"Unimportance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of anything to say. It was as though by that one act he had cut a bridge behind him and on the other side lay all the platitudes, the small give and take of their hours together. What to her was a regrettable incident was to him a great dramatic climax. Boylike, he refused to recognize its unimportance to her. He ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a woman, to whom external appearance is scarcely in any circumstance a matter of unimportance, and like a beauty who has confidence in ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... of naming, is, equally in both cases, the act of man: only in the one case, the ends of language and of classification would be subverted if no notice were taken of the difference, while in the other case, the necessity of taking notice of it depends on the importance or unimportance of the particular qualities in which ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... quarter of an hour he sat with his back against a half buried mesquite log smoking, and now eying the magnificent sheer crimson wall which lay across the river, now wondering where Diana was and now contemplating curiously the sense of his own unimportance which the Canyon was thrusting into his consciousness more persistently every hour. Jonas joined him for the last part of his rest, but when Milton announced that they had finished the packing and must now portage the boats, Jonas was on ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... one task to another with determined haste. At one moment she vowed the subject should never be thought of again; the next, she promised herself that she would put the whole matter before Gaston as soon as he returned, and, by so doing, prove the unimportance of the thing. But whichever way she looked at it, she hourly grew to dread Gaston's return. Life was never going to be the same. Something was going ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... She was mortally pierced. The blow was too cruel. She lowered her glance before his, and fixed it on the table-cloth. Her brow darkened. Her lower lip bulged out. She was the child again. He had with atrocious inhumanity reduced her to the unimportance of a child. She had bestowed on him and his interests the gift of her whole soul, and he had said that it was negligible. And the worst was that he was perfectly unaware of what he had done. He had not even observed the symptoms of her face. He had turned at once to the older women and ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... without being captured, for he did not agree with Ongoloo as to the unimportance of his own death! At the unexpected outcry in the rear the Raturans halted, and held ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... conception was the unimportance and unworthiness of the body and all material things. The spirit was the only thing that signified and that was to be dedicated to the service of the Lord, as announced in divine commandments. Sacrifices on the altar or gifts to the priests would ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... and no effort will be too great, for us to drag her from her imagined height into the dust. By force of arms, starvation and the power of lies, they hoped to force us back to unimportance, and now the issue is: Whether the categoric imperative of the East Prussian Kant, or the hypocrisy of British cant, ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... of voluntary delusion does every man endeavour to conceal his own unimportance from himself. It is long before we are convinced of the small proportion which every individual bears to the collective body of mankind; or learn how few can be interested in the fortune of any single man; how little vacancy is left in the world for any new object of ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... belt-line car my removal from these mad activities would at least be dignified by a notice in the papers. The shrinkage to my self-importance added fire to my ambition. More carefully but resolutely I threaded my way up Cortlandt Street, and at every step my sense of my unimportance increased. Even my hotel seemed to be a hotel of no importance. Mr. Pound had stayed there in 1876, and his account of its magnitude and luxury had led me to believe that I could find it merely by asking. ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... He has just been hit." As we drew aside to make room for him to pass, once more the civilian realized his helplessness and unimportance. One soldier was worth ten Prime Ministers in that place. We were as conspicuously mal a propos as an outsider at a bank directors' meeting or in a football scrimmage. The officer politely reminded us of the necessity of elbow room in the narrow quarters ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... that in view of his window sprang upward, grew into a spire, yearning higher until its uppermost tip was half invisible against the morning skies, gave him the first sense of the transiency and unimportance of the campus figures except as holders of the apostolic succession. He liked knowing that Gothic architecture, with its upward trend, was peculiarly appropriate to universities, and the idea became personal ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... family, girls were not valued so highly as boys, and were made to feel their unimportance in many ways that would be highly displeasing to little sisters of to-day. Girls were taught to wait upon their brothers and to treat them with respect. It was impressed upon them that the duty of a girl was to be useful and modest and quiet, and that ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips
... show insensibility &c n.; not mind, not care, not be affected by; have no desire for &c 866; have no interest in, feel no interest in, take no interest in; nil admirari [Lat.]; not care a straw for &c (unimportance) 643; disregard &c (neglect) 460; set at naught &c (make light of) 483; turn a deaf ear to &c (inattention) 458; vegetate. render insensible, render callous; blunt, obtund^, numb, benumb, paralyze, deaden, hebetate^, stun, stupefy; brutify^; brutalize; chloroform, anaesthetize^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Beetles. He has written some papers on them since his return, and they tell me he has made his mark, and will soon be considered a leading authority. I must say, however, that the whole thing seems to me of supreme unimportance. What on earth can it matter whether there are ten varieties of beetles or ten thousand? Rob is just the sort of hard-headed, determined fellow who could have made himself felt in whatever role he had ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... lost in a body of men, out of which he emerges only relatively in sharp-shooting, in the charge, in single contests, and in the retreat. Because of this incorporation of the individual in the one great whole, and because of the resulting unimportance of personal bravery, modern Gymnastics can never be the same as it was in ancient times, even putting out of view the fact that the subjectiveness of the modern spirit is too great to allow it to devote so much attention to the care of the body, and ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz |
