"Overestimate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... overestimate the importance of Mr. Humphrey Crewe, of his value to the town of Leith, and to the State at large, and in these pages only a poor attempt at an appreciation of him may be expected. Mr. Crewe by no means underestimated this claim upon the community, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... found that they had a slender view of his law reading, and spoke slightingly of Ford as a lawyer. They had both diligently studied to the lower depths of the law, had a fair appreciation of their acquisitions, and would not overestimate the few months of solitary reading of a boy in ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... overestimate the fervent love of liberty, the intelligent courage, and the sum of common sense with which our fathers made the great experiment of self-government. When they found, after a short trial, that the confederacy of States, was too weak to meet the necessities of a ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... not overestimate the originality of the Cortrights' seaside garden, and even after your intimate description, it contained several surprises in the shape of masses of the milkweeds that flourish in sandy soil, especially the dull pink, and the orange, about which the brick-red monarch butterflies were hovering ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... population, it is very difficult to speak positively. The invert himself is a misleading guide because he has formed round himself a special coterie of homosexual persons, and, moreover, he is sometimes apt to overestimate the number of inverts through the misinterpretation of small indications that are not always conclusive. The estimate of the ordinary normal person, feeling the ordinary disgust toward abnormal phenomena, is also misleading, because his homosexual acquaintances ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... not the reader gather from the very brief glance at the attainments of New Japan, that she has overtaken the nations of Christendom in all important respects; for such is far from the case. He needs to be on his guard not to overestimate what ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... overestimate art. Let me tell you that art is something quite different from what people make themselves ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... valuable in business, but also in every field of life. It makes statesmen and politicians, it brings clients to the lawyer, and patients to the physician. It is worth everything to the clergyman. No matter what career you enter, you can not overestimate the importance of cultivating that charm of manner, those personal qualities, which attract people to you. They will take the place of capital, or influence. They are often a substitute for a large amount of ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... accomplished, that guilt clinches its gripe upon the guilty heart, and claims it for its own. Then, and not before, sin is actually felt and acknowledged, and, if unaccompanied by repentance, grows a thousand-fold more virulent by its self-consciousness. Be it considered, also, that men often overestimate their capacity for evil. At a distance, while its attendant circumstances do not press upon their notice, and its results are dimly seen, they can bear to contemplate it. They may take the steps which lead to crime, impelled by the same sort ...
— Fancy's Show-Box (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... defects is to balance their real importance against both the good and the bad qualities shown not only by the individual but by his brothers, sisters, parents, and other relatives. Conscientious sufferers from visible defects of any kind are apt to overestimate their importance. Moreover, many supposedly hereditary defects may equally well be the result of an unfavorable environment like that which caused similar defects in the parents. Under ideal conditions they might never appear at all. In such matters, ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... and as varied as life itself. No one can estimate the value of them. Given right toys and surroundings, the young child has an almost perfect school. It is marvellous how well he learns, Preyer does not overestimate the facts when he says the child in the first three or four years of his life learns as much as the student in his entire university course. In the making of mud pies and doll dresses, sand-pile farms and miniature roads, tiny dams and water-wheels, whittled-out boats, ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... interests of those who feel that female dignity is compromised by it, I have here omitted a woman's flippant overestimate of the number of women in London society who suffer from nervous disorders at the ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... much better than the Atlantic ever had that I am probably inclined to overestimate everything I saw on the voyage. It was the first trip at sea that ever gave me any pleasure. The huge vessels are in themselves a great comfort, and in the placid waters and the sliding down the rotund side of the great globe under warmer and warmer skies one gains a very agreeable experience. ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... rather interesting to observe the different forms which vulgarity is apt to take in the two countries. In England vulgarity is stolid; in America it is smart and aggressive. We are apt, I think, to overestimate the amount in the latter country because it is so much more in voluble evidence. An English vulgarian is often hushed into silence by the presence of his social superior; an American vulgarian either recognises none such or tries to prove himself as good as you by being unnecessarily grob. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... of Truth, so the life-principle within us expands, the old bonds and limitations which had no existence in reality fall off from us, and we enter into regions of light, liberty, and power, of which we had previously no conception. It is impossible, therefore, to overestimate the importance of being able to realise the symbol for a symbol, and being able to penetrate to the inner substance which it represents. Life itself is to be realised only by the conscious experience of its livingness ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... order that his movements or lack of movement may be constantly watched and reported on. The usual tendency is towards a failure to send these patrols far enough to the front and for the patrol leader to overestimate the distance he has traveled. A mile through strange country with the ever-present possibility of encountering the enemy seems three miles ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... the English language, and valuable for that reason. While it is rather terrifying in some of its details its unreality saves it from harmful possibilities. Parents and teachers are inclined rather to overestimate the unpleasant consequences of reading terrifying things when they are of this character. Few, if any, children will read the story if it displeases them and those who do will not retain the disagreeable impression it makes for ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... but to drive on up to the end of the shaft, come out into that world wherever the shaft ended, then try to fight his way through to the great hall where he hoped to find Phee-e-al. And his haste made him overestimate the passing time; their journey had ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... his overestimate of her ignorance of affairs had not lured him into giving her the names of the parties at interest to transcribe. But did she really understand? ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... poorest boys may now enjoy. But he achieved greatness by always making the best use of such opportunities as came in his way. He was not afraid of work. He did not give up to discouragements. He did not overestimate his own abilities. He was earnest and faithful in little things; and that, after all, is the surest way of attaining to great things. There is no man to whom we Americans owe a greater debt of gratitude. Without his aid the American colonies would hardly have won independence. It was said ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... Ordronaux, John M. Hayes, Daniel Putnam, Martin H. Fisk, Isaac A. Parker, Ephraim March, William E. Barnard, Ambrose W. Clarke, Amos N. Currier, Richard C. Stanley, Albert S. Bickmore, George S. Morris, and John W. Scribner. It is hardly possible to overestimate the influence of these men in shaping the thought and life of ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... overestimate the importance to Brussels of the animating experience and distinguished commission of executing the set of tapestries for the Sistine Chapel after cartoons by Raffaelo Sanzio. The date is one to tie to (1515) and the influence of the work was far-reaching. The Gothic method ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... administration of our charitable and penal laws, and have furnished in their reports information and suggestions of great value. If it is true that an abuse exposed is half corrected, it would be difficult to overestimate their work. They have, their reports show, discovered abuses and cruelties practiced, under color of law, in the midst of communities noted for intelligence and virtue, which would disgrace any age. Let the board be granted increased powers ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... But I overestimate our numbers, for it was not the whole of the Heilbron contingent that reached the firing line. We had to leave some of them behind with the horses at the foot of the kop, and there were others who remained at the first safe position they reached—a frequent occurrence ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... made by the scrutin d'arrondissement. Five Republicans, not six, were chosen, and the defeated Republican candidate was no less a person than M. Jules Ferry himself! The first district of St.-Die gave him 6,192 votes, and elected a Monarchist to replace him by 6,403 votes. It is not easy to overestimate the significance of this change. Probably enough the majority will emphasize it by 'invalidating' the election ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... hope that I may be pardoned if I appear to overestimate the remarkable mental capacity and power of comprehension and discrimination which my pupil possesses, I wish to add that, while I have always known that Helen made great use of such descriptions and comparisons as appeal to her imagination and fine poetic nature, yet recent ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... without an atom of moral sense or loyalty, and both possessed ability, differing in kind, perhaps, which they used in the accomplishment of their own ends. France can never overestimate the great evil these two men did to the national cause. Napoleon's power and penetrating vision kept them in check only when he could grasp the nettle. Even when absent on his campaigns, they knew he was kept in close touch with what was going ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... father's injunction, leapt up before the concluding sentences were out of Mr. Broad's mouth. Mr. Scotton, however, rose, and Mr. Allen pulled George down. Mr. Scotton wished to say just one word. They could not, he was sure, overestimate the gravity of the situation. They were called together upon a most solemn occasion. Their worthy pastor had spoken as a minister of the gospel. He, Mr. Scotton, as a layman, wished just to remind ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... one, am not disposed to blame the politicians and the business men. They govern the nation, it is true, but they do it in a rather absentminded fashion. Those revolutionists who see the misery of the country as a deliberate and fiendish plot overestimate the bad will, the intelligence and the singleness of purpose in the ruling classes. Business and political leaders don't mean badly; the trouble with them is that most of the time they don't mean anything. They picture themselves as very "practical," which in practice ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... so, and knowing from experience that the larger the number the harder it is to judge he seemed to reason conversely that the more effort it takes to judge the more points there are, and hence he would overestimate ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... Concord, for the purpose of editing the Herald of Freedom, an anti-slavery paper which had been started some three or four years before. John Pierpont, than whom there could not be a more competent witness, in his brief and beautiful sketch of the life and writings of Rogers, does not overestimate the ability with which the Herald was conducted, when he says of its editor: "As a newspaper writer, we think him unequalled by any living man; and in the general strength, clearness, and quickness of his intellect, we think ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Journalists have an excessive overestimate of their influence. They cannot, as Diana said, comparing them with men on the Parliamentary platform, cannot feel they are aboard the big vessel; they can only strive to raise a breeze, or find one to swell; and they cannot measure the stoutness or the greatness of the good ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... revelation seemed as inconsistent with his previous impression of her reserve and independence as her girlish reasoning and manner was now delightfully at variance with her tallness, her aquiline nose, and her erect figure. Mr. Boyle, like most short men, was apt to overestimate the ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Mr. North, speaks excitedly," said the elder gentleman; "yet I think she does not overestimate the unfortunate position in which your odd fancy places you. I know nothing of the reasons that have impelled you to this step; I only know that the popular opinion is that the cause is utterly inadequate. You are still young, with a future ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... seriously, But not to gloom or whine; To never overestimate Our strength, or to decline To see this is no picnic, But do our earnest part With brain and muscles, newly trained— To keep ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... industry of the whole Colony is its fisheries—the ever-recurrent pursuit of the luckless cod, salmon, herring, halibut, and lobster in summer, and the seal fishery in the month of March. It is increasingly difficult to overestimate the importance, not merely to the British Empire, but to the entire world, of the invaluable food-supply procured by the hardy fishermen of these northern waters. Only the other day the captain of a patrol boat told me that he had just come over from service ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... of this factor in the campaign are hard to overestimate. The insufficient number of horses and their debility have doubtless accounted {p.098} for much of the delay and seeming languor of action, which has appeared otherwise inexplicable; the utter weakness of the poor beasts having ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... proverbs, songs and anecdotes above translated are at least indications of great latent capability, of unusual versatility of talent, and of a wide range of human feeling and sympathy. It is possible that I overestimate their value on account of my inability to separate the impressions made upon me by the people themselves from those made by their literature; but I am confident that the general outlines of the Caucasian character as I have tried here to sketch them are accurate, and that the reader ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... this confident dogmatism, which gives us the secret of the enormous influence of Treitschke on his countrymen, as it explains the hypnotism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on a previous generation. I do not think it would be easy to overestimate the extent of that influence. It is true that in one sense Treitschke's political philosophy only expresses the Prussian policy, and that he did not create it. But when a political ideal is expounded with ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... so?" she said, accepting Sammy's slight overestimate of the price of a flying machine ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... they instantly bombarded me with memorials and importunities for rewards for services. I assure your Majesty truthfully that, even if you had here three hundred encomiendas and a like number of offices, you could not recompense them for their services, which they exaggerate and overestimate beyond what they have actually performed for your Majesty. The most deserving of them merits very little, unless it be a reward for having conducted himself with great freedom, and for having destroyed the property committed to his charge. I do not in conscience feel that ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair
... overestimate the value of obedience, but there are some—I will not say who can dispense with obedience, of course not, but who cannot put off their individualities, who cannot become the merely typical novice—that one who would tell you, if she were asked to describe the first six ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... fairly personifies and leers at me. I get so that I fairly hate myself for the utter failure that I am, that at least I have been so far. I get to analyzing myself; I can't help it, and the result isn't pleasant. I've been doing so lately. I don't overestimate myself in the least, Elice girl. Practically, commercially, I'm a zero. I'm simply not built that way. If I'm ever of any use in the world, ever amount to anything whatever, it will be in an impractical, artistic way. Whether I'll ever ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... all my experience in the army. It was Colonel James Beecher, of the famous Beecher family, and a brother of Henry Ward Beecher. He was in command of the First North Carolina Colored Regiment. In this position it would be hard to overestimate the variety and value of his services, for he became for his soldiers at once a gallant fighter, an eloquent, convincing preacher, and a most indefatigable and successful school-teacher. Preaching had been his vocation before entering the army, and so it was but natural for him ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... other, the strange and secret ways through which that Arch-ruler of Civilization, familiarly called "Money," insinuates itself into our thoughts and motives, our hearts and actions; affecting those who undervalue as those who overestimate its importance; ruining virtues in the spendthrift no less than engendering vices in the miser. But when I half implied my farewell to the character of a novelist, I had imagined that this conception might be best worked out upon the stage. After some unpublished and ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... principle, that solicitude for the future is at bottom heathen worldly-mindedness. The heathen tendency in us all leads to an overestimate of material good, and it is a question of circumstances whether that shall show itself in heaping up earthly treasures, or in anxious care. These are the same plant, only the one is growing in the tropics of sunny prosperity, and the other ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... beginning of the Sherman campaign in Georgia, where I found a ward of eighty sick and wounded soldiers fresh from the battle of Resacea. My professional fitness for duties so grave and so large in extent was of a very questionable order, and I did not in the least overestimate it. ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... "Thou dost overestimate thyself," she retorted. Catching up the fan and chaplet that her woman had let fall she made as though to run past him. But he put himself in her way, and with shining eyes, caught ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... tales have done to marriage and the sober-satisfying everyday life, no one can estimate, no one can overestimate. Romanticism, which extols sex as the prime and only thing of life, prudery which closes its eyes to it and makes sour faces, need special places in Dante's Inferno. Neither has dealt with reality,—reality, ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... dear Miss Burns," cried Frederick, "how you overestimate me! Work! I am no better than a tramp. The thing I thought to cure myself with was laziness, idleness. Here I sit in a land discovered and conquered as a result of the tremendous will power of the Europeans, with my oars gone, my rudder gone and my last bit of free will. It is this ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... without hearing what I have to say. If you are imagining that the young fellow with whom you have an engagement of marriage would be rendered inconsolable by the loss of you, when it would be made up to him by the possession of a fortune, perhaps you overestimate things." ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... "You overestimate your handicap," John P. smiled. "Knowing how to build and repair cars and knowing how to sell cars are two entirely different propositions. The first requires a high degree of technical knowledge and a lot of practical experience. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... overestimate the valuable work which this Christian principle of human fraternity is thus doing at the present day. It is recognized in many ways so common that we cease to think of them as what they are—expressions of the common brotherhood of man. Our vast public charities supported ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... had put several small relics in a row on the edge of the lower part of the big mahogany bookcase, and was counting on her fingers the names of the friends for whom they were intended. Her grief was sufficiently real to make her, perhaps, overestimate the number of those to whom such relics would be precious. A tender smile was on her lips at the recollection of an old soldier servant of Sir David's who had been with him in Egypt. She hesitated a moment between two objects—one, ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... certainly a compliment to me as a conversationalist, As you wrote in your note you appreciate my sensible conversation I am afraid you overestimate me. I have a friend who is really brilliant, and can converse eloquently upon any subject. May ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... have made themselves a place in the first rank of the literature of their country, and if the Ecclesiastical Polity has done so, it has certainly not done so without cause. If there has been a certain tendency on the part of strong partisans of the Anglican Church to overestimate the literary and philosophical merit of this book, which may be called the first vernacular defence of the position of the English Church, that has been at least compensated by partisan criticism on the other side. Nor is there the least fear that the judgment of impartial critics will ever deprive ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... section of this city is in my opinion not so improbable a thing as you Bostonians imagine. The conflagration hazard in Boston's congested district is not a thing one can exactly calculate, but it would be difficult to overestimate its gravity. . . . There's your ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... purposes but for the vaudeville stage, and although such observations unquestionably have certain value for comparative psychology, it is well known that unless an observer knows the history of an act, he is not able to evaluate it in terms of intelligence and is especially prone to overestimate its value ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... We cannot overestimate the importance of the change effected in the Roman constitution by the creation of this office of the tribunate. Under the protection and leadership of the tribunes, who were themselves protected by oaths of inviolable sanctity, ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... have reason to believe that although the business genius must have a good inheritance, yet the inheritance does not determine what its possessor shall make of himself. Many persons are inclined to overestimate the influence of inheritance in determining success in business. The folly of this attitude is every day ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... stable system of government and increased railroad facilities are doing wonders for our neighbors across the Rio Grande. The iron horse and steel rail are great promoters of civilization. It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of this branch of progress in the interests of both Mexico and the United States, by which means we are constantly becoming more and more intimately united. The Mexican Central Railroad has lately completed its connection with Tampico on the Gulf by a branch ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... youth, but the strong, healthy men and women. The weaklings have to look out for themselves, receive ample warning in the disastrous obvious effects of the slightest imprudence. The robust, even the wariest of them, even the Henry Gowers, overestimate and overtax their strength. Gower's downfall was champagne. He could not resist a bottle of it for dinner every night. As so often happens, the collapse of the kidneys came without any warning that a man of powerful constitution would deem worthy of notice. By the ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... were the case, his want of discrimination was rather due to an overestimate of Inductive proof than to an undervaluation of Mathematical Demonstration. That Mathematics, Astronomy, and Physics were more perfect Sciences than the others in point of precision, he distinctly affirms, pointing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... activity depends. But on the modern theory, which includes the play of electrical phenomena as a function of the aether, there are other considerations which show that this number 10-2 is really an enormous overestimate; and it is not impossible that the co-efficient of ultimate inertia of the aether is greater than the co-efficient of inertia (of different kind) of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... overestimate their abilities, and their wandering disposition brings them into trouble. Once I found a herd of seven up to their backs in soft snow, and tired out,—a strange condition for a caribou to be in. They were taking ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... often expounded. I think that at present the tendency is rather to do injustice to the common-sense embodied in this system, to the soundness of its aims, and to its value in many practical and immediate questions, than to overestimate its claim to scientific accuracy. That claim may be said ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... is impossible to overestimate the influence of the newspapers and the periodical press in general, in the protection of wild life. But for their sympathy, their support and their independent assaults upon the Army of Destruction, our game species would nearly all of them have been ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... are mad. You presume on my generosity and my past indulgence toward you. I have already paid you more than I should have done, and you owe to me your life and your safety. You overestimate the value of your past services, and I am tired of your importunity. Remember that I am the commander-in-chief of the army and the governor of Louisiana. Do you think it safe to trifle with me? How did you ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... a one-syllable word when he can think of a longer one No satisfaction in being a Pope in those days Not afraid of a million Bedouins Not bring ourselves to think St John had two sets of ashes Old Travelers One is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare Only solitary thing one does not smell in Turkey Oriental splendor! Original first shoddy contract mentioned in history Overflowing his banks People talk so glibly of "feeling," "expression," "tone," ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger
... Roe certainly did not overestimate the value of the manuscript, and it would be extremely interesting could we trace the evidence by which it came to be believed that it was written by the hand of St. Tecla. A note in Arabic at the foot of the first page of Genesis says that it was "made an inalienable ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... elements. To the knowledge acquired by his observations on the nature or operations of mind, he owes no new power over that which he surveys: in at least its direct consequences, his science is barren. It would be difficult, however, to overestimate its indirect consequences. It seems impossible that the metaphysical province should long exist blank and unoccupied in any highly civilised country, especially in a country of active and acquiring intellects, such ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... beyond expression. But ... his play was also more than a slight thing in his life. It meant a good deal to him; he had worked hard and put the best that was in him into its making; and hard as the work had been, it had been a labour of love. He wasn't a man to overestimate his ability; he possessed a singularly sane and clear appreciation of the true value of his work, harbouring no illusions as to his real status either as dramatist or novelist. But at the same time, he knew when ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... head and presented in a concrete shape the somewhat vague speculations as to development and evolution which had long been floating in the minds of naturalists. In the actual working out of Darwin's great theory it is impossible to overestimate the influence of Lyell. This is made abundantly clear in Darwin's letters, and it must never be forgotten that Darwin himself was a geologist. His training in this science enabled him to grasp the import of the facts so ably marshalled by Lyell in the "Principles ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... the spiritual region, strength and courage do go together. The consciousness of the divine power with us, and that alone, will make us bold with a boldness that has no taint of levity and presumption mingled with it, and never will overestimate its own strength. The charge to Joshua, then, not only insists upon the duty of strength, but on the duty of conscious strength, and on the duty of measuring the strength that is at my back with the weakness that is against me, and of being bold because I know ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... patriotic, and because they were told so when very small, and remember distinctly of hearing mother read it out of a book, and they are all willing to swear that mother was a good woman. It is hard to overestimate the influence of early training—in the direction of superstition. You first teach children that a certain book is true—that it was written by God himself—that to question its truth is sin, that to deny it is a crime, and ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... are naturally inclined to overestimate the value of any new sources of information opened by their own diligence or sagacity of research, and a little of this feeling is perceptible in Mr. Bancroft's Preface; but, after all, we apprehend that the new evidence he has so diligently collected ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... was chiefly in slender plumpness and bloom. But it served her purpose as no classic mould would have done. She did not overestimate it. But she was probably better satisfied with it than with most of those conditions of her life that people were always telling her were ideal. They spoke of her as the only child in a way that implied congratulations on the undivided inheritance—and that reminded her how she had always wanted ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... stars thicken in our literary sky, and when in 1832 Irving returned from his long sojourn in Europe, he found an immense advance in fiction, poetry, and historical composition. American literature was not only born,—it was able to go alone. We are not likely to overestimate the stimulus to this movement given by Irving's example, and by his success abroad. His leadership is recognized in the respectful attitude towards him of all his contemporaries in America. And the cordiality with which he gave ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... efforts to achieve this end, and she really almost succeeds—at least she can reach a higher point on the trunk of a tree than any other dog of her size I know—say six feet; if the bark is rough, perhaps seven feet would not be an overestimate. Her attempts are unremitting—once the frenzy is on it is with the greatest difficulty that she can be separated, panting and exhausted, from ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... to overestimate the beneficent influence which Mrs. Carlyle exerted over her husband in those trying days of poverty and spiritual stress. When her private correspondence was inadvisedly published after his death, she unwittingly became her husband's Boswell. For many years after the appearance of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... the value of this evidence for our Lord's visit to the Unseen Life. Do not overestimate it. It is not all Scripture. But all that is not Scripture is the wide-spread belief of the primitive Church which was afterwards crystallized into an article of the Creed. Surely it is enough to deepen our sense of the ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... Christ's crucifixion. Rome was also a favorite resort of pilgrims, chiefly as the site of the graves of the great apostles, while many flocked to the tomb of Saint Martin of Tours. Meanwhile, wrote Henry C. Sheldon in a "History of the Christian Church," there were emphatic cautions against an overestimate of the value of pilgrimages. The eminent Greek Father, Gregory of Nyssa (332-398), said that change of place ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... which had defied the efforts of several predecessors to stop and it helped make a brilliant infield, for it gave the youngsters something they were not afraid to throw at. In giving credit for the work of Griffith's infield, the inclination is to overestimate the worth of the new stars. But there was a tower of strength at short in George McBride, who has been playing steadily and consistently at that position for several seasons without being given one-tenth the credit his work ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... you overestimate my service to him, possibly. I dare say the boat could have picked ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... described it as of the like good quality as at the Mission, but with much muskeg. It is difficult to estimate the extent of the latter, for, being more noticeable than good land, the tendency is to overestimate. Its proportion to arable land is generally put at about 50 per cent., which may be over or under the truth, for only actual township or topographic surveys ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... which the methods of the natural sciences have gained, particularly in their application to the phenomena of the physical universe, has undoubtedly led scientific men to overestimate the importance of mere conceptual and abstract knowledge. It has led them to assume that history also must eventually become "scientific" in the sense of the natural sciences. In the meantime the vast collections of historical facts which the industry of historical ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... "You greatly overestimate me, Mr. Williams. I have only a poor smattering of knowledge which I absorbed from two friends who are really educated ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... proudly said of Sir Walter as an author that he never forgot the sanctities of domestic love and social duty in all that he wrote; and considering how much he did write, and how vast has been the influence of his work on mankind, we can scarcely overestimate the importance of the fact. Yet it might have been all wrecked by one little parental imprudence in this matter of books. And what excuse is there, after all, for running the terrible risk? Authors who are not fit to be read by the sons and daughters are rarely ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... opportunity for strolls into the country and jaunts to the local entertainments. Over and above this, every Thursday evening she went to the subscription library to change the week's supply of books, and there again she met friends and acquaintances. It is hard to overestimate the value of church or chapel—but particularly chapel—as a social institution, in places like Woodhouse. The Congregational Chapel provided Alvina with a whole outer life, lacking which she would ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... although in some cases they may have had values influential in determining the course of events. It chanced that I myself was an actor in one of these lesser incidents, when second secretary to our legation in France, during the summer of 1862. I may possibly overestimate the ultimate importance of my adventure, for Mr. Adams, our minister of the court of St. James, seems to have failed to record it, or, at least, there is no allusion to it in his biography. In the perplexing tangle of the diplomacy of the darker days of ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... Elizabeth's vigorous mind, her clear insight, and strong common-sense, made her quick to judge and discriminate. As Dinah knew, she very seldom made a mistake in her opinion of a person. Dinah's charitable nature was rather prone to overestimate her friends and acquaintances—"all her geese were swans." As Elizabeth often said, when she cared for any one she simply could not see their faults. "If we were all as blind as Dinah," her sister would say, ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... published in England, and now exciting great attention there, containing the various pamphlets issued by him during the last six months. The subjects discussed embrace Jefferson Davis and Repudiation, Recognition, Slavery, Finances and Resources of the United States. It would be difficult to overestimate the effect of these Letters abroad. As our readers already possess them in the pages of THE CONTINENTAL, we enable them to complete the series by furnishing the ensuing Appendix. It closes with an extract from an 'Introductory Address' delivered by Mr. Walker before the National Institute, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... in seasons of happiness, even before our reason, locating it, reminds us what the actual source of our joy may be. He was at first afraid lest his excitement, working on the imagination, should have led him on the previous night to overestimate the fineness of the instrument, and he took it from the drawer half expecting to be disappointed with its daylight appearance. But a glance sufficed to convince him of the unfounded nature of his suspicions. The ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... will pardon the criticism, but you talk too much, and too many of you try to talk at once. My head is aching from the roar and din of your noisy orators. Gentlemen, what does it all amount to? You are talking about prohibition, but you overestimate your political strength. Disastrous failures attend upon all your endeavors to conquer existing evils by the votes of men alone. Give women the legal power to combat intemperance, and they will soon be able to prove that they do not like drunken ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... always emphasized in the training of the colonial girl was manners or etiquette—the art of being a charming hostess. As Mrs. Earle says, "It is impossible to overestimate the value these laws of etiquette, these conventions of custom had at a time, when neighborhood life was the whole outside world." How many, many a "don't" the colonial miss had dinned into her ears! Hear but a few of ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... days' march. Inter-tribal trade and intercourse reach only rudimentary development, under the prevailing conditions of mutual antagonism and isolation, and hence contribute little to the expansion of the horizon. Knowing only their little world, such primitive groups overestimate the size and importance of their own territory, and are incapable of controlling an extensive area. This is the testimony of all travellers who have observed native African states. Though the race or stock distribution may be wide, like that of the Athapascan and Algonquin ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... year, when promotions are to take place, or by the time they are ready to go to college or to enter upon what, in contrast with the probationary stage, is regarded as the serious business of life. It is impossible to overestimate the loss which results from the deflection of attention from the strategic point to a comparatively unproductive point. It fails most just where it thinks it is succeeding—in getting ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... course here to look even more to his mental character than to his moral, to do with him rather as a man of genius than as a 'man of good,' though it is impossible to overlook, and difficult to overestimate, his singular eminence as both combined. Of his actual literary accomplishment, something like a detailed view has been given in this little book, and of some of its separate departments estimates have been attempted.[48] ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... romances there is this direct and real dependence. The Medea of Apollonius Rhodius is at the beginning of medieval poetry, in one line of descent (through Virgil's Dido as well as Ovid's Medea); and it would be hard to overestimate the accumulated debt of all the modern poets whose rhetoric of passion, whether they knew it or not, is derived somehow from the earlier medieval masters of Dante ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... real value of the property. It is impossible to sell off a large and expensively improved estate like theirs all at once. It is probably true that the machinery and buildings were worth all they received for the whole property; and it would not be an overestimate to give the real value of what they sold at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They had begun, ten years before, with one hundred and twenty-five families; as after the second year they had bred no children, and as they then lost some members who left on account of their ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... Faerie Queene, the Don Quixote of Cervantes, the poems and novels of Scott, Grimm's and Andersen's Fairy Tales, much of Defoe and Swift, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wake field, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (he himself was very fond of that poem), and many other things, and I cannot overestimate the good they did me. His talks to me during our walks gave me, under the guise of pleasantry, not so much specific information concerning things (though that was not wanting), but—character; that is, the questions he put to me, the ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... offspring, and utter incapacity to alter it, are the inevitable result of their slavery. It is hopeless to attempt to reform their habits or improve their condition while the women are condemned to field labour; nor is it possible to overestimate the bad moral effect of the system as regards the women entailing this enforced separation from their children and neglect of all the cares and duties of mother, nurse, and even house-wife, which are all merged in the mere physical toil of a ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... to overestimate the drift in the direction of radicalism. The Plumb Plan has not yet been made the sine qua non of the American labor program. Although the American Federation of Labor endorsed the principle of government ownership of the railways at its conventions ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... amount, therefore, is a matter of guesswork, or "speculation."[10] Many unknown factors enter into the estimate of future incomes. The universal tendency to rhythm in motion (material or psychic) manifests itself in an overestimate or underestimate of incomes and of every other factor in value. This is emphasized by a psychological factor called sometimes the "hypnotism of the crowd," and sometimes, the "mob mind." Most men follow a leader in investment ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... to overestimate the excitement, the animosity, and the contention which arose in the New England colonies from these discussions over "singing by rule" or "singing by rote." Many prominent clergymen wrote essays and tracts upon the subject; of these essays "The Reasonableness of Regular Singing," also ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... prevalent among ignorant whites as among negroes, though with the latter there is generally a tendency to overestimate. Where negroes make wrong estimates, in three cases out of four they will be found excessive. With whites the variation will be diminutive as often as excessive. In judging of numbers of men, a column of troops, for example, both races are liable to exaggerate, the negro generally going beyond the ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... a great deal of him and often entrusts him with very delicate work. This morning he gave M. de Marsan a valuable paper to copy—a paper, Monsieur, the importance of which it were impossible to overestimate. The very safety of this country, the honour of our King, are involved in it. I cannot tell you its exact contents, and it is because I would not tell more about it to the police that they would not help ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... mean to, but you must not overestimate the impressions made on me. I am not so good as ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... golf course should not be fifty yards longer. One must not be like the man who in the discussion of bimetallism a few years ago used to keep his wife awake at night expounding to her the iniquities and inequalities of a single standard. It is safer to underestimate than to overestimate the endurance and patience ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... Providence to blacken paper, as she sweat ink from every pore." But, if we may credit her admirers, who were numerous, she had fine eyes, a pleasing expression, and an agreeable address. She evidently did not overestimate her personal attractions, as will be seen from the following quatrain, which she wrote upon a portrait made by ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... property; since, house and farm-rents being fixed by the value of the capital, and the latter being measured by the tax, to depreciate his real estate would be to reduce his revenue. On the other hand, it is equally evident that the same proprietors could not overestimate the value of their property, in order to increase their incomes beyond the limits of the law, since the tenants and farmers, with their old leases in their hands, would enter ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... to overestimate the far-reaching influence of such a Council. An interchange of opinions on the great questions now agitating the world will rouse women to new thought, will intensify their love of liberty and will give them a realizing sense of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... Darwinism with the Bible, but these efforts, while honest and sometimes even agonizing, have not been successful. How could they be when the natural and inevitable tendency of Darwinism is to exalt the mind at the expense of the heart, to overestimate the reliability of the reason as compared with faith and to impair confidence in the Bible. The mind is a machine; it has no morals. It obeys its owner as willingly when he plots to kill as when ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... Pentuer, "do not overestimate my services. Long years ago in our temples the condition of the state was represented in this manner. I have only disinterred that which later generations ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... friendship to those who expressed anything less than execration for its principles and its makers. Although it is always easy to exaggerate the influence that any single spirit may have upon a movement embracing {300} many nationalities and many different orders of mind, it would be difficult to overestimate the effect of Burke's words and Burke's actions in animating the coalition of monarchical Europe against insurgent France. And upon a responsibility for the intervention of other States in the affairs of France depends also a proportionate degree of responsibility for the results of ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy |
