"Unimportance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and minute criticism. Yet if I passed them over without mention it would probably be assumed that they made against my theory, or at least that I had some more pertinent reason for not considering them than their relative unimportance. In fact, however, they help to buttress my argument, and so at the risk of being tedious I shall deal with them, though as briefly as possible. Coleridge doubted whether Shakespeare had had anything to do with the ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... the Zambal people and their present comparative unimportance goes to show that they were the most indolent and backward of the Malayan peoples. While they have never given the governing powers much trouble, yet they have not kept pace with the agricultural and commercial progress of the other people, and their territory has been so steadily ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... possessions losing their value, and ordinary occupations appearing insignificant, their importance is realised as never before. If man does not live for ever, his character and actions seem of comparative unimportance. If he does live for ever, it is rational for him to look at each action in the light of that larger life which he inherits. If something like class distinctions are eternal, it is an inducement so to use your distinctive privileges here in a worthy manner, that ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... and adventurous and hopeful as they had never done before. How great was this purpose I had relinquished, this bold and subtle remaking of the English will! I had doubted so many things, and now suddenly I doubted my unimportance, doubted my right to this suicidal abandonment. Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted and favoured, who had turned aside by the way? Had I not, after all, stood for far more than I had thought; was I not filching from that dear great city of my birth and life, some vitally ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... of war, the individual is lost in a body of men, out of which he emerges only relatively in sharp-shooting, in the charge, in single contests, and in the retreat. Because of this incorporation of the individual in the one great whole, and because of the resulting unimportance of personal bravery, modern Gymnastics can never be the same as it was in ancient times, even putting out of view the fact that the subjectiveness of the modern spirit is too great to allow it to devote so much attention ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... I am to fill it!" Claude thought again. And he was conscious of unimportance. He even felt as if he had never composed any music, as if he knew nothing about composition, had no talent at all. It seemed to him incredible that, because of him, of what he had done, great sums of money were being spent, small armies of people ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... in the curious arts of the theatre, listened wide-eyed, spellbound, until flicked by the swishing skirts of fictitious emotion into genuine, yet covert, excitement. As the reading progressed Henrietta Frayling's presence increasingly sank into unimportance. More and more did the poem assume a personal character, of which, if the reader were hero, she—Damaris—became heroine. Marshall Wace seemed to read not to, but definitely at her; so that during more than one ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... girls were not valued so highly as boys, and were made to feel their unimportance in many ways that would be highly displeasing to little sisters of to-day. Girls were taught to wait upon their brothers and to treat them with respect. It was impressed upon them that the duty of a girl was to be useful and modest and quiet, and that her chief pleasure should lie in making home ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips
... another with determined haste. At one moment she vowed the subject should never be thought of again; the next, she promised herself that she would put the whole matter before Gaston as soon as he returned, and, by so doing, prove the unimportance of the thing. But whichever way she looked at it, she hourly grew to dread Gaston's return. Life was never going to be the same. Something ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... has still a place in my life, and existence without it would be an infinitely more dreary affair than it is. But I admit that I now call upon the Lord less often and less imperatively than I did before the stern years taught me my unimportance in the great scheme ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... quite a number of heads. These were never separated, and exact individual pedigrees were not included in the plan. This mixture seemed to have the advantage of keeping up an average value of the larger number of the characters, which either from their nature or from their apparent unimportance had necessarily ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to explain; whether I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance in which I have lived, both from the literary and ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the others contributed from a distance. Arnim edited the Einsiedler; Goerres was teaching in the university. There were, of course, many other adherents of the school, working individually at different times and places, scattered indeed all over Germany, and of various degrees of importance or unimportance, of whom I need mention only Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, the popular novelist and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... had been suddenly relegated to a position of utter unimportance. He was showing her that, as far as he was concerned, she was a person of not the slightest consequence, treating her like an inquisitive child. Their recent conversation, during which his mantle of reserve ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... simplest form of mental training is useful, and will help to develop your Will and Concentration. It is akin to the process of developing a physical muscle by some simple exercise, and in both cases one loses sight of the unimportance of the exercise itself, in view of the end to ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... family squabble among that most family-squabblesome of peoples, the Greeks.—In most of which I am only quoting Mahaffy; who, whether intentionally or not, deals with Greek history in such a way as to show the utter unimportance, irrelevance, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Bim-bi palaver," said Sanders; "the last time that happened, if I remember rightly, I had to burn crops on the right bank of the river for twenty miles to bring the Isisi to a sense of their unimportance." ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... in his new horde of relations-in-law was vastly less than nothing. But Mrs. Thropp gave him their names, their ages, habits, diseases, vices, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies. She recounted doings and sayings of infinite unimportance ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... religious revival, but the diplomats had least reason to complain, since they were more sought for there than they would ever be elsewhere. For young men Washington was in one way paradise, since they were few, and greatly in demand. After watching the abject unimportance of the young diplomat in London society, Adams found himself a young duke in Washington. He had ten years of youth to make up, and a ravenous appetite. Washington was the easiest society he had ever seen, and even the Bostonian became simple, good-natured, almost ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... cases, as it is but rarely that so large a number of constituents is absent, and it is much more frequent to find the deficiency restricted to one or two substances. They are illustrations of barrenness dependent on different circumstances. The first shows the unimportance of the organic matters of the soil, which are here unusually abundant, without in any way counteracting the infertility dependent on the absence of the other constituents. The second is that of a nearly pure sand; and the ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... details of that luncheon all three children thereafter declined to speak. To Genevieve Maud the only point worthy of mention was that she had what the others had. This compromise effected, the manner of eating it was to her a detail of indescribable unimportance. What were knives, forks, spoons, or their lack, to Genevieve Maud? The tin plate was merely a gratifying novelty, and that she had been in close communion with rice pudding was eloquently testified by the samples of that delicacy which clung affectionately to her features ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... his words, that have been perverted by materialistic imaginations so far from their original meaning,—"This is my body which is given for you." But the date of the origin of false opinions is a matter of comparative unimportance.] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... at least be dignified by a notice in the papers. The shrinkage to my self-importance added fire to my ambition. More carefully but resolutely I threaded my way up Cortlandt Street, and at every step my sense of my unimportance increased. Even my hotel seemed to be a hotel of no importance. Mr. Pound had stayed there in 1876, and his account of its magnitude and luxury had led me to believe that I could find it merely by asking. Three men met my simple inquiry with shakes of the ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... the wakes; but now, with the least inflection in the world, he put the wakes at its proper level in the scheme of things as a local unimportance! She adored him for this; she was athirst for sympathy in the task ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... practically what Michelet did, and though the garrulous old gossip drivelled endlessly about matters of supreme unimportance and ecstasized in his mild way over trivial anecdotes which he expanded beyond all proportion, and though his sentimentality and chauvinism sometimes discredited his quite plausible conjectures, he was nevertheless the ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... the Russian invaders, which lasted, with varying success, for many years. During a considerable part of the time Anadyrsk was garrisoned by a force of six hundred men and a battery of artillery; but after the discovery and settlement of Kamchatka it sank into comparative unimportance, the troops were mostly withdrawn, and it was finally captured by the Chukchis and burned. During the war which resulted in the destruction of Anadyrsk, two native tribes, Chuances and Yukagirs, who had taken sides with the Russians, were almost annihilated by the ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... pay visiphone. And again there were different levels of awareness in his mind—one consciously and defensively cynical, and one frightened at the revelation of his unimportance, and the third finding the others an ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... of a moonless clear night, on the Heavens glittering with stars, and know that each fixed star of all the myriads is a Sun, and each probably possessing its retinue of worlds, all peopled with living beings, we sensibly feel our own unimportance in the scale of Creation, and at once reflect that much of what has in different ages been religious faith, could never have been believed, if the nature, size, and distance of those Suns, and of our own Sun, Moon, and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... of supreme unimportance. To-night he was to face Rupert, to state, once and for all, that he had killed Carfax, to submit Margaret to a terrible test . . . even that of no importance. All life was insignificant beside something that was about to happen; before the ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... one of the oldest churches in Europe. Long before the conquest of England by the Normans, before the time of Wallace and Bruce in Scotland, before England had planted its foot in Ireland, the Vaudois Church existed. Their remoteness, their poverty, and their comparative unimportance as a people, for a long time protected them from interference; and for centuries they remained unnoticed by Rome. But as the Western Church extended its power, it became insatiable for uniformity. It would not tolerate the independence which characterized ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... your very modern poets, they are even worse than the Victorians. Masefield, for instance, is jejuneness enthroned. How can you expect the bulk of sane mankind to read poetry, when they repeatedly encounter this vacuity, this unimportance of thought and emotion, presented with all the pomp and circumstance ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... meeting and consulting Senators, Congressmen, politicians, financiers, and labor men. I consulted all who wished to see me; and if I wished to see any one, I sent for him; and where the consultation took place was a matter of supreme unimportance. I consulted every man with the sincere hope that I could profit by and follow his advice; I consulted every member of Congress who wished to be consulted, hoping to be able to come to an agreement of action with him; and I always finally acted as my conscience ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... I bade the Australian lad, with the very Australian estimate of the unimportance of some things sacred to English minds, the Australian ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... standards of importance and unimportance, of the admirable and the despicable, the noble and the base, are determined by approvals and disapprovals that have become socially habitual. When we speak of a country being imperialistic or materialistic, we mean that most individuals in it, or at least ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman |
