"Ineffectual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... composed of the habits they have been led to acquire. Some little propensities betrayed in childhood may very probably survive; one man may prove by his dying words that he was congenitally witty, another tender, another brave. But these native qualities will simply have added an ineffectual tint to some typical existence or other; and the vast majority will remain, as Schopenhauer said, Fabrikwaaren ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Apart from a recent ineffectual effort of a minority of the Justices to challenge the interpretation thus placed upon the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court has yet to register any departure from its ruling in Twining v. New Jersey.[877] In two subsequent ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... the individual triumphs for love that may be achieved, there is a field that can be won only by the corporate faithfulness to the ideal of the group. The individual may lose by all the worldly standards, and his life may seem an ineffectual protest or gesture, but it is the type of losing in which the soul is found and which sooner or later wins out for the group over the entrenched ...
— Hidden from the Prudent - The 7th William Penn Lecture, May 8, 1921 • Paul Jones
... upon her, strive as she would against it. She waited silently and watched, and twice or thrice made ineffectual efforts to rouse him. Her father came in once. He showed anxiety; that was unmistakable, but was it the anxiety of guilt of any kind? She said nothing. At five o'clock matters abruptly came to a climax. Jen was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... continued. "Let us assume that Holladay has been providing for this illegitimate daughter for years. At last, for some reason, he is induced to withdraw this support; or, perhaps, the girl thinks her allowance insufficient. At any rate, after, let us suppose, ineffectual appeals by letter, she does the desperate thing of calling at his office to protest in person. She finds him inexorable—we know his reputation for obstinacy when he had once made up his mind. She reproaches him—she is already desperate, remember—and he answers with that stinging sarcasm for ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... Inferno did the scientist get his hint? Indeed, science everywhere reveals a carnival of mightier gods than those that cut such fantastic tricks in the ancient world. Listen to Tyndall on light, or to Youmans on the chemistry of a sunbeam, and see how fable pales its ineffectual fires, and the boldest dreams of the poets ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... it has come to pass. The monarchy fell, and we lost Honor, Christian Virtue faded with the religion of our forefathers, and our own ineffectual attempts at government have destroyed Patriotism. Ideas can never utterly perish, so these beliefs linger on in our midst, but they do not influence the great mass of the people, and Society has no support but Egoism. Every individual believes ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... that they should be vainly mocked with a dream, as it were, of greater prosperity than their minds were capable of comprehending, and that the same fortune, which had entangled our army, should extricate it; that an ineffectual victory should be frustrated by a more ineffectual peace; and that a convention, on the faith of a surety, should be introduced, which bound no other person beside the surety. For what part had ye, conscript fathers; what ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... pietas, and attempted to improve the morals of the citizens by the enactment of sumptuary laws; the philosophers hoped to do good in the same direction by appealing to the intellect and reason, a method that was equally ineffectual. Marriages and an increased birth-rate were encouraged, and parents were honoured and given special privileges. The wisdom and prudence of Augustus were strangely accompanied by credulity and superstition. He was a profound believer in omens, and attached great importance to astrology. His horoscope ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... before Baron Martin. "The coat was produced," says the serjeant, "and the judge suggested that Sir Edwin should try it on; he made a wry face, but consented, and took off his own upper garment. He then put an arm into one of the sleeves of that in dispute, and made an apparently ineffectual endeavour to reach the other, following it round amidst roars of laughter from all parts of the Court. It was a common jury, and I was told that there was a tailor upon it, upon which I suggested that there was a gentleman of the same profession as the plaintiff ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... made use of last night for keeping on your masque, I endeavoured to defeat with reason, but that proving ineffectual, I'll try the force of rhyme, and send you the heads of our chat, in a poetical ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... Bim received two flurried Aldermen and the head of a city department. At 12.35 he held spirited debate with the Deputy Commissioner of Health. Just as the clock struck one, two advertising managers, arriving neck and neck, merged their appeals in an ineffectual attempt to obtain information from the youthful Cerberus, which he loftily declined to furnish, as to the whereabouts of anyone with power to ban or bind, on the "Clarion." At 1.30 the Guardian of the Gate had the honor and pleasure of meeting, for the first time, his Honor the Mayor ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... contrasted with recent and passing events in Ireland. So long as the conquerors in Roumania endeavoured to solve the problem, their efforts were unavailing. At the Convention of Balta-Liman between Russia and Turkey, where 'coercion' was coupled with 'remedial measures,' an ineffectual attempt was made to ameliorate the wretched condition of the peasantry on the old lines of feudalism; but it was not until the country became autonomous and the legitimate representatives of the people took the matter in hand, that an efficient remedy was applied. Then, ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... they preferred wasting it in protests against the judges, which availed them still less. By the former course they would probably have delayed the final sentence, and in the time thus gained the powerful intercession of their friends might perhaps have not been ineffectual. By obstinately persisting in denying the competency of the tribunal which was to try them, they furnished the duke with an excuse for cutting short the proceedings. After the last assigned period had expired, on the 1st of June, 1658, the council of twelve ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Fabius had a triumph decreed him at Rome, much more splendid than his first; they looked upon him now as a champion who had learned to cope with his antagonist, and could now easily foil his arts and prove his best skill ineffectual. And, indeed the army of Hannibal was at this time partly worn out with continual action, and partly weakened and become dissolute with over abundance and luxury. Marcus Livius, who was governor of Tarentum when it was betrayed to Hannibal, and ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... do or whether you do not is in the hands of God," the General said. "I don't think Nell will mind very much if your sword-arm is ineffectual or not. You've done enough for honour, anyhow. And I'm not going to betray any more of the child's secrets. You'd better come and hear them yourself. I'll tell you what: come on Christmas Day. Come to lunch and ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... except the Captain. He had sat with us at the table, but was too far gone in his cups to take part in the boisterous fun and conversation. Once in about every five minutes he had implored someone in a husky voice to give him a light for his pipe, then, after two or three ineffectual puffs, he would let it go out again. He had also attempted two or three times to join in the chorus of a song, but soon relapsed again into his ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... ineffectual attempts he managed to pitch the key of the cow-house door in through the window. Then, lifting his voice in the strains of "I'm afraid to go home in the dark," with a lusty drum accompaniment, he led the way back to the house. The hurried procession ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... in the autumn of the year before. It had been raging in Amsterdam and Hamburg in 1663. Precautions were taken to keep it out by stopping the importation of goods from these towns. But these proved ineffectual. Certain bales from Holland were landed and taken to a house in Long Acre, Drury Lane. Here they were opened by two Frenchmen, both of whom caught the disease and died. A third Frenchman who was seized in the same house was removed to Bearbinder Lane, St. Swithin's Lane, where ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... Lushington was judge of the Admiralty Court: he had been counsel for, and an executor of, Queen Caroline. He declined the offer now suggested, and the subsequent debates on the Wensleydale Peerage show that the proposed grant would have been ineffectual for its purpose.] ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... grown; his way of waging warfare with ruffians in disguise who slunk about under cover of darkness with pitch, straw, and sulphur, unheard of and quite without precedent as it was, would have rendered ineffectual an even larger protecting force than the one which was advancing under the Prince of Meissen. After reflecting a short time, the Governor determined therefore to suppress altogether the decree he had received; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... unexpectedly—October 6th, 1413, aged nearly 17. How he came to be at Merton is an unsolved question; for it looks as if he were in Arundel's keeping still, and as if the concession to Constance had remained ineffectual. His child-widow re-married Henry Percy, second Earl of Northumberland, and became the mother of a large family.—2. Elizabeth, born and died at Cardiff, probably in 1398.—3. Isabel, born at Cardiff, "on the feast of the Seven Holy ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... system of making them valuable presents to influence them to remain at peace has proved ineffectual. It is believed to be the better policy to colonize them in suitable localities where they can receive the rudiments of education and be gradually induced to adopt habits of industry. So far as the experiment ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... butterfly to do among bulls and bears? He had been a tea-merchant for a little longer, but had soon tired of pekoe and souchong. Then he had tried selling dry sherry. That did not answer; the sherry was a little too dry. Ultimately he became nothing, a delightful, ineffectual young man with a perfect profile ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... but as time meliorates in some degree even the most deplorable and distressing physical conditions, ambition slowly rallied, and while lying for several months a patient in various hospitals in an ineffectual attempt to regain even partial sight, the following ideas and efforts of past years were gradually recalled from the recesses of memory, and reduced to their present form, in which, with no small hesitation and misgiving, they are presented to the ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... renovation, and defines Each movement of its progress on his mind. 405 Man, where the gloom of the long polar night Lowered o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil, Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost Basked in the moonlight's ineffectual glow, Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night; 410 Nor where the tropics bound the realms of day With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame, Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere Scattered the seeds of pestilence, and fed Unnatural ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... interests me as much as East Hartford could, and no more; that is, the Rome which the average tourist feels an interest in. There are other things here which stir me enough to make life worth living. Livy and Clara are having a royal time worshiping the old masters, and I as good a time gritting my ineffectual teeth ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... felt that every one was uncomfortable, and, flitting about the room, she touched here and there to see how things were going on. They were not going on well, and she could not make them better; even her efforts at conciliation were ineffectual; she had stepped in between her mother, some of the gentlemen, and the general, in an argument in which she heard indications of strife, and she set about to explain away contradictions, and to convince every body that they were really all of the same opinion. With her sweet voice and pretty ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... fell in a swamp Near Manila, following the flag You were not wounded by the greatness of a dream, Or destroyed by ineffectual work, Or driven to madness by Satanic snags; You were not torn by aching nerves, Nor did you carry great wounds to your old age. You did not starve, for the government fed you. You did not suffer yet cry "forward" ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... snorings of the two friends were added to the music with which the rooms resounded—an ineffectual concert! The lights went out one by one, their crystal sconces cracking in the final flare. Night threw dark shadows over this prolonged revelry, in which Raphael's narrative had been a second orgy of speech, of words without ideas, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... quite cleared and the noise abated (it was a frightful experience to see how little the judge had been affected by all this hubbub of combined movement and sound), she stepped within the line of his vision and lifted her feeble and ineffectual hand in an effort to ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... personal share in the dispute in answer to Riolanus, a Parisian anatomist of some celebrity, whose objections were distinguished by some show of philosophy, and unusual abstinence from abuse. The answer was conciliatory and complete, but ineffectual to produce conviction; and in reply to Harvey's appeal to direct experiment, his opponent urged nothing but conjecture and assertion. Harvey once more rejoined at a considerable length; taking occasion to give a spirited rebuke to the unworthy ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... senate, XXIV. Jugurtha disappoints a second Roman deputation, XXV. He takes Cirta, and puts Adherdal to death, XXVI. The senate determine to make war upon him, and commit the management of it to Calpurnius, XXVII. He sends an ineffectual embassy to the senate. His dominions are vigorously invaded by Calpurnius, XXVIII. He bribes Calpurnius, and makes a treaty with him, XXIX. His proceedings are discussed at Rome, XXX. The speech of Memmius concerning them, XXXI. The consequences ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... philosophy of Hume, when, with admirable practical sagacity, he said: "As those dictates of experience which regulate conduct must be the objects of belief, all objections which attack them, in common with the principles of reasoning, must be utterly ineffectual. Whatever attacks every principle of belief, can destroy none. As long as the foundations of knowledge are allowed to remain on the same level with the maxims of life, the whole system of human conviction must continue undisturbed.... Skepticism has practical consequences of a very mischievous ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... had been uttered—it was in war times—and late in the evening got on his legs for the tenth time to make a reply. The spirit did not move him to utterance, however; on the contrary, it quite deprived him of the power of speech; and after an ineffectual attempt at ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... us," said the North Wind, "O ineffectual fog, for I am Winter's leader in his age-old war with the ships. I overwhelm them suddenly in my strength, or drive upon them the huge seafaring bergs. I cross an ocean while you move a mile. There is mourning in inland places when I have met the ships. ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... respect to the majority of those who cast their suffrages for Mr. Lincoln. It is none the less true that these hundreds of thousands of ballots, cast in aid of free territory and as a general defiance to the aggressions of the pro-slavery leaders of the South, would have been utterly ineffectual if the central and critical contest in Pennsylvania had not resulted in a victory for the Republicans in October. The tariff therefore had a controlling influence not only in deciding the contest for political supremacy but in that more momentous struggle which was to involve ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... front seat of a horse 'bus elbow to elbow with the driver, staring down over the brink of the abyss upon ears and necks—that low, distant space where the horses look so tiny and so ineffectual and so gone-by below. ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... frozen with the influence of this dreadful phantasy, I saw a pale, glimmering, ineffectual light rising before me. It was neither lamp, fire, nor candle; and though like, it was not yet flame. I took it at first for the lustre of a reflection from some unseen light, and I walked towards it, in the hope of finding a cottage or an alehouse, where I might obtain some refreshment and a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 399, Supplementary Number • Various
... that her friends would do their utmost on her behalf. Mrs. Henderson tried to compose and cheer her, walking with her herself to St. Kenelm's Parsonage, and trying to keep up her earnest desire to please Mr. Flight, the special object of her veneration. But wishes were ineffectual to prevent her from breaking down in the first line of her first song, and when Mr. Flight blamed, and Lady Flight turned round on the music-stool to say severely-"Command yourself, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... were made to proselyte him from the Popish faith, which all proved ineffectual. His friends conceived hopes from the moderation which he on all occasions expressed, that he was really a Protestant in his heart, and that upon the death of his mother, he would not scruple to declare his sentiments, notwithstanding the reproaches he might incur from the Popish ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... attempted to move, but the varnish had mingled with his hair, and it held him securely. After making one or two desperate but ineffectual efforts to release himself, he became very angry; and supposing that Jones's boy was holding him, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... The perfidious act of your reckless enemies to render ineffectual the late resolves of the body of the people, demands your assembling at the Old South Meeting House, precisely at ten o'clock this day, at which time the bells ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... that soothes; and thus, by prudence, sagacity, care and the fear he inspires, he has borne on his mighty shoulders the weight of this great policy and carried it into effect, all our schemes and plots, importunities and wiles, being ineffectual to blind his Argus eyes, ever on the watch lest one of us should remain behind in concealment, and like a hidden root come in course of time to sprout and bear poisonous fruit in Spain, now cleansed, and relieved of the fear in which our vast numbers kept it. ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... action to the purpose, and immediate. We can do it well, at less expense; with less trouble, with more dignity to ourselves, and with more honour to our successors, than any class of conversionists can do it for us; and certainly much more effectually when we commence, as years of ineffectual effort on their part ...
— Suggestions to the Jews - for improvement in reference to their charities, education, - and general government • Unknown
... since he proclaimed a change in the established religion, but tolerated Christianity. He was a Platonic philosopher—a man of great virtue and ability, whose life was unstained by vices. But his attempt to restore paganism was senseless and ineffectual. As a popular belief, paganism had expired. His character is warmly praised by Gibbon, and commended by other historians. He struggled against the spirit of his age, and was unsuccessful. He was worthy of the best ages of the empire in the exercise of all pagan virtues—the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... egotistical, overweening, vainglorious; nugatory, fruitless, ineffectual, frustrate, unavailing, bootless, futile, abortive, ineffective, empty; delusive, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... to her eyes. The word 'dead' was ineffectual to express her feelings. 'Murdered!' she said ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... occasion his certain destruction. In case of such an attempt, the invaders ought, no doubt, to be on their guard; but the country abounds so in springs, that might be soon cleared, as to render such a means of defence totally ineffectual, were the enemy aware of the circumstance. This poisonous species is called Bish, Bikh, and Hodoya Bish or Bikh, nor am I certain whether the Mitha ought to be referred to it, or to the ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... admitted Jack, his heart sinking as he remembered how ineffectual McGuffey had been in the box even while Chester was scoring against the Harmony man; and with Hendrix sending his puzzling shoots over, defeat was positive for Chester unless they had Donohue to depend on. "Tell me how it happens, ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... and do. Haul down those colours—hoist our ensign," he added. The change was rapidly effected; the signalising between the brigs and frigates went on still more vehemently, while the former sent a few ineffectual shot at their ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... never have adventured with so little; because the slightest obstacles in the metals (their being too hard or too soft, which is only discovered in operating,) would have caused him to be looked upon as an impostor, if, in case his first powder had proved ineffectual, he had not been possessed of more to renew the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... with extreme care I edged my way inch by inch along the fuselage toward the main planes and the pilot's seat. Casting back a glance I saw the hangars, a mere white bar across the plain. A few spectators who had pursued us in a desultory, ineffectual manner stood now at long intervals in our wake, and ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... "Jabberwocky"] Like {flame}, but connotes that the source is truly clueless and ineffectual (mere flamers can be competent). A term of deep contempt. "There's some guy on the phone burbling about how he got a DISK FULL error and it's all our comm software's fault." This is mainstream slang ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... sufferings. The struggle had begun in 1341 through the rival claims of Montfort and of Blois to the vacant dukedom. England had taken the part of Montfort, France that of Blois. Neither faction was strong enough to destroy the other, and so after ten years of continual fighting, history recorded a long ineffectual list of surprises and ambushes, of raids and skirmishes, of towns taken and retaken, of alternate victory and defeat, in which neither party could claim a supremacy. It mattered nothing that Montfort and Blois had both disappeared from the scene, the ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for his people. His excellent judgment had great weight in council, his political ideas were eminently liberal, and his tact and attention reached results where perhaps more aggressive qualities would have been ineffectual. On one occasion that I recall he was urging the passage of the bill to pay for use and occupation of the Theological Seminary near Alexandria during the war. He became the mark, in doing so, of inquiry and badinage, and some one, meaning to disparage the claim by intimation that the ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... man, as he had often heard, sprang from the same common fore-father, low-browed, muzzle-faced, hairy. Such were these, in varying degrees of intensity. None wore clothes. Grinning mouths exhibited fanglike teeth, bare chests broadened powerfully, clumsy hands with short, ineffectual thumbs made foolish gestures. But the feet, for instance, were not like hands, they were flat pedestals with forward-projecting toes. The legs, though short, were powerful. Man's father, decided Parr, must have had something of the bear about his appearance ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... Ripon had already made ineffectual representations to that Government concerning the contempt with which it was treating ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... spoken after this. The hearts were full to the brink—to speak was to interfere with their consummate joy. The doctor was the only one who made the attempt, and he, after a very ineffectual endeavour to be jocose, held his peace. The Bible was produced. The servants of the house appeared. A chapter was read from it by the incumbent—a prayer was offered up, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... Colonel! if that nigger gal a' yourn don't stand close with her blazer we'll get into an all-fired snarl," says one, endeavouring to extricate himself and regain his upright. After sundry ineffectual attempts, surging round the room in search of his hat, which is being very unceremoniously transformed into a muff beneath their entangled extremes, he turns over quietly, saying, "There's something very strange about the floor of this establishment,—it don't seem solid; 'pears ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... this the resolution, of such a dear wicked intriguer?—For, my lady, you can hardly conceive the struggles he apparently had to bring down his high spirit to so humble a level. And though, I hope, all would have been, even in this worst case, ineffectual, through Divine Grace, yet how do I know what lurking vileness might have appeared by degrees in this frail heart, to encourage his designs, and to augment my trials and my dangers? And perhaps downright violence might have been used, if he could not, on one hand, have subdued his passions, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... nunnery in Oxfordshire, where there was great strictness of life, and to which most of the young gentlewomen of the country were sent to be bred; so that the gentry of the country desired the king would spare the house: yet all was ineffectual." ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... to bed. Foreseeing some inconveniences possible in this nocturnal party, the Queen determined on having a number of people with her; and even ordered her waiting women to accompany her. All precautions were ineffectual to prevent the effects of calumny, which thenceforward sought to diminish the general attachment that she had inspired. A few days afterwards, the most wicked libel that appeared during the earlier years of her reign was circulated in Paris. The blackest colours were employed to paint ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... critters!" commented Mrs. Applegate from the porch. But Charley-Joe, with an almost hypnotic fixity in his yellow eyes, and who during the last few minutes had several times opened his mouth wide in an ineffectual attempt to mew, suddenly found his voice with a prolonged ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... giving us of her bounty what we could not hope for by our search. This success attends your lordship's thoughts, which would look like chance if it were not perpetual and always of the same tenor. If I grant that there is care in it, it is such a care as would be ineffectual and fruitless in other men; it is the curiosa felicitas which Petronius ascribes to Horace in his odes. We have not wherewithal to imagine so strongly, so justly, and so pleasantly: in short, if we have the same ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... found Ruby Ruggles, and having ascertained that she was at any rate living in a respectable house with her aunt, returned to Carbury. He had given the girl his advice, and had done so in a manner that was not altogether ineffectual. He had frightened her, and had also frightened Mrs Pipkin. He had taught Mrs Pipkin to believe that the new dispensation was not yet so completely established as to clear her from all responsibility as to her niece's conduct. Having done so much, and feeling that there was no more to be done, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... of Commons on the growth of tobacco in Ireland, in 1840, as follows:—'That it further appears, from the evidence, that smuggling of foreign tobacco is at present carried on to a great extent, and that all the measures now adopted, at great expense to the country, are and will be ineffectual to repress it so long as the temptation of evading a duty equal to twelve times the value of the article on ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Spaniards. The latter are not strong enough to wage war with him, and therefore overlook his insolence; this encourages him to begin anew his piratical raids against other islands. At this, several attempts are made to curb them, most proving ineffectual—although in January-February, 1658, Esteybar with a squadron of armed vessels, destroys several Mindanao villages. Finally (in 1662) the Manila authorities decide to abandon their forts in Mindanao and Jolo; this causes the loss of Spanish dominion there, and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... trees to which they were often under the necessity of being tied; sometimes they tore asunder the cartilage of the nostril through which the ropes ran, and got loose. On these occasions, all the exertions of the men to recover them would have been ineffectual, without the assistance of some young boys, whom these animals would permit to approach them, and by whose little management their rage was soon appeased. A circumstance respecting these animals, ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... south-westerly course, and in twenty-seven days the American continent was sighted at the place which was named Venezuela, because the houses being built upon piles reminded the beholders of Venice. Hojeda, after some ineffectual attempts to hold intercourse with the natives, with whom he had several skirmishes, next saw the Island of Margarita; after sailing about 250 miles to the east of the river Orinoco he reached the Gulf of Paria, and entered a bay called the Bay of Las Perlas, from ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... especially fitting that we should awake to the worth of the master by proxy just now, when the movement for the socialization of the world, after so many ineffectual centuries, is beginning to engage the serious attention of mankind. Thus far, one of the chief reactionary arguments against all men being free has been that men are so shockingly unequal. And the reactionaries have called us to witness the gulf ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... constantly escaped the pursuits of the boldest hunters, and had carried off horses and mules from the midst of enclosures; but, having no want of food, had not yet attacked men. The negro who conducted us uttered wild cries, expecting by these means to frighten the tiger; but his efforts were ineffectual. The jaguar, like the wolf of Europe, follows travellers even when he will not attack them; the wolf in the open fields and in unsheltered places, the jaguar skirting the road and appearing only at intervals ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the summer-day is past, when all Nature slumbers, and when the ancients feared to sing, lest the great god Pan should be awakened. Soft changes, the gradual shifting of every shadow on every leaf, begin to show the waning hours. Ineffectual thunder-storms have gathered and gone by, hopelessly defeated. The floating-bridge is trembling and resounding beneath the pressure of one heavy wagon, and the quiet fishermen change their places to avoid the tiny ripple that glides stealthily ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... streets became the scene of bloody battles; St. Peter's was closed to him, and Henry, worn and disheartened and in peril, was compelled to submit to be ingloriously crowned at St. John Lateran. With diminished strength and with loss of influence he withdrew to Tuscany, and laid ineffectual siege to Florence. Month after month dragged along with miserable continuance of futile war. In the summer of 1313, collecting all his forces, Henry prepared to move southward against the King of Naples. But he was seized with illness, and on the 24th of August he died at Buonconvento, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Thetis, his mother, who knew that Achilles, if he went to the siege of Troy, would never return, clothed him in female apparel, and concealed him among the maidens at the court of Lycom{e}des, king of the island of Scyros. But this stratagem proved ineffectual; for Calchas having informed the Greeks where Achilles lay in disguise, they sent Ulysses to the court of Lycom{e}des, where, under the appearance of a merchant, he was introduced to the king's daughters, and while they were studiously ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... shambling, with high and prominent cheekbones and eyes that showed a lot of white at all times. Across one cheek was a long, purplish scar reaching up to the corner of one eye. It gave him a look of cunning from that quarter. But on the whole he was an ineffectual, shiftless looking Negro, with hands that were always dangling and ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... too great for mortal frame to bear, He expected the time when He was again to be examined. He busied himself in planning ineffectual schemes for escaping both present and future punishment. Of the first there was no possibility; Of the second Despair made him neglect the only means. While Reason forced him to acknowledge a God's existence, Conscience made ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... us two as lovers,—love, things more beautiful than anything else in the world, things that set the mind hunting among ineffectual images in a search for impossible expression, images of sunlight shining through blood-red petals, images of moonlight in a scented garden, of marble gleaming in the shade, of far-off wonderful music heard at dusk in a great stillness, of fairies dancing softly, of floating happiness and stirring ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... of unmerited food had produced an autotoxic anaemia, and she was pale and weepy, easily fatigued, sleeping poorly, with the boggy thyroid and overactive tendon reflexes so common in subacidosis. She had to give up her school. After six months' ineffectual resting at home, she entered a special hospital where, after some weeks of intensive treatment, her physical restoration was remarkable. The marriage of her sister and death of her mother closed the home, and she went to live with a widowed aunt, the aunt ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... preoccupation, didn't mark the change for a day or two afterward. Then she saw that her frail little roommate had stopped chattering; that she no longer made nervous little excuses for leaving her, nor invented transparent little fibs to account for absences. She became, in her absurdly ineffectual little way, surly and defiant. She took to going about openly with her chorus-man, sharing his seat with him on the train, letting him carry her bag for her on the way to the hotel; and her manner toward Rose, when any of these manifestations fell beneath her eye, was one of uneasy challenge. ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... respite and peaceful joys in flowery fields, pure breezes, social fellowship, and the similitudes of their earthly pursuits. In this placid clime, lighted by its own constellations, favored souls roamed or reposed in a sort of ineffectual happiness. According to the pagans, here were such heroes as Achilles, such sages as Socrates, to remain forever, or until the end of the world. And here, according to the Christians, the departed patriarchs and saints were tarrying expectant of Christ's ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... very dull, and merchants, instead of hiring new assistants, were disposed to part with those already in their employ. After making several ineffectual applications, Dick began to think he should be obliged to stick to his profession until the next season. But about this time something occurred which considerably ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... on his knees before the trunk, and had inserted the key in the lock, or rather had made an ineffectual attempt to do so, when suddenly the candle was extinguished, and a horrible blast on the fish horn resounded ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... word, but waited with blazing eyes beside the door. He meant to strike the first blow with his coupling pin. There were two ineffectual thuds against the door and then a crash. The hinges started and one panel splintered inward. Another, and this time the door fell and a giant of a man, jerked off his balance by the sledge he had swung, staggered ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... carack set on fire, which was about midnight of the 8th, we stood off and on till morning, to see if we might find any thing in her ashes. Finding this ineffectual, we sought about for some place where we might find succour and refreshment for our sick and wounded on shore. The land was very high, and the sea every where too deep for anchoring, so that it was the 10th before we could find a good harbour, which was in the S.W. part of the island, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... quaint!" his mother exclaimed, putting out to caress him a practised but ineffectual hand. He slipped out of it, but looked with intelligent innocent eyes at Pemberton, who had already had time to notice that from one moment to the other his small satiric face seemed to change its time of life. At this moment ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... route. In doing this, I observed that his Highness's hand kept swerving far into the Netherlands, so, gently pulling it by the thumb towards Paris, I used as much force as I thought decorous, to induce it to advance in a straight line; however, finding my efforts ineffectual, I ventured with respectful astonishment, to ask, 'Why travel by so uninteresting ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... to be learned. I will only ask you, in proof of this which I affirm, to turn to any Pronouncing Dictionary. That greatest of all absurdities, a Pronouncing Dictionary, may be of some service to you in this matter; it will certainly be of none in any other. When you mark the elaborate and yet ineffectual artifices by which it toils after the finer distinctions of articulation, seeks to reproduce in letters what exists, and can only exist, as the spoken tradition of pronunciation, acquired from lip to lip by the organ of the ear, capable of being learned, but incapable of being ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... only impeded his own progress, but had the effect of restraining Hannibal, who was just on the point of quitting his winter quarters, after hearing of his passage, which was so much quicker than he expected; for he not only revolved in his mind how tedious was the siege of towns, but also how ineffectual was his attempt upon that same colony, when returning victorious ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... forward. Philip was thrown out at the side, aiming an ineffectual blow with his whip at Harry, as he found himself going, and landed in a half stunned condition on ...
— The Tin Box - and What it Contained • Horatio Alger
... was just the same, and altogether abominable. Night again overtook me in the direful scrubs, not very far from the place at which I had slept the previous night; the most of the day was wasted in an ineffectual search for water. ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... local legends, which would seem to be at variance with this opinion, were it not certain, though I cannot explain the cause, that local poetry, like local language or local melody, is in proportion to the interest it awakens among the local inhabitants, weak and ineffectual in its influence on the sentiments of the general world. The "Rans de Vaches," the most celebrated of all local airs, is tame and commonplace,—unmelodious, to all ears but those of the Swiss ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... exhilaration. The relish for stimulants was thus acquired, and habits of dissipation formed. They became idle, and of course uneasy. And they continued to drink, partly to gratify taste and partly to quiet conscience. They saw the ruin that was coming upon them, and they made some earnest but ineffectual struggles against it. But the resistance became weaker and weaker—by and by the struggle is ended—they float with the current, and where are they? One has been found by the temperance reformation, a mere wreck in property, character, body, and mind, and reclaimed. Another ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... themselves and the country. By the difference just mentioned, between Mr. Pitt and Lord Thurlow, the ministerial arrangements of 1793 were facilitated, and the learned Lord, after all his sturdy pliancy, consigned to a life of ineffectual discontent ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... progression, is performed by the motion of the wings; these require strong muscles as are seen on the breasts of partridges. Whence all attempts of men to fly by wings applied to the weak muscles of their arms have been ineffectual; but it is not certain whether light machinery so contrived as to be moved by their feet, might not enable them to fly a little way, though not so as to answer ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... The restless ineffectual arguing to and fro with which he had tormented himself the day before was absent from this calmer mood. What was the use of struggling against inexorable necessity? Certainly war was one of the most terrible evils to which the world had ever been subjected, and ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... sudden movement he shook his arms free, and after two ineffectual attempts stuck his freckled ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... forbearance is gone by," she said coldly in reply to the persevering representations of the prelate. "Indulgence has proved ineffectual hitherto; and it has consequently become imperative upon the King to adopt more rigorous measures. These gentlemen are enacting the petty sovereigns in their respective governments, but I shall take steps to repress ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... the Paglion now runs to the westward of the city walls, there should be a deep ditch to be filled with sea-water; and that a fortress should be built to the westward of this fosse. These particulars might be executed at no very great expence; but, I apprehend, they would be ineffectual, as the town is commanded by every hill in the neighbourhood; and the exhalations from stagnating sea-water would infallibly render the air unwholesome. Notwithstanding the undoubted antiquity of Nice, very few monuments of that antiquity now remain. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... was scarcely different. Kinnicutt was hibernating. Each household had drawn into its shell. And the huge drifts, lying defiant against the fences in the short, ineffectual winter sunlight, held out little hope of reanimation. Aunt Faith, in her pumpkin hood, and Rob Roy cloak, and carpet moccasins, came over once in two or three days, and even occasionally stayed to tea, and helped make up a rubber of ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... old man, as he made an attempt to pluck out his beard, which the shackles on his wrists rendered ineffectual. "Allah protect me! Is it not enough that I have fallen into captivity? Am I also doomed to pass the night under the same roof with an unbeliever, even as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... son who will live his own life no matter what may be his parents' will. It is only allied to it, however, not to be identified with it, because Maurice is too fearful of disappointing his parents, and too shrinking and ineffectual, to go against his parents' will. In Ireland, as I have said elsewhere, such parental will, by a survival of authority from the days of the clan system, was law until yesterday, and there will therefore be those, I have no doubt, who will find in the play a conflict of the old order and ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... day when he had packed up his father's clothes to move them to Madeleine's, and that was more than a fortnight ago. There was some delay in getting a chambermaid; servants are always busy, yet never to be had in an American hotel; after several ineffectual attempts, he obtained the services of an Irish girl; and he induced Adolphine to lend her aid, that the room might be aired, swept, and put in order more rapidly. Adolphine was rather a hinderance to the bustling Irish help, for a Parisian lady's-maid knows one especial ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... the criminal was satisfied that all applications that had been made for mercy were ineffectual, and that there was not the least probability of a pardon, he immediately sent for the clergyman before-mentioned, and desired to receive the Sacrament at his hands, to which the gentleman readily assented, uttering only a short previous exhortation unto a true repentance, open and genuine ...
— 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
... broom, and the two, with anxiety not unmixed with cynicism, watched Battersleigh as he made several ineffectual attempts to penetrate the armour of ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... knowing that you do so. At the same time, never cease to exercise a system of supervision. The great principle of housekeeping is regularity, and without this (one of the most difficult of the minor virtues to practise), all efforts to promote order must be ineffectual. I have seen energetic women, clever and well-intentioned, fail in attaining a good method, owing to their being uncertain in hours, governed by impulse, and capricious. I have seen women, inferior in capacity, slow, and apathetic, make excellent heads of families, as far as their ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... choice he had, if any choice were left to kings in what concerns the independence of their crown. Surrounded, therefore, with these difficulties; and that all his late humiliations might not be rendered as ineffectual as they were ignominious, he took the last step; and, in the presence of a numerous assembly of his peers and prelates, who turned their eyes from this mortifying sight, formally resigned his crown to the pope's legate; to whom at the same time he did homage, and ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... her altitude on the castle rock the great fire in Leith, which probably looked at first like the beginning of its destruction, and all the martial bands of England, and the Scots lords and their followers, lying between her and her friends. After some ineffectual efforts to communicate with them otherwise, she sent for the Lords Argyle, Glencairn, and the Earl Marischal, with the Lord James, who visited her separately, "not all together, lest that some part of the Guysian practice had lurked under the colour of friendship." ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... state, yet of the greatest advantage to me, by the use which divine wisdom made of it. This state of emptiness, darkness, and impotency, went far beyond any trials I had ever yet met. I have since experienced, that the prayer of the heart when it appears most dry and barren, nevertheless is not ineffectual nor offered in vain. God gives what is best for us, though not what we most relish or wish for. Were people but convinced of this truth, they would be far from complaining all their lives. By causing us death He would procure us life; for all our happiness, spiritual, ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... story of Cuba for many years has been one of unrest, growing discontent, an effort toward a larger enjoyment of liberty and self-control, of organized resistance to the mother country, of depression after distress and warfare, and of ineffectual settlement to be followed by renewed revolt. For no enduring period since the enfranchisement of the continental possessions of Spain in the Western Continent has the condition of Cuba or the policy of Spain toward Cuba not caused concern to the ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... the moon with ineffectual arrows; our hopes are set on inaccessible El Dorado; we come to an end of nothing here below. Interests are only plucked up to sow themselves again, like mustard. You would think, when the child was born, there would be an end to trouble; and yet it is only the beginning of fresh ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was only once of the many, many times when he proved himself a man. Though the adder only struck the fold of my skirt, I stood paralyzed with horror. Winthrope, as usual, was ineffectual. Tom came running with his club—and then—" The girl paused until the vivid blush that had leaped into her cheeks had ebbed away. "It was not alone his courage but his resourcefulness. Most men would have turned away from the ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... political power. The result would be good or bad as the new rulers acted or did not act in the spirit properly called Liberal. Unluckily the flattery of the working-man has come into fashion; we ignore his necessary limitations, and we deify the 'casual opinions and ineffectual public sentiments' of the half-educated. 'The great characteristic danger of our days is the growth of a quiet, ignoble littleness of character and spirit.' We should aim, therefore, at impressing our new masters 'with ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the charm which captivates without the aid of nature, and without which her utmost bounty is ineffectual. But it cannot be assumed as a mask to conceal insensibility or malevolence; it must be the genuine effect of corresponding sentiments, or it will impress upon the countenance a new and more disgusting deformity, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... afford a comfortable subsistence for the three. The baron, then a young man of three-and-twenty endeavored to obtain such military or civil employment as might become his rank; but, although the Bourbons were at that time restored to the throne of France, his efforts were ineffectual. Either his interest at court was bad, or secret enemies were at work to oppose his advancement. He failed to obtain even the slightest favor; and, irritated by undeserved neglect, resolved to leave France, and seek occupation for his energies in foreign countries, ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... providing for punishment of frauds committed on the Government of the United States. Either from some defect in the law or in its administration every effort to bring the accused to trial under its provisions proved ineffectual, and the Government was driven to the necessity of resorting to the vague and inadequate provisions of the common law. It is therefore my duty to call your attention to the laws which have been passed for the protection of the Treasury. If, indeed, there ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... from the cave. But their new equipment seems only destined to facilitate their dispersion from the parent nest, which takes place at dusk; and almost as quickly as they leave it they divest themselves of their ineffectual wings, waving them impatiently and twisting them in every direction till they become detached and drop off, and the swarm, within a few hours of their emancipation, become a prey to the night-jars and bats, which are instantly attracted to them as they issue in a cloud from the ground. I ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... a smoker, chanced to have in his pocket a box of allumettes. After several ineffectual essays, he succeeded in igniting one against the dank wall, and by its momentary glare perceived that the candle had been left in the tomb. This would serve him in examining the fastenings of the vault. If he could force the inner ...
— A Struggle For Life • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... The light, dim and ineffectual as it was, served to show that this woman was in a state of health which her friends, if she had any, must have deemed to be anything but satisfactory. It was easy to perceive that she had once possessed an attractive and rather pretty face. Some ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... growl which was more like that of a dog than a human being; and after an ineffectual attempt to get at Dick, he dragged himself away to kneel down at the first clear pool to bathe ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... to stay its ravages. It was a task beyond human strength, but he most gallantly attempted it. On some occasions he rescued with his own hands the victims of the popular fury, and arrested the cockaded assassins who would have destroyed them. But even his great popularity was ineffectual to prevent the massacre of innocent citizens, and more than once, overwhelmed with grief and disgust, he threatened to throw up ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... twelve, noon, a field-piece burst upon the stillness of the sultry day, and the band began the strains of "The Star-spangled Banner." Every hat was taken off, and an instant later, efforts to restrain it being ineffectual, six miles of solid cheering encompassed ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... double difficulty of preserving its market from the import of English cloth, through Hanseatic ships, and of obtaining the necessary raw material. The restrictive measures taken against the import of English cloth proved ineffectual, and Spanish wool, which was tried as a substitute for English, was of inferior quality. Ypres was the first to suffer, in spite of the solicitude of the dukes, who reduced commercial taxes in its favour. Its population fell from 12,000 ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... interested in his movements that she forgot her manners, and stood watching his ineffectual efforts at cleaning up, with a smile of amusement mingled ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... and I shall leave no son to inherit my share of life, with a better sense of its privileges and duties, when his father should vanish like a bubble; so that few mortals, even the humblest and the weakest, have been such ineffectual shadows in the world, or die so utterly as I must. Even a young man's bliss has not been mine. With a thousand vagrant fantasies, I have never truly loved, and perhaps shall be doomed to loneliness throughout the eternal future, because, ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... extraordinary effects it caused. As to the nature of the explosive and of the deflagrator, the elements of which the latter was composed, their manufacture, and the way in which they were employed, he preserved complete silence, and all attempts to worm the secret out of him remained ineffectual. Once or twice, during the height of the paroxysms to which he was occasionally subject, there had been reason to believe that his secret would escape him, and every precaution had been taken to note his slightest ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... the Audiencia, in the opinion of the French astronomer Le Gentil, were the only safeguard against an arbitrary despotism, yet Zuniga, a generation later pronounced its efforts in this direction generally ineffectual. [56] The residencia to which reference has been made was an institution peculiar in modern times to the Spanish colonial system, it was designed to provide a method by which officials could be held to strict accountability for all acts during their ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... by Acacius the Patriarch of Constantinople and Peter "the Stammerer," who accepted the Henotikon, preferred to his place, a reference to Rome led to a peremptory letter from Pope Simplicius, to which Acacius paid no heed whatever. Felix II. (483-92), after an ineffectual embassy, actually declared Acacius excommunicate and deposed. The monastery of the Akoimetai at Constantinople ("sleepless ones," who kept up perpetual intercession) threw itself strongly on to the side of the advocates of Chalcedon. Acacius, then excommunicated ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... An ineffectual aunt in the critical years of adolescence! Mic-co did not suggest that his cousin's sex had been ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... themselves. Here and there one of them starts to speak of nightly visions, complains about a feeling of anxiety, speaks of suspicious noises and voices in the vicinity, and finally makes a superficial, ineffectual attempt at suicide. Others become suddenly more antagonistic, vehemently assert their innocence, speak of being the victims of false accusations, etc. Still others suddenly develop a wild, maniacal ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... Law of the Conditioned," as a ground of faith in the Infinite Being, is utterly void, meaningless, and ineffectual. Let us re-state it in Hamilton's own words: "The conditioned is the mean between two extremes, two inconditionates exclusive of each other, neither of which can be conceived as possible, but of which, on the principle of Contradiction and Excluded Middle, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... though rather small, snapped even as did those of the parrot. Excitement—to-night she was very much excited—invariably produced in Serena an effect of clutching at her long-departed girlhood, an effect sufficiently pathetic in the case of a woman well on in the forties. And it was precisely this ineffectual throw-back to a Serena of seventeen or eighteen which lent a sharp edge of irony to the strident salutations of the parrot, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... made several ineffectual attempts to persuade Pitkin to take the colt back again on any terms, and was laughed at ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... ever tried! It was the ambition of my life to see myself in print; though, hitherto, it had been ineffectual. 'I have written a few sketches,' I answered, with becoming modesty. As a matter of fact, our office bulged ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... position they had taken up the evening before. Soon after daybreak it became evident that the conflict was to be renewed, and a little later the enemy resumed the offensive by an attack along my left front, especially on Walker's brigade. His attempt was ineffectual, however, and so easily repulsed as to demonstrate that the desperate character of his assaults the day before had nearly exhausted his strength. About 3 o'clock in the afternoon he made another feeble charge on my front, ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... putting a great fore paw on each of the man's shoulders, he laid him flat on his back in the road, and quietly picking up the bag, he proceeded peaceably on his wonted way. The man, much dismayed, arose and followed the dog, making, every now and then, an ineffectual attempt to coax him ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... field which he himself had cleared of its stumps. A widow's life is always a hard one, but in such a country and under such conditions it is even harder and more lonely than elsewhere. Mrs. Garfield's eldest boy, Thomas, was only eleven years old; and with the aid of this one ineffectual helper, she managed herself to carry on the farm for many years. Only those who know the hard toil of a raw American township can have any idea what that really means. A farmer's work in America is not like ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... humanitarianism. He thought all speculation, which did not bear directly on the welfare and happiness of human beings, a waste of ingenuity; and yet, at the same time, he taught that all practical systems, which left out of account the emotional and sentimental side of man, were incomplete and ineffectual. This higher side of his nature showed itself in his lively affections, his intense love of home and wife and children, his lifelong tenacity of friendship, and his overflowing sympathy for the poor, the abject, and ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... and machinations of the Russian Government respecting the Jews proved ineffectual. Nicholas I, with the possible exception of Ivan the Terrible, the greatest autocrat in Russian history, at whose wish seemingly insuperable obstacles were instantly removed, the wink of whose eye was sufficient ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... of merriment ran through the crowd, breaking in many places into ostentatious guffaws. To those who knew the underside of those meetings, the mild request appeared so ineffectual as to be merely ridiculous. The honorable chairman, on the stage, hid a sinister smile behind ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... fall into the snare, the spider does not sally out at once, but very patiently waits till it is sure of them; for, upon his immediately approaching the terror of his appearance might give the captive strength sufficient to get loose; the manner, then, is to wait patiently, till, by ineffectual and impotent struggles, the captive has wasted all its strength, and then he becomes a ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... he could say, and all Captain Tomlinson could urge, ineffectual, to prevail upon me to forgive an outrage so flagrantly premeditated; rested all his hopes on a visit which was to be paid me by Lady Betty Lawrance ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... escaped his right fist, and felt as though his heart had been drawn with it as it whizzed past his ear. He turned and fled frantically up-stairs, mistaking for the clatter of pursuit the noise with which Cashel, overbalanced by his ineffectual blow, ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... hero fixed in his resolve watches for the opportunity, when it is the turn of his beloved to officiate in the temple of Vesta, and enters therein. The Vestale is terrified and supplicates him to retire: in vain; and after a long but ineffectual struggle she sinks into his arms at the foot of the altar. Suddenly the sacred flame becomes extinguished; a noise is heard; the Vestals enter; the unfortunate fair is roused from her stupor by the noise of footsteps and has ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... weak language in which to express clearly its surpassing loveliness. This is Takabuko, or more familiarly, Papenberg, a spot with a sad and bloody history, for it was here that the remnant of the persecuted Christians, who escaped the general massacre in 1838,—when 30,000 perished—made a last ineffectual stand for their lives and faith. But to no purpose, for pressed to extremities by the swords of their relentless persecutors, they threw themselves over the heights, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... one ineffectual effort to re-unite them in solid rank against the attacking police enemy, ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... high, old-fashioned buggy at her aunt's side, an endless journey. Never had old Dolly traveled so deliberately or with more frequent dead stops in the road to meditate upon her long-past youth. Mrs. Wackernagel's ineffectual slaps of the reins upon the back of the decrepit animal inspired in Tillie an inhuman longing to seize the whip and lash the feeble beast into a swift pace. The girl felt appalled at her own feelings, so novel and inexplicable they seemed to her. Whether ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... soon as the symptoms of colic manifest themselves, has frequently afforded relief. At any rate, the irritating substances may be expelled from the alimentary canal before the pains will subside. All local remedies will be ineffectual, and consequently the purgative should be given in large doses until a copious vacuation ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... neighborhood with their clamor. I have no doubt the oranges have a market price; but I have been seeking the value the gardeners set on them themselves. As I walked towards the heights, the other morning, and passed an orchard, the gardener, who saw my ineffectual efforts, with a very long cane, to reach the boughs of a tree, came down to me with a basketful he had been picking. As an experiment on the price, I offered him a two-centime piece, which is a sort of satire on the very name of money,—when he desired me to help ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... generally to be coarse and vulgar. The chapel itself was perfectly plain, and unadorned but by a few of the customary figures and paintings, representing disgusting situations of saints and martyrs under voluntary torture and privation. Lamps that "shed a pale and ineffectual light," crucifixes, and images of the Virgin and Son, were duly scattered about the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... agreement was signed by Russia, Prussia, Denmark, and Sweden. It declared that arms and ammunition alone were contraband of war, that merchandise of belligerents, except contraband of war, was to be protected by a neutral flag, and that 'paper blockades' should be regarded as ineffectual. England immediately laid an embargo on the vessels of the powers signing it. In 1801, a British fleet under Sir Hyde Parker, with Nelson as second in command, bombarded Copenhagen. Again, in 1807, England, fearing that Denmark would be compelled ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... ensuing death of the Empress; but they are not circumstances that would have ever emanated with their emotional particularities from the solemn soul of Tacitus. The passage is only another powerful proof how absolutely ineffectual was the attempt of Bracciolini to render history after the style ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... to take the last words of this verse if you are ever going to put in practice its first words. 'Even as the Son of Man came, not to be ministered unto, but to minister,'—if Jesus Christ had stopped there He would only have been one more of the long roll of ineffectual preachers and prophets who show men the better way, and leave them struggling in the mire. But He did not stop there: 'Even as the Son of Man came ... to give His life a ransom ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... ineffectual remonstrance on the part of the president, the pleas of the prisoner were recorded, and the examination commenced. Governor de Haldimar was ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... was ineffectual, owing to the inadequacy of the landing forces, and the failure of the Entente powers to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... This rapid fulfilment of their own prognostications roused the Greeks to the highest pitch of excitement. But all faith in the Entente had not yet been extinguished. On the very day on which the Petrograd Government delivered its tardy and ineffectual ultimatum at Sofia, at Athens the Chamber held a historic debate, in which M. Venizelos for the first time proclaimed that the Graeco-Servian Treaty imposed an absolute obligation upon Greece to make war on Bulgaria and Turkey; adding—in answer to a question, what he would ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... returned her thanks for her generosity and bounty, What I do for you, said she, is nothing at all; I shall not be satisfied unless I die, to show how much I love you. I conjured her, by all the powers of love, to drop such a fatal resolution; but all my remonstrances were ineffectual: she was so afflicted to see me have but one hand, that she sickened and died, after five or six weeks' illness. After mourning for her death as long as was decent, I took possession of her estate, a particular account of which she gave me before she ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... friend Mr. Sala has been discoursing. Dick only began by playing pitch-and-toss on a tombstone: playing fair, for what we know: and even for that sin he was promptly caned by the beadle. The bamboo was ineffectual to cane that reprobate's bad courses out of him. From pitch-and-toss he proceeded to manslaughter if necessary: to highway robbery; to Tyburn and the rope there. Ah! heaven be thanked, my parents' ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... me drowsy. Ten minutes more, and I shall be asleep in the sun, with my head down-dropped on the window-sill. I get up, and, putting on my out-door garments, stray out into the sun, leaving Barbara—her pretty forehead puckered with ineffectual wrath, and Tou Tou blurred with grimy tears, to their death-struggle with the restive verb "to love." It is the end of March, and when one can hide round a corner from the wind, one has a foretaste of summer, in the sun's warm strength. I gaze lovingly at the rich brown earth, so ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... girlish, perfectly beautiful face, enveloped in white drapery, from beneath which strayed a lock or two of what seemed a rich, though hidden luxuriance of auburn hair. The eyes were large and brown, and met those of the spectator, but evidently with a strange, ineffectual effort to escape. There was a little redness about the eyes, very slightly indicated, so that you would question whether or no the girl had been weeping. The whole face was quiet; there was no distortion or disturbance of any single feature; nor was it easy to see why the expression was not cheerful, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a curious subject of observation to an inexperienced person, to note the manner in which the two fleets man[oe]uvred throughout that night. After several hours of ineffectual efforts to bring their enemies fairly within reach of their guns, after the moon had risen, the French gave the matter up for a time, shortening sail while most of their superior officers ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... from him some account of our misfortunes; but was still kept ignorant of young Mr Thornhill's being the cause. Though her father made several remonstrances on the impropriety of going to a prison to visit us, yet they were ineffectual; she desired the child to conduct her, which he did, and it was thus she surprised us at a ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... Thorne made an ineffectual grab as the Devil reared so straight that Leonie's face was hidden in the mane, and backed his horse as the waler came down with a terrific clatter on the hard ground, scraping the colonel mem-sahib's foot as she wheeled about, ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... occasionally visited Bridgeport, where he almost always found at the hotel a noted joker, named Darrow, who spared neither friend nor foe in his tricks. He was the life of the bar-room, and would always try to entrap some stranger in a bet and so win a treat for the company. He made several ineffectual attempts upon Barnum, and at last, one evening, Darrow, who stuttered, made a final ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... as squire or page to the Lady Elizabeth; and it was probably in the Prince's retinue that he took part in the expedition of King Edward III into France, which began at the close of the year 1359 with the ineffectual siege of Rheims, and in the next year, after a futile attempt upon Paris, ended with the compromise of the Peace of Bretigny. In the course of this campaign Chaucer was taken prisoner; but he was released without much loss of time, as appears by a document ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... he lay there, he could hear the shrieks of his shipmates and the shouts and execrations of their butchers, he expecting, every instant, to share the fate of the rest. At last all was silent, the pirates made an ineffectual attempt to scuttle the ship, but were hurried off, probably, by seeing a sail which they mistook for us, or ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... tell the best I find I cannot, My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots, My breath will not be obedient to its organs, I become ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman |
