"Assignable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... anon by some who had escaped from the affair, they took the hint, and, running up along the slope of the Acrocorinthus, succeeded in repelling an attack of the Argives and the rest. While they were still deliberating what they ought to do, down fell a capital from its column—without assignable cause, whether of earthquake or wind. Also, when they sacrificed, the aspect of the victims was such that the soothsayers said it was better to descend from ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... ardour of thought, through love of the poet's undying art, would, night after night for many hours, debar the inroads of sleep. The number of schools which I have particularised as having attended may occasion some surprise at the deficiency of my scholarship. For this, various reasons are assignable, all of which, however, hinge upon these two formidable obstacles—the inconveniency of local position, and the thoughtless inattention of youth. In remote country places, long and rough ways, conjoined not unfrequently with wild weather, require that children, before they can enter school, be pretty ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... were but to wars that else must have been? What shall I say of the singular affability of his manners, of his filial piety to his mother, [Footnote: He was the son of Paulus Aemilius, and the adopted son of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus. His mother, divorced for no assignable reason, was left very poor, and her son, on the death of the widow of his adopting father, gave her the entire patrimony that came into his possession.] of his generosity to his sisters, [Footnote: After his mother's death, law and custom authorized him to resume what he ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... ought to fear, but for whom, nevertheless, the very thought of death is fraught with all manner of terrors. As some are naturally afraid in the absence of light, and tremble with fear at being alone in a dark and lonely dwelling, or spot, or place, so there are many who, without assignable reason, other than a native tendency, are appalled at the ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... the like. Neither is such a distinction applicable at all to our internal bodily sensations, which give no sign of themselves when unaccompanied with pain, and even when we are most conscious of them, have often no assignable place in the human frame. Who can divide the nerves or great nervous centres from the mind which uses them? Who can separate the pains and pleasures of the mind from the pains and pleasures of the body? The words 'inward and outward,' 'active and passive,' 'mind ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... one of those afternoons, when all has gone smoothly and pleasantly, in school. There has been nothing to excite strong interest or emotion; and there has been, (as every teacher knows there sometimes will be,) without any assignable cause which he can perceive, a calm, and quiet, and happy spirit, diffused over the minds and countenances of the little assembly. His evening communication should accord with this feeling, and he should make it the occasion to promote ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... applicable to two or more in the same sense. The existence of other individuals to whom it applies may be highly improbable; but, if it be logically possible, that is enough. On the other hand, the enumeration of infinite peculiarities is certainly impossible. Therefore proper names have no assignable connotation. The only escape from this reasoning lies in falling back upon time and place, the principles of individuation, as constituting the connotation of proper names. Two things cannot be at the same ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... of the Charles River, in Massachusetts, possessed a flock of fifteen ewes and a ram of the ordinary kind. In the year 1791, one of the ewes presented her owner with a male lamb, differing, for no assignable reason, from its parents by a proportionally long body and short bandy legs, whence it was unable to emulate its relatives in those sportive leaps over the neighbours' fences, in which they were in the habit of indulging, much to the good ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... say that the ether is organized in such a complex and delicate way as to be like a negative image or counterpart of the world of sensible matter. The latter view is no doubt ingenious, but it is gratuitous. It is sustained not by scientific analogy, but by the desire to find some assignable use for the energy which is constantly escaping from visible matter into invisible ether. The moment we ask how do we know that this energy is not really wasted, or that it is not put to some use wholly undiscoverable by human intelligence, this assumption of an organized ether is at once seen ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... that, so far as you know, your husband capriciously struck you out of his will, without assignable reason or motive for doing so, and without other obvious explanation of his conduct than that he acted in this matter entirely under the influence of Mrs. Lecount, I will immediately take Counsel's ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... awakened, without any assignable cause, hours before my usual time. I tried to compose myself to sleep again. The effort was useless. Such a restlessness possessed me that I was not even able to lie still in the bed. My husband was sleeping soundly by my side. In the fear of disturbing him ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... Southwards still, over the hills of Parnassus, which remained for the inspired women of Boeotia the centre of his presence, he comes to Thebes, and the family of Cadmus. From Boeotia he passes to Attica; to the villages first; at last to Athens; at an assignable date, under Peisistratus; out of the country, into ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... heart could not grasp the romantic criterion with which Alice was wont to measure action. Her mind was single, impulsive, narrow and direct in all its movements. She loved, hated, desired, caressed, repulsed, not for any assignable reason more solid or more luminous than "because." She adored Rene and wanted him near her. He was a hero in her imagination, no matter what he did. Little difference was it to her whether he hauled logs for the English or smoked his pipe in idleness ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... poetry or of painting, if scenery and such accidental circumstances are to be regarded as every thing, and original character as nothing. But it may reasonably be doubted if ever natural scenery has any assignable influence on the productions of genius. The idea has probably arisen from the impression which the magnificence of nature makes on persons of cultivated minds, who fall into the mistake of considering the elevated emotions ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... and Herbert H. Knibbs. To these two authors, as well as others who have permitted me to make use of their work, the grateful thanks of the collector are extended. As will be seen, almost one-half of the selections have no assignable authorship. I am equally grateful ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... at the west end of Victoria Street began to raise its voice in a song, and by the time that was over, and the bells had burst out from the Abbey towers, a rumour had somehow made its entrance that Felsenburgh was to be present at the ceremony. There was no assignable reason for this, neither then nor afterwards; in fact, the Evening Star declared that it was one more instance of the astonishing instinct of human beings en masse; for it was not until an hour later that even the Government ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... the face of the person she had seen come out of my bedroom. I think this a very tidy ghost story; and I am bound to add, as a proper commentary on it, that I have never inhabited a house which affected me with a sense of such intolerable melancholy gloominess as this; without any assignable reason whatever, either in its situation or any of its conditions. My maid, to the present day, persists in every detail (and without the slightest variation) of this experience of hers, absolutely rejecting my explanation of it; that ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... set forth in the preceding chapter, all mental states are effects of physical causes, it follows that what are called mental faculties and operations are, properly speaking, cerebral functions, allotted to definite, though not yet precisely assignable, parts of the brain. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... stands, Signor Marchese. An idea was started at one moment that the old friar at St. Apollinare might have been the man. Strangely enough he also was in or near the Pineta much about the same time. But the total absence of all assignable motive—an infirm octogenarian; no, that is not it. But the truth is, Signor Marchese, that our inquiries with reference to this Padre Fabiano have brought to light facts which tend to make the case stronger ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... nothing to call him to my recollection," he says. To give his logic any value, he should constantly when (as far as he knew) awake, have had dreams that "shocked" him. Then one coincidence would have had no assignable ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... groupings as in water, and in gases such as hydrogen, oxygen, and so forth, where two, three, or more atoms cohere so strongly as to enable the molecules to act under ordinary circumstances like simple particles. Any or all of these molecules and atoms may be separated by any assignable distance from each other. Thus, in common air the molecules, though rapidly changing their positions, are on the average about two hundred and fifty times their own diameter apart. This is a distance relatively greater than the distance ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... high lards brought down to the ocean. But, taking into account the internal forces of the earth, which, upheaving the sea bottom, give rise to new land, he thought that these operations of degradation and elevation might compensate each other: and that thus, for any assignable time, the general features of our planet might remain what they are. And inasmuch as, under these circumstances, there need be no limit to the propagation of animals and plants, it is clear that the consistent working ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... all men everywhere believe in the existence of a supreme Being or beings to whom they are morally responsible, is a strong argument in favor of its truth. So universal an effect must have a cause as universal, otherwise we have an effect without any assignable cause. Certain is it that this argument makes the burden of proof to rest upon those who deny the existence ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... liked so much to stay and listen to the rustic tale or talk. The parlor was very depressingly papered, but on its walls I had the exalted company of his Majesty the King, their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales, the late Premier, the Marquis of Salisbury, and, for no assignable reason except a general fitness for high society, the twelve Apostles in Da Vinci's Last Supper, together with an appropriate view of ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... sharp remedy, however. For on the morrow of this resolve the owners of so many good houses, fields, and gardens, all the outward and visible of Uppingham School, became, for a term without assignable limit, landless and homeless men, and the Headmaster almost as much disburdened of his titular realm as if he were a bishop in partibus or the chief of a nomad caravan. It was a sharp remedy; but those who submitted ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... priests and laymen flocked to hear him, and so supreme was his influence that under his direction the people gladly undertook extensive works of bridge building and road making. Like Shotoku Taishi, his name is associated by tradition with achievements not properly assignable to him, as the invention of the potter's wheel—though it had been in use for centuries before his time—and the production of various works of art which can scarcely have occupied the attention of a religious zealot. By order of the Empress Gensho, Gyogi was thrown into ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Buenos Ayres told me that he considered it as fifty per cent less valuable. Hence the Cape de Verd salt is constantly imported, and is mixed with that from these salinas. The purity of the Patagonian salt, or absence from it of those other saline bodies found in all sea-water, is the only assignable cause for this inferiority: a conclusion which no one, I think, would have suspected, but which is supported by the fact lately ascertained, that those salts answer best for preserving cheese which contain most of ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... of time and to liberate itself from the transient accretions of a living, and therefore constantly changing, mode of speech. He strove after an enfranchisement of utterance, devoid of stratifying peculiarities, assignable to no age or epoch, and understood of all. A soul-shaking thought, prevalent throughout Christendom, was felt imaginatively by a highly endowed poet, and, like impetuous volcanic fires that fling heavenward mighty fragments and boulders of mountain in their red release, ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... planets in their places; the assimilation with falling bodies was the solution. But, say many persons, is not gravity itself a mystery? We say No; gravity has passed through all the stages of legitimate and possible explanation; it is the most highly generalised of all physical facts, and by no assignable transformation could it be made more intelligible than it is. It is singularly easy of comprehension; its law is exactly known; and, excepting the details of calculation, in its more complex workings, there is nothing to complain of, nothing to rectify, nothing to pretend ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... universal contempt for females even among cannibals. Thus it is known that the Peruvian Casibos never eat women. It is natural to jump to the conclusion that this is due to respect for the female sex. It is, however, as Tschudi shows, assignable to exactly the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... result—a result that normally would not have happened. Yet, on this particular day, it could not have happened differently. It had been a red-letter day from the beginning, from no assignable cause an exciting joyous day, and the thrill of the hard fast game, the shower, the rub, the walk, had brought her up to what engineers speak of ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... assignable to one of the three following causes, or a combination of these: First, hereditary or inborn weakness; second, unfavorable conditions of food, surroundings, etc.; third, bacteria or ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... the same inheritance of enforced conformity that we glide so easily towards the studied increase of pain. If some men were able to perceive what lay in the other scale, if they made a free choice, after deliberation, between well-defined and well-argued opinions, then what happened is not assignable to invincible causes, and history must turn from general and easy explanation to track the sinuosities of a tangled thread. In Mr. Lea's acceptation of ecclesiastical history intolerance was handed down as a rule of life from the days of St. Cyprian, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... male;" and Mr. Tegetmeier, "that a gamecock, though disfigured by being dubbed, and with his hackles trimmed, would be accepted as readily as a male retaining all his natural ornaments."[126] Evidence is adduced that a female pigeon will sometimes turn antipathy to a particular male without any assignable cause; or, in other cases, will take a strong fancy to some one bird, and will desert her own mate for him; but it is not stated that superiority or inferiority of plumage has anything to do with these fancies. Two instances are indeed given, of male birds being rejected, which had lost their ornamental ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... assumed the prefix of De, for no assignable reason, was the son of a butcher and Nonconformist in Cripplegate, who had the youth educated for the ministry. Daniel, however, preferred a more exciting occupation, and took part in the unfortunate expedition of the ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... be asked, if we have no prostitutes from the free class of society among ourselves. I answer, in no assignable proportion. With general truth, it might be said, that there are none. When such a case occurs, it is among the rare evils of society. And apart from other and better reasons, which we believe to exist, it is plain that it must be so, from the comparative absence of temptation. ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... seems written in these few words. Edward FitzGerald adds to this his own note: "Miss Ridout I remember—an elegant spinster; friend of my mother's. About 1825 she had been at Sidmouth, and known Crabbe." The son quotes some very ardent verses belonging to this period, but not assignable to any particular charmer, such as ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... to middle age, or in a stage approaching to superannuation? The idea of Kant presupposed a certain average duration as belonging to a planet of our particular system; and supposing this known, or discoverable, and that a certain assignable development belonged to a planet so circumstanced as ours, then in what particular stage of that development may we, the tenants of this respectable little planet Tellus, reasonably be conceived ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... in full military uniform, on horseback, galloping first to one place and then to another, and backing his horse among the people, and prancing, and curvetting, and shouting in a most alarming manner, and making himself very hoarse in the voice, and very red in the face, without any assignable cause or reason whatever. Officers were running backwards and forwards, first communicating with Colonel Bulder, and then ordering the sergeants, and then running away altogether; and even the very privates themselves looked from behind their glazed ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... upon, there was not a touch of latent Insanity; whereof indeed the actual condition of these Documents in Capricornus and Aquarius is no bad emblem. His so unlimited Wanderings, toilsome enough, are without assigned or perhaps assignable aim; internal Unrest seems his sole guidance; he wanders, wanders, as if that curse of the Prophet had fallen on him, and he were 'made like unto a wheel.' Doubtless, too, the chaotic nature of these Paper-bags aggravates our obscurity. ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Political Economy is the vivacious, acute and practically not unskillful, but sophistically superficial Macleod. (Elements of Political Economy, 1858, ch. 3, Dictionary, 1862, v. Credit.) The creditor's assignable right of demand, he considers immaterial capital. While bills of lading, warehouse receipts, dock yard receipts etc., only represent goods, the bank note is new goods. Even metallic money has only a credit-value, inasmuch as it can ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... effect appears to be a natural consequence of the action: the evolved substances are expelled from the decomposing mass (518. 519.), not drawn out by an attraction which ceases to act on one particle without any assignable reason, while it continues to act on another of the same kind: and whether the poles be metal, water, or air, still the substances are evolved, and are sometimes set free, whilst at others they unite to the matter of the poles, according to the chemical nature of the ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... asked me whether he should not hail them before they got farther away from us; frankly confessing, as he put the question, that his horse was nothing like equal to the pace of the horse ahead. Mechanically, without assignable purpose or motive, I declined his offer, and told him simply to follow at any distance he could. While the words passed my lips, a strange sensation stole over me: I seemed to be speaking as the mere mouthpiece of some other voice. From feeling ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... Any copyright is assignable in law by any instrument of writing, but such assignment must be recorded in the office of the Librarian of Congress within sixty days from its date. The fee for this record and certificate ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... objects of our own experience. Hence, to suppose that the Deity constructed the eye by any such process of thought as we know that men construct watches, is to make an assumption not only incapable of proof, but destitute of any assignable degree of likelihood. Take an example. The relation in which a bee stands to the external world is to a large extent a matter of observation, and, therefore, no one imagines that the formation of its scientifically-constructed ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... In many parts it did not conquer the population but so to speak built fortresses and left garrisons. It is probable that the Buddhism of Andhra, Kalinga and the south was represented by little more than such outposts. They included Amaravati, where portions of the ruins seem assignable to about 150 A.D., and Ajanta, where some of the cave paintings are thought to be as late as the sixth century. But of neither site can we give any continuous history. In southern India the introduction of Buddhism took place under the auspices of Asoka himself, though his inscriptions ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... mineral bodies as "de lames infiniment minces;" but who is it does not see, that these infinitely thin plates are no other than bodies of three dimensions, contrary to the supposition; for, infinitely thin, means a certain thickness; but the smallest possible or assignable thickness differs as much from a ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... philosophy, and persecution; and in three centuries took nearly undisputed possession, amongst many nations, of the temples of the ejected deities. He must farther believe that the original performers, in these prodigious frauds on the world, acted not only without any assignable motive, but against all assignable motive; that they maintained this uniform constancy in unprofitable falsehoods, not only together, but separately, in different countries, before different tribunals, under all sorts of examinations and cross-examinations, and in defiance of the gyves, ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... a merino sheep and a crossbred sheep each cost the same sum, say, for convenience, L10, to rear and maintain; and that there are no special costs assignable to the wool and the mutton respectively, as, of ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... facts, like the Djin from the jar which the fishermen so incautiously opened; and like the Djin again, being vaporous, shifting, and indefinable, but unmistakably gigantic. However modest the bases of one's calculation may be, the minimum of time assignable to the coal period remains ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... imbecile. There is not in the whole family, for generations back, a single case of feeble-mindedness, nor of disease that would undermine the nervous organization. Close scrutiny does not reveal a single assignable cause. She came, as an accident, to blight an otherwise ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... common feature. Sudden flashes of heat may be noticed passing over the patient's face. He is liable also to palpitations. The pulse is very variable, generally too slow. Extreme emaciation, without any other assignable cause for it, may be set down as another very ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... hope for the arrival of a time when death will cease to be anything but the effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the destruction, ever slower and slower, of the vital forces? May we not believe that the duration of the middle interval between birth and this destruction has no assignable term? Man will never become immortal, but is it a mere chimera to hold that the term fixed to his years is slowly and perpetually receding further and further from the moment at ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... pregnant female we find the young ones to possess gills like aquatic salamanders; and when placed in the water the young ones swim about like the tadpoles of the water newt. Now, to suppose that these utterly useless gills were specially designed is to suppose design without any assignable purpose; for even the far-fetched assumption that a unity of ideal is the cause of organic affinities, becomes positively ridiculous when applied to the case of embryonic structures, which are destined to disappear ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... Society for expenses incurred in supporting the Africans recaptured from the bark Pons; the defeat of the resolution creating the rank of Lieutenant-General; and the act founding a Military Asylum for the relief of disabled soldiers. The French Spoliation Bill, the bill making Land Warrants Assignable, the bill granting ten million acres of the public lands to the states for the relief of the indigent insane, and all the proposals for new steamship lines, as well as Mr. Collins's application for an additional appropriation ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... control of the person that is handling it, and moves as he moves it, similarly this universe, controlled by actions done in Time, moves as those actions move it. Seeing that the births and deaths of creatures take place without any (assignable) cause and in perfect wantonness, grief and joy are perfectly needless. Although this entanglement of thy heart is a mere delusion, still, if it pleaseth thee, O king, perform expiatory rites (for washing thyself free of thy so-called sin). It is heard, O Partha, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown |
