toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

immaterial
in a sentence

show 108 more with this conextual meaning
  • "True," said Monte Cristo, "the loss of a sum of money becomes almost immaterial with a fortune such as you possess, and to one of your philosophic spirit."   (source)
  • For whether in the guest rooms, the lobby, or the linen closet on the second floor, no detail was too small, no flaw too immaterial, no moment too inopportune to receive the benefit of the Bishop's precious, persnickety, and mildly dismissive interference.†   (source)
  • At that moment, all of Mammy's talk of reputations and mynah birds sounded immaterial to Laila.†   (source)
  • The city in the predawn is warm and fragrant and sleepy, and the houses on either side seem almost immaterial.†   (source)
  • Your Excellency, my background is immaterial.†   (source)
  • The thought wasn't just odd; under the circumstances, how she felt about Fast Cars was totally immaterial.†   (source)
  • They did not fare very well, though each of them negotiated some skimpily favorable remark before the protesting prosecution, which contended that personal comments of this nature were "incompetent, irrelevant, immaterial," hushed and banished them.†   (source)
  • Whether they had or not was immaterial; it was an opportunity to take the first step toward negotiations.†   (source)
  • The elves have long studied magic, but even they do not fully understand how the material and immaterial worlds interact.†   (source)
  • The fee is immaterial-name your own-but those who pay are among the most powerful men in the United States.†   (source)
  • Immaterial.†   (source)
  • Whether it was done as a compliment or in derision was immaterial.†   (source)
  • He said, "It's immaterial to me who your mom was."†   (source)
  • It is immaterial what method is used to declare the rights of citizens in the constitution that establishes the government.†   (source)
  • Yet immaterial to our plans.†   (source)
  • BRADY Irrelevant, immaterial, inadmissible.†   (source)
  • Men lived to acquire experience; the quality of the experience was immaterial; pleasure and pain—and above all, pain—had no meaning; to possess pain was as meaningless as to chase pleasure.†   (source)
  • Behold, once before you have ferried me across this water in your boat for the immaterial reward of a good deed.†   (source)
  • "What I think is immaterial," Langdon said.   (source)
    immaterial = not important, or not relevant
  • "The contents are immaterial," Vernet fired back.   (source)
  • My name is immaterial.   (source)
  • "Now let's consider this calmly-" began Atticus, but Mr. Gilmer interrupted with an objection: he was not irrelevant or immaterial, but Atticus was browbeating the witness.   (source)
    immaterial = unimportant
  • Slowly but surely I began to see the pattern of Atticus's questions: from questions that Mr. Gilmer did not deem sufficiently irrelevant or immaterial to object to, Atticus was quietly building up before the jury a picture of the Ewells' home life.   (source)
  • My methods are immaterial.   (source)
    immaterial = not important, or not relevant
  • "Of course, it's immaterial to me," she said.   (source)
  • But now we are alone,—although it is immaterial to me,—where are we going?   (source)
    immaterial = unimportant
  • Reminiscences, the most trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play.   (source)
    immaterial = not important, or not relevant
  • I rely much on external impressions; perhaps, with regard to you, they are immaterial, but I should be no artist if I had not some fancies.   (source)
    immaterial = unimportant
  • "It is quite immaterial to me," said Monte Cristo, "and it was very unnecessary to disturb me at the opera for such a trifle."   (source)
  • "It is immaterial to me how you go," he said.†   (source)
  • It's immaterial now; she might have won.†   (source)
  • You ask me questions, press for details, and when I offer you answers you reject them as immaterial.†   (source)
  • If Regis failed, every other inconvenience would become immaterial.†   (source)
  • 'I didn't walk through your door, you came through mine, but I suppose that's immaterial.†   (source)
  • It is immaterial.†   (source)
  • Although the objections proved immaterial, some States would have clung to them with dangerous inflexibility if their zeal for their opinions and interests had not been stifled by the more powerful sentiment of self-preservation.†   (source)
  • I'm within a few years of sixty-from one direction or another, it's immaterial-and without the Jackal, and the absence of some other fatal disease, I will have perhaps fifteen to twenty years.†   (source)
  • However, it seems reasonable to assume that the spirits know more than we about both the material and the immaterial, considering that they are the embodiment of the second and that they occupy the first when in the form of a Shade.†   (source)
  • This is not only irrelevant, immaterial—it is illegall (There is excited reaction in the courtroom.†   (source)
  • It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say.†   (source)
  • Such material difficulties were formidable; but much worse were the immaterial.†   (source)
  • The fact that we happen to be in a train is immaterial.†   (source)
  • "Ultimately," I said, "it is immaterial to the Governor how you manage the matter."†   (source)
  • Nor is he immaterial, and—†   (source)
  • "That is immaterial," Peeperkorn declared.†   (source)
  • It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live.†   (source)
  • Voices also ascended, wonderful in their distinct and immaterial clearness.†   (source)
  • "Be soople, Davie, in things immaterial," said he.†   (source)
  • It was the crowning buffet, the final victory of Philistia over art, beauty, and immaterial things.†   (source)
  • Irrelevant, immaterial, incompetent," snapped Belknap.†   (source)
  • And now to come to the material, or (to make a quibble) to the immaterial.†   (source)
  • On the material side the dinner was a success; it was no less so on the immaterial.†   (source)
  • Both bore languidly the indefinable burden of immaterial pleasures.†   (source)
  • Incompetent, immaterial, irrelevant.†   (source)
  • Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave.†   (source)
  • The line is immaterial.†   (source)
  • Mr. Fletcher, retired, of the Treasury, Mrs. Gorham, widow of the famous K.C., approached Him simply, and having done their praying, leant back, enjoyed the music (the organ pealed sweetly), and saw Miss Kilman at the end of the row, praying, praying, and, being still on the threshold of their underworld, thought of her sympathetically as a soul haunting the same territory; a soul cut out of immaterial substance; not a woman, a soul.†   (source)
  • I knew that seclusion and solitude were very necessary for my friend in those hours of intense mental concentration during which he weighed every particle of evidence, constructed alternative theories, balanced one against the other, and made up his mind as to which points were essential and which immaterial.†   (source)
  • I knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity, might by the least scruple of an overdose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of exhibition, utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change.†   (source)
  • The novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself.†   (source)
  • Childish and immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was still more childish and immaterial.†   (source)
  • Individuals must have supposed that they were cutting the letters of their names deep into everlasting tablets of brass, or enshrining their reputations forever in the hearts of their countrymen, while, as to fact, the affair would appear in printed reports under a meek and immaterial title.†   (source)
  • The mist of his feelings shifted between us, as if disturbed by his struggles, and in the rifts of the immaterial veil he would appear to my staring eyes distinct of form and pregnant with vague appeal like a symbolic figure in a picture.†   (source)
  • Francoise must often, from the next room, have heard these mordant sarcasms levelled at herself, the mere framing of which in words would not have relieved my aunt's feelings sufficiently, had they been allowed to remain in a purely immaterial form, without the degree of substance and reality which she added to them by murmuring them half-aloud.†   (source)
  • Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter— just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial?†   (source)
  • Yes, we might note that there was much to discuss and share: about matter as a disreputable degeneration of the immaterial, about life as an impudency of matter, about illness as life's lascivious form.†   (source)
  • Often for several days on end the suspicion that she was in love with some one else would distract his mind from the question of Forcheville, making it almost immaterial to him, like those new developments of a continuous state of ill-health which seem for a little time to have delivered us from their predecessors.†   (source)
  • Yet somehow, after a few moments, arrested by her earnestness and faith and love for her son and her fixed, inquiring, and humanly clean and pure blue eyes in which dwelt immaterial conviction and sacrifice with no shadow of turning.†   (source)
  • His tall form, as though robbed of its substance, hovered noiselessly over invisible things with stooping and indefinite movements; his voice, heard in that remoteness where he could be glimpsed mysteriously busy with immaterial cares, was no longer incisive, seemed to roll voluminous and grave—mellowed by distance.†   (source)
  • The first step toward evil, toward lust and death, was doubtless taken when, as the result of a tickle by some unknown incursion, spirit increased in density for the first time, creating a pathologically rank growth of tissue that formed, half in pleasure, half in defense, as the prelude to matter, the transition from the immaterial to the material.†   (source)
  • And this delight in being a lover, in living by love alone, of the reality of which he was inclined to be doubtful, the price which, in the long run, he must pay for it, as a dilettante in immaterial sensations, enhanced its value in his eyes—as one sees people who are doubtful whether the sight of the sea and the sound of its waves are really enjoyable, become convinced that they are, as also of the rare quality and absolute detachment of their own taste, when they have agreed to pay…†   (source)
  • Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.†   (source)
  • It was so small, in fact, such a tiny, initial, ephemeral concentration of something immaterial—of something not yet matter, but related to matter—of energy, that one could not yet, or perhaps no longer, think of it as matter, but rather as both the medium and boundary between the material and immaterial.†   (source)
  • She comforted her father better than she could comfort herself, by representing that though he certainly would make them nine, yet he always said so little, that the increase of noise would be very immaterial.†   (source)
  • Oh! how immaterial are all materials!†   (source)
  • But it turns out, that what he has to say is of that weight, as to withdraw some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial, compared with the universality of its application.†   (source)
  • Chapter XV: That Religious Belief Sometimes Turns The Thoughts Of The Americans To Immaterial Pleasures.†   (source)
  • June answered all her interrogatories simply, but with a caution which showed she fully distinguished between that which was immaterial and that which might endanger the safety or embarrass the future operations of her friends.†   (source)
  • Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial.†   (source)
  • His whole material and immaterial life is wonderfully strange; his death, the strangest thing of all.†   (source)
  • The temporal interests of all the several parts of the Union are, then, intimately connected; and the same assertion holds true respecting those opinions and sentiments which may be termed the immaterial interests of men.†   (source)
  • I could have thrown my bootjack at him (it lay ready on the rug), for having entrapped me into the disclosure of anything concerning Agnes, however immaterial.†   (source)
  • "It is immaterial whether it be one or the other," interrupted Miss Temple, with a logic that contained more feeling than reason; "I know Natty to be innocent, and thinking so I must think all wrong who oppress him."†   (source)
  • …honest as nine people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and prefer to transact business at midnight rather than 'Change-hours,—and for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public benefactors, if we consider only its result,—for unfortunate individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world-hunt at their heels!"†   (source)
  • "The material world," continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description.†   (source)
  • Still careful not to outrun the clerk's penmanship Stubberd pulled up again; for having got his evidence by heart it was immaterial to him whereabouts he broke off.†   (source)
  • Feeble as the immaterial portion of her existence was thought to be, it was sufficiently active to cause her to open her eyes at midnight.†   (source)
  • Fred Vincy, we have seen, had a debt on his mind, and though no such immaterial burthen could depress that buoyant-hearted young gentleman for many hours together, there were circumstances connected with this debt which made the thought of it unusually importunate.†   (source)
  • The circumstances of their evidence would have been, in modern days, divided into two classes—those which were immaterial, and those which were actually and physically impossible.†   (source)
  • Thus died Hetty Hutter, one of those mysterious links between the material and immaterial world, which, while they appear to be deprived of so much that it is esteemed and necessary for this state of being, draw so near to, and offer so beautiful an illustration of the truth, purity, and simplicity of another.†   (source)
  • This forces the poet constantly to search below the external surface which is palpable to the senses, in order to read the inner soul: and nothing lends itself more to the delineation of the ideal than the scrutiny of the hidden depths in the immaterial nature of man.†   (source)
  • Jasper turned away his head as the Delaware rose from the water, in pure disgust at his late errand; but the Pathfinder regarded his friend with the philosophical indifference of one who had made up his mind to be indifferent to things he deemed immaterial.†   (source)
  • Would you have robbed me — for no one's enrichment — only for the greater desolation of this world — of the immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my refuge from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my school in which I should have learned to be more humble and more trusting with them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them better?'†   (source)
  • Men holding so imperfect a belief will still consider the body as the secondary and inferior portion of their nature, and they will despise it even whilst they yield to its influence; whereas they have a natural esteem and secret admiration for the immaterial part of man, even though they sometimes refuse to submit to its dominion.†   (source)
  • Happily for the more tender-minded and the more timid, the trunks of the trees, the leaves, and the smoke had concealed much of that which passed, and night shortly after drew its veil over the lake, and the whole of that seemingly interminable wilderness; which may be said to have then stretched, with few and immaterial interruptions, from the banks of the Hudson to the shores of the Pacific Ocean.†   (source)
  • In such a vast picture of solemn solitude, the district of country we design to paint sinks into insignificance, though we feel encouraged to proceed by the conviction that, with slight and immaterial distinctions, he who succeeds in giving an accurate idea of any portion of this wild region must necessarily convey a tolerably correct notion of the whole.†   (source)
  • If there be a philosophical system which teaches that all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible, which the world contains, are only to be considered as the several parts of an immense Being, which alone remains unchanged amidst the continual change and ceaseless transformation of all that constitutes it, we may readily infer that such a system, although it destroy the individuality of man—nay, rather because it destroys that individuality—will have secret charms for men…†   (source)
  • If their social condition, their present circumstances, and their laws did not confine the minds of the Americans so closely to the pursuit of worldly welfare, it is probable that they would display more reserve and more experience whenever their attention is turned to things immaterial, and that they would check themselves without difficulty.†   (source)
  • I help myself to material and immaterial, No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me.†   (source)
  • If we make the latter supposition, it then becomes immaterial where the power in question is placed whether in their hands or in those of the Union.†   (source)
  • Alas! how short is the most protracted of such enjoyments! how immaterial the difference between him who retires the soonest, and him who stays the latest!†   (source)
  • And therefore if a man should talk to me of a Round Quadrangle; or Accidents Of Bread In Cheese; or Immaterial Substances; or of A Free Subject; A Free Will; or any Free, but free from being hindred by opposition, I should not say he were in an Errour; but that his words were without meaning; that is to say, Absurd.†   (source)
  • As to other occasions, he used to apply the philosophy of Square, which taught, that the end was immaterial, so that the means were fair and consistent with moral rectitude.†   (source)
  • It certainly must be immaterial what mode is observed as to the order of declaring the rights of the citizens, if they are to be found in any part of the instrument which establishes the government.†   (source)
  • Mrs Fitzpatrick failed not to make a proper return to the compliment which Lady Bellaston had bestowed on her cousin, and, after some little immaterial conversation, withdrew; and, getting as fast as she could into her chair, unseen by Sophia or Honour, returned home.†   (source)
  • There is abundant reason, nevertheless, to suppose that immaterial as these objections were, they would have been adhered to with a very dangerous inflexibility, in some States, had not a zeal for their opinions and supposed interests been stifled by the more powerful sentiment of selfpreservation.†   (source)
  • He by no means concurred with the opinion of those parents, who think it as immaterial to consult the inclinations of their children in the affair of marriage, as to solicit the good pleasure of their servants when they intend to take a journey; and who are by law, or decency at least, withheld often from using absolute force.†   (source)
  • "Can't see what witness's literacy has to do with the case, irrelevant 'n' immaterial."   (source)
▲ show less (of above)

show 4 more examples with any meaning
  • There are sicknesses that walk in darkness; and there are exterminating angels, that fly wrapt up in the curtains of immateriality and an uncommunicating nature; whom we cannot see, but we feel their force, and sink under their sword.†   (source)
  • There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture post cards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.†   (source)
  • I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mist-like transience of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired.†   (source)
  • where he saith, it shall be said to the wicked in the last day, "Go ye cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his Angels:" which place is manifest for the permanence of Evill Angels, (unlesse wee might think the name of Devill and his Angels may be understood of the Churches Adversaries and their Ministers;) but then it is repugnant to their Immateriality; because Everlasting fire is no punishment to impatible substances, such as are all things Incorporeall.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)