"Otiose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... person spending immense labour upon the habits of worms, or in speculating upon what may have happened millions of years ago. What does it matter? Here we are—face to face with the same facts. Fitzjames, in fact, agreed, though I fancy unconsciously, with Comte, who condemned such speculations as 'otiose.' To know what the world was a billion years ago matters no more than to know what there is on the other side of the moon, or whether there is oxygen in the remotest of the fixed stars. He looked with indifference, therefore, upon the application of such theories to ethical or political ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... up at Karachi, having been forwarded by special train from Bombay. No fatted calf was killed for them: in fact they all got fourteen days C.B. and three days pay forfeited; though, as Dr. Johnson observed, the sea renders the C.B. part rather otiose. ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... the poor; our municipal Gogs and Magogs who exhibit the extreme points of reticence and garrulity in the council chamber; our brandy drinkers, chronic carousers, lackered swells, pushing shopkeepers, otiose policemen, and dim-looking cab-drivers have all been photographed, framed, and hung up to dry long ago; our workshops and manufactories, our operatives and artisans, have likewise been duly pictured and exhibited; the Ribble has had its praises sung ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... everything. He emptied bagfuls of wild phrases—the collections of years—into the conversations of a few minutes. His style became, in a literary sense, vicious, a thing of tricks and conventions: blank-verse rhythms—I am sure there are a hundred blank-verse lines in the play—and otiose adjectives crept in and spoilt it as prose. It became like a parody of the beautiful English Synge wrote in ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... on the Slav literature of Dalmatia may be thought otiose, for the national aspirations would not have been less fervent if they had been expressed in Italian. One is reminded by the well-known Italian writer, Giuseppe Prezzolini,[28] that until last century the ruling classes of Piedmont spoke French; Alfieri and Cavour had to ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein |
