"Irrelevant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worship at any time. We appoint times and places so that we may do what something deep in us yearns to do, yet which we all too rarely engage in because most often we are caught up in the current of contrary or irrelevant events. Set times of worship not only aid us to worship at those times but at others too; and, of course, the more often we try to worship at other times, the more able we become to make good ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... and hold the sympathy of a man—how wonderful! Who wanted a pack of women? What you really wanted was some man whose trade it was to listen and to give heed. Some man to whom your daughter's pneumonia, of however long ago, was not irrelevant, but had its own significance, as having helped to build you up as you were, you, the problem, with your wonderful, puzzling temperament, so full of complexes, inconsistencies and needs. Some man who didn't lose interest in you just because you were ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... knights at your peril, marshals!" said he; "no man in this chamber is above the laws, and they protect every Scot who resents unjust aspersions upon his own character, or irrelevant and prejudicing attacks on that of an arraigned friend. It is before the majesty of the laws that I now stand; but were injury to usurp its place, not all the lords in Scotland should detain me a moment in a scene so unworthy ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... we have always come down to the point, here we are, where do we go from here and what do we do next? There, in a word, "Here we are." Lots of discussion, much of it irrelevant. I will just propose, along the lines I spoke before, that what comes out of this is that We recommend to the incoming president to organize a survey and testing campaign along the lines that seem to meet with some agreement; namely, getting the state vice-presidents busy in finding out the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... better comprehension of the events related in the preceding chapter, it will be necessary to cast a summary glance on matters of historical and domestic import no way irrelevant to our subject, save and except their having taken place some few years previous to the commencement of ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... that time, the Odd Girl had developed such improving powers of catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed with unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would address the servants in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had painted Master B.'s room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.'s bell away and balked the ringing, and if they could suppose that that confounded boy had lived and died, to clothe himself ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... No, Shirley; love is a divine virtue. But why drag that word into the conversation? It is singularly irrelevant." ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... noon," she announced casually and irrelevant to anything in the conversation. "He's going out to the Malay Coast to inspect what's been done with that lumber and rubber company ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... authority from whom we get any personal account of Arthur is Caradoc, if Caradoc it be. The biographer makes his hero St Gildas (I put minor and irrelevant discrepancies aside) contemporary with Arthur, whom he loved, and who was king of all Greater Britain. But his brother kings did not admit this sovereignty quietly, and often put him to flight. At last Arthur overthrew ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... you a picture—'tis far from irrelevant— By a famous old hand in the arts of design; 'Tis only a photographed sketch of an elephant; The name of the ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... and this she had never done. Undoubtedly he had made a bad bargain,—he was too easy-going, people presumed upon it. His barons snatched their cue and esteemed Dame Anne to be negligible; whereas the clergy, finding that she obstinately read the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue, under the irrelevant plea of not comprehending Latin, began to denounce her from their pulpits as a heretic and as the evil woman ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... to intimate a doubt, whether, should these papers be collected and republished, I shall not wholly recast the Initial Chapters in which the Caxtons have been permitted to reappear. They assure me, themselves, that they feel a bashful apprehension lest they may be accused of having thrust irrelevant noses into affairs which by no means belong to them—an impertinence which, being a peculiarly shy race, they have carefully shunned in the previous course of their innocent and segregated existence. Indeed, there is some cause for that alarm, seeing that not long since, in a journal ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... firm than a bigot and more terrible than a fanatic, a man with a definite opinion. But that definite opinion must in this view begin with the basic matters of human thought, and these must not be dismissed as irrelevant, as religion, for instance, is too often in our days dismissed as irrelevant. Even if we think religion insoluble, we cannot think it irrelevant. Even if we ourselves have no view of the ultimate verities, we must ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... silence them; he answered them. His question was no irrelevant riddle by which he met a difficulty and delayed the necessity of a reply. He definitely implied that the authority of John was divine and that his own authority was the same; but as they were afraid to deny the divine authority of John they were also powerless to deny that ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... a detective to be dogged by his gardener and his sweetheart," Norvin sympathized. He began to run through his mail, while his visitor talked on in his amusing, irrelevant fashion. ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... indifference upon the mushroom growths of Aryan civilisation, whether an Athens or a Birkenhead be the product, but admit that the living has so far an advantage over the dead. To find the moral of 'Coningsby' may be impracticable and is at any rate irrelevant. The way to enjoy it is to look at the world through the eyes of Sidonia. The world—at least the Gentile world—is a farce. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred are fools. Some are prosy and reasoning fools, and make excellent butts for stinging sarcasms; others are flighty and imaginative fools, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... an insult, but actually merely irrelevant—whereby the uncrowned little King of France was designated ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... larger selection, from the originals in the Vatican, appeared in Theiner's Annals of Gregory XIII. The letters written under Pius V. are beyond the limits of that work; and Theiner, moreover, has omitted whatever seemed irrelevant to his purpose. The criterion of relevancy is uncertain; and we shall avail ourselves largely of the unpublished portions of Salviati's correspondence, which were transcribed by Chateaubriand. These manuscripts, with others of equal importance not previously consulted, determine several ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... adding machine and leave the thinking function free to operate in any direction; but before that is possible the superficial mind must be familiar with the object that engages it. It is not an easy matter to figure sterling exchange, for instance, and at the same time think about irrelevant things; but it is easy to run an adding machine, or even to add, and think simultaneously. On the cash book Evan found himself engaged in all kinds of work; on some of it he had to concentrate (although no ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... hens here at Hillcroft. This remark may seem irrelevant, but not if you read on. Every time one of these hens brings five-pence-halfpenny worth of egg into the world it makes a noise commensurate with this feat. But I contend that even if your cow laid ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... part in those (it must be acknowledged) unseemly "high jinks," he never, in the Morgante, when speaking in his own person, and not in that of the worst characters, intimates disrespect towards any opinion which he did not hold to be irrelevant to a right faith. It is observable that his freest expressions are put in the mouth of the giant Margutte, the lowest of these characters, who is an invention of the author's, and a most extraordinary personage. He is the first unmitigated blackguard ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... June 17, 1778. Who is not familiar with the name and fame of "the saucy Arethusa"? Yet there is a curious absence of detail as to the fight. The combat, indeed, owes its enduring fame to two somewhat irrelevant circumstances—first, that it was fought when France and England were not actually at war, but were trembling on the verge of it. The sound of the Arethusa's guns, indeed, was the signal of war between the two nations. The other fact is that an ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... to the other, often with a trivial consideration of the importance of the points involved, and always with an entire absence of a universal point of view, of that genius which grasps a question in its entirety and is not confused by irrelevant details. It is only of late when the matter has come before the Federal Supreme Court and the courts of a few States which have been educated by a frequent recurrence of disputes of this sort that we begin again to see the principle clearly, ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... deliberating something in his own mind. He was well acquainted with Malcolm Sage's habit of asking apparently irrelevant questions. ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... she might go to bed, for I was safely and comfortably bestowed, as she could see, and ready for sleep; but she would not go, and there sat, with the candle in her hand, her face flushed and her great blue eyes soulfully glowing, while she continued to chatter in an incoherent and strangely irrelevant fashion: so that, astonished into broad wakefulness by this extraordinary behaviour, I sat bolt upright in bed, determined ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... of the polygamist King, Frederick William II., the successor of Old Fritz, was the most dissolute Court of Europe, as Berlin is to-day the most depraved city on the Continent. But somehow the scandals of the Hohenzollern seem to be irrelevant episodes. Somehow we do not think of the annals of the august House as a history of scandal. We only think of the Hohenzollern as the political necromancers of modern Europe, as the supreme masters ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... into the garden, and Signor Mannetti, finding a snug seat in the sun, decided to stop there. Henry and his uncle exchanged glances, and the latter found his faith weakening, for the Italian's mind appeared to wander. He became more and more irrelevant, as it seemed. He spoke again of the old dog who ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... that Locke was not more familiar with Descartes' writings than Hume seems to have been; for, viewed in relation to the passages just cited, the arguments adduced in his famous polemic against innate ideas are totally irrelevant. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... occasional inaccuracy in details, is William G. Sumner's Andrew Jackson (rev. ed., 1899). Of older biographies, the most important is James Parton's Life of Andrew Jackson, 3 vols. (1861). This work is sketchy, full of irrelevant or unimportant matter, and uncritical; but for a half-century it was the repository from which historians and biographers chiefly drew in dealing with Jackson's epoch. John H. Eaton's Life of Andrew Jackson (1842) ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... point out to this young man how silly and irrelevant such talk was to a sick man like himself, how impertinent and uncivil it was to him, an older man occupying a position in the official world of extraordinary power and influence. He insisted that a doctor was paid ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... not yet found any suitable reply to make to this rather irrelevant confidence, when Miss Broadwood turned to her cordially: "I'm awfully glad you've come, Miss Willard, though I've not quite decided why you did it. I wanted very much to meet you. Flavia gave me your thesis ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... "They seem rather irrelevant at times," he admitted, with a smile. "They're mere tags, labels, which can be attached to one as well as another; they seem ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... He was becoming irrelevant; a question to the point cut short his speech, like a pang of pain, and he felt extremely discouraged and weary. He was coming to that, he was coming to that—and now, checked brutally, he had to answer by yes or ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... before, the other girls had been earnestly talking, then had ensued a thoughtful silence and Jean's irrelevant speech. ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... morality would be a waste of time, Kenworthy pressed the committee members to tackle the services on their own ground—efficiency.[14-41] After seeing the Army so effectively dismiss in the name of military efficiency and national security the moral arguments against segregation as being valid but irrelevant, Kenworthy ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... eating anything, and you look as if you had been living on air of late—very unlike your appearance when you so efficiently aided me in the rearrangement of the store. I am delighted that you keep up the better order of things." Dennis's answer was quite irrelevant. ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... for a moment. He seemed not to have heard the suggestion, and when he did speak it was to ask a quite irrelevant question. ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... eloquence about "the fathers," much evocation of the shades of the great departed, who, having reached the eternal silence, could be claimed by both sides. The contention was none the less strenuous because it was entirely irrelevant; since the opinion of "the fathers" could not make slavery right or wrong. Many times therefore did Douglas charge Lincoln with having said "that the Union could not endure divided as our fathers ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... way of dismissing a question she liked not was to pour out matters which were quite irrelevant, when to stop her was altogether past hope. I had learned to wait. She, at my desire, made Jack her aid in her affairs, as I was fully occupied with my father's neglected business. Now, too, she was busy finding Jack a wife, and would tell me all ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... watching it excitedly, holding their breath, in fear of losing a single movement or expression of the bride and bridegroom, and angrily not answering, often not hearing, the remarks of the callous men, who kept making joking or irrelevant observations. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... aller. "Things are so bad that any change must be for the better." What is to make them better we are told in the socialist catechism; but how it is to do so, how and what anything is to become, this, the only question that matters, is regarded as irrelevant. It is answered by some halting and insincere stammer about "surplus value" which is to make everybody well off—and which would yield all round, as I have elsewhere shown, just twenty-five marks a head. Fifteen millions of grown men are pressing forward ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... and learning not alone with the counsel for the other side, but with the cold scrutiny of a calm, intellectual and judicial mind, trained to consider argument, and experienced in the elimination of the irrelevant, the ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... Lutherans unite with the Reformed, the former gradually sink to the level of the latter. Already by declaring the differences between the two Churches irrelevant, the Lutheran truths are actually sacrificed and denied. Unionism always breaks the backbone, and outrages the conscience, of true Lutheranism. And naturally enough, the refusal to confess the Lutheran truth is but too frequently followed by eager endorsement and fanatical defense of the opposite ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... absurd irrelevant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder of their combination. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging to the same school, is Burly. ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... sacred for the ears of Letty Tressady—little phrases and snatches of autobiography steeped in an exquisite experience: the nature Letty had rained her blows upon, kept nothing back, gave her all its best. How irrelevant much of it was!—chequered throughout by those oblivions, and optimisms, and foolish hopes by which such a nature as Marcella's protects itself from the hard facts of the world. By the time she had ranged through every ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... an eminent degree with the prevailing faults of the sixth century, an age of literary decay, when the language of Cicero and Virgil was falling into its dotage. There is much ill-timed display of irrelevant learning, and a grievous absence of simplicity and directness, in the "Various Epistles". It must be regarded as a misfortune for Theodoric that his maxims of statesmanship, which were assuredly full of manly ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... of the National Guards who have died in the defence of Paris. The resolution was carried unanimously. No National Guard has, indeed, yet been good enough to die; but of course this fact was regarded as irrelevant. The next resolution was that the concubines of patriots should enjoy the same right to rations as legitimate wives. As the Club prides itself upon the stern severity of its morals, this resolution was not carried. An orator then proposed that all strangers should be banished from France. He was ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... travelling through media previously existing, and being carried down, like a boat drifting down stream, by a flowing time which has a pace of its own, and imposes it on all existence. In reality, each "clock" and each landscape is self-centred and initially absolute: its time and space are irrelevant to those of any other landscape or "clock", unless the objects or events revealed there, being posited as self-existent, actually coincide with those revealed also in another landscape, or dated by another "clock". It is only by travelling along its own path at its own rate that experience ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... with all the simplicity and circumstantial detail of those who write authentic history as eye-witnesses. But, unless the design be to class the books of Samuel with "Gulliver's Travels" and "Robinson Crusoe," the argument is wholly irrelevant. With Swift and Defoe simplicity and minuteness of detail were a matter of conscious effort—a work of art, for which they naturally chose the region of fiction; and here they, and other men of genius, have been eminently successful. Shakespeare has portrayed ideal scenes in the ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... father in Baltimore the latter had him committed to the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital.[3] He remained there for one year and eight months, during which time his mood showed great variability. At times he would be elated, again depressed or anxious, often silly with irrelevant laughter. Towards the end of his admission he had quite long intervals when he appeared normal. Eight months after his discharge he began to have monthly attacks lasting from one to two weeks. At the beginning of 1911 he came under the observation of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... prose. Mahaffy describes it as "one of the most interesting and instructive documents of the age, very remarkable for its Machiavellian tone, in its calm ignoring of the right and wrong of the case as irrelevant."] ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... After some irrelevant adventures, much in the manner of Gil Blas, and which occupy the first thirty pages, the author relates that, being ill during a sea voyage, the crew abandoned him, together with a negro servant, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... simply, with a little gasp of returning consciousness. "It is good of you to say so, doctor," but it was doubtful whether she knew what she was saying. She was penetrated through and through with thankfulness, yet thanks to herself seemed so irrelevant that she did not care to ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... our adventurous party of travellers was re-united, and for some time nothing but wild excitement, congratulations, queries that got no replies, and replies that ran tilt at irrelevant queries, with confusion worse confounded by explosions of unbounded and irrepressible laughter not unmingled with tears, was the order ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... fact I was not talking of the Derby or even thinking of it at the moment. I had just been telling Elizabeth that the omelette which she had served us at dinner was leathery, and her remark struck me as irrelevant. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... centuries, they still suggest so many tableaux vivants pushed into the wall side by side, and in tiers. Then the compositions are as overfilled as the sheets of an illustrated newspaper—witness the "Massacre of the Innocents," a scene of such magnificent artistic possibilities. Finally, irrelevant episodes and irrelevant groups of portraits do what they can to distract our attention from all higher significance. Look at the "Birth of John"; Ginevra dei Benci stands there, in the very foreground, staring out at you as stiff as if she had a photographer's iron behind her ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... a series of interrogations, which at first seemed wholly irrelevant, for they appeared to bear only on the business relations between the prisoner and the witness. Then suddenly like the dim light at the end of a tunnel, where shines the pervading illuminating ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... days of salt wind, rain, and sun, Jacob Flanders had put on a dinner jacket. The discreet black object had made its appearance now and then in the boat among tins, pickles, preserved meats, and as the voyage went on had become more and more irrelevant, hardly to be believed in. And now, the world being stable, lit by candle-light, the dinner jacket alone preserved him. He could not be sufficiently thankful. Even so his neck, wrists, and face were exposed without cover, and his whole person, whether exposed ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... "That is irrelevant. It is not any question of shame or conscience, which are abstract things. It is merely one of fact—that is, whether you did or did not help Miss Catherwood, the spy, to escape. I am convinced that you helped ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... anything but beautiful. Its appearance is a little unfamiliar, of course, but all the muddle of dust-collecting hangings and witless ornament that cover the earthly bedroom, the valances, the curtains to check the draft from the ill-fitting windows, the worthless irrelevant pictures, usually a little askew, the dusty carpets, and all the paraphernalia about the dirty black-leaded fireplace are gone. The faintly tinted walls are framed with just one clear colored line, as finely placed as the member ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... detailed by "Matthew" and "Luke;" or to the appearances after the discovery of the emptiness of the tomb; is unintelligible, if "Mark" knew anything about them, or believed in the miraculous conception. The second Gospel is no summary: "Mark" can find room for the detailed story, irrelevant to his main purpose, of the beheading of John the Baptist, and his miraculous narrations are crowded with minute particulars. Is it to be imagined that, with the supposed apostolic authority of Matthew before him, he could leave out the ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... or the altogether formless of the Quaker. I believe that the best worship is the manifold activities of daily life laid upon God's altar, so that the division between things secular and things sacred is to a large extent misleading and irrelevant. But at the same time I believe that you have very little chance of getting this diffused and all-pervasive reference of all a man's doings to God unless there are, all through his life, recurring with daily regularity, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... theory in simple language, and by natural treatment of those things which constitute the Art of making War, had merely sought to establish just so much as admits of being established; if, avoiding all false pretensions and irrelevant display of scientific forms and historical parallels, it had kept close to the subject, and gone hand in hand with those who must conduct affairs in the field by ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... character may be in other directions, whether he is kind to his wife, whether he is loving towards his children, whether he is generous in a charitable way, whether he is politically stanch or corrupt, do you not see that these questions are entirely irrelevant, have nothing whatever to do with the question of success in the money field? He sows according to the laws of the product which he wishes to raise, and ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... embodying in this Preface one or two caustic reviews of our late work, from an Agnostic source, but have been deterred from so doing, for the reason that we deem it in bad taste as well as irrelevant at this late day. We shall be pardoned, however, in alluding to The National Quarterly Review, for the captious manner in which it treated us after we had courteously replied to several inquiries made of us in its two- or three-page review. After complaining that we had been "hailed, by ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... neatly articulated, the climactic effect is, as a rule, beautifully graduated and sure in its final force: the multitude of littles which go to make up the story are, upon examination, seen to be not irrelevant but members of the one body, working together towards a common end. It is a puzzling question how this firm art was secured: since technique does not mean so much a gift from heaven as the taking of forethought, the self-conscious skill of a practitioner. Miss Austen, setting ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... aspect—to fear, to dislike of various kinds of physical, social, and personal pain. The subject-matter does not appeal; it cannot appeal; it lacks origin and bearing in a growing experience. So the appeal is to the thousand and one outside and irrelevant agencies which may serve to throw, by sheer rebuff and rebound, the mind back upon the material from which ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... The Duke replenished his glass, hoping the spell might work yet.... Perhaps, had Byron not been a dandy—but ah, had he not been in his soul a dandy there would have been no Byron worth mentioning. And it was because he guarded not his dandyism against this and that irrelevant passion, sexual or political, that he cut so annoyingly incomplete a figure. He was absurd in his politics, vulgar in his loves. Only in himself, at the times when he stood haughtily aloof, was he impressive. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... his head-mastership. At lunch he did indeed once say, "next to impossible to think of anything else," but he immediately corrected himself and substituted the words, "next to impossible to entertain irrelevant ideas," after which he seemed to feel a good deal more comfortable. Ernest saw the familiar volumes of Dr Skinner's works upon the bookshelves in the Deanery dining-room, but he saw no copy of ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... but loquacious henchman, the worthy Roesemeyer. But it is more probable, as is hinted in the first preface, that Munchausen, being a shrewd man, found the practice a sovereign specific against bores and all other kinds of serious or irrelevant people, while it naturally endeared him to the friends of whom ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... wax candles, very lean ones, but the best the poor people could afford. All the villagers assembled soon afterwards, dressed in their best, he women with flowers in their hair, and a few simple hymns, totally irrelevant to the occasion, but probably the only ones known by them, were sung kneeling; an old half-caste, with black- spotted face, leading off the tunes. This finished, the congregation rose, and then marched ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... interchange opinions, and even they only with the utmost caution. For any event that concerns the welfare of the community is, in the mind of the aborigine, intimately connected with the doings of Those Above. And if the Shiuana were to hear an irrelevant or unpleasant utterance on the part of their children, things might go wrong. There is, beside, the barrier between clan and clan,—the mistrust which one connection feels always more or less strongly toward the others. ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... generation they have a tendency to become entirely swallowed up and to merge all their national characteristics by absorption in the Anglo-Saxon stock; and that apart from and unheeding all these irrelevant appendages, the great American people goes on its way, homogeneous, ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... R. proposes, gewt him on naca, the vessel set out, on alliterating as at l. 2524 (Zachers Zeitschr. iii. 402). B. reads on nacan, but inserts irrelevant matter ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... daily, heart-rending, almost hopeless struggle to obtain enough food to keep life in the bodies of this miserable family. The historian—who makes it his chief anxiety to record, to the minutest and most irrelevant details, the deeds, noble or ignoble, of those who have managed to stamp their names upon the muster-roll of Fame—turns carelessly or scornfully the page which contains such insignificant matter as this; ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... observance of parliamentary rules, and that the resolutions and speeches were unworthy the occasion. Yet the only time Mrs. Swisshelm ever honored our platform at a National Convention, her speech was far below the level of most of the others, and the resolutions she offered were so verbose and irrelevant, that the Committee declined to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... object, and, even if I do, why should I increase my subscription, on account of an obligation voluntarily incurred by you, without any encouragement from me? In a case of this kind, the 'guarantee' ought to be regarded as simply irrelevant, and the question decided solely on the merits of the result to be attained. Of course, I must be understood to be speaking here only of those cases in which the 'guarantee' is used as an additional argument for eliciting subscriptions, not of those ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... forms the great gospel revelation. But this was Bunyan's peculiar excellence. He was even better acquainted with the Gospel as the scheme of God, than he was familiar with the Bible-text; and the consequence is, that though he is sometimes irrelevant in his references, and fanciful in interpreting particular passages, his doctrine is almost always according to the analogy of faith. The doctrine of a free and instant justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ, none even of the Puritans could ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... seem that he was plunged very abruptly into this long adventure. But from certain passages (suppressed here because mixed up with irrelevant matter) it appears clearly that at the time of the meeting in the cafe, Mills had already gathered, in various quarters, a definite view of the eager youth who had been introduced to him in that ultra-legitimist salon. What Mills had learned ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... color swept her face. The words she flung at Gordon seemed irrelevant, but he did not think them ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... I next put seemed irrelevant, but really resulted from a long train of thought. This ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... its wisdom evinces a lack of political common-sense. It in fact resembles nothing so much as the attempt to whistle down a strongly prevailing October wind from the West. The attempt so to do is not practical politics! In reply, however, I would suggest that such a criticism is wholly irrelevant. The publicist has nothing to do with practical politics. It is as if it were objected to a physician who prescribed sanitation against epidemics that the community in question was by custom and tradition wedded to filth and surface-drainage, and could not possibly ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... see this readily, by the way in which she tried to put me off, changing the conversation whenever I got on to the forbidden ground, and suggesting various irrelevant queries on my endeavouring again to chain her wilfully-erratic attention down to the one topic that I only thought ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... of either. Herein comes William's policy. The question was one of English law and of nothing else, a matter for the Witan of England and for no other judges. William, by ingeniously mixing all kinds of irrelevant issues, contrived to remove the dispute from the region of municipal into that of international law, a law whose chief representative was the Bishop of Rome. By winning the Pope to his side, William could give his aggression ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... the midst of Madame Bertrand's effusive benevolence, seemed quite irrelevant to the matter in hand, but nevertheless imparted ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... to try The Prince by the author's own standards. He did not purpose, in Bacon's phrase, to describe what men ought to be but what they actually are; he put aside ethical ideas not as false but as irrelevant. But this rejection was fatal even to his own purpose, "for what he put aside . . . were nothing less than the living forces by which societies subsist and governments are strong." [2] Calvin succeeded where the Florentine failed, as ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... rehearsal had been resumed, she unfortunately uttered a loud, dry sob, startlingly irrelevant to the matter in hand. It came during the revelation of "Roderick Hanscom's" secret, ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... The hunchback made an irrelevant gesture. "The man wrote—to inquire if I would buy his title. I declined." Then he turned to my father. "Pendleton," he said, "you know about this matter. You know that every step I took was legal. And with pains and care how I got an order out of chancery to make this purchase, and how ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... after more than an hour had slipped away—time wasted in irrelevant questions and answers, with long pauses between, when neither could think of anything to say, and each wondered why the other did not speak—"By Jove, Eve! I must be off: I didn't think the time had gone so quick. We mustn't start at the furthest later than eight; and if I ain't ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... their faces were almost on a level. She had started up with defiant words ready to burst from her lips, but they fell back again without utterance. She had met Fra Girolamo's calm glance, and the impression from it was so new to her, that her anger sank ashamed as something irrelevant. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... cried Florida. "Such a man as you ought to leave the priesthood at any risk or hazard. You should cease to be a priest, if it cost you kindred, friends, good fame, country, everything!" She blushed with irrelevant consciousness. "Why need you be downhearted? With your genius once free, you can make country and fame and friends everywhere. Leave Venice! There are other places. Think how inventors ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... archives much valuable and interesting information exists, treating in this very manner such embellishments as may to-day be lacking; but unfortunately such facts are often buried in a mass of other irrelevant material which would make its discovery unusually difficult to any but a very learned local antiquarian. In this same connection, also, there is a dearth of illustrative material which can be depended upon as to ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... reader may think that all this is irrelevant to him, that the natural sciences will solve all his problems. He would be wise to recall that the great Roman republic in which Polybius lived more than 2200 years ago, did indeed become transformed into tyranny and, in the end, into anarchy and oblivion. No wonder that the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... prove uninteresting to our readers, or quite irrelevant to the subject, to close this brief account of the marriage of Anne Boleyn, with the copy of a letter from that queen to "Squire Josselin, upon ye birth of Q. Elizabth," preserved among the manuscripts in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... rummage in a voluminous pocket, and the production of several articles irrelevant to the occasion—a thimble, a bit of ginger, and part of a tract—Mrs Gray brought to light a piece of paper, on which ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... Vote!" the reiterated announcement of the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations that the conferees could not agree, the perpetual nagging of two Democrats and one Populist, the long trying intervals of debate on matters irrelevant to the great question torturing every mind, during which there was much confusion on the floor: the Senators talked constantly in groups except when the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations brought in his amended bill;—all this ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... days and human life was vivid. Ought we to deny to all this a warm and graphic setting forth? If we do we shall do it to our cost. Is it the proper attitude of the historian simply to write, without thought of anything so irrelevant as a reader? Bancroft was a pioneer, breaking the way ponderously perhaps, but he delved faithfully. If the orotund rolls too sonorously in his periods it was an excess in which his age upheld ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... abstract or moral purpose that was discouraging. "What's the good of that?" she would ask, lifting her eyes abruptly to the master. Mr. Ford, somewhat embarrassed by her look, which always, sooner or later, frankly confessed itself an excuse for a perfectly irrelevant examination of his features in detail, would end in giving her some severely practical answer. Yet, if the subject appealed to any particular idiosyncrasy of her own, she would speedily master the study. A passing predilection for botany was provoked by a single incident. The master deeming this ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... heroes are made. And he adored his clever, resourceful boss to the point of imitation. You should have seen him trying to sell a sled or a doll's go-cart in her best style. But we cannot stop for Aloysius. He is irrelevant, and irrelevant matter halts the progress of a story. Any one, from Barrie to Harold Bell Wright, will tell you that a story, to ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... of the numerous hitching-posts placed along the roadside for the use of worshippers, and we turned to the iron gate leading into the premises. As this clanged behind us we both felt keenly the jar it created, for everything was so still and peaceful that the slightest noise was irrelevant, and we felt bound to talk in whispers. We found ourselves upon a gravel walk bordered by cedars; to our left was the road, to our right the white stones of a vast burying ground rose up like spectral sentinels of ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... the face of Cynthia's son. Her father caught her at it and smiled. This made her flush and to even up matters she deliberately put salt instead of sugar into her father's after-dinner cup of coffee. Whereupon he, tasting the salt, made an irrelevant remark about handwriting ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... that the appeal which is made by Locke and others of the sensational school to the experiences of infants, idiots, the deaf and dumb, or, indeed, any cases wherein the proper conditions for the normal development of reason are wanting, are utterly irrelevant to the question. The acorn contains within itself the rudimental germ of the future oak, but its mature and perfect development depends on the exterior conditions of moisture, light, and heat. By these exterior conditions it may be rendered ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... trouble of mind; but he found trouble of his own in explaining his frequent bursts of laughter while they ate their breakfast in the cabin. And Florrie found trouble in accepting his explanations, for they were irrelevant, ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... but it is hard lines that we have not actually had the triumph of bringing him back as our own prisoner. Such are the adventures of last night, and you must acknowledge, my dear Holmes, that I have done you very well in the matter of a report. Much of what I tell you is no doubt quite irrelevant, but still I feel that it is best that I should let you have all the facts and leave you to select for yourself those which will be of most service to you in helping you to your conclusions. We are certainly making some progress. So far as the Barrymores go we have found ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... day, isn't it?" observed Galusha, backing from the gateway in order to give Horatio egress. Mr. Pulcifer's answer was irrelevant and surprising. ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... on these irrelevant matters, I am warned that the coaches are at the door, and that we are about setting off for Tepenacasco, another hacienda of Seor—-'s, a ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... truth in her heart was that she found Ansdore rather flat. Wilson's pride in the growth of the young lambs, Broadhurst's anxiety about Spot's calving and his preoccupation with the Suffolk dray-horse Joanna was to buy at Ashford fair that year, all seemed irrelevant to the main purpose of life. The main stream of her life had suddenly been turned underground—it ran under Ansdore's wide innings—on Monday it would come again to the surface, and ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... by spreading wild fictions and thus disturbing the peace of the Empire, only to bring on themselves the derision of the Powers for their indulgence in unbridled imagination in seizing upon the watchword 'self-determination of races' which is utterly irrelevant to Chosen, and in committing themselves to thoughtless act and language. The Government are now doing their utmost to put an end to such unruly behaviour and will relentlessly punish anybody daring to commit offences ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... conversation to interesting subjects—Coleridge, Southey, etc. He gave a very different impression from the preceding evening. His memory seemed clear and unclouded—his remarks forcible and decided—with some tendency to run off to irrelevant anecdote. ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
