"Inconsequence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Empire of Opinion" this is an unmitigated evil (Pilgrimage iii. 256); and now, after some thirty-four years, there are signs that the suggestions of common sense are to be adopted. England has heard of the extraordinary recklessness and inconsequence of the British-Indian ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... tempo does not mean unsteadiness.... We must have in music the sense of equilibrium, of stability. A careless, spasmodic hurrying and retarding leads only to flabbiness and inconsequence. ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... arguments were quite unheeded. Morva's sympathy alone seemed to have any consoling effect upon him. She would kneel beside him with her elbows on his knees, looking up into his face, and with make-believe cheerfulness would reason with a woman's inconsequence, fearlessly deducing results from causes which had ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... pleasure? Singular question! Man is always at strife with himself. His present woes give the lie to his hopes; yet he looks to a future which is not his, to indemnify him for these present sufferings; setting upon all his actions the seal of inconsequence and of the weakness of his nature. We have nothing here below ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the breech of the nearest gun, mopped the blood and perspiration from my face, and tried to understand the scene of ruin and carnage that surrounded me; for, with the cessation of the turmoil and excitement of battle, everything seemed suddenly to assume the inconsequence and unreality of a dream. I could not quite realise that the shot-torn, blood-bespattered wreck over which my gaze wandered wonderingly was the erstwhile smart and dainty little schooner of which I had been so proud, or that those maimed and disfigured forms lying broadcast about the deck ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... a conviction that he was dreaming. He laughed to think of his relief when he should awaken. The crowd surged about the ticker, and their voices came as from afar. Their acts all had the weird inconsequence of the people we see in dreams. Yet presently it had gone too far to be amusing. He must arouse himself and turn over on his side. In five minutes, according to the dream, he had lost five million dollars as nearly as ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... laughing. Nothing Danbury could have said would so prove the inconsequence of his injuries. It relieved his strained nerves until, in ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... wife," said the captain. But the captain, smelling the smoke from the kitchen, was not the forlorn companion of our treacherous voyage. "I reckon she'll stan' out ag'in, mebbe," said he, "soon 's she 's dry." But he winked at me with daring inconsequence. ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... happen, the just judgment which we have uttered. Direct or indirect, the rivalries of artists are to be regretted for the sake of art itself, which lives on noble sentiments and high thoughts. Although we may laugh at the inconsequence of a critic who extinguishes with one hand that which the other hand brought to light, we cannot repress a deep feeling of sadness when we see upon what reputation too often depends, and when we ask ourselves how much we are to ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... scenery, that no one in the factory would believe him to have been an impostor, and the Frenchmen evidently held my objections to be "founded on nationality." The besetting sins of the three volumes are inordinate vanity and inconsequence, but these should not obscure our vision as to their solid and remarkable merits. Compare the picturesque account of Sao Paulo with those of the latest English travellers, and the anthropology of the people, their religion, their ceremonies, their magic, their dress ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... I have vindicated the apparent inconsequence of teaching young students a good deal that seems at first sight profitless, but which helps them to learn and retain what is profitable. But this is an inquisitive age, and if we insist on piling ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... both cases irreconcilable. We are conscious that we are always free to choose, though not to act; but reason will have it that this is a delusion. There is no logical clue to the IMPASSE. Still, reason notwithstanding, we take our freedom (within limits) for granted, and with like inconsequence we pray. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... thought I heard Chaka say, though I daresay that I dreamt them. Indeed had it been otherwise, I mean had they really been spoken by Zikali, there would surely have been more in them, something that might have served his purpose, not mere talk which had all the inconsequence of a dream. Also no one else seemed to pay any particular attention to them, though this may have been because so many voices were sounding from different places at once, for as I have said, Zikali arranged his performance very well, as well ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... vocations drift into the gentle and devious stream of inconsequence. It would be vain-glorious, no doubt, to assert that there is placid indifference to vain-glory, which Carlyle declares to be, with neediness and greediness, one of the besetting sins of mankind; but am I not free from ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... and poetry of the sea are breathed into his shanties, where simple childlike sentimentality alternates with the Rabelaisian humour of the grown man. Whatever landsmen may think about shanty words—with their cheerful inconsequence, or light-hearted coarseness—there can be no two opinions about the tunes, which, as ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... understanding her. To the country lawyer of sober piety and granite sense of duty, the rich variety of her moods was a continual wonder and sometimes a painful bewilderment. But whether he understood the impetuous inconsequence of her temperament "after a fashion," or whether he failed entirely to follow the complexity of her thought, he met all her fancies with a sort of tender admiration. People said that Squire Hall was henpecked; ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... century rendering, included among The Tudor Translations. It is a strange and incoherent picture that the book presents. Pater well compares it to a dream: "Story within story—stories with the sudden, unlooked-for changes of dreams." And, as though to suit this dream-like inconsequence, the scene is laid in Thessaly, the natural home of witchcraft—where, in fact, I was myself laid under a witch's incantation little more than ten years ago, and might have been transformed into heaven knows what, if a remembered passage ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... and Ralph began to grow weary of the inconsequence of the debaters, and their entire inability to hold to the salient points; but he still kept his hand on the rudder of the discussion, avoided the fogs of the supernatural and religious on the one side towards which the little old man persisted in pushing, ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... vulgar notion is, in this case, the more correct. If, from our experience of John, Thomas, &c. who once were living, but are now dead, we are entitled to conclude that all human beings are mortal, we might surely, without any logical inconsequence, have concluded at once, from those instances, that the Duke Wellington is mortal. The mortality of John, Thomas, and Company, is, after all, the whole evidence we have for the mortality of the Duke of Wellington. Not one iota is added to the proof by interpolating ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... of the eternal cosmogenetic process" are best met by pointing to the fact that its most highly accredited and notorious representative has given to the world in exposition and defense of pure Darwinian philosophy, a work, which, for boldness of assertion, meagerness of proof, inconsequence of argument, inconsistency in fundamental principles and disregard for facts which tell against the author's theory, has certainly no equal in contemporary literature. In the apt and expressive phrase of Professor Paulsen, the book "fairly drips with ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... It's something," Mamie pursued, with some inconsequence, "that—somewhere or other, at some time or other—he appears to have done. Something that has made a ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... girl, she began to scour her cooking utensils with much energy, and soon commenced a song. Considering that she was compelled to constantly endure the company of a degraded officer, who had been expelled from the service with ignominy, she was absurdly contented. Indeed, with the happy inconsequence of youth, she quickly threw all care to the winds, and devoted her thoughts to planning a surprise for the next day by preparing some tea, provided she could surreptitiously open ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... like a mild nightmare, and he felt as though, with the inconsequence of dream-people, these people had gone away without having accomplished some essential act which had been the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... hands with the air of one who heard, but was allowing his thoughts to wander. When next he spoke it was only to increase the crazy inconsequence of their talk. ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... thought Georgina was giving her lover up (they flattered themselves she was discouraged, or had grown tired of him), when she was really only making it impossible she should belong to any one else. And with this, her inconsequence, her capriciousness, her absence of motive, the way she contradicted herself, her apparent belief that she could hush up such a situation forever! There was nothing shameful in having married poor Mr. Benyon, even in a little church at Harlem, and ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... subtle flattery in the apparent inconsequence of my companion's last few words that made them peculiarly acceptable to me; but discipline is discipline, and must be maintained, at all hazards, even when a crew has been picked up in such irregular fashion as mine had been; and I was determined to at once ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... to deserve such devotion as this?" Then with a strange and bewildering inconsequence she flung herself into Leonard's arms, and burying her head upon his breast ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... do not say, that all novels have this influence, but that they have it generally. The great demand for novels, inconsequence of the taste, which the world has shewn for this species of writing, has induced persons of all descriptions, and of course many who have been but ill qualified to write them. Hence, though some novels have ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... to reply, but the senator broke in with an anecdote, long but good, of a newly landed German. The judge followed close with the story of a very green Irishman; and the general, with mellow inconsequence, brought in a tale to the credit of the departed Jackson and debit of the still surviving Clay. A new sultriness prevailed. The judge's palliative word, that many a story hard on Clay was older than Clay himself, relieved the tension scarcely more than did Lucian's ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... being, but owing to his impressionability and bewilderment, or even owing to a momentary awakening of the moral consciousness. When he has come back to himself, that thief or assassin will regret and be ashamed of his inconsequence; his remorse will not be due to having done wrong, but to not having done it; his remorse is, therefore, economic, not moral, since the latter is excluded by hypothesis. However, a lively moral conscience is generally found ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... were not injured by a collegiate education." And yet he has done his best to drive all the youth of Scotland within the gates of the despised universities, and he has forced upon his own Pittsburg the gift of "free education in art and literature." Is it cynicism, or vain inconsequence? Cynicism, probably. The man who, having devoted his whole career to the accumulation of superfluous wealth, yet sings a paean in praise of poverty, is capable of everything. "Abolish luxury, if you please,"—thus he rhapsodises,—"but leave us the soil upon which alone the virtues and ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... Baxter moved to the door of her son's room, pretending to be unconscious of the gaze he maintained upon her. Mustering courage to hum a little tune and affecting inconsequence, she had nearly crossed the threshold ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... the ascent. At the top of the hill she paused again to look out over Paris, which lay spread far and wide beneath her, glittering and brilliant; the Eiffel Tower rising above domes and spires, in solitary inconsequence. It seemed to her as if she were looking upon the world and upon life, for the last time. A few weeks hence, would she be able to stand there and see the gay city at her feet? She plunged back along one of the converging avenues, yielding to the fascination of ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... we could back through the darkness and driving blasts of rain. The loafer followed with a long series of "God bless you's." He essayed once or twice to hold the umbrella over his "little gal's" head, but each time the wind turned it inside out, and he gave it up with an air of feeble inconsequence that characterized all ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... distance, when she hastily took refuge in a sheltered doorway, crouching in terror. Although no one approached her, she sat there late into the night, apparently too apathetic to move. With the curious inconsequence of moody youth, she was not aroused to action by the situation in which she found herself. The incident epitomized to her the everlasting riddle of the universe to which she could see no solution and she ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... to write the Essays of Elia, he had mastered the personal style so completely that his essays seem simply the overflow of talk. They are so desultory; they move from one subject to another so waywardly—such an essay as a Chapter on Ears, for instance, passing with the easy inconsequence of conversation from anatomy through organ music to beer—when they quote, as they do constantly, it is incorrectly, as in the random reminiscences of talk. Here one would say is the cream risen to the surface of a full mind and skimmed ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... occasions in life on which it is not possible to fail to see the inopportune or low-class by a dignified impassiveness of features, an adroitly-directed jest, or a remark of baffling inconsequence, but in the face of so distressingly straightforward a demand what can be advanced by a person of susceptible refinement when opposed to one of incomparably larger dimensions, imprisoned by his side in the recess of a fire-chariot ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... with those Harleys, my San Reve?" Storri's tone was supercilious and tired, as though he had been forced to remember ones who wearied him by vulgarest dint of their inconsequence. "I do not stand with the Harleys, I stand upon them. Where should such crawling, footless creatures be?" and Storri pointed to his own somewhat ample foundations as indicating the ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... if his unsophistication had allowed him, the facility with which she made it revolve now about their mutual pursuit of Eunice through the rattle and cheapness of what was known as "the Burton Henderson set." As it was against just such social inconsequence that Peter felt himself strong to defend her, he fell easily into the key of crediting the girl's sudden, bewildering flight to it as a mere ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... world. And even if I could! Oh, you cannot know what you ask Everett, my husband—I must say it, you make me tell you everything—is not free. He is little better than a slave to Eldon Parr. I hate Eldon Parr," she added, with startling inconsequence. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... hidden from her husband but evident to the two girls. The elder never neglected an opportunity to emphasize Linda's selfishness or make her personality seem ridiculous. But this Linda ignored from her wide sense of the inconsequence of most things. ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... nature recoils from the results of such reasoning. "After all," he says, "there is something in this problem which refuses to be thus laid to rest; and in treating it, it is hardly possible to escape the uneasiness of a certain moral inconsequence. If we consult the casuist of Common Sense he usually tells us that, in theory, Veracity can have no exceptions; but that, in practice, he is brought face to face with at least a few; and he cheerfully accepts a dispensation, when required, at the ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... Strauss or Renan, handling their propositions with admirable dialectical skill, is certainly, on the face of it, somewhat hazardous. But I can see no real incongruity in imputing to the seer of Patmos a prophetic insight into the future—no real inconsequence in imagining the opponent of Cerinthus spending his last breath in the defence of Christian truth against a foreseen ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... change or development is precluded. The conjuror provides for large transformation; but the law of such transformation is one of iron necessity, and, when he brings in at the end his interferences of Providence, they shock us as an inconsequence. However, though bound by their weird, his people are extraordinarily various in their aspect and doings. It is rare that he repeats his characters, albeit many of them touch each other at certain points. The exceptions are caused by his sometimes altering his ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... with the Ideal theory, if its consequences were burlesque; as if it affected the stability of nature. It surely does not. God never jests with us, and will not compromise the end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession. Any distrust of the permanence of laws, would paralyze the faculties of man. Their permanence is sacredly respected, and his faith therein is perfect. The wheels and springs of ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... are overlong and not a few of the others are overshort: this, however, has the prime recommendation of variety. Even the vagaries of editor and scribe will not account for all the incoherences, disorder and inconsequence, and for the vain iterations which suggest that the author has forgotten what he said. In places there are dead allusions to persons and tales which are left dark, e. g. vol. i. pp. 43, 57, 61, etc. The digressions are abrupt ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... said Dick, returning with sudden childish inconsequence to the subject uppermost in his thoughts. 'Joe isn't Why is it that the girls are ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... human enough to feel the strong attraction of the girl's beauty. Perhaps after all he was beginning to care. And if so, what then? She felt her face burn in the coolness. Somehow she did not want him to be hurt, to suffer as she knew that other men had been made to suffer by the gay inconsequence of her friend. Only a week ago she had desired his ignominious downfall. To-day she wanted to save him from it. She had a desperate longing to warn him that Violet's favour was a thing of nought, that her treatment of him had ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... devilish interesting. It doesn't go as you want it to go. Sometimes it lags, sometimes it dances; and horrible things happen, often most unexpectedly. In the novel, everything has to be rounded off and led up to, and you never get a notion of the inconsequence of life. The interest of life is not what happens, but how it affects people, how they meet it, how they fly from it: the relief of a biography is that you haven't got to invent your setting and your character—all that is done for you: you have ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that sometimes drifts up over Hindhead from the great glen which local myth has named the Devil's Punch Bowl. The Broom Squire is strangely unsatisfactory as a novel, or I find it so, with its entire needlessness and inconsequence of plot. But it has something in it of the heather and the wind, of the sand of Thursley and the steam of the Punch Bowl on a wet day; and you may still meet broom squires if you like to wander down into the deep of the glen. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... which always impressed Verena as something almost august. Such moods, however, were not often revealed to the public at large; they belonged to Miss Chancellor's very private life. One of them had possession of her at present, and she went on to explain the inconsequence which had puzzled her friend with the same quiet clearness, the detachment from error, of a woman whose self-scrutiny has been as sharp as ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... him quickly, across her shoulder, but she smiled as brightly as before, and with the same cordial inconsequence: "Oh, I can hardly think that!" she said. "And of course I'd be awfully sorry to think it. You're not moving away, are you, ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... at this, parted in a stare; her eyes darkened to the purple of one of the shadow-patches on the sea. She showed for the passing instant the face of some splendid tragic mask, and I remembered for the inconsequence of it what Mrs. Meldrum had said about her sight. I had derived from this lady a worrying impulse to catechise her, but that didn't seem exactly kind; so I substituted another question, inquired who the pretty young man in knickerbockers ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... strange inconsequence of the human mind, especially in moments of suppressed excitement, it was of this nameless lady and her lord that Godfrey kept thinking throughout the service, once more wondering who they were and what was their story. He remembered too how the graves of that unknown pair had been connected ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... rang in the sweet voice that almost reduced Matilda to tears. The abandon and inconsequence were so oddly mingled with the strange determined strength that the elderly woman was ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... his authority may generally conclude himself safe. His sentences are never too much dilated or contracted; and it will not be easy to find any embarrassment in the complication of his clauses, any inconsequence in his connections, or abruptness in his transitions. His style was well suited to his thoughts, which are never subtilised by nice disquisitions, decorated by sparkling conceits, elevated by ambitious sentences, or variegated by far-sought learning. He pays no court to ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... These cigars are excellent. Give your friend some tea. Do you know, Paul, I live a brute's life? It should be time to choose oneself a destiny, to employ one's powers on something which makes life worth living. Life is a singular comedy. I am frightened, I laugh at the inconsequence of our social order. The Government cuts off the heads of poor devils who may have killed a man and licenses creatures who despatch, medically speaking, a dozen young folks in a season. Morality is powerless against ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... completely lost his head, and began riding with desperate inconsequence as straight ahead as the trees would allow. Stay still he could not; the inaction terrified him. He argued that he must get somewhere by going on long enough—somewhere "through to the other side," as ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... interest; her beauty, her charm, her childlike gayety and inconsequence, which are but the upper current of a deeper sea of sincerity and common sense. Somebody says: "Ladies vary in looks; they're like military flags for a funeral or a celebration—one day furled, next day streaming. Men are ships; figureheads, ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... fear. Wife, country, friends, son, kinsmen, and relatives, all these one can have if the king happens to be possessed of accomplishments and virtuous eyes. If the king happens to be sinful, his subjects, inconsequence of his oppressions, meet with destruction. The king is the root of one's triple aggregate (i.e., Virtue, Wealth, and Pleasure). He should protect his subjects with heedfulness. Taking from his subjects a sixth share of their wealth, he should protect them all. That king who does not protect his ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... averages two fathoms, and rarely runs less than ten feet. The engines are over far from the boiler, and the long raking stern swells out into a big belly worthy of a manatee or a Dutch hoy. Her boiler had been replaced with the usual inconsequence. She had been repaired by an 'intelligent artisan,' Mr. Emery; but, as he was allowed no tools and no time, he contented himself with reporting her in good working order. Consequently after every half-hour ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... selfishness did her good. He was like a pleasant, rather spoilt child, unconventionally affectionate, and by no means difficult to manage. They called each other by their Christian names before she had been twenty-four hours at the farm, and chaffed each other with cheery inconsequence whenever they met. Sylvia sometimes marvelled at herself for that surface lightheartedness, but somehow it seemed to be in the atmosphere. Bill Merston's hearty laugh was irresistible to ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... regained his feet slowly and passed his father, but not without noticing with the same listless yet ineffaceable perception of childhood that he was hurriedly concealing the paper in his pocket. With the same youthful inconsequence, wondering at this more than at the interruption, which was no novel event, he went slowly ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... sudden and startling exhibition of female inconsistency and inconsequence, Jim was for a moment speechless. Then he recovered himself, volubly, aggrievedly, and on his legs. What DID she mean? Was he to give up understanding girls—or was it their sole vocation in life to impede masculine processes and shipwreck masculine conclusions? ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... lost his three wishes by the ill counsel and lack of wit in the woman; "And this, O King" (said the Wazir), "have I told thee, that thou mightest be certified of the thoughtlessness of women and their inconsequence and silliness and see what cometh of hearkening to their counsel. Wherefore be not persuaded by them to slay thy son, thy heart's core, who shall cause thy remembrance to survive thee." The King gave ear to his Minister's words and forbore to put his son to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... know more. His letter to Dick seemed of inconsiderable importance, even the disaster of its reaching Amelia. If she held him up to it, he could laugh it off. Anything could be laughed off. So, the shadows mingling with the inconsequence of his thoughts, he drifted away to sleep, catching himself back, now and then, to luxuriate in the assurance that he was in the right place, finding comfortable assuagements, and that inexplicably, because so suddenly, everything was for ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... have been, had lacked the black bitterness marking our next ordeal and that I conceive to have proceeded from some rank predominance of the theory and practice of book-keeping. It had consorted with this that we found ourselves, by I know not what inconsequence, a pair of the "assets" of a firm; Messrs. Forest and Quackenboss, who carried on business at the northwest corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, having for the winter of 1854-5 taken our education ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... it so," she said. "Please God!" she added with delightful inconsequence. "I'm glad ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... to the wagon. "Thar's a shakedown in the wagon bed; you kin lie there." Nevertheless he hesitated, and, with the inconsequence and abruptness of a shy man, continued ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... a quaint inconsequence her truer self appeared at the Revolution! She, who will foresee Napoleon, was rudely shocked by the fall of the Bastille. The Revolution touched her in her tenderest point. With every year, in spite of her sentiments and cosmopolitan culture, this Princess of Zerbst became more and more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... that, in spite of this high ideal, sensuality flourished undiminished, and a troubadour who loudly sang the praise of chastity and blatantly professed his entire disinterestedness in the service of his mistress, did not see the least inconsequence in carrying on a dozen intrigues at the same time with other women. Sordello, one of the best known poets of this period, was charged by a contemporary with having changed his mistress over a hundred times, and he ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... only takes its turn with that of the other agents of the story, no matter how occasional these may be. It is left, in other words, to answer for itself equally with theirs: wherefore (by a parity of reasoning if not of example) Miriam's might without inconsequence be placed on the same footing; and all in spite of the fact that the "moral presence" of each of the men most importantly concerned with her—or with the second of whom she at least is importantly concerned—is independently answered for. The idea of the ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Pisa and Lucca—unless possibly the country between Lucca and Pistoia. If Pisa is dead Tuscany, Lucca is Tuscany still living and enjoying, desiring and intending. The town is a charming mixture of antique "character" and modern inconsequence; and! not only the town, but the country—the blooming romantic country which you admire from the famous promenade on the city-wall. The wall is of superbly solid and intensely "toned" brickwork and of extraordinary breadth, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... spoken of as "a crathur," and whose proceedings are more or less exempt from criticism. People often said of him that he had plenty of sense of his own, and the remark was to some extent explanatory, as a certain singularity in his way of viewing things even more than an occasional inconsequence and flightiness in his sayings and doings tended to establish the reputation for eccentricity which followed him closely as a shadow, and set an impalpable barrier between himself and his kind. As he advanced in life this was strengthened by his ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... tilt of her head that the pulse was another dumb servant that she had no use for. Then I thought I would tell her my symptoms and how I felt, so that she would understand the case; but that was another inconsequence, she did not need to know those things; moreover, my remark about how I felt was an abuse of language, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pose. If he comes to lecture on Cobbett and talks for three-quarters of an hour on how his hat blew off, it is not a pose, it is the natural inconsequence of Chesterton on the platform. If Shaw is invited to a dinner and writes that he does not eat dinner and does not care to see others doing nothing else, he is posing; but, if so, it is because he is ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... the Bank of England was for many years together obliged to coin gold to the extent of between eight hundred thousand pounds and a million a-year; or, at an average, about eight hundred and fifty thousand pounds. For this great coinage, the bank (inconsequence of the worn and degraded state into which the gold coin had fallen a few years ago) was frequently obliged to purchase gold bullion at the high price of four pounds an ounce, which it soon after issued in coin at ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... your pardon? Nero never did anything of the kind," Mangan observed, with a perfectly diabolical inconsequence, "for violins weren't invented ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... her hat and wraps with that manner of inconsequence which distinguishes the artistic temperament from the thrifty one, and passed on into the cozy dining-room. The maid had arranged some sandwiches and a bottle of light wine. She ate and drank, while intermittent smiles played across her merry face. Having satisfied ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... a state of revolution, he regarded murder and robbery as necessary incidents. When an unfortunate lady driving in the evening along a country road was shot dead beside her husband, whose only offence was that of being a landlord, the public were lectured for the inconsequence of their indignation. On the Dublin conspirators, who were watching to murder Mr. Forster, were not lost the lessons which Mr. Morley had been preaching on the vileness of the permanent officials at the Castle. They determined to murder Mr. Burke, and ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... looking back upon his own childhood. Plato, whom Coleridge claims as the first of his spiritual ancestors, Plato, as we remember him, a true humanist, holds his theories lightly, glances with a somewhat blithe and naive inconsequence from [70] one view to another, not anticipating the burden of importance "views" will one day have for men. In reading him one feels how lately it was that Croesus thought it a paradox to say that external prosperity was not necessarily ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... be ready to write on almost any subject under the sun at a minute's notice. In a certain class of old-fashioned literature the newspaper-writer is represented as a careless, dissipated Bohemian, who lived with rackety inconsequence. That tribe of writers has long vanished from the face of the earth. The last of the sort that I remember was a miserable old man who haunted the British Museum. No one knew where he lived; but his work, such as it was, usually went in with punctuality, and he drank the ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... eatables distinctly enticing.... Of course, if Claire had been introduced to any of these questionable delights by anybody short of a survivor of the Stillman clan, Mrs. Robson might have had a misgiving. As it was, she was not above a certain forewarning sense that made her say with an air of inconsequence as ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... his venerable aunt, relates that when the brilliant red flames burst into view behind the dark moon on the morning of the 8th of July, 1842, the populace of Milan, with the usual inconsequence of a crowd, raised the shout, "Es leben die Astronomen!"[175] In reality, none were less prepared for their apparition than the class to whom the applause due to the magnificent spectacle was thus adjudged. And in some measure through their own fault, for ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... heard from these two and other members of this incredible deputation of insurgent mutineers and of what I saw of the doings of the whole deputation, was vague and confused. From the confusion emerged a predominating sense of their many inconsistencies and of the haphazard irresponsibility and inconsequence of their states of mind and actions. They were, indeed, entirely consistent in one respect. Unlike Maternus and his men, not one of them blamed Commodus for anything, not even for having appointed ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... tea-caddy. "Do you think you've accomplished great things by coming? Judging by your manner of late, not to mention your looks, you haven't been drunk with happiness since you reached this town of historic importance and modern inconsequence. But of course—" she tilted the spout of the kettle into the teapot—"my suggestion that you stay where you belong was a mere woman's, and you saw fit to ignore it. Men like to bring blessings on their head—and my friend John Maxwell is ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... another time, remembering how his life had once a different shape, he will say, 'Many an hour I have spent in the strife of the good and the evil, but now it is the pleasure of my playmate of the empty days to draw my heart on to him; and I know not why this sudden call to what useless inconsequence.' An innocence, a simplicity that one does not find elsewhere in literature makes the birds and the leaves seem as near to him as they are near to children, and the changes of the seasons great events as before our thoughts had arisen between them and us. At times I wonder if he has it from the ...
— Gitanjali • Rabindranath Tagore
... further of the glove. But at night, in his bed, the glove was a principal actor in events of extraordinary magnitude and inconsequence. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Animation, oddity, inconsequence, all these things Margaret observed in Kitty during luncheon in a restaurant of the Merceria, and various incidents connected with it; animation above all. The Ashes fell in with acquaintance—a fashionable and harassed mother, on the fringe of the Archangels, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... well as the cabin of Hawkins, half-way up the ascent, until, by a circuitous route, at last she reached, unobserved, the summit. Before her rose, silent, darkened, and motionless, the object of her search. Here her courage failed her, with all the characteristic inconsequence of her sex. A sudden fear of all the dangers she had safely passed—bears, tarantulas, drunken men, and lizards—came upon her. For a moment, as she afterward expressed it, "she thought she should die." With this belief, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... Miss Lawrence on that fateful evening, his whole soul was full of unrest. He paced the quiet streets in that tense mood which makes thought and breath alike torture. Now that it was over, he said, with the inconsequence of love, that he had been a weak, cowardly fool to fear his fate too much; and yet the next instant he knew he would surely have lost it all, and that in time she must come to need him. If he could wait! Well, he would wait. He ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... I amuse people; I know it. You—and everybody—say I am all cleverness and froth—not to be taken seriously. But did it ever occur to you that what you see in me you evoke. Shallowness provokes shallowness, levity, lightness, inconsequence—all are answered by their own echo.... And you and the others think it ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... taken so strong a list to starboard that it was only with the utmost difficulty I could retain my footing upon her steeply inclined deck, while she was so much down by the stern that the sea was almost level with the deck right aft. Scarcely knowing what I did, acting with the inconsequence of one in a dream, I clawed my way across the bridge that led from the upper deck to the poop, and reached the taffrail, where I stood gazing blankly down into the black water, thinking, I am afraid, some rather rebellious thoughts. I must have stood thus for ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... said Augustina, with a wistful inconsequence, straining her eyes as though to look through the diamond panes of the window opposite, at the park and the ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was, it had not been there yesterday. Yesterday morning she had felt no desire to sit in the shallows and throw shells at crabs. Yesterday morning her mind had been full of that happy inconsequence which feels no need of thought. Today was different. Mentally she shook herself with some irritation. "What is the matter with you?" she asked. But the self she addressed seemed oddly reluctant. "Come now," said Desire, hitting an especially ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... of the problem of the girl's disappearance. He left the hotel in a state of thoughtfulness, fully realizing the difficulties of the task which lay before him in tracing Sisily's movements on the previous night, and discovering where she had flown. The deeper questions of motive and the inconsequence of some of her actions he preferred to leave till later. Action, and not mental analysis, was the need of the moment. Barrant prided himself on being a man of action, and he was also a detective. The thrill of ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... of absorption into the divine essence. For none has done more to fortify the patriarchal principle which from the earliest times governed the tribal family, and to establish the Hindu conception of the family as it prevails to the present day. With that curious inconsequence which frequently characterises Hindu thought, even when it professes to be ruled by the sternest logic, the belief that every rebirth is irrevocably determined by the law of Karma, i.e. in accordance with the sum total of man's ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... graduated kinship of moods would have been so great that irrelation was almost unavoidable with efforts so diverse. I must trust for right note-catching to those finely-touched spirits who can divine without half a whisper, whose intuitiveness is proof against all the accidents of inconsequence. In respect of the less alert, however, should any one's train of thought be thrown out of gear by a consecutive piping of vocal reeds in jarring tonics, without a semiquaver's rest between, and be led thereby to miss the writer's aim and meaning in one out of two contiguous compositions, ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... needed no injunction to that effort of avoidance. Many a London garret knows how I struggled with the unwelcome chamber-fellow. I marvel she did not abide with me to the end; it is a sort of inconsequence in Nature, and sometimes makes me vaguely uneasy through ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... Blaize and the Blue Door (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is frankly built after that famous plan this means no more than that Mr. BENSON has used, so to speak, the CARROLL formula as a medium for his agreeable fancies. These are altogether original and filled with the proper dream-spirit of inconsequence. Moreover the author has a pretty gift for remembering just the stuff that childhood's dreams are made of—such transfigured delights as swimming like fishes or flying in a company of birds; he knows ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... in fact, a hypochondriac sees them—he, Parsifal, this thin-blooded inheritor of rickets and an exhausted physical frame, is called the Redeemer, and becomes head of the Brotherhood of the Grail. Beside this inconsequence, all other inconsequences seem as nothing. One might ask, for instance, how, seeing that no man can save his brother's soul, Parsifal saves the soul of Amfortas? This is a fallacy that held Wagner all his life. We find it in "The Flying ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... Glover came in at that moment, and divested of his long raincoat and hat, he proved to be of a type that the Universities turn out by the hundred. He was good-looking too, Lydia noticed with feminine inconsequence, and there was something in his eyes that inspired trust. He nodded with a smile to Mrs. Rennett, then turned to ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... his uneasy walk. At the end of a quarter of an hour the servant came to let him know that his carriage was at the door. "Send it away," he said without hesitation. "I shan't use it." When the ladies had half-finished dinner he returned and joined them, with a formal apology to his wife for his inconsequence. ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little wantonized: but even in the describing of real and every day life, that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature—show more of that inconsequence, which has a natural alliance with frenzy,—than a great genius in his "maddest fits," as Withers somewhere calls them. We appeal to any one that is acquainted with the common run of Lane's novels,—as they existed some ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... notwithstanding her apparent inconsequence, had a keen eye for her guests, directed her conversation for a time into another channel, and finally changed places with Sarah in order to come into closer touch with a spiritualist from Sweden, who was on the lookout for a medium. Sarah ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had thought it, and by no means wanting in evidences of quiet strength if one forgave the funny little moustache which (now one came to, observe it seriously) was precisely what lent that possibly deceptive look of innocence and inconsequence, positively weakening the character of what might otherwise have been a countenance ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... to induce a seriously-minded person, such as she is represented, to throw aside for it all other considerations, the hastiness with which, on discovering her mistake, she entertains the idea of bestowing her hand, if not her heart, on another, is an exhibition of feminine inconsequence which no amount of previous misconduct on the part of her lover, Laurent, can justify. Further, Therese is self-deceived in supposing her passion to have died out with her esteem. She breaks with the culprit and engages ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... pleasant anticipation, instead of a season of dread, or, as with many it has been, of horror." It would be well for non-investigators who maintain that my father's belief in Spiritualism necessarily proves him to have been illogical, to see to it that they are not falling into the inconsequence which they are ascribing to him. Reasoning a priori, should we not believe that the man who saw so clearly the dangers which were unperceived by some of our keenest statesmen, could not become, except in a rare instance and for a short time, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... fashion she nimbly pursued a train of vitiated logic, passing from inconsequence to inconsequence. And O'Moy, thankful that she should take such a view this—mercifully hopeful that the last had been heard of his peccant and vexatious brother-in-law—content, more than content, to leave her ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... philosophers, ask that you retain, for our sakes, beauty of face and form, beauty of raiment, low, modulated voices, and a graceful carriage, faith, hope, and charity, even though you continue to reveal these last-named as at present with sweet, illogical inconsequence. More than this, we cannot do without the tender devotion, the unselfish forethought, the aspiring faith, which, even though we seem to mock and to be blind, saves us from the world and from ourselves. ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... blame her for altering her father's checks. That's nothing," observed Dora, with typical feminine inconsequence, "but letting people ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... least realization of his mother's actual sentiments in the matter. It was the consequence in inconsequence of a woman, which a man can seldom grasp. From what he had known of his mother's character heretofore, a girl coming from such a family would have been the last one to appeal to her for a daughter-in-law. She had been plainly ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... been very plentiful in that long-ago time. Old drunken Ben Blankenship never dreamed that pieces of his house would be carried off as relics because of the literary fame of his son Tom—a fame founded on irresponsibility and inconsequence. Orion Clemens, who was concerned with missionary work about this time, undertook to improve the Blankenships spiritually. Sam adopted them, outright, and took them to his heart. He was likely to be there at any hour of the day, and he and Tom had cat-call signals at night which would bring him ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a burglar. I came to rob. But I was a coward, or else I had a conscience, or else I knew my own unworthiness." There was a long pause. As both of them, whenever they heard the tune afterward, always remembered, the Hungarian band, with rare inconsequence, was playing the "Grizzly Bear," and people were trying to speak to Helen. By her they were received with a look of so complete a lack of recognition, and by Philip with a glare of such savage hate, that they retreated ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis |
