"Trifler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the humble, to the meek, to the undiscerning, to the thoughtless? Nor age, nor business, nor distress can erase the dear image from my imagination. In the same week, I saw her dressed for a ball, and in a shroud. How ill did the habit of death become the pretty trifler! I still behold the smiling earth—A large train of disasters were coming on to my memory, when my servant knocked at my closet-door, and interrupted me with a letter, attended with a hamper of wine, of the same ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... trifler. Love! I know thee not, I care not for thee, Kate: this is no world To play with mammets, and to tilt with lips; We must have ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the room in loops of flight I watch you wayward go; Dance down a shaft of glancing light, Review my books a-row; Before the bust you flaunt and flit Of "blind Maeonides"— Ah, trifler, on his lips there lit ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... fauna of Patagonia or New Zealand. But while the Patagonian naturalist secures recognition and is decorated, every jaunty man of letters feels at liberty to scoff at the liturgiologist as a laborious trifler. ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... reproach. ] Secondly, the trifler shamefully reporteth, that adulteries and whoredomes are not onely publique, and common vices amongst Islanders: but that they are not accounted by ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... is stronger if we suppose her guilt, and that what we see before us is a great spirit carried away by passion—that something beyond reason, beyond all human power to restrain, which sometimes binds an angelic woman to a villain, and sometimes a man of the highest power and wisdom to a lovely trifler or a fool. It seems to me as at once more consistent with the facts and with human nature to realise the position of the unhappy Queen as transported by that overwhelming sentiment, and wrought on the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... prime of these rose up,— One, of whose name from childhood we had heard 495 Familiarly, a household term, like those, The Bedfords, Glosters, Salsburys, of old Whom the fifth Harry talks of. [Y] Silence! hush! This is no trifler, no short-flighted wit, No stammerer of a minute, painfully 500 Delivered. No! the Orator hath yoked The Hours, like young Aurora, to his car: Thrice welcome Presence! how can patience e'er Grow weary of attending on ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... found her. You may think me a trifler, Easelmann; but every nerve I have is quivering with agony at the thought of the pain I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... like a man with an excellent appetite, fell to upon the various hors d'oeuvres, the entire collection of which, in fact, he consumed in a wonderfully short space of time. The Baron, being himself no trifler with his victuals, regarded this feat with sympathetic approval, and began to feel a little less alone in the world. His naturally open disposition was warmed besides, owing to a slight misconception he had ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... time, with the dead and dying all about them, was "more shocking than a game of cards on Sunday." She regarded his attentions, glances, tones, as mere well-bred persiflage, indulged in for his own amusement, and she put him down as a trifler for his pains. That he, as she would phrase it, "was just smitten without any rhyme or reason" seemed preposterous. She had done nothing for him as she had for Scoville. The friendly or the frankly admiring looks ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... Agnes's sin of hypocrisy! Into how many ears have I poured tender words, until fair hands were as good as offered to me, and I turned their love to mockery! I hated and despised all womanhood; and even in Paris I became notorious as a heartless trifler with the affections I won and trampled under my feet. Whenever a brilliant and beautiful woman crossed my path, I attached myself to her train of admirers, until I made her acknowledge my power and give public and unmistakable manifestation of her ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... to her birthday feast? He had thrown her kindness back into her face, had first accepted and then carelessly repudiated her friendship; and it was only too probable she had written him down as a casual and discourteous trifler with whom, in future, she ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... first time since the death of Charlemagne, was governed by a prince of great firmness and ability. On the other hand England, which, since the battle of Hastings, had been ruled generally by wise statesmen, always by brave soldiers, fell under the dominion of a trifler and a coward. From that moment her prospects brightened. John was driven from Normandy. The Norman nobles were compelled to make their election between the island and the continent. Shut up by the sea with ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... their numbers; how they rise and fall: Like baneful herbs the gazer's eye they seize, Rush to the head, and poison where they please: Like idle flies, a busy, buzzing train, They drop their maggots in the trifler's brain: That genia soil receives the fruitful store, And there they grow, and breed a thousand more. Now be their arts display'd, how first they choose A cause and party, as the bard his Muse; Inspired by these, with clamorous zeal they ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe
... SCAN. A trifler—but a lover of art. And the Wise Men of the East owed their instruction to a star, which is rightly observed by Gregory the Great in favour of astrology. And Albertus Magnus makes it the most valuable science, because, says he, it teaches us to consider the causation of causes, in the causes ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... only a courtier in Versailles, came to Madame Geoffrin's parties. He was a man who combined in a most surprising manner true philosophy and a deep knowledge of political economy, with the outward appearance of a fop and a trifler. Among the other distinguished men who lived in Paris, Marmontel names with high praise the Abbe Galliani, Caraccioli, who was afterward Neapolitan ambassador, and the Swedish ambassador, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... the last few years, unsettled and even revolutionized our estimates of Swedenborg as a philosopher. That man, indeed, whom Emerson ranks as one amongst his inner consistory of intellectual potentates cannot be the absolute trifler that Kant, (who knew him only by the most trivial of his pretensions,) eighty years ago, supposed him. Assuredly, Mr. Clowes was no trifler, but lived habitually a life of power, though in a world of religious mysticism and of apocalyptic visions. To him, being such a man by ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... unmistakably upon the lips, is a final seal and ultimate surrender, and that if you do not marry a man you have so kissed you would be no better than a worthless deceiver, an outrageous flirt, an abandoned trifler——" ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... misrule, is everywhere. Narbonne has been made War Minister! At this crisis, when the allied armies are gathering on the frontier, when war is imminent against two hundred and fifty thousand of the finest soldiers in Europe, a trifler like Narbonne is placed in power! But if others were no worse than he! 'Tis incredible the villains who have pushed themselves into the high places. Can you believe it, boy?—your servant, that scoundrel Bertrand, that soldier of the ranks, that waiter of the Cafe ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... plans—and at night he drifted into the land where were warmth and light and lawlessness. He had his duty there, such as it might be, for he was both a gambler and a protector, and, young as he was, callow as he was, within a year he had become one in demand, no trifler at the table, and an object of rivalry among those whose regard means fee of body and of soul. He, himself, at that time, did not appreciate the remarkable nature of his changing. So rapidly he aged in knowledge ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... since we were married; and these four years, Seraphina, have not perhaps been happy either for you or for me. I am well aware I was unsuitable to be your husband. I was not young, I had no ambition, I was a trifler; and you despised me, I dare not say unjustly. But to do justice on both sides, you must bear in mind how I have acted. When I found it amused you to play the part of Princess on this little stage, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... if he found a serious flaw in it; after which he began again: "I never supposed you a trifler." ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Between Fortuny and Meissonier there lies the gulf that separates the genius and the hard-working man of talent. Nevertheless Meissonier's statue is in the garden of the Louvre, Meissonier is extolled as a master, while Fortuny is usually described in patronising terms as a facile trifler. The reverse is the truth. No one has painted sunlight with more intensity; he was an impressionist before the word was coined. He is a colourist almost as sumptuous as Monticelli, with a precision of vision never attained by ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... most important subject, trifler, this 435 To lay before the Gods!'—'Nay, Father, nay, When you have understood the business, Say not that I alone am fond of prey. I found this little boy in a recess Under Cyllene's mountains far away— 440 A manifest and most apparent thief, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... continual inattention to matters that occur, is the characteristic of a weak mind; the man who gives way to it, is little else than a trifler, a blank in society, which every sensible person overlooks; surely what is worth doing is worth doing well, and nothing can be done well if not properly attended to. When I hear a man say, on being asked about any thing that was ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... and Mr. John Collier gives his sitter 'a cheerful slap on the back, before he says, like a shampooer in a Turkish bath, "Next man!" Mr. Herkomer's art is, 'if not a catch-penny art, at all events a catch-many-pounds art,' and Mr. W. B. Richmond is a 'clever trifler,' who 'might do really good work' 'if he would employ his time in learning to paint.' It is obviously unnecessary for us to point out how luminous these criticisms are, how delicate in expression. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... over "the threshold of Eld" (as were Judge Webb and Lord Penzance when they took up Shakespearean criticism). His knowledge of Elizabethan literature is vastly superior to mine, for I speak merely, in Matthew Arnold's words, as "a belletristic trifler." ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang |
