|
|
|
More "Comprehensible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... literary men were once asked to select the best reviews of a novel which had just appeared. One of the three statements which they rated highest said of the book that it "achieves the true purpose of a novel, which is to make comprehensible the philosophy of life of a whole community or race of men by showing us how that philosophy accords with the impulses and yearnings of typical individuals." Few phrases could be more foreign to Bible phrases than those. But there is valuable ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... science of matter in that it contemplates this energy under an aspect of responsive intelligence which does not fall within the scope of physical science, as such. The Science of Spirit and the Science of Matter are not opposed. They are complementaries, and neither is fully comprehensible without some knowledge of the other; and, being really but two portions of one whole, they insensibly shade off into each other in a border-land where no arbitrary line can be drawn between them. Science studied in a truly scientific spirit, following out ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... of the many new hands who flocked in with the spring, the line progressed slowly. This was quite comprehensible, and when I traveled over it afterward as a passenger I wondered how we had ever built it at all. Portions were hewn out of the solid rock, of a hardness that was often too much for our most carefully tempered drills; others ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... the French use the word moral for what we used to call morale, and therefore we ought to do the same; and (2) the French use morale to mean something different from what we mean by it. The case against moral is (1) that it is a new word, less comprehensible to ordinary people, even now, after its war-time currency, than the old morale; (2) that it badly needs to be dressed in italics owing to the occasional danger of confusion with the English word moral, and that such artificial precautions are never kept up; (3) that half of us do not know ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... Pegasi and Hippogriffs, and of flying chariots, from that of Phaeton downwards to Astolfo's,[3] were evidently intended by their authors as mythical; not so, however, with Bishop Wilkins;—he boldly avers, for several reasons which he keeps to himself, and for others not very comprehensible to us, which he details "seriously and on good grounds," "that it is possible to make a flying chariot, in which a man may sit, and give such a motion unto it, as shall convey him through the air; and this perhaps might be made large enough to ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... a new and less comprehensible emotion. At first Miss Loder had accepted the fact of her employer's marriage as one accepts any fixed tradition; and the subject rarely entered her thoughts ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... play of "St. George and the Dragon," over which I have burnt the midnight oil (you must colour the thing by lamplight because that is how it will be seen), still lacks most conspicuously, alas! two wings of the Sultan's Palace, and also some comprehensible and workable way of ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... not so much a possession of my memory as an inherent part of myself. It was ever present to my mind and ready to my hand, but I was loth to touch it from a feeling of what I imagined to be mere shyness but which in reality was a very comprehensible mistrust of myself. ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... however, is always more comprehensible and instructive than a general discussion. Let us therefore take the incidents and conditions which preceded our recent war with Spain. The facts, as seen by us, may, I apprehend, be fairly stated as follows: In the island of Cuba, a powerful military force,—government it scarcely ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... was odd yet comprehensible; for though his desire was unquestionably great, it was not particularly active, probably because he knew that he held her and that no aggressive effort was necessary. Secure in the feeling that she belonged ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... having ventured to bring the question of repeal before the house. He asked, what was meant by the watch-word of repeal of the union between Great Britain and Ireland. If those who used it meant a complete separation, or a species of Hibernian republic, their conduct was both comprehensible and consistent; but if, as they asserted, they only meant two separate independent legislatures, under the same monarch, the motion was inconsistent with the first principles of the science of government. After having shown ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... flank movement at Atlanta, he had given up that city. Even later—when General Hood published his report of the Atlanta campaign—he differs in essential points from General Johnston, and neither his theories nor their carrying out are made comprehensible ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... to grasp the total process of redistribution of matter and motion as to see simultaneously its several necessary results in their actual interdependence is scarcely possible. There is, however, a mode of rendering the process as a whole tolerably comprehensible. Though the genesis of the rearrangement of every evolving aggregate is in itself one, it presents to ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... first envisage his own plight in definite and comprehensible terms. Things happened to him so much of late, his own efforts had counted for so little, that he had become passive and planless. His last scheme had been to go round the coast of England as a Desert Dervish giving ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... had no prejudice against the conventional as such, and was never anxious to exhibit special "insight" of any kind. Yet I think his portrayal of Swift has seemed to most readers a clear presentation of a real and comprehensible character.[191] ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... short, every thing they see calls for observation, and affords an opportunity for the application of their geometrical knowledge. Let it not, then, be said that it is beyond their capacity, for it is the simplest and most comprehensible to them of all knowledge;—let it not be said that it is useless, since its application to the useful arts is great and indisputable; nor is it to be asserted that it is unpleasing to them, since it has been shewn to ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... when the German shall consent to clear his throat, the Frenchman his nose, the Spaniard his tonsils and the Englishman the tip of his tongue—when all shall become as little children and be mutually comprehensible. Commerce at present is doing more than the philosophers to that end. While the countrymen of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Max Mueller persist in burying their laboriously heaped treasures under a load of black-letter type ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... 'Zekiel to be surprised that all the dogs were chatting together in very comprehensible Dorsetshire English. To see them actually living, and moving about, was such an extraordinary thing that it swallowed up every other feeling, ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... nothing but the mediaeval and Teutonic form of tenets common to all the nations upon earth. The changeling superstition and the classic stories of children and adults beloved by gods of high and low degree are consistent with this belief, and inseparable from it. The motive is so far comprehensible: what is wanted is to know whether any special relations, such as are pointed at by the Greek epithet Drakos, were held to exist between the mysterious world and newly-born babes which would render the latter more obnoxious to attack than elder children ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... expression, as when {173} "The Spirit himself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered" (Rom. 8: 26). But the idea which is really intelligible is the idea that is embodied in speech. For finite minds, at least, words are the measure of comprehensible thoughts. Evidently Jesus claims for his teaching not only inspiration, but verbal inspiration, when he says that his words are "spirit and life." And to this agrees the saying of Paul, in speaking of the inspiration ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... SAHTOF. That is quite comprehensible and correct; but if, as you are kind enough to inform us, the plunging of the medium into a trance produces perturbations of the spiritual ether, allow me to ask why (as is usually supposed to be the case in spiritualistic sances) these perturbations result ...
— Fruits of Culture • Leo Tolstoy
... clarinets and bassoons in the hour of her deep affliction and abasement, and by the flutes and hautboys when her soul has finally cast off all the trammels of earth—and Wolfram by the violoncello. The feelings of the two are so exquisitely portrayed by the orchestra, that the scene would be easily comprehensible if it were carried on—as indeed much of it is—without ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... expects an old person to be. Old persons ought to take up the position of audience. They ought, above all things, to give a rest to the minds of young people, who, goodness knows, have enough to worry them, by being easily comprehensible. With mother one knew exactly where one was; one knew everything that had happened to her and how she had felt about it, and there was no question of anything fresh ever happening to her. But from the deep, slow breaths this woman drew, from the warmth that seemed to radiate ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... hatred to the English, and a jealousy of their power in the Mediterranean; and in this so strange and senseless a manner, that we must join the extremes of imbecility and treachery in the same cabinet, in order to find it comprehensible. Though the very existence of Naples and Sicily, as a nation, depended wholly and exclusively on British support; though the royal family owed their personal safety to the British fleet; though not only their dominions and their rank, but the liberty ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... world, their true nature is in a manner so involved with obscurity, that unto many philosophers, and those no mean ones, they seemed altogether incomprehensible, and the Stoics themselves, though they judge them not altogether incomprehensible, yet scarce and not without much difficulty, comprehensible, so that all assent of ours is fallible, for who is he that is infallible in his conclusions? From the nature of things, pass now unto their subjects and matter: how temporary, how vile are they I such as may be in ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... not go out until nearly noon the next day. In terms comprehensible to any low-grade submoron, it was emphasized that all this meant was that slaves should henceforth be called freedmen, that they could have money just like Lords-Master, and that if they worked faithfully and obeyed ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... assembly,—entering which a wicked man does not become penetrated with fear (born of his wicked deeds). That man is the foremost of his species who having dived into and enquired after righteousness succeeds in acting according to the conclusions to which he arrives.[853] The acts of a wise man are not easily comprehensible. He that is wise, is never stupefied when afflictions come upon him. Even if he falls away from his position like Gautama in his old age, in consequence of the direct calamity, he does not suffer himself to be stupefied.[854] By any of these, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... rise to the cultivated and philanthropic feelings which accompanied the skepticism of their remote founders, they based their denial of moral accountability—as narrow and vulgar minds naturally do—on a predestination, which is as insulting to GOD as to man, since it is consistently comprehensible only by supposing HIM a slave to destiny. Among such vassals to a worse than earthly tyranny, the man who as 'a Scottish servant regarded not his own life or that of any other save his master,' would find doctrines congenial enough to his ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... had the knack of annoying him. In a year, working night and day, he could only make of all his rhymes, one single volume which never sold, I said to him: "Ah! you see," just in a reasoning spirit, to bring him to something more comprehensible, more remunerative, He got into a frightful rage, and afterwards sank into a state of gloomy depression which made me very unhappy. My friends advised me as well as they could: "You see, my dear, it is the ennui and bad temper of an unoccupied man. If he worked a little ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... popular rights with contempt. Of popular sovereignty he had no conception. His patriotism, like his ambition, was provincial. Yet his perceptions as to eternal necessity in all healthy governments taught him that comprehensible relations between the state and the population were needful to the very existence of a free commonwealth. The United Provinces, he maintained, were not a republic, but a league of seven provinces very loosely hung together, a mere provisional ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... space was to see the origin and growth of the human race; thence we were to derive our first and only accounts of primitive history; and such a locality was to lie before our imagination, no less simple and comprehensible than varied, and adapted to the most wonderful migrations and settlements. Here, between four designated rivers, a small, delightful spot was separated from the whole habitable earth, for youthful man. Here he was to unfold his first capacities, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... too strong and deep to be shaken by this temporary lapse into brutality which he had known all along was there although held miraculously in abeyance these many weeks. The man was a genius, with all the temperamental fluctuations of mood which are comprehensible and forgivable in a genius. Dick did not begrudge the other any relief he might find in his debauch of ill humor, was more than willing he should work it off on his humble self if it could do any good though he would be immensely relieved when the old ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... children. Characters of this kind no one ever delineated better than Dickens. That Leigh Hunt, the poet and essayist, who had sat for the portrait of Skimpole, was not altogether flattered by the likeness, is comprehensible enough; and in truth it is unfair, both to painter and model, that we should take such portraits too seriously. Landor, who sat for the thunderous and kindly Boythorn, had more reason to be satisfied. Besides these one may mention Joe, the outcast; ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... That evening the Nabob opened a shabby little portfolio, badly worn at the corners, in which for ten years past he had manoeuvred his millions, minuting his profits and his expenses in hieroglyphics comprehensible to himself alone. He calculated for a moment, then turned to ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... election. This explanation will perhaps be more comprehensible if the actual result of the polling in the Nyland division, so far as the first 25 candidates are concerned, is given in a ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... a very sketchy statement of the ground-work of "Fors," but to most readers nowadays as comprehensible as, at the time of its publication, it was incomprehensible. For when, long after "Fors" had been written, Ruskin found other writers advocating the same principles and calling themselves Socialists, he said that he ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... ill-feeling already excited by the submarine campaign. If the contention of certain naval authorities that the observance of the Declaration of London by our enemies would have brought us no important material advantage is correct, the issue of our Note of February 16th becomes even less comprehensible. Having admitted in this Note that the declaration of the barred zones was caused by the fact that all was not well with us, we could hardly expect England would fall in with the proposal made at our suggestion by Mr. Wilson, and thus allow us so easy a diplomatic triumph. The President, ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... family reasons caused me to move from Griesheim to this place, Keilhau.[114] Next came other pupils also, with Langethal's arrival in September. My household was growing fast, and yet I had no house of my own. In a way only comprehensible to Him Who knows the workings of the mind, I managed by November to get the school that I now occupy built as a frame-house, but without being in possession of the ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... personally or through his intermediate agents, one half of the annual amount of lumber felled for market, the sale of which was arranged with the neighboring forge owners by mutual agreement; the other half was disposed of by notarial act. This latter arrangement was clear and comprehensible; the price of sale and the amounts falling due were both clearly indicated in the deed. But it was quite different with the bargains made by the owner himself, which were often credited by notes payable at sight, mostly worded in confused ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... of him, people in Iping, on the whole, agreed in disliking him. His irritability, though it might have been comprehensible to an urban brain-worker, was an amazing thing to these quiet Sussex villagers. The frantic gesticulations they surprised now and then, the headlong pace after nightfall that swept him upon them round quiet corners, ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... science; for no object is comprehensible by us in all its properties at once. But if we forget the limitations of our abstract data, we are liable to make strange blunders by mistaking the character of the results: treating the results as simply true of actual things, instead of as true of actual ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... when the artists "had been brought under proper control." The "Lenin" had been painted a year and a half ago, when, as fading hoarding in the streets of Moscow still testify, revolutionary art was dominated by the Futurist movement. Every carriage is decorated with most striking but not very comprehensible pictures in the brightest colors, and the proletariat was called upon to enjoy what the pre-revolutionary artistic public had for the most part failed to understand. Its pictures are "art for art's ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... three parts drunk, and for some reason, not very comprehensible, he had chosen to resent the presence of this clean-limbed, clean-featured English lad. Possibly he recognized in him a type which for its very cleanness he abhorred. Possibly his sodden brain was stirred by an envy which the Colonials round him were powerless ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... ring in her voice, or the sheer seriousness of the position, he did not feel resentment as when he lost her to Fiorsen. Love! A passion such as had overtaken her mother and himself! And this young man? A decent fellow, a good rider—comprehensible! Ah, if the course had only been clear! He put his hand on her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... an alluring pastime, but one that must not divert us here. Our point of view reverses that of the philosophers. We are chiefly concerned, not with some vague saying of Anaxagoras, but with what he really knew regarding the phenomena of nature; with what he observed, and with the comprehensible deductions that he derived from his observations. In attempting to answer these inquiries, we are obliged, in part, to take our evidence at second-hand; but, fortunately, some fragments of writings of Anaxagoras have come down to us. We are ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... millions taken in by Vanderbilt in these transactions came from a host of other men who would have plundered him as quickly as he plundered them. They came from members of the Legislature who had grown rich on bribes for granting a continuous succession of special privileges, or to put it in a more comprehensible form, licenses to individuals and corporations to prey in a thousand and one forms upon the people. They came from bankers, railroad, land and factory owners, all of whom had assiduously bribed Congress, legislatures, common councils and administrative officials to give them special laws ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... us who cannot accept Mr. Wells's Invisible King as a God in any useful or even comprehensible sense of the term, there remains the question whether he is a useful figure of speech. Metaphors and personifications are often things of great potency, whether for good or evil. It might quite well happen that, if we wholly rejected Mr. Wells's gospel, on account of a mere squabble ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... its birth. On the contrary, it was childlike and rather crooked in many of its ways; but chastisement and criticism have brought it very far toward real manhood. Its early nurses were standing continually on the dark line separating the comprehensible from the incomprehensible, without any guides. They were out upon an unexplored sea in the mere twilight of the morning. They were opposed at every step by the combative tendencies of human nature, which are ever seeking too much for their own gratification to admit any strange, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... in the sensation, yet with it a perfectly comprehensible alarm. And instinctively the thought stirred in him: "What should I—could I, do—if anything happened and he did ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... humanism and rationalism have brought antiquity into the field as an ally; and it is therefore quite comprehensible that the opponents of humanism should direct their attacks against antiquity also. Antiquity, however, has been misunderstood and falsified by humanism . it must rather be considered as a testimony against ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... in her mind, the parrot becoming sanctified through the neighbourhood of the Holy Ghost, and the latter becoming more lifelike in her eyes, and more comprehensible. In all probability the Father had never chosen as messenger a dove, as the latter has no voice, but rather one of Loulou's ancestors. And Felicite said her prayers in front of the coloured picture, though from time to time she ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... know so little! Time and space have yielded not an iota of their mystery to our most penetrant minds. And whether we delve baffled into the unknown smallness of the small, or whether we peer, blind and helpless, into the unknown largeness of the large, it is the same—infinity is comprehensible only to the Infinite One: the all-shaping Force directing and controlling the Universe and the unknowable Sphere. The more we know, the vaster the virgin fields of investigation open to us, and the more infinitesimal becomes our knowledge. But ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... heart, as well as the other glands of internal secretion stimulating the organism as a whole. Though the isolation in pure form of the substance or substances involved has never been scientifically achieved, their inference is entirely justified. It is indeed the only comprehensible mechanism conceivable that will fit all the known facts about the matter. And even though the assertions of Brown-Sequard were only the exaggerations of a semi-charlatan, it is certain that some day ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... through it, he sees an angel pointing somewhere towards a miraculous pair of spectacles!!! Yes, two polished pieces of crystal were the humble means by which the golden plates were to be rendered comprehensible. By the bye, the said spectacles are a heavy, ugly piece of workmanship of the last century; they are silver-mounted, and bear the maker's name, plainly engraved, ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power is seen which it exercises on the most enlightened minds. This power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... his diagnosis. Training may have had something to do with it. She would not laugh, not she, but once or twice she raised her napkin to her face and coughed slightly. For the rest, she sat demurely, with her eyes on her plate, a model of propriety. Nick's sufferings became more comprehensible. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... one great obstacle to the reception of that spiritual- ity, through which the understanding of Mind-science 115:3 comes, is the inadequacy of material terms for metaphysical statements, and the consequent difficulty of so expressing metaphysical ideas as to make 115:6 them comprehensible to any reader, who has not person- ally demonstrated Christian Science as brought forth in my discovery. Job says: "The ear trieth words, as the 115:9 mouth tasteth meat." The great difficulty is to give the right impression, when translating ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... deliverance of superficial criticism than that which declares French poetry in general to be either nought—which is still a not uncommon notion—or at least not great enough to be worth the study which alone could make it comprehensible. There are many good people who dare to say this, yet live, audacious, and unconscious of their folly. We have, however, to consider Victor Hugo on a ground which no one ventures to dispute. The great romances—for which we should like to invent another name—which ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... them, especially those in Webster, are fitter for a child's scrap-book than for a volume intended to go into a student's library. Such adjuncts seem to us allowable only, if at all, somewhat as they were introduced by Blunt in his "Glossographia," to make terms of heraldry more easily comprehensible. They might be admitted to save trouble in describing geometrical figures, or in explaining certain of the more frequently occurring terms in architecture and mechanics, but beyond this they are childish. The publishers of Webster give us all the coats-of-arms of the States of the American Union, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... Prince Hal[1] so fine a representative of all that is careless and gay in prodigal youth, with its noble qualities but half in abeyance, and abounding spirit and humour and reckless fancy making its course of wild adventure comprehensible even to the gravest. Perhaps the licence of the Stewart blood carried the hapless northern prince into more dangerous adventures than the wild fun of Gadshill and Eastcheap. And Prince David's future had already been compromised by certain sordid treacheries about his ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... its disuse being from causes before mentioned. It, however, may be true in some cases that a tribe, having been for a long time in contact only with others the dialect of which was so nearly akin as to be comprehensible, or from any reason being separated from those of a strange speech, discontinued sign language for a time, and then upon migration or forced removal came into circumstances where it was useful, and revived it. It is asserted that some of the Muskoki and the Ponkas now in the ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... sea-shore, to the gigantic crater, which, at the Lord's command, vomits fire out of its throat which has been closed for thousands of years: they all spoke with one voice which is not heard by the haughty, being only manifest and comprehensible to the humble. These were the words of Him who created them, be it in six days or in six thousand years, "A thousand years are but as ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... that they may lie classed under three general heads; 1. Those which are understood by the Danish Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries, and Professor Rafn, their Secretary; 2. Those which are comprehensible only by Mr. Rafn; and 3. Those which neither the Society, Mr. Rafn, nor anybody else can be said in any definite sense to understand, and which accordingly offer peculiar temptations to enucleating sagacity. These last are naturally deemed the most valuable by intelligent antiquaries, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Bielby was informed of his state, and came to see him; but Maitland talked so wildly about the Hit or Miss, about the man in the bearskin coat, and other unintelligible matters, that the hermit soon withdrew to the more comprehensible fragments of "Demetrius of Scepsis." He visited his old pupil daily, and behaved with real kindness; but the old implicit trust never revived with ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... successors of Moses transmitted to us ideas more clear, more sensible, more comprehensible of the Divinity? Has the Son of God made his Father perfectly known to us? Has the church, perpetually boasting of the light she diffuses among men, become more fixed and certain, to do away our uncertainty? Alas! in spite of all these supernatural succors, we know nothing ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... hurriedly. In not very carefully chosen phrasing the orchestra was to represent the ocean, and, as far as might be, the ship upon it. A forcible, pathetically yearning and aspiring theme was the only comprehensible idea amid the swirl of enveloping sound. When the whole had been repeated, there was a sudden jump to a different theme in extreme pianissimo, accompanied by the swelling vibrations of the first violins, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... appetible apprehensible audible cessible coercible compatible competible comprehensible compressible conceptible contemptible contractible controvertible convertible convincible corrigible corrosible corruptible credible decoctible deducible defeasible defensible descendible destructible digestible discernible ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... ascertain precisely what this power would be in any given instance, it only remains to find an expression for the spring power with which we have been hitherto dealing, that shall be more generally comprehensible. ...
— A Project for Flying - In Earnest at Last! • Robert Hardley
... personality is quite comprehensible: he is indignant at his mother's and his uncle's deeds, and wishes to revenge himself upon them, but is afraid his uncle may kill him as he had killed his father. Therefore he simulates insanity, desiring to bide his time and observe ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... the rank and file, was proof positive of something radically wrong, either in his disposition or his record. It was entirely comprehensible and fully in accordance with human nature and the merits of the case that a man should quit drinking when he quit the army, but that a man with the blot of an occasional spree on his escutcheon should enlist for any other cause than sheer desperation, ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... befits the artist asked to listen to a rival. Mr. Thornburgh sat pensive, one foot drooped over the other. He was very fond of the Leyburn girls, but music seemed to him, good man, one of the least comprehensible of human pleasures. As for Rose, she had at last arranged herself and her accompanist Agnes, after routing out from her music a couple of Fantasie-Stuecke, which she had wickedly chosen as presenting ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... are frequently amusing but rarely edifying, and this hatred of Bowring that possessed the soul of poor Borrow in his later years is of the same texture as the rest. We shall never know the facts, but the position is comprehensible enough. Let us turn to the extant correspondence[87] which, as far as we know, opened when Borrow paid what was probably his third visit to London ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... but I have never met an Englishman yet who hated Islam and its people as I have met Englishmen who hated some other faiths. Musalmani awadani, as the saying goes—where there are Mohammedans, there is a comprehensible civilisation. ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... being is unknown. Out of this mass there were evolved two orders of beings, namely, demons and gods. The demons had hideous forms, even as Berosus said, which were part animal, part bird, part reptile and part human. The gods had wholly human forms, and they represented the three layers of the comprehensible world, that is to say, heaven or the sky, the atmosphere, and the underworld. The atmosphere and the underworld together formed the earth as opposed to the sky or heaven. The texts say that the first two gods to be created were LAKHMU and LAKHAMU. Their ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... is perhaps to be sufficiently accounted for by Scott's double dislike, both as an independent person and a man of business, of giving a monopoly of his work to one publisher, and by his constant fancy for trying experiments on the public—a fancy itself not wholly, though partially, comprehensible. As a matter of fact, Old Mortality and the Black Dwarf were offered to and pretty eagerly accepted by Murray and Blackwood, on the terms of half profits and the inevitable batch of 'old stock.' The story of the unlucky quarrel with Blackwood in consequence ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... these—and that was the trouble—other things had vanished. That deep filling of his lungs with spring, for instance. And the longing that went with it. That was it—the longing. He longed for the longing—if that is comprehensible. He longed vaguely for a longing that had been his, and which was gone. He never saw, now, a land that was as a golden pool beneath a turquoise dome; nor a boy in the wild ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... felt boyishly jealous of her friendship with Emile. That was very natural. For this was their honeymoon. She considered it their honeymoon prolonged, delightfully prolonged, beyond any fashionable limit. Lucrezia's depression was easily comprehensible. The change in her husband she accounted for; but now here was ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and politics are carefully avoided, and a pure morality, a simple theosophy, comprehensible to the meanest understanding, pervades these simple discourses. The consequence of this toleration and liberal spirit is that an union between the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches has ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... nothing, but embraced me and drew me back on the ottoman. She began to kiss me anew, and this silent language was so comprehensible, ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... preference of creditors in this direction, and of mysterious spiriting away of property in that; and as nobody on the face of the earth could be more incapable of explaining any single item in the heap of confusion than the debtor himself, nothing comprehensible could be made of his case. To question him in detail, and endeavour to reconcile his answers; to closet him with accountants and sharp practitioners, learned in the wiles of insolvency and bankruptcy; was only to put the case out at compound interest and incomprehensibility. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... daily business and not suspecting that they were made a show of. And these books are as English as a beefsteak. Have they ever been tried in America? It needs an English residence to make them thoroughly comprehensible; but still I should think that the human nature in them would give them ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... the means by which we were made competent witnesses. They are the bed-rock of evidence. We know facts and truths, both comprehensible and incomprehensible, by the same means. We are as competent to testify of that which we do not comprehend as we are to testify of the most ordinary fact. As competent to bear testimony to the fact of a sweeping tornado as to the fact of a gentle breeze. ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... just possible, Master Vasari, that Botticelli may have laid out his money at higher interest than you know of; meantime, he is advancing in life and thought, and becoming less and less comprehensible to his biographer. And at length, having got rid, somehow, of the money he received from the Pope; and finished the work he had to do, and uncovered it,—free in conscience, and empty in purse, he returned to Florence, where, "being a sophistical ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... named by a word which is singular only: as, perry, cider, coffee, flax, hemp, fennel, tallow, pitch, gold, sloth, pride, meekness, eloquence. But there are some things, which have in fact neither a comprehensible unity, nor any distinguishable plurality, and which may therefore be spoken of in either number; for the distinction of unity and plurality is, in such instances, merely verbal; and, whichever number we take, the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... awkward-seeming interruption. Its content was not comprehensible to Telzey at all, but in some unmistakable manner it was defined ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... some man of public research enlighten the public on the proceedings at the Mint? The whole system is as little comprehensible by the uninitiated as the philosopher's stone. The cost of the Mint is prodigious—the machinery is all that machinery can be; yet we have one of the ugliest coinages of any nation of Europe. A new issue of coin is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... an economic necessity was perfectly comprehensible to him, but it was difficult for him to conceive of anybody indulging in it simply as a matter of sentiment. That April afternoon was so far away now that it had ceased to exist even ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... statements it appears the project will cost 92,830 pounds; and the amount of revenue arising from such tonnage as is comprehensible, will amount annually to 7,322 pounds 12s. 6d. which is rather more than 8 per cent. per annum for the shareholders, independent of 39,090 tons more which the works will be able to perform, if required, and which from the low price of one penny per ...
— Report of the Knaresbrough Rail-way Committee • Knaresbrough Rail-way Committee
... Mythologies" (at least, as briefly set forth by you in Kuhn's Zeitung), yet I am deeply impressed with this apparent opportunity of bridging the seemingly impassable gulf between Etrurian Religion and the comparatively clear and comprehensible systems of the Pelasgo- Phoenician peoples. That Kad or Kab can refer either (as in Quatuor) to a four-footed animal (quadruped, "quad") or to a four- wheeled vehicle (esseda, Celtic cab) I cannot for a moment believe, though I understand that ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... unknown. If we denote anything incomprehensible by the symbol X, we can describe what X is to a certain extent by knowing what it is not. We can, gradually, gain a certain insight into what it is by comparing it to what IS comprehensible. ...
— Unthinkable • Roger Phillips Graham
... theater. Is there not here a human world created by us, unforeseen and unknown by Eternal destinies, comprehensible by our minds alone, a sensual and intellectual distraction, which has been invented solely by and for that discontented and restless ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... work—how soon the most objectionable American girl of the sort known as "fast," or even "loud," softens into a very charming creature who makes the admiration bestowed upon her by European men quite comprehensible. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... was foreign to his nature. There was no room in him for sham or artifice. Whatever happened, he must be real. He couldn't talk their talk just yet, though in time he would. Upon that he was resolved. But in the meantime, talk he must, and it must be his own talk, toned down, of course, so as to be comprehensible to them and so as not to shook them too much. And furthermore, he wouldn't claim, not even by tacit acceptance, to be familiar with anything that was unfamiliar. In pursuance of this decision, when the two brothers, talking university shop, had used "trig" ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... could compare Christ with Socrates, Plato and Seneca; fewer still those who could say with Franck, "Heretic is a title of honor, for truth is always called heresy." The names of Marcion and Pelagius, Epicurus and Mahomet, excited a passion of hatred hardly comprehensible to us. The {584} refutation of the Koran issued under Luther's auspices would have been ludicrous had ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... To render this adventure comprehensible, it is necessary to add here that Lord Dudley naturally found many women disposed to reproduce samples of such a delicious pattern. His second masterpiece of this kind was a young girl named Euphemie, born of a Spanish lady, reared ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... complicated transactions of our common lives,—are thus overruled by God's Providence; and, without restraint, are so controlled that they shall subserve to the ulterior purposes of His will,—after a fashion which altogether defies analysis. Beyond this inner circle of comprehensible causation,—external to the immediate sphere of cause and effect which courts our daily scrutiny,—there is an outer circle, which rounds our lives; and (as I said) overrules all we do; fashioning, by virtue of a supreme ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... familiarly acquainted with the developement of the elements of things, as where we are. What we have not yet mastered, we feel confidently persuaded that the investigators that come after us will reduce to rules not less obvious, familiar and comprehensible, than is to us the rising of the sun, or the progress of animal and vegetable life from the first bud and seed of existence to the last ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... of diminishing but of increasing the general liberty—so the Church, divinely safeguarded too in the process, takes the Revelation of Christ and by her dogma and her discipline popularizes it, so to speak, and makes it at once comprehensible and effective. ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... thirsty. He was evidently not sleeping very heavily, for he awoke at my first call and came to the side of my bunk; but I at once perceived that it was not the man I had before seen; this fellow's voice and manner were surly in the extreme, and as he bent over me he gruffly demanded, in a scarcely comprehensible French patois, what I wanted. I answered, in French, that I should like something to eat and drink; whereupon he produced, from a sort of cupboard in the darkest corner of the forecastle, a bowl and a large can of soup, together with a wooden tray of flinty biscuit and an old iron ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... Egalit, Pamela, Henrietta Circe, and several others, who appeared in various ways, as artists, gentlemen, domestics, and equals, on various occasions. The history of their way of life is extraordinary, and not very comprehensible, probably owing to the many necessary difficulties which the new ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... is partly on account of the traditions respecting this bit of family history that I am so often asked if I am a spiritualist. I am sometimes tempted to reply in grammar comprehensible to the writers of certain letters which I receive upon ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... converted into a huge chaotic mass of unintelligible technicality; and such was his skill and industry, that he was able, after the severe toil of two or three days, to present to the consideration of the young counsel the principal facts of the case, in a light equally simple and comprehensible. With the assistance of a solicitor so affectionate and indefatigable, Alan Fairford was enabled, then the day of trial arrived, to walk towards the court, attended by his anxious yet encouraging parent, with some degree of confidence that he ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... became comprehensible to Thor that his father might raise the rent and still not be an instrument of oppression. It was consoling to him to perceive this. It helped to allay certain uncomfortable suspicions that had risen in his mind since coming home, and which ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... wounded; the arrows of God, the darts of fire, have stricken me. We find in the American legends the descending dbris constantly alluded to as "stones, arrows, and spears"; I am poisoned with the foul exhalations of the comet; the terrors of God are arrayed against me. All this is comprehensible as a description of a great disaster of nature, but it is extravagant language to apply to a ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... he took her hand, a fat little round hand, with a golden circle upon one of the fingers, which denoted betrothal or marriage, and pressed it fondly. We could not understand their Finnish speech; but there is a language comprehensible to all, in every clime. That the pair were in love no one could for a moment doubt, and that they heeded nothing of those quaint old Finnish chants, distinctly audible from the opposite carriage, was evident, for they talked ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... in a strange content. The music filled their veins with intoxicating delight; it was of a kind that Lettice rejoiced in exceedingly, and that Alan loved without quite knowing why. The Tannhauser Overture, the Walkueren-Ritt, two of Schubert's loveliest songs, and the less exciting but more easily comprehensible productions of an earlier classical composer, were the chief items of the first part of the concert. Then came an interval, after which the rest of the afternoon would be devoted to the Choral Symphony. But ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... died away in the distance. Tom and Erica laughed, but the incident set Erica thinking. Here was a man who would not believe what he could not understand, who wanted "pipes and a meter," and for want of comprehensible outward signs ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... she threw off the shawl from her feet and the cushions that supported her shoulders, and got up and walked about the room, looking out upon the afternoon sunshine and the trees that were turning their shadows to the east. How she longed, with a fervour scarcely explainable, not at all comprehensible to most people, to leave the place, to open her wings in a ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... Brahman dawns. Nothing however can be known about the nature of this indefinite except its character as indefinite. That all the phenomena of the world, the fixed order of events, the infinite variety of world-forms and names, all these are originated by this avidya, ajnana or maya is indeed hardly comprehensible. If it is indefinite nescience, how can all these well-defined forms of world-existence come out of it? It is said to exist only relatively, and to have only a temporary existence beside the permanent infinite reality. To take such a ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... to a dark cell. No wonder that many committed suicide. Dr. Vrbensk could tell how he used to get excited by the cry of the ill-treated prisoners. Even his nerves could not stand it. It is quite comprehensible, therefore, that Dr. Scheiner (the president of the 'Sokol' Union) in such an atmosphere was physically and mentally broken down in two months. Dr. Kramr and Dr. Rasn also had an opportunity of feeling the brutality of Polatchek and Teszinski. In the winter we ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... into restless death-ridden dreaming; and so it was many nights, until the dawn that they fronted a swift river, black from its snowy banks, saw the rising pine hills opposite and were swept possibly by mistake into the center of comprehensible action—a picture lifted from the ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... words hoarsely, but nothing was comprehensible but "quick!" and "run." He pointed seaward, though in the direction opposite to that which the party had taken that morning on their way round to Crater Bay, a journey which familiarity had ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... in a bar,—would be more comprehensible for the performers, if instead of indicating them by a particular series of gestures, they were treated as though the one was composed of three and two in a bar, and the other composed ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... methods by which Science has arrived at conclusions so strangely in harmony with the ancient thought of the East, may suggest the doubt whether those conclusions could ever be made clearly comprehensible to the mass of Western minds. Certainly it would seem that just as the real doctrines of Buddhism can be taught to the majority of believers through forms only, so the philosophy of science can be communicated to the masses through suggestion only,—suggestion of such facts, or arrangements of ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... was comprehensible, and the charioteer, assiduously obliging, fell to posture of ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... hand staring at her. She flew to him directly, with a broken entreaty that she might be taken to her father. Again they tried questioning her, but Richard, whether speaking English or Provencal, always succeeded in obtaining readier and more comprehensible replies than did the Princess. Whether she recognized him as her preserver, or whether his language had a familiar tone, she seemed exclusively attracted by him; and he it was who learnt that she lived at home—far off—on the Green ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from its educational possibilities one never ceases to marvel at the power of even a mimic stage to afford to the young a magic space in which life may be lived in efflorescence, where manners may be courtly and elaborate without exciting ridicule, where the sequence of events is impressive and comprehensible. Order and beauty of life is what the adolescent youth craves above all else as the younger child indefatigably demands his story. "Is this where the most beautiful princess in the world lives?" asks a little girl peering ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... the relation between God and man, between the visible creation and the unseen world. It was a theory of a material rather than a spiritual order: it reduced the things of the spirit into terms of the things of the flesh. It was crude, it was easily comprehensible, it was fitted to the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... system of education, to which through coming centuries men can only approximate, must present to the child the precise step in knowledge which he waits for, and upon which he is able to raise himself with that glow of pleasurable activity which God gives to exertion directed to a comprehensible end. The feeblest mind is capable of assimilating knowledge with a satisfaction the same in kind as that which rewarded the maturest labors of Humboldt or Newton. There are sequences of facts every one of which, imparted in its natural order, brings an immediate interest. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... taken in two ways. First, on the part of a form, and thus we have the negatively infinite, i.e. a form or act not limited by being received into matter or a subject; and this infinite of itself is most knowable on account of the perfection of the act, although it is not comprehensible by the finite power of the creature; for thus God is said to be infinite. And this infinite the soul of Christ knows, yet does not comprehend. Secondly, there is the infinite as regards matter, which is taken privatively, i.e. inasmuch as it has not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... a moment. Hard they were in line, fixed in expression, and opaque in color, these copies of famous masterpieces,—saints of either sex, ascensions, assumptions, martyrdoms, and what not,—and they were not quite comprehensible till Don Ippolito explained that he had made them from such prints of the subjects as he could get, and had colored them after his own fancy. All this, in a city whose art had been the glory of the world for nigh half a thousand years, struck Ferris as yet more comically pathetic than ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... the night was fine and warm. They had seen Hernani, and Regina had naturally found it hard to understand the story, even with Marcello's explanations; the more so as he himself had never seen the play before, and had come to the theatre quite sure that it must be easily comprehensible from the opera founded on it, which he had heard. Regina's arm was passed through his, and as they made their way through the crowd, under the not very brilliant lights in the portico, Marcello was doing his best to make the plot of the ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... difference of their objects. Now the object of the theological virtues is God Himself, Who is the last end of all, as surpassing the knowledge of our reason. On the other hand, the object of the intellectual and moral virtues is something comprehensible to human reason. Wherefore the theological virtues are specifically distinct from the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... the Italian atmosphere. (They preferred those about peasant life, because of the descriptions of scenery and the pleasanter sentiments, though in general they liked novels about people in society, whose motives and habits were more comprehensible, spoke severely of Dickens, who "had never drawn a gentleman," and considered Thackeray less at home in the great world than Bulwer—who, however, was beginning to be thought old-fashioned.) Mrs. and Miss Archer were both great ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... know what is being sung or done, the music is as clear as the day. Wagner knew this better than anyone, and, as I pointed out in commenting on the Dutchman, he brought his whole theatrical experience and training to help him to make the drama as simple and comprehensible as possible. When the Wagner battle was raging in the seventies and eighties, the sages pointed to the necessity of understanding the drama for the purpose of understanding the music as a defect of the Wagner music-drama, and a proof of Wagner's inferiority as a composer. ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... up to them). Yes, yes, 'tis comprehensible enough, Wherefore with your commission of to-day, You were not all too willing to remember Your ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... illumination, but not far enough to create political stability. We have seen before that they touch the artistic creative planes, in their descent, before they reach the more material planes. So her position is perfectly comprehensible. The old European manvantara was dying; elsewhere it was dead. Its forces, when they passed away through Ireland, were nearly exhausted; in no condition whatever to penetrate to the material plane and make political greatnesses and strengths. But they found in her very soil ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the disposal of the other.... How many homes there are where the menfolk can get anything done willingly, and the mistress nothing whatever! The girls go out so early. They miss the rough and tumble of their homes. They have their own little ambitions, hardly comprehensible to anyone else. Whether or no they desire to be satisfactory, they do want their ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... condition, as given by her maid, although hideously unlike the beautiful object they were meant to call up to her father's mind, were sufficiently expressive and comprehensible. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... for emigration or settlement within its own territories; and we have conditions which explained and emphasized German naval construction. Both German ambition and German naval construction were therefore easily comprehensible. ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... complete your good work?" broke out the man tied to the chair in harsh and foreign but sufficiently comprehensible French, "by ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... it a foregone conclusion, if I assert the superior likelihoods of the latter, and not of the former? Let us come then to a few of many reasons. First: it was by no means probable to be supposed anteriorly, that the God should be clearly comprehensible: yet he must be one: and oneness is the idea most easily apprehended of all possible ideas. The meanest of intellectual creatures could comprehend his Maker, and in so far top his heights, if God, being truly one in one view, were yet only one ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... she had resisted without the least effort. Still, he pursued, and he had once told her with smiling candour that if she did not mind the pursuit, he did not mind the chase. Only, he never urged it into the presence of Mrs. Falconer, of whom alone he stood in speechless, easily comprehensible awe. Perhaps to-night—as Amy had never seen him in ball-dress—she might begin to succumb; he had just placed her under obligation to him by an unexpected stroke of good fortune; and finally he had executed one neat stratagem at the expense of Mr. ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... specimens were spared for study, isolated on a peninsula of one of the continents, and turned over to Dival for observation and dissection. All I can say for the book is that it is probably accurate. Certainly it is neither interesting nor comprehensible. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... world toward these problematical occurrences is quite comprehensible. Throughout the nineteenth century the attention of scientists has been almost wholly directed toward the investigation of the forms and forces of matter, the phenomena and principles of the visible universe. In this ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... came up alone and manifested a desire for a little conversation. He, too, if not so mysterious as the captain, was not very comprehensible to Mr Powell's uninformed candour. He often favoured thus the second officer. His talk alluded somewhat enigmatically and often without visible connection to Mr Powell's friendliness towards himself and his daughter. "For I am well aware that we have no friends on ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... to me a comprehensible reason why I should not accept that scholarship? I don't understand your objection in the least. But anyway, it won't do the slightest good for you to object, for I've already accepted it and I am not going to ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... that any idea we may form of the astral life will be incomplete, and inadequate to give a true conception what it is really like. Perhaps the most comprehensible of the subplanes is that which reproduces the physical landscape in astral matter. There the average man will begin his conscious astral career. If we think of the world as we know it here and then imagine all that is material to have ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... the Loyalists, without distinction, largely responsible for British pre-Revolutionary policy, asserting that they misinformed the Government as to conditions and sentiment in America, partly through stupidity and partly through selfish interest. It was therefore perfectly comprehensible that the feeling should be bitter against them in the United States, especially as they had given efficient aid to the British during the war. In various States they were subjected to personal violence at the hands of indignant "patriots," many being ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... the Middle West to secure American work, he made a trip to Europe, visiting England, France, Holland, Sweden, Germany, Hungary, Austria and Italy. With the exception of England and Germany, the governments were sympathetic. The indifference of those two countries was at the time was not quite comprehensible. There might have been several explanations, including the threat of war. There were also those who said that England and Germany had entered into a secret alliance against this country for the purpose of minimizing the American influence in commerce, soon to be strengthened ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... and ecstasy—both elements which, in minds that are laden with all the influences of the East, produce a facile and dangerous excitement. On the other hand there survives in the Italian population the hatred against the Croatian supremacy, a hatred which is comprehensible but which in time must give place to other sentiments, rendering possible a fair coexistence of the two populations, whose aim should be common—the prosperity and development of Dalmatia, in the prosperity and for the prosperity, in the ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... comprehensible. The little Saint could not bring herself to decide whether to ride forth to battle on the day of our Lady's Feast or to fold her arms while fighting was going on around her. Her Voices intensified her indecision. They never instructed her what to do save when she knew herself. In ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... of Nature; it is full of studio combinations; and yet it is not a frankly decorative arrangement, as the portrait of the mother or Miss Alexander. When Hals painted his Burgomasters, he was careful to place them in definite and comprehensible surroundings. He never left us in doubt either as to the time or the place; and the same obligations of time and place, which Hals never shirked, seem to me to rest on the painter, if he elects to paint his sitter in any attitude except one ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... there was a casus belli. There always is among savage as well as civilised nations, and it is a curious coincidence that the reasons given for the necessity for war are about as comprehensible among the civilised as the savage. Of course among civilised nations these reasons for war are said to be always good. Christians, you know, could not kill each other without good reasons; but is it not strange that among educated people, the reasons ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... were evolved two orders of beings, namely, demons and gods. The demons had hideous forms, even as Berosus said, which were part animal, part bird, part reptile and part human. The gods had wholly human forms, and they represented the three layers of the comprehensible world, that is to say, heaven or the sky, the atmosphere, and the underworld. The atmosphere and the underworld together formed the earth as opposed to the sky or heaven. The texts say that the first ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... equals, not in a desire to stand well with himself. In consequence he had not the builder's fundamental instinct. He made no effort to supply himself with anything that did not satisfy this amiable desire. The contradictions of his conduct, therefore, become comprehensible. We begin to see why he wore silks and satins and why he neglected what to us are necessities. We see why he could display such admirable carriage in rough-riding and lassoing grizzlies, and yet seemed to possess such feeble military efficiency. We comprehend his generous ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... Tiger and Jack he himself seemed odd, both anatomically and in other ways. His fine gray fur and his four-fingered hands set him apart from them—he would never be mistaken for an Earthman, even in the densest fog. But these were comprehensible differences. His close attachment to Fuzzy was something else, and still seemed beyond ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... distress to a great many people because of its supposed invasion of recognised morality. It deals, as every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and an elopement which he planned with the bride of one of the Riccardi. The lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less comprehensible reasons of convenience; but the habit of shrinking from the final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, but die, as it were, waiting for each other. The objection that the act thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... the Hawkeses were but homely folk; she knew that any Monroe should shrink from this hot and noisy kitchen. But Sally's heart welcomed the eager bustle, the tasks so imperative that her timid little entity was entirely forgotten, the talk that was friendly and affectionate and comprehensible. ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... Of course, I hate to swallow an early and rapid dinner. One did such things in the war, gladly dislocating an elderly digestion in the service of one's country. In peace time one demands a compensating leisure. But this would be comprehensible only to a well-trained married woman. My misery would have been outside Auriol's ken. I meekly said nothing. The world of young women knows nothing ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... bureaux, where business was prepared, and where the smaller matters were practically settled. By the royal councils and their subordinate public offices, France was governed to an extent and with a minuteness hardly comprehensible to any one not accustomed to ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... processes which marked the transition of the United States from a peace to a war basis are comprehensible unless we remember that the President was constantly working to overcome the forces of decentralization, and also that the military programme was always on an emergency basis, shifting almost from week to week in ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... look like that." For though I felt a little nervous, I saw no cause for the boy's abject dread, having yet to learn that anything not comprehensible to the savage mind is set down at once as being the work of ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... now lost their whole character of vagueness, and begun to lead us in a perfectly definite direction, let us examine the statements of Hester Dyett. Now, it is immediately comprehensible to me that the evidence of this woman at the public examinations was looked at askance. There can be no doubt that she is a poor specimen of humanity, an undesirable servant, a peering, hysterical caricature of a woman. Her statements, if formally recorded, were not believed; ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... language this means, that all the multifarious and complicated activities of man are comprehensible under three categories. Either they are immediately directed towards the maintenance and development of the body, or they effect transitory changes in the relative positions of parts of the body, or they tend towards the continuance of the species. Even those manifestations ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Captain Pedolsky opened the pouch on his belt and took out the false palate and tongue-clicker without which no Terran could do more than mouth a crude and barely comprehensible pidgin-Ulleran. Stuffing the gadget into his mouth, he turned and ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... one side. But this is a very gross delusion. Although truth is difficult to state, it is both easy and agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet it ere the phrase be done. The universe, in relation to what any man can say of it, is plain, patent, and staringly comprehensible. In itself, it is a great and travailing ocean, unsounded, unvoyageable, an eternal mystery to man; or, let us say, it is a monstrous and impassable mountain, one side of which, and a few near slopes and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... answered the man. It would have been very strange if he had not understood, for though Grant addressed him in English the word grod bawled so frequently into his ear was sufficiently comprehensible. ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... the world the Son of God, descending from His heavenly seat, and not quitting the glory of His Father, begotten in a new order by a new nativity. In a new order: because He who was invisible in His own nature, was made visible in ours; He who was incomprehensible [could not be contained], became comprehensible in ours; remaining before all times, He began to be in time; the Lord of all, He took upon Him the form of a servant, having obscured His immeasurable majesty. He who was God, incapable of suffering, did not disdain to be man, capable ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... transport them. Moreover, with so many hostiles on every side, was he justified in stripping the post of its defenders? It was no pleasant situation. It was more than perplexing. Presently he turned and, using such signs as he thought might be comprehensible, asked the impassive runner if he knew where the first fight took place, and the Hualpai, as would almost any Indian partially gathering the drift of a question, began a rambling reply, pointing as he spoke, with shifting finger, all over the range ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... emerging champion and lover is comprehensible to us of a later day—that, and the joy she feels in watching him impatiently submit to be armed. Even so might one of us watch and listen to and keep for ever in memory the stamp of the foot, the sound of the "ringing ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... friendly eyed, north-country woman flashed across Esther's mental vision, obscuring the less comprehensible figure of her sister-in-law. She thought ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... women narrowed their eyes, and looked questioningly at one another. Isabelle, who was far too securely throned to be jealous of any one, sometimes told her that she would make a fortune on the stage, but old Mrs. Carter, who for reasons perfectly comprehensible in an old lady who had once been handsome herself, detested Harriet, and said to her daughter-in- law that in her opinion there was something queer ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... parts drunk, and for some reason, not very comprehensible, he had chosen to resent the presence of this clean-limbed, clean-featured English lad. Possibly he recognized in him a type which for its very cleanness he abhorred. Possibly his sodden brain was stirred by an envy which ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... Dr. Latrobe, "is perfectly comprehensible to me. The only way to get along with him is to let him know his place, ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... would to banish the contestants, Dr. Surtaine's Paean of Policy and McGuire Ellis's impassioned declaration of faith did battle for the upper hand in his formulating professional standards. The Doctor's theory was the clean-cut, comprehensible, and plausible one. But something within Hal responded to the hot idealism of the fighting journalist. He wanted Ellis for a fellow workman. And his last waking notion was that he wanted and needed Ellis mainly because Ellis had told him to ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... reverses that of the philosophers. We are chiefly concerned, not with some vague saying of Anaxagoras, but with what he really knew regarding the phenomena of nature; with what he observed, and with the comprehensible deductions that he derived from his observations. In attempting to answer these inquiries, we are obliged, in part, to take our evidence at second-hand; but, fortunately, some fragments of writings of Anaxagoras have come down to us. We ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... men otherwise distinguished in literature wrote letters—sometimes in curious contrast with other productions of theirs. The most remarkable instance of this, but an instance easily comprehensible, is that of Samuel Pepys. Only a part of Pepys' immense correspondence has ever been printed, but there is no reason to expect from the remainder—whether actually extant, mislaid or lost—anything better than the examples which are now accessible, and which are for the most part the very ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... advanced accordingly towards the black, who now awaited my approach with folded arms, like one prepared for either destiny. As I came nearer, he reached forth his hand with a great gesture, such as I had seen from the pulpit, and spoke to me in something of a pulpit voice, but not a word was comprehensible. I tried him first in English, then in Gaelic, both in vain; so that it was clear we must rely upon the tongue of looks and gestures. Thereupon I signed to him to follow me, which he did readily and with a grave obeisance like a fallen king; all the while there had come ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... no affectation of fancy. Shelley saw the immortal shapes of "Desires and Adorations" lamenting over the bier of the mortal Keats, because for him an idea or a passion was incomparably more real and more comprehensible than the things of flesh and earth, of whose existence the senses persuade us. To such a mind philosophy was not a distant world to be entered with diffident and halting feet, ever ready to retreat at the first alarm of commonsense. It was his daily habitation. He lived ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... of the parables was comprehensible through study, prayer and search was intimated in the Teacher's admonishment: "Who hath ears to hear, let him hear."[650] To the more studious inquirers, the Master added: "Take heed what ye hear: with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you: and unto you that hear shall more be given. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Dragon," over which I have burnt the midnight oil (you must colour the thing by lamplight because that is how it will be seen), still lacks most conspicuously, alas! two wings of the Sultan's Palace, and also some comprehensible and workable way ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... rocks of offence when they are detached from the spiritual order and set apart in an order of their own. The age in which we live affords a concrete illustration of the vital processes in society and means of contact with that society, but it is comprehensible and educative in the exact degree in which we understand its relation to other times. The impression which the day makes upon us needs to be tested by the impression which we receive from the year; the judgment of a decade ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... present to the best among the German people; many quotations to this effect (for example, Geibel's lines) are to-day in everybody's mouth. Deeper thoughts are aroused by a less-known remark of Richard Wagner's: "A great mission, scarcely comprehensible to other nations, is unquestionably reserved for the whole German character (Anlage)"; this character he defines as "the spirit of pure humanity," and the mission of the Germans as "the ennoblement of the world...." Not to believe in ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... his intermediate agents, one half of the annual amount of lumber felled for market, the sale of which was arranged with the neighboring forge owners by mutual agreement; the other half was disposed of by notarial act. This latter arrangement was clear and comprehensible; the price of sale and the amounts falling due were both clearly indicated in the deed. But it was quite different with the bargains made by the owner himself, which were often credited by notes payable at sight, mostly worded in confused terms, unintelligible ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... understand me when I said she would be compromised! He won't be able to leave his bed under four weeks; and she said she hadn't much money. If she had once known him, if he were some former neighbour, it would be comprehensible. But an individual she never laid eyes on day before yesterday! And the minute he gets up, he'll head for the public bar. There's something queer about that young man; but we'll never be able to find out what it is. I don't believe his ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... as given by her maid, although hideously unlike the beautiful object they were meant to call up to her father's mind, were sufficiently expressive and comprehensible. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... people who collect and hold in themselves some knowledge of contemporary events as the air collects and holds moisture; it may be that we all do, but only one here and there becomes aware of the fact. As the impalpable moisture in the air changes to palpable rain so does this vague cognisance become a comprehensible revelation by being resolved into a shower of words on occasion by some process psychically analogous to the condensation of moisture in the air. It is a natural phenomenon known to babes like Beth, but ill-observed, and not at all explained, because man ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... day shut up in his chamber, then forth to wander solitary beneath the holm-oaks that bordered the Ema road at the hour when the first stars are a-tremble in the pale evening sky. If by chance he encountered riders of his own age, he never laughed, and said little—and that little was not always comprehensible. His strange bearing and ambiguous words were a grief and a grievance to his comrades—and above all to Messer Betto Brunelleschi, for he dearly loved Messer Guido, and had no fonder wish than to make him one of the Brotherhood which embraced the richest ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... important in their influence in shaping physical geography, and giving accuracy to the mode of representing natural phenomena. Before Humboldt we had no graphic representation of complex natural phenomena which made them easily comprehensible, even to minds of moderate cultivation. He has done that in a way which has circulated information more extensively, and brought it to the apprehension more clearly than it could have been ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... and his sense of access to God had given a new courage to his mind; in these moods of enlightenment he could see the world as a comprehensible ball, he could see history as an understandable drama. He had always been on the verge of realizing before, he realized now, the two entirely different and antagonistic strands that interweave in the twisted rope of contemporary religion; ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... profound admiration for him which he could neither realize nor reciprocate. It is too much to expect that the mighty genius of Beethoven, which broke through all rules in vindication of the principles underlying them, would be comprehensible to a mind like Cherubini's, in which, while the creative faculties were finely developed, the critical faculty was atrophied and its place supplied by a mere disciplinary code inadequate even as a basis for the analysis of his own works. On the other hand, it would be impossible to exaggerate the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... night before had left 'em with an uncomfortable feeling that their spy was taking quite unreasonable risks. It is of course most unusual for a spy to make use of rocket signals. Do I make myself comprehensible?" ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... offered to him in the school of life. In ultimate importance it outranks the arithmetic, the grammar, the geography, the manuals of science; for without the aid of the imagination none of these books is really comprehensible. ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... bring the question of repeal before the house. He asked, what was meant by the watch-word of repeal of the union between Great Britain and Ireland. If those who used it meant a complete separation, or a species of Hibernian republic, their conduct was both comprehensible and consistent; but if, as they asserted, they only meant two separate independent legislatures, under the same monarch, the motion was inconsistent with the first principles of the science of government. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... proceeds on the assumption that all religions are products of thought, commenced and continued in accordance with the laws of the human mind, and, therefore, comprehensible to the extent to which these laws are known. No one disputes this, except in reference to his own religion. This, he is apt to assert, had something "supernatural" about its origin. If this word be correctly used, it may stand without cavil. The "natural" is that of which we know ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... ever-widening kingdom established without the aid of the sword and freed from all racial barriers—the eternal, universal, spiritual kingdom of God on earth. It is evident that in contrast to the other types of messianic prophecy this form was comprehensible, practicable, and alone capable ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... which befits the artist asked to listen to a rival. Mr. Thornburgh sat pensive, one foot drooped over the other. He was very fond of the Leyburn girls, but music seemed to him, good man, one of the least comprehensible of human pleasures. As for Rose, she had at last arranged herself and her accompanist Agnes, after routing out from her music a couple of Fantasie-Stuecke, which she had wickedly chosen as presenting the most severely classical contrast to the 'rubbish' ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Macpherson rather objected to being made the subject of an article—first of all, for the very comprehensible reason that such publicity would draw down upon her a host of visitors; and when I suggested that visitors probably meant funds, she added a second, and not quite so comprehensible an objection—that these funds themselves might alloy the element of Faith in which the work ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... into a room where there are red arm-chairs. Here, there is a dark patch on the carpet, concerning which fingers are still shaken at Grisha. Beyond that room is still another, to which one is not admitted, and where one sees glimpses of papa—an extremely enigmatical person! Nurse and mamma are comprehensible: they dress Grisha, feed him, and put him to bed, but what papa exists for is unknown. There is another enigmatical person, auntie, who presented Grisha with a drum. She appears and disappears. Where does she disappear to? Grisha has more than once looked ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the tone in which they were uttered, would have been comprehensible to a much meaner intelligence than Sonny's. As if he had been whipped, he curled down his abbreviated tail, and ran and ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... in subordinate regard, Language; the prominent criterion, by which a human being is proudly elevated above the rest of the animated creation. Speech, and its representation by characters, are exclusively comprehensible by man; and these have been the sources of his vast attainments and rapid progression. The ear receives the various intonations that convey intelligence, and the characters or symbols of these significant sounds are detected by ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... Mme. de Bargeton's past life, a dreary chronicle which must be given if Lucien's position with regard to the lady is to be comprehensible. Lucien's introduction came about oddly enough. In the previous winter a newcomer had brought some interest into Mme. de Bargeton's monotonous life. The place of controller of excise fell vacant, and M. de Barante appointed a man whose adventurous life was a sufficient passport to the ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... Europe and Australasia, they are taught on a background of the geography of yards, alleys, squares, streets and playgrounds with which they are familiar. Geography thus concretely presented, becomes comprehensible to even the ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... being free from the body, she knew no physical pain, and she shrank from returning before she need, knowing well the anguish of suffering that awaited her. The desolation and loneliness made her unhappy in a vague and not very comprehensible fashion, but she did not suffer actively. That would come later when return became imperative. Till then she flitted to and fro, intangible as gossamer, elusive as the snow. She wondered what Apollo would say if he could see her thus. ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... this realm of myths and missions, and general dread and discomfort," said Mr. Rollin, "on to comprehensible soil again, where ordinary sinners are sure of some sort of a footing,—and bad as a fellow is he knows there are plenty more like him,—then I shan't appear to you in such a deucedly poor light as I do now, a doubtful sort of pearl in a setting of ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... evidently comprehensible, for the man at once threw the birds at McLeod's feet, and, taking the flask, emptied its ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... abstract. He was conceived, some Chinese writers say, because the philosophical explanations of the Cosmos were too recondite for the ordinary mind to grasp. That he did fulfil the purpose of furnishing the ordinary mind with a fairly easily comprehensible picture of the creation may be admitted; but, as will presently be seen, it is over-stating the case to say that he was conceived with the set purpose of furnishing the ordinary mind with a concrete solution or illustration of this great problem. There is no evidence that P'an ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... generous, if his methods were perniciously mistaken. In his theory of Free Love alone, borrowed like the rest from the Revolution, his aim was as mischievous as his method. At the same time he was at least logical. His theory was repulsive, but comprehensible. Whereas from our present via media—facilitation of divorce—can only result the era when the young lady in reduced circumstances will no longer turn governess but will be open to engagement as wife ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... was as clear and even as the arrangement of the matter was lucid; the voice was not loud, but so distinct that it carried to the furthest benches. No syllable was slurred, no point hurried over. All this made for the lucid and comprehensible; well-chosen language and fine utterance shaped a perfect vehicle of thought. But it was the lucidity of the thought itself, thus expressed, that gave his lectures their quality. A clever and accomplished lady once, in intimate conversation, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... parapet, I wondered if he recognised the passing step—if he recognised my step—and associated them with a penny? Of what use that he should know the different steps? if he knew them there would be anticipation and disappointments. But a dog would make life comprehensible; and I imagined a companionship, a mingling of muteness and blindness, and the joy that would brighten the darkness when the dog leaped eagerly upon the blind man's knees. I imagined the joy of warm feet and limb, and the sudden poke of the muzzle. A dog would be a link to bind the ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... received your letter. The two K.'s—Kompel and Kahnt—shall be made most welcome. Pohl had already told me of Kahnt's coming; it will be a pleasure to me not to verlangweilen [To make the time hang heavily] his visit here (if that word is not quite German, still I consider it is comprehensible!). Julius Schuberth had also the intention of rescuing something [Namely, Liszt's composition] from Kuehn. [Music publisher] Your idea of giving Bronsart the conductorship of the Euterpe Concerts is a most excellent one. I suppose the letter which I wrote about this to ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... indefinite except its character as indefinite. That all the phenomena of the world, the fixed order of events, the infinite variety of world-forms and names, all these are originated by this avidya, ajnana or maya is indeed hardly comprehensible. If it is indefinite nescience, how can all these well-defined forms of world-existence come out of it? It is said to exist only relatively, and to have only a temporary existence beside the permanent infinite reality. To take such a principle and to ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... in lively remembrance before his fancy, which liked to go back into that first and only period of his freedom, though, perhaps, also of his beggarhood. In Freudenberger's school he had learned a natural, easy, and comprehensible arrangement of little groups, and a neat, dainty manner, in which wise it was no difficult task for him to represent such scenes with truth and grace. Thus we find these pictures of his, which, for the most part, are painted on small sheets, his sports, banterings, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... she preferred to construct her own plots and put her own words in the mouths of the singers. Though a constant attendant on the opera, she never knew what "Il Trovatore" was about, which, perhaps, is not so surprising after all. Doubtless the play which she had fashioned in her own mind was more comprehensible than Verdi's medley of burnt children and asthmatic dance rhythms. Madame de Stael went so far as to condemn the German composers because they "follow too closely the sense of the words," whereas the Italians, "who are truly the musicians of nature, ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... superficial criticism than that which declares French poetry in general to be either nought—which is still a not uncommon notion—or at least not great enough to be worth the study which alone could make it comprehensible. There are many good people who dare to say this, yet live, audacious, and unconscious of their folly. We have, however, to consider Victor Hugo on a ground which no one ventures to dispute. The great romances—for which ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... however, with the work of the allied institution of which I now come to speak. The Institute of Hygiene deals with topics not very remote from those studied in the Virchow Institute, part of its work, indeed, falling clearly within the scope of pathology; but it differs in being clearly comprehensible to the general public and of immediate and tangible interest from the most strictly utilitarian stand-point, hygiene being, in effect, the tangible link between the more abstract medical sciences and ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... smile of extraordinary significance, and told me that I must have very little idea of what her relations with Beatrice were; but I must do her the justice to add that she went on to make herself a little more comprehensible by saying that it was quite reason enough for her sister not to be alarmed that Mark would be sure to be. He was always nervous about the child, and as they were predestined by nature to take opposite views, the only thing for Beatrice was to cultivate a false optimism. If Mark were ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... wished to examine the actresses at first hand, so he had mingled in the groups of admirers and gallants, had penetrated into the greenroom, where was whispered and talked a French required by the situation, a market French, a language that is readily comprehensible for the vender when the buyer seems disposed ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... had a dowdy wife and a dowdy mind, and spent much of his time in town taking advantage of the army's lately exalted social position. Last of all was the general, who traversed the roads of the camp preceded by his flag—a figure so austere, so removed, so magnificent, as to be scarcely comprehensible. ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... mine, than what are the absolutely necessary angles of the octahedron, which is its common form. At all events, that mathematical part of crystallography is quite beyond girls' strength; but these questions of the various tempers and manners of crystals are not only comprehensible by you, but full of the most curious teaching for you. For in the fulfilment, to the best of their power, of their adopted form under given circumstances, there are conditions entirely resembling those of human virtue; and indeed expressible under no term ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... to the government of this country, something not quite comprehensible, in this League. For the first time in the southern hemisphere, a Reform League is to be inaugurated. There is something ominous in this; the word 'League,' in a time of such feverish excitement as the present, is big with immense purport (indeed!) ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... "Lectures to Working Men" which, as Mr. Leonard Huxley is good enough to inform us, was not delivered until December 15th, and therefore could not have been seen by Mr. Darwin on December 10th. The change of date makes comprehensible the reference to Falconer's paper "On the American Fossil Elephant of the Regions bordering the Gulf of Mexico (E. Columbi, Falc.)," which appeared in the January number of the "Natural History Review." It is true that he had seen advanced sheets ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... show that he was struggling to see in the origin of species a process just as scientifically comprehensible as the birth of individuals. They show, I think, that he recognised the two things not merely ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... was of a kind that Lettice rejoiced in exceedingly, and that Alan loved without quite knowing why. The Tannhauser Overture, the Walkueren-Ritt, two of Schubert's loveliest songs, and the less exciting but more easily comprehensible productions of an earlier classical composer, were the chief items of the first part of the concert. Then came an interval, after which the rest of the afternoon would be devoted to the Choral Symphony. But during this interval Alan hastened to make ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... dervish, with the haggard face and wild, restless eyes of one addicted to bhang, now volunteers to take me under his protection and lead me out of the caravanserai to—where? He vouchsafes no explanation where; none, at least, that is at all comprehensible to me. Where do these interesting specimens of Beerjand's weird population want to entice me to? why do they want to entice me anywhere? I conclude to go with ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... undoubtedly much in primitive Christianity to appeal to this man, and Jesus' hard sayings to the rich and about the rich would have been entirely comprehensible to him. Yet the religion that is preached in our churches and practiced by our congregations, with its element of display and self-aggrandizement, its active proselytism, and its open contempt of all religions but its own, ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... to get the accent as all that," returned the Baron. "I don't think it is necessary for a man to make a monkey of himself just for the pleasure of mastering a language. Reasoning similarly, a man to master the art of braying in a fashion comprehensible to the jackass of average intellect should make a jackass of himself, cultivate his ears, and learn to kick, so as properly to punctuate his sentences after the manner of most ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... something important. Accordingly, when he said the formula, she was as careful to remember it accurately as she was to remember the place of the bottle on the shelf. Now she wrote it down just as he spoke it, and, though perhaps not exactly as he would have written it, still comprehensible. She pinned the piece of paper in the cuff of her dress; it would not be found there if, by ill luck, she was caught and searched later on. Next she went to the kitchen cupboard; there were several wide-necked stoppered bottles there, doubtless without the ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... daughter, and she was ignorant of the pleasant everyday amenities of a father's love. As there is undoubtedly such a thing as love at first sight, so must there be sympathy at first sight. For Jocelyn it was comprehensible—nay, it was most natural. This was Jack's father. In his manner, in everything about him, there were suggestions of Jack. This seemed to be a creature hewn, as it were, from the same material, moulded ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... was coming to establish. A kingdom of souls, if not intolerable to his Sadducean faith, seemed to him but an abstraction drawn from the depths of a devotion too fond and dreamy. A kingdom of Judea, on the other hand, was more than comprehensible: such had been, and, if only for that reason, might be again. And it suited his pride to think of a new kingdom broader of domain, richer in power, and of a more unapproachable splendor than the old one; of a new ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... extreme limit of all moral inquiry, and it is of great importance to determine it even on this account, in order that reason may not on the one band, to the prejudice of morals, seek about in the world of sense for the supreme motive and an interest comprehensible but empirical; and on the other hand, that it may not impotently flap its wings without being able to move in the (for it) empty space of transcendent concepts which we call the intelligible world, and so lose itself amidst chimeras. For the rest, the idea of a pure world of understanding ...
— Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals • Immanuel Kant
... Europe moated off into this manageable and comprehensible space, you are next to fix the limits which divide the four Gothic countries, Britain, Gaul, Germany, and Dacia, from the four Classic countries, Spain, Italy, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... the one impulse needed to crystallize these disconnected facts into one comprehensible whole. The connecting link was everywhere common descent, difference was due to the continual variation and divergence of their ancestors. The classification, which all were seeking, was really the ancestral tree of the animal kingdom. Forms more generalized should be placed ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... training, and some by fate, but I have never met an Englishman yet who hated Islam and its people as I have met Englishmen who hated some other faiths. Musalmani awadani, as the saying goes—where there are Mohammedans, there is a comprehensible civilisation. ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were made a show of. And these books are as English as a beefsteak. Have they ever been tried in America? It needs an English residence to make them thoroughly comprehensible; but still I should think that the human nature in them ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... occur to 'Zekiel to be surprised that all the dogs were chatting together in very comprehensible Dorsetshire English. To see them actually living, and moving about, was such an extraordinary thing that it swallowed up every other feeling, ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... knowledge came a new and less comprehensible emotion. At first Miss Loder had accepted the fact of her employer's marriage as one accepts any fixed tradition; and the subject rarely entered her ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... intensely religious. She had months earlier chosen the Brompton Oratory for her devotions, partly because of the name of Philip, which had been murmured in accents of affection by her dying mother, and partly because it lay on a direct, comprehensible bus-route from Piccadilly. You got into the motor-bus opposite the end of the Burlington Arcade, and in about six minutes it dropped you in front of the Oratory; and you could not possibly lose yourself in the topographical intricacies ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... only of average and COMMON experiences, must have been the most potent of all the forces which have hitherto operated upon mankind. The more similar, the more ordinary people, have always had and are still having the advantage; the more select, more refined, more unique, and difficultly comprehensible, are liable to stand alone; they succumb to accidents in their isolation, and seldom propagate themselves. One must appeal to immense opposing forces, in order to thwart this natural, all-too-natural PROGRESSUS IN SIMILE, the evolution of man to ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of a great man. Moreover, she was not in the least what one expects an old person to be. Old persons ought to take up the position of audience. They ought, above all things, to give a rest to the minds of young people, who, goodness knows, have enough to worry them, by being easily comprehensible. With mother one knew exactly where one was; one knew everything that had happened to her and how she had felt about it, and there was no question of anything fresh ever happening to her. But from the deep, slow breaths this woman drew, from the warmth that seemed to radiate from her, from ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... though terror-stricken by the French, was still actuated by hatred to the English, and a jealousy of their power in the Mediterranean; and in this so strange and senseless a manner, that we must join the extremes of imbecility and treachery in the same cabinet, in order to find it comprehensible. Though the very existence of Naples and Sicily, as a nation, depended wholly and exclusively on British support; though the royal family owed their personal safety to the British fleet; though not only their ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... for Colon. And at Colon he found himself once more among his own kind. Scattered up and down the Isthmus he found an occasional Northerner to whom he was not unknown, engineers and construction men who could talk of things that were comprehensible to him, gamblers and adventurers who took him poignantly back to the life he had left so far behind him. Along that crowded and shifting half-way house for the tropic-loving American he found more than one passing friend to whom ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... for the rapid acceptance of his new theology hard to understand. The movement was essentially popular and national. It appealed to the pious-minded who desired a simplification of Christian dogma and a comprehensible method of salvation. It also appealed to the worldly minded who longed to seize ecclesiastical lands and revenues. Above all, it appealed to the patriots who were tired of foreign despotism and of abuses which they traced ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... the murder of Leopold Winkler, then he will take the next train back and give himself up to the authorities. That he makes no such move as long as he thinks there is no suspicion on any one else, no possibility that any one else could suffer the consequences of his deed—is quite comprehensible—it is only natural ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... or anybody else's does not matter),—in the Huguenot and his mistress, or the ivy behind them,—in the face of Ophelia, or in the flowers floating over it as it sank;—much more, so far as he saw what instantly comprehensible nobleness of passion might be in the binding of a handkerchief,—in the utterance of two words, "Trust me" or the like: he prevailed, and rightly prevailed, over all prejudice and opposition; to that extent he will in what he has done, or may yet ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Valedolmo is stupid for a man; but why don't you try mountain-climbing? Everybody finds that diverting. There's a guide here who speaks English—really comprehensible English. He's engaged for to-morrow, but after that I dare say he'll be free. Gustavo can tell you ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... of suffering, perhaps, in a blind rudimentary way, on which Julia's sensibilities naturally declined to linger. She so fully understood her own reasons for leaving him that she disliked to think they were not as comprehensible to her husband. She was haunted, in her analytic moments, by the look of perplexity, too inarticulate for words, with which he had acquiesced to ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
