"Irrelevant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not yet found any suitable reply to make to this rather irrelevant confidence, when Miss Broadwood turned to her cordially: "I'm awfully glad you've come, Miss Willard, though I've not quite decided why you did it. I wanted very much to meet you. Flavia gave me your thesis ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... from Oxford this morning; a cup of tea and some nice toast, please, Bates," said Theydon. Then when the two were alone together again, he brushed aside the question of his age as irrelevant. ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... super-sensuous art, the aim being to reach the hidden meaning and the inner life. Hence the favourite practice of placing and posing in the painting-room some well-chosen figure which was quietly looked at, carefully considered, and taken in; thus the irrelevant elements were eliminated, and only the essential truths assimilated. This was for Overbeck the saving study of nature: he made extracts and essences, elaborated generic types, and thus his art became supreme in beauty. ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... Kapilavatthu. That he should have done so is natural enough but there is little trace of sentiment in the narrative of the Vinaya. Its object is to state the occasion on which the Buddha laid down the rules of the order. Irrelevant incidents are ignored and those which are noticed are regarded simply as the circumstances which led to the formulation of certain regulations. "The Lord dwelt in the Sakka country near Kapilavatthu in the Banyan Grove. And in the forenoon ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. . . . To put the conclusion crudely, the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. . . . The realistic matter and fields of force of former physical theory are altogether irrelevant except in so far as the mind-stuff has itself spun these imaginings. . . . The external world has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... bearing upon health has at least an indirect connection with manners; the reader will therefore excuse us for introducing here a few remarks which may seem, at the first glance, rather irrelevant. Sound lungs, a healthy liver, and a good digestion are as essential to the right performance of our social duties as they are to our own personal comfort; therefore a few words on eating and drinking, as affecting these, will not be ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... are often as colloquial in style as the contracts are formal. Hence they swarm with words and phrases for which no parallel can be found. Unless the purpose of the letter is otherwise clear, these words and phrases may be quite unintelligible. Any side issue may be introduced, or even a totally irrelevant topic. While the point of these disconnected sentences may have been perfectly clear to the recipient of the message, we cannot possibly understand them, unless we have an intimate acquaintance with the private life and personal relations of ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... to-morrow noon," she announced casually and irrelevant to anything in the conversation. "He's going out to the Malay Coast to inspect what's been done with that lumber and rubber company ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... dollars. One of the witnesses on the stand was asked by a lawyer, who wanted to embarrass or discredit him, if he were not an Abolitionist. Objection came from the other side on the ground that the inquiry was irrelevant; but the learned justice-of-the-peace who presided held that, as it related to the witness's sanity, and that would affect his credibility, the question was admissible. It is not, perhaps, so very strange that in those ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... with her sisters everywhere, Florence had an instinctive love of a fad. Realizing this fact, Scotty was not in the least deceived when, during a lull at the dinner-table one evening late in the Fall, she broke in with an irrelevant ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... shot down the road, and the pastor joined his hostess on the way to the house, with the irrelevant remark, "Dr. David Peak, a missionary to Africa, is to speak at our Sunday morning service. I hope we have a large attendance, as this will be a rare treat. It isn't often a little country church can secure so notable a speaker. ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... what followed. Much of it was irrelevant, all of it was preposterous. It ended by Mirza directing me to the nearest hotel, in perfect English. The crosser he got, the better his English. That's odd, you know. Of course, I chucked the chap. He lost a ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... my play-acting. Only Lubov Sergievna, who, I believe, really believed me to be a great egoist, atheist, and cynic, had no love for me, but frequently disputed what I said, flew into tempers, and left me petrified with her disjointed, irrelevant utterances. Yet Dimitri held always to the same strange, something more than friendly, relations with her, and used to say not only that she was misunderstood by every one, but that she did him a world of good. This, however, did not prevent the rest of ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... that incongruity with which things trivial and irrelevant come upon us, even in the supremest moments of life, the thought struck her sharply how old a man ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... of varied, aggregated facts stored up by man's patient study of this universe are irrelevant here, in a sketch of the progressive advance of his knowledge of creation. Those who desire to examine the evidence which has led to this verdict must go over the records themselves, or accept, out of their own convictions, the result of the examination. To entirely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... certainly a brave attempt at eloquence, but perhaps it was not wonderfully convincing. At all events it did not keep Anthony from taking possession of one of her hands and interrupting her with a most irrelevant speech. ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... may be tested with other papers in the case, but not with irrelevant papers, and the whole of the test paper must be shown him. He is entitled to ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... a beneficed clergyman, Mr. Bevis," said Mrs. Ramshorn—who very consistently regarded any practical reference to our Lord as irrelevant, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... as purely irrelevant humor, with possibly a trap or pitfall in it, moved away from the fireplace without a word, and retired to the adjoining kitchen to ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... had told Peggy nothing more about the girl in France. Jeanne was his own precious secret. That it was shared by Phineas and Mo didn't matter. To discuss her with Peggy, besides being irrelevant, in the circumstances, was quite another affair. Indeed, when he had avowed the girl in France, it was not so much a confession as a gallant desire to help Peggy out of her predicament. For, after all, what was Jeanne but a beloved war-wraith ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... needed to be altered or amended it would be in the power of the Conference to do so, but that unless some regular method of proceeding were adopted the sessions would be prolonged indefinitely, and the Conference would be confused by a multitude of irrelevant propositions that might ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... by the flock of women, I took to examining the floor of this church, which contains tesselated marble pavements depicting centaurs, unicorns, lions, stags, and other beasts. But my contemplation of these choice relics was disturbed by irrelevant remarks on the part of the worldly females, who discovered in the head of the stag some subtle peculiarity that stirred their sense ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... and sentences. The entire educational effort was to develop the powers of observing and memorizing accidental, superficial, or even purely artificial relations. This double faculty of observing trifling and irrelevant details, and of remembering them, became ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... other, and only such as are very intimate venture to interchange opinions, and even they only with the utmost caution. For any event that concerns the welfare of the community is, in the mind of the aborigine, intimately connected with the doings of Those Above. And if the Shiuana were to hear an irrelevant or unpleasant utterance on the part of their children, things might go wrong. There is, beside, the barrier between clan and clan,—the mistrust which one connection feels always more or less strongly toward the others. Instead of the ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... the midst of Madame Bertrand's effusive benevolence, seemed quite irrelevant to the matter in hand, but nevertheless imparted a ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... Schwarzburg. Greifenstein began to think that the problematical personage was dead, though Clara evidently did not share his opinion, for she never regained her former manner. Under any other circumstances Greifenstein would have enjoyed the change, the absence of irrelevant interruption, the rest from her unnatural laughter, the gravity of her tired face. He was far from being satisfied, however, and his earnest mind brooded constantly over the possibilities of the unknown future. His situation was the harder to bear ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... Wordsworth is not as illuminating as Walter Pater's. The essay on Gray is not as well ordered as Arnold's. The essay on Thoreau is quite as unsatisfactory as Stevenson's. It is true that the famous longer essays on Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton, are full of irrelevant matter, of facile delightful talk which often leads nowhere in particular. It is true, finally, that a deeper interest in philosophy and science might have made Lowell's criticism more fruitful; ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... matter what his moral character may be in other directions, whether he is kind to his wife, whether he is loving towards his children, whether he is generous in a charitable way, whether he is politically stanch or corrupt, do you not see that these questions are entirely irrelevant, have nothing whatever to do with the question of success in the money field? He sows according to the laws of the product which he wishes to ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... many criticisms made of this work, most are irrelevant to our present purpose, or have been satisfactorily met by the authors. It must be said, however, that as the children examined were all school children, the really degenerate offspring of alcoholics, if any such ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... bit of specious nonsense," returned the ghost, throwing a quart of indignation into the face of the master of Harrowby. "It may rank high as repartee, but as a comment upon my statement that you do not know what you are talking about, it savors of irrelevant impertinence. You do not know that I am compelled to haunt this place year after year by inexorable fate. It is no pleasure to me to enter this house, and ruin and mildew everything I touch. I never aspired to be a shower-bath, but it is my doom. Do ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... carry forward into the present. The function of the brain then, or of a mental faculty intimately co-operating with the brain is to discriminate, to sift and select, to prolong into present consciousness what is of importance for action and to relegate the irrelevant to partial or total oblivion. From this psychological standpoint ignorance and obliviscence are seen to be achievements of the intellect. The presence of all facts in a human consciousness is unthinkable. If it were possible, it would paralyse action. If we exempt Christ from the ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... beautiful. Its appearance is a little unfamiliar, of course, but all the muddle of dust-collecting hangings and witless ornament that cover the earthly bedroom, the valances, the curtains to check the draft from the ill-fitting windows, the worthless irrelevant pictures, usually a little askew, the dusty carpets, and all the paraphernalia about the dirty black-leaded fireplace are gone. The faintly tinted walls are framed with just one clear colored line, ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... vague, hastily jotted down, carelessly edited. One of the chief reasons for the eternal misunderstandings! Often the author fails to state the quantities to be used. He has a mania for giving undue prominence to expensive spices and other (quite often irrelevant) ingredients. Plainly, Apicius was no writer, no editor. He was a cook. He took it for granted that spices be used within the bounds of reason, but he could not afford to forget them ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... "commonly indicate that we have not the point to be determined clearly in view." So an extreme sense of striving effort, or, in other words, an extreme sense of inward hindrance, in the performance of a high task, usually denotes the presence in us of an element irrelevant to our work, and perhaps unfriendly to it. If a stream flow roughly, you infer obstructions in the channel. Often the explanation may be that one is attempting to-day a task proper to some future time,—to another year, or another century. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... about Don Joe Antonio Gonzalez de Salas, whose connecting passages, with the exception of one which is irrelevant, are here included. ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... Daniel many years later bore a strong resemblance to what Charles had been, and he too possessed a kindred humorous faculty and told a story in much the same solemn manner, bringing out the point as if it were something entirely irrelevant and unimportant and casually remembered. The subject of this sketch, however, was the only member of the family in whom a love for the droll and incongruous was a controlling disposition. As is frequently the case, a family trait ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... lost. I said prayers in the family, with the tenor of which the wife was delighted, but the weaver still dissatisfied; and, after a supper of the most homely fare, he tried to start an argument with me, proving that everything for which I had interceded in my prayer was irrelevant to man's present state. But I, being weary and distressed in mind, shunned the contest, and requested a couch whereon ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... private citizens who are not in the least instigated thereto by any official invitation or at all subject to official control. While some of them are entitled to Executive consideration, many of them are so irrelevant or in the light of other facts so worthless, that they have not been given the least weight in determining the question to which they are supposed to relate." If such matter were to be considered public records and subject to the inspection of the Senate, the President ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... Darius, extending over thirty-six years, was memorable for vast improvements in the administrations of the empire, nor will it, in this place, be an irrelevant digression to glance briefly and rapidly back over some of the events and the innovations by which it ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... argument! How plausible it appears! And yet it is irrelevant, as Dr. Priestly frankly confesses, who tries to save the credit of the apostle by the convenient principle of accommodation! The whole force of Peter's reasoning depends upon the word "corruption." David ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... truth, then his character of Samuel Johnson is the most vividly conceived and deeply etched in all the realm of books. But if he gives merely the simple facts, then Boswell is no less a genius, for he has omitted the irrelevant and inconsequential, and by playing off the excellent against the absurd, he has placed his subject among the few great wits who have ever lived—a man who wrote remarkably well, but talked ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... fried the bear steak over the gasoline "plate," Sandy told the story of the fishing trip, while Will listened with a grin on his face, now and then interrupting with what Sandy declared to be an entirely irrelevant remark. ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... that time, the Odd Girl had developed such improving powers of catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed with unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would address the servants in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had painted Master B.'s room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.'s bell away and balked the ringing, and if ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... hour, sometimes for an hour and a half, and yet I never felt bored or wearied by his long discourses, but really looked forward to them. This was because his sermons, instead of consisting of a string of pious platitudes, interspersed with trite ejaculations and irrelevant quotations, were one long chain of closely-reasoned argument. Granted his first premiss, his second point followed logically from it, and so he led his hearers on point by point, all closely argued, to an indisputable ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... a few years, he did return to England. The cause of his return is irrelevant to the history, but I may say that it sprang from a conflict between the Five Towns temperament and the Trenton Union of Earthenware Operatives. Such is the power of Unions in the United States that Toby, if he wished to remain under the Federal Flag, had either to yield or to starve. He ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... characters belonging to the inventive genius has necessitated some seemingly irrelevant remarks on the action of the environment. Let us return ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... me to do." And here on the Cross He repeats, "It is finished." When we think of this we are impressed with the steadiness with which our Lord pursued His purpose, with the way He concentrated His whole life upon His work. He declined to be drawn aside by anything irrelevant to it. People came to Him with all sorts of requests, from the request that He will settle a disputed inheritance to the request that He will become their king; and He puts them all aside as having no pertinence to His mission. It is interesting to go through the Gospel and note just what ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... Persis' answer was irrelevant. "Joel, seems to me that so far my life's been for all the world like a checked gingham, if ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... I had taken the book down and read again its totally uninteresting and unsuggestive title and, by another reference to its dim and faded leaves, found that my memory had not played me false and that it contained nothing but stupid and wholly irrelevant statistics, my confidence in it as a possible aid in the work I had in hand departed just as it had on the previous occasion. I was about to put it back on the shelf, when I bethought me of running my hand in behind ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Constitution—why this fierce crusade against slavery? In deciding this very question, namely, the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, a high judicial authority has said that "the abstract proposition of the justice or injustice of slavery is wholly irrelevant here, and, I apprehend, ought not to have the slightest influence upon any ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... this irrelevant talk!" P'ing Erh laughed. "You and I are friends; so compose your mind and take the things I gave you just now! Besides, I have, on my part, something to ask of you. When the close of the year comes, select a few of your cabbages, dipped in lime, and dried ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... never hear this definition challenged, and it is true as far as it goes, for philosophy has indeed manifested above all things its interest in unity. But how about the VARIETY in things? Is that such an irrelevant matter? If instead of using the term philosophy, we talk in general of our intellect and its needs we quickly see that unity is only one of these. Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned, along with ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... questions I ask you may seem trivial, but as I said to the sheriff a moment ago, some word of yours that appears to you entirely unconnected with the case may give me a clue which will be exceedingly valuable. You will, therefore, I am sure, pardon me if some of the questions I ask you appear irrelevant." ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... character. As the exercise of muscle builds up physical vigour, so the persistent exertion of will develops mental and moral power. Men who have a paramount aim in life should never hesitate in strangling all irrelevant and inferior appellants for sympathy. A comparatively briefless attorney should trample out as he would an invading worm the temptation to dream rose-coloured visions, wherein bows, arrows, and bleeding hearts are thick and plentiful as gooseberries. Love in a ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... simply, with a little gasp of returning consciousness. "It is good of you to say so, doctor," but it was doubtful whether she knew what she was saying. She was penetrated through and through with thankfulness, yet thanks to herself seemed so irrelevant that she did not ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... same style, declaimed during an hour against Whigs and Dissenters, and reminded the jury that the prisoner's husband had borne a part in the death of Charles the First, a fact which had not been proved by any testimony, and which, if it had been proved, would have been utterly irrelevant to the issue. The jury retired, and remained long in consultation. The judge grew impatient. He could not conceive, he said, how, in so plain a case, they should even have left the box. He sent a messenger to tell them that, if they did not instantly return, he would adjourn the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... him live; but, in so far as he is revolting, let him die. Many things in the world seem ugly and purposeless; but to a deeper intelligence than ours, they are a part of beauty and design. What is ugly and irrelevant, can never enter, as such, into a work of art; because the artist is bound, by a sacred obligation, to show us the complete curve only,—never the ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... the next, and, in case of need, to defend him—from whom? From somebody unknown, but terrible and dangerous. What he needed was to feel that there was another man, an old and tried friend, that he might call him in his sick moments merely to look at his face, or, perhaps, exchange some quite irrelevant words with him. And if the old servant were not angry, he felt comforted, and if he were angry, he was more dejected. It happened even (very rarely however) that Fyodor Pavlovitch went at night to the lodge to wake Grigory and fetch him for a moment. When the old man came, Fyodor ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... some six hundred members whose business it should be to draw up a constitution for a united German nation. This assembly, reluctantly authorized by the Diet, convened May 18 in the free city of Frankfort. The task to be accomplished was formidable and much valuable time was consumed in learned but irrelevant disputation. In the end it was decided that not the whole of Austria, but only the German portions, should be admitted to the new union; that there should be established a full-fledged parliamentary ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... please, of course, but I think you had much better appear by counsel. I give you notice that, if you do not, you must not expect to be shown any consideration. You will not be heard by me at any greater length than the case requires, nor allowed to go into irrelevant matter, as persons who argue ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... where children never seem to think of paying any respect to the presence of their parents or older people; where they will monopolize conversation at table, interrupt their parents and guests to ask irrelevant questions or relate irrelevant incidents, enter a room abruptly, and, without waiting to learn whether any one is speaking, at once begin to speak of something pertaining to their own affairs. All this is bad behavior and bad manners. ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... quitting my subject, and proceeding, as it is too often with appearance of justice alleged against me, into irrelevant matter. Pardon me; the end, not only of these lectures, but of my whole professorship, would be accomplished,—and far more than that,—if only the English nation could be made to understand that the beauty which is indeed to be a joy for ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... to say proved inconsequent enough, an irrelevant suggestion concerning the training of field-dogs for close covert work and the reasons for not breaking such dogs on quail. Then the question of cross-breeding came up, and he gave his opinion on the qualities of "droppers." ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... the elder, who was a clear-headed, practical person, competent in all petty plans, that if the son settled down to law and got his "call," then he would be summoned back to Dublin and put in a way to achieve distinction. But if the young man still pursued his desultory reading and scribbling on irrelevant themes, why then the remittances were to be withdrawn and Edmund Burke, being twenty-one years of age, could sink or swim. Burke pater would wash his hands in innocency, having fully complied with all legal requirements, and God knows that is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... combination directed against Germany and engineered, in the earlier years, for that purpose by King Edward VII. This impression of the Belgian representatives is no proof, it is true, of the real intentions of the Entente, but it is proof of how they did in fact appear to outsiders. And it is irrelevant, whether or no it be true, to urge that the Belgians were indoctrinated with the German view; since precisely the fact that they could be so indoctrinated would show that the view was on the face of it plausible. We see, then, in these dispatches ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... stick to the subject?" I cried; "you have the most irrelevant mind! How do you expect to rise ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are unrivaled for graphicality, (why is there not such a word?) for the force with which they convey the true by the novel or unexpected, by the introduction of touches which other artists would be sure to omit as irrelevant to the subject. This faculty, too, springs from her subjectiveness, which leads her to paint a scene less by its features ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... first section, i.-iv. 40, Moses, after reviewing the recent history of the people, and showing how it reveals Jehovah's love for Israel, earnestly urges upon them the duty of keeping His laws, reminding them of His spirituality and absoluteness. Then follows the appointment, iv. 41-43—here irrelevant (cf. xix. 1-l3)—of three cities of refuge east of ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... his desire. He inwardly declared that he intended to obey orders. Why should he have got into any argument about the validity of these orders? It was only the common trick of desire—which avails itself of any irrelevant scepticism, finding larger room for itself in all uncertainty about effects, in every obscurity that looks like the absence of law. Still, he ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... may well stagger occasionally under the burden of their own conceptions of them. To rise to the height of such an argument demands a more than Miltonic imagination; and criticisms directed only at this or that fragment of the whole are as irrelevant, if not as inept, as the criticism of the mathematician directed against Paradise Lost, that it 'proved nothing.' The mystery of being and of life, the true purport and reality of this world of which we seem to be a part, and yet of which we seem to have some apprehension as though we ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... remarked that the inquiry was irrelevant, unless the district attorney expected to show from it a bias on the part of ...
— Report of the Proceedings at the Examination of Charles G. Davis, Esq., on the Charge of Aiding and Abetting in the Rescue of a Fugitive Slave • Various
... angry cries of "Vote! Vote!" the reiterated announcement of the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations that the conferees could not agree, the perpetual nagging of two Democrats and one Populist, the long trying intervals of debate on matters irrelevant to the great question torturing every mind, during which there was much confusion on the floor: the Senators talked constantly in groups except when the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations brought in his amended bill;—all this had ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... that a missionary may have edited, if not composed, this song. However that may be, the remainder of it gives us several pretty glimpses of Tongan amorous customs and may therefore be cited, omitting a few irrelevant sentences: ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the fine arts, and a mere amateur like Nehemiah is apt to fail in point of consistency. He was inattentive while the surveyor dilated on the probable value, the accessibility, and the relative height of the "fall" of the various sites, and their available water-power, and he put irrelevant queries concerning ineligible streams in other localities. No man comfortably mounted upon his hobby relishes an interruption. The surveyor would stop with a sort of bovine surprise, and break ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... crimson maple, and I remember how the light struck through it and flushed the print with the gules of the foliage. My friend was away by this time on one of his several absences in the Northwest, and I was quite alone in the absurd and irrelevant melancholy with which I read myself and my circumstances into the book. I began to read them out again in due time, clothed with the literary airs and graces that I admired in it, and for a long time I imitated Ik Marvel in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... It is irrelevant, certainly, but we must acknowledge our indebtedness to a lady customer who supposed that the "Married Life of the Frederic Carrolls" was an historic work, dealing with the domestic existence of the ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... will change the subject. Your remarks are irrelevant and unintelligible. The question before us is what are we to do with these Indians? The obvious thing is to escort them home, if we knew where their ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that they much more often do not. The question here is only of the primacy of the principle. Thus it would seem that the facts of musical structure constitute in themselves a refutation of the view we have disputed. To say that music arose in "heightened speech" is irrelevant; for the occasion of an aesthetic phenomenon is never its cause. It might as well be said that music arose in economic conditions,— as indeed Grosse, in his "Anfange der Kunst," conclusively shows, without attempting to make this social ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... the great social trouble of which he was so unaccountably the axis. A text, irrelevant enough and yet curiously insistent, came floating up out of the darkness of his memory. This ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... was once launched, she danced up to her husband, and set to him with a meek deliberation that was as funny as any part of the scene. So then the mover of all this slipped on one side, and let the stone of merriment—roll—and roll it did; there was no swimming, sprawling, or irrelevant frisking; their feet struck the ground for every note of the fiddle, pat as its echo, their faces shone, their hearts leaped, and their poor frozen natures came out, and warmed themselves at the ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... humour. "Take care I don't get them into YOU! You'd like them, my friends at home, Waymarsh," he declared; "you'd really particularly like them. And I know"—it was slightly irrelevant, but he gave it sudden and singular force—"I know they'd ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... appear that Locke was not more familiar with Descartes' writings than Hume seems to have been; for, viewed in relation to the passages just cited, the arguments adduced in his famous polemic against innate ideas are totally irrelevant. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... corkscrew of the good landlord; but the file of the Times I have it not. Have you your boots, your fish-sauce, your currycomb?' he went on. Then, lapsing into irrelevant local gossip, 'the granddaughter of the blacksmith has the ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... page, with its wealth of detail, and its unnecessary and irrelevant information, the book ripples on like a brook, and to the weary reader of problem novels it may have something of the ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... little and cared less. He was aware of a fine gentleman striding through the cloister, lolling in the garth, and occupying a prominent seat in the church; he noticed that his master was long in coming to him after the protracted chapter-meetings, but it appeared to him all rather an irrelevant matter. These things were surely quite apart from the business for which they were all gathered in the house—the opus Dei and the salvation of souls; this or that legal document did not seriously ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... then, in a very different voice, Sylvia Bailey asked the Comte de Virieu a question that seemed to him utterly irrelevant. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... the young clergyman, indifferently, as waiving a discussion that he considered irrelevant or unseasonable. He had a ready faculty, indeed, of escaping from any topic that agitated his too sensitive and nervous temperament.—"But, now, I would ask of my well-skilled physician, whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have profited by his kindly care of this ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... judges returned the evidence went on. Though most of it was entirely irrelevant, its volume was so great that at length the Old Bishop grew weary, and said he would hear no more. Then the judges went on to put, first to Cicely and afterwards to Emlyn, a series of questions of a nature so abominable that after denying the first of them indignantly, ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... existence through the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. of the archaic temple) is not affected by Mr. Penrose's theory, and I leave my arguments, such as they are, for the consideration alike of those who do and who do not agree with Mr. Penrose. Much of my article will appear irrelevant to the former class, but, as Mr. Penrose's views may not be at once generally accepted, it is as well to leave the discussion of previous theories as it was before the appearance ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... feelings of admiration and enthusiasm which works of such great beauty were intended to inspire? Are they exercised to the same extent? Or is the tendency rather to trammel and divert them by so much laborious and irrelevant interference? ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... rigorously insist on that cast-iron incorporation which, as it happens, in the case of Ireland I believe to be equally hopeless and undesirable. This explanation, therefore, of my favour for Welsh Disestablishment is as absurdly ignorant as it is far-fetched and irrelevant. ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... who were quite strangers, mere spectators, were watching it excitedly, holding their breath, in fear of losing a single movement or expression of the bride and bridegroom, and angrily not answering, often not hearing, the remarks of the callous men, who kept making joking or irrelevant observations. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... irrelevant to enter into the details of these coteries. (23) Some were simply of fashion and taste; but others were undoubtedly gatherings of powerful thinkers, imbued with infidel principles, whose character belongs to French literature and the mental and moral ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... justify her love by giving to Antonio (as Shakspeare would probably have done) such strong specialties of character as would compel, and therefore excuse, his mistress's affection. He has plenty of time to do this in the first scenes,—time which he wastes on irrelevant matter; and all that we gather from them is that Antonio is a worthy and thoughtful person. If he gives promise of being more, he utterly disappoints that promise afterwards. In the scene in which the Duchess tells her love, he is far smaller, rather than greater, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... mental or physical defects are rarely mentioned. The greatest objection to the utilization of this material, however, is the amount of labor necessary in order to glean the desired facts from the mass of irrelevant data. For example, in order to find one case of first cousin marriage it is necessary on an average, to examine the records of ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... forefinger touched Copenhagen. Leaning over her shoulder, he felt her hair crumpling against his breast. He felt an insane desire to bury his face in it and hug her up close in his arms—for a single moment the question of whether she came from Copenhagen or the moon was irrelevant and of little consequence. He, at least, had found her. He was digging her out of chaos, and he was filled with the joyous exultation of a triumphant discoverer—almost the thrill of ownership. He held his breath as he watched the little forefinger telling ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... cake for a saint, and the pieces cut in France for le bon Dieu and the Virgin or the three Magi, have a like origin. One may compare them with the Serbian breaking of the kolatch cake in honour of Christ "the Patron Namegiver." Is it irrelevant, also, to mention here the Greek Church custom, at the preparation of the elements for the Eucharist, of breaking portions of the bread in memory of the Virgin and ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... dementia. The man, who formerly showed nothing in his conduct and behavior indicative of a mental disorder, suddenly changes into a state where he does not know his name, age, or his whereabout. His answers to questions are irrelevant and of a remarkedly silly coloring. He begins to act in a childish, affected manner, executing many silly, meaningless acts, or he may break out in a wild furious excitement, loudly proclaiming his innocence, and threatening those who arrested ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... from him. He felt that he had been living in a world of false proportions; that the maze of doubts and fears through which he had wandered was, after all, no part of life itself, merely a tissue of irrelevant issues, to which his distorted imagination had affixed a purely fictitious importance. What concern of his was it how Morris Barnes had lived or died? And who was Bentham that his fate should ever disturb him? The secrets of other people were theirs ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sat long in the twilight, talking very little, and with their eyes rarely meeting, although their hands met frequently at quite irrelevant intervals. Just the graze of a butterfly to make it certain that the other was there: but all the while they both regarded the tiny fire which had set each content of the room a-dancing in the companionable ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... motive for this irrelevant way of talking? Or was he, to judge by his own account of himself, going round and round the subject of his wife and his guest, before he could ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... Kirkton—his ladyes dangerous sickness, and bitter curses if he should leave her, and the appearance of abortion on his offering to go from her. And many others pled, in general terms, that their wives opposed or contradicted their going. But the justiciary court found this defence totally irrelevant."—Fountainhall's Decisions, Vol. ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... my habits, but go on with the list of your wounds. A great beauty of mathematics is that it compels you to keep to your subject. When you're solving one of those delightful problems in mathematics you can't digress and drag in irrelevant things. Algebra is the very thing for a confused mind like yours, Frank, one that doesn't coordinate. But get ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... world and to be absolutely truthful is very difficult, is all but impossible," remarked Miss Burleigh with a mild sententiousness that sounded irrelevant, but came probably in the natural ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... common law, they have gone from one extreme to the other, often with a trivial consideration of the importance of the points involved, and always with an entire absence of a universal point of view, of that genius which grasps a question in its entirety and is not confused by irrelevant details. It is only of late when the matter has come before the Federal Supreme Court and the courts of a few States which have been educated by a frequent recurrence of disputes of this sort that we begin again to see the principle clearly, as ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... safely and comfortably bestowed, as she could see, and ready for sleep; but she would not go, and there sat, with the candle in her hand, her face flushed and her great blue eyes soulfully glowing, while she continued to chatter in an incoherent and strangely irrelevant fashion: so that, astonished into broad wakefulness by this extraordinary behaviour, I sat bolt upright in bed, determined to ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... and typhoid flies. But meanwhile, and always, for that matter, the sensitive soul must learn to adjust itself to circumstances and conditions. This adjustment may in itself become a fine art. It is really the art by which the painter excludes the commonplace and irrelevant from his landscape. Sometimes we have to do this consciously; for the most part, it should be ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... after all, was to promise Plank his opportunity, but not tell him how he was to obtain it; for Mortimer had an uneasy idea that there was something of the Puritan deep planted under the stolid young man's hide, and that he might make some absurd and irrelevant objection to the perfectly proper methods employed by his newly self-constituted guide and mentor. No; that was no concern of Plank's. All he had to do was to be ready. As for Quarrier, anybody could forecast his action when once convinced of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... anti-moralists aver * * that they are quoted unfairly;—that although they disavow, it is true, the necessity, and deny the value, of practical morality and personal holiness, and declare them to be totally irrelevant to our future salvation, yet that * * I might have found occasional recommendations of moral duty which I ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... names, and see what you will do," I said jokingly. My joke was not generally appreciated. The widow gave me a look a little short of savage. Bessie suppressed a smile, in order to give me a reproof with her eyes, and Miss Van just then thought of something wholly irrelevant to say, as if she had not noticed my remark at all. On the whole, I was made to feel that it was ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... unsuspicious, to appear deeply grateful for the kindness offered you; receive these men and your spiritual adviser whenever they call, and above all, keep me informed of everything that occurs, no matter how insignificant or irrelevant it may seem to you to be. Keep me advised on even the smallest details—anything, ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... so honored, and so paid. And the payment should be for great work done—and bear no relation whatever to age or sex, or sex-relation; much less to the pathological condition of irrelevant husbands. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... assistance against the Lacedaemonians; that his purpose was to draw the Achaean youth out of Peloponnesus as hostages, in order to implicate the nation in a war with the Romans. Cycliades, the Achaean praetor, thinking that it was irrelevant to develope the matter by argument, said nothing more than that it was not allowable, according to the laws of the Achaeans, to take any matters into consideration except those on which they had been called together: and the decree for levying an army against Nabis ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... that you?" replied the smoker of the cigar. "What are you doing here, in God's name? I imagined you at Mohamera, by this time, or even in the Gulf." This remark, it may not be irrelevant to say, was in German—as spoken in the trim ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... organic laws of their nature. All that is done in schools or colleges toward physical education is the mere strengthening of the muscular system by muscular exercise; but this is not half enough. These remarks may be deemed irrelevant to my subject, but they can not be lost to an audience whose highest interest is the education of man; and if I am mistaken in supposing that little attention has been paid to the subject, its ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres. He possessed the art, acquired by habit, of reading a book by his fingers, as it has been happily expressed; and of comprising, in concise extracts, a just notion of a book, without the addition of irrelevant matter. Lively, neat, and full of that attic salt which gives a relish to the driest disquisitions, for the first time the ladies and all the beau-monde took an interest in the labours of the critic. He wreathed the rod ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... educational system is that it neglects the plant for the sake of the flower. In anxiety for elegance it forgets substance, preparing not at all for the discharge of parental functions and for the duties of citizenship, by imparting a mass of facts most of which are irrelevant, and the rest without a key. But the accomplishment of all those things which constitute the efflorescence of civilisation should be wholly subordinate to that instruction and discipline on which civilisation rests. As they occupy the leisure part ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... turning to Beason, who was plainly impatient at this shifting to anything so irrelevant as a wife, "I play quite a leading part in Dr. Hubers' life. I'm his cousin—that's the accident of birth; but I handed over to him his wife, for which he owes me undying gratitude. I'm looking for something ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... me, please, with irrelevant remarks," Nan cried, laughing in spite of herself. "Seriously, Jim—you must listen to me. I'm in dead earnest. There's no virtue in riding behind a donkey if you can own a carriage. There can be no virtue in ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... know? She made no sign of distance or dissent, but somehow she didn't seem to belong to him. There was something remote and irrelevant about her; she didn't fit into the advertisement. And in her remoteness and irrelevance she remained inscrutable. She gave no clue to what she really thought of him. When "They" went for him she soothed him. She spread her warm ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... take it was sure to consist—as addresses of welcome in all ages have done—of two words, by dexterously using which, any man can make a good speech of this character. These two words are "We" and "You;" and all else not connected with these is irrelevant and useless. They do not constitute two parts of the same speech but ordinarily play back and forth, like a game of battledore. Who "we" are; what "we" have done; how "we" saw "you;" what "we" have ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... suppose a person to say, and to say with truth, that his own individual faith does not rest upon miracles, is he, therefore, released from the defence of miracles? Is the question of their truth or falsehood an irrelevant one to him? Is his faith secure if they are disproved? By no means; if miracles were, although only at the commencement, necessary to Christianity, and were actually wrought, and therefore form part of the Gospel record and are bound up with the Gospel scheme and ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... giving offence. To say that late marriages are a mistake or second marriages a folly may be to make enemies for life. Which, by the way, is absurd: all conversation should be regarded as privileged and impersonal. 'T is brain meeting brain, not foot treading gingerly among irrelevant personal considerations. And just as we are all willing to preach, we are all willing to be preached at—it gives us such an opportunity of gauging the preacher's morality and ability. The Scotch peasants who denounce their meenister's orthodoxy are ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... very theory of art the poet has conscientiously drawn a veil between himself and his reader, and the scraps of information about him given us by the fourth century grammarian, Donatus, are inconsistent, at best unauthenticated, and generally irrelevant. ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank |
