"Insignificance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... later, one morning when a gentleman whose portrait he was painting canceled his appointment, Renovales remembered his promise and went to the Museo del Prado, feeling, as he entered, the same sensation of insignificance and homesickness that a man suffers on returning to the university where he has ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... town, were brought and distributed among them. The most disaffected were purchased with the largest presents. Even Malatchee himself seemed fully contented with his share, and the savages in general perceiving the poverty and insignificance of the family of Bosomworth, and their total inability to supply their wants, determined to break off all connection with them ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... Intellectual over the Material. But as nations, resembling individuals, do not become illustrious from their mere physical proportions; as in both, renown has its moral sources; so, in examining the causes which conduced to the eminence of Greece, we cease to wonder at the insignificance of its territories or the splendour of its fame. Even in geographical circumstance Nature had endowed the country of the Hellenes with gifts which amply atoned the narrow girth of its confines. The most southern part of the continent of Europe, it ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... listened to see if he could understand what they said. He had studied French himself for a year or two, and could say a great many things. In fact, he had been accustomed to consider himself quite a good French scholar. But he now found that all his acquisitions dwindled into utter insignificance, when compared with the power over the language possessed by those ...
— Rollo in Paris • Jacob Abbott
... first voyage of Columbus, which brought together two streams of human life that had been disjoined since the glacial period. But as an achievement in ocean navigation that voyage of Columbus sinks into insignificance beside it.... When we consider the frailness of the ships, the immeasurable extent of the unknown, the mutinies that were prevented or quelled, and the hardships that were endured, we can have no hesitation in speaking of Magellan as the ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... never rest, and the hurricane only slumbers to bring forth the worse dangers of the fog-bank and the iceberg. Fierce as has been during the four centuries the fight for the fisheries by European rivals, their petty racial quarrels sink into insignificance before the general struggle for the harvest. The Atlantic roar hides all minor pipings. The breed of fisher-folk from these deep-sea voyagings consist of the toughest specimens of human endurance. All other dangers which ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... remained in the hands of the Scotch, and King Edward prepared to lay siege to this. Save for the band of Wallace there was no longer any open resistance in the field. A few holds like those of Archie Forbes still remained in the hands of their owners, their insignificance, or the time which would be wasted in subduing them, having protected them from siege. None of the nobles now ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... freedom of production and adheres to the real. In the artist is a double tendency, toward the perfection of the type and toward the representation of natural reality. He should not fall into the abstraction of the type, nor into the insignificance of empirical reality. Schleiermacher feels all the difficulty of such a problem as whether there be one or several ideals of the human figure. This problem may be transferred to the sphere of art, and we may ask whether the poet is to represent only the ideal, or whether he should also deal with ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... faded into insignificance compared with the first sight of the genuine Lunatics, or men in the moon, "four feet high, covered, except in the face, with short, glossy, copper-colored hair," and "with wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs from the top of their shoulders to the calves ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... not seem a very important thing. One should not, in theory, be able to dominate from its height, nor to feel the world small below one, nor to hold a whole countryside in one's hand—yet one does. The mountains from their heights reveal to us two truths. They suddenly make us feel our insignificance, and at the same time they free the immortal Mind, and let it feel its greatness, and they release it from the earth. But I say again, in theory, when one considers the exact relation of their height to the distances ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... been the dirigibles: their second was a blow which paled the other into insignificance. ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... anything half so gorgeous, and though she did not know yet whether she liked or disliked the bewildering decorations of mermaids and sea animals and flowers, she was struck by their magnificent audacity into a sense of her own insignificance. Before she could dare to walk here as by right, or seat herself in one of those great gilded and brocaded chairs, she must buy clothes which suited Monte Carlo as all this florid splendour of ornamentation ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... di Tenda wonderful, and the way down to Bellagio over the mountains still more thrilling; but here, they were dwarfed into utter insignificance. I could have imagined nothing like this feat of engineering, nothing so wild, so majestic as the ever-changing views from ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... clear, belongs ultimately to those who are slowly building up sounder traditions into the structure of life. The "problem of sexual abstinence" will more and more sink into insignificance. There remain the great solid fact of love, the great solid fact of chastity. Those are eternal. Between them there is nothing but harmony. The development of one involves the development of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... could not amend; they might indeed reject it; but to reject it was to shake the foundations of public credit and to leave the kingdom defenceless. Thus one branch of the legislature was systematically put under duress by the other, and seemed likely to be reduced to utter insignificance. It was better that the government should be once pinched for money than that the House of Peers should cease to be part of the Constitution. So strong was this feeling that the Bill was carried only by sixty-five to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... differing in construction from that of ours, with billions of miles of interstellar space intervening between each; yet so vast are the dimensions of the celestial sphere that those distances when measured upon it sink into utter insignificance. As the receding depths of space are penetrated by powerful telescopes, they are found to be pervaded with stars and starry archipelagoes, distributed in profusion over the circular immensity and extending away into ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... sank into insignificance beside a more definite sound—the crackle of dry leaves and the snapping of twigs beneath a heavier footfall than that of any marauding Tom, and through a clearing in the woods slouched the figure of a ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... willing to suffer even unto death. The mercy that could stoop to ransom such a transgressor, claimed an affection before which poor Derry's deep love for his earthly darling paled, as the things of time fade into insignificance ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... America and the conquest of Grenada—which owed their origin to the enterprise of the two famous personages whose ashes were inclosed in the heavy leaden cases at my feet; and I never felt more profoundly the insignificance of earthly renown, or the vanity of individual glory. "The paths of glory lead but to the grave." Coming from the tomb, we were next shown a sceptre and crown which had been used by the illustrious dead. Also a sword which Ferdinand himself wore in his battles ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... to live in San Francisco. A sense of a loss of independence—of a change of circumstances that left him no longer his own master—began to perplex him, in the midst of his brightest projects. Certain other relations with other members of his family, which had lapsed by absence and his insignificance, must now be taken up anew. He must do something for his sister Jane, for his brother William, for his wife's poor connections. It would be unfair to him to say that he contemplated those things with any other instinct than that of generosity; yet he ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... Unimportance. — N. unimportance, insignificance, nothingness, immateriality. triviality, levity, frivolity; paltriness &c. Adj.; poverty; smallness &c. 32; vanity &c. (uselessness) 645; matter of indifference &c. 866; no object. nothing, nothing to signify,, nothing worth speaking of, nothing particular, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... responsibility had made a man of him. His father would have preferred that he should have returned with him to England, but Harold finally decided upon remaining. In war men's passions become heated, the original cause of quarrel sinks into comparative insignificance, and the desire for victory, the determination to resist, and a feeling of something like individual hatred for the enemy become predominant motives of ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... Lesbia had felt in the advent of a stranger dwindled to nothing after Mr. Hammond's frank avowal of his insignificance. At the very beginning of her career, with the world waiting to be conquered by her, a high-born beauty could not be expected to feel any interest in nobodies. Lesbia shook hands with her brother, honoured the stranger with a stately bend of her beautiful throat, and then ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... dice of God are always loaded." Doubtless we must always pay for greatness by isolation, or some more bitter toll. And for our insignificance, in turn, come the Bobbies as reward. It behooves those of us, then, who are insignificant, to appreciate our blessing, to cherish our penguins, the more since we, when "the world is too much with us," when the tyranny of economic conditions oppresses ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... four and a half. He read it through once and then read it through again. It contained a great many figures—figures running into the millions, whose effect was to make twenty-five dollars a week shrink into insignificance. On the whole, it was decidedly depressing reading—the more so because he ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... combined refusal to repay. The Exchequer was empowered to retain grants due for various purposes in Ireland and to recoup itself in proportion to the defalcation in any county. It should be added that individual failures have been rare to the point of insignificance, and that no combined refusal has been attempted, or advocated, even ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... had fully recovered the use of his eyes, was their home, not a thousand feet away. George brushed his way out, and he stood there, not knowing whether to run or to shout or to cry. Every emotion appealed to the boys for mastery. All previous experiences during the past year paled into insignificance in comparison with the hour just ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... seven day courtship, in which the discrepancy in ages vanished into insignificance before the ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... couldn't believe you'd slipped your cable for good an' there she was, a-waitin' an' a-waitin' for her king to come back. Gib, I'm free to tell you that piracy, barratry, murder an' homicide pales into insignificance compared with what you went an' done, for you broke an innercent an' trustin' heart an' hell's too good for a man that'll pull ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... assurances, another member of the family appeared at the door, little Geoff, in a little black dress, which showed his paleness, his meagre, small person, insignificance, and sickliness more than ever. He had been there, it would seem, looking on while his uncle spoke. At this moment he came down deliberately, one step at a time, till his head was on a level with the carriage window. "It is quite true," he said. "Mother's in her own room. She's ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... onto the ground, were as fine a body of youths as one could easily encounter in the course of a long day's march. The picture of health and physique, they seemed almost like some of those heroes of old beside whom poor everyday man was wont to shrink into insignificance. Among the blues towered Jim, among the reds Charlie, two by no means the ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... some respects too wide and in others too narrow, are inquiries which, though important in themselves, need hardly detain us. The question in comparison with which all matters of detail sink into insignificance is not what are the limitations which the Constitution imposes on the competence of the Irish Parliament, but what is the efficacity of the means provided by the Constitution for compelling the Irish Parliament to respect these limitations? This is the one ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... noticed Natalie's withdrawal from Graham and himself. When she was around he was his old punctilious self, gravely kind, more than ever considerate. Beside his failure to her, her own failure to him faded into insignificance. She was as she was, and through no fault of hers. But he was what he had ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... helped Mrs. Bal out of the blue car (also big, in proportion to the size of the owner and his fortune) was Morgan P. Bennett of New York, the Tin Trust millionaire. Somerled's puny horde of millions dwindle into humble insignificance beside Morgan Bennett's pile. If Somerled has made two millions out of his mines and successful speculations, and a few extra thousands out of his pictures, M. P. Bennett has made twenty millions out of tin—and unlimited cheek. He is so big that his pet name in Wall Street ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the ages confronted her. Her own insignificance, her humbleness, accentuated and betrayed her. Who would listen? How dared she speak! Who would ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... your account of this unfortunate being, and his forlorn piece of self-history, with that smile of half-interest which the annals of insignificance excite, till I came to where he says, "I was bound apprentice to Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathematics," etc.; when I started as one does on the recognition of an old acquaintance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... and watched, I thought, as every one must surely think, with strange paradoxical feelings, of one's own utter insignificance in creation, mingled with the delightful consciousness of our individual importance in the eyes of the Maker and Father of all. An atom among worlds, as one feels, sitting there at such an hour and in such a spot, still we remember with love and pride, ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... and the desire to provide for a respectable burial, we can see another motive which brought the weak and lowly together in these associations. They were oppressed by the sense of their own insignificance in society, and by the pitifully small part which they played in the affairs of the world. But if they could establish a society of their own, with concerns peculiar to itself which they would administer, and if they could create positions ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... fiery-faced quintessence of all that is abominable!—thou—thou-" here standing upon tiptoe, seizing her by the throat, and placing my mouth close to her ear, I was preparing to launch forth a new and more decided epithet of opprobrium, which should not fail, if ejaculated, to convince her of her insignificance, when to my extreme horror and astonishment I discovered that I had ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... that has prevented a revolution on this same subject long ago. One hundred thousand such fire-eaters as Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the land, could raise a rumpus which would cause the late unpleasantness to pale into insignificance. Armed and equipped, what a sight would be presented by an army of strong-minded women! There would be no considering the question of whether the cavalry should ride side-saddle, or a la clothes-pin. Such detail would be of too small importance to receive ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... feeding-time would be a paradise of tranquillity and repose. The rattle and rumble of carts and carriages, which drive the professors and possessors of milder music to the side-streets and suburbs, sink into insignificance when these cataracts of uproar begin to peal forth; and their owners would have no occasion to seek an appropriate spot for their volcanic eruptions, were it not that the police, watchful against accident, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... arm stretched out. It was a large stout arm, and the possessor was large and stout, with pale golden hair and many sparkling jewels. Her glance roamed lazily from place to place. It rested for an instant on Peter, and then moved on, and Peter felt the comment upon his own insignificance. ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... unmarked with insolence. He knew what was due to the station which he filled, and he exacted the respect to which it was entitled. He crushed assumption and forward impudence by a look, and brought them down to the level of their own insignificance. I recollect an instance of this on one occasion, when I attended him as counsel on a summons. The Attorney on the opposite side was a Mr. Tomlinson, a man then in extensive practice, but forward, assuming, and self-sufficient. He made some observation which offended the learned ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... Romana, with a small body of cavalry, left Toabado, crossed the Minho, descended into the valley of the Tamega, and took refuge close to the Portuguese frontier line. Here he was, for a time, safe from the pursuit of the French, the insignificance of his force being his best protection. Soult lost no time. As soon as the English army had left, Corunna opened its gates to him, as did Ferrol, although neither of these towns could have been taken without a siege, and Soult must have been delayed until ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... decidedly belonged to that class of men whom that witty writer, Balzac, so delightfully calls les hommes predestines in his Physiologie du Mariage. Without doubt, he was a very good-looking man, but he bore that stamp of insignificance which so often conceals coarseness and vulgarity, and was one of those men who, in the long run, become unendurable to a woman of refined tastes. He had a good private income, but his wife understood ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... as we know, far less brilliant and less extravagant than those supplied by popular imagination. It would be a mistake, however, to neglect or despise them on account of their tedious monotony and the insignificance of the characters who appear on the stage. It was by dint of fighting her neighbours again and again, without a single day's respite, that Rome succeeded in forging the weapons with which she was to conquer the world; and any one who, repelled by their ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... toward the railway, imagining that her large business would be a sufficient compulsory influence; but now Hawkeye was frightened; and before Col. Sellers knew what he was about, Hawkeye, in a panic, had rushed to the front and subscribed such a sum that Napoleon's attractions suddenly sank into insignificance and the railroad concluded to follow a comparatively straight coarse instead of going miles out of its way to build up a metropolis in the muddy ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... Lygia felt guilty, but not to that degree. She had judged even that withdrawal from Miriam's house would be her victory over temptation, and would lessen her fault. Crispus rubbed her into the dust; showed her all the misery and insignificance of her soul, which she had not suspected hitherto. She had judged even that the old presbyter, who from the moment of her flight from the Palatine had been to her as a father, would show some compassion, console her, give ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... away into all but complete insignificance. After two or three abortive efforts to again bring forward reform, Grattan gave up the hopeless attempt, and retired broken-hearted from public life. The "United Irishmen," in the first instance an open political body, inaugurated and chiefly supported by Protestants, now rapidly ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... awakening us to a proper sense of our insignificance, pulpit orators sometimes make an unfair use of the grave and its worms. Let us put no faith in their doleful rhetoric. The chemistry of man's final dissolution is eloquent enough of our emptiness: there is no need to add imaginary horrors. The worm of the sepulchre is an invention of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... uproariously—secure in their employment by a foreign tourist agency from the disgust of the Muslim population, whose scowls shadowed them. Elias Abdul Messih was one of them. The other, who boasted a very large hooked nose, like a parrot's beak, which reduced the rest of his face to insignificance, was Yuhanna Mahbub, ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... worth enumeration as an example of the utter insignificance of the production, which should be an important item in the agricultural wealth of the island. The greater portion of the tobacco consumed in Cyprus is imported in bales from Salonica, and is consigned to manufacturers who ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... of laying tiles is so trifling as hardly to be worth estimating, except to show its insignificance. The estimate, by English engineers, is two cents per rod for "pipe laying and finishing." What is included in "finishing," does not appear. From the personal observations of the writer, it is believed that an active man may lay from ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... one small room, and when the three girls followed Mr. Ashby to the place, they were amazed at the insignificance of their exhibition. ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... pale blueness of his eyes, made them more vivid by contrast; they were like pools of blue light amid the brownness of his face. Peter always ran about his work with eager alacrity. A simple and willing old man, he affected the quick readiness of youth to atone for his insignificance. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... followed the example of the Butlers. The Earl of Clancarty sued for pardon and delivered up his eldest son as a hostage for his good faith; the Earl of Thomond—more suspected than compromised—yielded all his castles, with the sole exception of Ibrackan. But the next year, mortified at the insignificance to which he had reduced himself, he sought refuge in France, from which he only returned when the intercession of the English ambassador, Norris, had obtained him full indemnity for the past. Sir James Fitzmaurice, thus ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... and that I am unimportant. For I would have you know I am a monstrous clever fellow. As for you, you are either a delusion or a god or a degraded Realist. But whatever you are, you have lied to me, and I know that you have lied, and I will not believe in the insignificance of Jurgen." ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... the shoguns. One reason operating to produce this result was that, in an age when lineage or military prowess was the sole secular step to fortune, men of civil talent but humble birth had to choose between remaining in hopeless insignificance or entering the priesthood where knowledge and virtue were sure passports to distinction. It was thus that in nearly every monastery there were found men of superior intellect and erudition. The fact was recognized. When Ashikaga Takauji desired to take counsel of Muso Kokushi, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... true that the tendency of this Bill will be to throw power into the hands of the landed interest, we shall have a great Tory party, which will be selfish, bigoted, and ignorant, and a Radical party, while the Whig party, who will have carried the measure, will sink into insignificance. Such present themselves to my mind as possible alternatives, as far as it is practicable to take anything like a view of probabilities in the chaos and confusion that mighty alterations ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... him, and she was unconscious of the influence his rank and wealth had exercised upon her feelings. She had thought of herself so often as the Marchioness of Strishfogel, had so completely projected her mind into that brilliant future, that to descend from this giddy height to the insignificance of unwedded girlhood was as sharp a fall as if she had worn a crown and ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... unfulfilled expectation in which he found himself. In the first place, Petrograd was so very different from anything that he had expected. Its size and space, its power of reducing the human figure to a sudden speck of insignificance, its strange lights and shadows, its waste spaces and cold, empty, moonlit squares, its jumble of modern and mediaeval civilisation, above all, its supreme indifference to all and sundry—these things cowed and humiliated him. He was sharp enough to realise that here ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... few articles, which pleased him highly: a small shawl, a razor, three bunches of beads, some buttons, and a powder-horn. Apologizing for the insignificance of the gift, I wished to know what I could bring him from Loanda, saying, not a large thing, but something small. He laughed heartily at the limitation, and replied, "Every thing of the white people would be acceptable, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... sits still, or reposes himself upon a couch, no more deceives himself than he deceives others; he knows that he is doing nothing, and has no other solace of his insignificance than the resolution, which the lazy hourly make, of changing his ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... seen that small-featured, conscientious little face? He seemed to associate it with some agreeable and not very distant episode; yet its intelligent insignificance was so overshadowed by the pleasantness of the episode itself, that he now tried in vain to identify it with a searchlight of recognition. "I give up," he said to himself discontentedly. "Maybe it'll come to me later." And then, suddenly, ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... should directly link together Milan with the Netherlands, and so give the Spanish policy a necessary preponderance in the affairs of Europe." Richelieu spoilt this fine prospect just as it seemed about to become a reality, and the Spanish Hapsburgs gradually sank into insignificance, and their line disappeared in 1700, on the death of Charles II., the most contemptible creature that ever wore a crown, and scarcely man enough to be a respectable idiot. Such was the termination of the great Austro-Burgundian dynasty that was founded by Charles ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... recalled his impressions on first meeting the girl a week before, and his own outspoken surprise at the insignificance of the sister of his beautiful hostess. A plain, odd little creature, that had been the involuntary verdict, but almost immediately it had been amended. Plain, but charming; distinctly the little thing had charm! Now, at the expiration of six days it had come to this, ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... the greatest deluge which can be imagined sinks into insignificance beside that of the slowly floating, slowly melting iceberg, or the glacier creeping along at its snail's pace of a yard a day. The study of the deltas of the Nile, the Ganges, and the Mississippi has taught ...
— Time and Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... restlessly. The sight of his working face brought a quick hand to Tessibel's lips, and her white teeth set deeply into the upraised knuckles to help stifle the groans. Every trouble of her own sank into insignificance before the calamity facing her. Many times Tess had viewed death afar off, but not until the past three days had it threatened her own loved ones. In that hour she was experiencing the extremity of sorrow, and each aching nerve in her body seemed ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... person's pleasure to come without parade or attendants—this was indifferent to her. It was their conversation, their characters, their merit, she looked to; and many a lord and lady of showy dress and equipage, and vast importance in their own opinions, shrunk into insignificance in the company of Mrs. Hungerford; and, though in the room with her, passed before her eyes without making a sufficient sensation upon her organs to attract her notice, or to change the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... showed Las Cases a great scar on his thigh which he said had been received in a bayonet charge at Toulon. "Men wondered at the fortune which kept me invulnerable; I always concealed my dangers in mystery." The hypothesis of his insignificance appears unlikely when we examine the memoirs written by his contemporaries, and consider the precise traditions of a later generation; it becomes untenable in view of what happened on the next day, when the commissioners nominated ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... primary importance on our planet; but the Grecian name, represented by Greece considered as a territory, or as the original seat of the Hellenic people, ceased to have much importance, in the eyes of historians, from the time when it became a conquered province; and it declined into absolute insignificance after the conquest of so many other provinces had degraded Hellas into an arithmetical unit, standing amongst a total amount of figures, so vast and so much more dazzling to the ordinary mind. Hence it was that in ancient times no complete history of Greece, through all her phases and stages, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... by Christendom or a conspiracy of Jews or a part of the lingering quarrel with Moslems, are alike the effect of forces gathered and loosened in that one mysterious moment in the history of the city. They equally proclaim the paradox of its insignificance and ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... considerable period without further excitement. Closely associated with him in the present adventure is La Belle Chasseuse. Neither would endeavour to procure safety by flight to a foreign country. They will seek insignificance by living in a normal and commonplace manner. What more easy, for instance, for Mademoiselle than to return to the life of the circus, whilst her lover—granted that he wished to remain in her company—will obtain some suitable employment in the same circle. There is ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... expeditions against the "Turks," of captured cities and spoils. Now, after what he had heard from el-Tadhil, he began to fear whether in the presence of far greater events, all his acts would not fade into insignificance, just as a drop of rain disappears in the sea. "Perhaps," he thought with bitterness, "nobody will pay attention to what I have accomplished, and Smain will not even be pleased that I have brought ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... their case we look far back into the vista of history to recall the change, whereas in the instance of Spain we are contemporary witnesses. From a first-class power, how rapidly she has sunk into comparative insignificance! She has been shorn of her wealthy colonies, one after another, in the East and in the West, holding with feeble grasp a few inconsiderable islands only besides this gem of the Antilles, the choicest jewel of her crown. Extremely poor ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... with the street, but just large enough to permit a pigmy ale-house or eating-house, still allowed by the rich to their stable-servants, to stand in the angle. There is something cheery in its very dinginess, and something free and elfin in its very insignificance. At the feet of those grey stone giants it looks like a ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... concentration: it was as though for an instant the boy was able to give one a glimpse of the wonderful force of his intellect. When he looked one in the face with intention, and suddenly allowed one to realise, as it were, all the dominating power of his brain, one shrank into insignificance, one felt as an ignorant, intelligent man may feel when confronted with some elaborate theorem of the higher mathematics. "Is it possible that any one can really understand these things?" such a man might think with awe, and ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... more rhetorical. "Yes, it's their only salvation from their rotten insignificance." He meditated. "And yet—hnn!" He was about to say something much kindlier when suddenly he laughed down from a side window upon the twins ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... for Agelastes and the Caesar, and when they observed the condition of Achilles Tatius, it seemed such as rather to express doubt and consternation, than to give encouragement to the hopes they had entertained. Many of the lower classes, however, felt too secure in their own insignificance to fear the personal consequences of a tumult, and were desirous, therefore, to provoke the disturbance, which ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the necessary intercourse of civility, and fill up the vacuities of actions by agreeable appearances. It had therefore been of advantage, if such of our writers as have excelled in the art of decorating insignificance, had supplied us with a few sallies of innocent gaiety, effusions of honest tenderness, or exclamations ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... lawsuit.' There was a rush to Rome, where, for several ensuing years, the hostile English parties were to wage a furious battle in the antechambers of the Vatican. But the dispute over the Oblates now sank into insignificance beside the rage of contention which centred round a new and far more deadly question; for the position of Dr. Errington himself was at stake. The Cardinal, in spite of illness, indolence, and the ties of friendship, had been brought at last to an extraordinary step— he was petitioning ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... MURILLO (1617-1682) has always been accounted the most popular of the Spanish painters, and it is only in recent times that his popularity has faded into comparative insignificance on the fuller recognition and understanding of the genius of Velasquez. The intensely Anglican feeling in this country during the eighteenth and ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... the thought help us to the conviction of the relative insignificance of all that can change. That will not spoil nor shade any real joy; rather it will add to it poignancy that prevents it from cloying or from becoming the enemy of our souls. But the thought will wondrously lighten the burden that we have to carry, and the tasks ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... has. It is no fault of his own if he has not a commanding eye, for he studies hard to assume it. His features are well formed, though perhaps the sharpness of his nose may give to his face in the eyes of some people an air of insignificance. If so, it is greatly redeemed by his mouth and chin, of which he ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... these discoveries, his tenure of the chair would have been an illustrious one. It happens, however, that in the gigantic mass of his intellectual work these researches, though intrinsically of such importance, assume what might almost be described as a relative insignificance. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... initial character of the war changed within a few weeks: it developed into a conflict between international democracy on the one hand and international autocracy on the other hand. It was then when the question of Serbia sank into comparative insignificance that the Russian autocrats realized that they had enlisted on the wrong side. But with the whole populace of the country enthusiastically united behind it, the Government was swept onward; it was too late to make an abrupt ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... attempt a review of the topics discussed in the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth Congresses. The day was fast coming when contests for the Speakership and battles over appropriation bills, ay, even the fierce struggle over Kansas, would sink into insignificance, and Mr. DAVIS, with that political prescience for which he was always remarkable, seemed to discern the first sign of the coming storm. The winds had been long sown, and now the whirlwind was to be reaped. The thirty-sixth Congress, which ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... Valley with the exception of Dayton, Hamilton was hardest hit. Many persons killed, a thousand houses wrecked by the rushing torrent and 15,000 homeless was the toll of the flood in this city and environs, and the harrowing scenes attending flood disasters in the past decade faded into insignificance when compared with the havoc ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... way to the front hall. Evelyn, considerably piqued at being ignored, took advantage of his disappearance in search of his sister, to open up a broadside of inconsequential chatter before which her previous efforts paled into insignificance. And it was in the midst of her verbal barrage that Gresham appeared at the far end of the hall with ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... and the country cleared and stocked with the reasonable returns of so great a trade; the forests are stripped and nothing left in prospect, but the gloomy apprehension when the timber is gone, of sinking into insignificance and poverty. Formerly the woods swarmed with American adventurers who cut as they pleased. These men seeing the advantages that were given them, and wishing to make the most of their time, cut few but prime trees, and manufactured ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... and make their presence felt in Western Asia. But when once the organization broke down, either on account of internal rivalries or the influence of an outside power, they lapsed back again into a state of political insignificance in the affairs of the ancient world. It is possible that about 1800 B.C. the Hittite confederacy was controlled by an ambitious king who had dreams of a great empire, and was accordingly pursuing ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... himself—and that they had all gone behind the curtain forever out of her sight. Of all the white men Jorgenson alone was left, that man who had done with life so completely that his mere presence robbed it of all heat and mystery, leaving nothing but its terrible, its revolting insignificance. And Mrs. Travers was ready for revolt. ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... clearing with a few trees dotted about, upon which in former times the skins of the sacrificial victims were hung. The central point of the grove, at least among the tribes of the Volga, was the sacred tree, beside which everything else sank into insignificance. Before it the worshippers assembled and the priest offered his prayers, at its roots the victim was sacrificed, and its boughs sometimes served as a pulpit. No wood might be hewn and no branch broken in the grove, and women were generally ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... of insignificance making its way into his mind. He had been vain of his looks, but what did looks amount to down there? He had been proud of his money, but what privilege did money give him on that flood? He had rejoiced in his popularity and the attention women paid him, but the indifferent gaze of that smoking ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... ditch with a bank on the outside, both usually very regular and well constructed. Within, at the centre, is a mound not more than a foot high containing the sepulchral deposit. Occasionally there are more than one of these minute mounds, which often escape notice by reason of their insignificance. ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... strength or the weakness of States according as they are able or unable to hold them against an enemy. Of the two fragments, the smaller was militarily important only as a feeder to the other. Severed from the body to which they belonged, the seceded States west of the Mississippi sank into insignificance; the fire that had raged there would smoulder and die of itself, now that a broad belt which could not be passed interposed between it and the greater ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... a projected marriage and not the consummation of one already concluded. When there was a solemn public betrothal and then a wedding after an interval of time, the latter was plainly a repetition which had no significance. What happened finally was that the betrothal fell into insignificance, or was united with the wedding as in the modern Anglican service, and concubitus was allowed only after the wedding. The wedding then had importance, and was not merely a blessing on a completed fact. It was then a custom in all ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... unique design was brought out by Clara for the occasion. It belonged to her husband's family in France and came to him as an heirloom. The contrast between it and the mulberry set which mother gave me struck me as singular, but the flowers and figures of the mulberry ware did not fall into insignificance. They were to me the embodiment of beauty. Among my earliest disappointments was the giving of grandmother's china to Hal, and I cried for "just one saucer," and this was a fac-simile and met a hearty appreciation. I bedewed it with tears, and Aunt Hildy said it was dretful dangerous to ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... were the chief beauty of the old masks, but the best of them sink into {117} insignificance before such a masterpiece of art as this. Perhaps nothing in a modern language comes nearer to giving the peculiar effect which is the glory of Pindar. Of course there is in it more of the fanciful, and more of the romantic, ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... this the political disintegration of Poland proceeded rapidly, and when that unhappy country fell to pieces Russia naturally took for herself the lion's share of the spoil. Sweden, too, sank to political insignificance, and gradually lost all her trans-Baltic possessions. The last of them—the Grand Duchy of Finland, which stretches from the Gulf of Finland to the Polar Ocean—was ceded to Russia by the peace of ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... dear fellow. Carnes, doesn't the sight of the glowing orb of night influence you to pious meditation upon the frailty of human life and the insignificance of human ambition?" ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... of the greatest movement now taking place on the face of the globe. In comparison with it, the agitation in Russia shrinks to insignificance; for it is not political, but social. Its object is not a changed dynasty, nor a revolution in the form of government; but, with higher aim and deeper motive, it promises nothing short of the complete renovation of the oldest, most populous, and most conservative of empires. ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... eyes disturbed me. They were unusually large, the iris golden like Felipe's, but the pupil at that moment so distended that they seemed almost black; and what affected me was not so much their size as (what was perhaps its consequence) the singular insignificance of their regard. A look more blankly stupid I have never met. My eyes dropped before it even as I spoke, and I went on my way upstairs to my own room, at once baffled and embarrassed. Yet when I came there and saw ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 1613, and the establishment of a more regular government than had previously been known. We only read occasionally of embassies being sent to Moscow, in general for the purpose of arranging commercial relations. From this state of insignificance, Peter, the first Emperor of Russia, raised his country, by introducing into it the arts of peace, by establishing a well-organized and disciplined army in the place of a lawless body of tumultuous mutineers, by creating a navy, where scarce ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... must be supposed to be the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the applications of their inferiors. While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy. The conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its original state of white paper. A sucking babe ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... proportion as it is variable and indefinite. A circumstance, apparently of no value, shall alter the whole interpretation to be put upon an expression or action and it shall alter it thus powerfully because in proportion to its very insignificance it shows a strong general principle at work that extends in its ramifications to the smallest things. This in fact will make all the difference between minuteness and subtlety or refinement; for a small or trivial effect may ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... was the stream of his lively imagination, of his inexhaustible interest in every form of beauty and strangeness and folly. On this stream, sitting in the stout little craft of his poverty, his insignificance and his independence, he had made some notable voyages.... And so, when Susy Branch, whom he had sought out through a New York season as the prettiest and most amusing girl in sight, had surprised him with the contradictory revelation ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... patiently until they have re-formed some habits of study and rediscovered the pleasures of systematic thinking. The best stimulus will be a teacher so convinced of the supreme importance of the subject to be studied as to lead the members to recognize its importance and the insignificance of any price they may pay for ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... were now at hand before which the Public Worship Regulation Act and the Slave Circular paled into insignificance. ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... citizens who died in their struggle for liberty. Amid quiet by-ways, for instance, I discovered a tablet with the name of a young soldier who fell at that spot, fighting against the Bourbon, in 1860: "offerse per l'unita della patria sua vita quadrilustre." The very insignificance of this young life makes the fact more touching; one thinks of the unnumbered lives sacrificed upon this soil, age after age, to the wild-beast instinct of mankind, and how pathetic the attempt to preserve the memory of one boy, so soon to become a meaningless ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... trouble. In any case what was sought was revolution, and those who preached it ought to contemplate all the possibilities of such a course. They might be the fathers and founders of a new nationality, but they might also be simply mischief-makers, whose insignificance and powerlessness were their sole protection, who were not important enough for "either a traitor's ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... reading of sentences, to accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place, beyond the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time, that everlasting solace of humanity which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task. Vergil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind. But ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... animal who hasn't known enough to die. His undeveloped senses have permitted him to survive in the manner of the oyster. The mysteries, dangers, and delights of the sea do not exist for the oyster. Its senses are not stirred by typhoons, impressed by earthquakes or annoyed by its own insignificance. ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... pile, formerly raised to religion or royalty, were scattered about; regularity and perfect design were strangely mixed up with ruin and disorder, and nature had done it all. Niagara has been considered one of her wildest freaks; but Niagara falls into insignificance when compared with the wild grandeur of this awful chasm. Imagination carried me back to Thebes, to Palmyra, and the Edomite Paetra, and I could not help imagining that I ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... discovery Santo Domingo had passed the zenith of its glory. The vast and wealthy countries discovered and conquered on the mainland of America absorbed the attention of colonists and of the government, and Santo Domingo quickly sank to a position of economic and political insignificance. So little importance was given the island by chroniclers during the ensuing two hundred and fifty years and so few are the records remaining, that not even the names of all the governors and the periods of their rule can be accurately determined. ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... credit upon a writer, few have ever better illustrated these traits than 'A COLORED BALTIMOREAN,' or deserved a nobler tribute of praise. He who would be ashamed to acknowledge such a man as his countryman and brother, has yet to learn his own insignificance and what constitutes ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... quite out of tone with the original work. Jean de Meung abandoned entirely the refined and aristocratic atmosphere of his predecessor, and wrote with all the realism and coarseness of the middle class of that day. Lorris's vapid allegory faded into insignificance, becoming a mere peg for a huge mass of extraordinarily varied discourse. The whole of the scholastic learning of the Middle Ages is poured in a confused stream through this remarkable and deeply interesting work. Nor is it merely as a repository of medieval erudition that Jean ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the great public throne-room had always overwhelmed me with a sense of my own insignificance. On that morning, chagrined at my reception by Vedius and Satronius, weak, ill and tottering on my feet, needing all my will power to stand steadily and not reel, with my head buzzing and my ears humming, feeling large and light and queer, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day had so largely and variously coloured Browning's work. It occurred to none of those worldly bishops to justify their worldliness,—it was far too deeply ingrained for that. But Blougram's brilliant defence, enormously disproportioned as it is to the insignificance of the attack, marks his tacit recognition of loftier ideals than he professes. Like Cleon, he bears involuntary witness ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... socialistic thinkers at all, but have been drawn by them from the evolutionary philosophy of the nineteenth century generally, in so far as it was applied to historical and sociological questions. The dominant idea which distinguished this school of thought was the insignificance of the individual as compared with society past and present. Thus Herbert Spencer, who was its most systematic exponent, opens his work on the Study of Sociology with an elaborate attack on what he calls "The Great Man Theory," according ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... insignificance of the means employed, the effects were absolutely miraculous. The explosion of the fulminate on striking either the hard cordage of the net or one of the steel ribs used to give the gas-holder rigidity, broke the two tubes full of liquid. Then came another far more violent explosion, ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... strength in fighting against the iron gates of destiny. No one, whose esteem is worth having, will respect us less because we dress according to our means, even if those means should have dwindled into insignificance. But if we toil unduly to make ourselves appear to be something that we are not, we shall earn contempt and reap disappointment. It is far more noble-minded to bid farewell to all our greatness, than to catch greedily at any of the outlying tinsel that may remain here and there. This indicates ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... me, and slanted round his best ear, and once, when I was speaking of some trifling, tender reminiscence, drew a long breath, with such a tremor in it that a little more and it would have been a sob, why, then I felt there must be something of nature in them which redeemed their seeming insignificance. Tell me, man or woman with whom I am whispering, have you not a small store of recollections, such as these I am uncovering, buried beneath the dead leaves of many summers, perhaps under the unmelting snows of fast-returning winters,—a few such recollections, which, if you should write ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... among the dead, emasculated by the sense of his own insignificance, crushed by the passive mastery of the slumbering ages. The magnitude of all things appalled him. Everything partook of the superlative save himself—the perfect cessation of wind and motion, the immensity of the snow-covered wildness, the height of ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... life, and gave dignity to men who would otherwise have been insignificant. The example of men who rejoiced to part with their lives for the sake of their religion, became to the world the most impressive voice which it yet heard of the insignificance of this life when compared with the life to come. "What will it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" became thus one of the most stupendous inquiries which could be impressed on future generations, and affected all the relations of society. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord |
