"Inoffensive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very considerable success. There were dinners, balls, dejeuners, and picnics in the Bois de Cambre, excursions to Waterloo, and select little parties to Bois-fort,—a charming little resort in the forest whose intense cockneyism became perfectly inoffensive as being in a foreign land, and remote from the invasion of home-bred vulgarity. I mention all these things to show the adjuncts by which I was aided, and the rattle of gayety by which I was, as it were, "accompanied," when I next tried ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... of society, it follows that it can be proper to none who is not in his nature social. Now, society is agreeable to no creatures who are not inoffensive to each other; and we therefore observe in animals who are entirely guided by nature that it is cultivated by such only, while those of more noxious disposition addict themselves to solitude, and, unless when prompted by lust, or that ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... occurred; slight, yet momentarily alarming. Accidents will happen, even in the best regulated political organizations,—and accidents in these days appeared to be the rule. A certain Mr. Edgar Greenhalge, a middle-aged, mild-mannered and inoffensive man who had made a moderate fortune in wholesale drugs, was elected to the School Board. Later on some of us had reason to suspect that Perry Blackwood—with more astuteness than he had been given ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... passing judgment upon him. I verily believe that he had no more desire to be irreverent than you or I have. The fault lay rather in the religious coldness and carelessness of those days than in him. He was liked and respected by every one as a harmless, inoffensive, good-hearted old fellow, and I cannot better close this brief account of some of his peculiarities than by saying—as I do with all my ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... Falstaff, and Pepys showed himself, too, like Falstaff, on terms of unbuttoned familiarity with himself. Falstaff had just the same 'naivete', but in Falstaff it was the 'naivete' of conscious humour. In Pepys it was quite different, for Pepys's 'naivete' was the inoffensive vanity of a man who loved to see himself in the glass. Falstaff had a sense, too, of inadvertent humour, but it was questionable whether Pepys could have had any sense of humour at all, and yet permitted himself to be so delightful. There was probably, however, more involuntary humour in Pepys's ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... one friend in the Chamber, a deputy newly elected for the Deux-Sevres, called M. Sarigue, a poor man sufficiently resembling the inoffensive and ill-favoured animal whose name he bore, with his red and scanty hair, his timorous eyes, his hopping walk, his white gaiters; he was so timid that he could not utter two words without stuttering, almost voiceless, continually sucking jujubes, which completed the confusion of his speech. ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... commencement of the fever, another quarter terminates with the complete eruption, another quarter with the complete maturation, and another quarter terminates the complete absorption of a material now rendered inoffensive ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... compound and found their way into Eswareinmal, where they made themselves very much at home. They quartered themselves on several of the householders, and, having discovered that cooked food was more palatable than earth, they had no diffidence in helping themselves. In other respects they were inoffensive and inclined to be sociable, but, even in Maerchenland, the most harmless and playful Yellow Gnome is not considered a desirable addition to any respectable family. The citizens one and all regarded their visitors as intolerable nuisances ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... consuming that wealth, and executed the father for collecting it! How much are our best laid schemes defective? How little does expectation and event coincide? It is no disgrace to a man that he died on the scaffold; the question is—What brought him there? Some of the most inoffensive, and others the most exalted characters of the age in which they lived, have been cut off by the axe, as Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, for being the last male heir of the Anjouvin Kings; John Fisher, ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... me by Messer Gonzaga, and to you was given the honourable office of captain over them, that you might lead them in this service of mine in the ways of duty, submission, and loyalty. Instead of that, you were the instigator of that outrage this morning, when murder was almost done upon an inoffensive man who was my guest. What have you ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... driven from St. James's Square over the Junior Carlton Club. He will then expatiate learnedly on angle, and swing, and line of flight, and having raised his stick suddenly to his shoulder, by way of an example, will knock off the hat of an inoffensive passer-by. This incident will remind him of an adventure he had while shooting with Lord X.—"A deuced good chap at bottom; a bit stiff at first, but the best fellow going when you really know him"—through the well-known coverts ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... when they found the people about them were so indifferent and they were chagrined to learn that they were again deceived. It was no volcano, there would be no terrible cataclysm, it was only an inoffensive man-hole to the sewers, into which the waste steam of one of the factories ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... part at least of Mankind in general. I indulge the hope and expectation that WAR shall one day be universally and finally extinguish'd. But I will confess also, that appearances would tempt us to apprehend that day is far distant. And while we make War for Sport on useful, generous, inoffensive Animals, it is not easy to imagine that we shall cease to make ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... dear-bought experience, have only given an unequivocal proof of their inveterate hatred to France and Spain; since, not being able to obtain any advantage over the French and Spanish forces, they directed their fire against an inoffensive town, which received no small injury in the buildings. This is the only glory which the arms of Great ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... his stroke than mere awkwardness. It was downright savagery. Generally when a man is in anger or despair he longs to smash things; and these inoffensive tennis-balls were to Thomas a gift of the gods. Each time one sailed away over the backstop, it was like the pop of a safety-valve; it ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... it do her? Is not that a convincing proof of what I say, that you have no cause to be afraid of them, and that it is very silly to be so? It is certainly foolish to be afraid of any thing, unless it threatens us with immediate danger; but to pretend to be so at a mouse, and such like inoffensive things, is a degree of weakness that I can by no means suffer any of my children to indulge.' 'May I then, madam,' inquired the child, 'be afraid of cows and horses, and such great beasts as those?' 'Certainly not,' answered her ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... gratification of their malice was probably a far stronger motive than the bribe for the capture of a bishop. The holy prelate was seized on the 6th December, 1679. Even Ormonde wished to have spared him, so inoffensive and peaceful had been his life. He was arraigned at the Dundalk assizes; but although every man on the grand jury was a Protestant, from whom, at least, less partiality might be expected towards him than from members of his own Church, the perjured witnesses ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... member from Wales who had been nominated by the Nonconformist Eastern Missionary Society to put that question to the minister of the Annexation Department on the subject of Mr. Courtland, the explorer. Mr. Ayrton was the better pleased at his discovery, because of the inoffensive nature of the phrase which he had taken out of its case, so to speak. As a rule, he did not mind being offensive if only his phrase was apt. Only people who had no artistic appreciation found fault with the tone of some of his most notable phrases. He did not mind whether they were just or ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... The result was that in about ten days he sent Walter Clifford a letter and the draft of a lease, very favorable to the landlord on the whole, but cannily inserting one unusual clause that looked inoffensive. ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... tribe were bound in honour to retaliate. But upon whom? The Pakehas who had caused their chiefs death were far out of reach in the north. Still they were not the only Pakehas in the land. In quite a different direction, in the harbour which Captain Cook had dubbed Hicks's Bay, lived two inoffensive Whites who had not even heard of "Lizard's" death. What of that? They were Whites, and therefore of the same tribe as the Pakehas concerned! So the village in which they lived was stormed, one White killed at once, the other ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... worthy friend, I would rather prove myself a gentleman by being learned and humble, valiant and inoffensive, virtuous and communicable, than by any fond ostentation of ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... been drunk than at Clovelly, the borough for which Sir Gregory Grogram sat. When it came to be a matter of individual prosecution against one whom they had all known, and who, as a member, had been inconspicuous and therefore inoffensive, against a heavy, rich, useful man who had been in nobody's way, many thought that it would amount to persecution. The idea of putting old Browborough into prison for conduct which habit had made second nature to a large proportion of the House was distressing to Members ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... convict in hiding, or, by the more charitable, a maniac as yet not dangerous. North Aston held him in deeper horror than it had held even Pepita, and his true personality exercised its wits more keenly than had even the true personality of madame. In point of fact, he was a quiet, inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself about his own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular. Nevertheless, for all his reserved habits and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... to ask you if you'd run across any snakes yet?" Colon inquired, with considerable show of interest, because, as well known among his friends, the tall runner had always felt a decided antipathy for all crawling things, and would never handle even an inoffensive garter-snake; indeed, slimy greenbacked frogs he abominated, claiming that they had the same clammy feeling ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... saying that they haven't done anything?" demanded the captain. "You seem to think that they are the most innocent, inoffensive people in the world; but I know that is not characteristic of Unionists in this part of the country. How do you know but that they have ambushed ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... considerable scruple about it in any free and unprejudiced mind. And this I shall do from these words of St. Paul, which are part of the defense which he made for himself before Festus and Agrippa, the substance whereof is this, that he had lived a blameless and inoffensive life among the Jews, in whose religion he had been bred up; that he was of the strictest sect of that religion, a Pharisee, which, in opposition to the Sadducees, maintained the resurrection of the dead and a future state of rewards and punishments ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... advanced, and the novelty of being at home wore off, Herbert began to return to his old habit of teasing his inoffensive sister. They were sitting beside their mamma, who was sewing, while she listened with as much delight almost as Caroline did to Herbert's stories of his life at school. Caroline was on the floor dressing her doll, while Herbert sat on a low stool at his mother's feet; but unable ...
— Carry's Rose - or, the Magic of Kindness. A Tale for the Young • Mrs. George Cupples
... shame that the world should have been so disturbed; that peaceful men are compelled to lie out in the mud and filth in the depth of raw winter, shot at and stormed at and shelled, waiting for a chance to murder some other inoffensive fellow creature? Why must the people in old Poland die of hunger, not finding dogs enough to eat in the streets of Lemberg? The long lines of broken peasants in Serbia and in Roumania; the population of Belgium and Northern France torn from their homes to work as slaves for the Germans; ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... tract of twelve miles on the river and three or four northwardly was occupied by scattered settlers, while in the centre of the town a compact village had grown up. In the immediate vicinity there were but few Indians, and these generally peaceful and inoffensive. On the breaking out of the Narragansett war, the inhabitants had erected fortifications and taken other measures for defence; but, with the possible exception of one man who was found slain in the woods in 1676, none of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... while at the same time it shows us the want of accord of our conduct with it and thereby strikes down self-conceit, is even natural to the commonest reason and easily observed. Has not every even moderately honourable man sometimes found that, where by an otherwise inoffensive lie he might either have withdrawn himself from an unpleasant business, or even have procured some advantages for a loved and well-deserving friend, he has avoided it solely lest he should despise himself secretly in his own eyes? When an upright man is in the ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... by such a Practice, I believe it would prevent them"; the more, that if the author be "so unfortunate to depend on the success of his Labours for his Bread, he must be an inhuman Creature indeed, who would out of sport and wantonness prevent a Man from getting a Livelihood in an honest and inoffensive Way, and make a jest of starving him and his Family." There is other evidence that young men about town were wont to amuse themselves by damning plays 'when George was King.' In the Prologue to this same condemned play, spoken by the actor Quin, and said to have ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... things, as Kingsley, should allow himself to be drawn so deeply into such low snares; the tricks of which seemed so apparent, and the attractions of which, in the present instance, were obviously so inferior and low. I little knew by what inoffensive and gradual changes the human mind, having once commenced its downward progress, can hurry to the base; nor did I sufficiently allow for that love of hazard itself, in games of chance, which I have already expressed the opinion, is natural to the proper heart of man, belongs to a rational curiosity, ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... to certain piratical rovers, of various European nations, who formerly infested the coasts of Spanish America. They were originally inoffensive settlers in Hispaniola, but were inhumanly driven from their habitations by the jealous policy of the Spaniards; whence originated their implacable hatred to that nation. Also, a large musketoon, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... "The Gray Champion" and "Endicott and the Red Cross," Hawthorne paints the stern courage of the Puritan, but never his gentle or humane qualities. His typical tale presents the Puritan in the most unlovely guise. In "The Maypole of Merrymount," for example, Morton and his men are represented as inoffensive, art-loving people who were terrorized by the "dismal wretches" of a near-by colony of Puritans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Morton's crew were a lawless set and a scandal to New England; but they were tolerated until they ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... described as a squalid, unhealthy people, typical of the region they frequent; but who are, in reality, more robust than the Europeans in India, and whose disagreeably sallow complexion is deceptive as indicating a sickly constitution. They are a mild, inoffensive people, industrious for Orientals, living by annually burning the Terai jungle and cultivating the cleared spots; and, though so sequestered and isolated, they rather court than avoid intercourse with those whites whom they ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... it would," General Cordeen thought, and a pall of awe covered the linked minds. The implications of the naively frank remark just uttered by this apparently inoffensive and defenseless young woman were simply too ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... the four had an intellectual ambition. Mary 'Liza's scholarship did not excite their envy because she was quiet and inoffensive. Proficiency in her studies was "one of her ways." I was talkative and aggressive, and needed taking down. They set themselves systematically about the performance of the duty. The work was done deftly and discreetly, out of the sight and hearing of our elders. Young and raw ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... so spoils himself, is known to the editor of every magazine. Any editorial office force can insert missing commas and semicolons, and iron out blunders in the English; but it has not the time, if indeed the ability, to instil life into a lifeless manuscript. A living style is rarer than an inoffensive one, and the road of literary ambition is strewn ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Austrian Galicia are quiet, inoffensive people, take them as a whole. The Jews, who number a twelfth of the population, are the most intelligent, energetic, and certainly the most money-making individuals in the province, though the Poles proper, or Mazurs, are ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... in vast flocks upon the wild karoos of South Africa; are inoffensive animals, except when wounded; and then the old bulls are exceedingly dangerous, and will attack the hunter both with horns and hoot. They can run with great swiftness, though they scarce ever go clear off, but, keeping at a wary distance, circle around the hunter, ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... he wished to see every one happy around him." As a child, his brother informs us, his exemplary behaviour was so conspicuous, that mothers were satisfied of their children's safety, if they learned that they were in company with "Bob Tannahill." Inoffensive in his own dispositions, he entertained every respect for the feelings of others. He enjoyed the intercourse of particular friends, but avoided general society; in company, he seldom talked, and only with a neighbour; he shunned the acquaintance of persons of rank, because he ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... deaths (which, if we count the odd troopers in the last scene, is exceeded in Old Mortality, and reached, within one or two, both in Waverley and Guy Mannering) that marks the peculiar tone of the modern novel. It is the fact that all these deaths, but one, are of inoffensive, or at least in the world's estimate respectable persons; and that they are all grotesquely either violent or miserable, purporting thus to illustrate the modern theology that the appointed destiny of a large average of our population ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... room, the only resource was to snuff them with the fingers, at which all the boys became great adepts from necessity. One evening Barker, having snuffed the candle, suddenly and slyly put the smouldering wick unnoticed on the head of a little quiet inoffensive fellow named Wright, who happened to be sitting next to him. It went on smouldering for some time without Wright's perceiving it, and at last Barker, ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... shall earn the gratitude of many a reader by making him acquainted with this rare, complex, and exceedingly modern spirit. For Jonas Lie is not (like so many of his brethren of the quill) a mere inoffensive gentleman who spins yarns for a living, but he is a forceful personality of bright perceptions and keen sensations, which has chosen to express itself through the medium of the novel. He dwells in a many-windowed house, with a large ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... proofs of the return of confidence on the part of the natives: a man and a boy insisted on remaining on board to sleep, probably induced by the anticipation of a present. There never were more harmless, inoffensive, or tractable people: for, when most troublesome, they may be led in any direction you choose, by taking hold of the hand, or even of ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... who a year before had been an inoffensive student of mechanics and an enthusiast dreaming of an unsolved problem, spoke of the frightful destruction of life and the havoc that he had caused by just pressing a button with his finger, as coolly and quietly as a veteran officer of artillery might have ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... must continue still to lie Alone, for reasons which don't matter; you The same, Katinka, until by and by: And I shall place Juanna with Dudu, Who's quiet, inoffensive, silent, shy, And will not toss and chatter the night through. What say you, child?"—Dudu said nothing, as Her talents were of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... knew an Amlet in real life, who, wanting Dick's buoyancy, sank indeed. Poor W—— was of my own standing at Christ's, a fine classic, and a youth of promise. If he had a blemish, it was too much pride; but its quality was inoffensive; it was not of that sort which hardens the heart, and serves to keep inferiors at a distance; it only sought to ward off derogation from itself. It was the principle of self-respect carried as far as it could go, without infringing upon ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... keeps his 'cello at the dance hall. Next to him is a pale woman who sits and sews all day and waits for her drunken husband to come home. In front there is some kind of foolish girl who leaves her door open in the hope that I'll look in at her, and a couple of inoffensive people not ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... action, though I refused it decidedly, from the man whose alliance is forbidden to us. I had no resource but to respect myself, as I respected him; and it is no great matter that it hurt me to cut up that gentle, inoffensive old man, endeavouring to show his rue for having proved, twenty years ago, what my father was to at least an equal degree, and what I have no assurance that I would not have found myself, to a far greater extent than either of them—a slave ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... attacking the remnant of the Moravians who were settled among them. On the other hand, the militia included in their ranks most of those who had taken part in the murderous expedition of two months before; this fact, and their general character, made it certain that the peaceable and inoffensive Indians would, if encountered, be slaughtered as pitilessly as ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Lord Spencer to shoot the poor animal—but it was honorable in him to make up the farmer's loss, for it doubled the amount of wages he gained; yet to sum up the proceeding, it was wrong—for besides killing an inoffensive animal, it did not ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... stories, and before they descended several objectionable persons had joined Laurie, evidently expecting to be taken to upper floors themselves. This meant a delay in his tete-a-tete with the boy, and Laurie turned upon the person nearest him, an inoffensive spinster, a look of such intense resentment that it haunted that lady ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... result will be the same.' I question the soundness of this inference. Ningpo is situated on the south-eastern verge of the mighty valley of the Yang-tze-kiang, which is inhabited by a population the most inoffensive, perhaps, both by disposition and habit, of any on the surface of the earth. Their amenity towards the foreigner is due, I apprehend, to temperament, as much, at least, as to the recollection of the violence which they may ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... in Ireland, who in the night amuse themselves with cutting inoffensive passengers across the face with a knife. They are somewhat like those facetious gentlemen some time ago known in England by the title ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... do no harm, break no bones. be good &c. adj.; excel, transcend &c. (be superior) 33; bear away the bell. stand the proof, stand the test; pass muster, pass an examination. challenge comparison, vie, emulate, rival. Adj. harmless, hurtless[obs3]; unobnoxious[obs3], innocuous, innocent, inoffensive. beneficial, valuable, of value; serviceable &c. (useful) 644; advantageous, edifying, profitable; salutary &c. (healthful) 656. favorable; propitious &c. (hope-giving) 858; fair. good, good as gold; excellent; better; superior &c. 33; above par; nice, fine; genuine &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... they are so in this instance. Nothing could look more innocent and inoffensive than the kauri-bug, yet few insects rival it in crime. It is an oval shape, anything under and up to the size of a crown piece. It is flat, black, hard, and shiny, and resembles a cross between the ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... permission of the provost marshal. Belgian Hall was a rented hall, and the Wahoo Fuel Company controlled most of the available town lots, leaving only the farms of the workers, that were planted thick with gardens, for even the most inoffensive meeting. ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... for the difficulties and contradictions that your artistic zeal encounters. The world is so formed that the practice of the Good and the search for the Better is not made agreeable to any one; not in the things of Art, which appear the most inoffensive, any more than in other things. In order to deserve well one must learn to endure well. The best specific for the prejudice, malice, imbroglios and injustice of others is not to trouble oneself about them. It seems that such and such people find their ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... a lower Nature. Since therefore no Man's Lot is so unalterably fixed in this Life, but that a thousand Accidents may either forward or disappoint his Advancement, it is, methinks, a pleasant and inoffensive Speculation, to consider a great Man as divested of all the adventitious Circumstances of Fortune, and to bring him down in ones Imagination to that low Station of Life, the Nature of which bears some distant Resemblance to that high one he is at present ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Turkish prowess in the work of butchery. It was no easy matter for the Sultan to requite himself for the sack of Tripolitza upon Kolokotrones and his victorious soldiers; but there was a peaceful and inoffensive population elsewhere, which offered all the conditions for free, unstinted, and unimperilled vengeance which the Turk desires. A body of Samian troops had landed in Chios, and endeavoured, but with little success, to excite the inhabitants to revolt, the absence of the Greek fleet rendering ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... inside and out; I won't let inoffensive people—and a woman, too—come to harm if I can help it. And if I can't help, nobody can. You understand—nobody! There's no time for it. But I am like any other man that is worth his salt: I won't let the end ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... the inoffensive fool—as they christened that unfortunate man of genius, Adolphe Monticelli, in the dialect of the South, the slang of Marseilles—where he spent the last sixteen years of his life. The richest colourist of the nineteenth century, obsessed by colour, little is known of this ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... nature, in the fields, in the woods and in the animals. Of aristocratic birth, he hated instinctively the year 1793, but being a philosopher by temperament and liberal by education, he execrated tyranny with an inoffensive and declamatory hatred. His great strength and his great weakness was his kind-heartedness, which had not arms enough to caress, to give, to embrace; the benevolence of a god, that gave freely, without questioning; in a word, a kindness of inertia that became almost a vice. ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... to a sudden close Gov. Geary's term of office. When he had disbanded the three thousand "Law and Order" militia that were to attack Lawrence, that part of them known as the Kickapoo Rangers were returning home by way of Lecompton. One of this number went into a field where "a poor, inoffensive, lame young man" named David C. Buffum was plowing, and demanded his horses. Buffum protested against this robbery, but the wretch shot Buffum and took the horses. The unhappy man gave the following account ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... swine at their husks, and of Lazarus, whose sores the dogs licked. Usually, of course, he is not physically of such a presence as to fit him for any place in good society short of Abraham's bosom; but even if he were entirely decent, or of an inoffensive shabbiness, it would not be possible for his benefactors, in any grade of society, to ask him to their tables. He is sometimes fed in the kitchen; where the people of the house feed in the kitchen themselves, he is fed at the ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... link between the Lemurs and the Bats in the Colugos. (Galaeopithecus): their limbs are connected with a membrane as in the Flying Squirrels, by which they can leap and float for a hundred yards on an inclined plane. They are mild, inoffensive animals, subsisting on fruits and leaves. Cuvier places them after the Bats, but they seem properly to link the Lemurs and the frugivorous Bats. As yet they have not been found in India proper, but are common in the Malayan Peninsula, and have ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... of praise, Mr. Rollo. Harmless and inoffensive—to berries. What will you do, then, Mr. Falkirk? seeing there are ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... place, it was honestly confessed that Ireland would never have quietly submitted to the indignity offered to her, unless poor inoffensive Scotland had been included in the regulation. The Green Isle, it seems, was of the mind of a celebrated lady of quality, who, being about to have a decayed tooth drawn, refused to submit to the operation till she had seen the dentist extract a sound and serviceable grinder from the jaws ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... and sketches, not yet famous, and he held a not very lucrative public office, which he had secured, not in the usual way, by party service, but by the political influence of his old college mates, who were strangers to the town. He was inoffensive, but he was not liked, and took no pains to make himself one of the community; he was ignored by the citizens of the place because he ignored them, and when his Washington friends lost power, there was no one else interested ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... remarkable that the species should have been able to survive to this day under conditions so unfavourable to its development. It should be mentioned, however, that apart from this characteristic devotion to their wearisome toil, they appear inoffensive and docile; and satisfied with the leavings of those who evidently are the guardians, if not ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... with his naturally keen sensibilities refined and sharpened by the best education of his times, appears to have played his part with the others, neither better nor worse than they, equally blind to the injustice and tyranny practised upon the inoffensive and defenceless Indians and only eager for his share of the profits derived from their sufferings. The contradiction is as flagrant as in the case of the great Admiral who initiated the system which brought all these horrors in logical sequence. The ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... with contempt. Whoever he might be he looked upon a Quaker as a mild, inoffensive person, hardly deserving the ...
— A Cousin's Conspiracy - A Boy's Struggle for an Inheritance • Horatio Alger
... history a wholly independent nation has entered a great and costly war under the influence of ideas rather than immediate interests and without any expectation of gains, except those which can be shared with all liberal and inoffensive nations. ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... over the child and remained perfectly still. He did not dare to move, lest any action, however inoffensive, might induce Moosa to change his mind and separate ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... With which mild and inoffensive joke I shook hands with Tom, informing him where to find me; made Miss Katy a bow, which she returned with a charming smile and a little inclination which shook together her ringlets; and then leaving the young ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... a smile of condescension, advised Dr. Beaumont to reflect on his own situation, and consider his temporal advantages and personal security. He spoke in praise of his learning, benevolence, and inoffensive conduct, and desired him, by a timely conformity to the prevailing doctrines, to avoid being implicated in the ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... they doing there, all these feverish workers? They were making a clearance of death on behalf of life. Transcendent alchemists, they were transforming that horrible putridity into a living and inoffensive product. They were draining the dangerous corpse to the point of rendering it as dry and sonorous as the remains of an old slipper hardened on the refuse-heap by the frosts of winter and the heats of summer. They were working their hardest ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... dinner a servant brought word that a reporter wished to speak to John. Usually Lane refused to see reporters outside his office, and there turned them over to his secretary, who was skilled in the gentle art of saying inoffensive nothings in many words. But to her surprise John after slight hesitation went into the library to see the man, and it was a long half hour before he returned to his dinner. The evening was another one of those torturing periods when Isabella's heart was ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... altogether discreditable member of the community; his vocation is better than that of begging, and he certainly works hard enough for the pennies thrown to him, lugging his big box around the city from morning until night." To this good word for the organ grinder it may be added that he is generally an inoffensive person, who attends closely to his business during the day, and rarely ever falls into the hands of the police. Furthermore, however much grown people with musical tastes may be annoyed, the organ grinders furnish an immense amount ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... joy from the rescue of Hector in the Iliad, "Thus Apollo bore me from the fray." In this Satire, which was admirably imitated by Swift, it always seems to me that we get Horace at his very best, his dry quaintness and his inoffensive fun. The delicacy of Roman satire died with him; to reappear in our own Augustan age with Addison and Steele, to find faint echo in the gentle preachments of Cowper, to impress itself in every page on the lambent ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... human society with kind and complacent survey, we are more than half tempted to imagine that men might subsist very well in clusters and congregated bodies without the coercion of law; and in truth criminal laws were only made to prevent the ill-disposed few from interrupting the regular and inoffensive proceedings ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... slaughter of birds which has been indulged in by individuals who have killed them for the uses of their own lady friends. I know one Brown Pelican colony which was visited by a tourist who shot four hundred of the big, harmless, inoffensive creatures in order to get a small strip of skin on either side of the body. He explained to his boatmen, who did the skinning for him, that he was curious to see if these strips of skin with their feathers would not {154} make an interesting coat for his wife. ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... swearers, in abundance; and Uncle Nathan felt, at the bottom of his philanthropic heart, a desire to lead them from their sins. Not that he was officious and meddlesome, for he believed in "a time for everything." In his modest, inoffensive way, no doubt, he sowed the seeds of future ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... heels, and he wore the light clothes of which Maude had written, and a stove-pipe hat, and dove colored gloves, and carried a little cane, which he constantly nibbled at, when he was not beating his little boot with it. But he was good-natured and inoffensive and kind-hearted, with nothing low or mean in his nature; and Jerrie, who looked as if she could have picked him up and thrown him over the house, liked him far better than she did the 'elegant Tom,' as she had nicknamed him, who stood six feet without ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... snorted. "Some people have got a nerve!" He glowered forbiddingly at an inoffensive young man in a light overcoat who had just entered, and the young man, though his conscience was quite clear and Mr. Brewster an entire stranger to him, stopped dead, blushed, and went out again—to dine elsewhere. "Some people have got the nerve of ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... consuming care for the souls of his people. Very Faithful himself stood before the bar of Judge Jeffreys in the person of Richard Baxter. It took all the barefaced falsehood and scandalous injustice of the crown prosecutors to draw out the sham indictment that was read out in court against inoffensive Richard Baxter. But what was lacking in the charge of the crown was soon made up by the abominable scurrility of the judge. 'You are a schismatical knave,' roared out Jeffreys, as soon as Baxter was brought into court. 'You are an old hypocritical villain.' And then, clasping his hands and turning ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... solicitude rather to avoid than to court observation. If there is any thing positively indicative in his expression, by which I include his manner, it is that of a good-humoured indifference, an inoffensive, unobtrusive stoicism. He would seem to have adopted the excellent advice given by the Apostle to the Thessalonians—"STUDY TO BE QUIET." This is his rule of life, and he acts upon it upon great and small occasions. He only desires that you will have the goodness to let him alone. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... some distinctiveness of dress, as in the case of "Dungaree Jack"; or from some peculiarity of habit, as shown in "Saleratus Bill," so called from an undue proportion of that chemical in his daily bread; or from some unlucky slip, as exhibited in "The Iron Pirate," a mild, inoffensive man, who earned that baleful title by his unfortunate mispronunciation of the term "iron pyrites." Perhaps this may have been the beginning of a rude heraldry; but I am constrained to think that it was because a man's real name in that day rested solely upon his ...
— Tennessee's Partner • Bret Harte
... of his fellow roomers. A strange, drab lot he thought them from the occasional glimpses he had had in passings upon the dark stairway and in the gloomy halls. They appeared to be quiet, inoffensive sort of folk, occupied entirely with their own affairs. He had made no friends in the place, not even an acquaintance, nor did he care to. What leisure time he had he devoted to what he now had come to consider as his life work—the answering of blind ads in the Help Wanted columns ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of Dick's attempt on the young schoolmaster, ("You know Mr. Langdon very well, Elsie,—a perfectly inoffensive young man, as I understand,") Elsie turned her face away and slid along by the wall to the window which looked out on the little grass-plot with the white stone standing in it. Her father could not see her ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... think that item of evidence so satisfactory as Isel did. But he had not come with any intention of ferreting out doubtful characters or suspicious facts. He was no ardent heretic-hunter, but a quiet, peaceable man, as inoffensive as ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... jealous soul could tolerate no rival—or it may be that she really loved the King. He had given himself to her in the flush of his triumphant return, while he was still young enough to feel a genuine passion. For her sake he had been a cruel husband, an insolent tyrant to an inoffensive wife; for her sake he had squandered his people's money, and outraged every moral law; and it may be that she remembered these things, and hated him the more fiercely for them when he was inconstant. She was a woman of extremes, in whose tropical temperament there ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... essential difference between the articles which have been appearing in Mr. Ford's paper, either in spirit or in text, and those which, in a past so recent that its horror haunts the memory of men and women of our generation, let loose upon tens of thousands of helpless and inoffensive people the most bestial and fiendish cruelty and hatred ever attained by beings ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... legs, and then runs backward out of her hole to dump it down behind her. Mr. Emerton tells me that he never saw a bee in the act of digging but once, and then she left off after a few strokes. He also says, "they are harmless and inoffensive. On several occasions I have lain on the grass near their holes for hours, but not one attempted to sting me; and when taken between the fingers, they make but ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... The gods are paid (gratified) by sacrifices, the Rishis, by study, meditation, and asceticism, the (deceased) ancestors, by begetting children and offering the funeral cake, and, lastly other men, by leading a humane and inoffensive life. I have justly discharged my obligations to the Rishis, the gods, and other men. But those others than these three are sure to perish with the dissolution of my body! Ye ascetics, I am not yet freed ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... saving now, their helplessness, unhappily, being the same? Was the novelty of their appearance and situation a plea more forcible than acquaintance with their merits? than the view of their harmless lives, their inoffensive manners, their patient resignation to ...
— Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (1793) • Frances Burney
... I depict the anguish of the brave Who envied comrades sleeping in the grave? Shall I exult o'er inoffensive dust Of valiant men whose swords have turned to rust? Shall I, like Menelaus by the coast, O'er dead Ajaces make unmanly boast? Shall I, in chains of an ignoble Verse, Degrade dead Hectors, and their pangs rehearse— Nay! such ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... shriveled and withered, with velvet hat, not of the latest style, its well-kept strings of black vastly different from the glossy blue he had so much admired at an earlier period of the day. Was ever man more disappointed? Who was she, the old witch, for so he mentally termed the inoffensive woman devoutly conning her prayer book, unconscious of the wrath her presence was exciting in the bosom of the young man beside her! How he wished he had stayed at home, and were it not that he sat so far distant from the door, he would certainly ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... of these versions imply that the "massacre" was a mere marauding, cruel, and murderous invasion of an inoffensive and peaceful settlement; while the other two versions of Dr. Ramsay and Mr. Hildreth clearly show the provocation and cruel wrongs which the Loyalists, and even Indians, had experienced from the continentals and inhabitants of Wyoming; that the settlement ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... objection. And yet, when it was promulgated in 1850, their chief spoke of it, in his ill-timed letter to the Bishop of Durham, as "insolent and insidious." For many an age to come, Catholics will read with astonishment that so inoffensive an act of the Holy See, done at the request of the Catholic bishops of England, and in the interest of the Catholic people, at the time some seven millions in number, should have excited the anger of so great a portion of the ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... into the hands of the Jews before he was twenty, and was driven to break the entail by the time he was forty, passing to a family of Dyers. The best that could be said of them was, that the old people were comparatively inoffensive and the young were presentable. They were inclined to be friendly with the town—it might be till they could secure a footing with the county people, if that were possible. They dressed well, thanks to their milliners and dressmakers, kept a good table, ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... car squirmed out of the ruck of vehicles and came rolling on to the sward. The gentleman ensconced upon its back seat was for the saddle, and plainly glad of it. His careless, handsome face was radiant, his manner full of an easy, inoffensive confidence, his gaiety—to judge from his companions' laughter—infectious. His turn-out was simple, but faultless. Despite the fact that he was sitting between Lady Touchstone and Valerie, Anthony ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... "bottom," and the Rattle Snake Fork of Paint, the driver discovered poor old Jake laid out, stiff and cold as a wedge! Alas, poor old Jake! Gone! Quite a gloom hung over the "grocery;" Jake was an inoffensive, good old fellow, nobody denied that, and certain young "fellers" who had shaved the tail of Jake's mare the night previous, and set her loose, now felt sort of sorry for the deed. The editor of the "Argus of Freedom" came down to the "grocery," to ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... it seems, though he had done everything for his son in breeding him a scholar, though when he grew up to man's estate he had nothing to give him, and was forced to let him come over to England to list himself in the Foot Guards. His officers gave him always the character of a quiet, inoffensive lad, who injured nobody, nor was himself addicted to those vices which are common to the men of his profession. On the contrary, he retained yet strong notions of those religious principles in which he had been educated. He addicted himself much to reading, and though ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... foam. It slipped discreetly along as in the maritime silence of the first millennium of the new-born earth. The oceanic inhabitants approached it confidently upon seeing it rolling like a mute and inoffensive whale. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a possibility, and the fact was somewhat unsettling to her faith in Nevill Tyson. "Isn't it—for a young bride, you know—just a little—a little triste?" And being more than a little afraid of her son-in-law, she waved her hands to give an inoffensive vagueness to her idea. Tyson said he didn't care to spend money on a place like Thorneytoft; he didn't know how long he would stay in it; he never stayed anywhere long; he was a pilgrim and a stranger, a sort of cosmopolitan Cain, and he might ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... (Meles-Taxus) is at once one of the most inoffensive and (in one sense) offensive of our few remaining British Carnivora. He is described by NAPIER of Merchiston, in his Book of Nature and of Man, as a "quiet nocturnal beast, but if much 'badgered' becoming obstinate, and fighting to the last, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... marked off the days before the holidays on a little calendar, simply bent on hiding what I was or thought or felt from everyone, with a fortitude that was not in the least stoical. What I was afraid of I hardly know; my aim was to be absolutely inoffensive and ordinary, to do what everyone else did, to avoid any sort of notice. I was a strange mixture of indifference and sensitiveness. I did not in the least care how I was regarded, I had no ambitions of any kind, did not want to be liked, or to succeed, or to make an impression; while I was ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... night. Across the way gas-lit windows glowed like squares on some great, blurred checker-board. The roadway teemed with shrieking children. Somewhere—near at hand—a pianola lost its temper and whaled the everlasting daylights out of an inoffensive melody from "The Pink Lady." Other, more diffident instruments tinkled apologetically in the distance. Intermittently, across the gaunt scaffolding of the Ninth Avenue L, at one end of the block, roaring trains flashed long chains of lights. ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... split into small strips, and platted together like straw. It was Sunday, and most of the people were in town, sitting at the doors of their huts, or under their verandahs. Nearly all the inhabitants of Totagalpa are pure Indians, and are simple and inoffensive people. They sat listening to three men, one with a whistle, the others with drums, each striving to make as much noise as possible, without any attempt at harmony or tune, whilst an enthusiast in discord kept clanging away at the bells ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... I also hushed a groan. Oh!—I just wished he would let me alone—cease allusion to me. These epithets—these attributes I put from me. His "quiet Lucy Snowe," his "inoffensive shadow," I gave him back; not with scorn, but with extreme weariness: theirs was the coldness and the pressure of lead; let him whelm me with no such weight. Happily, he was ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... head. There was a long silence. The old man wished to give his companion time to think; and indeed he thought that Harold was weighing the proposition in his mind. As for Harold, he was thinking how best he could make his absolute refusal inoffensive. He must, he felt, give some reason; and his thoughts were bent on how much of the truth he could safely give without endangering his secret. Therefore he spoke at last ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... time to bring down a rabbit, or even a bird. All day long he would wander in unfrequented uplands, slinging stones at every object that tempted his eye, and roaring and dancing with delight whenever he hit the mark. He was inoffensive enough and had never been known to deliberately aim at a human being, though more than one shooting party had been considerably alarmed by the crash of Toller's stones among the branches, or by his long-range sniping of the white-clothed luncheon-table. On one occasion Toller ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... neighbors were the Howes, and beyond the impish pleasure she derived from taunting Martin, they had no interest for her. The sisters were timid, inoffensive beings enough; but had they been three times as inoffensive they were nevertheless Howes; moreover, Ellen did not care for docile people. She was a fighter herself and loved a fighter. That was the reason she had always ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... examined these attentively. No doubt it must have struck him that the apartment was very exposed for so secret a meeting. Yet its distance from the road made it of less consequence. Finally he discussed the matter with his fellow lodger. Scanlan, though a Scowrer, was an inoffensive little man who was too weak to stand against the opinion of his comrades, but was secretly horrified by the deeds of blood at which he had sometimes been forced to assist. McMurdo told him shortly what ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Trevison's viewpoint, I suppose," he laughed. "He came into my office this morning, after being served with a summons from Judge Lindman's court in regard to the title of his land, and tried to kill me. Failing in that, he knocked poor, inoffensive little Braman down—who had interfered in my behalf—and threw him bodily through the front window of the building, glass and all. It's lucky for him that Braman wasn't hurt. After that he tried to ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... him. In vain I told him, in English, that boys were the most dangerous creatures; and if once you began with them, it was safe to end in a shower of stones. For my own part, whenever anything was addressed to me, I smiled gently and shook my head as though I were an inoffensive person inadequately acquainted with French. For indeed I have had such experience at home, that I would sooner meet many wild animals than a troop ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who were present (one not an officer of the regiment) proved that Capt. Reynolds' manner was quiet and inoffensive. Capt. Jones reported the conversation; and, soon afterwards, Capt. Reynolds was summoned to the orderly room; where, in presence of Major Jenkins, the adjutant, and Capt. Jones, Lord Cardigan thus addressed Capt. Reynolds, in no very agreeable tone, or manner: 'If you ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton |
