed, is the result of an hereditary cultivation of what is thought beautiful, and that the vainest, ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... so graceful a faith the Greeks had their share; what was crude and inane in it becoming, in the atmosphere of their energetic, imaginative intelligence, refined and humanised. The oak-grove of Dodona, the seat of their most venerable oracle, did but perpetuate the fancy that the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... other things for the pleasure-seekers. Let them go to the Falls, and Lake Nyassa, and the Himalayas, and those tourist treasures; but why come and chatter inane banalities about his ruins: his treasured, mysterious relic of perhaps the oldest civilisation ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... igne. Tange NIHIL, dicesque NIHIL sine corpore tangi. Cerne NIHIL, cerni dices NIHIL absque colore. Surdum audit loquiturque NIHIL sine voce, volatque Absque ope pennarum, et graditur sine cruribus ullis. Absque loco motuque NIHIL per inane vagatur. Humano generi utilius NIHIL arte medendi; Ne rhombos igitur, neu Thessala murmura tentet Idalia vacuum trajectus arundine pectus, Neu legat Idaeo Dictaeum in vertice gramen. Vulneribus saevi NIHIL auxiliatur amoris. Vexerit et quemvis trans ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson |
