"Inconsequent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inconsequent about money and a great gambler; he told me one day in sorrow that his only chance of economising was to sell his horses and go to India to shoot big game, incidentally escaping ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... find the memorandum of dates which I have here set down for my own guidance more simply useful than those confused by record of unimportant persons and inconsequent events, which form the ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... the greatest value. Stevenson seems to have remembered the impressions of his childhood with accuracy, and he has recorded them without affectation, without sentimentality, without exaggeration. In depicting children he draws from life. He is at home in the mysteries of their play and in the inconsequent operations of their minds, in the golden haze of impressions in which they live. The references to children in his essays and books show the same understanding and sympathy. There is more than mere literary charm in what he says here. In ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... really be hard to find a worse case of this inconsequent sentimentalism than the theory of the British Empire advanced by Mr. Roosevelt himself in his attack on Sentimentalists. For the Imperial theory, the Roosevelt and Kipling theory, of our relation to Eastern races is simply one of eating ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... object which he never saw before.—I have as little torment of this kind as any creature alive; and yet I honestly confess, that many a thing gave me pain, and that I blush'd at many a word the first month,—which I found inconsequent and perfectly innocent ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... was inconsequent and rambling. For a considerable time it led nowhere. Miss Ironsyde was taciturn. It occupied all her energies to conceal the fact that she was suffering a good deal of physical pain. She made no original suggestions. Churchouse, according ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... old gentleman sits quite apart, disgusted with the whole unimpressive scene. Everybody is trifling, and no one is serious for the occasion. The furnishings of the room are beautiful, delicate, almost frivolous. People are strewn about like flowers, and the whole effect is airy and inconsequent. Fortuny painted also "The Praying Arab," "A Fantasy of Morocco," "Snake Charmers," "Camels ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... they sat and watched the white river fog rise toward them, translucent and distant at first, and then blowing upon them in gusty, impalpable billows. Timothy's tongue was loosened by the understanding in the little girl's eyes and he poured out to her the wise foolishness of his inconsequent and profound faery lore. He told her what was in the fog for him, the souls of mountain people long dead, who came back to their home heights thus. He related long tales of the doings of the leprechaun, with ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... Lying Tale in Henderson's Folk-Lore, first edition, p. 337, a Suffolk one, "Happy Borz'l," in Suffolk Notes and Queries, while a similar jingle of inconsequent absurdities, commencing "So he died, and she unluckily married the barber, and a great bear coming up the street popped his head into the window, saying, 'Do you sell any soap'?" is said to have been invented by Charles ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... expressing thanks for an unexpected joy, so true it is that everything is turned to use and is modified under the empire of our instinct. Certainly, there is no similarity between this and the superfluous action, the inconsequent movements determined by the working of a rule without a reason. And this is so because in all that instinct suggests, it is the Supreme Artist himself who disposes of us and acts in us, while whatever is suggested ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... conjecture, highly entertained. I think you may take it, too, that a certain healthy sort of children will like to have these queer stories read aloud. The villainies of the Baba Yaga, an old witch of terrific resourcefulness, and the oddly inconsequent animal stories should make particular appeal. But you will be hard put to it to answer the questions which will be thrust at you; and (by the way) perhaps you will discreetly have to leave out a phrase or two for prudence' sake. On no account let the youngsters ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... given her permission to do so, and Eva denying it. The child sat listening in her little chair with a look of dawning intelligence of wrath and wicked temper in her face, because she was herself in a manner the cause of the dissension. Suddenly Andrew Brewster, with a fiery outburst of inconsequent masculine wrath with the whole situation, essayed to cut the Gordian knot. He grabbed the little dress of bright woollen stuff, which lay partly made upon the table, and crammed it into the stove, ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... at the crossing of a street; a heavy dray was lumbering slowly past them. Georgina, as she stood there, turned her face to her lover, and rested her eyes for some moments on his own. At last: "Nothing will help us; I don't think we are very happy," she answered, while her strange, ironical, inconsequent smile played about her ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... afternoon the inconsequent dotard had employed a telephone to summon his car to transport him to the links, and had denied even a glance of acknowledgment at the wonder floating above him. Much like that is growing Newbern. There was gasping aplenty when Winona Penniman abandoned ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... though rather fragmentary and inconsequent, recollections of our three summer excursions ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... crime is both direct and indirect. We see its direct influence in those crimes which are committed whilst the culprit is either in a state of intoxication or else just recovering from such a state. To detect and trace its indirect influence a much closer study is required. The inconsequent, lazy and thriftless life of the criminal demands some sort of stimulant, and this is found readily at hand in alcohol. Alcohol is not the cause of the crimes of these people but it is closely associated with ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... me of the time we came so near crossing together," he broke out, diverting the subject in his inconsequent fashion. "D'ye remember that Dr. Mead who dressed our wounds for us after our little argument? It appears that he and a Dr. Woodward fell into some professional dispute as to how a case should be treated, and Lud! nothing would satisfy ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... cried. "I believe, if only your husband could get over his horror of the scandal and talk, that a separation would be best for you both. It is not as if he cared for you. One can see he does not. You are such a strange, inconsequent being, Hadria, that I believe you would feel the parting far more than ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... her quick mind to work upon that, and then make the inconsequent retort, which he accepted as perfectly sagacious, because, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... however, on which health depends, are infinitely complex and immensely extended. They sweep the whole material universe and are intertwined most closely with all social and passionate forces, with their incalculable mechanical springs. Meantime the mind begins by being a feeble and inconsequent ghost. Its existence is intermittent and its visions unmeaning. It fails to conceive its own interests or the situations that might support or defeat those interests. If it pictures anything clearly, it is only some phantastic image which ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and in a few minutes they were bending busily over the broken plaque, as interested and eager about it as if no subject of more vital importance had ever distracted them. They were like two children together, often as quarrelsome, always as inconsequent; happy hard at work, and equally happy idling; apt to torment each other at times about trifles, but always ready to forget and forgive, and with that habit in common of forgetting everything utterly but the occupation ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... Adj. intuitive, instinctive, impulsive; independent of reason, anterior to reason; gratuitous, hazarded; unconnected. unreasonable, illogical, false, unsound, invalid; unwarranted, not following; inconsequent, inconsequential; inconsistent; absonous^, absonant^; unscientific; untenable, inconclusive, incorrect; fallacious, fallible; groundless, unproved; non sequitur [Lat.], it does not follow. deceptive, sophistical, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... any pleasure or pain. Fourthly, when she doth dissemble, and covertly and falsely either doth or saith anything. Fifthly, when she doth either affect or endeavour anything to no certain end, but rashly and without due ratiocination and consideration, how consequent or inconsequent it is to the common end. For even the least things ought not to be done, without relation unto the end; and the end of the reasonable creatures is, to follow and obey him, who is the reason as it were, and the law of this great city, and ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... be given of strange and inconsequent reasoning; but I shall only adduce the following. He reproaches the Pharisees, Luke xi. 47, 48, for building and adorning the sepulchres of the Prophets, whom their wicked fathers slew; and says to them, "Your fathers ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... weeks of their absence he had scarcely even mentioned his grandfather. He had been gay and inconsequent, or fiercely passionate in his devotion to her. But of his loss he had never spoken, and vaguely she had known that he had shut it out of his life with that other grim shadow that dwelt behind the locked door she might not open. She had not deemed him heartless, but she had ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... very happy and delightful time. I was living among friends who were all very hard at work, and the very contrast of my freedom with their servitude was enlivening. I was able, too, to think over my schoolmastering experience; and the result was The Upton Letters, an inconsequent but I think lively book, also published anonymously and rather disregarded by reviewers. But the book was talked about and read; and for the next year or two I worked with indefatigable zest at writing. I brought out monographs ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... as if it were a picnic. She had never seen him so cheery and inconsequent. It was as if he also were engaged in some species of make-believe. Or was it the enchantment of spring that had fallen upon them both? Dinah could not have said. She only knew that she had never felt so happy in all ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... and willowy; without the massive face and temperamental stolidity of the average squaw. "Lit-lit," so called from her fashion, even as a child, of being fluttery, of darting about from place to place like a butterfly, of being inconsequent and merry, and of laughing as lightly as she darted and ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... for ethical authority its editorials might be compared only to the Herald's; for disinterested principle the Sun alone could compare with it; it had all the lively enterprise and virile, restless energy of the Tribune; all the gay, inconsequent, and frothy sparkle of the Evening Post; all the risky popularity of the Outlook. It was a very, very great New York daily. What on ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... consulting clergymen upon curious personal matters—matters upon which a lawyer or a doctor should rather be consulted. He himself had never encouraged such confidences. What did he keep curates for? His curates had saved him many a long hour of talk with inconsequent men and illogical women who had come to him with their stories. What were to him the stories of men whose wives were giving them trouble? What were to him the stories of wives who had difficulties with their housemaids or who could not keep their boys from reading pirate literature? ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... madly inconsequent jumble it all was! Little more than two hours ago he was driving through the Bois with no other notion in his brain than to seek a means of earning a livelihood; yet here he was at the Gare de l'Est carrying a sword as a symbol of kingship. A sword, wrapped in brown paper, tied with string! ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... excited kitten, and kitten-wise badly wants to tumble over and worry it; for it is made of bits of wool, which, as every sensible baby knows, were only put in to be pulled out. She resists the temptation, however, and presents the ball to Tara with a somewhat inconsequent "Tankou!" "Tankou!" returns Tara politely, and tosses the ball again. This time Evu sits down with her back to Tara, and proceeds to investigate the ball. It is perfectly fascinating. The ends are all loose and quite easily pulled out. Evu forgets all about Tara in her keen desire ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... treat with the Provisional Government "on a de facto footing";[2] and, while pouring cold water upon him with one hand, with the other they gave him money. This mode of action was the result of a compromise, achieved at the Boulogne Conference, between France and her partners. A feeble and inconsequent way of doing things, no doubt. But to be consequent and powerful, a partnership must be bottomed on some common interest or sentiment; and such in the Greek question, as already ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... had kicked kept a kind of half-witted conscience or cowardice, for he stood staring at the senseless body and murmuring words of inconsequent self-justification, making gestures with his hands as if he were arguing with somebody. But the other three, with a mere whoop and howl of victory, were boarding the car on three sides at once. It was exactly ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... looked so upset about it. But you know the fellow's way; whenever it's important for him to make himself clear he loses what little power of speech he has, becomes worse than dumb-unintelligible. He sputtered inconsequent ejaculations at me in ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... from time to time she suddenly flushed or paled; it was true that her mind seemed incapable of the slightest consecutive thought; it was true that she seemed to be in a dream, peopled by crazily inconsequent images—she had again and again a vision, startlingly vivid, of the red-twigged osier beside which she had stood; it was true that she had a slight feeling of vertigo when she tried to think ahead of the next moment—but still she was ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... mood of passion passed as quickly as it came; and she answered her companions with a tantalizing, sparkling smile, rallying them on their seriousness, and flashing whimsicalities around the circle like some splendid, inconsequent fire-fly. ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... recommended by most critics, are the fragments "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel"; but in dealing with these the reader may do well to form his own judgment. Both fragments contain beautiful lines, but as a whole they are wandering, disjointed, inconsequent,—mere sketches, they seem, of some weird dream of mystery or terror which Coleridge is trying in ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Earl could utter any comment on a suggestion so surprising, and at that particular moment so inconsequent. Was his daughter not weighing—with prayer, he hoped, and certainly with all her senses—the prospect of an alliance with the Duke of Marshire? How, then, could she pause in a meditation of such vital interest to make capricious remarks about a ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... had long struck me as mistress, in her levity, of one of the happiest of forms—the only objection to my use of which was a certain extraordinary benightedness on the part of the Anglo-Saxon reader. One had noted this reader as perverse and inconsequent in respect to the absorption of "dialogue"—observed the "public for fiction" consume it, in certain connexions, on the scale and with the smack of lips that mark the consumption of bread-and-jam by a children's school-feast, consume ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... peered out, there came to me a sudden, inconsequent memory of that last journey among the Outer worlds. I remembered the sudden vision that had come to me, as I neared the Solar System, of the fast whirling planets about the sun—as though the governing quality of time had been held in abeyance, ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... and cogency which is apt to be mistaken for sound logic. He supports glaring paradoxes with an array of ingenious arguments, and with fatal facility and apparent precision he deduces from his unfounded premises a series of inconsequent conclusions, which he regards as authoritative and universally applicable. At times he becomes less rigid, as when (under the influence of Montesquieu) he studies the relations between the physical constitution of a nation, its territory, ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... upon the principles of the old Samaritans. So these nations feared Jehovah, and served their graven images, both their children, and their children's children; as did their Fathers, so do they unto this day." 2 Kings xvii 41. Their religion is as inconsistent and inconsequent as the conduct of Nebuchadnezzar; who "answered unto Daniel, and said, of a truth it is that your God is a God of Gods, and a Lord of Lords," Dan. ch. ii. 47. And who, notwithstanding, set up an idol of gold, and commanded all peoples, nations, and languages to fall down and worship ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... the goose, for the gander Is sauce, ye inconsequent fair! It is better to laugh than to maunder, And better is mirth than despair; And though Life's not all beer and all skittles, Yet the Sun, on occasion, can shine, And, mon Dieu! he's a fool who ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... had proceeded a couple of hundred yards, he still making inconsequent remarks, his right arm round my neck and my left arm round his middle, suddenly he collapsed in a dead faint, and as his weight was more than I could carry, I had to ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... characteristic stamp of violent mental agitation. In real life we often see a man under the influence of rage, or fear, or indignation, or beside himself with jealousy, or with some other out of the interminable list of human passions, begin a sentence, and then swerve aside into some inconsequent parenthesis, and then again double back to his original statement, being borne with quick turns by his distress, as though by a shifting wind, now this way, now that, and playing a thousand capricious variations on his words, his thoughts, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... the subject. Dick was often rather casual and inconsequent, but there was a stubborn vein in him. When he took the trouble to think a matter out he was apt to ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... sweetness? Possibly these early flowers are destined to produce fruit for the admiration of living things upon which the gardener bestows anything but a welcome. It may come to maturity just after the wet season, when flies and moths feast and corrupt in riot which provokes to wrath. Inconsequent feeders, they probe the fruit and flit away after a sip which does not absorb a thousandth part of its keen juices, or they use a comely specimen in which to deposit eggs, which in the course of Nature ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... meteorologist what the elements of the planetary orbits are to the astronomer; but, unlike planetary perturbations, the weather makes the most reckless excursions from its averages, and obscures them by a most inconsequent and incalculable fickleness. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the influences brought to bear on them," Uchimura said to me in his decisive way, "there will be laid bare to you the foundations of Japan. You know our proverb, of course, No wa kuni no taihon nari ('Agriculture is the basis of a nation')? Have you been to Nikko?" This seemed a little inconsequent, but I told him I had not yet been to Nikko. ("Until you have seen Nikko," runs the adage, "do not say 'splendid'.") "How many of the tourists who are delighted with Nikko," he went on, "have heard how the richest farms near ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... had made love to me when he was just out of petticoats and I was in short dresses. I stretched or shortened the truth a little, but it was a case of necessity. Then I intimated that I never would have married Ned Temple, anyway, and THAT worked beautifully. She turned upon me in such a delightfully inconsequent fashion and demanded to know what I expected, and declared her husband was good enough for any woman. Then I said I did not doubt that, and hinted that other women might have had their romances, even if they did not marry. That immediately interested her. She stared at me, and said, ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... which we intuitively feel as consistent with our highest thoughts, noblest moods, and best resolutions. This is distinguished from the merely sensuous, as represented sometimes in Berlioz, Goldmark, Gounod, and the like; and the fantastic, inconsequent, and irresponsible, as represented, for instance, in ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... avoidance of the scene a ne pas faire as in his divination of the obligatory scene. There is always the chance that no one may miss a scene demanded by logic or psychology; but an audience knows too well when it has been bored or distressed by a superfluous, or inconsequent, or wantonly ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... doing our best for her. We're making her want to live." And Kate again watched her. "To-night she does want to live." She spoke with a kindness that had the strange property of striking him as inconsequent—so much, and doubtless so unjustly, had all her clearness been an implication of the ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... October Sixth, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four, is this: "Called on Dante Rossetti. Saw Miss Siddal, looking thinner and more death-like, and more beautiful and more ragged than ever; a real artist, a woman without parallel for many a long year. Gabriel as usual diffuse and inconsequent in his work. Drawing wonderful and lovely Guggums one after another, each one a fresh charm, each one stamped with immortality, and his picture never advancing. However, he is at the wall and I am to get him a white calf and a cart to paint here; ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... did not ask if the mother lived; the question was inconsequent. No mother would have sent her daughter into the world with such a wardrobe. Straitened circumstances would not have mattered; a mother would have managed somehow. In the '80s such a dress would have indicated considerable financial ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... home Rosebud at last found reason to grumble at his silence. She had chattered away the whole time in her light-hearted, inconsequent fashion, and at last asked him a question to which she required more than a nod of the head in reply. And she had to ask it three times, a ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... an unmeaning grin, his eyes, which ran water against his will, fixed in mild reproach upon my beaming uncle, turning but once, I recall, to my solicitous self. With no unseemly outbreak—with but an inconsequent ahem and a flirt of his handkerchief over his lips—he returned to his composure. He would never again drink rum with my uncle, nor any other liquor, through all the years of our intimate connection; but this mattered ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... smiled. "I should be one if I allowed it to annoy me. My little girl, I wish I could make you see how trivial, how inconsequent such things are. No human being is a 'nobody' who is faithful to the best that is in him. It doesn't make much real difference what people say of us, as long as we keep an honest heart and serve God and our fellow ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... Nobody came into the street. There was nothing to happen. It might have been an hour before Dan Anderson leaned over, picked up a splinter to whittle, and went on with his story, back of which I was long before this well convinced there remained some topic concealed, albeit beneath inconsequent and picturesque details. ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... magnified), but they were sufficiently prominent in him to have a determining effect upon his mind. Thus he was distinguished less for broad views than for an extraordinary faculty for detail; when he attempts to generalise we are likelier to get a flood of inconsequent prejudices than a steady flow ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... her. Consider that she has been unfortunate in her associates. Consider that she has been a petted child all her life, and that you have helped to pet her. Consider how much your sex always do to weaken the moral sense of women, by liking and admiring them for being weak and foolish and inconsequent, so long as it is pretty and does not come in your way. I do not mean you in particular, John; but I mean that the general course of society releases pretty women from any sense of obligation to be constant in duty, or brave in meeting emergencies. You yourself have encouraged Lillie to ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that the House received a shock which loosed another riot, but one of a kind different from that which greeted Representative Rollinson's vote on the "Breaker." The reading-clerk had sung his way through an inconsequent bill; most of the members were buried in newspapers, gossiping, idling, or smoking in the lobbies, when a loud, cracked voice was heard shrilly ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... completer and far less messy job than the bludgeon; and that there is in politics room for the delicate art of jiu-jitsu. Further, the Ontario mind was under the sway of that singular misconception, so common to Britishers, that a Frenchman by temperament is gay, romantic, inconsequent, with few reserves of will and perseverance. Whereas the good French mind is about the coolest, clearest, least emotional instrument of the kind that there is. The courtesy, grace, charm, literary and artistic ability that go with it are merely accessories; ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... measured. A vulgar woman, and now justly incensed, Mrs. Pepys spared him no detail of suffering. She was violent, threatening him with the tongs; she was careless of his honor, driving him to insult the mistress whom she had driven him to betray and to discard; worst of all, she was hopelessly inconsequent in word and thought and deed, now lulling him with reconciliations, and anon flaming forth again with the original anger. Pepys had not used his wife well; he had wearied her with jealousies, even while himself unfaithful; he had grudged her clothes and pleasures, while lavishing ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... which Nugent had started in my mind; I was honestly indignant at his uselessly disturbing me with the vainest of all vain hopes. The one wise thing to do in the future, was to caution this flighty and inconsequent young man to keep his mad notion about Lucilla to himself—and to dismiss it from my own thoughts, at once ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... feminine and inconsequent—had sighed for country and sunshine, had longed for a ramble in the woods, the music of the birds, the sight of the meadows sugared ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... ragged man, surprised and plainly grateful that one holding a supremely high position in the community should vouchsafe to remember a fact relating to so inconsequent an atom as himself. "But I ain't heared it fur so long I come mighty nigh furgittin' it sometimes, myself. You see, Judge Priest, when I wasn't nothin' but jest a shaver folks started in to callin' me Peep—on account of my last name bein' O'Day, ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... not confine himself to purposeless copying, without thought, each blade of grass, as commended by the inconsequent, but, in the long curve of the narrow leaf, corrected by the straight tall stem, he learns how grace is wedded to dignity, how strength enhances sweetness, that elegance ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... "no one can be called a criminal until he has been so adjudged by the courts. Happily a man's honor does not depend upon the inconsequent, malicious opinion of others. On the contrary blame should attach to him who condemns the accused without a hearing. No constituted power, whether that of king or judge, has yet convicted me of any culpable action. Apart from the courtesy ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... pace up and down the room. "That's your beastly America, where everything goes by freaks—where everything is queer and inconsequent and tortuous, and you can't ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... smile at her, and for the sake of the smile—she knew of none other just like it—she forgave him for involving her in the labours she already clearly foresaw were to be hers. How precisely like Red Pepper Burns it was to plan for a "stag" dinner in this inconsequent way! If it had been a coming operation, now, no detail of preparation would have been too insignificant to command his attention. But in the present instance unquestionably all he had done was to appear at the door of the kitchen and casually inform Cynthia that eight or nine men were coming to ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... details, but clear about the outcome of her expedition with Prosy. They perfectly understood each other, and it wasn't anybody else's concern; present company's, of course, excepted. Questioned as to plans for the future—inasmuch as a marriage did not seem inconsequent under the circumstances—Sally became enigmatical. The word "marriage" had not been so much as mentioned. She admitted the existence of the institution, but proposed—now and for the future—to regard it as premature. ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... woman breezed on to another subject in the light, inconsequent fashion she had, and presently deserted Yeager to meet the badinage of an extra sitting ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... captain for the moment, but the next instant he startled us all with an utterly inconsequent question, having no reference to what he had before been ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... to overwhelm the republic, for, in the face of the supreme danger, as is usual in such cases, every party jealousy was forgotten. The proud commoner accepted the command with alacrity, setting out for distant Gaul immediately, and taking Sulla as one of his subordinates. After two years of inconsequent strategy, he overcame the barbarians at a spot twelve miles distant from Aqu Sexti (the Springs of Sextius, the modern Aix, in Provence), (B.C. 102). He collected the richest of the spoil to grace a triumph that he expected to celebrate, and was about to offer the remainder to the gods, ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... her coachman into helpless intoxication, had invested himself in the domestic's livery, and had driven off with the lady in the darkness after the performance to the outskirts of the town. What happened exactly, the McMurrays did not know; but there was the devil to pay in Vienna. And yet this inconsequent libertine did the following before my own eyes. We were walking down Piccadilly together one afternoon in the hard winter of 1894. It was a black frost, agonizingly cold. A shivering wretch held out matches for sale. His hideous red toes protruded through his boots. "My God, my God!" ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... of cats are curious things, no doubt, and few may guess their furry, silent pathways as they go winding along their length of inconsequent development. For, softer than any mouse, the children glided swiftly into the next room where Mother slept beneath the book- shelves—two shining little radiant figures, hand in hand. They tried for a moment to pull out Mother too, but found her difficult ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... her distress, was silent for a moment or two, then suddenly smiled upon him—a sunny inconsequent smile. "Guess I've got you on my side now," she said with satisfaction. "You're nice and solid, Mr. Jake Bolton. When you've been picked up from the very bottom of the sea, it's good to have someone big and safe to hold ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... just did," she answered untruthfully. "You see—you see, I'm not strong yet, and my mind rambled around in an inconsequent sort of way. It just happened on cats. But, Francis, you mustn't reproach yourself. I know you are feeling altogether too badly about what you did. But you mustn't. That's just the way you're made. You haven't nice tame emotions, and in a way you're better ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... the flight. The air was too full. One wearied of the ceaseless panorama of the gay bejewelled insects. They were the possessors of the prime of that glorious morning. Beautiful and frail, and inconsequent as they were, you envied them. They flitted on without guide or leader, venturing the dangers of water and air, flying up in the full blaze of the sun—eager, joyous, unconcerned. In the boat we were compelled to loll about between heaven and the cool coral groves, and compare enforced inactivity ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... stories of the kind," I replied. "Genuine ghost stories are generally abrupt and inconsequent in the extreme, but on this very account all the more impressive. Don't ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... had been, down to the latest casual man whose eyes had grown alert and appreciative as they rested upon her, there was needed only that matchless candor she could throw into a look or clothe with an inconsequent clause—for she had talked always in broken clauses—to weave about her immeasurable illusions, immeasurable distances, immeasurable light. To create souls in men, to create fine happiness and fine despair she must remain deeply proud—proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... she, a little wistfully as it seems to him, every trace of late sauciness now gone, and with it the sudden shyness. After many days the professor grows accustomed to these sudden transitions that are so puzzling yet so enchanting, these rapid, inconsequent, but always lovely changes ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... impeachment—and that without appeal to The Cleveland Plain Dealer of eleven years ago ("slushy and disgusting"), or to The New York Post ("sterile and malodorous ... worse than immoral—dull"), or to Ainslee's Magazine ("inconsequent and rambling ... rather nauseating at times"). These devotees of the adjective that hunts in pairs are hardly to be discussed, I suppose, in connection with any rewards except such as accrue to the possessors ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... noble thoughts, thoughts that pass across his heart like great white birds." Such thoughts came often to MacDowell—they seem always to be hovering not far from the particular territory to which his inspiration has led him, even when he is most gayly inconsequent; and in his finest and largest utterances, in the sonatas, their majestic trend appears somehow to have suggested the sweeping and splendid flight of the musical idea. Not often subtle in impulse or recondite in mood, his art ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... gloomy, and a premonition of winter was in the air. Evelyn sat down on a bench under a pine-tree, and began to weep quite unrestrainedly. She did not know why. She heard the song of the pine over her head, and it seemed to increase her apparently inconsequent grief. In reality she wept the tears of the world, the same which a new-born child sheds. Her sorrow was the mysterious sorrow of existence itself. She wept because of the world, and her life in it, ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and found Calmar Bye, the city man, metamorphosed indeed. Bronzed, bearded, corduroy-clothed, cigarette-smoking,—for cigars fifty miles from a railroad are a curiosity,—as the seasons are dissimilar, so was he unlike his former inconsequent self. In his every action now was a directness and a purpose of which he had not even a conception ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Lady B, to be of this dinner, as I had heard nothing but good of her; but I am now disabused on her subject: she is past her first youth, has very little instruction, is inconsequent, and subject to caution; but having evaded with one of her pretenders, her reputation has been committed by the bad faith of a friend, on whose fidelity she reposed herself; she is, therefore fallen into devotion, goes no more to spectacles, and play is ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... to leave this little book with me, Mrs. Hornby," he said, breaking in upon that lady's inconsequent babblings, "and, as I may possibly put it in evidence, it would be a wise precaution for you and Miss Gibson to sign your names—as small as possible—on the page which bears Mr. Reuben's thumb-mark. That will anticipate any suggestion ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... and discursive, never really results in deep thinking. He is content to embroider his pattern out of the stray fancies of an imaginative nature. His best known work, the Religio Medici, is a random confession of belief and thoughts, full of the inconsequent speculations of a man with some knowledge of science but not deeply or earnestly interested about it, content rather to follow the wayward imaginations of a mind naturally gifted with a certain poetic quality, than to engage in serious intellectual exercise. ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... the silence was broken by speech, and it was as though a cloud had passed over the sun. For, with the first word spoken, misunderstanding began; and, for a time at all events, they drifted far apart, each out of sight and knowledge of the other's soul. Had Snarley begun by saying something inconsequent or irrelevant, had he proposed to build three tabernacles, or cried, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man," or quoted the words of some inapplicable Scripture that was being fulfilled—there might have been no rupture. But, as it was, he spoke to the point, ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... been difficult indeed to say who enjoyed it the most. Hal was in great form, and Sir Edwin Crathie half unconsciously took his tone from her, dropping his usual attitude towards women he liked, and adopting instead one as gay and careless and inconsequent as hers. ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... a Job's comforter at hand to put these black thoughts into my head they would not have helped me nor harmed me much. My whole heart had been set on getting my sights, and filled with the inconsequent hope that in getting them I somehow would be bettering my chances of coming out safe at last; and so it seemed to me when I could not get them—and in this, though the sight-taking had nothing to do with ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... psychology which I advance is only a necessary consequence of the cellular physiology promulgated by Virchow. His present opposition to the former is either a renunciation of the latter or an untenable and inconsequent position. To explain this astonishing metapsychosis, we shall do well first to glance at the soul in general, and then give ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... Seville became a social centre, for his young wife, beautiful, witty, and accomplished, was a born leader of society. She now had to the full the opportunity of studying those types of Spanish ladies and gentlemen whose gay, inconsequent chatter she has so brilliantly reproduced in her novels dealing with high life. The Marquis died in 1835, and after two years she again married, this time the lawyer De Arrom. Losing his own money and hers, he went as Spanish consul to Australia, where he died in 1863. She remained ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... all said who knew him, of whose large soul so many large deeds were demanded that he had no time for little and inconsequent things—indeed, scarce knew that they existed. To think, to feel, to create, to achieve—these were his absorbing tasks; and so exigent were the demands on his great intellectual resources that he seemed never to know the existence of ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... she go? Or rather, to what place was she taken? Somewhere near; somewhere within easy reach, for the alarm soon rose and then she could not be found. Mrs. Ocumpaugh, I am going to ask you an apparently trivial and inconsequent question. Was Gwendolen ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... long, the longest I've ever spent. Sometimes she seemed to sleep, sometimes whispered to herself about her mother, her grandfather, the garden, or her cats—all sorts of inconsequent, trivial, even ludicrous memories seemed to throng her mind—never once, I think, did she speak of Zachary, but, now and then, she asked the time.... Each hour she grew visibly weaker. John Ford sat by her without moving, his heavy breathing was often the only sound; sometimes ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... English woman would have inquired the genesis of so inconsequent a question, but Lady Alicia followed the trend of my thought, and answered at once as if my query ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... and who in his heart of hearts has not been only too well aware that they are nocturnal, exclusively nocturnal. The shadows of evening bring with them visitors; prying, curious visitors; grim and ghastly visitors; grey, esoteric visitors; visitors from a world seemingly inconsequent, wholly incomprehensible. Mrs. Gordon did not believe in ghosts. She scoffed at the idea of ghosts, and, like so many would-be wits, unreasonably brave by day, and the reverse by night, had hitherto attributed banshees and the like to cats and other animals. But now,—now ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... her recovery from the paralyzed mood of the former day, while she had resolved not to blast utterly the happiness of her present husband by revealing the history of the departed one, she had also determined to indulge a certain odd, inconsequent, feminine sentiment of decency, to the small extent to which it could do no harm to any person. At Redrutin she emerged from the railway carriage in the black attire purchased at the shop, having during the transit made the change in the empty compartment she had chosen. The other clothes were ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... taught me the rudiments,' I began; and with that he led me on to talk of her, but with some cunning. For now he would divert me to another topic and again bring me back to her, so that it all seemed the vagrancies of a boy's inconsequent chatter. ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... to the chorus her sorrow at the reported death of Orestes and her fond memories of his babyhood—-with the most homely details; and the most striking realistic touch is perhaps the broken structure and almost inconsequent utterance of the old faithful slave's speech. These two are veritable figures drawn from contemporary life; and though both appear only once, and are quite unimportant in the drama, the innovation is most significant, and especially as adopted by ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... it, threshing out the question why the note he strained every chord to pitch for common ears should invariably insist on addressing itself to the angels. Being, as it were, ourselves the angels we had only a limited quarrel in each case with the event; but its inconsequent character, given the forces set in motion, was peculiarly baffling. It was like an interminable sum that wouldn't come straight; nobody had the time to handle so many figures. Limbert gathered, to make his pudding, dry bones and dead husks; how then ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... beginning to smile again. He was still more perplexed, for this inconsequent smile made nothing clear, though it seemed to prove, indeed, that she had a sweetness and softness that reverted instinctively to the pardon of offenses. "It has never occurred to Mr. Winterbourne to offer me any tea," she said with her ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... one grows, the less one wonders at the sudden, inconsequent turns which an apparently reasonable person will make in a line of conduct. Still I must say that I was not prepared for what Mrs. H. Boardman Jameson did in about a week after she had declared that her daughter ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... back questioning whether I was the victim of a hallucination or just an everyday fool. To satisfy myself on this important question I looked about for the hall-boy, with the intention of asking him if he had seen any such person go out, but that young and inconsequent scamp was missing from his post as usual, and there was no one within sight to ...
— The Gray Madam - 1899 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... unobserved. But the babble of voices seemed to pursue her. She stood for a moment on the steps and felt as if the people were all preparing to stream out of the drawing room after her, to surround her, and keep up the distracting buzz in her ears by their idle inconsequent talk. Their horses were prancing about the drive; their empty carriages, with cushions awry and wraps flung untidily down on the seats, or even hanging over the doors and grazing the dusty wheels, gave her a sense of disorder and discomfort from which she felt ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... left his prison-doors noisily declaring that the rest of his life should be "devoted to Christian chivalry"—whatever that majestic dictum may mean. As regards his subsequent journalistic career I can observe only that it has been unfortunate as inconsequent. He took up the defence, abusing the Home Secretary after foulest fashion of the card-blooded murderer Lipski, with the result that his protege was hanged after plenary confession and the Editor had not the manliness to apologise. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... with involuntary trepidation, until he realized that it was not Budge Street, that he was a happy alien to its squalor, that he was a butterfly, a thing of woods and hedgerows fluttering for an inconsequent moment in the gloom. He came among them, none knew whence he was going, none knew whither. He was conscious of being a creature of mystery. He pitied the fettered youth of these begrimed and joyless towns—slaves, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... example, tired himself by their scramble under the hot sun, and contented himself for a while by turning a deaf ear and polite, little mechanical gestures to her perennial flow of inconsequent chatter, which seemed quite impervious to fatigue, while he rested his eyes on the charming prospect at their feet; the ragged descent of red rocks, broken here and there by patches of burnt grass and pink mallows, the little sea-girt ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Musset, or the many agreeable dialogues and monologues of the French domestic stage, than of any work of English or American hands. His softly ironical yet affectionate treatment of feminine ways is especially admirable. In his numerous types of sweetly illogical, inconsistent, and inconsequent womanhood he has perpetuated with a nicer art than Dickens what Thackeray calls "that great ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... glance as no member of the Madden family. Her immaturity (but fifteen, she looked two years older) appeared in nervous restlessness, and in her manner of speaking, childish at times in the hustling of inconsequent thoughts, yet striving to imitate the talk of her seniors. She had a good head, in both senses of the phrase; might or might not develop a certain beauty, but would assuredly put forth the fruits of intellect. Her mother, an invalid, was spending ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... which the men of future centuries were yet to discover throughout the peninsula. Prince Henry, as may be seen by his perseverance up to this time, was not a man to have his purposes diverted by such criticism, much of which must have been, in his eyes, worthless and inconsequent in the extreme. Nevertheless, he had his own misgivings. His captains came back one after another with no good tidings of discovery, but with petty plunder gained, as they returned from incursions ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... light, inconsequent laugh; sharply he turned. She had opened the window of his smoking-den and was standing in the entrance with impudent merriment in her eyes. There was triumph also in her pose—a triumph that sent a swirl of hot passion ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... and his language became more and more incoherent and inconsequent. He addressed himself at one moment to the representatives of the people, who were quite overcome by astonishment; at another to the military in the courtyard, who could not hear him. Then, by an unaccountable transition, he spoke of "the thunderbolts of war!" and added, that ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... deep sea were better things than the incense and banners at St. Peter's; he had asserted that the purring of kittens was sweeter to the Father of all than the thunder of a mighty organ played in the noblest cathedral ever made with hands. All these foolish and inconsequent comparisons, uttered thoughtlessly by Barron's lips while his mind was on his picture, seemed very fine to Joan; and the finer because she did not understand them. Again, Joe rarely listened to her; this man always ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... Mr. Floyd found on the table when he got up early next morning did not begin "I am much surprised," and it was such a motherly, respectful, inconsequent, regretful letter that he kept it for many years; long after his marriage with Miss Wimbush, of Andover; long after he had left the village. For he asked for a parish in Sheffield, which was given him; and, sending for Archer, Jacob, and John to say good-bye, he told them to ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... at once, without instruction, what we find it extremely difficult to learn ourselves; for a large portion of mankind prove themselves utterly unable ever to discriminate between sound arguments and those which are utterly inconsequent ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... wrong thing will be done, as well as a probability, falling little short of certainty, that all the ships of the rear will not do the same thing; that is, they will be thrown into confusion with all its dire train of evils, doubt, hesitancy, faltering, and inconsequent action. It is hard work to knit again a shattered line under the unremittent assault of hardened veterans, such as ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... agility, also a little to one side, because there was nothing else to do, reflecting in a kind of inconsequent way, that after all Zikali's Great Medicine was not worth a curse. The lion landed on my side of the wall and reared itself upon its hind legs before getting to business, towering high above me but ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard |
