"Imperfection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arise, whether from a natural imperfection of the rational faculties, or from want of education, or from drowning it wholly in bestial and sensual pleasures, is doubtless one of the highest misfortunes which can befall any man whatsoever; for it not only leaves him little better ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... differ slightly on each island of the group." ("Life and Letters of Charles Darwin", I. page 82.) In the famous tenth and eleventh chapters of the "Origin", the palaeontological evidence is examined at length and the imperfection of the geological record is strongly emphasised. The conclusion is reached, that, in view of this extreme imperfection, palaeontology could not reasonably be expected to yield complete and convincing proof of the evolutionary theory. "I look at the geological record as a history of ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... seedlings, but all turned out to be worthless; the trees after several years growth were small, or grew mostly in bush form. They blossomed every spring but never set any fruit on account of some imperfection in the flowers. Four years ago we started to use the Compass cherry as the male parent, and this combination is more promising. The seedlings make a good growth and a fairly good sized tree, practically as hardy as the Compass cherry. The seedlings ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... free from human attributes. He recognizes none but negative attributes; in other words, he defines God by means of negations only. For instance, asserting that the Supreme Being is omniscient or omnipotent, is not investing Him with a positive attribute, it is simply denying imperfection. The student knows that in the history of the doctrine of attributes, the recognition of negative attributes marks a great advance in philosophic reasoning. Maimonides holds that the conception of the Deity as a pure abstraction is the only one ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... searching for the minutest effects, we may gradually approach, though we may never reach, absolute exactness. Here we see the first difficulty in reaching a definite conclusion. One cannot be quite sure that a deviation is not due to some imperfection in mathematical method until he and his fellows have exhausted the subject so thoroughly as to show that no error is possible. This ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... way here is a passage of Festus, who is a great authority on matters of Roman antiquity, because he made his excerpts from Verrius Flaccus; it is only in a few points that, in my opinion, either of them was mistaken; all the rest of the mistakes in Festus may be accounted for by the imperfection of the abridgment, Festus not always understanding Verrius Flaccus. The statement of Festus to which I here allude is that Tarquinius Superbus increased the number of the Vestals in order that each tribe might have two. With this we must ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... remained undecided whether the creature which stood before him could possibly be the same with her, who had, in a different dress, made such an impression on his imagination, or indeed was the imperfect creature she now represented. She had at once all that could mark the imperfection of hearing, and all that could show the wonderful address by which nature so often makes up of the deficiency. There was the lip that trembles not at any sound—the seeming insensibility to the conversation that passed around; ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... my visit at my friend's house that I first witnessed the peculiar manner in which the markets in Mizora are conducted. Everything, as usual, was fastidiously neat and clean. The fruit and vegetables were fresh and perfect. I examined quantities of them to satisfy myself, and not a blemish or imperfection could be found on any. None but buyers were attending market. Baskets of fruit, bunches of vegetables and, in fact, everything exhibited for sale, had the quality and the price labeled upon it. Small ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... but determinedly forbore. Was there some miracle at work here; like those Fire-balls, and supernal and infernal prodigies, which, in the case of the Jewish Mysteries, have also more than once scared-back the Alien? Be this as it may, such failure on my part, after best efforts, must excuse the imperfection of this sketch; altogether incomplete, yet the completest I could give of a Sect ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... a Kanaka advantages himself by a three-years course in civilization in Queensland, is a necklace and an umbrella and a showy imperfection in the art of swearing, it must be that all the profit of the traffic goes to the white man. This could be twisted into a plausible argument that the traffic ought to be ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of course, that he had for a moment doubted it? It was coming back to him now, clothed with the mortal pathos of its imperfection. She was dearer to him—unspeakably dearer, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... much of the south coast as totally unknown. It is necessary to mention also, that what he says immediately before, in allusion to the discoveries made by Captain Furaeaux, must submit to correction. That officer committed some errors, owing, it would appear, to the imperfection of preceding accounts; and he left undetermined the interesting question as to the existence of a connection betwixt Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales. The opinion which he gave as to this point, on very insufficient data certainly, viz. that there is "no strait ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... fox-hounds, bordering on perfection, is a task of no ordinary difficulty. The best proof of it is to be found in the few sportsmen that have succeeded in it. Not only is every good quality obtained if possible, but every imperfection or fault is avoided. The highest virtue in a fox-hound is his being true to the line his game has gone, and a stout runner at the end of the chase. He must also be a patient hunter when there is a cold scent and ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... thou complain," she said tenderly, "when it is to that very imperfection of our enjoyment that we are indebted for its continuance? I loved thee a few minutes since, now I love thee a thousand times more, and perhaps I should love thee less if thou hadst carried my ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of the said College of Montreal aforesaid, as well in all Our Courts of Record, as elsewhere, and by all and singular Judges, Justices, Officers, Ministers, and other subjects whatsoever, of Us, Our Heirs and Successors, any misrecital, non-recital, omission, imperfection, defect, matter, cause, or thing whatsoever, to the contrary thereof, in anywise notwithstanding, without fine or fee, great or small, to be for the same in any manner rendered, done, or paid to Us in Our hanaper, or elsewhere, to Our ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... the Mount is the greatest lesson in holiness and is from the only one that can teach holiness. Great lessons can be taught by all persons, taught of God, but 'tis better to drink at the fountain than out of a stale bucket. Besides all have imperfection. "To the law and to the testimony if they speak not according to this word it is because there is no light in them." "They shall all be taught of God." "If any lack wisdom, let him ask of God who giveth to all liberally and upbraideth not, and ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... Mussulmans, who would have been subjected to another day's abstinence if it had not been perceived till the succeeding evening. The colonel, however, slyly remarks, that "it was very odd that the Hindoos could not see the new moon," and hints that their imperfection of vision was shared by himself, but it was otherwise decided by the Faithful; and he proceeded, amid the noisy rejoicings of the Moslem feast of Bukra-Eed, (called by the Turks Bairam,) by Najeena, the Birmingham of Upper India, to Nujeebabad. Here resided, on a pension of 60,000 rupees ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... Gamblers? No Man Understands Iron We Long for Immortal Imperfection—We Can't Have It. Three Water-Drops Converse Did We Once Live on the Moon? William Henry Channing's Symphony The Existence of God—Parable of the Blind Kittens Have the Animals Souls? Jesus' Attitude ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... "townsmen" at such a critical juncture, for they would look for the like concession at other times. The Londoners were not peculiar in their desire to have their own officers, according to the earl's own showing, for the letter continues:—"You and my lords all know the imperfection at this time, how few leaders you have, and the gentlemen of the counties here are likewise very loth to have any placed with them to command under them, but well pleased to have some expert man with them to give them advice." Two years later a code of regulations for ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... the common good but to his own private purposes. In modern terms, it is a simple, rough-and-ready attempt to solve that constant problem of politics, how efficient government is to be combined with popular control. This problem arises from the imperfection of human nature, apparent in rulers as well as in ruled, and if the principle which attempts to solve it be admitted as a principle of importance in the formation of the best constitution, then the starting-point of politics will be ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... feelings, impulses, and passions; and then hangs and burns his brother, who, as dogmatically as he, makes out a different map and inventory. The common understanding has no humility. Its God is an incarnate Divinity. Imperfection imposes its own limitations on the Illimitable, and clothes the Inconceivable Spirit of the Universe in forms that come within the grasp of the senses and the intellect, and are derived from that infinite and imperfect nature which is but ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... inquiring what light international statistics are capable of throwing on the relations between poverty and crime. At the outset of this inquiry we are at once met by the old difficulty respecting the value of international criminal statistics. The imperfection of those statistics is a matter it is always important to bear in mind, but in spite of this circumstance the light which they shed on the problem of poverty and crime is not ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... Imperfection of human disposition and character is a fruitful source from which mistakes arise. Here is a person so slow as to be a trial to nearly every one about him, while here is another who, because he is so fast, is continually injuring the ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry
... our greatest enemies. They would lead us to question every point of duty, and induce us to waver at every step. They arose only from remaining imperfection, and were always evidence of sin. Our only way was to dismiss them immediately, repent, and confess them. They were deadly sins, and would condemn us to hell, if we should die without confessing them. ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... All those nations which envy our greatness would insult our downfall, a downfall which would be all our own work; and the history of our calamities would be told thus: England had institutions which, though imperfect, yet contained within themselves the means of remedying every imperfection; those institutions her legislators wantonly and madly threw away; nor could they urge in their excuse even the wretched plea that they were deceived by false promises; for, in the very petition with the prayer of which they were weak ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... why there is evil in existence is the same as why there is imperfection, or, in other words, why there is creation at all. We must take it for granted that it could not be otherwise; that creation must be imperfect, must be gradual, and that it is futile to ask ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... advisable, while South Midian feels like Thebes after Cairo. The coast climate is simply perfect, save and except when El-Ayli, the storm-wind from 'Akabat Aylah, is abroad. My meteorological journal was carefully kept, despite the imperfection of the instruments. Mr. Clarke registered the observations during my illness; Mr. Duguid and Nasir Kaptan made simultaneous observations on board the ships; and Dr. Maclean kindly corrected the instrumental errors ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... his own light in blunt disobedience. For it was his belief that while others speculated he knew all. He knew where the plots had failed; he knew the man who had bent and doubled. In the patriotic cause, perfect arrangements are crowned with perfect success, unless there is an imperfection of the instruments; for the cause is blessed by all superior agencies. Such was his governing idea. His arrangements had always been perfect; hence the deduction was a denunciation of some one particular person. He pointed out the traitor here, the traitor there; and in one or two cases ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... shame those that are spoken of in the story, but to take away all trust in created beings, by revealing the trouble to which these are liable, and this to the end that we may fix and rest our hope on Him alone who is perfect, and without whom every man is only imperfection." ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... theory. Many can, I think, be satisfactorily answered. Natura non facit saltum answers some of the most obvious. The slowness of the change, and only a very few individuals undergoing change at any one time, answers others. The extreme imperfection of ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... out to toil desperately in adventurous conditions. A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing. Just nothing—like a mere adventurer. Those men understood the nature of their work, but more or less dimly, in various degrees of imperfection. The best and greatest of their leaders even had never seen it clearly, because of its magnitude and the remoteness of its end. This is the common fate of mankind, whose most positive achievements are born from dreams and visions followed loyally ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... I was consulted about the previous case, to notice at an early period any symptom of this nature in her children, the fact was immediately attended to. The affection was evidently in the hip; there was imperfection in the gait, and pain upon pressing over the joint. A blister was applied, perfect rest to the limb enjoined, and steel medicines ordered; and in a fortnight the motions of the joint were restrained more effectually by the application of strips ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... susceptible to that look of hers. It suggested incarnate conscientiousness, and seemed incompatible with human imperfection or unworthy ambitions. He was too wroth to relent altogether, but he compressed his lips and returned her look searchingly, as though ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... cement differs from Portland cement in degree only. It is made by calcining and grinding a limestone rock containing naturally enough clayey matter (silica and alumina) to make a cement that will harden under water. Owing to the imperfection and irregularity of the natural rock mixture, natural cement is weaker and less uniform than Portland cement. Natural cement concrete is suitable for work in which great unit strength or uniformity of quality is not essential. It is never used for ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... physical habits already referred to should also be acquired. Furthermore, it is the sacred duty of the parent to see to it that the child is not handicapped through physical defects of eye or ear, enlarged tonsils, adenoids, decayed teeth, or by any other common imperfection which may be easily and permanently remedied if taken in time, but which, if neglected, may cause untold suffering and ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... on my part! That was not difficult to believe. Fully conscious of my weakness and imperfection, my heart overflowed with gratitude. I had distressed myself, fearing I might have stained my baptismal robe, and this assurance, coming as it did from the lips of a director, a man of wisdom and holiness, such as our Mother St. Teresa desired, seemed to come from God Himself. Father ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... relation,—to the divine nature by his actual perfections, to the human nature by his participation in the same animal frailties and capacities of fleshly temptation. No other vinculum could bind the two postulates together, of an absolute perfection in the end proposed, and yet of utter imperfection in the ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... the subject to him. I finished the geological evidence chapters yesterday; they are very fine and very striking, but I cannot see they are such forcible objections as you still hold them to be. I would say that you still in your secret soul underrate the imperfection of the Geological Record, though no language can be stronger or arguments fairer and sounder against it. Of course I am influenced by Botany, and the conviction that we have not in a fossilised condition a fraction ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... perfect discernment of the law and of the facts of the case, and of the application of the one to the other, and who was perfectly able to keep the law. By a reflex principle, a man judges of his own act, taking account of the imperfection of his knowledge and the limitations of his power. Probabilism steps in, only where a case is practically insoluble to an agent upon direct principles. The probabilist thereupon leaves the direct speculative doubt unsolved. He relinquishes the attempt of determining what a man should ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... regulating the primary assemblies must not be estimated too highly. The new law of election did not prevent, and perhaps did not even materially impede, the contemporary formation of a new politically privileged order. It is certainly not owing to the mere imperfection of tradition, defective as it undoubtedly is, that we are nowhere able to point to a practical influence exercised by this much- discussed reform on the course of political affairs. An intimate connection, we may add, subsisted between this reform, and the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... can justify the assumption of any power not granted. The powers conferred upon the Government and their distribution to the several departments are as clearly expressed in that sacred instrument as the imperfection of human language will allow, and I deem it my first duty not to question its wisdom, add to its provisions, evade its requirements, or nullify ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Millard Fillmore • Millard Fillmore
... parents, who had never been in slavery, and had never followed any menial or degrading occupation; and also that both her parents should be living. To be an orphan was considered, it seems, in some sense an imperfection. ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... laird of Balmawhapple, ... he had no imperfection but that of keeping light company at a time; such as Jinker the horse-couper, and Gibby Gaethroughwi't, the piper o' Cupar; 'O' whilk follies, Mr Saunderson, he'll mend, he'll mend,' pronounced the bailie. 'Like sour ale in summer,' ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... conclude that, being reconciled by faith, we are accounted righteous for Christ's sake, not for the sake of the Law or our works, but that this inchoate fulfilling of the Law pleases on account of faith, and that, on account of faith, there is no imputation of the imperfection of the fulfilling of the Law, even though the sight of our impurity terrifies us. Now, if justification is to be sought elsewhere, our love and works do not therefore justify. Far above our purity, yea, far above the Law itself ought to be placed ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... his hand, and before one o'clock on the same night he had ceased to philosophize. The words with which his pen ended its long and laborious career, are characteristic enough, both of the general imperfection of human knowledge, and of the particular quality of Schlegel's mind. The Germans have a proverb:—"Alles waere gut waere kein ABER dabei"—"every thing would be good were it not for an ABER—for a HOWEVER—for a BUT." This is the general human vice that lies in that significant ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... possible. The most loving and indulgent parents are now and again ill-tempered, fretful, or nervous. The fathers were men subject to all the limitations of other men. Granting these limitations and making due allowance for human imperfection, the rule of the fathers must still be admired for its wisdom and commended ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... with man individuals, and therefore individual events have to be studied; because every man possesses a character as an individual. And since individuals and events are without number or end, an essential imperfection attaches to history. In the study of it, all that a man learns never contributes to lessen that which he has still to learn. With any real science, a perfection of knowledge is, at any ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... scheme. The claim of the colonists seems to imply a misapprehension of the character of parliament; for parliament is not a mere meeting of delegates, it is an imperial assembly, and its sovereignty is neither derived from the perfection of its constitution nor lessened by its imperfection. Taxation is an attribute of sovereignty, and parliament had a right to tax the colonies because the sovereign power resided in it. Where else could it reside? To deny the right to tax and to admit the right to legislate was inconsistent. How could parliament, in virtue of its sovereign authority, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... advancement in knowledge. Our moral nature is subject to fluctuations; circumstances play upon us, and 'nothing continueth in one stay.' Change is the condition of life. It means growth and happiness; it belongs to the perfection of creatures. But the unchangeableness of God is the negation of all imperfection, it is the negation of all dependence on circumstances, it is the negation of all possibility of decay or exhaustion, it is the negation of all caprice. It is the assurance that His is an underived, self-dependent being, and that with Him ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... designs to be exemplary, is equally blamable and ridiculous. She follows the maxim of Clarissa, of declaring all she thinks to all the people she sees, without reflecting that in this mortal state of imperfection, fig-leaves are as necessary for our minds as our bodies, and 'tis as indecent to show all we think, as all we have. He has no idea of the manners of high life: his old Lord M. talks in the style of a country justice, and his virtuous young ladies romp like the wenches round a maypole. ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... of specific social systems of this type to attain in every region the locally suitable permanent form, in face of those two inveterate enemies of human stability, innovation, and that secular increase in population that security permits. The imperfection of the means of communication rendered political unions of a greater area than that swept by a hundred-mile radius highly unstable. It was a world of small states. Lax empires came and went, at the utmost they were the linking ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... accidentally at odd moments; and then they only ask whether that healthy human life is suited to our streets and trades. Perfection may be attainable or unattainable as an end. It may or may not be possible to talk of imperfection as a means to perfection. But surely it passes toleration to talk of perfection as a means to imperfection. The New Jerusalem may be a reality. It may be a dream. But surely it is too outrageous to say that the New Jerusalem is a reality ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... a nap at a coffee-house. Thus their meeting had the importance of an adventure. They were at once drawn together by secret fibres. Besides, how can we explain sympathies? Why does a certain peculiarity, a certain imperfection, indifferent or hateful in one person, prove a fascination in another? That which we call the thunderbolt is true ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... is that the fortress of Maubeuge, with its garrison of reserve and second line men, had, of course, been at once invested by the Germans when the British and French line had fallen behind it and left it isolated. The imperfection of this fortress I have already described, and the causes of that imperfection. Maubeuge commanded the great railway line leading from Belgium to Paris, which is the main avenue of supply for an invasion or for a retreat, running north-east to south-west ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... method over the direct method of operating the buzzer is that any imperfection in the night-alarm contact at the drop is much less likely to prevent the flow of current of the high-voltage battery 6 than of the low-voltage battery 1, shown in connection with Fig. 274. This is because the higher voltage is much more likely to break down any very thin ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... flatness of the earth be not greater then Huyghens supposed, the margin between the degrees of the meridian measured in France, and the first degrees of the meridian near the Equator, would not be too considerable to be attributed to possible errors of the observers, or to the imperfection of instruments. But, if the observation can be made at the Pole, the difference between the first degree of the meridian nearest the equatorial line, and, for example, the sixty-sixth degree, which crosses the polar circle, will be ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... first the experiments were made with common ice, during the cold freezing weather of the latter end of January 1833; but the results were fallacious, from the imperfection of the arrangements, and the following more unexceptionable form ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... men who point to weak and imperfect Christians as an excuse for their own weak lives; the drunkards and the liars and the oppressors of the poor; the people who heard a thousand sermons full of Gospel truth and despised them because of some imperfection in delivery or elocution; all those men who went through life the betrayers of the home; the selfish politicians, who betrayed their country; the men who read the Bible and believed only the parts that didn't hurt their sensitive feelings; ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... an ordinary man or woman, implies at least modesty, and always procures a kind quarter from the censorious. Who will ridicule a personal imperfection in one that seems conscious, that it is an imperfection? Who ever said an anchoret was poor? But who would spare so very absurd a wrong-head, as should bestow tinsel to make ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... wise, dear Masters,—I have been intending, for a long time past, to show my respect for your Wisdoms by the presentation of some humble picture of mine as a remembrance; but I have been prevented from so doing by the imperfection and insignificance of my works, for I felt that with such I could not well stand before your Wisdoms. Now, however, that I have just painted a panel upon which I have bestowed more trouble than on any other painting, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... the inferiority of the Son to the Father (John xiv. 28). Indeed, as M. Reville well observes, it is part of the very notion of the Logos that it should be imperfect relatively to the absolute God; since it is only its relative imperfection which allows it to sustain relations to the world and to men which are incompatible with absolute perfection, from the Philonian point of view. The Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity finds no support in the fourth ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... two kinds of abstractions. In this particular, languages and philosophies are alike deficient. The less common an idiom is, and the more obscure its terms, the more prolific is it as a source of error: a philosopher is sophistical in proportion to his ignorance of any method of neutralizing this imperfection in language. If the art of correcting the errors of speech by scientific methods is ever discovered, then philosophy will have found its ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... suppose I ought to be ashamed, if we have any right to be ashamed of those idiosyncrasies which are ordered for us. It is the same tendency which often leads us to prefer the picturesque to the beautiful. Mr. Gilpin liked the donkey in a forest landscape better than the horse. A touch of imperfection interferes with the beauty of an object and lowers its level to that of the picturesque. The accident of the holes in the stone of the noble building, for the boys to play marbles with, makes me a boy again and at home with them, after looking with awe upon the statue of Newton, and ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... suggestion, he would expose himself, he feared, to most unjust suspicion. He would, therefore, content himself with remarking that there was an easy-chair in the room, and that the door was far from being air-tight. This latter imperfection, he might perhaps venture to add, was not uncommonly to be met ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... who have not yet the suggestions of sexual desire imparted by the presence of the spermatic fluid, the presence of the prepuce seems to anticipate those promptings. Circumcised boys may, in individual cases, either through precept or example, physical or mental imperfection, be found to practice onanism, but in general the practice can be asserted as being very rare among the children of circumcised races, showing the less irritability of the organs in the class; neither in infancy are they as liable ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... It further implies imperfection, which is equally far from our hopes of happiness beyond the grave. The polyp, which reproduces by a division of itself, is in one sense more complete than we are. The man is in some respects inferior to the woman; the woman in others is subordinate to man. A happy ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... of the sun. This is accidental darkness, whereas in the creation story the word darkness signifies something elemental at the basis of corporeal things. This is what is known as matter, which on account of its darkness, i. e., its imperfection and motionlessness, is the cause of all the blemishes and evils in the world. In receiving forms, however, it acquires motion; its darkness is somewhat diminished, and it appears to the eye through the forms ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... chair-back, and now by the wall behind him. He was very angry, exasperated beyond control by Ellis' raillery and abuse. He forgot himself and uttered a series of peculiar cries very faint and shrill, like the sounds of a voice heard through a telephone when some imperfection of transmission prevents one from distinguishing the words. His mouth was wide open and his tongue rolled about in an absurd way between his teeth. Now and then one could catch a word or two. Ellis went into spasms of laughter, ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... a pad apiece. Neither dared to smoke, Sayre because it might reveal his hiding place, Langdon because smoking might be considered an imperfection ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... Further, that he employs popular phraseology when speaking of natural phenomena, is a statement altogether undeniable. But such remarks are a gross fallacy, and a mere deceit, if it be meant that the statements in the Bible partake of the imperfection of knowledge incident to a rude and primitive state of society. To revive an old illustration,—Is a philosopher therefore a child, because, in addressing children, he uses language adapted to their age and capacity? GOD ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... flashes of genius, the sallies of wit, the little touches of tenderness and romance, and so forth. Very likely; but the actual child does just the reverse of this. Is there a trivial weakness, a venial shortcoming, a microscopic spot of imperfection anywhere? The ruthless little imp has marked it for his own, and will infallibly reproduce it, certainly before your servants, and possibly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... best, saw less its positive perfections than the tiniest opening through which an imperfection might push its way, and in such an hour as this she saw it not at all. Her mouth a trifle firm in its outline, her face a little pale, she went quickly up the wide white stairway and along the open balcony above. There ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... reveal himself to her by the most watchful observance of her conduct. At all times and in all places, by day and by night, her slightest faults were noticed and punished by this still invisible, but now evidently present monitor. At the least imperfection in her conduct, before she had time to accuse and to condemn herself, she felt the blow of a mysterious hand, the warning of an ever-attentive guardian; and the sound of that mystical chastisement was audible to others also. ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... they are easily dislodged and taken. The natives always pitch on a part of a tree for this purpose, which has been perforated by a worm, which indicates that the wood is in an unsound state, and will readily yield to their efforts. If the rudeness and imperfection of the tools with which they work be considered, it must be confessed to be an operation of great toil ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... occupations of a country life—as in superintending the improvements of the mansion, and the planting and disposal of the grounds of Abbotsford; or, as Walpole said of John Evelyn, "unfolding the perfection of the works of the Creator, and assisting the imperfection of the minute works of the creature;" so as to render Abbotsford as Evelyn describes his own dear Wotton, "large and ancient (for there is an air of assumed antiquity in Abbotsford), suitable to those hospitable times, and so sweetly environed with those delicious streams ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... a handy manner at the side of the furrow. Hussey's completed a similar breadth, but deposited the sheaves behind, and consequently several binders were required to follow the machine to clear the course for cutting the next breadth, an imperfection, which, however, it was understood could be easily remedied, and the back deliver replaced by a side one. This breadth was closer cut than the one executed by McCormick's reaper. The two were then tried across the ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... liberty or property without due process of law.[1002] Also, whenever a wrong judgment is rendered, property is taken when it should not have been; yet whatever the ground may be, if the mistake is not so gross as to be impossible in a rational administration of justice, it is no more than the imperfection of man, not a denial of constitutional rights.[1003] In conclusion, the decision of a State court upon a question of local law, however wrong, is not an infraction of the Fourteenth Amendment merely because it is wrong. It is not for the Supreme Court to determine whether there has been an erroneous ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... indeed the strong wing and the swiftness of the king of birds. And yet the works of few really great painters—and among the really great we place Ferrari—leave upon the mind a more distressing sense of imperfection. Extraordinary fertility of fancy, vehement dramatic passion, sincere study of nature, and great command of technical resources are here (as elsewhere in Ferrari's frescoes) neutralised by an incurable defect of the combining and harmonising faculty, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... my hero. He was—well, he considered himself a young man, so we will consider him so too. He was not perfect; but in these days the taste in heroes is for a good deal of imperfection, not to say wickedness. He was not an only son. On the contrary, he had a great many brothers and sisters, and found them quite as objectionable ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... officially recognized. There is a hypocrisy in not recognizing the inadequacy of human eyes and ears to grasp even simple concrete facts. A timidity exists that will not allow the admission of human imperfection. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... Masons utterly refuse to admit as members women, slaves, persons not free-born, and persons having any maim, defect, or imperfection in their bodies; or, at least, the principles of Masonry forbid the admission of all such persons. (Masonic Constitutions, published by authority of the Grand Lodge of Ohio, Art. 3 and 4.) Moore, editor of the Masonic Review, in his Ancient Charges and Regulations of Freemasonry, in commenting on ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... wonder of Dantes, who almost fancied he had to do with one gifted with supernatural powers; still hoping to find some imperfection which might bring him down to a level with human beings, he added, "Then if you were not furnished with pens, how did you manage to write the work ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... perfectly." It is a mistake, however, to suppose that the articulation was by any means perfect, and expectancy no doubt had a great deal to do with my recognition of the sentence; still, the articulation was there, and I recognized the fact that the indistinctness was entirely due to the imperfection of the instrument. I will not trouble you by detailing the various stages through which the apparatus passed, but shall merely say that after a time I produced the form of instrument shown in Fig. 9, which served ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... photograph of a statue, which exhibits a marked contrast of light and shade, and it will tend to confuse and blend the two. The taste for polychrome sculpture in the period of the decline of art was obviously but a returning to the primitive imperfection of art, when an attempt was made to produce illusion in order to please the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... say so, we do not think that foreign powers, when they believe it their duty to provide themselves with materiel of great caliber, will think of supplying themselves from the Essen works, on account of the memorable accidents due to the imperfection of guns coming from this celebrated establishment. The list of burstings that have occurred, not only in Germany, but also in Russia, Bohemia, Italy, Turkey, and Roumania, is already a long one. To speak here ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... belonging, according to Indian ideas of land title, to one or another of the Indian tribes. To determine the several tribal possessions and to indicate the proper boundary lines between individual tribes and linguistic families is a work of great difficulty. This is due more to the imperfection and scantiness of available data concerning tribal claims than to the absence of claimants or to any ambiguity in the minds of the Indians as to the boundaries of their ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... years have been raised from Botany-Bay seeds, this is one of the first which flowered in this country, and one of the most ornamental; to the greenhouse it is indeed an invaluable acquisition: we regret that the size of our paper and the imperfection of the colouring art, will not admit of our giving a representation of it ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 8 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... solid and silent self-sacrifice. It challenges our honesty and our capacity for national work. It is a movement that aims at translating ideas into action. And the more we do, the more we find that much more must be done than we have expected. And this thought of our imperfection must make us humble. ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... but little drudgery at Fairbairn's. There would be something daily to be done, slovenliness to be avoided, and a higher mark of skill to be attained; he would chip and file, as he had practiced scales, impatient of his own imperfection, but resolute ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... efforts to get out through the overhead route to persevere, or too weak with hunger in case of long detention in a pistillate trap where no pollen is, what then? Open a dozen of Jack's pulpits, and in several, at least, dead victims will be found - pathetic little corpses sacrificed to the imperfection of his executive system. Had the flies entered mature spathes, whose walls had spread outward and away from the polished column, flight through the overhead route might have been possible. However glad we may be to make every due allowance for this sacrifice of the higher life ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Egyptian; being handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech. And, if our plates had been sufficiently large, we should have written in Hebrew; but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also; and, if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, ye would have had no imperfection in our record. But the Lord knoweth the things which we have written, and also that none other people knoweth our language; therefore he hath prepared means ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... yielding, for I didn't mean to have any photographs until the experiment was quite finished—to mortify me in future with their record of imperfection; but I'm so nearly perfect now that, really, it's time I had something to tell me how I do look. Of course, as fast as I can lay hands on them, I'm destroying every likeness of the old Nelly. At the studio ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... endless series of beings who, in their several degrees, are in a similar predicament to myself. Perhaps they are; but if so, the moral evil with which I am directly acquainted is made all the blacker by the fact that it is thus but a drop in an infinite ocean of moral imperfection. When, therefore, Professor Flint goes on to say, "We ought to be content if we can show that what God has done is wise and right, and not perplex ourselves as to why He has not done an infinity of other things," I answer, Most certainly; but can we show that what ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... Here, however, the imperfection of economic law is balanced by an extreme uncertainty as to the ideal. Perfect mobility of labor may be economically desirable in a very narrow sense of the term; but it opens out a vista of racial, national and cultural problems, into which ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... "Sire," replied the ingeniously gallant Perez, "she set the world on fire with that; if she had preserved both, she would have consumed it." It is of little consequence. Any slight physical blemish or imperfection was more than counterbalanced by the wit and accomplishments of this seductive woman, whose enchantments, like those of Ninon de l'Enclos, defied the impairing ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... books, as a resource against a rainy day, he goes to some wild spot—the wilder the better—where he roves at will from point to point of interest and beauty, and spends his time in reading, sketching, and—alas, for human imperfection!—shooting. These vagrant habits first brought him into the neighborhood of Donaldson Manor, and he had for two successive summers hunted with the Colonel and sketched with the young ladies, when he was invited to join their Christmas party ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... which had removed some of the most important qualifications under which he himself had accepted the theory? He proceeded to enumerate the] "crushing accumulation of evidence" [during this period, which had proved the imperfection of the geological record; had filled up enormous gaps, such as those between birds and reptiles, vertebrates and invertebrates, flowering and flowerless plants, or the lowest forms of animal and plant life. More: paleontology alone ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... nurtured, existed close at hand, and in profusion. Wastefulness, in this great period of confusion, of the most precious things that we possess: time, thought, and feeling refused to the realities of the world, and lavished on the figments of the imagination. Why this vagueness, this imperfection in all mediaeval representations of life? Because even as men's eyes were withdrawn, by the temporal institutions of those days, from the sight of the fields and meadows which were left to the blind and dumb thing called serf; so also ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... "cure" the surface of his India-rubber, but only the surface. Very thin cloth made by this process was a useful and somewhat durable article; but for any other purpose, it was valueless. The public and signal failure of the mail-bags, together with the imperfection of all his products except his thinnest cloth, suddenly and totally destroyed his rising business. Everything he possessed that was salable was sold at auction to pay his debts. He was again penniless and destitute, with an increased ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... not a thing to be expected at all among mankind, that all laws should be right, or "just and equal." Human legislation must be expected to bear the marks of an imperfection, which attaches itself to everything human. If obedience to government were obligatory, only on the condition that all the laws of that government are just; then, such obedience would mean nothing at all, and every man would be absolved from all allegiance to the government, and from all obligations ...
— The Religious Duty of Obedience to Law • Ichabod S. Spencer
... trouble has preceded death, the incoherence of the first communications does not last. They soon become as clear as the imperfection of the means which the dead man has to use permits. In the George Pelham case, which we shall examine later on, the first communications were also incoherent. Yet George Pelham was soon to become one of the most clear and lucid, if not ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... Bath sath in Chaucer by her husband, we owe them not a word. If we should die tomorrow; I hope her Majesty will find by our writings that the honour of the cause, in the opinion of the world, must be with her Majesty; and that her commissioners are, neither of such imperfection in their reasons, or so barbarous in language, as they who fail not, almost in every line, of some barbarism not to be borne in a grammar-school, although in subtleness and impudent affirming of untruths and denying of truths, her commissioners are not ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the author has endeavored to avail himself of the best sources of information which this country affords; and though, of course, there must be in these volumes, as in all historical accounts, more or less of imperfection and error, there is no intentional embellishment. Nothing is stated, not even the most minute and apparently imaginary details, without what was deemed good historical authority. The readers, therefore, may rely upon the record as the ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... though it portrays But feebly her angelic loveliness. Aught less than perfect is depicted falsely, And fancy must supply the imperfection. ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... supposed the ant-heap to be financially sound. I am no economist, only a writer of fiction; but even as such, I know one thing that bears on the economic question—I know the imperfection of man's faculty for business. The Anarchists, who count some rugged elements of common sense among what seem to me their tragic errors, have said upon this matter all that I could wish to say, and condemned beforehand great economical ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... divides evil into three kinds—imperfection, natural evil and moral evil—including under the last head all the physical evils that arise from human actions, as well as the evils which consists in the guilt of ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... the most part, we can know nothing, and who, instead of serving their country, may be serving only their own interests. The monks are a powerful aid, but they are not sufficient. You inspire great interest in me, and I would not have the imperfection of our governmental system tell in anyway against you. I cannot watch over any one; every one cannot come to me. Tell me, can I be useful to you in any way? Have ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... must not fall into the same error that has produced the socialist question in modern civilised states. The earth belongs to those creatures who live on it and by it in accordance with a higher law than human imperfection has framed. Therefore the soil of our earth must be no object of traffic. Its growth is inseparable from that of the body of the state. I dare not hope that it will be allotted to me or my contemporaries to solve this question, ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... there is a distinction made between; impotence and sterility. Impotence is a loss of power to engage in the sexual act and is common to men. It may be imperfection in the male organ or a lack of sufficient sexual vigor to produce and maintain erection. Sterility is a total loss of capacity in the reproduction of the species, and ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... opportunity; and though I doubt that this man will be the most ungovernable of fools, as all witty and vain fools are, take him as a punishment, since you cannot as a reward: in short, as one given to convince you that there is nothing but imperfection in ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... acquaintance can never be wholly remedied short of our succeeding in becoming acquainted with the whole of duration. It is something, however, to be aware of the flaw, even if we cannot wholly remedy it, and the wider the acquaintance the less is the imperfection in the ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... sea shall beginne to sweate, which sweat for want of aire to drie it up, would turne to putrifaction, then the mats thus lying betweene, will not only exhale and sucke up the sweate, but also keep the corne so coole and dry, that no imperfection shall come unto it: and here is to be noted, that these mats should rather be made of dry white bents, than of flagges and bulrush, for the bent is a firme, dry, crispe thing, and will not relent or sweat of it selfe, but the flag or bulrush is a spungy and soft substance which is never ...
— Agriculture in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Lyman Carrier
... we have the great sun-kindled, constructive imaginations, and a far more numerous class of poets who have a certain kind of moonlight-genius given them to compensate for their imperfection of nature. Their want of mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive to those impressions which stronger minds neglect or never feel at all. Many of them die young, and all of them are tinged with melancholy. There is no more beautiful ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... confidence of the House of Commons, the House of Lords can avail them but little. The matter is of much importance and much difficulty. We can only hope that the opportunity of redressing this manifest imperfection in the structure of the present government will not be lost, and that the House of Commons may recover those political privileges which it has hitherto been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... ALPHA}) The infirmity of human nature flows from four separate and distinct sources: (1) concupiscence (fomes peccati); (2) imperfection of the ethical judgment (imperfectio iudicii); (3) inconstancy of the will (inconstantia voluntatis); and (4) the weariness caused by continued resistance to temptation. In view of these agencies and their combined attack upon the will, ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... discouraging a thing to have my monitress so very good!—I protest I know not how to look up at her! Now, as I am thinking, if I could pull her down a little nearer to my own level; that is to say, could prevail upon her to do something that would argue imperfection, something to repent of; we should jog on much more equally, and be better able to comprehend one another: and so the comfort would be mutual, and the remorse not ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... simple organ can be changed and perfected into a highly developed being or elaborately constructed organ; secondly, the subject of Instinct, or the mental powers of animals; thirdly, Hybridism, or the infertility of species and the fertility of varieties when intercrossed; and fourthly, the imperfection of the Geological Record. In the next chapter I shall consider the geological succession of organic beings throughout time; in the eleventh and twelfth, their geographical distribution throughout space; in the thirteenth, their classification ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... else not relevant to the matter in hand. Secondly, it is naive: it takes the gods of the popular belief for granted essentially as they are; it does not raise the crucial question whether the popular belief is not quite justified in attributing to these higher beings all kinds of imperfection, and wrong in attributing perfection to them, and still less if such beings, whether they are defined as perfect or imperfect, exist at all. It follows that as a whole this form of criticism is outside the ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... the rational powers of man. Man gathers knowledge and transmits it from generation to generation. He is not born with a ready skill, but with a capacity for it. His mind is formed destitute of all connate knowledge, that it may acquire the knowledge of all things. "Man's imperfection at his nativity is his perfection; while the perfection of brutes at their nativity is their imperfection." No rational being has ever arrived at such perfection that he cannot still improve; he can travel on from one attainment to another in a perpetual progress of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... who knows the ignorance, the imperfection, the passionate frailty of human nature entertains such a wild dream or makes such ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... was not opened, eyes that were fast closed, hands and feet that were not moveable; in a word, they were rather statues of flesh, than living men. A second divinity, whom they call Ecannum, less powerful, but more benign than the former, having seen men in their state of imperfection, took a sharp stone and laid open their mouths and eyes; he gave agility, also, to their feet, and motion to their hands. This compassionate divinity was not content with conferring these first benefits; he taught men to make canoes, paddles, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... sincerely protested that Stella and imperfection could not be named together, except as contrasts, for he truly thought so. She sighed, and then smiled, and the colonel cantering up cut short the interesting conversation—interesting to the two persons concerned, at ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... waste a small quantity of marble and hard stone, which are very costly, cannot have that practice in the art that is essential; he who does not practise does not learn it; and he who does not learn it can do no good. Wherefore they should rather excuse with these arguments the imperfection and the small number of their masters, than seek to deduce nobility from them under false colours. As for the higher prices of sculptures, they answer that, although theirs might be much less, they have not to share them, being content with a boy who grinds their ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... and bosoms, I thought it more satisfactory to begin with considering man in the abstract, his nature and his state; since, to prove any moral duty, to enforce any moral precept, or to examine the perfection or imperfection of any creature whatsoever, it is necessary first to know what condition and relation it is placed in, and what is the proper end and purpose ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... more equal, and consequently more agreeable. There is perhaps less difference than is commonly supposed between the best performers and those in the next class. Whatever the difference be, it is an inconvenience and an imperfection that ought to be palliated; but we aggravate it. The first-rate actor always does his best, because the audience expect it, and reward him with their applause; but no one cares for, or observes, the performer of second-rate talents: whether he be perfect in his part, and exert himself ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... that neither now, nor at any time, is it prudent or safe to be meddling with the fundamental principles and ancient tried usages of our Constitution—that our representation is as nearly perfect as the necessary imperfection of human affairs and of human creatures will suffer it to be; and that it is a subject of prudent and honest use and thankful enjoyment, and not of captious ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... Infinite Being, omnipotent, ever-present, who reads his heart, who is "about his path, and about his bed, and spies out all his ways."[1111] He instinctively catches at anything whereby he may be relieved from the intolerable burden of such a thought; and here the imperfection of language comes to his aid. As he has found it impossible to express in any one word all that is contained in his idea of the Divine Being, he has been forced to give Him many names, each of them originally expressive of some one of that Being's attributes. But in course ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... passed judgment on all things by the use of three terms: "out of date," "antiquated," "superannuated."[*] A man, a woman, or a piece of furniture might be "out of date"; next, by a greater degree of imperfection, "antiquated"; but as to the last term, it was the superlative of contempt. The first might be remedied, the second was hopeless, but the third,—oh, better far never to have left the void of nothingness! As to praise, a single word sufficed him, doubly and ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... nation, an event ascertained in its minutest details; an event of which the principal actors are known to you familiarly, as if belonging to your own age; an event of a magnitude before which imagination shrinks at the imperfection of her powers. It is your further happiness to behold, in those eminent characters, who were most conspicuous in accomplishing the settlement of your country, men upon whose virtue you can dwell with honest exultation. The founders of your race are not handed down to ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams
... and exactly in accordance with their environments. In the case of the Carroll family, Arthur Carroll, who was in himself of a perfect and unassailable balance as to the right estimate of things, and the weighing of cause and effect, who had never in his whole life taken a step blindfold by any imperfection of spiritual vision, who had never for his own solace lost his own sense of responsibility for his lapses, had made his family, in a great measure, irresponsible for the same faults. Except in the possible case of Charlotte, all of them had a certain measure ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... source of these errors was the theory of emanations. The first dreamers, who were called philosophers imagined that matter and light were co-eternal; they supposed that was all one unformed and tenebrous mass; and from the former they established the principle of evil and of all imperfection, while they regarded the latter as sovereign perfection. Creation, or, one might better say co-ordination, was only the emanation of light which penetrated chaos, but the mixture of light and matter was the cause of all the inevitable imperfections of the universe. ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... mines, offered golden incentives to bravery. But however virtuous in this respect might have been the intentions of the sea robbers, it was not invariably the merchantmen of Spain which suffered from their depredations, since from 'an imperfection, in the organs of vision,' or from some other cause 'they were not always able to distinguish the flags of different nations.' Others than the Spaniards, were consequently occasional sufferers; and a ready market was found for their plunder in the French, and English islands, especially in Jamaica, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... other devices for obtaining rotatory motion from a piston rod. Before passing on, it may be mentioned that Watt was the father of the modern—that is, the high-pressure—steam-engine; and that, owing to the imperfection of the existing machinery, the difficulties he had to overcome were enormous. On one occasion he congratulated himself because one of his steam-cylinders was only three-eighths of an inch out of truth in the bore. Nowadays a good firm would reject a cylinder 1/500 of an inch ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... and antennae, organs of locomotion and perception that are no more of any use to them. (There is a slight difference in this regard between different genera, as for instance, Coccus and Dorthesia retain these organs in different degrees of imperfection, Lecanium and Aspidiotus losing every ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... he said, "into the abstract merits of our articles and liturgy; perhaps there are some things in them which one would wish had not been there; and they are not without the marks and character of human frailty. But," he added, "it is not human frailty and imperfection, or even a considerable degree of them, that becomes a ground for alteration; for by no alteration will you get rid of those errors, however you may vary them." He then adverted to the inexpediency of these alterations, and the temper of the times. "If," said ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... light the current passes across an imperfect contact, and this imperfection consists in a gap of about one-sixteenth of an inch between the extremities of two rods of carbon carrying a current. This small gap is a place of bad conduction and of the piling up of atoms, producing heat, ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... corpuscles or atoms. Anaxagoras made believe that the atom had reason. Xenophanes wished to persuade me that God and the Universe were one. Empedocles, the wisest of the whole company, despaired at the imperfection of reason, and went in despair and flung himself head ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... was often necessary to employ some address)[119]. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, you are to consider what is the meaning of purging in the original sense. It is to expel impurities from the human body. The mind is subject to the same imperfection. The passions are the great movers of human actions; but they are mixed with such impurities, that it is necessary they should be purged or refined by means of terrour and pity. For instance, ambition is a noble passion; but by ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... this is obviously very dangerous. Certain poets, especially among the moderns, may be said to choose imperfect rimes deliberately, both as a fresh means of securing variety and avoiding the monotony of hackneyed rimes, and also as a means of subtly suggesting the imperfection and futility of life. A few famous examples, defensible and indefensible, are: Wordsworth's robin: sobbing, sullen: pulling; Tennyson's with her: together, valleys: lilies; Keats's youths: soothe, pulse: culls; Swinburne's lose him: bosom: ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... than to his own. The conversion of the sceptical gentleman of whom he speaks is highly illustrative of popular credulity carried away into enthusiasm, or into imposture, by the evidence of those around, and at once shows the imperfection of such a general testimony, and the ease with which it is procured, since the general excitement of the moment impels even the more cold-blooded and judicious persons present to catch up the ideas and echo the exclamations of the majority, who, from the first, had considered the ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... him. They would both speak English—which they spoke with difficulty and in an indistinct utterance of voice—and he did not like to break the conversation into French, because to have done so would have looked like a condemnation of their English, of any imperfection of which they did not seem to ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... solid earth and phantasy. Nature is distraught; and so much has man subordinated and possessed her elsewhere that here, where existence is defeated by the absolute impossibility of sustenance, a poignant feeling of her imperfection steals over us and weighs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... the grave; We need a broken season, where the cloud Is ruffled into glory, and the dark Falls rainful o'er the sunset; need a world Whose shadows ever point away from it; A scheme of cones abrupt, and flattened spheres, And circles cut, and perfect laws the while That marvellous imperfection ever points To higher perfectness than heart can think; Therefore to us, a flower of harassed Spring, Crocus, or primrose, or anemone, Is lovely as was never rosiest rose; A heath-bell on a waste, lonely and dry, Says more than lily, stately in ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald |
