"Trivial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for the words seemed trivial and out of place in face of the effect the girl's appearance had on him, but ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... of course, no hope of salvation. Help that arrived now would be too late. Lourdes would be teeming. The trivial round of Pau would be in full blast. The possible passage of another car would spare us—me particularly—some ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... for the preponderance of the trivial in the affairs of life, all women and nearly all men would believe in Fate. This is borne out by the evidence of great men, who are fatalists one and all—or who were so until these modern, ultrapsychologic days in which overthinking ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... at my destined haven, and, what is very unusual for me, have been successful in several trivial circumstances, such as getting over the ferry (which is difficult at this season), finding temporary quarters for my chevaux without difficulty or delay. I cannot help regarding these as harbingers of good luck. I am, however, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... position, so many provincial autocrats, brought constantly into conflict with the popular body, and unable to conceive any system of government possible that did not place the province directly under the control of the imperial authorities, to whom appeals must be made in the most trivial cases of doubt or difficulty. The representative of the crown brooked no interference on the part of the assembly with what he considered his prerogatives and rights, and as a rule threw himself into the arms of ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... provide for his work. It astonished him to find how reluctant he was to return; he seemed to have found the sort of life he needed in this quiet place. He had walked with the Vicar, and had been deluged with interesting particulars about the parish. Much of it was very trivial, but Howard saw that the Vicar had a real insight into the people and their ways. He had not seen Maud again to speak to, and it vexed him to find how difficult it was to create occasions for meeting. His mind and imagination had been taken captive by the girl; he thought of her constantly, ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... you to waive it. You see, questions about me are so comparatively trivial. What sort of ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... gauntlet for the actual ownership of man by man. Even Russia never fought for serfdom, and Austria has only enslaved nations, not individuals. In civil wars, especially, all historic divergences have been trivial compared to ours, so far as concerned the avowed principles of strife. In the French wars of the Fronde, the only available motto for anybody was the Tout arrive en France, "Anything may happen in France," which gayly recognized the absurd chaos of the conflict. In the English civil ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... cutting up the carcass of the animal, they discovered it had been shot at by hunters not more than a week previously, as an arrow-head and a musket-ball were still in the wounds. Under other circumstances such a matter would have been regarded as trivial, but as they knew the Snake Indians had no guns, the presence of the bullet indicated that the elk could not have been wounded by one of them. They were aware that they were on the edge of the Blackfeet country, and as these savages were supplied with firearms, it was surmised ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... kind, or it may mean stronger in the sense of the capacity to perform feats of strength. It being commonly assumed that vitality and muscularity are identical, this distinction is, on that assumption, merely academic and trivial. But as muscularity and vitality are not identical, and have indeed very little to do with each other, and as muscularity may even in certain conditions prejudice vitality, the distinction is not ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... and gesticulation was quite uncalled for. It is remarkable, however, how much may be done by mere action and intonation to impress the listener with the idea that the speaker must be a person of uncommon intelligence. But when half a dozen such talkers are engaged in discussion upon some trivial topic, and each employs the same means to enforce his views upon the rest (this occurs nightly in the cafes at Cahors), the Northerner is inclined to think that they are all mad. The wiry old man explained to me, in order to account for the ease and agility ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners. We have no right to purge the popular Press of all that we think vulgar or trivial. Dr. Horton may possibly loathe and detest Limericks just as I loathe and detest riddles; but I have no right to call them flippant and unprofitable; there are wild people in the world who like riddles. I am so afraid of this movement passing off into mere formless rhetoric and platform passion ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... occupied with politics and aggrandizement ever to become cultured. In spite of this heritage from the Greeks, decadence took place among the Arabs, and, as the centuries go on, what they do becomes more and more trivial, and their writing has less significance. Just the opposite happened in Europe. There, there was noteworthy progressive development until the magnificent climax of thirteenth century accomplishment was reached. It is often ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... Iscariot had notice (for those assemblies were public and notorious) he ran from Bethany, and offered himself to betray his Master to them, if they would give him a considerable reward. They agreed for thirty pieces of silver.' In a case so memorable as this, nothing is or can be trivial; and even that curiosity is not unhallowed which has descended to inquire what sum, at that era of Jewish history, this expression might indicate. The bishop replies thus:—'Of what value each piece was, is uncertain; but ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... Kagekatsu, the lord of Echigo and Aizu. He had retired to Aizu after having solemnly made a covenant(192) with the others engaged in the plot to take measures against Ieyasu. He was summoned to Kyoto to pay his respects to the emperor, but on some trivial excuse he declined to come. Ieyasu now saw that nothing but war would settle the disputes which had arisen. He repaired to Yedo and to Shimotsuke, and made preparations for the conflict which he ...
— Japan • David Murray
... feelings. In a halting way they may sometimes say a word of that nature to another boy, or pal, but before a girl, however much she may move their compassion, they remain dumb. I remember, when my age was about nine, the case of a quarrel about some trivial matter I once had with my closest friend, a boy of my own age who, with his people, used to come yearly on a month's visit to us from Buenos Ayres. For three whole days we spoke not a word and took no notice of each other, whereas before we had been inseparable. ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... in their favour observed? They are rendered nugatory in trivial as in serious cases. By a late act, Catholic chaplains are permitted in gaols, but in Fermanagh county the grand jury lately persisted in presenting a suspended clergyman for the office, thereby evading the statute, notwithstanding the most pressing ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... and again is to avoid all fine writing, all descriptions of mere scenery and trivial events. What the world wants are racy, real, genuine scenes, and the more out of the way the better. Poetry is utterly to be avoided. If Apollo were to come down from Heaven, John Murray would not take his best manuscript as a gift. Stick to yourself, to what you have ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... prepared and written. There is no undue invasion, which a son's pride might be apt to make, of domestic privacy, and no dealing with irrelevant topics or elaboration of those set forth with becoming modesty and restraint; far less is there the discussion of any subject, for a trivial or vain purpose. Throughout the work we meet with no unnecessary lifting of veils or treatment of themes merely to satisfy morbid curiosity. Everywhere there is the evidence of sound judgment, unimpeachable taste, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... importance of the subject on which he spoke. But when I tried to reconstruct from the ashes of my industrious notes the mental conflagration which I had witnessed, I was at a complete loss to understand what had happened. The records were not only dull, they seemed essentially trivial, and almost overwhelmingly unimportant. But the magic had been there. Apart from the substance, the performance had been literally enchanting. I do not honestly believe that Mr. Gladstone was a man of great intellectual force, or even of very deep emotions. He was a man of ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pointed unwittingly the significance of that trivial matter on the same night. He dined at the house of an old friend, and after the ladies had gone he moved up into the next chair, and so sat beside a weary-looking official from the Punjab named ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... exceptional crises in life, in the moments of intense insight or emotion which philosophy calls knowledge and religion faith, the weight of custom falls away, the truth breaks through the veil, and the most trivial object or accident comes to reflect in itself the whole system of nature or the whole providence of God. At such moments man realises that in order to live he must die, that in order to be free he must obey, and that only by surrendering his fancied independence ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... Europe. He was so far fond of nature that, anticipating the most recently developed of modern tastes, he ascended Mount AEtna and the Mons Casius, in order to enjoy the spectacle of sunrise. In his villa at Tivoli he indulged a trivial fancy by christening one garden Tempe and another the Elysian Fields; and he had his name carved on the statue of the vocal Memnon with no less gusto than a modern tourist: audivi voces divinas. His memory was prodigious, his eloquence in the Latin language ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... read the confused answers of Mr. Adams and note his apparent misapprehension of questions that would tend to involve him, and note the apparent failure of his theretofore wonderfully clear and exact memory of the most trivial and unimportant details, I am inclined to reject the whole story as a fabrication that has been punctured and fallen to pieces. . . . I find it to be impossible to rely upon the testimony of Henry C. Adams. Excluding it the will is ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... presence, the noise she made at work in the adjoining room, even with her silence, she enveloped mademoiselle in the despair that exhaled from her person. At the slightest word she would bristle up. Mademoiselle could not address an observation to her, ask her the most trivial question, give her an order or express a wish: everything was taken by her as a reproach. And thereupon she would act like a madwoman. She would wipe her eyes and grumble: "Oh! I am very unfortunate! I can see that mademoiselle doesn't care for ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... there were no divine and therefore natural law behind all that, why should that trivial incident, the crucifixion of one among the unnumbered host of vagabonds executed every year in the reign of Tiberius and the Caesars that followed him, how comes it that we are here today? Why are railways built and special trains organized and six ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... stated, in his reply (July 22) to a letter from Aguinaldo, that he had no authority to recognize Aguinaldo's assumption of dictatorship. The native swaggering soldiery, with the air of conquerors, were ever ready to rush to arms on the most trivial pretext, and became a growing menace to the peaceful inhabitants. Therefore, on October 25, Aguinaldo was again ordered to withdraw his troops still farther, to distances varying from five to eight miles ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... own inheritance, And stretching backward, dim and dimmer still, Is lost in a remote antiquity. Grapes do not come of thorns nor figs of thistles, And even a great poet's divinest thought Is coloured by the world he knows and sees. The little intimate things of every day, The trivial nothings that we think not of, These go to make a part of each man's life; As much a part as do the larger thoughts He takes account of. Nay, the little things Of daily life it is which mold, and shape, And make him ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... gliding swiftly through the squad room upset a stool with a loud crash. Yet few of the soundly sleeping soldiers bothered their heads about such a series of trivial noises. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... fresh heart from that trivial diversion of thought, and stood quietly contemplating alternately the hall below and that above (both of which were visible from my place on the intermediate platform; all was still in both of these wide corridors), to make sure of the safety of my enterprise; and now, once ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... problem than in the character of his dialogue. The whole tradition of structural technique rests upon a more or less arbitrary rearrangement of life. Othello, the noblest of tragedies, no less than the most trivial French farce, depends for the continuity of its mere action on an improbable artifice. Desdemona's handkerchief may almost be taken to symbolise that element in the drama which Hauptmann studiously denies himself. And he does so by reason of his more ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... require something more elevated; the assemblies of the people, something more spirited; and at the bar, public and capital causes, something more accurate. But a private deliberation, and causes of trivial consequence, as the stating of accounts and the like, need little beyond the plain and easy manner of common discourse. Would it not be quite shameful to demand in elaborate periods the payment of money lent, or appeal to the emotions in speaking of the repairs ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... the hedges that runs out at last upon the common. You may imagine the young people brushed up after the labours of the day, and making this novelty, as they would make any novelty, the excuse for walking together and enjoying a trivial flirtation. You may figure to yourself the hum of voices along the road in the gloaming. ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... snatch my prize away, Due to the deeds of many a dreadful day? A prize as small, O tyrant! match'd with thine, As thy own actions if compared to mine. Thine in each conquest is the wealthy prey, Though mine the sweat and danger of the day. Some trivial present to my ships I bear: Or barren praises pay the wounds of war. But know, proud monarch, I'm thy slave no more; My fleet shall waft me to Thessalia's shore: Left by Achilles on the Trojan plain, What spoils, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... slight tremor about the knees. The lady had a "grande revolution," as French patients say,—went home, and kept her bed for the rest of the day. Perhaps the reader may smile at the mention of such trivial indispositions, but in more sensitive natures death itself follows in some cases from no more serious cause. An old gentleman fell senseless in fatal apoplexy, on hearing of Napoleon's return from Elba. One of our early friends, who recently died ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... the path to play. This is commendable neither in poet nor errand-boy. The Metaphysical School failed, not because it toyed with imagery, but because it toyed with it frostily. To sport with the tangles of Neaera's hair may be trivial idleness or caressing tenderness, exactly as your relation to Neaera is that of heartless gallantry or of love. So you may toy with imagery in mere intellectual ingenuity, and then you might as well go write acrostics: or you may toy with it in raptures, and then ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... I desire that it should be as nearly perfect as may be. Most of the emendations are trivial and do not affect the substance—all are merely ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... place, fireth; changed often, it doth nothing. The purest joy we can experience in one we love, is to see that person a source of happiness to others. When you are with the person loved, you have no sense of being bored. This humble and trivial circumstance is the great test—the only sure ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... is an instance of that happy power of applying old stories, for which Mr. Windham, no less than Sheridan, was remarkable, and which, by promoting anecdote into the service of argument and wit, ennobles it, when trivial, and gives new ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... had obeyed an academic intention it seemed to March poor and coarse, as in the bronze fountain beside the Church of St. Lawrence. The water spins from the pouted breasts of the beautiful figures in streams that cross and interlace after a fancy trivial and gross; but in the base of the church there is a time-worn Gethsemane, exquisitely affecting in its simple-hearted truth. The long ages have made it even more affecting than the sculptor imagined it; they have blurred the faces and figures in passing till their ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... slave and men like him, players of farces, composers of indecent songs, written at the expense of their companions in the hope of raising a laugh—these are the men he likes and keeps about him. {20} You may think that these are trivial things, men of Athens: but they are weighty, in the judgement of every right-minded man, as illustrations of the temper with which Philip is cursed. At present, I suppose, these facts are overshadowed by his continual prosperity. Success has a wonderful ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... passed and Mrs. Pantin twittered brightly on impersonal subjects, introducing topics which evidenced clearly that her mentality was of a higher order than that of the women about her, whose conversation consisted chiefly of gossip and trivial happenings, Mrs. Toomey came to think that she was mistaken and that this friendly visit was ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... The trivial round, the common task, Would furnish all we ought to ask; Room to deny ourselves; a road To bring ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... a method of observing nature different from that of all the three and yet succeeding in everything which they had attempted, often in vain. Both Keats and Moore had an eye for the beauty which lay in trivial and daily objects. But in both of them, there was a want of deep religious reverence, which kept Moore playing gracefully upon the surface of phenomena without ever daring to dive into their laws or inner meaning; ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... across at his neighbor, he found the dark glasses focused upon himself with such fixity that he responded with a friendly nod, and, making some trivial remark, found Mr. Mannering not at all averse to conversation. A few commonplaces were exchanged until the arrival of Mr. Rosenbaum's order, when ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... my poor words do but paint you wrong, Nor can I utter, in one trivial song, The goodness I ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... farewell of a people and country that I love is that I shall always possess them in memory—a treasure which no one can take from me. As I look back over the quickly speeding year I find that I have forgotten those trivial incidents of discomfort which pricked my hurrying feet. All I can recall is the rugged beauty of the land, the brave and simple people with their hardy manhood and more than generous hospitality, and most of all my little bairns who hold in their ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... was finished to the regret of the servants, who had kept an amused eye on Antonio's performance, while pretending to be busy on some trivial tasks near the Patio or court. In her own room, the Senorita was faint with laughter as she watched Antonio dusting the two ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... godliness, and their noble adherence, in the face of obstacles, to the dictates of their consciences, that their wills were not developed past the reasonable limit of nature. What wonder is it that their descendants inherit this peculiarity, though they may develop it for much less worthy and more trivial causes than the exiling themselves for a question of faith, even the carrying-out of personal ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... what hath been before-mentioned, and common to them with the Mountebank, viz. Vapouring and braging of their skill, and decrying Physicians, by talking above the Capacity of those they converse with, who therefore take all they say to be authentick, though never so absurd, and trivial, and many times to set off themselves they will venture to speak Latine commonly as false as the matter, although some of them at Coffee-Houses, and in other mixt Companies, by venturing so boldly have been met with and baffled, and made to depart thence with shame and discredit enough, which ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... began that Wednesday afternoon seems, as I look back to it now, a bit of the remote past, instead of seven days of a year ago. Its happenings, important and wonderful as they were, seem trivial and tame compared with those which came afterward. And yet, at the time, that week was a season of wild excitement and delightful anticipation for Hephzibah, and of excitement not unmingled with doubts and misgivings for me. For us both it was a busy week, ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Is—er—Mr. Johnson at home?" He came near saying "Take-Notice," but caught himself in time. Take-Notice Johnson was what men called the man whom Andy had ridden over to see upon a more or less trivial matter. ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... passed through many trivial vicissitudes, changes of ownership, vexed land-titles, and royal encroachments. For several years the people had no visible government at all. They did not hold themselves so well in hand as did New York, and were less audacious and aggressive in resistance; but in one way or ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... and the other papers made much of the capture of Denison. Still, I was not prepared for the host of Maiden Lane cases that followed. Many of them were essentially trivial. But one proved to ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... absurd if I had asked where we were going, so I held my tongue, for at such moments a man should take heed to his words. Branicki was silent, and I thought the best thing I could do would be to engage him in a trivial conversation. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the minds of our people a new appreciation of the problems of national life and a deeper understanding of the meaning and aims of democracy. Matters which heretofore have seemed commonplace and trivial are seen in a truer light. The urgent demand for the production and proper distribution of food and other national resources has made us aware of the close dependence of individual on individual and nation on nation. The effort to keep up social and industrial organizations, ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... for his amusement, he gives him to understand that he looks on his fidelity as only securable by the bastinado, and makes him the subject of his practical jokes. The respectable giant Morgante dies of the bite of a crab, as if to spew on what trivial chances depends the life of the strongest. Margutte laughs himself to death at sight of a monkey putting his boots on and off; as though the good-natured poet meant at once to express his contempt of a merely and grossly anti-serious mode of existence, and his ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... done yet; but it has mainly touched the details, not the general principles. The system is wonderfully complete for its own ends, and the more one studies it the less one sneers. Many a form which at first seems to the volunteer officer merely cumbrous and trivial he learns to prize at last as almost essential to good discipline; he seldom attempts a short cut without finding it the longest way, and rarely enters on that heroic measure of cutting red-tape without finding at last that he has entangled his own ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... madame Wang speedily suggested addressing Pao-yue, "change it and have done; and you, sir, needn't lose your temper over such a trivial matter!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... A rather pathetic incident occurred one day. Just after we had finished lunch three of us were seated, talking of the meals the "Australia" provided, when a fragment of shell came through the roof on to the table and broke one of the enamel plates. This may seem a trivial affair and not worth grousing about; but the sorry part of it was that we only had one plate each, and this loss entailed one man having to wait until the others ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... uncongenial; he must have joy of some kind, or he will fall into despair. The company and the joy can best be supplied by the wife to the husband, and by the husband to the wife. If the woman is dull and trivial, then her husband soon begins to neglect her; if she is meek and submissive, the neglect does not rouse her, and there are no violent consequences; but it is awful to think of the poor creature who sits at home and dimly wonders ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... in detail, which might have appeared trivial, the nature of the bottom of the sea immediately surrounding Keeling atoll; and I will now describe with almost equal care the soundings off the fringing-reefs of Mauritius. I have preferred this arrangement, ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... his unintelligibility, or imputed it only to the abtruse high nature of the topics handled. Let us hope so, let us try to believe so! There is no doubt but Coleridge could speak plain words on things plain: his observations and responses on the trivial matters that occurred were as simple as the commonest man's, or were even distinguished by superior simplicity as well as pertinency. "Ah, your tea is too cold, Mr. Coleridge!" mourned the good Mrs. Gilman once, in her kind, reverential and yet protective manner, handing him a very tolerable ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... although our readers may smile because he regarded the matter in such a serious light, they must remember that this was almost, if not altogether, his first sorrow; and we are far from believing the sorrow of a child the trivial thing it is generally considered, and perhaps but the beginning of ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers
... relations to some other essences. The air of presumption which there might seem to be in proclaiming that mathematics reveals what has to be true always and everywhere, vanishes when we remember that everything that is true of any essence is true of it always and everywhere. The most trivial truths of logic are as necessary and eternal as the most important; so that it is less of an achievement than it sounds when we say we have grasped a truth that is ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... thousands of more or less hypocritical or more or less cynical persons annually visit the place for the sake of the probable catastrophe, and that I came late in the day to work myself up about it. There was in fine the TRIVIAL association, one of the vulgarest in the world; but which give me pause no longer, I think, simply because its vulgarity is so advertised. The revolution performed by Strether under the influence of the most interesting of great cities was to have nothing to do with any ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... trivial name from their being met with principally on the great prairies of the west—although other species of American wolves are found in the prairie country as well as they. They are sometimes called "barking" wolves; because, as we have noticed, the ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... was called away from London, with Mr. Westaby Jones, to consult in a matter of business. Mr. Westaby Jones is a member of the Stock Exchange and, amongst other trivial failings, he possesses one which is not altogether unknown in his profession. He cannot resist a small wager. On several occasions he has gambled with me and shown himself to be a gentleman of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... to take the tax off of whisky, so it can be sold cheaper, and be obtained in greater quantities by the masses. Any such great laws for the benifit of the nation, of course, would justify a change in the Constitution and the laws; but for any frivolous cause, any trivial cause, madam, we male custodians of the sacred Constitution would stand as walls of iron before it, guarding it from any shadow of change. Faithful we ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... man; there was something about those brown eyes of his that appealed to me. Also it struck me as odd that he should happen to be present on this occasion, for I have always held that there is nothing casual or accidental in the world; that even the most trivial circumstances are either ordained, or the result of the workings of some inexorable law whereof the end is known by whatever power may direct our steps, though it ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... of my predecessor, Polensky, I had found a collection of powder colors, grease paints, toupee-paste, spirit-gum and other materials which threw a curious light on his activities. On my return to the shop I made a few experiments with these materials and was astonished to find on what trivial peculiarities facial expression depends. For instance, I discovered that a strip of court-plaster, carried tightly up the middle of the forehead—where it would be hidden by a hat—altered the angle of the eyebrows ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... counterbalancing merits, and the mode of treating Home Rule purposely adopted in these pages has, it is conceived, two not inconsiderable advantages. The first of these advantages is that it diverts the mind from a crowd of personal, temporary, and in themselves trivial considerations, which, though they possess not only an apparent but also a real significance, are at bottom irrelevant to the final decision of the true points at issue. Whether, for example, Mr. Gladstone ought to ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... the gravest fault in this poem is the frequent intermixture, as in these two lines, of trivial thoughts and circumstances with those of a ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... known psychoses, constantly evidence a sort of paranoid habitus, a paranoid trend which is exclusively directed against those who had anything to do with their conviction and safe-keeping. The most trivial occurrences in their environment are endowed by them with a personal note of prejudice. The delay of a letter, the refusal to grant some of their unusual requests, an attendant's accidental failure to sweeten their coffee sufficiently, the slightest ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... well had never failed to interest and excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, I committed to memory its external appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also fell, at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I might have entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when a stiff ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... to pleasures in general, when he cannot deny that they are different? What common property in all of them does he mean to indicate by the term 'good'? If he continues to assert that there is some trivial sense in which pleasure is one, Socrates may retort by saying that knowledge is one, but the result will be that such merely verbal and trivial conceptions, whether of knowledge or pleasure, will spoil the discussion, ...
— Philebus • Plato
... to call this woman mother? Because by nature's law she has authority over me, am I to be trampled upon in this manner? Am I to be goaded with insult, loaded with obloquy, and suffer my feelings to be outraged on the most trivial occasions? I owe her respect as a son, but I renounce her as a friend. What an example does she show me. I hope in God I shall never follow it. I have not told you all, nor can I; I respect you as a female, nor altho I ought to confide in you as a sister, will I shock you with the repetition ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... Armenian's flowing eloquence would have seemed as far from affecting my life as the source and flow of the sacred Ganges, and yet it was some trivial irritation of it that kept us from hearing his philosophy that night, and, more important to me, that sent another to expound ideas far different than could ever have come from the famous thinker. All the college, all in Harlansburg who were well-to-do and wise, watched for ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... he lay there the rough loft and its straw seemed to pass away, for the background of his mental picture to become the park and grounds about the old Hall, on one of the old sunny days when he and Scarlett had had a quarrel about some trivial matter, and were gazing threateningly at each other after uttering dire words, and were declaring that everything between them was quite at an end, and that they were never going to speak to each ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... to the hermitage. In Master's presence my friend received such spiritual peace that he was soon a constant visitor. The trivial preoccupations of daily life are not enough for man; wisdom too is a native hunger. In Sri Yukteswar's words Dijen found an incentive to those attempts-first painful, then effortlessly liberating-to locate a realer self within his bosom than the humiliating ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... he never spoke of it. There was that side to it, too. It induced another order of reflection. He was so much in the habit of relating to her, partly for her amusement, partly for his own, all the happenings, both trivial and important, of each day, that his silence with regard to this one, which surely must be considered strange—strange, if no more—was noticeable. A wretched woman toward whom he was acting on behalf of a friend! It surely couldn't, couldn't be a wretched woman toward whom he was acting, ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... theory of aerial navigation. There is a long list of "don'ts" in flying; in the handling of one's machine, in the weather one flies in, in all the feats that one should attempt and leave alone. A number of details must be memorised, and must never be forgotten or overlooked, trivial though some of them may seem. The frame of mind of the man who flies must be alert, yet quiet and reposeful; he must be clear-headed, not hot-headed. The man who is in a hurry, who ignores details when he sets out on a flight, is the man who runs risks and is bound sooner or ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... hesitation Aram named a sum so moderate, so trivial, that the Minister, accustomed as he was to the claims of younger sons and widowed dowagers—accustomed to the hungry cravings of petitioners without merit, who considered birth the only just title to the right of exactions from the public—was literally startled by the contrast. "More than ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... know too much—too much to smile At trivial errors of the heart and hand, Nor be too proud to play the friend the while, And cease to ...
— All That Matters • Edgar A. Guest
... of all their honor when once the first step downward has been taken. The decree was passed, and Cicero finished his last speech on so poor an occasion. But though the thing itself then done be small and trivial to us now, it was completed in magnificent language.[223] The passage of which I give the first words below is very fine in the original, though it does not well bear translation. Thus he ended his fourteenth Philippic, and the silver tongue which had charmed ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... Seven Dials. In strength of lungs, it must be granted, the Italian easily surpasses the Londoner, for the Southern voice is positively alarming in its vigour and its far-reaching power. No one—man, woman or child—can apparently speak below a scream; even the most amiable or trivial of conversations seems to our unaccustomed ears to portend an imminent quarrel, to so high a pitch are the naturally harsh voices strained. Morning, noon and night the same hubbub of men shouting, of women screeching, and of children yelling continues for nobody minds noise ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... saw the trouble was not with the college, the trouble was with the young man. He had mentally dwelt on some trivial slights until he had got so out of harmony with the institution that he had lost the power to derive any benefit from it. No college is a perfect institution—a 5 fact, I suppose, that most college presidents and college men are quite willing to admit; but a college does supply certain advantages, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... Eleven years before, when Anna was a baby, Mrs. Livingstone had playfully told the captain, who was one day deploring his want of a wife, that if he would wait he should have her daughter. To this he agreed, and the circumstance, trivial as it was, made a more than ordinary impression upon his mind; and though he as yet had no definite idea that the promise would ever be fulfilled, the little girl was to him an object of uncommon interest. Mrs. Livingstone knew this, and whenever Anna's future prospects were the ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... strangely peaceful, idyllic day—all save its ending. Looking back on it, I know that the sun which set that evening went down on the last of my happiness. But it all seems trivial now. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... church somewhere in Europe of which it is said that if a certain brick were removed the whole edifice would fall in ruins. Pee-wee was not even an amateur engineer. That world-stirring consequences could flow from an act so casual and trivial as securing a fishing rod never entered his innocent and pre-occupied mind. He did not know that in the hasty calculations of Townsend all the component parts of this system of props and fetters were necessary one to another. He removed the brick and the cathedral ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... one of the fortunate four who lived through Isandhlwana. On this occasion his usual good fortune attended him, for though his horse was killed and his helmet knocked off, he was not touched. The Boer loss was very trivial. ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... Passions which will inevitably render them miserable? A thing which can never be otherwise whilst Women are bred up in no right Notions of Religion and Vertue; or to know any use of Reason but in the service of their Passions and Inclinations; or at best of their (comparatively trivial) Interests. ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... half an hour, talking at intervals in a constrained, awkward way about trivial subjects. Then as Easton did not come, Ruth decided to serve Slyme without waiting any longer. With this intention she laid the baby in its cot, but the child resented this arrangement and began ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... defendant, and the latter had threatened him. Was any one else present? Yes. John Bly and Mr. Louder were both present when he threatened to kill her husband. Charles Stevens remembered having a slight altercation when he was quite a boy with Mr. Williams; but it was such a trivial matter that he had forgotten it till now. Then she told that her loving husband feared he would be slain by Charles Stevens, and that he went away to New York city on a voyage, and that the same ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... spacious reading room, exclusively for the English papers. The love of news is at all times natural; but at a distance from home the mind is doubly anxious for the details of what is going on there, and attaches an interest to particulars which, under other circumstances, it would consider as too trivial to be worthy of attention. During my stay on the Continent, I felt very forcibly the truth of Dr. Johnson's observation, "that it is difficult to conceive how man can exist without a newspaper." I was, however, for a considerable time, forced to be satisfied ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... great influence for him, summoned a council at Constantinople in the year 867, to decree the counter-excommunication of the Western Patriarch. Of the eight articles which were drawn up on this occasion for the incrimination of the Church of Rome, all but two relate to trivial matters, such as the observance of Saturday as a fast, and the shaving of their beards by the clergy. The two important ones deal with the doctrine of the Procession of the Holy Spirit, and the enforced ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... seeing the living plant, to observe if it was not referable to some other genus; accordingly Mons. L'HERITIER, who, when lately in England, saw it in the royal garden at Kew, joined it to the genus Selago, retaining the trivial name of ovata, bractaeata would perhaps have been a better name; for though its ovate inflorescence may be peculiar to the species, its bracteae or floral leaves are so very singular that they constitute the most prominent feature of ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 6 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... Very trivial in Dr. Dunlap's eyes were the anxieties of some poor fellows whom he saw later in the day appealing to Colonel Menard. The doctor was returning to a patient. The speeches were over, and the common meadow had become a wide picnic ground under the slant ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... creative. They have observed the simple fact that the will to do anything can and does, at a certain pitch of intensity set up by conviction of its necessity, create and organize new tissue to do it with. To them therefore mankind is by no means played out yet. If the weight lifter, under the trivial stimulus of an athletic competition, can 'put up a muscle,' it seems reasonable to believe that an equally earnest and convinced philosopher could 'put up a brain.' Both are directions of vitality to a certain end. Evolution shews us this direction of vitality doing all sorts of things: ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... was uttered. In the same day he would be a Radical and a Conservative, devoted to the Church and a scoffer at parsons, animated on behalf of staghounds and a loud censurer of aught in the way of hunting other than the orthodox fox. On all trivial outside subjects he considered it to be his duty as a tradesman simply to ingratiate himself; but in a matter of breeches he gave way to no man, let his custom be what it might. He knew his business, and was not going to be told by any man whether the garments which ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... some time, and my duties, as he detailed them, sounded astonishingly light. Indeed, he paused occasionally as if seeking to augment them by the addition of trivial household tasks. ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... then from his small eyes at the white face in the corner. When they got out at the station, he offered Ida his arm and she took it half-unconsciously. The path was too narrow to permit of three to walk abreast, and Joseph sent Isabel on in front; and on some trivial excuse or another contrived to lag some little distance behind her. Every now and then he pressed Ida's arm more closely to his side, looking at her with sidelong and lingering glances, and at last he said, in a kind of whisper, so that Isabel ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... bookish, scholastic, solid, profound, deep-read, book- learned; accomplished &c (skillful) 698; omniscient; self-taught. known &c. v.; ascertained, well-known, recognized, received, notorious, noted; proverbial; familiar, familiar as household words, familiar to every schoolboy; hackneyed, trite, trivial, commonplace. cognoscible[obs3], cognizable. Adv. to one's knowledge, to the best of one's knowledge. Phr. one's eyes being opened &c. (disclosure) 529; ompredre tout c'est tout pardonner[French: to know all ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and with a half-lazy arrogance he answered, "Why should I try to create a personal and trivial future, when I can, without striving, merely survive from a far more glorious past? Listen, Mademoiselle, do you think as much can be accomplished by one short generation as by many? For instance, could a garden such as this be produced in the lifetime of one man?" He waved his arm ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... remember such a trivial circumstance, Mademoiselle. M. de Marmont saw me after that here as guest in your father's house. He was greatly surprised at finding me—a mere tradesman—in such an honoured position. Surprise ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... generations upon his back, the devout took no more thought of them than they themselves took thought of the devout. The life of Osiris, on the other hand, was intimately mingled with that of the Egyptians, and his most trivial actions immediately reacted upon their fortunes. They followed the movements of his waters; they noted the turning-points in his struggles against drought; they registered his yearly decline, yearly compensated by his aggressive returns and his intermittent victories over Typhon; his ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... his hand resting on the table, turned over in his mind the names and deeds of those who were accounted as his friends, but whom he suspected to be his enemies. He had close to his hand slips of paper, on which were written notes of the most trivial doings of those by whom he was generally surrounded; and the very spies who gave him the information were themselves the unfortunate subjects of similar notices from others. The wretched man was tortured by distrust; ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... Hear, Earth and Heaven, he owns it! No excuse! No varnish, no disguise!—He will not stoop To use dissembling with a wretch he scorns, Nor thinks it worth his pains to fool me further! Proceed, brave sir, proceed! In trivial strain Tell me how light are lovers' oaths, how fond Youth's heart of change, how quick love comes and flies; And own that yours for me is flown for ever. Then with indifference ask a parting kiss, Hope we shall still be friends, profess ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... than to behold a soft and tender female, who had been all weakness and dependence, and alive to every trivial roughness while treading the prosperous paths of life, suddenly rising in mental force to be the comforter and supporter of her husband under misfortune, and abiding with unshrinking firmness the bitterest blast ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... you not do this perfectly trivial thing for me? If not, say so now, and let us end this farce of pretending that you care a snap ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... for this, his spirits were good. If now and then he was appalled at what he, a shy fellow with no antecedents to recommend him and no persuasive powers, had undertaken, he thought of Olivia Guion. The thing he was attempting became trivial when compared with the possible ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... Sheridan, &c.' She said, 'Now you don't know the meaning of clever, Sheridan might be clever; yes, Sheridan was clever,—scamps often are; but Johnson hadn't a spark of cleverality in him.' No one appreciated the opinion; they made some trivial remark about 'cleverality,' ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of animal motion which degenerates into restlessness and buffoonery in the Neapolitan, or the native of Languedoc, assumes a more dignified character in the Catalan, who is certainly a gentleman of Nature's own making. One of the crew, a tall athletic fellow, was holding forth to the rest on some trivial matter with a varied and graceful action, which might have served as a model to a painter. The rest were at breakfast; but even their mode of pouring the wine on their tongues at arm's length, from the long spout of a sort of glass kettle, had somewhat classical ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... substituted without great loss. As between complete and accomplish, complete considers rather the thing as done; accomplish, the whole process of doing it. Commit, as applied to actions, is used only of those that are bad, whether grave or trivial; perpetrate is used chiefly of aggravated crimes or, somewhat humorously, of blunders. A man may commit a sin, a trespass, or a murder; perpetrate an outrage or a felony. We finish a garment or a ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... sensations, but how false and inaccurate the judgments we form of things! I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most excellent performances of genius, which I felt at that age from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible. Every trivial cause of pleasure is apt to affect the man of too sanguine a complexion: his appetite is too keen to suffer his taste to be delicate; and he is in all respects what Ovid says ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... with eager out-stretched hands, and in all these months she had not had one single regret, or one moment of longing for peaceful, grey-tinted England, or the friends with whom she had visited and hunted and done the hundred and one trivial things wealthy beautiful girls are accustomed to do in England, and who in her case had continued their social career without breaking their hearts or engagements on account of the monetary debacle of their one time companion. Her instinct ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... abnormally large proportion of the "unfittest" left as our residuum. But in comparison with the armies of the unfit systematically produced by our industrial system, the stratum of residuum deposited in the metropolis by the flood of immigration rolling westward, is too trivial to disturb the equanimity of candid observers. Only the perverted vision which leads New York's most famous charitable institutions to imprison beggars and kidnap the children of the very poor in the name of philanthropy, can so confuse cause and effect. If we were civilized, if we were doing the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... prognostication possess over every rank of society. Such scenes as that described in the Spectator, where so much unhappiness was created by spilling the salt, are still realized every day in nearly every family in Great Britain. All phenomena which cannot easily be accounted for, and hundreds of trivial incidents, are considered by the gravest as portentous signs of events to come. The coincidence of any event and its prognostic, though it might have been ten to one that it would happen, is received as evidence of their connexion, which it would be impiety ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... no doubt, but beyond that not much. In painting, after all, there is in the less important details something of the craft of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not mechanical is often trivial enough. I don't wonder, now," he added, with a suspicion of a twinkle in the eye, "if you imagine that one comes down here in a fine frenzy every ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... very angry, and yet all this is a trivial part of what we have a long time been discussing. The sudden glint of wealth in certain quarters has changed the aspect of even book collecting, that once most individual ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... ever you saw a young woman who was glad and thankful to turn her face toward home, I am that person. I think that one of the heaviest crosses humanity has to bear is to have constantly to decide between two or more absolutely trivial conclusions in one's own affairs; but when one is called upon to multiply one's useless perplexities by, say, ten, life is ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... oppidan of his day should have utterly ignored the supposed inferiority of the less wealthy section of the school, and looked on worth and high character as none the worse for being clothed in a coarse serge gown, is a fact seemingly trivial to ordinary readers, but very noticeable to Eton men. As a rank and file collegian myself, and well remembering the Jew and Samaritan state that prevailed between oppidans and collegers, I remember with pride that ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Genevieve, her melancholy gaze on George. Yesterday she would have had Emelene's childlike faith. But this stranger, who, for a trivial and tyrannical reason, had sent away ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... our one act, the previous work's his own. You criticize the soul? it reared this tree— This broad life and whatever fruit it bears! What matter though I doubt at every pore, Head-doubts, heart-doubts, doubts at my finger's ends, Doubts in the trivial work of every day, Doubts at the very bases of my soul In the grand moments when she probes herself— If finally I have a life to show, The thing I did, brought out in evidence Against the thing done to me underground By hell and all its brood, for aught I know? I say, whence ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... first knew him. His strange household of fretful and disappointed almspeople seems as well known as our own. At the head of these pensioners was the daughter of a Welsh doctor, (a blind old lady named Williams), who had written some trivial poems; Mrs. Desmoulins, an old Staffordshire lady, her daughter, and a Miss Carmichael. The relationships of these fretful and quarrelsome old maids Dr. Johnson has himself sketched, in a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Thrale:—"Williams hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of lime dust, which will collect in the pipes mainly at the points where they are constricted; and as the pipes will be of comparatively large bore until the actual burner is readied, it will be chiefly at the orifices where the deposition occurs. This cause, though trivial, is often overlooked. It will be obviated whenever the plant is intelligently designed. As the phosphoric anhydride, or pentoxide, which is produced when a gas containing phosphorus burns, is a solid body, it may be deposited at the burner jets. This cause may be removed, ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... been less like him in impetuosity and stubbornness. They became engaged, they made preparations for a marriage which was never consummated and for years was never definitely abandoned; mutual devotion is ever and anon interrupted by serious or trivial quarrels, and the imperfect relation drags on to the vexation of both, until Grillparzer as an old man of sixty takes lodgings with the Froehlich sisters and, finally, makes Katharina his ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the poor? we must answer that they include widely divergent types of character,—the selfish and the {12} unselfish, the noble and the mean, workers and parasites—and that, in going among them, we must be prepared to meet human beings differing often from ourselves, it may be, in trivial and external things, but like ourselves ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... some high stimulus to call into play her strong and well-trained faculties. Money-making, the natural sphere of man, has become a more and more absorbing pursuit, while the usual feminine occupations have become more than ever trivial and unimportant at the very moment when the feminine mind has taken a new start in its development. The woman who is fresh from reading Gauss and Pindar, and who has taken sides in the discussion ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... which every moment of his time thus necessarily bore, unlike most literary men, he was never ruffled in the slightest degree by the interruptions of his family, even on the most trivial occasions; the book or the pen was ever laid down with a smile, and he was ready to answer any question, or to enter with youthful readiness into any temporary ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Great Britain, by her vast wealth, her excited and protected industry, is enabled to bear a burden of taxation, which, when compared to that of other nations, appears enormous; but which, when her immense riches are compared to theirs, is light and trivial. The gentleman from South Carolina has drawn a lively and flattering picture of our coasts, bays, rivers, and harbors; and he argues that these proclaimed the design of Providence that we should be a commercial people. I agree with him. We ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... of whatever party. If such men will make a firm and solemn pause, and meditate dispassionately on the importance of this interesting idea; if they will contemplate it in all its attitudes, and trace it to all its consequences, they will not hesitate to part with trivial objections to a Constitution, the rejection of which would in all probability put a final period to the Union. The airy phantoms that flit before the distempered imaginations of some of its adversaries would quickly ...
— The Federalist Papers
... say everything was nearly perfect. As a result, satire tended toward personal whines, like The Curate, toward attacking tiresomely obvious objects, like the superficial chit-chat of Lloyd's Conversation, toward trivial quarrels, like Churchill's Rosciad, toward broadly unimpeachable morals, like Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes. It is understandable that many writers, such as Joseph Warton and Christopher Smart, abandoned satire ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... seeing it acted on the stage! We realized what Irish feeling was when we heard these angry cries, and noted how appeals that would have affected English partisans fell on deaf ears. I remember how one night in the summer of 1880, when the Irish members kept us up very late over some trivial Bill of theirs, refusing to adjourn till they had extorted terms, a friend, sitting beside me, said, "See how things come round. They keep us out of bed till five o'clock in the morning because our ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... was prolific, and which found their way to him. His quickness in detecting the drift of an author was marvellous. Two or three pages of a pamphlet were generally sufficient to put him in complete possession of the writer's object, while nothing was too trivial for his attention where there existed a possibility of its contributing a clue to the problems of his command. Not the least onerous of the doctor's duties was the deciphering of private letters found in prizes, a channel by which important public interests are often ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... "On trivial occasions any initiated man may personate Ukuku or issue commands for the family. On other occasions, as in Shiku, to raise prices, the society lays its commands ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... disgust at what he chose to consider a competition in assininity between his two old friends, turned from them to Betty with some trivial remark. As he spoke he was contrasting her with the splendid Zoraida and had he voiced the comparison Zoraida must have whitened with anger and mortification while Betty flushed up, startled. He would have said; "One is like a poison serpent ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... registrar sympathetically, "but I can't let you go. We're going to be very strict about this vacation. A great many girls went home early at Christmas, and it's no exaggeration to say that a quarter of the college came back late on various trivial excuses. This time we're not going to have that sort of thing. The girls who come back at all must come on time; the only valid excuse at either end of the vacation will be serious ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... quite content to think and speak about public affairs as I conceive best conduces to the interests both of myself and of the Republic. Moreover, I make this declaration the more openly and frequently, both because my brother Quintus is Caesar's legate, and because no word of mine, however trivial, to say nothing of any act, in support of Caesar has ever transpired, which he has not received with such marked gratitude, as to make me look upon myself as closely bound to him. Accordingly, I have the advantage of his popularity, which you ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... himself. Many people were indebted to him for his kindly services in the police station and the justice courts, for in those days Irish constituents easily broke the peace, and before the establishment of the Juvenile Court, boys were arrested for very trivial offenses; added to these were hundreds of constituents indebted to him for personal kindness, from the peddler who received a free license to the businessman who had a railroad pass to New York. Our third campaign against him, when we succeeded in making ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Holroyd was as guiltless as Mark himself of any intention to portray Mr. Humpage in the pages of 'Illusion'; he had indeed heard of him from the Langtons, but the resemblances in the imaginary solicitor to Dolly's godfather were few and trivial enough, and, like most of such half-unconscious reminiscences, required the aid of a malicious dulness to pass as ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... there will assuredly come of it such burning as, in its appointed mode and measure, shall shine before men, and be of service constant and holy. Degrees infinite of lustre there must always be, but the weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which worthily used will be a gift also to ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... was stern to the point of injustice, the most trivial offence did not escape his punishment, every evening he held a court of justice by which he had those who were accused imprisoned in the ship's hold, flogged, or shot. Yet there was one person whom he never attacked, Glasby. He spent whole nights in questioning him about his ...
— The Corsair King • Mor Jokai
... its vehicles of communication. Instead of the old-time masses of metal, or bands of leather, which moved stiffly through ranges comparatively short, there is to-day employed a medium which may traverse 186,400 miles in a second, and with resistances most trivial in contrast ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... Part of his great work. In the Second there was no longer room for such discussion. But he has supplied the place by garrulous reminiscences, personal anecdotes, incidental adventures, and a host of trivial details,— trivial in the eyes of the pedant,—which historians have been too willing to discard, as below the dignity of history. We have the actors in this great drama in their private dress, become acquainted with their personal habits, listen to their familiar sayings, and, in short gather ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... are, it will only be for some trivial ailment amongst the native people, and I should ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... authorities forgot their customary caution and encouraged the circulation of any story that told in favor of the American colonies. Little did they realize the impression that the statement of grievances—so trivial compared with the injustices that were being inflicted upon the Spanish colonials—was making upon their subjects overseas, who until then had been carefully guarded from all modern ideas of government. American successes were hailed with enthusiasm ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... apparently trivial acts in an uneventful life, it was decisive. As she expected, she met two or three of her late applauders, whom, she fancied, looked sheepish and embarrassed; she met, also, her companions looking for her in some alarm, who really appeared astonished at ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... lady—what would your friend's situation be if, as you put it, she 'got rid' of her husband on so trivial a pretext?" ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... comet's tail. But the swift-blooded Irishman felt himself caught away strangely and suddenly into another world. Out of the abyss of the subconscious there rose a gesture prophetic and immense. The trivial phrase and that intercepted look opened a great door of wonder in his heart. In a second he grew "absent-minded." Or, rather, something touched a button and the whole machinery of his personality shifted round noiselessly and instantaneously, ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... pontifex maximus, that the holder might not, if high office were added to the title, prove detrimental to liberty, which was then their principal care. And I do not know but that, by fencing it in on every side to excess, even in the most trivial matters, they exceeded bounds. For, though there was nothing else that gave offence, the name of one of the consuls was an object of dislike to the state. They declared that the Tarquins had been too much habituated to sovereignty; that it had originated with Priscus: that Servius ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... a loyal and venerable ex-slave as an artless exponent of freedom, freedom of conduct as well as of speech, the author of this trivial volume is perhaps not composing an individual so truly as individualizing a composite, ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... wanted with him? They had talked of Simla and the Moffatts. The conversation had gone in spurts, she looking at him every now and then with eyes that seemed to say more than her words. All that she had actually said was perfectly insignificant and trivial. Yet there was something curious in her manner, and when the time came for him to take his departure she had bade him ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... see for himself, all tend to fall at once into the production of bad blank verse. And here it may be pertinently asked, Why bad? And I suppose it might be enough to answer that no man ever made good verse by accident, and that no verse can ever sound otherwise than trivial when uttered with the delivery of prose. But we can go beyond such answers. The weak side of verse is the regularity of the beat, which in itself is decidedly less impressive than the movement of the nobler prose; ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... medical work is that it admits of organization, and consequently of the distribution of the work in such a manner as to avoid wasting the time of highly qualified experts on trivial jobs. The individualism of private practice leads to an appalling waste of time on trifles. Men whose dexterity as operators or almost divinatory skill in diagnosis are constantly needed for difficult cases, are ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... Arts, used and known as the Temple of Sculpture. The panels express not so much the historical Greek tradition - though they are, indeed, produced in the purest Greek manner - as they do the high spirit and ideals of Greek art, the devoted seeking for divine fire, the determined opposition to the trivial and the base. Each of the panels is once repeated. The panel of "The Triumph of Apollo" shows the fiery god of Inspiration, Music and the Sun in a procession of worshipers; his flaming wings are the rays of the sun. The panel of "The Unattainable in Art" might well be called "The Struggle for the ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... furnish the grandest, the most brilliant recollection of our whole lives. We felt at this moment that all our actions would engage the attention of the astonished world, and that every movement we made, however trivial, ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote |
