"Triviality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... considerable harmonic boldness. After some reminiscent appearances of the introductory horn-call, a long-sustained dominant note introduces the second theme which seems a bit cloying, to be sure, but is just suited to the melting tone-color of the clarinet. The closing theme borders on triviality; the Exposition ends, however, with some exceedingly brilliant improvisations on the rhythmic figure of the main theme. The following Development is rather flimsy and we need expend upon it no critical powder. Weber was a great colorist but not a great architect. ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... but also because he was a man whose glowing hatred of all injustice and sympathy for all suffering never evaporated in empty words. His fine literary perception enabled him to detect the genuine excellence which underlay the superficial triviality of Crabbe's verses. He discovered the genius where men like North and Shelburne might excusably see nothing but the mendicant versifier; and a benevolence still rarer than his critical ability forbade ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... closing to add force to your words by tones and gestures that emphasize ideas of the contrast in weights between the two sides of the scale. By your light tone you can indicate the triviality of objections to your proposition. With the heavier tone of power you can suggest the great weight of the favorable ideas. If you use broad gestures of your whole hand and full arm, you can seem to pile a large heap of points on your side of the scale. Conversely ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... cold in a drive through the cool air; and then, as old fellows do, we bantered each other about our ages, each claiming to be older than the other, and the kind, sweet young girl sat listening with that tolerance of youth for the triviality of age which is so charming. When he could do no more, he said he was sorry, and wished me luck, and drove on; and I being by this time tired with my three miles' tramp, took advantage of a wayside farmhouse, the first in all the distance, and went in and ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality at the head of the present war. Not the slaughter of ten million men can make the quality of the German Kaiser ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... only be deemed a compliment. It is perhaps a triviality on my part, but I feel prompted to say that I have at no time discussed your position or prospects with Mrs. Frothingham, and that I have neither offered advice on the subject nor have been requested to do so. If this statement should appear to you at all germane to the matter, I beg ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... goal. He was free, he had nothing but his aim to consider, and he reached it. But tie yourself up with a woman and, like a chained convict, you lose all freedom! And all you have of hope and strength merely weighs you down and torments you with regret. Drawing rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, and triviality—these are the enchanted circle I cannot escape from. I am now going to the war, the greatest war there ever was, and I know nothing and am fit for nothing. I am very amiable and have a caustic wit," continued Prince Andrew, "and at ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... I do not say you are wrong. I will consider your suggestion. Certainly it would be the straightest course. But first a complete explanation is due to the Queen. She must know all,—and if her interest can be awakened by such a triviality as her son's love- affair—" and he smiled somewhat bitterly,—"perhaps she may agree to your plan as the best way out of the difficulty. In any case"—here he extended his hand which the Professor deferentially bowed over—"I respect your honesty and plain speaking, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... a good many hours later that the anticlimax of the recent situation struck Trix. Excitement had prevented her from realizing it at first. In the excitement of what the thing stood for, she had overlooked the utter triviality of the thing itself. When, later, the two separated themselves in a measure, and she looked at the thing as apart from what it indicated, the ludicrousness of it ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... fingers of reproach! Still Amy is engaged. To whom at the particular moment I cannot say, but I fancy to an early one who has lately become a widower. After more exact knowledge I do not care to enquire; for to confess ignorance on the subject, implying that one has treated as a triviality and has forgotten the most important detail of a matter that to her is of vital importance, is to hurt her feelings; while to angle for information is but to entangle oneself. To speak of Him as "Tom," when Tom has belonged for weeks to the dead and buried past, to hastily correct oneself ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... so convinced of the triviality of this amusement that to find at last that he had taken it in the most disastrous earnest ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... inability to grasp with a clear and uninvolved vision, permeates not only the triviality of a sit-round game but even the most important transactions ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... That was the essence of E science, that any requirement outside of his own making didn't exist. It had to be that way. That kind of mind could not tolerate barriers, but spent itself constantly in destroying them. Erect barriers of triviality, and it would waste its substance upon trivial matters. The only answer was to remove all possible barriers for the E, lest immersion in something trivial prevent that mind from seeking out a barrier to ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... rate, that a certain number of them may find their highest happiness in knowledge and wisdom rather than in amateur theatricals and fancy-dress balls. The human mind, after all, cannot find rest in triviality, and after so long a period of the most sordid and vulgar self-indulgence it is reasonable to hope that our aristocracy may experience ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... found among the earliest productions. There we see earnestness of purpose combined with heavenly aspiration and deep searching after truth. Subsequent to this we see the light vanishing and earnestness giving place to triviality of thought, to the ravings of superstition, to the inanities of ceremonialism and to the laws of social and religious bondage. All this progress downward is in direct ratio to our distance ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk stockings, he has nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an impression of almost perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a beau. He affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a china figure of insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded everything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not be helped. He warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defence of the house of Walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... consummation to be desired; but that is not the normal attitude of normal people. Such would still fain believe that the grave is not the end, but many of them are in a state of bewilderment and insecurity. On the one hand men have never grown reconciled to the heart-breaking triviality of death, never accepted this dispensation without a question, a hope, or, failing hope, a sense of rebellion; on the other, we have to recognise that we live in an age when multitudes have ceased to accept religious beliefs simply upon the authority of the Bible—when ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... about one another is, "Is she pretty?" and in their criticism of one another the personal appearance is the first and most, important subject discussed. A personal beauty ideal has little value to the character; in fact, it tends to exaggerate vanity and triviality and selfishness; it leads away from the higher aspects of reality. If you ask the majority of women which would they rather be, very beautiful or very intelligent, most will say without question (in their frank moments) ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... an important element in the world of New York. I very soon came to the conclusion that the professional, paid mediums were, in many cases, the worst kind of impostors, and, in all cases, so far as any intellectual evidence was concerned, of an absurd triviality. Even in the private circles, where no trace of fraud could be suspected, the good faith of all entering them being assured, I found sometimes such extraordinary credulity that the subject would have been offensive to ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... forming the pattern in the other, and vice versa. By this ingenious means there is absolutely no waste of stuff. You get, moreover, almost invariably a broad and dignified effect: the process does not lend itself to triviality. It was used by the Italians, and more especially by the Spaniards of the Renaissance, who borrowed the idea, of ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... exploit of the American strategist is much the most brilliant and memorable; his preparations and blunders were conducted on a vaster scale, and, Varus-like, scorning the triviality of a bloodless disgrace, he left sixteen thousand dead, wounded, and missing ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... temple of art is a lottery. The town that had welcomed her so wildly now went Elssler-mad. The gossamer floatings of this French danseuse possessed everyone. People courted trash and trumpery. Greatness gave way to triviality. This pitiful condition preyed upon her. The flame of genius never for a moment became less dim, but her eyes grew larger, brighter, more melancholy. Sometimes she would fall into a painful reverie and I knew too well the subject ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... she was not, and Mr. Alwynn and Charles departed together, Charles ruefully remembering that he had still to ask advice on a subject the triviality of which would ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... Greek original. And what do these other words mean, "Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live"? (John xi. 4, 25). It would be a triviality to think that Jesus meant to say that Lazarus had only become ill in order that Jesus might manifest His skill through him. And it would again be a triviality to think that Jesus meant to assert that faith in Him brings to life again one ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... and exalts to a pinnacle of undeserved pre-eminence the cigar, and still more the cigarette ... why should it be considered a mark of vulgarity, of plebeianism, to inhale tobacco-smoke through the stem of a briar, and the hall-mark of good breeding to finger a cigar or dally with that triviality and travesty of the adoration of My Lady Nicotine—a cigarette?" To these questions there can be but one answer: and the future, there can be little doubt, will emphasize that answer, and abolish the ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... large companies, and that is why he did not please everybody at St. Petersburg. You will easily see the reason why this incomparable man in such companies, where people talk of fashion, of clothes, of frippery, and all other sorts of triviality, neither gives pleasure to others nor finds pleasure himself." And the friendly Swede rises to the height of generalisation in the quaint maxim, Where an empty head shines, there a thoroughly cultivated man ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... effect of a good dinner, that dwindling away of pleasant emotions; perhaps it was the very triviality of the offense for which he was thus suddenly arraigned; at any rate, he lost his temper, and he was rather formidable when ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... of oppression that has not until now been confessed by those who suffer from it or who are participants, as mere witnesses, in its tyranny. It is the obsession of man by the flower. In the shape of the flower his own paltriness revisits him—his triviality, his sloth, his cheapness, his wholesale habitualness, his slatternly ostentation. These return to him and wreak upon him their dull revenges. What the tyranny really had grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in country lodgings, where the most ordinary things of design and decoration ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... rhyme frequent and never forced, while the entire poem should be marked by tasteful moderation, high finish, and completeness: for, however trivial the subject-matter may be, indeed, rather in proportion to its triviality, subordination to the rules of composition, and perfection of execution, are of the utmost importance." Among the enviable versifiers who can satisfy these requirements Praed and Locker both hold a high place. Praed, indeed, is the chief among writers of "vers de societe," for not only does ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... of spirit hardly to be looked for in such a primeval daughter of Eve. Her imagination and her reading had saved the girl's sweet modesty. A certain detachment made it possible for her to ignore the squalor of the actual and see it only as a surface triviality, to let her mind dwell in inner concepts of goodness and beauty while bestiality crossed the path ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... royale, a pu reussir a m'ennuyer', shows how little he had realised the fatiguing effect of theatrical splendour too persistently displayed. St. Evremond finds juster cause for his bored state of mind in the triviality of the subject-matter of operas, and his words are worth quoting at some length: 'La langueur ordinaire ou je tombe aux operas, vient de ce que je n'en ai jamais vu qui ne m'ait paru meprisable dans la disposition du sujet, et dans les vers. Or, c'est ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... the fact that in the shifting architectural life of New York the actual original scenes of the incidents had been demolished and built upon by new apartment-houses, or new railroad stations, or new factories seventy-five stories high, was an unobstructing triviality. Accounts of his manner of conducting himself in European courts to which he had supposedly been bidden, of his immense popularity in glittering circles, of his finely democratic bearing when confronted by emperors surrounded by their guilty splendors, ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... indeed, of these Romans d'aventures is surprising, and they very seldom display the flatness and triviality which mar by no means all but too many of their English imitations. Some of the faults which are part cause of these others they indeed have—the apparently irrational catalogues of birds and beasts, stuffs and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the human-hearted piety of Bunyan touches and ennobles, convinces, accuses the reader. Through no art beside the art of words can the kindness of a man's affections be expressed. In the cuts you shall find faithfully parodied the quaintness and the power, the triviality and the surprising freshness of the author's fancy; there you shall find him out-stripped in ready symbolism and the art of bringing things essentially invisible before the eyes: but to feel the contact of essential goodness, to be made in love ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 'Palaemon and Arcyte,' by Richard Edwardes, was acted at Court in 1566, and a second piece, called 'Palamon and Arsett' (also lost), was purchased by Henslowe in 1594. The non-Shakespearean residue of 'The Two Noble Kinsmen' is disfigured by indecency and triviality, and is ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... which grim circumstance stages it for a single playing—unless, indeed, the curtain rings down on a tragedy that brings the actors before their district judge for trial. And, as so frequently is the case, the beginning was casual to the point of triviality. ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... look of astonishment, remembered that he was unshaven, and that his clothes had been thrown on haphazard. It was a queer thought to intrude at such a time. But he was usually a scrupulously dressed man, and the triviality worried him. ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... clean of mind and frank of speech, their clearness as yet unblurred by the expediencies, compromise and experimental contacts of life, Neville was stabbed by a sharp pang of fear and hope for them. Fear lest on some fleeting impulse they might founder into the sentimental triviality of short-lived contacts, or into the tedium of bonds which must out-live desire; hope that, by some fortunate chance, they might each achieve, as she had achieved, some relation which should be both durable and to be endured. As to the third ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... art of Aachen. People who begin to collect have lost the first fury of creation. The change that came over plastic art in France towards the end of the twelfth century is reflected in the accomplished triviality of Chretien de Troyes. The eleventh century had produced the Chanson de Roland, a poem as grand and simple as a Romanesque church. Chretien de Troyes melted down the massive conceptions of his betters and twisted them into fine-spun conceits. ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... with an easy and conversational companion. That companion had been a part of his recent drama; it was the red-haired poet Gregory. They were walking like old friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about some triviality. But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... thought took hold of me with an overwhelming power—I saw the truth as I had never seen it before in my life. I saw how we live in society; and how social convention and triviality have us in such a grasp that it never even dawns upon us that the laws it dictates are not eternal and necessary! "You must be dignified, and calm, and commonplace," say social convention ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... island home has its history. The land is small, but the changes among the inhabitants, and the achievements of its heroes, have redeemed it from triviality, and made it among nations great and important. The deeds Englishmen have done, the afflictions they have suffered, the victories they have won, and the results that they have brought about, conspire to make ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... are sons of a King, and look forward to a royal inheritance, but in the meantime they have, as it were, to keep a little huckster's shop in a back alley. But if we adequately realised the promise of our inheritance, the meanness of our surroundings and the triviality of our occupations would not make us mean or trivial, but our souls would be 'like stars' and 'dwell apart' while we travelled 'on life's common way in cheerful godliness,' and did small duties in such a manner as to make ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... restricted by the accidents of circumstance and individual character; (2) as I have hinted, the Beach of Falesa has faults of construction, one of which is serious, if not vital, while The Isle of Voices, though beautifully composed, is tied down by the triviality of its subject. But The Bottle Imp is perfectly constructed: the last page ends the tale, and the tale is told with a light grace, sportive within restraint, that takes nothing from the seriousness of the subject. Some may think this extravagant ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... flirtation, his matchless ability at croquet, his assiduity over Bell's Life, the cleverness of his book on the Derby. No sensible or well-informed girl, she tells us, can talk for ten minutes to this creature without weariness and disgust at his ignorance, his narrowness, his triviality; no modestly-dressed or decently-mannered girl can win the slightest share of his attentions. Married, he is as frivolous as before marriage; he selects the toilette of the demi-monde as an agreeable topic of domestic conversation, he resents affection and proclaims home a bore, he grudges ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... accession was signalised by two noteworthy endeavours to put away wrong. We will turn first to that which seems the least immediately philanthropic, although the injustice which it remedied was trivial in appearance only, since in its everyday triviality it weighed most heavily on the most numerous class—that of the ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... a loud voice, "The brothers Saradine, I suppose. They both look innocent enough. It would be hard to say which is the good brother and which the bad." Then, realising the lady's presence, he turned the conversation with some triviality, and strolled out into the garden. But Father Brown still gazed steadily at the red crayon sketch; and Mrs. Anthony still gazed ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... fate of the soul; and literature is only redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us or the things on the retina of the eye or the enormous irrelevancy of encyclopaedias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... "I can imagine nothing except that I'm in a desperate position, and that if you don't help me, everything will come to grief, and I first of all. Excuse me for the triviality of the expression, but ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... earth. He would tell you he had the finest place in the world, and the finest pictures in the world, yet these things did not save him from unhappiness. He could not understand that happiness is attained through renunciation. He had never renounced anything, and so his life was a mere triviality. The clearness of her vision surprised her; she paused a moment and then continued. He must always be amused, he could not bear to be alone. Distraction, distraction, distraction was his one cry. She had to combat the spectre ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... full of archaisms, which he much affected (he gives, therefore, no quotations from post-Augustan writers). His style shows the defects of an age in which men had ceased to feel the full meaning of the words they used, and strove to hide the triviality of a subject under obscure phrases and florid expression. Yet, on the whole, he is a very interesting writer, and the last that can in any ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... their manner of application, vary with the sex, the age, the temperament, the occupation, and the other conditions, of the individual. Pedagogics as a science can only go over its general principles, and these can be named briefly. It we attempt to speak of details, we fall easily into triviality. So very important to the whole life of man is the proper care of his physical nature during the first stages of its development, that the science of Pedagogics must not omit to consider the different systems which different people, according to ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... supplies me with but one advice,—be patient; say little; do as little as possible; and endeavor to appear insensible to their insults. I would say to you, if you will excuse the triviality of the comparison, imitate those feeble insects who simulate death when they are touched. They are defenceless; and that is their ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... to be a trifle unsympathetic; in particular in its patronizing way of dwelling upon the thinness of the American social environment and the consequent provincialism of Hawthorne's books. The "American Note Books," in particular, seem to Mr. James a chronicle of small beer, and he marvels at the triviality of an existence which could reduce the diarist to recording an impression that "the aromatic odor of peat smoke in the sunny autumnal air is very pleasant." This peat-smoke entry has become proverbial, and is mentioned by nearly everyone who writes about Hawthorne. ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... charm and convincing atmosphere, Wild Wales did not please the critics. Those who noticed it (and there were many who did not) either questioned its genuineness, or found it crowded with triviality and self-glorification. It was full of the superfluous, the superfluous repeated, and above all it was too long (some 250,000 words). The Spectator notice was an exception; it did credit to the critical faculty of the man who wrote it. He declined "to boggle and wrangle over minor defects in ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... rending of the veil, do not touch on this incident at all. The whole representation, it is argued, lacks the sobriety which is characteristic of the authentic miracles of the Gospels and broadly separates them from the ecclesiastical miracles, about which there is generally an air of triviality ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... and it has turned out that I am a most ordinary official, a cardplayer, and have no partiality for ideas of any sort. I am a worthy representative of the rotten world from which you have run away because you were revolted with its triviality and emptiness. Recognise it and be just: don't be indignant with me, but with yourself, as it is your ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... himself for a fool for letting her go—a boy's trick. But then the whole affair did not desperately engage him. He sat in the comfortable chair, and lit a cigarette, shielding it with his hand so that she would not see it, recognize in its triviality his detachment. A wave of weariness swept over him; the night was like a blanket on the land. Minutes passed without her return; soon he would go in search of her; he would find her ... in the dark ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... little more uneasy than usual. In the beginning of dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from the mass of a magistrate's mind fell too noticeably. She wondered how a man like Mr. Casaubon would support such triviality. His manners, she thought, were very dignified; the set of his iron-gray hair and his deep eye-sockets made him resemble the portrait of Locke. He had the spare form and the pale complexion which became a student; as different as possible from the blooming ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... afresh in a vein of the extremest circumstantiality. With deliberate malice I loaded a prolix narrative with every triviality that a fairly retentive memory could rake out of the half-forgotten past. I cudgelled my brains for irrelevant incidents. I described with the minutest accuracy things that had not the faintest significance. I ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... things, when we remember that Puritanism, which means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... induce in him a sense of superior intellectual worth. The familiar was not binding upon him, for his thought was emancipated from routine and superficiality. Furthermore his intellectual courage and resolution did not permit him to indulge in triviality, doubt, or paradox. He sought his own with a faith that could not be denied. Even Heraclitus the Dark, who was also called "the Weeping Philosopher," because he found at the very heart of nature that transiency which the philosophical mind seeks to escape, felt himself to be exalted as well as isolated ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... whistling proceeds, appalling to the inexperienced. This, it appears, is the language of the dead; its purport is taken down progressively by one of the experts, writing, I was told, 'as fast as a telegraph operator'; and the communications are at last made public. They are of the baldest triviality; a schooner is, perhaps, announced, some idle gossip reported of a neighbour, or if the spirit shall have been called to consultation on a case of sickness, a remedy may be suggested. One of these, immersion in scalding water, not long ago proved fatal to the patient. The whole business is very ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who deeply discredit it. Offenses against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that the demand must be supplied, can no more be ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... sacred Books—is pre-eminently the history of a race singled out by an overruling Power for the education of conscience. To this bear witness the laws of the Two Tables, and most of those other laws, purely ceremonial, whose apparent triviality in some particulars is at any rate a mode of symbolizing what was the main object of the Lawgiver—keeping the heart and conscience pure. To this bear witness the indignant denunciations of their prophets, as well ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... petty nor wasted on unworthy or vulgar design. The just relation of scale between the building and all its parts was admirably maintained; the ornament was distributed with rare judgment, and the vigor of its design saved it from all appearance of triviality. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... surpasses anything of which Dryden was capable. The flaws in his style are mainly due to carelessness in the rimes and some questionable coining of words. He also occasionally lapses into the vulgarity and triviality which marred certain ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... was it to the moon and all those shining swarms of stars, and that far star-dust in the Milky Way, whether he, Jerome Edwards, had shoes to close or not? Whether he and his mother starved or not, they would shine just the same. The triviality—even ludicrousness—of the sorrow of man, as compared with eternal things, was over the boy. He was maddened at the sting and despite of his own littleness in the face of that greatness. Suddenly a wild impulse of rebellion that was almost blasphemy seized him. He ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and smiles a very little—almost within himself: "Tiens, I'll tell you; I noticed—it isn't very important, this," he insists, as though suddenly embarrassed by the triviality of this parenthesis—"but I noticed (you notice it in a glance when you're noticing something else) that it was cleaner in our house than ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... but tossed it carelessly into the well of the desk, and laughed again. The sheer folly of the thing offended him, and he was ashamed of his own eager speculation, as one who pores over the high-sounding announcements in the agony column of the daily paper, and finds nothing but advertisement and triviality. He walked to the window, and stared out at the languid morning life of his quarter; the maids in slatternly print-dresses washing door-steps, the fishmonger and the butcher on their rounds, and the tradesmen standing ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... witch-wood in the gale. All the vigour of the morning seemed to have gone out of his blood; he felt lonely and apprehensive and puzzled. He wished he had Dickson beside him, for that little man's cheerful voice and complacent triviality would be a comfort.... Also, he was abominably cold. He put on his waterproof, and turned his attention to the fire. It needed re-kindling, and he hunted in his pockets for paper, finding only the slim volume ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... slavery." Nor is the case much better, if instead of waiting for the actual application of coercion, I act in obedience to authority from the hope and fear of the State's rewards and punishments. For virtue has ceased, and I am acting from self-interest. It is a triviality to distinguish, as Whig thinkers do, between matters of conscience (in which the State should not meddle) and my conduct in the civil concerns of daily life (which the State should regulate). What sort of moralist can he be, who makes no conscience of what he ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... into a long dissertation on the primal sin; the gist of which was that though the woman had never been warned not to eat of the Forbidden Fruit, she had to bear the brunt of the punishment. Then—though one is almost ashamed to chronicle such a triviality—he waxed very wroth because the serpent was spoken of as being cursed above all "cattle." Who ever heard of snakes being called cattle? He was condemned to go on his belly. How did he go before? Did he go on his back or "'op" along on the tip of his tail? These ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... Paris, time-honoured Historian of Astronomy Ancient and Modern. Poor Bailly, how thy serenely beautiful Philosophising, with its soft moonshiny clearness and thinness, ends in foul thick confusion—of Presidency, Mayorship, diplomatic Officiality, rabid Triviality, and the throat of everlasting Darkness! Far was it to descend from the heavenly Galaxy to the Drapeau Rouge: beside that fatal dung-heap, on that last hell-day, thou must 'tremble,' though only with cold, 'de froid.' Speculation is not practice: ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... now to admit American ships, or to import many articles from the United States, and given special privileges in the West Indies, had more than doubled their imports from the mother country; the amount rising from L379,411 to L829,088. These sums are not to be regarded in their own triviality, but as harbingers of a development, which it was hoped would fill the void in the British imperial system caused by the loss of the former colonies. The West Indies showed a more gradual increase, ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... lives would be, and he hummed beautiful music as he went along the roads, Schumann's Lotus Flower and The Moonlight. Then he recalled the beautiful duet, Siegmund's and Sieglinde's May Time, and turning from sublimity suddenly into triviality he chanted the somewhat common but expressive duet in Mireille, and the superficiality of its emotion pleased him at the moment and he hummed it until he arrived ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... happily delivered of a child. God did us the grace to give us a son. He bore, as I had, the name of Vidame of Chartres. I do not know why people have the fancy for these odd names, but they seduce in all nations, and they who feel the triviality of them, imitate them. It is true that the titles of Count and Marquis have fallen into the dust because of the quantity of people without wealth, and even without land, who usurp them; and that they ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... trio. Trip faleti. Trip vojagxo—eto. Tripe tripo. Triple triobla. Tripod tripiedo. Trisyllable trisilabo. Trite komuna, eluzita. Triturate pisti. Triumph triumfi. Triumphal triumfa. Trivial triviala. Triviality trivialajxo. Trombone trombone. Troop (people) bando, amaso. Trooper rajdistarano. Trophy venksigno. Tropics tropiko. Tropical tropika. Trot troti. Trot troto—ado. Trouble konfuzi, cxagreni. Troublesome malfacila. Trough trogo. Trousers ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Faculties and teachers of our Universities to see the subdivision of labor carried out as never before. The movement is irresistible; it brings with it exactness, exhaustive knowledge, a narrow but complete self-satisfaction, with such accompanying faults as pedantry, triviality, and the kind of partial blindness which belong to intellectual myopia. The specialist is idealized almost into sublimity in Browning's "Burial of the Grammarian." We never need fear that he will undervalue himself. To be ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... investigated Mrs. Piper had to admit that her case was full of mystery. But if one reads the reports through from beginning to end one cannot help feeling that her spirit messages are filled with nonsense, at least of triviality. Here is a specimen—and a fair specimen, too—of the kind of communication Pelham gave. He wrote out the message. It referred to a certain famous man known in the reports as Mr. Marte. Pelham is reported to have written by Mrs. ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... write literary letters, but they do want to tell the folks at home something about their life and the great things of which they are a part. But the great things are too great for them. They cannot put them into words. And they ought not to try, for the secret of letter-writing is intimate triviality. Bill could not have described the retreat from Mons; but he could have told, as he told me, about the blister he got on his heel, how he hungered for a smoke, how he marched and marched until he fell asleep marching, how he lost his pal at Le Cateau, and how his boot sole dropped off at ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... sense; less and less for truth and good, for God and eternity. Absorbed in the materialistic game, or frittered and jaded in frivolous diversions, all eternal aims go by default. In what precious age was maddening rivalry so universal, giggling laughter so pestilent an epidemic, triviality at such a premium and sublimity at such a discount? But the things to which men really devote themselves dilate to fill the whole field of their vision. They soon come to disbelieve that for which they take no thought and make no sacrifice or investment. The average men of our time, as ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... before we could get into smooth water. The fact soon faced us that we were in the remorseless grip of a current that set right over that reef, and against its steady stream all our efforts were the merest triviality. Still, we hung on, struggling desperately to keep what we had earned, until so close to the roaring, foaming line of broken water, that one wave breaking farther out than the rest very nearly swamped us all. One blow of an axe, one twirl of the steer-oars, ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... the Yellow Editors turn to popular philosophy or cheap theology for the solace of their public. To men and women excited by the details of the last murder they discourse of the existence of God in short, crisp sentences,—and I know not which is worse, the triviality of the discourse or its inappositeness. They preface one of their most impassioned exhortations with the words: "If you read this, you will probably think you have wasted time." Though this might with propriety stand ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... hospitable feeling, that it kindled animation in the most cheerless or torpid of invalids. I cannot imagine that any memorabilia occurred during the visit; but I will use the time that would else be lost upon the settling of that point, in putting down any triviality that occurs to my recollection. Both Lamb and myself had a furious love for nonsense, headlong nonsense. Excepting Professor Wilson, I have known nobody who had the same passion to the same extent. And things of that nature better illustrate the realities ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... don't you see it is the triviality of the offence which makes the penance necessary. Had he knocked me over the head with a pickaxe, or burned the house down, I should have had a right to be angry. But I was angry because he wanted a horse on Sunday;— and therefore ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... I, "while you were away in London, he ran young Richards through the lungs over some triviality, and they say ...
— The Honourable Mr. Tawnish • Jeffery Farnol
... intent was, who can be so bold as to say? What part of his purpose was, we know. He would excoriate a false and flippant chivalry. Contemporaneous chivalry he knew well; for he had been a common soldier, wounded and distressed. He had seen what a poor triviality that once noble thing had grown to be. Institutions become effete. Age is apt to sap the strength of movements as of men. Feudalism and the Crusades had commissioned the knight-errant; and now, when law began ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... enough to arouse the most violent scenes. Hitherto they had been restrained by the presence of others, but now it was the same whether they were alone or not. Very soon, as far as brutality of expression or the triviality of the question was concerned, he was as bad or ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... after he had turned the key in his own door to find the light still blazing, betraying the fact of Helen's wakeful presence. He dallied over the triviality of ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... similitudes may serve to remind us how much of the interest of Old London centred round its port. Here were to be heard those tales of far-sought adventure and peril which gave even to the boisterous life of Elizabethan London an air of triviality and security. Hereby came in "the variety of fashions and foreign stuffs," which Fynes Moryson, writing in Milton's childhood, compares to the stars of heaven and the sands of the sea for number. All sorts of characters, nationalities, and costumes were daily to be seen in Paul's Walk, adjoining ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... intellectually; it is studious, empirical, inventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite openness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has gained a sense of possible depths in all directions. Under these circumstances, some triviality and great confusion in its positive achievements are not unpromising things, nor even unamiable. These are the Wanderjahre of faith; it looks smilingly at every new face, which might perhaps be that of a predestined friend; it chases after ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... but in the life of the winds and rains. Such churches as this, anything but swept and garnished, correspond in a way to Browning's poetry; there is the high solemnity brought home to you, not disturbed, by the very triviality of the details; mysteries and wonders overarching the real living life of ex-votos and pictures of runaway horses and houses on fire; the life worn like the porphyry discs of the pavement, precious bits trodden into ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... smile was somewhat wistful. "Nothing but silly imaginings." She laughed and when she spoke again her voice was as light as if her world held only triviality and laughter. "Yet there be important things to decide. What shall I wear ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... because she was such a good dancer, and Jim kept wanting to cut in to get an extra dance with her himself. Somehow even the sting of the visiting girl's laugh and of Raymond's defection seemed to have subsided into triviality. And when Raymond came up to ask for a dance she experienced a new and pleasurable thrill in telling him she was already engaged. That thrill disturbed her a little. Was it possible that she was vindictive, wicked? But when she saw Jim approaching while Raymond was receiving his conge, she ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... she outwitted held Elizabeth to be little more than a frivolous woman, or that Philip of Spain wondered how "a wanton" could hold in check the policy of the Escurial. But the Elizabeth whom they saw was far from being all of Elizabeth. Wilfulness and triviality played over the surface of a nature hard as steel, a temper purely intellectual, the very type of reason untouched by imagination or passion. Luxurious and pleasure-loving as she seemed, the young Queen lived simply and frugally, and she worked hard. Her ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... there, and afterwards shoot up vigorously, and grow to prodigious bulk, cultivated by custom. And it is a very dangerous mistake to excuse these vile inclinations upon the tenderness of their age, and the triviality of the subject: first, it is nature that speaks, whose declaration is then more sincere, and inward thoughts more undisguised, as it is more weak and young; secondly, the deformity of cozenage does not consist nor depend ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... him! There is not left any vestige of despair, or misanthropy, or cunning, or exclusiveness, or the ignominy of a nativity or color, or delusion of hell or the necessity of hell—and no man thenceforward shall be degraded for ignorance or weakness or sin. The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into anything that was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer—he is individual—he is complete in himself—the others are as good as he, only he sees it, and they do not. He is not one of the chorus—he does not stop for ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... it was repressed on principle,—a man of high character and probity, greatly esteemed by his associates. He endeavored to bring up his children in sound religious principles, and to leave no room in their lives for triviality. One of the two weekly half-holidays was required for the catechism, and the only relaxation from the three church services on Sunday was the reading of "Pilgrim's Progress." This cold and severe discipline at home would have been intolerable but for the ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... twilight in a way which seemed to give the approaching evening a specially wonderful attractiveness for me. Even the walls of the adjoining house seemed to grow beautiful. Is this uplifting of the cover of triviality from the everyday world, I wondered, due to some magic in ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore |
