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More "Futile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the music of antiquity—that is, in an art-form—is nearly, if indeed not quite, enveloped in mystery; and it were futile to profess to give an historical presentation of an art from its birth, when documentary evidence of ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... the old lady who held her down, that the latter was compelled to release her grasp, and the poor girl got up, vowing she would not have another incision made. Of course all resistance would have been futile, or probably have only brought down a fearful chastisement upon her if she had been alone with her tribe in the bush; but she took advantage of my presence, and escaped with nearly one-third of the incisions deficient. At this ceremony many other natives of both sexes, and of all ages were ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... of "success." When Arthur's manliness first asserted itself, there was perhaps as much of vanity as of pride in his acceptance of the consequences of Hiram's will. But to an intelligent man any environment, except one of inaction or futile action, soon becomes interesting; the coming of Madelene was all that was needed to raise his interest to enthusiasm. He soon understood his fellow-workers as few of them understood themselves. Every human group, of whatever size or kind, is apt to think its characteristics peculiar to itself, ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... signal had been rendered futile by this uproarious rapping Wildeve withdrew, passed out at the gate, and walked quickly down the path without thinking of anything except getting away unnoticed. Half-way down the hill the path ran near a knot of stunted hollies, which in the general darkness of the scene stood as the pupil in a ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... 'I deny that the age is crowded; I will admit one fact, and one fact only: that I am futile, that he is futile, and that we are all three as futile as the devil. What am I? I have smattered law, smattered letters, smattered geography, smattered mathematics; I have even a working knowledge of judicial astrology; ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... twenty-story buildings and streams of velvet smoke. Blocks and blocks of tenements, with the same dirty people wallowing around them, answered my searching eyes in blank response. There was an occasional dingy sign offering board and lodging. After I had made several futile inquiries at imposing offices on the river front I felt that it was a hopeless quest. I should never get work unknown, unskilled, already tired and discouraged. My collar was wilted in the fierce heat; my shabby felt sailor hat was no protection against ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... with the loss of two of its arms, was still powerful enough to make all his efforts futile, and he felt himself being drawn into some recess beyond where he had first seen the octopus squatting on the rock and glaring at them ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... been stolen by Azamat with his father's consent; at any rate, that is what I suppose. So, one day, Kazbich went and waited by the roadside, about three versts beyond the village. The old man was returning from one of his futile searches for his daughter; his retainers were lagging behind. It was dusk. Deep in thought, he was riding at a walking pace when, suddenly, Kazbich darted out like a cat from behind a bush, sprang up behind him on the horse, flung him to the ground with a thrust ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... not best after those words the Queen spoke to you last night," she answered simply. "Besides, our best efforts at escape would be futile should she suspect you have not perished where she entombed you. I am safe here, for the present at least, while you can accomplish much more for all of us if she believes you dead and takes no precautions to ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... range on the entire seventy-mile front from Regetow to Wolosate. Convinced that we were directing our chief efforts against his flanks, the enemy now strove to break our resistance in the Rostoki direction, but, after sixteen futile attacks, he was obliged to cede the commanding height of Telepovce, our occupation of which will probably compel him to evacuate his positions at Polen and Smolnik and withdraw to the valley of the Cziroka, a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... France. In spite of the atrocities committed by Robert and his hirelings, the revolt continued with unabated fury, and at last Gregory was constrained to return in person to Italy with the purpose of pacifying the turbulent forces. He entered Rome, January 17, 1377; but after a year of futile effort he died, leaving the confusion worse ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... try to get her offen that Plank for a minute, and would bring up the World's Fair to her, and how big the housen wuz, I would find my efforts futile; for all she would say about 'em wuz to tell what Mr. Plank would have done if he had been a-livin', and if he had been onhampered, and out of salt, how much better he would have done than the directors did, and what bigger ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... also that the most vital point in the coming conflict would be the control of the sea. Accordingly he urged upon the Athenians the necessity of building a powerful fleet. In this policy he was aided by one of those futile wars so characteristic of Greek history, a war between Athens and the island of AEgina. In order to overcome the AEginetans, who had a large fleet, the Athenians were compelled to build a larger one, and by the time this purpose was accomplished rumors came that ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... Peyster, then in the fifth year of her widowhood, had graciously undertaken to manage and underwrite the debut of her second cousin (not of the main line, be it said) and had tried to discharge her duty in the important matter of securing her a husband. But her efforts had been futile, and to say that Mrs. De Peyster had not succeeded was to admit that poor Olivetta Harmon was indeed a failure. She had lacked the fortune to attract the conservative investor who is looking for a sound business proposition ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... both. After several futile efforts he succeeded in writing a few words. Then he folded up the note, and handed ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and I were much more sensible, but that whole blessed time is wrapped in rosy mists with streaks of moonlight to the tune of heavenly music, so it 's futile to try to recall just what did happen. I ought to have gone to another hotel, but the chain of memory ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... more and more impenetrable. The skipper kept walking from end to end of the bridge, restlessly, and I could sympathize with him. He was in a hurry, a deadly hurry, which he had shown plainly enough from the first moment my eyes had rested upon him, and now this mist was rendering all his haste futile, as far as I could see. Every moment now I expected to see him ring down to the engine room for reduced speed, but we kept on going, doggedly, blindly, until at last we were pitching over long, smooth swells that were covered by ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... to me some modern religious pictures in Byzantine style painted for the Cathedral of Kieff, he said, "They represent an effort as futile as trying to persuade chickens to reenter the egg-shells from which they have escaped." He next showed me two religious pictures; the first representing the meeting of Jesus and Pilate, when the latter asked, "What is truth?" Pilate was depicted as a rotund, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... king, if thou recognise him as a Brahmana by characteristics, then, O long-lived one, the distinction of caste becometh futile as long as conduct doth not ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... After many futile attempts, and some skin knocked off their knuckles through awkward handling of the knife and flint, a good fire was at last kindled, as there was no lack of dry wood on the shore. Catharine then triumphantly produced ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... fishing, denotes energy and economy; but if you do not succeed in catching any, your efforts to obtain honors and wealth will be futile. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... the width of the bridge, under the impression that bridges were cut out of paper, and so brought to ruin at least half an acre of calculations—and Hitchcock, new to disappointment, buried his head in his arms and wept; the heart-breaking delays over the filling of the contracts in England; the futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of commission if one, only one, rather doubtful consignment were passed; the war that followed the refusal; the careful, polite obstruction at the other end that followed the war, till young Hitchcock, putting one month's leave to ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... can wait." After all, Rickie was treating him as he had treated Rickie, as one in the grave, to whom it is futile to make any loving motion. Gone upstairs—to brush his hair for dinner! The irony of the situation appealed to him strongly. It reminded him of the Greek Drama, where the actors know so little ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... with his young friend, and holding this letter in his pocket. Had he shown it to Herbert, or spoken of it, he would have utterly disturbed the equilibrium of the embryo law student, and rendered his entrance in Mr. Die's chambers absolutely futile. "Ten will not be too early for you," he had said. "Mr. Die is always in his room by that hour." Herbert had of course declared that ten would not be at all too early for him; and Mr. Prendergast had observed that after leaving Mr. Die's chambers, he himself would go on to the ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... in council of war together," he said, "and they have not even told her of it, nor suffered her to join them! How can they treat her so—even Dunois and La Hire—when they have seen again and yet again how futile are all plans made by their skill without the sanction of her voice? It makes my gorge rise! Do they think her a mere beautiful image, to ride before them and carry a white banner to affright the foe? It is a shame, a shame, that they should ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... ask of you is that you will not make Mrs. Scrivener-Yapling's position any harder by futile endeavours to form the acquaintance of the ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... afraid of failure; they fear that they haven't the persistence and capacity for application that is needed to assure success. Perhaps they do make an attempt, but the work is hard, they just know that they won't be able to stick it out, and after a few futile efforts they give it up, and spend the rest of their lives wondering what they might have accomplished if ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... motive for simulating defeat, and his long years of experience upon pirate infested waters gave weight to his opinion. The weak spot in his argument was his inability to suggest a reasonable motive. And so it was that for a long time they were left to futile conjecture as to the action that had saved them from a bloody encounter with ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... this brilliant and beloved woman were devoted to futile attempts to solve the problem of Perpetual Motion. I wish she had given ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... sentiments. The papacy remained vacant after the death of Nicholas IV. in 1292, so that there was no danger of Rome taking the appointment into its own hands, and the happy accident, which had given the monks of Christchurch a statesmanlike prior in Henry of Eastry, minimised the chances of a futile conflict between the king and the canonical electors. Eastry took care that the archbishop-elect should be a person acceptable to the sovereign. Robert Winchelsea, the new primate, was an Englishman and a secular clerk, who had taught with ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... fiercer blast than ever, laden with a stinging volley of snow, and seemed to sweep the words from the girl's mouth. She bent before it involuntarily, and the conviction forced itself upon her that, after all, resistance to injustice might be as futile as resistance to storm, that injustice might be one of the primal forces of the world, and one of the conditions of its endurance, and yet with the conviction came the renewed ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... no other way of effecting his object, he had begun to taste the bitterness of futile effort, when fortune, always his friend, put him in a position to do what he wanted in the easiest possible way ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... their appointed course in yonder blue firmament—his device taught that—made her belong to him. If she could have forced herself to silence the desire of her heart, it would have been futile. Whoever divides two trees which have grown from a single root, she said to herself, destroys at least one; but she would live, would be happy on the highest summit of existence. She could not help obeying his summons, for as soon as she listened to the warning voice within, the "Because ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... proposition that a vessel darkened is much safer from submarine attack at night than in the daytime, and Captain Turner exercised proper and good judgment in planning accordingly as he approached dangerous waters. It is futile to conjecture as to what would or would not have happened had the speed been higher prior to the approach to the Irish coast, because, obviously, until then the Captain could not figure out his situation, not knowing how he ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... too many futile words who is never silent; a garrulous tongue, if it be not checked, sings ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... their walks through life by no very distinct principles, still there had been with them so much of adherence to a sacred law, that no acre of the property had ever been parted from the hands of the existing squire. Some futile attempts had been made to increase the territory, as indeed had been done by Kit Dale, the father of Christopher Dale, who will appear as our squire of Allington when the persons of our drama are introduced. Old Kit ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... Ibn Khallikan took a professorship in Cairo, learned by heart further enormous quantities of poetry, and engaged in literary discussions which, judging by a specimen given in one of his Lives, were even more futile than discussions usually are. ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... here to stay, Doctor. Legislation against it is as absurd and futile as a movement to stop the tides. We will never pull down these big department stores or go back to the little ones. The skyscraper will not come down from the heavens merely because a belated traveller rails that his view of ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... are also enabled to realise how futile, how misplaced, and how mischievous it is to raise the cry of "Race-suicide." It is futile because no outcry can affect a world-wide movement of civilisation. It is misplaced because the rise and fall of the population is not a matter of the birth-rate alone, ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... The moon was just rising, and the group of dragoons could easily be distinguished where they had been left. Suddenly turning, the whole gang leveled their pieces and drew the triggers. The action was noticed, and the snapping of the locks was heard by the soldiers, who returned their futile attempt with a laugh of ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... had concluded that a command organized and operated as contemplated by this act could do great damage to the enemy guarding that portion of Northern Virginia abandoned by the Confederate armies. But the partizan branch of the service having been brought into disrepute by the worse than futile efforts of others, his superior officers at first refused him permission to engage in so questionable an enterprise. Finally, however, General Stuart gave Mosby a detail of nine men from the regular ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... running from all directions, from the distant groups of mines, rushing to the burning mills, where the little fire corps belonging to the camp, were already engaged in a futile battle with the flames; but around the Yankee Boy mine there was no sign ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... in the gap relieved upon the sky line; and the next, fled trembling and sat down glowing with excitement on the Weaver's stone. She shut her eyes, seeking, praying for composure. Her hand shook in her lap, and her mind was full of incongruous and futile speeches. What was there to make a work about? She could take care of herself, she supposed! There was no harm in seeing the laird. It was the best thing that could happen. She would mark a proper distance to him once and for all. Gradually the wheels of ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... then succeeded by unscrupulous cunning; and, for futile efforts, without hostile collision, to impose a claim of authority upon people who repudiated it, were substituted measures which could be sustained only ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... women about the war are absolutely futile. They follow the war very closely after their own method, and believe that any defeats, such as on the Somme or Verdun, are tactical rearrangements of positions, dictated by the wisdom of the General Staff, and so long ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... acquiescence and walked wearily to the window. This was only an old and futile argument ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... one day understand," she answered, earnestly, "that God has helped us both, and how futile my efforts would have been without such help. But, Mr. Gregory," she continued, looking frankly into his flushed face (for she was beginning to suspect now something of his drift, and instinctively sought to ward off words which might disturb their pleasant relations), "I ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... my dear," said Constance, gravely, "makes a futile attempt semi-weekly to beat his brains out with a club; and every successive failure encourages him to try again; the only effect being a temporary decapitation of his family; and I believe this is the night on which he periodically turns a ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the mirror in the hall the sight of her face made her stop abruptly. There was no vestige of colour in it; and the shadow beneath her eyes made them seem inhumanly large and deep. The bright hair, to be sure, waved over her head and coiled on her neck, but it was like a futile shaft of sunlight falling on a dreary moor in winter. She went on thoughtfully to the door of the living-room but there she paused again with her hand upon the knob; and while she stood there she remembered herself as she had been only a few months before, with the colour flushing in her face ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... young bravo's hand, and the thrashing that he afterwards gets is pitiless, and the would-be stabber finds no voice lifted in his favour. He also gains the stigma of cowardice, and the bad reputation of being malignant and revengeful. Indeed, so utterly futile is the drawing of murderous instruments in little affrays of this sort, that, though I have known them displayed hundreds of times, yet I never knew a single wound to have been inflicted—though many a heavy beating ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union Cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the Rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause are preposterous and futile—that the Rebellion, if crushed out to-morrow, would be renewed within a year if Slavery were left in full vigor—that the army of officers who remain to this day devoted to Slavery can at best be but half way loyal to the Union—and that every hour of deference to Slavery is an hour ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... must be to train the will. Without this faculty in control all else comes to nothing. Exercises may be given for articulation, but without a determined purpose to speak distinctly little good will result. The teacher may spend himself in an effort to inspire and enthuse the student, but this is futile unless the student comes to a resolution to attain those excellencies of which the teacher has spoken. That a student may become self-reliant is the chief business of the teacher. To suggest such vital ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... as Symes saw clearly now, the fulfilment of it would have been futile so far as ending the intimacy was concerned, for the only result would have been that Augusta would have done the visiting. That he let the matter of Dr. Harpe's broken word pass without protest evidenced the completeness of his capitulation, his entire realization ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... Your 'poison' is but the spicy sauce for a strong man's meat, your 'plundering' but the stealing of a napkin from a loaded table. Look for your denizens of hell not among lovers of women, but among lovers of money and of power and of fame. Their dreams are the futile frenzies." ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... was slowly recovering from its dire distress, but its weavers and mechanics were blazing up into fierce, futile struggle with the powers by which masses of the people believed themselves oppressed. If the men of war had no longer anything to do abroad, there was great fear that work might be found for them at home. All Europe was looking on ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... arrangements for the future were discussed, the room was cleared of all but the committee. Experience had brought that about; for when outsiders had been allowed to remain, the number and variety of absurd and futile suggestions which were made, prevented any conclusion being come ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... more than fifty years. In 1449 his pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, who had probably been his assistant in the painting, demanded permission to continue the work; but the authorities were not content to grant it, and it was only in 1499, after some futile negotiations with Perugino, who appears to have refused the commission, that they finally resolved to place the decoration in the hands of Signorelli. Perhaps decided to this step by the success of the Monte Oliveto frescoes, they were yet so cautious ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... a futile attempt of hers was interrupted by the son of one of their neighbors, a lad of eighteen, who had just been given a subordinate position in his father's business. As he strolled up to their veranda steps, Lydia ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... came from the Back Benches. I saw the Speaker's face stiffen like the face of a helmsman as he humours a hard-mouthed yacht after a sudden following sea. The trouble was barely met in time. There came a fresh, apparently causeless gust a few minutes later—savage, threatening, but futile. It died out—one could hear the sigh—in sudden wrathful realisation of the dreary hours ahead, and the ship of ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... attended to her duties, observing all that was passing, but taking no part in these shameful intrigues. Conscious that any attempt to influence Madame de Montespan, hardened as she was in her career, would be futile, she ventured to address herself to the young and inexperienced Duchess de Fontanges. Gently she endeavored to lead her to some conception of the enormity of the life she was leading, and of the indecency of compromising the king and the court ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... that night was destined to be futile. Some minutes were lost in gaining access to the rear roof through the house next on the west, and some minutes more in prying open a shutter and forcing a carefully locked sash. By this time the twilight had deepened ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... ten days at the most. The king promised on his word to abide firmly and stably by what they should decree. But this commission was nearly a year behind time in assembling, and, even when it was assembled, its labors were so slow and so futile, that the Count de Dampmartin was quite justified in writing to the Count of Charolais, become by his father's death Duke of Burgundy, "The League of common weal has become nothing but ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... shires of England, or the snows of Lower Canada; so, after a little time, the Scotch and English volunteers began to melt away, and on the 9th of December the last warrior had disappeared. But the effects of their futile demonstration soon became apparent in the increasing violence and tyranny of Riel and his followers. The threatened attempt to upset his authority by arraying the Scotch and English half-breeds against him served ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... the Congress continued to remonstrate against the cost of the army, until in 1902, after all the futile protests of the intervening years, it condemned an increase of pay to British soldiers in India which placed an additional burden on the Indian revenues of L786,000 a year, and pointed out that the British garrison ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... MAY 28th. D'Harcourt and Thorring, after junction at Donauworth several weeks ago, and a good deal of futile marching up and down in those Donau Countries,—on the left bank, for most part; Khevenhuller holding stiffly, as usual, by the Inn, the Iser, and the rivers and countries on the right,—did at last, being now almost within sight of Passau and that important valley of the Inn across yonder, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... in a few moments. The surprise had been so great that resistance was futile. The baffled conspirators stood huddled ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... gold-seeker is constantly liable. Futile attempts of physician to save crushed leg of young miner. Universal outcry against amputation. Dr. C., however, uses the knife. Professional reputation at stake. Success attends the operation. Death of another young miner, who fell into mining-shaft. His funeral. Picturesque appearance ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... find some shelter where a fire could be built to dry his clothes. He was not in a fit condition to risk catching cold. In fact, Duane's teeth were chattering. To find a shelter in that barren waste seemed a futile task. Quite unexpectedly, however, they happened upon a deserted adobe cabin situated a little off the road. Not only did it prove to have a dry interior, but also there was firewood. Water was available in pools everywhere; ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... here in my balcony, I picture the possessor of that voice as a small, stout young man, standing a little apart from the other singers, with his hands behind him, under his coat-tail, and a severe expression of countenance. He sometimes leans forward, with a futile attempt to read the music over somebody else's shoulder, but always resumes his old severity of attitude before singing his part. Meanwhile the celestial subjects of this choral adoration look down upon the scene with a tranquillity and patience which can only result from the security with ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... things, belongs exclusively to a higher power. And it would be well for us to leave the Almighty to perfect his own works and fulfill his own covenants. Especially, as the history of the past shows how entirely futile all human efforts have proved, when made for the purpose of aiding him in carrying out even his revealed designs, and how invariably he has accomplished them by unconscious instruments, and in the face of human expectation. Nay more, that every attempt which has been made by fallible man to ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... your future and leave me without regret. A courtesan is too exacting; I should not love you like the simple, artless girl who felt for a moment the delightful hope of being your companion, of making you happy, of doing you honor, of becoming a noble wife. But I gather from that futile hope the courage to return to a life of vice and infamy, that I may put an eternal barrier between us. I sacrifice both honor and fortune to you. The pride I take in that sacrifice will support me in my wretchedness,—fate ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... behind the fallen king, as with murder in their savage little hearts they rushed forward upon Korak and Akut; but the old ape was too wise to court any such unequal encounter. To have counseled the boy to retreat now would have been futile, and Akut knew it. To delay even a second in argument would have sealed the death warrants of them both. There was but a single hope and Akut seized it. Grasping the lad around the waist he lifted him bodily from the ground, and turning ran swiftly toward another tree which swung low branches ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... from the young recruits. They thought victory complete already, but Ned knew that the Mexicans would not abandon the enterprise. General Urrea, after another futile charge, repulsed in the same deadly manner, withdrew some distance, but posted a strong line of sentinels ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... use the Senate as a council, but the effort proved futile, principally because the Senate balked. For the details see Corwin, The President, Office and ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... stolen horses when abstracted near caravans, is likely to prove of more service than casting horoscopes. Some time after the occurrence mentioned, the missionaries lost a horse and mule. 'We each mounted a camel, and made a circuit in search of the animals. Our search being futile, we resolved to proceed to the Mongol encampment, and inform them that our loss had taken place near their habitation. By a law among the Tartars, when animals are lost from a caravan, the persons occupying the nearest encampment are bound either to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... kinder feeling for her in the heart of her brother. As one fights fire with fire in the great conflagrations of the prairies, Amelie hoped also to combat the influence of Angelique des Meloises by raising up a potent rival in the fair Heloise de Lotbiniere but she soon found how futile were her endeavors. The heart of Le Gardeur was wedded to the idol of his fancy, and no woman on earth could ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... not for me,' said Madame Bertin, as she leaned upon the table and read it. I was laying a sheet upon the body; when I rose she handed it to me. It bore neither name nor address; the poor futile life had blundered out without even this thing completed. It was short, and to some woman. 'Tres-chere amie,' it said; 'once I made a mistake. I have paid for it. You laughed at me once; You would not laugh now. If you ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... came many alterations of opinion; time and again it looks as though we ought to stop when it seemed futile to be pushing and pushing without result; then would come a stretch of easy going and the impression that all was going very well with us. The fact of the matter is, it is difficult not to imagine the conditions in which ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... he had an unalterable grudge. He recognized in the Westerner an eager energy, a clean-cut resilience, and an abounding vitality he would have given a great deal to possess. His own early manhood had been frittered away in futile dissipations and he resented bitterly the contrast between himself and Lindsay that must continually be present in the mind of the girl who had promised to marry him. He had many adventitious things to offer ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... of work, or of official visiting among the soldiers' and sailors' wives and mothers, fell into the way of going out late in the afternoon for a walk by herself. She had grown to dread with a nervous dislike the constant meeting with acquaintances and neighbours, the usual rather futile exchange of remarks about the War, or about the local forms of war and charitable work in which she and they were now all engaged. The stillness and the solitariness of the evening walk soothed ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... listen to a piece of music was to experience a succession of loud and soft auditory sensations, to handle a stone was to receive a group of sensations of touch. To suppose that anything beyond these sensory units was ever really experienced was futile fiction. Experience was a mosaic, of which the stones were the detached sensations, and their washed-out copies, ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... hotel. And as he came down I saw him holding a knife and trying to cut his name on the scaffolding. He had time to try and do this for he must have had nearly three hundred feet to fall. And I could think of nothing but his folly in doing this futile thing, for not only would the man be unrecognizably dead in three seconds, but the very pole on which he tried to scratch whatever of his name he had time for was certain to be burnt in ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... lunatic asylum possibly be worse than this house, or any othe r? Kindly take me there at once. Please do! Everybody is wicked and futile and worthless and stupid; I am an object of disgust to myself, I don't believe ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... her arrival that one object of her visit to New York would be futile. She would not see Mr. Keith. He had gone abroad.—"In pursuit of Mrs. Lancaster," said Mrs. Nailor; for Lois was willing enough to hear all that lady had to say on this subject, and it was a good deal. "You know, ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... me, Miss Carson?" he asked. "I am telling the Prince that zeal is not enough, and that high ideals, unless they are accompanied by good conduct, are futile. I want him to change, to ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... It is futile to advance the argument that glasses are unromantic. They are not. I know, because I wear them myself, and I am a singularly romantic figure, whether in my rimless, my Oxford gold-bordered, or the plain gent's spectacles which I wear in ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the horse so that it broke away, pulling off the paling in the bridle-rein. I ran to bring a hammer to repair the damage. Mr Beecham caught the horse while I attempted to drive the nail into—the fence. It was a futile attempt. I bruised my fingers. He took the hammer from me, and fixing the paling in its place with a couple of well-aimed blows, ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... brought to account, and paid out of the estates of Trenck. For this shameful purpose some thousand of florins were paid besides to this species of claimants and though, after examination, their pretensions all proved to be futile, and themselves were cast in damages, yet was none of this money ever refunded, or the false claimants punished. Among these the pretended daughter of General Schwerin received two thousand florins, notorious as was her character. Again, Trenck ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... gave it headlines; from Toronto they sent special reporters. Of course, it was most of all the opportunity of Mr Horace Williams, of the Elgin Express, and of Rawlins, who held all the cards in their hands, and played them, it must be said, admirably, reducing the Mercury to all sorts of futile expedients to score, which the Express would invariably explode with a guffaw of contradiction the following day. It was to the Express that the Toronto reporters came for details and local colour; and Mr Williams gave them just as much as he ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... did you have in you?—some childish notions, a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance. And you wanted to write! Why, you're just on the edge of beginning to get something in you to write about. You wanted to create beauty, but how could you when you knew nothing about the nature of beauty? You wanted to write about life when you ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... punishment, treading happiness and heaven beneath the feet,—such as doomed the greatest genius of the Middle Ages to agonies more bitter than scorpions' stings, and shame that made the light of heaven a burden; to futile expiations and undying ignominies. No, it was none of these things,—not even the consecrated endearments of a plighted troth, the sweet rest of trust and hope, in the bliss of which we defy poverty, neglect, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... attempted to carry through a crack between the laths in the kitchen wall. The nuts were too large to go through the crack. The mouse would try to push them through; failing in that, he would go through and then try to pull them after him. All night he or his companion seems to have kept up this futile attempt, fumbling and dropping the nut every few minutes. It never occurred to the mouse to gnaw the hole larger, as it would instantly have done had the hole been too small to admit its own body. It could not ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... reason of his sensitiveness to the opinions of foreigners, the encroachments of foreign officials, and the strictures of the foreign press. He was agitated by a restless craving for their sympathy on the one hand, and by a futile resentment of their criticisms or their claims ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... wrestling with him the fielders have scattered to play at something else. The Gardens are noted for two kinds of cricket: boy cricket, which is real cricket with a bat, and girl cricket, which is with a racquet and the governess. Girls can't really play cricket, and when you are watching their futile efforts you make funny sounds at them. Nevertheless, there was a very disagreeable incident one day when some forward girls challenged David's team, and a disturbing creature called Angela Clare sent down so many yorkers that—However, instead ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... members of the great European aristocracies towards petty islanders. One of the most intolerable forms of the arrogance of the Knights during their last years at Malta was their disgusting behaviour towards the womenfolk of the natives; complaint was dangerous and futile. When the British captured the island in October, 1800, the mere proposal to restore the Order raised such a storm of protest from the Maltese as to prove conclusively to all how hated had been the domination of ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen
... occasion, and he answered the questions in a prompt, frank, fearless fashion, that more than once evoked a round of applause from the lookers-on. He had nothing but the truth to tell and his cross-examiner ere long came to the conclusion that it was futile endeavouring to get him to tell anything else; and so, with rather bad grace, he gave it up, and said he ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... that new will to power came many enterprises more or less futile and harmless, with the "institutional" church at their head. Piety was cunningly disguised as basketball, billiards and squash; the sinner was lured to grace with Turkish baths, lectures on foreign travel, and free instructions in stenography, rhetoric and double-entry book-keeping. ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... I imagine, to observe how contrary such regulations are to the boasted liberty of the subject, of which we affect to be so very jealous; but which, in this case, is so plainly sacrificed to the futile interests ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... interests, and impressing upon the minds of the children of the poor, sentiments of just subordination and honest independence. How happy would it have been for France, if women of fortune and abilities had always exerted their talents and activity in this manner, instead of wasting their powers in futile declamations, or ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... let ye hold a general fishing inquiry into my business. There are two kinds of foolish folk in this world. Those who babble of their affairs to their womenfolk, and those who babble of them to strangers. I have no womenfolk, thank God! so I cannot talk to the futile creatures." ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... that his well-shod toes could not reach the shins of his preceptor, the young prince ceased his futile effort, and with a most ungracious air moved along the beach. The limping baron followed him gloomily, with itching fingers. He felt that, in spite of the fact that his imperial master would shortly ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... and their leader himself counselled no resistance, why should they encompass their own destruction by a gesture of futile heroism? They answered without much hesitation that they would do as was required ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... bylanes, cow-paths, and cart-tracks, that twice the dawn found me as completely lost as though I had been set down in the midst of the Sahara. I thus wasted much time, and wandered many miles out of my way; wherefore, to put an end to these futile ramblings, I set my face westward, hoping to strike the highroad somewhere between Tonbridge and Sevenoaks; determined rather to run the extra chance of capture than follow haphazard these tortuous and ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... enforcing the fulfilment of financial contracts. On the other hand remedies against a debtor's person, and still more against the persons of his family, are not only inconsistent with the growth of opinion among civilized communities, but are in themselves worse than futile, inasmuch as they strike at the root of all personal effort on the part of a debtor to retrieve his position and render a return to solvency impossible. Hence the necessity of devising some system which is just to creditors while not unduly harsh upon ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... DuPont; (3) a new purge in the top level of the Supreme Soviet; (4) delight to rocketeers at Holloman Air Force Research Center, Cape Canaveral and Vandenburg Air Force Base; and (5) agonizing fits of hair-tearing to every chemist, biologist and physicist who had a part in the futile attempts to analyze the two ingredients of what the press had ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... has most clearly stated Ibsen's position: "He seems to be in ill humor with humanity and the plan of creation in general (if, indeed, he recognized such a plan), and he devotes himself, with ruthless satisfaction, to showing what a paltry contemptible lot men are, and how aimless, futile, and irrational their existence is on this earth, with its chaotic strivings and bewildered endeavors." ... "Furthermore, he utterly undervalues what we call civilization, which he regards primarily ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... he, with a pathetically futile effort to make a fine gesture, "don't do it. I am brave enough to die. You would not have ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... and always would be, much more to her than the world within. She was not to be one of those narrow, self-centred, morbid beings whose days are spent in introspection, and whose powers are wasted in futile efforts to set their own little peculiarities forth in such a way as to make them seem of consequence. She never at any time studied her own nature, except as a part of human nature, and in the hope of finding in herself some clue which ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... figuratively, I stood with open mouth, heart beating slightly faster, and mind making to itself such imbecile remarks as: "Well, what do you think of that! Who in blazes would have expected ducks here?" and other futile remarks. In the meantime, the trained part of me had jerked the gun off my shoulder, pushed forward the safety catch, and prepared for one hasty long shot at the last and slowest of the ducks. Now the instinctive part of one can do the preparations, ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... fortunes do not interest India. The talk in some of the papers about the necessity of smashing him, in order to avert the risk of some general Mahomedan uprising, is futile and imaginative. The Indians think the English rather mad to go crusading against him in the Soudan, and they may soon get irritated at the waste of Indian lives at Suakin, when we want our best men on the N.W. frontier; but, for the rest, they do not concern themselves about ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... After fifteen minutes of futile effort at concentration he flung down the paper and strode to the door of the stateroom. A white linen arm answered his gentle knock. There was a moment's consultation, then the nurse came out and ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... occupied by him; and if while he slept one of his wakeful brothers or sisters crawled over him and momentarily usurped his proud position, then, in the very moment of his awakening, that other puppy would be rolled backward, full of gurgling and futile protestation, and Finn would resume the picked place. Whatever was best in the way of warmth, and food, and comfort, that Finn obtained, even at this absurdly rudimentary stage, by token of superior weight, energy, and vitality. Also, though the last to be born, Finn was the first to ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... and Mr. Cutler, who had seized the opportunity to attempt amateur detective work on his own account, was groveling perseveringly about the floor, among old porcelain and loose pieces of armor, in the futile hope of finding any clue that the thieves might have ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... futile attempt to arrange terms for a cessation of hostilities both parties again took the field. Tournay having been reduced by the allies under Marlborough and Eugene, they next proceeded to threaten Mons. In order to protect this stronghold Villars, the French ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... into as many volumes as she liked. To-day, however, her mind was not attuned to study. She sat with a volume of Macaulay open before her: but her thoughts were not with the author. She was wondering what those two were saying in the room overhead, and finding all attempts at reading futile, she let her head sink back upon the cushion of her deep luxurious chair, and sat with her dreamy eyes fixed on the summer landscape and her thoughts with ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... whole body strained and twisted in a futile effort to raise himself to at least one elbow. "Why, I'm stripped to my waist!" he stammered ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... lies close to the first: The man must enthrone his will to rule over his thought, his feelings, and all his physical powers, so that the outer self may give perfect, unhampered expression to the inner. It is futile, we assert, to lay down systems of rules for voice culture, intonation, gesture, and what not, unless these two principles of having something to say and making the will sovereign have at least begun to make themselves ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... those trite and commonplace remarks that are customary for use under such circumstances and yet are so futile to express one's real sentiments, you arise and undertake to pacify the infuriated creature with household remedies. You try to lure him away with a wad of medicated cotton stuck on the end of a parlor ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... Old Man who supposed That the street door was partially closed; But some very large Rats ate his coats and his hats, While that futile Old Gentleman dozed. ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... from the futile attempt to introduce scientific demonstration into a region which confessedly transcends human experience, and when we consider the question upon broad grounds of moral probability, I have no doubt that men will continue in the future, as in the past, to cherish the ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... the outset by two French privateers, sailed finally from L'Orient, after one futile attempt, August 14, 1779, and made during the first forty days of the fifty days' cruise a number of unimportant prizes. On the 18th of August, the privateer Monsieur, which was not bound by the concordat, took a prize, ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... myself with futile speculations on the subject, however, and as the last peaks of the Scavaig hills vanished in pale blue distance I felt as if I had been brought suddenly back from a fairyland to a curiously dull and commonplace world. ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... beautiful earth, above on the glorious universe studded with shining orbs, without number numberless, what can I make of them? Nothing absolutely nothing—yet they are all creatures like myself. But—if I try—audaciously try—to strain my finite faculties, in the futile attempt to take in what is infinite—if I aspiringly, but hopelessly, grapple with the idea of the immensity of space, for instance, which my reason yet tells me must of necessity be boundless—do I not fall fluttering ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... in each of these letters, probably as a bribe to Jane Clemens to be lenient with his prodigalities, which in his youthful love of display he could not bring himself to conceal. But apparently the salve was futile, for in another letter, a month later, he complains that his mother is "slinging insinuations" at him again, such as "where did you get that money" and "the company I kept in San ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the wretched natives to confess their plot and punished the authors of it. The natives likewise are acquainted with a plant whose smell fortifies them, and serves as remedy against the odour of this tree, making it possible for them to handle the wood. These particulars are futile; and this enough on ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... absurd, futile, obtuse, silly, sottish, undiscerning, dull, ignorant, senseless, simple, stupid, unintelligent. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... know—of course, if you feel like that about it," he said, "we'll see what can be done. It's hard work, and a good many times it seems futile. They die, you know, in spite of all we can do. And there are many things that ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... In the futile hope of rendering themselves popular, may not the members of an elective legislature, the majority of whom cannot be Richelieus, Pitts, or Louvois, in a misconceived spirit of economy, allow the institutions necessary for a large, well-appointed, and disciplined army to fall into ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... you blightin' perisher, I said a piggy-back," he snarled, his resplendent shoes twinkling in futile kicks. "Oh, Joe, there's times when ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... here, with this grand advantage which no other political philosopher or reformer had ever had before; he has the true definition in his hands to begin with; not the specific and futile notions with which the human mind, shut up within itself, seeks to comprehend and predict and order all, but the solid actual universals that the mind of man, by the combination and scientific balance of its faculties, is able to ascend to. He has in his hands, to begin with, the causes ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... of making game preserves out of our forest reserves, but we have the additional problem of enlarging the area of forest reserves so as to provide for winter feeding. If this is not done all the protection which is afforded during the summer will be wholly futile. This condition does not prevail in the East, in Maine and in the Adirondacks, where the winter and summer ranges are practically similar. It is, therefore a new condition and a ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... passed, and we were impatient to hear from Murden. Mr. Brown had put his police to work to find out the accomplice of Follet, but all attempts to discover him had proved futile. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... captured by his words. The man's qualities—his quietness, peace, slowness, silence—betrayed somehow that his inner life dwelt in a region vast and simple, shaping even his exterior presentment with its own huge characteristics, a region wherein the distress of the modern world's vulgar, futile strife could not exist—more, could never have existed. The Irishman, who had never realized exactly why the life of Today to him was dreadful, now understood it in the presence of this simple being with his atmosphere of stately power. He was like a child, but a child of some ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... warns against all speculations concerning the hidden God as futile, foolish, presumptuous, and wicked. The secret counsels, judgments, and ways of God cannot and must not be investigated. God's majesty is unfathomable, His judgments are unsearchable, His ways past finding out. Hence, there is not, and there cannot be, any human ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... followed with an expression of perplexity, her mouth shaped to futile expositions. The Widgett method of thought puzzled her weakly rhetorical mind. "There is no remedy, girls," she began, breathlessly, "except ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... and death-like was the swoon, and so futile the usual methods of restoration, that the prisoner was carried into the small ante-room, and laid upon a wooden bench; where a physician, who chanced to be in the audience, was summoned to attend her. Finding restoratives ineffectual, he ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... them. We sent wagons from Las Palomas after their few effects, and had all the families contentedly housed, either about headquarters or at the outlying ranchitas, before the first contingent of beeves was gathered. But the attempt to induce any of the new families to occupy the stone cottage proved futile, as they were superstitious. There was a belief among the natives, which no persuasion could remove, regarding houses that were built for others and never occupied. The new building was tendered to Tio Tiburcio and his ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... Salandra residence, to hang about and yell themselves hoarse in the hope of evoking something from the former Premier. The two poles of the following "demonstrations" were the Salandra and the Giolitti residences with occasional futile dashes into ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... deny that the age is crowded; I will admit one fact, and one fact only: that I am futile, that he is futile, and that we are all three as futile as the devil. What am I? I have smattered law, smattered letters, smattered geography, smattered mathematics; I have even a working knowledge of judicial astrology; and here I stand, all London roaring ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... without adequate fortifications. Here is France's vulnerable point. For France to be now outnumbered in this theater of the war is strong evidence of her also being out-generaled. While the French have wasted needless troops in futile excursions beyond the Vosges and in the Ardennes, they seem to have been blind to the tremendous concentration of German fighting strength in the north. Had it not been for the solid, heroic resistance of the British army under Field-marshal ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... a particularly favourable stretch. That is part of the glorious uncertainty of it all. The boat of to-day, for example, accounted yesterday for one solitary kelt, though it had shared our experience of futile pulls and visible rises in the afternoon. Now if—— Ah! The shrill tongue of Tom Thumb's reel gave a welcome view holloa (half-past eleven) and the sentence I was pencilling remains unfinished. I have forgotten what it would have been. By this time the motions of a kelt had ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... these processes, success is entirely dependent on the skill with which the captors turn to advantage the terror and inexperience of the wild elephant, since all attempts would be futile to subdue or confine by ordinary force an animal of such strength ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... generous hospitality of the castle on his last visit, and as Lord Ross was constantly saying that the earl would like to see him, he determined to call on the afternoon before his departure. Lady Cochrane, as usual, did not appear, and neither did her daughter, and after a futile conversation with Dundonald, who seemed feebler than ever, Claverhouse left, and had it not been for a sudden whim, as he was going through the courtyard, he had never seen Jean Cochrane again, and many things would not have happened. But there was a way of ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... the insurance companies to this accusation is that great corporations, such as they are, must keep on hand, ready for emergencies, enormous amounts of cash. This is a futile argument, for in the nature of things the daily receipts of each of the Big Three are larger than the expenditures. We are also told "We keep large amounts, ready to take advantage of a sudden smash in the market." This sounds well, but cloaks one of the most vicious practices of these great institutions, ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... returned home I fell asleep standing; it wad the dead sleepiness of a child fatigued by a long journey, against which it is futile to struggle, and I was carried to ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... human, Yet beyond the gods to exalt— O quiet Love, couching with the curled might and majesty Of tawny leopards! O tamed tiger, Love, whose golden eyes Weep for the thrift of angels! Thou pinnacled pain of the midnight, Rose-strewer of daylit mire, Transfiguration of our futile lives, Dazzler into the secret courts of heaven— Thou whose passion is written in all men's blood and tears And in silver letters upon the books of God— Make me to stand erect, and walk with danger, And strive like a flame! For Thou and I are struck as cymbals of God's ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... at every step to reduce the schedules, but generally without success. In this effort, they were supported by Democratic Senators and Representatives, but the "Old Guard" controlled such a pronounced majority in both Houses as to render the opposing efforts futile, fierce though they were. So general was this conflict that in many matters the Progressives soon established a faction of their own. There were many skirmishes all along the line. Their divergence from the views of Regular ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... strayed back to the futile subject of dress, always at hand to be taken up again, one would say, when the judges were non-plussed. Her first reply on this subject is remarkable and shows that dark and terrible forebodings were already beginning to mingle with ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... having seen it, when we try to put our story into words—when we try to set down on paper the unspeakable horror of it—we realize what a futile, incomplete ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... for her son's sake.' But he knew how futile were his words, as he saw the bitter contempt ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... helpless as a man in a strait waistcoat. When I tried to rise, my captors tautened the rope and dragged me along the ground. Resistance being futile, I resigned myself to ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... can go on?" he said to Robin on their second meeting in the Gardens. "The things we used to fill our time and amuse ourselves with—dancing and tennis and polo and theatres and parties—how jolly and all right they were in their day, but how futile they seem just now. How could one even stand talk of them! ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... amidst the futile monuments of the Hohenzollern Museum, in Berlin, where all the portraits, effigies, personal belongings and memorials of that gifted, eccentric race are gathered and historically disposed. The princes of the mighty ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... is open, go when you like," was her father's one reply to such futile outbursts. But they well knew the road was not open to Willie. The six mountain miles intervening between their ranch and the station formed an impassable ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... in superhuman but futile efforts to release his foot, the sentinel of the passage, who had picked himself up, ran through the postern toward the palisade, followed by another soldier from the garrison. Together they fell upon Trenck, overwhelming him with blows with ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... the possession of Barbara Jane for six weeks, during which Miss Rosetta broke her heart with loneliness and longing, and meditated futile plots for the recovery of the baby. It was hopeless to think of stealing it back or she would have tried to. The hired man at the Wheeler place reported that Mrs. Wheeler never left it night or day for a single moment. She even ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to push me away, but I clung to him all the harder; at which his whole manner changed and he began to make futile efforts to calm me and lead me away from the spot. Seeing that these attempts were unavailing, he turned pale and raised his arm up passionately, but speedily dropped it again, and casting glances this way and that, broke suddenly into a loud laugh and became, as by the touch of a magician's ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... leaves on the trees. When you first see the tame, ordinary-looking picture, your first impulse is to turn your back upon it, and say "Humbug"—but your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in—and appreciate it in its fulness—and understand how such a miracle could have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands. You will never get tired of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... How futile their poor little efforts were! How powerless they found themselves against the tide of wilful misunderstanding, ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... episode with the conviction that a pacific renovation of France, an orderly readjustment of her institutions, was hopelessly impossible. 'Si on avait ete sage!' those cry who consider the Revolution as a futile mutiny. If people had only been prudent, all would have been accomplished that has been accomplished since, and without the sanguinary memories, the constant interpolations of despotism, the waste of generous lives and noble purpose. And this is true. But then prudence itself ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... an idea that the departed mother was probably just as well, if not better, off, free of the battle for existence which appeared to confront this futile old man and his elf of a daughter. He glanced at the embryo shack under construction and, comparing it with his own beautiful home on Tyee Head, he turned toward the bight. A short distance off the bulkhead, he observed ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... his steely nonchalance as she stood apart while he went through the usual forms of a professional visit that was obviously futile. She followed him to the front door. He answered her eager inquiries with ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... effect. It is probable that these magnates had good information that Lord John and his government merely intended to carry a bill which might be held in terrorem—a mode of legislating against the church of Rome, which an experienced politician must have known was futile. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... illustrations based on human understanding, and I wrote for my students a certain tract on the unity and trinity of God. This I did because they were always seeking for rational and philosophical explanations, asking rather for reasons they could understand than for mere words, saying that it was futile to utter words which the intellect could not possibly follow, that nothing could be believed unless it could first be understood, and that it was absurd for any one to preach to others a thing which ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... chronicled. What, then, had he done with it? The more I pondered the question the more puzzled I became, and at the same time the more determined to seek a solution of the mystery. But how? I made a dozen plans, all of which, upon consideration, appeared so futile, that I gave up the game in despair, and decided to see if my brain would not become clearer after I had paid my promised visit to ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... standard and quality of the average birth. All the great concerns of life work out with a very little analysis to that, even our wars, our orgies of destruction, have, at the back of them, a claim, an intention, however futile in its conception and disastrous in its consequences, to establish a wider security, to destroy a standing menace, to open new paths and possibilities, in the interest of the generations still to come. One may present the whole ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... He had been charged with many crimes, but always through the aid of "the big fellows" he avoided the penitentiary and every fresh and futile attempt to end his career increased the numbers and reverence of his followers. His had been the history and he was the pattern now of practically every gang leader of consequence in the city. The fight ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... debilitating cycle of emotions, still fed the fire of his excitement with driblets of Rhine wine: a boy at odds with life, a boy with a spark of the heroic, which he was now burning out and drowning down in futile reverie and solitary excess. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... air; soft and strong, like the touch of a brave woman's hand. The air of an early March day in New Orleans. It was folly to shut it out from nook or cranny. Worse than folly the lady thought who was making futile endeavors to open the car window near which she sat. Her face had grown pink with the effort. She had bit firmly into her red nether lip, making it all the redder; and then sat down from the unaccomplished feat to look ruefully at the smirched ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... even be called sublime. No doubt the captain and crew of the ship were as much astonished as we are, and their opinion of Jonah went up several hundred per cent. They resolved to make a last supreme effort before turning him into a fish-bait. But all their gallant endeavors were discovered to be futile and a mere waste of time. So the men, more in sorrow than in anger, finally took Jonah up and threw him overboard. They had done their best for him, and now, finding that they could do no more except ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... barely talk, but he drove himself and his companion relentlessly. He no longer troubled to look ahead in hope of beholding a change in the land. The weary futile task of placing one mat before the other occupied him entirely. And suddenly he found himself pushing head foremost into a hedgelike thicket of ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... conclusion that farther discovery was impossible, because the English of Hudson Bay had stirred up the Western tribes to oppose it. Therefore he set out for the settlements, and, reaching Quebec in the autumn of 1753, placed the journal of his futile enterprise in the hands of Duquesne, the new governor. [Footnote: Journal sommaire du Voyage de Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, charge de la Decouverte de la Mer de ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... of shell and canister from our batteries, while our lines were thinned by his ricochetting projectiles, that rebounded again and again over the thinly covered limestone formation and sped on to the rear of Negley. But all his efforts to dislodge or destroy us were futile, and for the first time since daylight General Hardee was seriously checked in the turning movement he had begun for the purpose of getting possession of the Nashville pike, and though reinforced until two-fifths of Bragg's army was now at his command, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... to the intricate puzzle that he had worked over for so many years, he began at once to tell his friends about it and to try to secure capital, but they had listened to their sorrow so many times that his efforts were futile. For a number of years be struggled and experimented and worked along in a small way, his family suffering with himself the pangs of the extremest poverty. At last he went to New York and showed some of his samples to William Ryder, who, with his brother Emory, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... his own invention designed for use in No Man's Land on a dark night. Its exact beauties escape my memory; as far as I can remember one put the bowl in one's mouth and the tobacco in the stem and blew. It was an invention typical of Percy—utterly futile. He had just called the company commander "dear old soul" for the tenth time, and was explaining how no sparks or glowing ash could be seen if you made use of this patent atrocity, when a Lewis gun started rattling ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... in life means that our fellow man believes in us and wishes us to do so. Without his co-operation it would be futile to arouse our own ambitions. We could not hope to win a victory all alone and against the great majority who believe in certain standards and conditions. We might fool ourselves into thinking that because of some stroke of fortune we had established an immunity for ourselves. ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... them, that I can see—that the emancipation of the serfs may lead to the establishment of a more liberal system of government throughout the Russian dominions. All hopes based upon isolated revolutions are futile. ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... It was all Godfrey could do to keep his contempt and hate within what he would have called the bounds of reason, as he waited for "the miserable mongrel." He kept walking up and down the little lawn, which a high shrubbery protected from the road, making a futile attempt, as often as he thought of the policy of it, to look unconcerned, and the next moment striking fierce, objectless blows with his whip. Catching sight of him from a window on the stair, Tom was so little reassured by his demeanor, that, crossing ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... use for purposes of aerostation, we are indebted to Mr. Charles Green. Up to his discovery, the process of inflation was not only exceedingly expensive, but uncertain. Two, and even three days, have frequently been wasted in futile attempts to procure a sufficiency of hydrogen to fill a balloon, from which it had great tendency to escape, owing to its extreme subtlety, and its affinity for the surrounding atmosphere. In a balloon sufficiently ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... which the gold-seeker is constantly liable. Futile attempts of physician to save crushed leg of young miner. Universal outcry against amputation. Dr. C, however, uses the knife. Professional reputation at stake. Success attends the operation. Death of another young miner, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... opposite wall being too far distant to allow me to get any purchase for my feet, I presently desisted. The closeness of the door to the jambs warned me that an attempt to prise it open would be equally futile; and for a moment I stood gazing in perplexity at the solid planks, which bid fair to baffle me to ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... visited with the punishment due to such guilt. No demonstrated fruitlessness of similar fears in the past served to allay fears for the future; no inefficiency of brute force permanently to stay the enterprise of the mind prevented brute force from making its futile and sometimes fatal attempts. It is no matter that increased facility of production has been attended by an increased demand for the product; it is no matter that ingenuity has never been held permanently back from its carefully conned plans; there have not been wanting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... over-flowing with love towards my fellow-men. Industrial strife must cease. Strikes are a barbarous and futile method of redressing wrong. Rather think that an increase in wages of two shillings a day would appeal to our members. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... great men; nature made them pleasure-loving or base, every one. Some mocking or jealous power corrupted them in either soul or body, so as to make all their powers futile, and their ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... him the bulldog pistol's honest bark Has naught of terror in its blunt remark. He looks with calmness on the gleaming steel— If e'er it touched his heart he did not feel: Superior hardness turned its point away, Though urged by fond affinity to stay; His bloodless veins ignored the futile stroke, And moral mildew kept the cut in cloak. Happy the man, I say, to whom the wage Of sin has been commuted into age. Yet not quite happy—hark, that horrid cry!— His cruel mirror ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... showing the effects of their defeat, the Germans on April 10, 1916, attacked Caillette Wood, but were repulsed. Further attempts made in the course of the night to eject the French from the trenches to the south of Douaumont also failed. These futile assaults by no means weakened the Germans' determination, and on March 11, 1916, they attacked in force the front between Douaumont and Vaux. At some points they succeeded in penetrating the French trenches, but were driven ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... great number of the natives walking past the base of the mound towards the bush. Then I remembered that some one, Marama, I think, had informed me that there was to be a great sacrifice to Oro at dawn on that day. After this I thought no more of the matter but occupied myself in a futile study of the heavenly bodies. At length the dawn broke and put a period to ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... signs? Scoundrel, puppy, foreign-born poacher, didn't you see my sign-boards?" And as she looked down at him—Richard's blood alive and red in a youthful and beautiful body: and she what she was—she fell into one of those futile and dreadful fits of rage to which the evil old are subject; and mumbled with her skinny bags of lips, and shook and nodded her deathly head, and waved her claw-like hands, ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... talking with Washington," he announced, and his voice was one of steel coolness. At such an hour as this Malone wasted no minim of strength in futile anger. That belonged to other moments. "We have done what we could. It is not enough. We must do more. We have pegged those stocks where the slump would be most demoralizing and already this highbinder, Burton, has smashed those pegs like match-stems. We have sent ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... him as full of intrepidity and executive force. In the field he was a worse failure than ever Banks had been. In my idea he deserves in 1864 the characterisation by Charles Francis Adams. He was the Grouchy who made futile Grant's advance upon Richmond and he blundered at Fort Fisher, but he was a pachyderm of the toughest—too thick-skinned to be troubled by the scratches of criticism, always floundering to the front with ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... revolution has followed neither of these lines. Always the opponent of sane social reforms which Socialists deride as "melioration" or as futile attempts to shore up an obsolete system, it has consistently disassociated itself from such men as Lord Shaftesbury, who did more to better the conditions of the working classes than anyone who has ever lived. ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... my mother's means—a cookie or a slice of buttered white bread—I would eye him enviously till he complained that I made him choke. Then I would go on eying him until he bribed me off with a piece of the tidbit. If staring alone proved futile I might try to bring him to terms by naming all sorts of loathsome objects. At this it frequently happened that the prosperous boy threw away his cookie from sheer disgust, whereupon I would be mean enough to pick it up and to eat it in triumph, ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... went home mystified. The story of their futile attempt to discover deception in Bernadette got abroad, "and still the wonder grew." The interest in the visions intensified, and vast crowds, numbered not by tens, but by hundreds, assembled to watch Bernadette during the appointed fifteen ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... works is a futile reliance for heaven. It is the first necessity, and perhaps the next and greatest, is, to 'Do unto all what you would have all do unto you.' These are the words of the great Chinese philosopher, Confucius, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... riven like matchwood. Far down below man was destroying the flinty rock, while overhead the rock was destroying the handiwork of man! But the destruction in the one case was slow, in the other swift. A desperate but futile effort was made by the crew to get out the boats, and the passengers, many of whom were women and children, rushed frantically from the cabin to the deck, and clung to anything they could lay hold of, until strength failed, and the waves ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... finished their work, my men were all discontented, and wished to throw back their presents, saying I did not love them, although they were "perminents," as much as the "temperaries." They, however, gave in, after some hours of futile arguments, on my making them understand, through Baraka, that what they saw me give to the pagazis would, if they reflected, only tend to prove to them that I was not a bad master who forgot his obligations when he could get no more ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... proving futile, I pushed on to the town of Farmington, where the Dakota branch of the Milwaukee railroad crossed my line of march. Here I felt to its full the compelling power of the swift stream of immigration surging to the west. The little village had doubled in size almost in a day. It was a junction ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... definitely decided to quit the study of theology and divinity, and to throw himself into that of the law. Religious controversy had become suddenly distasteful to him. The Questions and other books of the theological faculty appeared to him futile and unsatisfactory. He had definitely resolved upon the secular life for himself; and although that did not mean that his convictions were shaken, or that his faith was in any way less precious to him, it gave to ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... burning with a sense of futile rage. It was useless to rebel, however, for on a ship a boy is the ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... the impossible. So far, indeed, did he go in this futile direction that, as others are wont to do, he constructed dialogues and scenes in which Grace had turned out to be the mistress of Hintock Manor-house, the mysterious Mrs. Charmond, particularly ready and willing ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... the rebels in the water, when they saw with what facility the boatman moved the bateau in the swift tide, as compared with his futile efforts farther up the stream, were fully satisfied of the truth of their companion's assertion. Tom decided to run the gauntlet between the right bank and the soldier nearest to that shore. He paddled the bateau with all his vigor, until he had ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... tell, as you look on the course of a life that seems to you a failure, because you do not hear its "Io triumphe" on the lips of a crowd, what sweet dead dreams, what noble vain desires, what weariness of futile longing, what conscious waste of vanished years—nay, what silent acts of pure nobility, what secret treasures of unfathomed love—may lie within that which seems in your sight even as a waste land untilled, as a fire burnt out, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... in the childish jingle of the mediaeval Latin is a sign of a futile mind, no doubt, and I beg pardon of you and of the Church for wasting your precious summer day on poetry which was regarded as mystical in its age and which now sounds like a nursery rhyme; but a verse or two of Adam's hymn on the Assumption of the Virgin completes the record of her rank, and goes ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... in the formation of the plan of campaign; for he it was who persuaded Colonel Mack to accompany him to London, and there discuss with Ministers the alternative schemes. The mention of Mack will excite surprise among those who know of him only by the futile Neapolitan campaign of 1799, and the frightful disaster of Ulm. In regard to strategy and the theory of war he displayed much ability; and his administrative talents and energy as Quarter-Master-General in 1793 should have screened him from the criticism ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... forces on this ship that would make the energies of your greatest battleship seem weak and futile. We can race through space a billion times faster than the speed of light; we can tear apart and destroy the atoms of matter; we can rip apart the greatest of planets; we can turn the hurtling stars and send them where we want them; we can curve space as we please; we can put out ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... the breaking-point of his self-control had come. This impertinent interruption, this thrusting into the last few seconds of his life of a reminder of all that he had lost, this futile postponement of his end, was cruel, unhuman, unthinkable. The pistol was still in his hand. He had but to draw it and press it close, and before the marine could leap upon him he would ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... figure than ever before; but in her beautiful dark eyes only the direct intelligence of a child answered his gaze of inquiry; and her voice, too, had become soft and hesitating, and the infantile falsetto sounded in it at times, sweet, futile, immature. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... the support of precedent failed him, he remained without any firm conviction of his own. While his poetic taste was quite adequate to the appreciation of a Samuel Rogers or a Barry Cornwall, it was incomparably futile in the perception of a Wordsworth or a Shelley. In a passage composed at the end of his long editorial career in 1829, he unconsciously announced his own extinction as ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... some vast hotel. And as he came down I saw him holding a knife and trying to cut his name on the scaffolding. He had time to try and do this for he must have had nearly three hundred feet to fall. And I could think of nothing but his folly in doing this futile thing, for not only would the man be unrecognizably dead in three seconds, but the very pole on which he tried to scratch whatever of his name he had time for was certain to be burnt in a few weeks ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... towards women, you will, I think, see that it is not a paradox to say that a woman may and does suffer if she does not fulfil the whole of her nature, and yet that it is a monstrous fallacy to affirm that, because of that, she ceases to have any reason for existence; that she is a futile life, a person who does not really "count." Sex is a great and a mighty power, but it is something more than the mere satisfaction of a physical need. It is part of the great rhythm of life, running through all the higher creation; it is the instinct to ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... fell with the wound which was later to prove fatal, Pellegrom came up with his platoon to relieve the exhausted platoon, and "C" Company Yorks arrived on the line from their futile flank march just in time to join the Americans at 9:00 a. m. in checking the redoubled counterattack of the hordes ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... pacific Guizot, and the satisfaction with which both the latter and his Sovereign regarded the displacement of Palmerston by Aberdeen, began to lead to a better entente. The scheme of fortifying Paris continued, however, to be debated, while the Orleanist family were still the subjects of futile attentats. ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... "Futile," decided the lawyer. "There is no use in our going that way." And he turned to look again at the ground in their immediate vicinity. As he did so, his eye lighted on the triangular spot where the ell met the side of the house under the kitchen windows. Here there was no flagging, ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... you tantalize yourself with hopes so likely to prove futile, when nobler thoughts should engross you? Look, Mr. Woodburn," she said, pointing, with charming enthusiasm, towards the distant summits of Manchester, then beginning to be dimly visible in the rays of the rising moon, "cast your eyes northward! Beneath yon blue ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... holding back England and France and driving the Russian millions out of East Prussia. It is something bigger than that. Peasants and princes, these men are dying gladly, backed up by fitness, discipline, and a passionate unity such as the world has not often seen. This, and not the futile nurses' tales with which the American public permitted itself to be diverted during the early weeks of the war, is what strikes one in Germany. It is a fact, like the Germans being in Belgium, which you have got to face and think about, whether you like ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... sting of the recollection is removed, when, for example, the calling up of the image of a lost friend is no longer accompanied with the bitterness of futile longing, that a healthy mind ventures to nourish recollections of such remote events and to view these as part of its recent experiences. In this case the mnemonic image becomes transformed into a kind of present emotional possession, an element of that ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... profit since it was elected in December, 1910. The unnoticed residue are probably wondering whether it is their own modesty or the shortsightedness of Ministers that has caused them to be passed over. Mr. Billing, after several pathetic but futile efforts to regain his place in the limelight, has at last succeeded in getting himself named, suspended, and forcibly assisted by four stalwart officials in his exit from the House—the most salutary movement, in ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... her poetry, she writes almost like a follower of Buddha. The individual soul is absorbed in the universal whole; future life has no certainty; hope in redemption is buried in a sepulchre; life in most cases is a futile struggle; the great problems of existence are invested with gloom as well as mystery. Thus she discourses like a Pagan. She would have us to believe that Theocritus was wiser than Pascal; that Marcus Aurelius was ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... beginning of the nineteenth century, the great thinker, Hegel, retaining essentially the Greek cast of thought, could make the metaphysical declaration that, since seven planets were known, and since seven is the perfect number, it would be futile to search for other planets. But even as he made this declaration another planet was found. It would be safe to say that no thinker of the present day would challenge defeat in quite the Aristotelian or Hegelian manner; ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... entering wedge of this kind into our laws. A nation like the United States, jealous of the liberties of its citizens, may well hesitate before it incorporates into its polity a system which is fast disappearing in Europe before the progress of liberal institutions. A wide experience has shown how futile such precautions are, and how easily passports may be borrowed, exchanged, or even forged by persons interested ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... fell back, but sprang forward again as the youth, seizing the rein of Peggy's little mare, attempted to make a dash for liberty. Had he been alone the effort might have succeeded, but hampered with a second horse the attempt was futile. The cousins were again surrounded, and Clifford was dragged unceremoniously from his saddle. He struggled fiercely with his assailants, managing to shake them off so as to reach Peggy's side just as one ruffian was about to ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... that the cold and wet were robbing him of his store of strength. Could he possibly get out to where the boat was? There might be one way, but there could be only one, and even that appeared a desperate and utterly futile venture. It was to find a footing somehow, to let go his vise-like grip of the rail, and leap out into the darkness across the black and fathomless gulf of water surging up between the hull and the vessel's main boom in the hope of landing in the belly of the sail; to be ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... vamp up and replace the Bourbon line? The wittiest man who ever sat here[21] said That half our nation's debt had been incurred In efforts to suppress the Bourbon power, The other half in efforts to restore it, [laughter] And I must deprecate a further plunge For ends so futile! Why, since Ministers Craved peace with Bonaparte at Chatillon, Should they refuse him peace and ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... from spoiled members of the great European aristocracies towards petty islanders. One of the most intolerable forms of the arrogance of the Knights during their last years at Malta was their disgusting behaviour towards the womenfolk of the natives; complaint was dangerous and futile. When the British captured the island in October, 1800, the mere proposal to restore the Order raised such a storm of protest from the Maltese as to prove conclusively to all how hated had been the domination ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen
... now partners at the wickets; but Lansdowne did not appear to like his mate, on whose play it is impossible to calculate. Coventry, the short slip, excited much merriment, by a futile attempt to catch this player out, which terminated in his finding himself horizontal and mortified. Wellington, having bowled out Lansdowne, resigned his ball to Peel, who took his place at the wicket with a smile of confidence, which frightened the bat out of the hands of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... more frankly intolerable and ridiculous to him whose favour she so desperately sought. Under less anxious circumstances Charles Verity might have been contemptuously amused at this exhibition of futile ardour. Now it exasperated him. Yet he waited, in rather cruel patience. Presently he would demolish her, if to do so appeared worth the trouble. Meanwhile she should have her say, since incidentally he might learn something from it bearing upon the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... from the "American Note-Books"; and now and then we get from the same source a glimpse of the haunting sense that he is missing his fit relation to the rest of the race, the question whether his pursuit was not in some way futile like all the human pursuits he had noticed,—whether it was not to be nipped by the same perversity and contradiction that seemed to affect all things mundane. Here is one of his proposed plots, which turns an inner light upon his own frame of mind: ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... customs and conventionalities, and she partly sympathised with it, though she knew that such revolts are dangerous. Even in the West, those who cannot lead must march in column with the rank and file or bear the consequences of their futile mutiny. It is a hard truth that no man can live ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... directed the equipment of a squadron to "take the English colony of Port Jackson, where considerable resources will be found."* (* Napoleon's Correspondance Volume 20 document 16 544.) But it was a futile order to give at that date. Trafalgar had been fought, and the defence of the colony in Australia was maintained effectively wherever British ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... and Violet had lavished gifts upon her at parting, feeling fonder of her governess in the last week of their association than at any other period of her tutelage. To-day, in her sorrow, it was a relief to Violet to find herself free from the futile consolations of friendship. She flung herself into the arm-chair by the fire and sobbed out ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... established from the beginning to the end. Now, deep as is the sense we entertain of the services of Hamilton to his country, and scarcely less than filial as is the veneration we have been taught from our earliest days to feel for his memory, we must pronounce this pretension to be as absurd and futile in itself as it is unjust and ungenerous to the other great men ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... the Afrikaner Bond coterie have been so assiduously and deeply instilled into the Boer mind that demonstrations are utterly futile in shaking the national conviction of the divinely approved justice of his cause. The first occasion when I saw this illustrated, and also the people's unreasoning adherence to their leaders' opinions, happened about ten years ago at burgher meetings which had been convened ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... He gave no more attention to Venner's futile blows than to the whispering of the sands of the shore. But bearing ever toward the other two men, now seemingly paralyzed out of all volition by the awful exhibition of strength, he reached out with his free hand and added Tomlin to his capture as he had ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... out to the barn. The great three-legged savage was in the midst of a fierce scrimmage. Two farm dogs were attacking him. They were both half-bred sheep-dogs. One was making futile attempts to get a hold upon the stranger, and Neche was shaking the other as a terrier would shake a rat. And Andy, the choreman, was lambasting the intruder with the business end of a two-tine hay-fork, and shouting frightful curses at him in ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... she dragged him away. Mr. Brimmer, after a futile attempt to appear at his ease, promptly effected the usual marital diversion of carrying the ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... pitiless as the mirage mocks a thirst-crazed creature of the desert. In an hour or two it would be gone. He might keep up its embers for a time—until the Eskimos, or starvation, or still greater storm put an end to it. The effort, in any event, would be futile in the end. Their one chance lay in finding the other cabin, and reaching it quickly. When it came to the point of absolute necessity he could at least try to make fire as he had seen an Indian make it once, though at the time he had regarded the achievement ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... and cranks at cherubim and seraphim. Perhaps he may have found and gathered, ragamuffin though he be, the Lily of High Truth, the Rose of Far-sought Beauty, for whose lack so many of the writers of Ireland, whether famous or forgotten, have been futile as the ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... belief of his time, that it was futile to hope to "retain and incorporate the blacks into the State." He wrote: "Deep-rooted prejudices of the whites, ten thousand recollections of blacks of injuries sustained, new provocations, the real distinction Nature has made, and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... rejected. I based my counsel upon the indisputable fact that there was no means of obtaining arbitration. The law supplied none; earnest efforts at mediation had failed to influence the men in the least. To stand firm for the principle of arbitration and yet not get arbitration seemed to me futile, and something more than futile, because it involved incalculable distress to the country and consequences in some respects worse than those of war, and that in the ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... to the scenery. Starr was gone with Rabbit at a sliding trot down the slope that kept the ridge between him and the pinnacle. She stood staring after him blankly, her hat askew on the back of her head, and her lips parted in futile astonishment. She did not in the least realize just what Starr's extreme caution had meant. She had no inkling of the real gravity of the situation, for her ignorance of the lawless possibilities of that big, bare country ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... seemingly futile; seemingly it got them nowhere, for the newcomer again demanded: "Is ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... been more exact to say that she listened, as she was not a great talker herself. She had a horror of a certain kind of conversation, of that futile, paradoxical and spasmodic kind which is the speciality of "brilliant talkers." Sparkling conversation of this sort disconcerted her and made her feel ill at ease. She did not like the topic to be the literary ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... only means of elevating ourselves and attaining equality in this country or any other, and it is useless, utterly futile, to think about going any where, except we are determined to use these as the necessary means of developing our manhood. The means are at hand, within our reach. Are we willing to try them? Are we willing to raise ourselves superior to the condition of slaves, or continue ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... day dawned, and had commenced their preparations for breakfast, when Joel, the miller, and a few of that set, in a paroxysm of valour, had discharged a harmless volley at them; the distance rendering the attempt futile. This fire had been partially returned, the whole concluding with the finale from the Irishman's gun, as has been related. As it was now too light to apprehend a surprise, and the ground in front of the palisade had no very dangerous covers, Robert ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... lawyers and agents when there was an account to be rendered, or an affair of business to be discussed between them; and never kept any appointment but when its object was the raising of money. Thus, previous to catching this most shy and timorous bird, the Major made more than one futile attempt to hold him;—on one day it was a most innocent-looking invitation to dinner at Greenwich, to meet a few friends; the Baronet accepted, suspected something, and did not come; leaving the ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Moses; I was oncommon stupid to let you sit so long beside the kittle," replied the Irishman, as he made a futile effort to scrape another spoonful from the bottom of it. "Och! but ye've licked it as clane as one of yer own dogs could ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... he did not find his father in the shop, and after a few futile minutes he returned upstairs. Mrs Nixon preceded him, carrying the tea-urn, and she told him that his father had sent word into the kitchen that they were not to ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... of excitement as he threw down the cards, exclaiming, "By Jove! I've lost again!" and have watched the flashing eye and heaving breast, they would have felt, even more keenly than they did, how futile were words or sympathies to check ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... tendency of our religious education was to befog the intellect and produce scepticism in a mind that presumed to think for itself and to inquire into the why and the wherefore. I fully believe that the agnosticism of yourself and myself was produced by the futile attempt to mix and harmonize the wisdom of the world with ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... original attacking party, had waited patiently for this state of affairs. When quite certain that the seamen were all sleeping soundly, they crept silently forward, and pounced upon them. The struggle was sharp, but short. Courage and strength are futile when opposed to overwhelming numbers. A few minutes later, and the white men were led, with hands bound behind them, into the depth of ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... No weak and mean upbraidings of the beloved, no futile complaints; a solemn resignation to immitigable Fate; intense gratitude for inspiring love to the unloving beloved. So in 'A Serenade at the Villa'; so in 'One Way of Love', ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... the meeting-place at "The Anchor" in West Street might have been discovered, and Martin could not afford to run any risk to-night. To both men it seemed evident that Crosby's reliance in Rosmore's promise was futile. It was possible, even probable, that Sir John Lanison might not know all Rosmore's plans, or might not have told everything he knew, but all faith in Rosmore must fall like ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... trace with a briefer touch our intensely odd concatenation. Three weeks after this came Vereker's death, and before the year was out the death of his wife. That poor lady I had never seen, but I had had a futile theory that, should she survive him long enough to be decorously accessible, I might approach her with the feeble flicker of my petition. Did she know and if she knew would she speak? It was much to be presumed that for more reasons than one she would have nothing ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... in their downcast eyes and in their furtive glances at one another—and at Lawler—one might have read evidence of doubt and uncertainty. They might fight the powerful forces opposed to them—and there was no doubt that futile rage against the power surged in the veins of every man in the group about Lawler. But there seemed to be no way to fight; there seemed to be nothing tangible upon which to build a hope, and no way to attack the secret, subtle force which ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... nature and habits. In writing, he thinks of nothing but his idea and the person whom he addresses: ad rem et ad hominem. A man of conviction and doctrine, to write does not weary him; to be questioned does not annoy him. When approached, he cares only to know that your motive is not one of futile curiosity, but the love of truth; he assumes you to be serious, he replies, he examines your objections, sometimes verbally, sometimes in writing; for, as he remarks, 'if there be some points which correspondence can never ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Greeks themselves wisely left covered in a mist of mythology. The destruction dealt on the Athenian acropolis, under the name of scholarship, is a type of modern practice. The history of two thousand years has so far as possible been swept carelessly away in the futile attempt to lay bare an isolated picture of the age of Pericles; now archaeologists find that they cannot stop there, and fix their interest on the shapeless fragments of barbaric art beneath. But the Greek ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... to St. Mena's Island, Herr Rix," decided Kapitan Schwalbe, after the two officers had discussed the sinister matter of their futile attempt to make use of the wireless. "To-night at nine o'clock ought to suit. If we cannot get von Ruhle to see our signals—for my own part, I doubt whether he is in these parts—we'll have to do our best ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... are born and bred in poverty and squalor. She repeatedly endeavored to persuade me to desist in the work I had undertaken and re-enter the Church as a good Christian member. My efforts to convert her as a believer in Natural Law were futile, and a great gulf seemed to be springing up and separating us from one another. I felt that I was placed in a very difficult position. On the one hand, I loved this beautiful young woman more than words can convey any idea of. She seemed to be a part of my life. I would have gladly ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... should go on with these massacres till whole towns and shires were left without one inhabitant, the survivors would still be bound meekly to submit, and to be torn in pieces or roasted alive without a struggle. The arguments in favour of this proposition were futile indeed: but the place of sound argument was amply supplied by the omnipotent sophistry of interest and of passion. Many writers have expressed wonder that the high spirited Cavaliers of England should ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... hills. In vain he toils and strains to burst the links that bind him. His soul is yearning for the cooling freshness, the sweet fragrance, the beauty, the glory, of the outer world. It is just beyond his reach; and, wearied with futile exertions, he sinks, fainting and despairing, in his efforts to rend the chain of penury. And there are many other bonds which hold us to areas of life from which we have gathered all the fresh bloom and the rich fruit. We may tread ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... self-seeking vested interests, let it do its best to break down the obstruction. Until some altogether new means of transport are provided, the attempt to restrict the number of passengers which a car or trolley may carry is, I think, antisocial, and must prove futile. The force of public convenience would break the red-tape barrier like a cobweb. The trains and trolleys follow each other at the very briefest intervals; it does not seem possible that a greater number should be run on the existing lines; and, that being so, there is no alternative ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... discrimination, and characterize them en masse by negations. The passengers of the Isaac Newton, on a certain evening of July, 18—, were not so intrusively green and so gasping as Britons, not so ill-dressed and pretentious as Gauls, not so ardently futile and so lubberly as Germans. Such were the negative virtues of our fellow-citizen travellers; and base would it be to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... him up for the night. Nor was he the sort of rounder to dissipate his energies in all-night debauchery. Dick had come to Santa Fe for a definite purpose. The old miner knew from long experience that he would not be diverted from it for the sake of the futile foolish diversions known by some as pleasure. Therefore the mind of Davis jumped at once to the ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... cutting his canteen in half, began to use one side of it as a scoop. He scooped out a wide hollow, so wide that Cameron was certain he had gone crazy. Cameron gently urged him to stop, and then forcibly tried to make him. But these efforts were futile. Warren worked with slow, ceaseless, methodical movement. He toiled for what seemed hours. Cameron, seeing the darkening, dampening sand, realized a wonderful possibility of water, and he plunged ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... from the Assessor, with his hat now almost hanging by an ear, the gentleman, after various futile but ingenious efforts to face towards the door by turning his head alone that way, finally succeeds by walking in a circle until the door is before him. Then, with his whole countenance charged with almost scowling intensity of purpose, though finding it difficult to keep his ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... to descend the cliff. But I sat still with clenched teeth. I had nailed down my resolutions, I had determined to hold fast to such threads of my common sense as remained. Only in the night-time, when sleep mocked me and all hope of escape was futile, was I forced to grapple with this new-born monster of folly. It drove me up across the Park to where the house, black and lightless, rose a dark incongruous mass above the trees, down to the sea, where the wind came booming across the bare country northwards, and the spray leaped white ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Donau-Country), MAY 28th. D'Harcourt and Thorring, after junction at Donauworth several weeks ago, and a good deal of futile marching up and down in those Donau Countries,—on the left bank, for most part; Khevenhuller holding stiffly, as usual, by the Inn, the Iser, and the rivers and countries on the right,—did at last, being now almost within sight of Passau and that important valley of the Inn across ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... ridiculing the puerile maneuvers of backwoods politicians whose ignorance amounted almost to high crime. To him the Independent Treasury Bill was an attempt to separate the Government from business, as futile as to try to divorce the law from the judges in the administration ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... over-charged water-spout sent it toppling over, on one side, and discovered Miss Mowcher struggling violently to get it right. After making one or two sallies to her relief, which were rendered futile by the umbrella's hopping on again, like an immense bird, before I could reach it, I came in, went to ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... draw up a course of lessons satisfactory to the minds even of girls under eighteen, and at every turn a thoughtful question may be critical, and the explanations in the hands of a non-Catholic teacher scarcely less futile than the efforts of old Kaspar to satisfy "young Peterkin" ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... we make of our successive results an abstract and regular entity that we call our prudence or our will. Then a gust of wind passes, and behold the smallest of these arrows, the very lightest and most futile, is carried beyond our vision, beyond the horizon, to the ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... even alive! Mr. Rawlinson had despatched to the Sudan whole caravans, while Pan Tarkowski, disguised as an Arab, had penetrated with the greatest danger to his life as far as Khartum, but all was futile. The men who could have given any news died of smallpox, of starvation, or perished during the continual massacres, and of the children there was not the slightest clue. In the end both fathers lost all ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... it," said Lord Colambre: "I cannot be better prepared at any moment than the present; never more disposed to give my assistance to relieve all difficulties. Blindfold, I cannot be led to any purpose, sir," said he, looking at Sir Terence: "the attempt would be degrading and futile. Blindfolded I will not be—but, with my eyes open, I will see, and go straight and prompt as heart can go, to my father's interest, without a look or thought ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... were just trooping up the staircase from the fields, and at this strange apparition stood still and made a lane for it to pass. Dangle's struggles were futile. The giant, if he was aware of them, heeded them no more than the kicking of a kitten, and proceeded deliberately down the stairs, past everybody, juniors, middle-boys, prefects and all, and walked with ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... of phraseology, false elegance, and futile commentary, are nowhere more conspicuous than in his version of the sixth book of the Annals and of ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... with their heads almost buried in the earth, one or two kneeling, and still screaming for mercy. The old housekeeper had fallen on her haunches, and was looking up to heaven, while she wildly struck the ground with her hands; the poor page had made a last, but futile effort to escape with the aid of his heels, but he had been at once caught, and was now bound by his waist to a tree, which grew close to the road on which the wretched party were huddled; the poor boy had quite forgotten his attempt at manhood and mingled his loud ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
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