"Inane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... none too good for me," said he to himself swaggeringly. No doubt about it—no, indeed, not the slightest. But—well, everybody wouldn't realize this, as yet. And it must be admitted that those mere foppish, inane nothings did produce a seeming of difference. Indeed, it must even be admitted that the way Margaret had been brought up would make it hard for her, with her sensitive, delicate nerves, to bear with him if she really knew him. A ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... import of the promise which, by the act of writing in verse, an Author in the present day makes to his reader: but it will undoubtedly appear to many persons that I have not fulfilled the terms of an engagement thus voluntarily contracted. They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... one to half a dozen of these sequences, each by a different artist. Bud Fisher with "Mutt and Jeff" comes first in popularity, I believe, and then there are his rivals and his imitators. Nothing more inane than some of these series could be invented; and yet they persist and could not, I am told, be dropped by any editor who thought ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... think in army corps, and they frankly and sneeringly asked us, "What could you do?" They were still in the stage where they freely applied to enemies and possible enemies the expression, "They are afraid of us." "The more enemies, the more glory," was the inane motto so popular early in the war that it was even printed ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... "Some one frames upon the keys That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain The night and moonshine; music which we seize To body forth our vacuity." She then: "Does this refer to me?" "Oh no, it is I who am inane." ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... apologised; but her face was not startled; it was not aware of him; it wore a singular expression of resolution. A very singular expression which, as it were, detained him for a moment. In order to cover his embarrassment, he made some inane remark on the weather, upon which, instead of returning another inane remark according to the tacit rules of the game, she only gave him a smile of unfathomable meaning. Nothing could have been more singular. The good-looking young gentleman ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... a smile of his own, a weak inane sickly smile that irritated instead of pleasing you, and made you always feel as if you would like to punch his head for being such a fool, when all the time he was not a fool at all, but a thoroughly good-hearted, brave, and clever fellow—true as steel—steel of the very elastic watch-spring ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... deep-rooted dislike. At the beginning one looks about anxiously for the object which could produce so grotesque a smile. There is nothing, for the conversation has been as lead, but the smile does not subside; it only passes through the endless variations that succeed each other from the inane grin to the affected simper which is meant to be tender. The whole face moves perpetually, as the facial muscles of a corpse, excited by an electric current, seem to parody all the ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... suggested, holding up an inane, pretty-girl covered book. He eyed it dubiously and pointed to a title which hinted of the West ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... glad to say that I did not. I found my tongue by and by, and voiced some inane remark to the effect that she might most assuredly "come up," if she had the least inclination to do so, but, on the other hand, that I was more than willing to "come down." Which I did, when she made known her choice ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... the nation, and make us all both better and wiser men than we were before. We have already gained by it many notable experiences, and it has put our wisdom, and our foolishness also, to the test. It has both humbled and exalted our pride. It has cut away from the national character all those inane excrescences of vanity and brag which judicious people everywhere, who were friendly to us, could not choose but lament to see us exercise at such large discretion. It has brought us face to face with realities the most terrible the world has ever ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Venus, that of Medici seems as inane and trifling as mere physical beauty always must by the side of beauty baptized, and made sacramental, as the symbol of that ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Esterhazy failed to see its purport or significance and was unable to comprehend it. Beethoven should not have been surprised at this, since he knew himself to be in advance of his time. At the conclusion of the service the Prince made the rather inane remark, "but my dear Beethoven, what have you been doing now?" in allusion to the mass. Beethoven, deeply offended, left abruptly, and returned to Vienna. It may be said in passing that Beethoven frequently managed to disappoint the persons for whom he wrote. This did not lead ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... would not be so wanting in common sense," said the captain sternly. "What pleasure could he find in so inane a prank?" ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... sing," observed Lorimer; "if they only knew how awfully ridiculous they look, standing up in dress-coats and white ties, pouring forth inane love-ditties that nobody wants to hear, they wouldn't do it. Only a woman looks pretty ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... inane response. She was struck by a change in his appearance. His eyes looked a little bloodshot to her; his face had lost something of its ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... their den. A few hours later he would have brought a spruce partridge to Gray Wolf, but just as he was about to spring upon his feathered prey the soft chatter of a porcupine a few yards away brought him to a sudden stop. Few things could make Kazan drop his tail. But that inane and incoherent prattle of the little spiked beast sent him off at double-quick with his tail between his legs. As man abhors and evades the creeping serpent, so Kazan would hereafter evade this little creature of the forests that never in animal history has been ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... Maluka's reply came, and Mac whistled in amazement. "By George!" he said to those near him, "she IS a goer, a regular goer"; and after much careful thought wired an inane suggestion about waiting until ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... of Emerson the spirit of these orders manifests itself. His range of subjects is very wide, ascending to the highest sphere of spiritual contemplation, bordering on that "intense inane" where thought loses itself in breathless ecstasy, and stooping to the homeliest maxims of prudence and the every-day lessons of good manners, And all his work was done, not ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... ashamed that she invested me With such great talent; that I stand myself A very idol in the world of art. He taunts me also with the Mausoleum Of Julius, still unfinished, for the reason That men persuaded the inane old man It was of evil augury to build His tomb while he was living; and he speaks Of heaps of gold this Pope bequeathed to me, And calls it robbery;—that is what he says. What ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... dramatic moments of our lives it is always the inane that first suggests itself. It was so likely that Macdonald ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... did not altogether agree with Mrs. Gray. Rheumatic damps rose from the water, and the mornings were chilly and uncomfortable. The inane round of dressing, eating, appearing in the veranda, taking the daily drive, and other mild etcetera, grew irksome; and, beyond all, the faces of the dear ones at home were longed for. Winifred came for a few days, and then the place ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... quidem ad congressum incitarit, et horum apud me copiolas elevarit, adversarii perpetuum in Scripturis exponendis ingenium, plenum fraudis, inane prudentiae. Statim haec, philosophi, tangeretis. Itaque ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... flourished the paper above his head. Instantly the column was in an uproar. Caps were thrown into the air, voices grew hoarse with shouting; frantic gesticulation, tearful eyes and laughter, yells, inane antics, queer combinations of sacrilegious oaths and absurd embraces were everywhere to ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... notes melodious pass, How suns exploded from the kindling mass, 490 Waved o'er the vast inane their tresses bright, And charm'd young Nature's opening eyes with light. Next from each sun how spheres reluctant burst, And second planets issued from the first. And then to EARTH descends the moral strain, ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... things for the pleasure-seekers. Let them go to the Falls, and Lake Nyassa, and the Himalayas, and those tourist treasures; but why come and chatter inane banalities about his ruins: his treasured, mysterious relic of perhaps the oldest civilisation ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... the writer of Rome. He never realized the degradation possible to Christianity until he visited "The Eternal City," with its huge shams and ghastly superstitions. He never saw Hinduism with its myriad inane rites and debasing idolatry half so grotesque, idiotic, and repulsive, as in this city of Benares, where one ought to see the religion of these two hundred odd million people at its best, and not ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... if you could tell me where my hotel is, officer?" Oliver began. "What hotel?" said the policeman uninterestedly. Oliver noticed with an inane distinctness that he had started to swirl his nightstick as a large blue cat might switch its tail. He wondered if it would be tactful to ask him if he had ever been a drum major. Then he realized that ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... to whom he was presented greeted him with an affected lisp, drooping eyes and an inane ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... altogether unsoldierly; it is fussy and inflated; a full blown specimen of the pompously inane. How can Burnside venture to say that after the repulse, during three days he expected the enemy to leave his stronghold and attack him—Burnside? The rebels never did anything to justify such a supposition. They are ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... life, and assimilates their essences. This cyclic pilgrimage it undertook, foreseeing pain, but "preferring free will to passive slavery, intellectual, self- conscious pain, and even torture, 'while myriad time shall flow,' to inane, imbecile, instinctual beatitude," foreseeing pain, but knowing that out of it all would come a nobler state of life, a divinity capable of rule, a power to assist in the general evolution of nature. It is true in the experience ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... people see a wallflower rooted in the clefts of some old church tower, they don't jump at once to the inane conclusion that it is made of rock—that it derives its nourishment direct from the solid limestone; nor when they observe a barnacle hanging by its sucker to a ship's hull, do they imagine it to ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... declared that truth lies at the bottom of a well;—the well in which the truth in regard to these matters lies would seem to stretch far enough down—reaching, in fact, almost to the kingdom of the Inane. The beautiful simplicity of Bible truths has often become so perverted—so overloaded by the vain works (and words) of man's device—as barely to escape total extinction. Witness 'repentance'; in what a farrago of endless absurdities and palpable contradictions ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a voyage into the inane. Again I found myself sitting in the little hotel parlor, by the side of a man with glittering eye, with a third somebody on the other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... she walked in front with Beatrice heard Matty's little and inane giggles, and her ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... it's very pretty." Stopping before the dressing-table, Gabriella frowned on the photograph of a young man in a silver frame—a young man with a fascinating smile and inane features. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... somewhat higher up and more sublimated and etherealized than the Olympus of Homer and of the popular faith. In a flash of poetic inspiration, he says, "The walls of the universe are cloven. I see through the void inane. The splendor (numen) of the gods appears, and the quiet seats which are not shaken by storm-winds nor aspersed by rain-clouds; nor does the whitely falling snow-flake, with its hoar rime, violate their summery warmth, but an ever-cloudless ether laughs above them with widespread radiance." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... rewards for nothing but valor, and threatened punishments for nothing but cowardice; and even of these they speak obscurely. Nothing is said of an under world. They supposed the ghosts at death floated upward naturally, true children of the mist, and dwelt forever in the air, where they spent an inane existence, indulging in sorrowful memories of the past, and, in unreal imitation of their mortal occupations, chasing boars of fog amid hills of cloud and valleys of shadow. The authority for these views is Ossian, "whose genuine strains," Dr. Good observes, "assume ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... favourite studies of the later painters, and were multiplied and varied to infinitude from the beginning of the seventeenth century. From these every trace of the mystical and solemn conception of antiquity gradually disappeared; till, for the majestic ideal of womanhood, we have merely inane prettiness, or rustic, or even meretricious grace, the borrowed charms of some ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... seemed exceedingly intelligent and superior men. They were quite preoccupied, like men who are going to do something. There was none of that inane shouting "A bas les Bosches." Later on, some transport columns were passed, and the men descended from their wagons and distributed ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... delivered against an artist; such would, I believe, have been illegal; but the odd and pleasant fact is this, that they were never needed. Painters, sculptors, writers, singers, I have seen all of these in Barbizon; and some were sulky, and some blatant and inane; but one and all entered at once into the spirit of the association. This singular society is purely French, a creature of French virtues, and possibly of French defects. It cannot be imitated by the English. The roughness, the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... putrescent, which radiated from his person. A contingent of Little White Cows, a kind of bodyguard, stood at a respectful distance beyond, intent upon his every movement. The Master never stirred. He sat there to be looked at—accustomed to homage almost divine; beatifically inane. Like the Christians of old, he wore no hat. The head was nearly bald. A long cloak, glistening with grease stains, swathed his limbs and portly belly, on which one suspected multitudinous wrinkles of fat. Two filmy lidless eyes, bulging on a level with his forehead, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... betake myself,—to books, "the immortal children" of "the understanding, courage, and abilities" of the wise and good,—ay! and to inane, drivelling, doting books, the bastard progeny of vanity and ignorance,—books over which one dawdles in an amusing dream and pleasant spasm of amazement, and which teach us wisdom as tipsy Helots taught the Spartan boys sobriety. Montaigne "never travelled without books, either in peace or war"; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... invitatus et ore, Huic sacra Romanus credidit ossa loco; Sontibus addixit quae caeca rebellio flammis, Nec tulit impietas majus in urbe scelus. Quid tanto vesana malo profecit Erynnis? Ipsa sui testis pignoris extat humus. Crypta manet, memoresque trahit confessio cives, Nec populi fallit marmor inane fidem. Orphana, turba, veni, viduisque allabere saxis, Est aliquid soboli patris ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... fancied any joke perpetrated upon Cousin Albert must be pretty strong or the father would stamp it as inane and ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... so, to be sure," said Peter; "he fretted and fumed a good deal, and kicked against the pricks. Here, there, now, anon, he would enjoy his brief little vision of her—then she would vanish into the deep inane. So, in the end—he had to take it out in something—he took it out in writing a book about her. He propped up a mental portrait of her on his desk before him, and translated it into the character of Pauline. In that way he was able to ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... "I have tried fashionable life to see how much it is worth, and oh! it is altogether hollow and inane. I did not expect much from it, but it is utter ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... Nithsdale hermitage—'all like Apparitions now, bringing with them airs from Heaven, or the blasts from the other region, there is not one of a more undoubtedly supernal character than yourself; so pure and still, with intents so charitable; and then vanishing too so soon into the azure Inane, as an ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... no means satisfied. As to his speech, indeed, though it had the worth just ascribed to it and more, and though masses of it were deliberately put on paper by himself, in prose and verse, and continue to be printed and kept legible, what he spoke has pretty much vanished into the inane; and except as record or document of what he did, hardly now concerns mankind. But the things he did were extremely remarkable; and cannot be forgotten by mankind. Indeed, they bear such fruit to the present hour as all the Newspapers are obliged to be taking note of, sometimes ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... guileless tried to see the imaginary line of the meridian which the sophisticated pointed out to them on the water; the cream-peppermint lady went so far as to say she felt the jar as the steamer passed over it. Conjectures, witty, mathematical, or inane, were made as to the identity of to-day, if yesterday was Friday and to-morrow ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... girl was made of. Nothing foolish or nervous or hysterical about her. And then, subsequently, when he had met her on her own ground, she had endeavoured to put him at his ease. Funny that, but he appreciated it, nevertheless. And she could talk. She didn't giggle and ask inane questions. Nor did she treat him as some sort of a natural curiosity, who might be expected to do something shocking but entertaining at any moment. She was sensible as—well—as sensible as Sheila ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... among the mere minutiae of erudition, and thus to confuse the unimportant and the important; to their habit of rising at times into the clouds rather than above the clouds, and of there disporting themselves in regions "close-bordering on the impalpable inane;" to their too conspicuous want of order, system, perspective. The dramatic machinery of "Sartor Resartus" is therefore turned to a third service. It is made the vehicle of much good-humoured satire upon these and similar characteristics of Teutonic scholarship and speculation; ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... est, visam fera saevit in umbram. Utque Iovis praepes, vacuo cum vidit in arvo Praebentem Phoebo liventia terga draconem, 715 Occupat aversum, neu saeva retorqueat ora, Squamigeris avidos figit cervicibus ungues, Sic celeri missus praeceps per inane volatu Terga ferae pressit dextroque frementis in armo Inachides ferrum curvo tenus ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... freedom from the inane interruptions of the mentally deficient," said Clovis, "but it seems I asked ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... at last, and comforted himself with the reflection that the most eminent K.C.'s often made inane remarks with the idea of throwing people off ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... vein political, read the speeches of some of our members of Parliament. Only read them, I wish no man so ill an to inflict upon him the torture of hearing them—read them, I say, and you will have taken the very highest degree in the order of inane flippancy. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... deserves so much; but deserves not that loving minuteness a Menadic Insurrection did. Much more let prior, and as it were, rehearsal scenes of Federation come and go, henceforward, as they list; and, on Plains and under City-walls, innumerable regimental bands blare off into the Inane, without ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... studio the next day he looked at her; and when Jennings looked, he saw—as must anyone who lives well by playing upon human nature. He did not like her expression. She did not habitually smile; her light-heartedness, her optimism, did not show themselves in that inane way. But this seriousness of hers was of a new kind, of the kind that bespeaks sobriety and saneness of soul. And that kind of seriousness—the deep, inward gravity of a person whose days of trifling with themselves and with the facts of life, and of being trifled with, are over—would ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... special colors to the persons in the Trinity, (red, blue, and green,) and then allots to Satan a constituent of one of these, (yellow,) has drifted away from the solid anchorage of observation into the shoreless waste of the inane, if not amidst the dark abysses ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... so graceful a faith the Greeks had their share; what was crude and inane in it becoming, in the atmosphere of their energetic, imaginative intelligence, refined and humanised. The oak-grove of Dodona, the seat of their most venerable oracle, did but perpetuate the fancy that the sounds of the wind in the trees may be, for certain prepared ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... attract attention. It had scanty white locks and a fringe of white whiskers under the chin, and these framed a smiling face and features that were extremely winning in expression. No one could remember ever seeing Old Hucks when he was not smiling, and the expression was neither set nor inane, but so cheery and bright that you were tempted to smile with him, without knowing why. For dress he wore a much patched pair of woolen trousers and a "hickory" shirt of faded blue, with rough top boots and a dilapidated straw hat that looked as ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... continued by the side of Lady Madeleine for about twenty minutes, seizing every opportunity of uttering, in the most courtly tone, inane compliments; and then trusting that he might soon have her Ladyship's opinion respecting the Austrian troop at the New House, and that Von Konigstein and his English friend would not delay letting him see them there, his Imperial Highness, followed by his silent ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... which the distinguished coadjutors are responsible, reek with mawkish sentimentality, inane vapidity, or vulgar buffoonery. Most of the leading characters are duplicated or triplicated. Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who is repellently coquettish. This new creation finds a lover in another new character, a brainless youth, ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... perfectly happy, Joyce?" It was an inane question, but like some inane questions it touched a ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... stock. Well, the Boer is nothing of the kind. He is not in any way degenerate. He is a good fighting man, according to his lights. He does not wear a stand-up collar, nor an eyeglass, nor spats to his veldtschoon. He does not talk with a silly lisp or an inane drawl. Therefore, the useless fellows whom Britain trusted with the important task of watching him and sizing him up counted him as a boor as well as a Boer—a mere country clod. But now, from the ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... afford so many square yards of his walls for the reception of such a performance, is almost marvellous. It is, throughout, in the worst possible taste. The countenance of Cupid, who is sitting on the bed or couch with the vacant grin of an ideot, is that of a negro. It is dark, and of an utterly inane expression. The colouring is also too ruddy throughout. Near to this really heartless picture, is one of a woman flying; well drawn, and rather tenderly coloured. Opposite, is a picture of Venus supported in the air by a group of Cupids. The artist is Prudhon. In the general glare of colour, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... merit de condigno. And yet they bid us doubt whether there be a habit present. How, therefore, do they know whether they acquire merit de congruo or de condigno [in full, or half]? But this whole matter was fabricated by idle men [But, good God! these are mere inane ideas and dreams of idle, wretched, inexperienced men who do not much reduce the Bible to practise], who did not know how the remission of sins occurs, and how, in the judgment of God and terrors of conscience, trust in ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... different from the half affectionate derision which he directed against the old tyrants or humbugs of the earlier nineteenth century—the pompous Dedlock or the fatuous Nupkins, the grotesque Bumble or the inane Tigg. In those old books his very abuse was benignant; in Hard Times even his sympathy is hard. And the reason is again to be found in the political facts of the century. Dickens could be half genial with the older generation of oppressors because it was a dying ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... life it was—feeble beyond expression, and ugly with the ugliness of savagery. She wriggled and screwed up her skinny features with inane ferocity. A motherless wallaby would have submitted to human solace and ministrations with daintier mien; but the whole household thrilled with excitement. Could the spluttering spark of life be made to glow? That was the all-absorbing ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... audience spell-bound by the interpretation of great human emotion was a different matter from making a zany of oneself and, upside down, playing a one-stringed fiddle behind one's head, and uttering degraded sounds through painted grinning lips in order to appeal to the inane sense of humour of the grocer and his wife. No. There was all the difference in the world. The comparison filled him less with consolation than with despair. The actor, mocking the octopus below, had calmly stepped from ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... predicament for a man who had determined to move slowly and with calm foresight. Furthermore, the whole world in which his love lived and moved was repellent, silly, and morbid. Since his meeting with her he had tried to read some of the journals devoted to her faith, and had found them incredibly inane—smudgily printed, slovenly of phrase, and filled with messages from Aristotle, Columbus, and Confucius, which would have been discouraging in a boy of twelve years old. The phraseology, the cant terms, nauseated him. The ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... carelessly indicated, the characters are those with which the author loves to surround himself. A tuft-hunting county baronet's widow, an inane captain of dragoons, a graceless young baronet, a lady with groundless pretensions to feeble health and poesy, an obsequious nonentity her husband, and a flimsy and artificial young lady, are the personages in whom we are expected to find amusement. Two individuals ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lines you dictate shall be to them but the idle vaporings of a mind diseased. Your acute ears shall hear these daughters express the wish that you were dead; and then in your blindness you will give yourself into the keeping of a woman as dull, inane and unfeeling as the foolish child you first chose as wife. But with it all your obstinacy shall constitute your power; and that beauty which was yours in youth shall be with you to the last. You shall feel all ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... frozen silence, excepting for his inane laughter. He made a few more irritating remarks which he seemed to think were very funny, and then he disappeared inside his tank and prepared to follow us. We had gone ahead a couple of hundred yards when we heard bombs exploding, and ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... all the blood out of a newspaper and leaves it colourless and inane; sometimes he leaves it undisturbed, and lets it talk out its opinions with a frankness and vigour hardly to be surpassed, I think, in the journals of any country. Apparently the censor sometimes revises his verdicts upon second thought, for several times lately he has suppressed journals ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... carriage-door, whence she smiled down to the colonel on one side, the general on the other, the ladies round them. Farther back still her eyes fell on all the uplifted moustaches, the light ones, the brown, the black, the dyed, the thin moustaches, the thick, the curved, and the inane, the drooping, the smartly curled. Among that melancholy and shaggy crowd a few clean-shaven faces looked ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... summisso poplite reges, Et mendicantum series longissima fratrum; Cereaque in manibus gestant funalia caeci, Cimmeriis nati in tenebris, vitamque trahentes. 60 Templa dein multis subeunt lucentia taedis (Vesper erat sacer iste Petro) fremitoesque canentum Saepe tholos implet vacuos, & inane locorum. Qualiter exululat Bromius, Bromiique caterva, Orgia cantantes in Echionio Aracyntho, Dum tremit attonitus vitreis Asopus in undis, Et procul ipse cava responsat rupe Cithaeron. His igitur tandem solenni more peractis, Nox senis amplexus Erebi taciturna reliquit, ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... be in converse with Mr. Copley, who was not beyond converse yet, though Rupert saw he had been some time drinking. His face was flushed a little, his eyes dull, his features overspread with that inane stupidity which comes from long-continued and purely sensual indulgence of any kind, especially under the fumes of wine. To the side of this man, Rupert saw Dolly go. She went in, as I said, with a light, quick step, looked at nobody else, made straight to her father, and laid a hand ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... sort of clearing under a clump of oaks, whose shadows were lengthening in the setting sun. The men, lighting matches on the seats of their trousers, began to smoke. The women chattered and laughed and threw themselves backward in paroxysms of inane hilarity and noisy outbursts of delight. Germinie alone did not speak or laugh. She did not listen or look. Her eyes, beneath their lowered lids, were fixed upon the toes of her boots. So engrossed in thought ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... little veiled or adorned; the most undisguised arrogance; and the coarsest neglect of all kindly feelings and attentions haughtily assumed for the sake of shining in a false and despicable refinement; even more inane and intolerable to a healthy mind than the awkward stiffness of the declared Nobodies. It has been said that vice and poverty form the most revolting combination; since I have been in England, vice and boorish rudeness seem to ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... It sounds inane enough in the telling of it, but meaningless phrases and abrupt expressions may, at certain moments ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... interest in the former, and no more use for the latter. All the literary productions that refer to the struggle over political institutions will be seen no more,—their subject-matter has ceased to be. The study of all such matters will belong to the history of civilization. The vast mass of inane productions—the evidences of a spoiled taste, often possible only through sacrifices at the altar of the author's vanity—are gone. Even speaking from the view-point of present conditions, it may be said without exaggeration ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... laughed that funny, somewhat inane laugh of his, which had deceived the clever men of two countries as to ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... as broad as his drinks are long. He affects a rowdy geniality and a swaggering gait, by which he seeks to overawe the inoffensive. Though he has but a small stock of intelligence, he passes for a wit amongst his associates by dint of perpetually repeating an inane catch-word. With this, and a stamp of the foot, he will greet a friend who may meet him before lunch. Amongst his intimates such a welcome is held to be intensely humorous. He scatters the same sort of stamp and the identical remark broadcast over the loungers who congregate in front ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... regarded as a debased sort, and unfit socially to mix with those who had kept their race free from taint. The female fruitage of the mixture lost nothing by acquiring some of the Caucasian stock, but the men, in numerous cases, seemed to be inferior for the blending. In appearance they were inane, in speech laconic; they were shy in manners, and reserved, to boorishness, while in intellectual alertness they were inferior to the boisterous savage, or the shrewd, dignified white. But the woman perpetuated the shy, winning coyness of her red mother, and ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... Keats, it preserves something also of the wit and civilisation of the eighteenth century. Lines like "a Muezzin from the tower of darkness cries," or "Their mouths are stopped with dust" are successful in the same sense as "Pinnacled dim in the intense inane" or "Through verdurous glooms and winding ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Helen came to the inane Lily Pearl's support in a manner she knew would hit loyal ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... of Leander across the material Hellespont was but a trifle to!—In which of the villages Hotham and Dickens lodged, I did not learn or inquire; nor are their copious Despatches, chronicling these sublime phenomena from day to day for behoof of St. James's, other than entirely inane to us at this time. But one thing we do learn from them: Our Crown-Prince, escaping the paternal vigilance, was secretly in consultation with Dickens, or with Hotham through Dickens; and this in the most tragic humor on his side. In such effulgences ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... who were jostling each other in a gentle, well-bred sort of way in their eagerness to get into the saloon. They were mostly silent, as is the way of the English among strangers, but a few, here and there, who seemed to have already made each other's acquaintance, passed the usual inane remarks about the absurdly inconvenient arrangements generally of the ship. Some half a dozen stewards were showing the passengers to their places at table, as they passed in through the doorways; and upon my entrance I was at once pounced upon by one of the aforesaid stewards, who, in ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... of "playing 'possum" on the part of our opossum, the trick would seem to be particularly inane. The truth of the matter is, what is attributed to an unusual brilliancy on the part of the creature is positively unusual witlessness. The animal has an exceedingly small brain, as compared with that of a dog of similar size, and to anyone who knows brains ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... favourite tavern—suburban in those days—or house of call for City tradesmen. There he smokes half a pipe and drinks a pint of ale. In the evening at another tavern he smokes a pipe and drinks two pints of cider, winding up the inane day at his club, where he smokes three pipes before coming home at twelve to go ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... previous experience, or from the analogy of the hen, he judged would have a soothing effect, and inspire confidence in the youthful mind, and running a wooden horse of peculiar hideousness backwards and forwards in a way that was little short of inane. This went on for some minutes, and then all of a sudden the lad stretched out both his little arms and ran ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... written in a respectable journal, and are almost too gross and brutal for the Sun. Take from an old comedy its oaths and its grossness, and nothing is left but a residuum of boisterous inanity. The condensed old comedy which has just been laid before the readers of PUNCHINELLO, is as inane and vapid as anything that WALLACK'S theatre has shown us in the past month. Do you find it dull? For my part, I don't hesitate to say that the "Essence of Old Virginny," as furnished by the venerable ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various
... made various inane suggestions as to the sender. Phoebe said nothing. There was a frown on her face as she watched the captain get to work on the box with chisel and hammer. It contained a beautiful doll, fully and expensively dressed, and pinned to the dress was a card—"To ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... single thought or feeling with that vigour which once gave it life and truth. It was a period of religious and metaphysical delirium, when everything became everything, when Maya and Sophia, Mitra and Christ, Viraf and Isaiah, Belus, Zarvan, and Kronos were mixed up in one jumbled system of inane speculation, from which at last the East was delivered by the positive doctrines of Mohammed, the West by the pure Christianity ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... to stop at a shop window, and I wouldn't let you. The window contained an inane repetition display of thirty horrible prints at two and six each of Lalan's 'Triumph.'" Leighton sprang to his feet. "God! Poster lithographs at two and six! Boy, Lalan's 'Triumph' was a triumph once. He turned it into a mere success. ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... usually upon comparatively easy words) were greeted with some laughter, and the ridiculed spellers sought their seats with hanging heads. By and by, however, the failures were not all at the bottom of the class; here and there such lists as "inane, profane, humane, insane, mundane, urbane," or, "staid, unlaid, mermaid, prayed, weighed, portrayed" began to pick out uncertain ones the entire length ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... own way. The desire of compensating for what had passed with Norman, led to great civilities from Dr. and Mrs. Hoxton, which nobody was at liberty to receive except Flora. Pretty, graceful, and pleasing, she was a valuable companion to a gentle little, inane lady, with more time and money than she knew what to do with; and Mrs. Hoxton, who was of a superior grade to the Stoneborough ladies in general, was such a chaperon as Flora was glad to secure. Dr. May's old loyal feelings could not help regarding her notice of his daughter as a favour ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... inane and unanswerable argument Benjamin made no reply, and from that time on a chasm began to widen between them. He wondered what possible fascination she had ever exercised ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... How inane and silly their conversation is! Sometimes a whim comes upon them, and one runs for a few yards; the whim takes possession of others, and they do exactly the same. One seizes another round the body and wrestles with him. Immediately the others begin to wrestle too; their actions are stereotyped, ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... are only reading at first. In most of the amateur shows, the players never do anything else but read the parts. They read, crossing back and forth whenever the coach thinks they ought to cross, and it doesn't mean a thing. I watched that very thing in an amateur show not so long ago, and it was inane. Nobody should move from one place on the stage to another without a reason for moving. There is a reason for every inflection of the voice. A person with common sense will read a part intelligently, but only a person with a dramatic spark inside of the body ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... And the inane chorus of pleased laughs that followed Polk Hayes's brainless disposal of the important question in hand made me ashamed of being a woman—though it was funny. Still I bided my time and Polk saw the biding, I could tell by the expression in the ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... fox-brush was fastened in his hat. Thus Tristran de Leonois may have ridden a-hawking in drowned Cornwall, thus statelily and composedly, Katharine thought, gazing after him. She went to her apartments, singing an inane song about the amorous and joyful time of spring when everything and ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... remarkable. And not the least valuable part of it is the preface, in which there occurs this passage: "Those who, reading the words of authors, do not form sensible images of the things referred to, obtain no true ideas, but conceive false imaginations and inane phantasms." You see, William Harvey's words are just the same in substance as those of Mr. Freeman, only they happen to be rather more than two centuries older. So that what I am now saying has ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... makes men in Alpine travel-books write as men never write elsewhere? What is the origin of a style unique in literature, which misses both the sublime and the ridiculous, and constantly hops from tall-talk to a mirth feeble and inane? Why is it that the senior tutor, who is so hard on a bit of bad Latin, plunges at the sight of an Alp into English inconceivable, hideous? Why does page after page look as if it had been dredged with French words through a pepper-castor? Why is the sunrise or the ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... It was an inane speech, so commonplace, so entirely foolish. And the man ignored it absolutely. Only the corners of his lips drooped a little to express, perhaps, a profounder degree of hate ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... turned from me to her, smiled and bowed. His smile was inane, but he bowed very well; he had been groomed into that sort of thing or had it ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... fervour and devotion pervading the book that contrasts pleasantly with the trivially inane tone some writers think fit to adopt in writing for and about children. All Sunday-school teachers and parents would do well to lay ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... men!" declared Hilary, with scarlet face. "I'd rather marry a red Indian than one of these inane men about town." ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... weight and high office are always a trifle ponderous when conversing with ladies. Young lieutenants—or, at all events, officers not above the rank of captain—are far more successful at the game. How they contrive to be so God only knows. Let them but make the most inane of remarks, and at once the maiden by their side will be rocking with laughter; whereas, should a State Councillor enter into conversation with a damsel, and remark that the Russian Empire is one of vast extent, or utter a compliment which he has elaborated ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... yet—to him—subtly revealed, warmth of Mrs. Taine's greeting embarrassed him with a momentary sense of shame. The frothing gush of Louise's inane ejaculations, and the coughing, choking, cursing of Mr. Taine,—whose feeble grip upon the flesh that had so betrayed him was, by now, so far loosed that he could scarcely walk alone,—set the painter struggling for words that would mean nothing—the only words that, under the circumstances, ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... fleeting glimpses of the more unusual happenings in their lives. You may, or may not, emerge from this experience a better writer than you were when you went in. Your style may become simpler and more forceful by newspaper training. Or it may become tawdry, sloppy and inane. ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... me, and nobody else has seen anything of him." And so Mr. Harrison, inwardly anathematizing the rest of the company, was compelled to go through a long series of handshakings, and finally to be drawn into a group of young persons whose conversation seemed to him the most inane he had ever heard in ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... so much so that her old friends who had not seen her for some time could scarcely have known her. She was no longer fat and inane. Her figure had become slim and graceful; her face had become expressive and remarkably pretty, and her manners were those of a well-bred and self-possessed lady. Gildart felt that he could no more have taken the liberties he had ventured on in ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... Jonson makes that dry, shrewd, water carrier of his, Cob, rail at the 'roguish tobacco:' he would leave the stocks for worse men, and make it present whipping for either man or woman who dealt with a tobacco-pipe. But King James, in his inane 'Counterblast,' is more violent than even Cob. He argues that to use this unsavory smoke is to be guilty of a worse sin than that of drunkenness, and asks how men, who cannot go a day's journey without sending for hot coals to kindle their tobacco, can be expected to endure the privations ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... curling line of her lips, as they closed on each other, said all the rest; all the cruel truths about his unspeakable, inane, coarse follies, his laziness, his excesses, his lies, his deceptions, his bad faith, his truculence, his improvidence, his shameful waste and ruin of his life and hers. She doubted whether he realized his baseness and her wrongs, but if he could not read them in her silent contumely, she was ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... and defended because it was democratic; and Napoleon was not feared as the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats. What France set out to prove France has proved; not that common men are all angels, or all diplomatists, or all gentlemen (for these inane aristocratic illusions were no part of the Jacobin theory), but that common men can all be citizens and can all be soldiers; that common men can fight and can rule. There is no need to confuse the question with any of those escapades ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... the small bone and ivory figures of men and women which are also found. These usually have little blue beads for eyes, and are of the quaintest and naivest appearance conceivable. Here we have an elderly man with a long pointed beard, there two women with inane smiles upon their countenances, here another woman, of better work this time, with a child slung across her shoulder. This figure, which is in the British Museum, must be very late, as prehistoric Egyptian antiquities go. It is almost as good in style as ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... political opinions, we have been grossly misunderstood and misrepresented. There never was a time, even in the re-election of Lincoln, when to differ from the leading party was considered more inane and treasonable. Because we made a higher demand than either Republicans or Abolitionists, they in self-defense revenged themselves by calling us Democrats; just as the church at the time of its apathy on the slavery question revenged the goadings of Abolitionists ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... success of Pasquin attests, as we have said, the readiness of London audiences in 1736 to applaud an honest and humorous presentation of wicked Ministers, corrupt clergy, lawyers, and doctors, inane Laureates, and degrading public entertainments. Mrs Delany, gathering London news for Dean Swift, writes on April 22, "When I went out of Town last Autumn, the reigning madness was Farinelli; I find it now turned on Pasquin, a dramatic ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... and regulations for the benefit of all; it would be necessary to do so unless the individuals were not only perfect, but also absolutely of one mind on all subjects relating to their welfare. Can the imagination picture existence more inane? ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... same unnamable, invisible qualities. But no man has them. Your husband is a thousand times more worthy than the other, yet even he does not deserve worship. Let the man do the crowning if you can, although a woman of your temperament would find even that difficult—that which the most inane of women could accept with calmness and a smile. You have the magnificent humility of the truly great. Still it is not appreciated in this world. Try resting for a while and let your husband ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... way to her mother's chamber. Mistress Pauncefort was there. Venetia endeavoured to assume her accustomed serenity. The waiting-woman bustled about, arranging the toilet-table, which had been for a moment discomposed, putting away a cap, folding up a shawl, and indulging in a multitude of inane observations which little harmonised with the high-strung tension of Venetia's mind. Mistress Pauncefort opened a casket with a spring lock, in which she placed some trinkets of her mistress. Venetia stood by her in silence; her eye, vacant and wandering, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... angry when he read this book that he said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman. But he must have approved of the picture of the Petersburg group, who under a thin veneer of polished manners are utterly inane and cynically vicious. One of them had "an expression of constant irritability on his face, as though he could not forgive himself for ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... showed black and inhospitable even in the sunlight. The rock walls rose sheer, the roofs slanted rakishly, the signs scratched on the rock by facetious riders were pointless and inane. Lone picked his way through the crooked defile that was marked MAIN STREET on the corner of the first huge boulder and came abruptly into the road. Here he turned north and shook ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... him for a long moment, then gave an inane giggle. He stepped back and flicked Joe Mauser a salute. "Very well, captain. As a matter of routine, I shall report this use of an aircraft for reconnaissance purposes, and undoubtedly a commission will meet to investigate the ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... concluded by an adjournment to the dining-room to play bagatelle, the most inane of games, to which the billiard-player goes with contempt, changed quickly to wrath when he cannot put the balls into absurd little holes. Mary was an adept, and took pleasure in showing James how the thing should be done. He noticed that she and the curate managed the whole affair between them, ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... mean? One week—a week to the day since he had first met this girl and conceived a violent dislike to her on the spot. Voice, accent, and manner had alike jarred on his nerves: she had appeared in every respect the opposite to the decorous, soft-voiced, highly-bred, if somewhat inane, damsel who represented his ideal of feminine charm. One week ago! What magic did she possess, this little red-haired, white-faced girl, to make such short work of the scruples of a lifetime? What was this mysterious feminine charm which blinded ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... join Marcello at once, but he had not had the least intention of doing so, and had come back to Paris as soon as he was sure that the Contessa was gone. But he had made a mistake in his calculations. He had counted on Regina for the love of excitement, display, and inane dissipation which women in her position very often develop when they find that a man will give them anything they like; and he had counted very little on her love for Marcello. Folco was still young enough to fall into one ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... training instead of worry. Bend your sense, your intellect, your time, your energy, to seeking how to train your children, instead of doing the senseless, foolish, inane, and utterly useless thing of ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tells us, as an immense Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are set on that to steady it. At the Last Day they shall disappear "like clouds"; the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself off into wreck, and as dust and vapor vanish in the Inane. Allah withdraws his hand from it, and it ceases to be. The universal empire of Allah, presence everywhere of an unspeakable Power, a Splendor, and a Terror not to be named, as the true force, essence ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... me. It was draped entirely in black, hiding whatever windows there might be. The polished wood floor was bare. The ceiling was painted with a number of sprawling Cupids, some of them scattering flowers, others weaving leafy chaplets, presumably to crown the inane-looking goddess reclining in their midst on a bank of impossible cloud. But both Cupids and goddess were dingy with age, and seemed to have grown too old for such ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... existence it has been, he says, the constant, burning desire of the Montenegrins to be joined to it. We may well rub our eyes at a letter in the same newspaper from Lord Sydenham, who makes the perfectly inane remark that this constant, burning desire was never probable. "Montenegro already is Serbia," says Mr. Leiper, "and Serbia Montenegro, in every way except verbally." But Lord Sydenham has set himself up as a stern critic ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... phrase that same "entertaining" always sounds to my ear. When I learn that the Marquis of Mopes has been "entertaining" his friends, the Duke of Drearyshire, Count and Countess Crotchet, Viscount Inane, Sir Simon and Lady Sulkes, the Honourable Hercules Heavyhead, etc., etc., at his splendid seat, Boudoir Castle, I cannot refrain from picturing to myself the dignified host standing on his bald head for the amusement of his immovable visitors, or otherwise, forgetful of his usual staid ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... metaphorically speaking, have no legs—as Adrian Harley said was the case with the women in Richard Feverel's poems. He must never be seen to walk in prose, for his part is, 'pinnacled dim in the intense inane,' to hang aloft and warble the unpremeditated lay, without erasure or blot. This is, I am sure, not fanciful, for two or three modern instances, which I am far too considerate to name, illustrate ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... house, and the row of windows behind him blazed with light. One or two of the big casements were open, and music and odd bursts of laughter drifted out. Somebody, it seemed, was singing an amusing song, but the snatches of it that reached Nasmyth struck him as pointless and inane. He had been at Bonavista a week, but, after his simple, strenuous life in the Bush, he felt at times overwhelmed by the boisterous vivacity with which his new companions pursued their diversions. There are not many men without an occupation in the West, but Mrs. Acton knew where to lay her ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... utterly at a loss for anything to say. The whole thing had been so unexpected, so very opposite to the commonplace ending he had anticipated, that he was too dazed and confused to do anything but smile in an inane and foolish manner. He had rather looked forward to seeing some eccentric individual, some elderly recluse who lived there with a servant or two. And here he was, face to face with the man who, at the present moment, was to him the ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... won't work, there is a reason for it somewhere, and our business is to find it out, and not loftily to assure our patients that there is nothing much the matter, and all they need is rest, or a little cheerful occupation. Furthermore, the most inane thing that a sympathizing friend or kindly physician can do to a neurasthenic, is to advise him to take his mind off himself or his symptoms. The utter inability to do that very thing is one of the chief symptoms of the disease, which will not disappear ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... quiet of the place were almost enchantment enough to account for the gray-headed porters, their immobility and longevity, and I longed to draw the charm over me. But I was one of a party which had come under the inspiration of the most inane motive of travel,—the desire to see all there was to be seen; and so, after a half-hour's repose, and the usual refreshments,—preserved fruits and a glass of water, followed by coffee,—we enlisted the Hegoumenos in our party, and set ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... question, that of Hawkins, "How did you come to get mixed up in this crowd?" And the inane response he had made to the counter as though it all were a mystery too vast for solution. Oh, well, Hawkins was a queer bird, inexpressive and glum and commonplace. Could not be expected to register much. His thoughts probably were too rusty and old by the time ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... into the innermost secrets of nature, by the aid of the principles of unity (among all kinds of which teleological unity is the highest), while it ought not to attempt to soar above the sphere of experience, beyond which there lies nought for us but the void inane. The critical examination, in our Transcendental Analytic, of all the propositions which professed to extend cognition beyond the sphere of experience, completely demonstrated that they can only conduct us ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant |
