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Thornton, "which pervades the whole of their habits, is so general, even in things of apparent insignificance, as almost to indicate design rather than accident. The whole exterior of the Oriental is different from ours." And then he goes on to mention some specimens, to which we are able to add others from Volney and Bell.
There are quite a number of people who get through life without realizing their own insignificance. Ninety-nine out of a hundred persons signify nothing, and the hundredth is usually so absorbed in the message which he has been sent into the world to deliver that he loses sight of the messenger altogether.
He disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody.
And Alaric thought over the matter coolly also. He looked at it till the bugbears shrank into utter insignificance; till they became no more than forms of shreds and patches put up to frighten birds out of cherry-orchards. Why should the constitution be wounded by the presence of one more commissioner in Parliament?
It was ten to one they were rubbish, they were vain, they were empty; that they had been even a practical joke on the part of some weak-minded gentleman of leisure, the former possessor of the confounded davenport. The longer I hovered about them with such precautions the longer I was taken in, and the sooner I exposed their insignificance the sooner I should get back to my usual occupations.
She felt suddenly acutely conscious of the poverty of her travelling clothes, of her own insignificance. "Won't you sit down for a moment?" Elizabeth begged, pointing to a chair by her side. "You and I must be friends, you know, for Philip's sake." Beatrice recovered herself a little.
Whatever he knew or guessed of the part she had played in his disaster, it was not callousness that had made him greet her with such forgiving warmth, but the same sense of smallness, insignificance and isolation which perpetually hung like a cold fog on her own horizon. Suddenly she too felt old old and unspeakably tired. "It's been nice seeing you, Nelson. But now I must be getting home."
The system of Jupiter, illuminated by four moons performing their revolutions in different and regular periods, exhibited to the proud reason of man the comparative insignificance of the globe he inhabits, and proclaimed in impressive language that that globe was not the centre of the universe.
At the moment of my departure, I find within myself only a smile of careless mockery for the swarming crowd of this Lilliputian curtseying people laborious, industrious, greedy of gain, tainted with a constitutional affectation, hereditary insignificance, and incurable monkeyishness. Poor cousin Number 415! how right I was to have held him in good esteem!
There was an end of his writing, of his novels and his short stories and his plays, and if he didn't look out and do something there would be an end of him. And he couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear to be reduced to inactivity and insignificance to be wiped out. He wasn't going to be made an end of if he could help it. These were the things we said about him.
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