nugae

Some confessors there be who laugh within their hearts at these sorrows of lovers, as if they were mere "nugae" and featherweights: others there are who wax impatient, holding all love for sin in some degree, and forgetting that Monseigneur St. Peter himself was a married man, and doubtless had his own share of trouble and amorous annoy when he was winning the lady his wife, even as other men.

A Monk of Fife Andrew Lang 1878

But these are most erroneous paradoxes, ineptae et fabulosae nugae, rejected by our divines and Christian churches.

Anatomy of Melancholy 2007

But, if we inquire into our own thoughts, and consider what has been premised, we may perhaps entertain a low opinion of those high flights and abstractions, and look on all inquiries, about numbers only as so many difficiles nugae, so far as they are not subservient to practice, and promote the benefit of life.

A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, by George Berkeley 2006

Dividing his life and his work between politics and leisured retirement, he wrote light poems (nugae), verse panegyrics, and letters, which give a vivid description of Romans and barbarians in fifth-century Gaul.

5. The Later Empire, 284-527 C.E 2001

“Tum si coronas, serta, unguenta iusserit ancillam ferre Veneri aut Cupidini, tuos servos servet, Venerine eas det an viro. si forte pure velle habere dixerit, 800 tot noctes reddat spurcas quot pure habuerit.” haec sunt non nugae, non enim mortualia.

Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi Amphitryon, The Comedy of Asses, The Pot of Gold, The Two Bacchises, The Captives Titus Maccius Plautus 1919

Nihil est, nugae. mulier, tibi me emancupo: tuos sum, tibi dedo operam.

Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi Amphitryon, The Comedy of Asses, The Pot of Gold, The Two Bacchises, The Captives Titus Maccius Plautus 1919

All this is very slight, _merae nugae_; but even if the humour be not of the first water, it will compare well with the humour of epigrams of any age.

Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal Harold Edgeworth Butler 1914

I have an aversion to tame poetry; at best, perhaps the art is the sublimest of the difficiles nugae; to measure or rhyme prose is trifling without being difficult.

Selected English Letters Various 1913

Scriptural exegesis of the Rabbis, and condemned incontinently as nugae rabbinorum.

The Legends of the Jews — Volume 1 Louis Ginzberg 1913

Why am I permitted to fatigue you, as the representative of a slaveholding State, with the discussion of the "_nugae canorae_" (for so I think them) that have been forced into this debate contrary to all the remonstrances of taste and prudence?

American Eloquence, Volume 2 Studies In American Political History (1896) Various 1899