"Profundity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with a rather grim pertness: "He'll have to get tired of me first." A long silence ensued. The mother, with her feet propped up on a stool, seemed to be trying to get to the bottom of that answer, whose feminine profundity had struck her all of a heap. She had never really understood why Winnie had married Mr Verloc. It was very sensible of her, and evidently had turned out for the best, but her girl might have naturally hoped to find somebody of a more suitable age. There had been a steady young fellow, only son ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... judgment, reason, discernment, judiciousness, reasonableness, discretion, knowledge, sagacity, enlightenment, learning, sense, erudition, prescience, skill, foresight, profundity, understanding. information, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Montesinos and the anonymous Jesuit Uira or Vira is a corruption of Pirua meaning a depository. The first meaning of Cocha is a lake, but here it is held to signify profundity, abyss, space. The "Dweller in Space." Ticci or Tici is base or foundation, hence the founder. Illa means light. The anonymous Jesuit gives the meaning "Eternal Light" to Illa-Ticci. The word Con, given by Betanzos and Garcia, has ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... bad thing to set up as a judge without a plentiful stock of profundity. Mark scowled angrily at the sleepers, and turned away in disgust to gaze out of the cabin window at the flashing sea and try in vain to catch sight of some ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... somebody once said with equal truth and profundity, knows what a minute may bring forth, much less, therefore, does anybody know what an evening of say two hundred and forty minutes may produce. For instance, Harold Quaritch—though by this time he had gone ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... with the processes of scientific and philosophic investigation, and where the agitation of these problems is so peculiarly active and violent, it has seemed that a work marked by so much scholarship, profundity, and comprehensiveness and originality of treatment, must serve an important purpose to the cause of religious no less than of scientific truth. It may be explained here, that the author resided for some years in the family of the Duke of Argyll, and there breathed, to a certain extent, the scientific ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... on supreme achievement—the result of the highest genius matured by experience and by careful experiment and labor—in all phases of the work of a poetic dramatist. The surpassing charm of his rendering of the romantic beauty and joy of life and the profundity of his presentation of its tragic side we have already suggested. Equally sure and comprehensive is his portrayal of characters. With the certainty of absolute mastery he causes men and women to live for us, a vast representative group, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... that all sin is ignorance, as we sometimes hear it said with a great show of tolerant profundity. There is some ignorance in all sin, but the essence of sin is the aversion of the will from a law and from a Person, not the defect of the understanding. So far from all sin being but ignorance, and therefore blameless, there is no sin without ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... policy, and the important movements of foreign governments, or our own, in matters tending to affect the general welfare and progress of humanity, had a profound interest for me; but I talked so little on such subjects, as became the profundity of my ignorance, that Mrs. Grote supposed them altogether above my sympathy, and probably above ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... friend has sat in several parliaments, and given bushels of votes. He is a man of that profundity in the matter of vote-giving, that you never know what he means. When he seems to be voting pure white, he may be in reality voting jet black. When he says Yes, it is just as likely as not - or rather more so - that he means No. This is the statesmanship of our honourable friend. It is ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... ropes'-ends, and struggling men. Opening my eyes I beheld the hull of the schooner, a short distance away, standing almost perpendicular, and slowly gliding downwards, bows first. Even as I looked she vanished into the dark profundity beneath, and then I directed my glances above me. It seemed that I was fathoms deep, for the phosphorescent foam that boiled overhead looked almost as far aloft as a frigate's lower yard; and by the same ghastly phosphorescent ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... utter ignorance respecting pictures to be found among persons of the first standing in society. Often where a liberal spirit exists, and a wish to patronise the fine arts is expressed, it is joined to a profundity of ignorance on the subject almost inconceivable. A doubt as to the excellence of their artists is very nervously received, and one gentleman, with much civility, told me, that at the present era, all the world were aware that competition was pretty well at an end between our ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bruyere, to ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... Everybody reads Shakespeare, but few know what the word means. The theatre is crowded to hear Macready's "Hamlet," but it is to see Macready, not to study the drama. When he is gone the play remains; and though it is spoken by stupid men, their dulness cannot affect its profundity and strength. That is the test of art, that it transcends its instruments; and the artist at his piano realizes the soul, though not the effect of the symphony which has spoken to him so loudly ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... still remember that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof—an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... which in "Hamlet" hangs in the background like a storm-cloud ready to break, in "King Lear" rages; and it is the use of this which lends its amazing psychical power to the play. It has been said (with no great profundity of criticism) that English fiction is chiefly remarkable for its power of particularization of character, and that where French work, for instance, will present ideas, English will present persons. The judgment is grossly insufficient, ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... the Bar-tender Sees." And the exordium is worthy so profound a speculation. "Did you ever stop to think," murmurs the Yellow philosopher, "of all the strange beings that pass before him?" There's profundity for you! There's invention! Is it wonderful that five million men and women read these golden words, or others of ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... heaven—aware of myself, a consciousness forced on me by these things—I feel that thought must yet grow larger and correspond in magnitude of conception to these. But these cannot content me, these Titanic things of sea, and sun, and profundity; I feel that my thought is stronger than they are. I burn life like a torch. The hot light shot back from the sea scorches my cheek— my life is burning in me. The soul throbs like the sea for a larger life. No thought which I have ever ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... sculpturing is never disordered; the luxury of ornament never overloads the chaste eloquence of the principal lines. His best works abound in combinations which may be said to be an epoch in the handling of musical style. Daring, brilliant, and attractive, they disguise their profundity under so much grace, their science under so many charms, that it is with difficulty we free ourselves sufficiently from their magical inthrallment, to judge coldly ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... close with a discord. And indeed, in looking back, we are pained to perceive how slight is the justice we have been able to render to the rare combination of powers exhibited in the works we have enumerated. We have left unnoticed the wonderful extent and accuracy of the learning, the compass and profundity of the thought, the inexhaustible spirit, ever preserving the happy mean between mental languor and nervous excitement. In these twenty-seven volumes of criticism, scarcely an error has been detected, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... undervalued, Madam, either the brilliance or the profundity of your own active intellect! What you say is of interest. We already have followed with profound interest your efforts. Your words here justify our concern in meeting you. This is perhaps the first time in our history ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... apparently, presents any difficulty whatever, he being, like Father O'FLYNN, able to discourse on Theology or Conchology, or Mythology, and all the other ologies, including, in this instance, Golfology, with equal skill and profundity of wisdom. Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit, and the scent of the LANG Y LANG, is over all periodical literature generally. Let not the elderly intending student of Golf, on opening the book, be deterred by seeing a chapter headed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... party; because, where they were admitted, the time was wasted in frothy compliments, weak indulgences, and idle ceremonies. To shew the greatness of her mind, she avoided all compliance with the fashion; and to boast the profundity of her knowledge, mistook the various textures of silk, confounded tabbies with damasks, and sent for ribands by wrong names. She despised the commerce of stated visits, a farce of empty form without instruction; and congratulated herself, that she never learned to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... accuse me of undue prejudice in favor of slavish surrender of volition. I accept in a large measure the view advanced with breadth of learning and defended with profundity of thought by Hegel, that history is the unfolding and realization of freedom. The point I wish to make is that the whole teaching of Bushido was so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice, that it was required not only of woman but of man. Hence, until the influence of its Precepts ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... acquaintance with a charming and delicate soul that wished to be understood and was willing to be intimate. Life astonished her, and her comments on life are her poems. They are often mystical, not to say obscure; and the obscurity, as a rule, is caused by vagueness rather than profundity, by the fact that she hardly knows herself what she feels, or thinks, or believes. But from so gracious a spirit one accepts without demur that which from another would not have passed unchallenged. Miss Coleridge ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... of the heavens was extensive, if not profound. On any fair view of profundity, I am inclined to think that it was profound, though of the technique of astronomy he knew but little. He had all the constellations at his fingers' ends, and had given to many of them names of his own; he knew their seasons, their days, even their hours; he knew ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... venerable, and lofty fixedness of mind, and the whole divine race together a perfect preparation for sharing in Plato's most mystical and far-seeing speculations, which he declares to us himself in the Parmenides, with the profundity befitting such topics, but which he (i.e. his master Syrianus) completed by his most pure and luminous apprehensions, who did most truly share the Platonic feast, and was the medium for transmitting the divine truth, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... Wonders, of his Might. Then staid the fervid Wheels, and in his Hand He took the Golden Compasses, prepar'd In Gods eternal Store, to circumscribe This Universe, and all created Things: One Foot he center'd, and the other turn'd Round, through the vast Profundity obscure; And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, This be thy just ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... reader, much of Sir THOMAS MORE's writing is well-nigh unintelligible; nay, in some instances, the Baron can only approximately arrive at the meaning, as though it were a writ in a foreign language with which his acquaintance was of no great profundity. Certes, the learned and reverend compiler hath a keen relish for this quaintness, but not so will fifteen out of his twenty readers, who, pardie! shall regret the absence of a key without which some of the treasure must, to them at least, remain inaccessible. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... surpassed at all points. His was a great soul and a fine talent. But neither were well enough served by circumstances. We see in him a personality worthy of all veneration, a man of singular goodness and a writer of distinction, but not quite a great man, nor yet a great writer. Profundity and purity, these are what he possesses in a high degree, but not greatness, properly speaking. For that, he is a little too subtle and analytical, too ingenious and fine-spun; his thought is overladen with detail, and has not enough flow, eloquence, imagination, warmth, and largeness. Essentially ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... done with amorous grace and attitude, soaring rapture, and profundity of sigh, suspense (more agonizing than suspension), despair, prostration, grinding of the teeth, the hollow and spectral laugh of a heart forever broken, and all the other symptoms of an annual bill of vitality; and ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... writer, Wordsworth not excepted, who reveals more delight in the visions of Nature than Henry Vaughan. He is a true forerunner of Wordsworth, inasmuch as the latter sets forth with only greater profundity and more art than he, the relations between Nature and Human Nature; while, on the other hand, he is the forerunner as well of some one that must yet do what Wordsworth has left almost unattempted, namely—set forth the sympathy of Nature with the ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... the common belief that both are on the decline. Whether such a belief has any solid foundation in the case of letter-writing, we may be warranted in doubting. Observations of this sort, which have a false air of acuteness and profundity, are repeated periodically. The remark so constantly made at this moment, that nowadays people read nothing but magazines, was made by Coleridge early in this century; and Southey prophesied the ruin of good letters from the penny post. It is ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... stall, 'r' you," declared the young gentleman with a scowling profundity. "No go. Got to come out your corner 'n' fight. 'N' I'm goin' ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... failed to observe. Longings for the unattainable began to stir within him and take hold of him in a manner entirely new. Hazy, fragmentary glimpses of hitherto undreamed possibilities began to shape themselves in his mind. The immensity and profundity of the universe and the mysterious growth of its hidden life ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... want of Sally? You don't kiss a girl because she is anything but a girl. It was a profundity. Gaga had ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... it yet, von Stinnes," Dorn smiled. "I will later. So far I've managed to do nothing more than enjoy myself. Profundity is diverting in New York, but a bore in Berlin. There's too much of it. Good God, man, there are times when I feel that even the buildings of the ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Volkerpsychologie and sociology were embryonic sciences, explains the phenomena of Jewish history as well as the phenomena of the religious and spiritual evolution of mankind, and does it with remarkable originality and profundity. ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... see and do a good deal in that time," I said, not flattering myself on the originality of the remark, but desiring to set him talking. In the country, as elsewhere, we must forego profundity if ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... effort of the human intellect, may be designed to stimulate that intellect to strenuous action and healthy effort—as well as to supply, in their solution, as time rolls on, an ever-accumulating mass of proofs of the profundity of the wisdom which has so far anticipated all the wisdom of man; and of the divine origin of both the great books which he is privileged to study as a pupil, and even to illustrate as a commentator,—but the text of which he ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... passionate affection. He ruled all the rest of the little world round about him. As he grew, the elders were amazed at his haughty manner and his constant likeness to his father. He asked questions about everything, as inquiring youth will do. The profundity of his remarks and interrogatories astonished his old grandfather, who perfectly bored the club at the tavern with stories about the little lad's learning and genius. He suffered his grandmother with a good-humoured indifference. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... representative of his craft, he was literally, to employ the slang phrase in that quarter, the "cock of the walk." He was, however, not so much regarded by the villagers a worthy as a clever man. It required not erudition to win the credit of profundity, and the lawyer knew how to make the most of his learning among those who had none. Like many other gentlemen of erudition, he was grave to a proverb when the occasion required it, and would not be ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... of trick, which may arise either from intellectual insufficiency or from an imperfect trust in one's own convictions, procured for Mr. Razumov a reputation of profundity. Amongst a lot of exuberant talkers, in the habit of exhausting themselves daily by ardent discussion, a comparatively taciturn personality is naturally credited with reserve power. By his comrades at the ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... journalist—must not be too eloquent, or too witty, or too humorous, or too ingenious, or too profound. Yet the English reader likes, or thinks he likes, eloquence; he has a keen sense of humour, and a fair appreciation of wit; and he would be much hurt if he were told that ingenuity and profundity were in themselves distasteful to him. How, then, to give him enough of these qualities to please and not enough to offend him—as much eloquence as will stir his emotions, but not enough to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry home the argument, but not enough to make him ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... reproached the woman for contradicting herself in claiming earthly and celestial happiness at the same time. She answered him with profundity, that the contradiction lay not in herself, but ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... sound as though a thunderous drum were beating somewhere in the dark. It was the falling of the mules' hoofs upon the bridge made of strong hides lashed to poles and stretched across the chasm. Half a mile further was Tacuzama. The village was a congregation of rock and mud huts set in the profundity of an obscure wood. As they rode in a sound inconsistent with that brooding solitude met their ears. From a long, low mud hut that they were nearing rose the glorious voice of a woman in song. The words were English, the air familiar to Armstrong's memory, but ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... He was a navigator of some renown, principally derived from a voyage of destruction against the Spaniards in 1592; but he was a vain and affected character, little calculated for decisive and manly action. Instructions were prepared, but the King, with his accustomed profundity of folly, directed that they should be sealed in a box, and not opened until the voyagers arrived upon the coasts of Virginia. In the vessels there embarked, beyond the regular crews, one hundred five persons, to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... along Julia's Street toward Julia's Party, there was something in his mien and look more dramatic than mere sprightliness; and when he came within sight of the ineffable house and saw its many lights shining before him, he breathed with profundity, ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... and that one of his middle teeth in his lower jaw, broke out while he was at dinner." He sat (for the last time) for "a second picture to Mr. Ryley," p. 379. Ashmole's intimacy with Lilly was the foundation of the former's (supposed) profundity in alchemical and astrological studies. In this Diary we are carefully told that "Mr. Jonas Moore brought and acquainted him with Mr. William Lilly, on a Friday night, on the 20th of November," p. 302. Ashmole was then only 26 years of age; and it will be readily conceived how, at this susceptible ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Depth. — N. depth; deepness &c. adj.; profundity, depression &c. (concavity) 252. hollow, pit, shaft, well, crater; gulf &c. 198; bowels of the earth, botttomless pit[obs3], hell. soundings, depth of water, water, draught, submersion; plummet, sound, probe; sounding rod, sounding line; lead. bathymetry. [instrument to measure depth] sonar, side-looking ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... synthetic judgments a priori POSSIBLE?" Kant asks himself—and what is really his answer? "BY MEANS OF A MEANS (faculty)"—but unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display of German profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether loses sight of the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer. People were beside themselves with delight over this new faculty, and the jubilation reached its climax when Kant further discovered a ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Lady Joan Fitz-Warene, who was gratified by the devotion of the Cupid of May Fair. He uttered inconceivable nothings, and she replied to him in incomprehensible somethings. Her learned profundity and his vapid lightness effectively contrasted. Occasionally he caught her eye and conveyed to her the anguish of his soul in a glance of ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... Nazarites (which last discovered that the name of Noah's wife was Ouria, and that she set the ark on fire); or with the Valentinians, who taught that there were thirty AEones, ages or worlds, born out of Profundity (Bathos), male, and Silence, female; or with the Marcites, Colarbasii, and Heracleonites (who still kept up that bother about AEones, Mr. Profundity and Mrs. Silence); or with the Ophites, who are said to ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Bouillon had a warmth of expression and a confidence of manner which captivated those who heard him. His valor, his keen perception in the field, the profundity of his political views, his knowledge of the affairs of Europe, his reflective and decided character, all rendered him one of the most capable and imposing men of his time-the only one, indeed, whom the Cardinal-Duc ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... character outwardly; but the human reality lies within, and to be seen requires the illumination which only our own hearts can give. All fiction is such a shadowing forth of the soul. The constancy, the intimacy, the profundity with which Shakspere felt this, from the earliest syllables of his art, and the frequency with which he dwells upon it, mark a characteristic of genius. ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... Folter was busied with her hair; "I want to know your opinion of it." Folter gave a toss of her head that seemed to say, "Have not I spoken?" but what it really did mean, how should other mortal know? for the main obstructions to understanding are profundity and shallowness, and the latter is far the more ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... same gem in a less brilliant setting might have failed to draw my admiration. I was the captive both of the spirit and the form. Soul and body had co-operated in producing my passion, and this may account for its suddenness and profundity. Why I loved her person, I knew—I was not ignorant of the laws of beauty—but why the spirit, I knew not. Certainly not from any idea I had formed of her high moral qualities; I had no evidence of these. Of her courage, even to daring, I had proof; of energy and determined will; of ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... point of view, and finished. In fact, Pott and Pell, in their way, are the two best pieces of work in the book. How admirable is the description; "a tall, thin man with a sandy-coloured head, inclined to baldness, and a face in which solemn importance was blended with a look of unfathomable profundity. He was dressed in a long, brown surtout, with a black cloth waistcoat and drab trousers. A double eye-glass dangled at his waistcoat, and on his head he wore a very low-crowned hat with a broad rim." Every touch is delightful—although all is literal the literalness ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... left for Mestra and Venice. We escorted the married couple to their house, and returned home to amuse M. Bragadin with the relation of our expedition. This worthy and particularly learned man said a thousand things about the marriage, some of great profundity and others ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... a visitor at Wendell Phillips's home in Boston, and the music of his voice, the liquid charm of his words, the purity, the transparency of his diction, the profundity of his knowledge, the fascination of his personality, and his marvelous art of putting things, I shall never forget. He sat down on the sofa beside me and talked as he would to an old schoolmate, and it seemed ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... because they are written by great stylists, but few read for just that reason. They read because there is something in an author's work which attracts them to his style, and that something may be study of character, skill in narrative, or profundity in truth, of which style is the perfect expression, but not the thing itself. Only connoisseurs, and few of them, read for style. And, furthermore, I very much doubt whether readers go to Conrad to learn about the sea. They might learn as much from Cooper or Melville, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... must be, shall be!" Bakahenzie grunted his acknowledgment of the profundity of the statement. "He who would trap the leopard must needs dig the pit!" Another uncompromising silence urged Birnier to force the pace a little: "O son of Maliko, what say the omens and the signs ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... simple affirmative, he shows that he does not understand its force; and, at the same time, it is a form of thought so natural and universal, that I have heard English people, under corresponding circumstances, spontaneously fall into it. In short, whether a man differ from others by greater profundity or by greater sublimity, and whether he write as a poet or as a philosopher, in any case, he feels, in due proportion to the necessities of his intellect, an increasing dependence upon the Latin section of the English ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... had been weeping, and were so joyously consoled that they forgot to wipe away their tears. They were bright but not clear—large and shimmering, as if reflected from some invisible sea, not immediately present to his eyes. The gulfs in which they floated were black blue with profundity. There was no moon, but the night was yet so far from dark, that it seemed conscious throughout of some distant light that illumined it without shine. And his heart felt like the night, as if it held a deeper life than he could ever know. He wandered ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... black-bearded speaker, who poured forth abundant venomous froth of denunciation. He had caught enough of the phraseology of the more philosophical Disciples, to impress the earnest ignorant with some show of profundity. I was glad when his stream dried up. Pendlam next arose and read a paper upon "Magnetisms and Organizations." After him, came forward a gentleman with a model, illustrating the design of a dwelling-house ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... among strangers from the distant cities. It consists in the wonderful inequality between his mental and social development. The same person who will be regarded as a boor in good society, will yet exhibit a rapidity and profundity of thought and intelligence—a depth and soundness of judgment—an acuteness in discrimination—a logical accuracy, and critical analysis, such as mere good society rarely shows, and such as books almost as rarely teach. ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... supposed substratum, or hidden cause of the appearances perceived by our senses; the evidence of which, whatever may be thought of its conclusiveness, is certainly not the evidence of sense. And it will always remain a signal proof of the want of metaphysical profundity of Reid, Stewart, and, I am sorry to add, of Brown, that they should have persisted in asserting that Berkeley, if he believed his own doctrine, was bound to walk into the kennel, or run his head against a post. As if persons who ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... by the careless passer-by, who cannot see the deep infinity of waters of which it is the symbol, and knows not even whether they exist, is termed "a pretty stream of thought and fancy, but one that hath no profundity nor seriousness." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... the house twenty years?" he inquired in tones of such profundity that Feldman was obliged to ask him to repeat his question. At the second repetition Uncle Mosha said that it might be a month less ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... sandy plain, nor any circumscribed and scant oasis I seem to realize. A forest valley, with rocky sides and brown profundity of shade, formed by tree crowding on tree, descends deep before me. Here, indeed, dwell human beings, but so few, and in alleys so thick branched and overarched, they are neither heard nor seen. Are they savage? Doubtless. They ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... road, and halted at a lonely kahveh —a wind-swept ruin of a place, the wall of whose upper story was patched with ancient sacking, but whose owner came out and smiled so warmly on us that we overlooked the inhospitable frown of his unplastered walls, hoping that his smile and the profundity of his salaams might prove prophetic of comfort and cleanliness within. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... had put the glow of high health on the cheek of George Peabody. He was big in body, manly, intelligent and could meet men on a basis of equality. If I were president of a college, I would certainly have a Chair devoted to Psychic Mixability, or Charm of Manner. Ponderosity, profundity and insipidity may have their place, but the man with Charm of Manner keeps his capital active. His soul is fluid. I have never been in possession of enough of this Social Radium to analyze it, but I know it has the power of dissolving opposition, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... less comprehensive than they. Is it better to be a profound student, or a comprehensive one? In some degree this must depend upon the direction of the studies: but generally, I think, it is better for the interests of knowledge that the scholar should aim at profundity, and better for the interests of the individual that he should aim at comprehensiveness. A due balance and equilibrium of the mind is but preserved by a large and multiform knowledge: but knowledge itself ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... seen. There was only a black void dividing some clusters of brilliant but remote and diminished lights. There were odd stars which detached themselves from the fixed clusters, and moved in the void, sounding the profundity of the chasm beneath them with lines of trembling fire. Such a wandering comet drifted near where I stood on the verge of nothing, and then it was plain that its trail of quivering light did not sound, but floated and undulated on a travelling road—that chasm before me was black because it ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... by the camp-fire till twilight faded and moon and stars shone with desert brilliancy. Shaking the dust from our beds as a testimony against the spiteful spirits of Rawhide Peak, we slept with our usual profundity. Always, however, before bedtime we had to go through the little ceremony of removing the burs from our clothing, for every plant in this country seems to have a bur or a tick-seed, and we found a new one in every ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... departure, and an hour's sleep in that profundity of unconsciousness that follows prolonged effort, Robin put on his sword and hat and cloak, having dressed himself with care, and went slowly out of the inn to inspect the battlefield. He carried himself deliberately, with a kind of assured insolence, as if he had supreme rights in this place, ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... Delorier, brought up the rear with his cart, waddling ankle-deep in the mud, alternately puffing at his pipe, and ejaculating in his prairie patois: "Sacre enfant de garce!" as one of the mules would seem to recoil before some abyss of unusual profundity. The cart was of the kind that one may see by scores around the market-place in Montreal, and had a white covering to protect the articles within. These were our provisions and a tent, with ammunition, blankets, and ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... buffoonery. They were all whipped syllabub. There was no investigation of first causes, first principles. There was no investigation of any thing at all. There was no attention paid to that great point, the "fitness of things." In short there was no fine writing like this. It was all low—very! No profundity, no reading, no metaphysics—nothing which the learned call spirituality, and which the unlearned choose to stigmatize as cant. [Dr. M. says I ought to spell "cant" with a capital K—but ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... cast; to have a larger perception of surrounding facts and to care for knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar. It is true that among her contemporaries she passed for a young woman of extraordinary profundity; for these excellent people never withheld their admiration from a reach of intellect of which they themselves were not conscious, and spoke of Isabel as a prodigy of learning, a creature reported to have read the classic authors—in translations. Her paternal aunt, Mrs. Varian, once spread the ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... novelists. He sympathizes merely in the sense that he understands in his heart as well as in his brain. He has the most unbiassed attitude, I think, of any author in the world. Mr. Edward Garnett, in his introduction to Mrs. Garnett's translation of Tchehov's tales, speaks admirably of his "profundity of acceptation." There is no writer who is less inclined to use italics in his record of human life. Perhaps Mr. Garnett goes too far when he says that Tchehov "stands close to all his characters, watching ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... in a satisfactory way, even to Archie ordering a new suit of clothes. The youth came out temporarily from his usual profundity, and had a real, natural boyish talk with Ralph. The latter recited the incident of the adventure with Billy Bouncer's crowd ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... was full by then and buzzing with voices. I had been looked at with curiosity by every one, but how am I to describe the sensation produced by the appearance of Falk himself blocking the doorway? The tension of expectation could be measured by the profundity of the silence that fell upon the very click of the billiard balls. As to Schomberg, he looked extremely frightened; he hated mortally any sort of row (fracas he called it) in his establishment. Fracas was bad for business, ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... the profundity of his main idea, that, exception made for the lower forms, the animal is essentially active, that it always reacts to the external world, is never passively acted upon. Let us not forget that he pointed out the essentially psychological moment implied in all processes ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... in the reflection that "the essence of scholarship lay in profundity and acumen rather than in the ability to rattle off pages like so many psalms." Yet those "five hundred leaves" of his gave me ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... found time to engage in the trifling prattle about war and peace going on in those times. The talking Doctor hits him very hard in "Taxation no Tyranny": "Those who wrote the Address (of the American Congress in 1775), though they have shown no great extent or profundity of mind, are yet probably wiser than to believe it: but they have been taught by some master of mischief how to put in motion the engine of political electricity; to attract by the sounds of Liberty and Property, to repel by those of Popery and Slavery; ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... proves the profundity of an observation made by Mr. Bagehot—a man who carried away into the next world more originality of thought than is now to be found in the Three Estates of the Realm. Whilst remarking upon the extraordinary reputation ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... almost always came back. Two or three times it happened that a woman from a brothel would suddenly prove pregnant—and this always seemed, on the face of it, laughable and disgraceful, but touching in the profundity of the event. ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... of philosophy and poetry. The proudest triumphs of genius are in a realm which art can never approach, yet the wonders of art are still among the great triumphs of civilization. Zeuxis or Praxiteles may not have equaled Homer or Plato in profundity of genius, but it was only a great age which could have produced a Zeuxis or Praxiteles. I cannot place Raphael on so exalted a pinnacle as Luther, or Bacon, or Newton, and yet his fame will last as long as civilization shall exist. The creations of the chisel ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... of mouth. And this is asserted to be the case not only in respect to brief messages, but in long addresses, which are given every Sunday in our principal cities before large audiences, and in the writing of books of considerable length, but not, as a rule, of any great profundity or literary value. To all these claims, however, we can simply record the verdict "not proven." When a man writes or says anything we want more than his mere assertion to prove that it does not come ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... planet. It is singular that Herschel, who, though not versed in the methods of the higher mathematics, had considerable native power as a mathematician, was unable to perceive the force of Laplace's reasoning. Indeed, this is one of those cases where clearness of perception rather than profundity of mathematical insight was required. Laplace's equations of motion did not express all the relations involved, nor was it possible to judge, from the results he deduced, how far the stability of the Saturnian rings depended on the real structure of these appendages. ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... Fuller":—"Life Within and Without," "At Home and Abroad," "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," "Art, Literature, and Drama,"—he would be prepared to find eccentricities of style, straining for effect, mystical utterances, attempts at profundity, and stilted commonplace. He would, however, find nothing of this sort, or of any sort of make believe, but simply a writer always in earnest, always convinced, with a fair English style, perfectly intelligible, intent upon conveying an idea in the simplest manner ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... musical giggle as one of them struck her. A bird on a long twig balanced above them, and for a time a squirrel chattered at them in mock scolding from the top of a pine. Little by little Charles-Norton sank into a profundity of well-being. He could see ahead, now, his life stretching placid and colored, solved at last, with both Dolly and the wings, uniting love and freedom, the ecstasies of flight with the ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... campaign of the Austrians is incomprehensible to all our military men—not on account of its profundity, but on account of its absurdity or incoherency. In the present circumstances, half-measures must always be destructive, and it is better to strike strongly and firmly than justly. To invade Bavaria without disarming the Bavarian ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... you, I was caught up,—snatched out of that black profundity with inconceivable swiftness,—and when the ascending movement ceased, I found myself floating lightly like a wind-blown leaf through twining arches of amber mist, colored here and there with rays of living flame ... I heard whispers, and fragments of song and speech, all sweeter ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... relentlessly direct in its moral. For some people, who take what they are able to receive, the French spirit seems trivial and superficial, merely wanton and gay, chiefly characterised by that Lubricity which worried the pedagogic Matthew Arnold. The French spirit is more specifically distinguished by its profundity and its seriousness. Without profundity and seriousness, indeed, gaiety and wantonness have no significance. If the Seven Sins had not been Deadly, the Christian Church could never have clothed them in garments of tragic dignity. Unless you cut deep into life, wantonness ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... deal more, with tipsy profundity and a serio-comic air, and keeping his eye all the time on Mrs Sliderskew, who was unable to hear one word, Mr Squeers concluded by helping himself and passing the bottle: to which Peg did ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... glorious war'. Though he spent many years and a large part of his fortune in the collection of materials for his history of the wars between France and England, it is not as an historian that he is now remembered; it is as a writer of magnificent prose. His Chroniques, devoid of any profundity of insight, any true grasp of the movements of the age, have rarely been paralleled in the brilliance and animation of their descriptions, the vigour of their character-drawing, the flowing picturesqueness of their style. They unroll ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... way that was almost paternal, what of the profundity of pity and patience with which he ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... to the Hellenic world, for whom it was a vast bound from their naturalistic polytheism. Zealous as he was for the pure faith, he realized that mankind could not attain it directly, but must approach it by conceptions of the One God gradually increasing in profundity and truth. The Greek thinkers had approximated closest to the Hebraic God-idea when they conceived one supreme, immanent reason in the universe; and Philo, in carrying his audiences beyond this to the transcendent-immanent ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... of conjunction, if all its particularities are abstracted from it, will leave us with nothing on our hands but the original disjunction which it bridged over. But to escape treating the resultant self-contradiction as an achievement of dialectical profundity, all we need is to restore some part, no matter how small, of what we have taken away. In the case of the epistemological chasm the first reasonable step is to remember that the chasm was filled with SOME empirical material, whether ideational or sensational, which performed ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... a moral phenomenon of amazing profundity takes place which is, nevertheless, so simple as never to be noticed. If two men meet in a salon, one of whom has the right to hate or despise the other, whether from a knowledge of some private and latent fact ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac
... ceremony more fully understand the grandeur and profundity of the sacrament than those who now saw the acts of the Church justly following the ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... talk as well as any one; but he could hold his tongue, if that were more expressive, and he usually did so when his perplexities were greatest. He had been sitting for several evenings in a beer-cellar, smoking his pipe with a profundity of reticence. This attitude was so unbroken that it marked a crisis—the complete, the acute consciousness of his personal situation. It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an evening. At this particular establishment the ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... that fiction was the most effective medium for expressing her philosophy of life. Thereafter she strove earnestly to develop that sense of narrative which, at the outset, was largely lacking in her mind. To many readers who are not without appreciation of the importance and profundity of her understanding of human nature, her stories are wearisome and unalluring, because she told them with labor, not with ease. She does not seem to have had a good time with them, as Stevenson had with "Treasure Island," a story ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... hospital; and though as yet there had been no complaint or symptom of panic, the face of each man, soldier, sailor, or prisoner, wore an expectant look, as though he wondered whose turn would come next. On the ship—rolling ceaselessly from side to side, like some wounded creature, on the opaque profundity of that stagnant ocean—a horrible shadow had fallen. The Malabar seemed to be enveloped in an electric cloud, whose sullen gloom a chance spark might flash into a blaze ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... Creation, and the wonders of his might. Then staid the fervid wheels, and in his hand He took the golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal store, to circumscribe This universe, and all created things: One foot he centered, and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure; And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, This be thy just circumference, O World! Thus God the Heaven created, thus the Earth, Matter unformed and void: Darkness profound Covered the abyss: but on the watery calm His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread, And vital virtue ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... here is a reading of it by a Unitarian—a reading, I venture to say, for all minds, for all places, for all times—a reading which stands clear of controversial theology, and which, in spite of its profundity, is a message for the simple as well ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... their interest is not due to another cause. I wonder if they do not feel—perhaps unconsciously—that words indicate the man, that the power to write well shows intellect, and measures, if not its profundity, at least the stage of its development. We fasten on the defects of the letters written by undergraduates, on their faltering speeches, on their confused examination papers, as something significant, ominous, worthy even of comment in the press. And we are, I believe, perfectly right. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... the irresponsible imbecility of a private individual, and not with the profundity of a professional adviser, I should say that if the circumstance of its being too much, weighs upon your mind, you have the haven of consolation open to you that you can easily make it less. And if you should be apprehensive of the trouble ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... in order that I may read this incomparable author in his own tongue. I have written some not unacceptable books myself, but I am not worthy to unloose the shoestrings of this wonderful man. I advise you to throw yourself into the depths of Jacob Behmen. There is such a profundity and exaltation of truth in them, and such ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... that we were often awed by their intellectual profundity, nor that they gave our youthful brains an impetus which sent them bounding through the severe curriculum we had ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... Blessington ('Conversations', pp. 238, 239), "you must make acquaintance with Sir William Drummond, for he is certainly one of the most erudite men and admirable philosophers now living. He has all the wit of Voltaire, with a profundity that seldom appertains to wit, and writes so forcibly, and with such elegance and purity of style, that his works possess a peculiar charm. Have you read his 'Academical Questions'? If not, get them directly, and I think you will agree with ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... it at all adventures it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to ingulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisitions, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... finds it excellent but not ample or satisfying. There is little in it which cannot be found in some of the many scriptures of Hinduism and it is silent on many points about which they speak, if not with convincing authority, at least with suggestive profundity. Neither do I think that Europe is likely to adopt Buddhist or Brahmanic methods of thought on any large scale. Theosophical and Buddhist societies have my sympathy but it is sympathy with lonely workers in an unpopular cause and I am not sure that they always understand ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... blossoms I have intermixed some that were produced long ago,—old, faded things, reminding me of flowers pressed between the leaves of a book,—and now offer the bouquet, such as it is, to any whom it may please. These fitful sketches, with so little of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose,—so reserved, even while they sometimes seem so frank,—often but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image,—such trifles, ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... political economy, so infinite and subtile are the forces that enter into its shifting phenomena, is a science of no slight complexity, and that the successful unveiling of its disordered tissue demands, in the first instance, the highest intellectual acuteness and profundity. We here encounter the same obstacles as in metaphysics, except that in the one case the phenomena investigated are subjective, in the other objective. Both conditions have peculiar advantages; both are open to peculiar difficulties, which ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... so far as it regards man, in this machinery for sifting and winnowing the merits of races, there is a system of marvellous means, which by its very simplicity masks and hides from us the wise profundity of its purpose. Often-times, in wandering amongst the inanimate world, the philosopher is disposed to say—this plant, this mineral, this fruit, is met with so often, not because it is better than ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... wonder for the children of the nobles; whosoever enters and understands it, his heart weighs carefully what it says, and it does not produce satiety.'" We must not expect to find in this work any great profundity of thought. Clever analyses, subtle discussions, metaphysical abstractions, were not in fashion in the time of Phtahhotpu. Actual facts were preferred to speculative fancies: man himself was the subject of observation, his passions, his habits, his temptations and his defects, not ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... monologue. In the smoking-room or at the supper-table he crushed conversation flat as a steam-roller crushes a road. He was quite irresistible. Trite anecdotes were sandwiched between aphorisms of the copybook; and whether anecdote or aphorism, all was delivered with the air of a man surprised by his own profundity. If you waited long enough, you had no longer the will power to run away, you sat caught in a web of sheer dulness. Only those, however, who did not know him waited long enough; the rest of his fellow-members at his appearance straightway ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... inability to express the profundity of his emotion, Dag Daughtry broke off the sentence and drowned it in ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... semblables and to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone be than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously command and promise which on all mortals with prophecy ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... "Morning Post," quick-sighted gentleman! hath this morning truly observed, (I beg pardon if I falsify his words, their profound sense I am sure I retain,) both prologue and epilogue were worthy of accompanying such a piece; and indeed (mark the profundity, Mister Manning) were received with proper indignation by such of the audience only as thought either worth attending to. PROFESSOR, thy glories wax dim! Again, the incomparable author of the "True Briton" declareth in his paper (bearing ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... "O PROFUNDITY! O mysteries of that other life that separates us! I who was always so anxious about him, who wanted so much to know everything, wherever he may be now there is an end to that. I follow him into the three abodes; I stop at that of ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... shall hear the weeping.' Could there be an allusion of more classical beauty, or more finely charged with typical truth? And yet such was one of the common and briefer exercises of the illustrative faculty in this gifted man. On another occasion we heard him dwell on that vast profundity characteristic of the scriptural representations of God, which ever deepens and broadens the longer and the more thoroughly it is explored, until at length the student—struck at first by its expansiveness, but conceiving of it as if it were a mere measured expansiveness—finds that ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... eye of the quiet moon. A few fishing vessels alone specked the water, and now and then the gentle breeze wafted the sound of voices as the fishermen called to one another. I felt the silence, although I was hardly conscious of its extreme profundity, until my ear was suddenly arrested by the paddling of oars near the shore, and a person landed close to ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... his infinite demurs to those finite flourishings. The listeners laughed and applauded by turns; and had now fairly pitted them against each other, as the philosopher of Hopefulness and of the Unhopeful. The contest continued with all that ready wit and philosophy, that mixture of pleasantry and profundity, that extensive knowledge of books and character, with their ready application in argument or illustration, and that perfect ease and good-nature, which distinguish each of these men. The opponents were so well matched, that ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... mighty sage, Yavakri, son of the ascetic Bharadwaja, acquire profundity in the Vedas? And how also did he perish? I am anxious to hear all this, just as it happened. I take delight in listening to the narration of the deeds of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... great mental shocks. Nature seems to collect her strength to sustain the misfortune. We do not feel all its intensity at once; it is only afterwards that we realize the extent and profundity of the evil. ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... immediately to be found; and, after she had found him, lectured him all the way for his temerity in presuming to be absent when Miss Walladmor condescended to want him. Tom's intellectual faculties were not of the most brilliant order: whether Tom had any latent and yet undiscovered profundity which qualified him for philosophic speculations, we cannot say: for the honor of the male sex, we heartily hope that he had some bright endowment in his brain which was deeply concealed from all men to balance his prodigious inferiority to Grace in all ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... its slang, to which he made copious contributions, enriching its vocabulary with a wealth of uncommon phrases more remarkable for their aptness than their refinement, and which impressed the unlearned "tenderfoot" with a lively sense of the profundity of their inventor's acquirements. When not entertaining a circle of admiring auditors from San Francisco or the East he could commonly be found pursuing the comparatively obscure industry of sweeping out the various dance houses and purifying ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... Nothing can lessen, nothing can enlarge such grandeur as we have here. Sea and pine-forest are the same, alike in thunder-cloud or under a serene sky—summer and winter, lightning and rain—we can hardly add by a hairbreadth to the profundity ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... NEWMAN, the distinguished and outspoken musical critic, will shortly deliver a public lecture on behalf of the admission of other instruments to these mysteries, and in particular the tuba. The claim of the tuba, Mr. NEWMAN holds, is not only based on the profundity of its tones, but upon long literary tradition. Nothing could be more conclusive than the reference in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... the same after the war." This is one of the consoling platitudes with which people cover over voids of thought. They utter it with an air of round-eyed profundity. But to ask in reply, "Then how will things be different?" is in many cases to rouse great resentment. It is almost as rude as saying, "Was that thought of ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... to the formation of the membranes of the human stomach, in which they used words that were over a foot long by actual measurement. I have never heard such splendid words in my life; but such were their grandiloquent profundity, and their far-reaching lucidity, that I understood rather less about it when they had finished than I did ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... of the mooted question of the greatness of Bruckner's symphonies, there is no doubt that he had his full share of technical profundity, and a striking mastery of the melodious weaving of a maze of concordant strains. The question inevitably arises with Bruckner as to the value of the world's judgments on its contemporary poets. There can be no doubt that the furore of the musical public tends ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... gradually sink in a burning lake of brimstone and fire. Those whose sins cause them to sink so low that they no longer can rise to the surface are for ever forgotten by God, i.e., they fade out from the omniscient memory, says the poem—an expression, by the way, of an extraordinary profundity of thought, when closely analysed. The Virgin is terribly shocked, and falling down upon her knees in tears before the throne of God, begs that all she has seen in hell—all, all without exception, should have their sentences remitted to ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... the upright poise, or rather went a little beyond it since his bulky protuberance in front gave him the appearance of leaning backward. The deepening crimson of his countenance showed the profundity of his anger. ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... greatness of a piece of literature not by the beauty of the style or the profundity of the thought but by the influence it has exercised over men, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius will rank high. Its chief sources were the meditation and observation of its author. If he took some things from Garcia de Cisneros, some from The Imitation of Christ, some ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... were those of Mr. Adams. Every department of literature and science received more or less of his attention—every path of human improvement seems to have been explored by him. As a statesman, he was unrivalled in the profundity of his knowledge. His state papers—given to the world while Minister, Secretary of State, President, and Member of Congress—his numerous addresses, orations, and speeches, are astonishing in number, and ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... disclosed to us, we should find that the turns of the daughter's complaint in December 1694 bore an exact analogy to the turns of the father's fortune in December 1688. It was at midnight that the father ran away from Rochester; it was at midnight that the daughter expired. Such was the profundity and such the ingenuity of a writer whom the Jacobite schismatics justly regarded as one ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... from men who have not acquired their hardiness of assertion from the profundity of their thinking, about the omnipotence of a majority, in such a dissolution of an ancient society as hath taken place in France. But amongst men so disbanded there can be no such thing as majority or minority, or power in any one person to bind another. The power of acting ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... "and it is that which attaches me to you. By assuming your likeness yesterday, I became acquainted with your character, and was no less astonished at the profundity and range of your thoughts than at the heroic magnanimity with which these were combined. And now, in addition to these, you are dedicated to the great work of the Lord; for which reasons I have resolved to attach myself as closely to you as possible, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... agree to the project, and then had very distinctly hung back from implementing its promises and fulfilling its good intentions. So the Apostle, in the chapter from which my text is taken, with wonderful delicacy, dignity, and profundity, sets forth the true principle, not only of Christian giving, but of Christian asking. The text advises that the gushing sentiments of brotherly sympathy and liberality which had inspired the Corinthians a year ago should ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a low guttural grating. No cub had a cavernous profundity of sound such as that. Still there was not the stir of a muscle, so far as ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... no longer the shy girl whom I had met on the first night of my university life. Then she was only in her fifteenth year. I was a junior when she produced her lauded essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," and it revealed to me the profundity of her mind. To match her, I must sit many a night driving my way through difficult pages of the classics, and often when my heart was in some smoky den with a few choice spirits, my body bent over my table and my brain wearied ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... and more particularly by intelligent and discreet crime. Machiavelli emphasised the separation, at times relative, at times absolute, which exists between politics and morals. His Discourses upon Livius are full of sense, penetration, and profundity; his light works show a singular dexterity of thought united to a fundamental grossness which it would be impossible ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... saw him, "a Eulogy of Gresset recently published? The author has sent me a copy of it, without naming himself. He will probably come to see me; he may, perhaps, have come already. What could I say to him? I do not think any one ever wrote worse. He mistakes obscurity for profundity; it is the darkness before ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... etymologies. He has an argument for the deterioration of man, drawn from the fact that the Romans expressed in the same word, supplicium, the two ideas of prayer and punishment (Soirees, 2ieme entretien, i. p. 108). His profundity as an etymologist may be gathered from his analysis of cadaver: ca-ro, da-ta, ver-mibus. There are many others ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... black balls and white boards, in fixed combinations; by night, with colored lanterns. Each section of the city has a signal-tower of this sort, and the engine-house is close at hand. Gradskaya Duma means, literally, city thought, and the profundity of the meditations sometimes indulged in in this building, otherwise not remarkable, may be inferred from the fact discovered a few years ago, that many honored members of the Duma (which also signifies the Council of City Fathers), whose names still stood on the ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... with a look of profundity worthy of Solomon, "that your people should be so fond of smokes and drinks that make them sick and mad when they have so much of the sparkling ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... approach the matter more closely. To physical science, one act is precisely the same as another; a mere matter of molecular movement or change. You raise your arm, you think with the energy and profundity of a Hegel; to the physicist it is all one and the same thing—a fresh distribution of matter and motion, muscular contraction, and rise and fall of the grey pulp called brain. A burglar shoots a policeman dead and the public ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... entireness of moral health and sanity is leading the time steadily forward into its great believing and builded future; though it may follow from his limitations that into this future he cannot accompany it very far. Mr. Carlyle, with a poetic profundity of nature and a force of insight which entitle him not merely to a high place among the men of our time, but to a name among the men of all time, standing face to face with the divine reality and wonder of existence, conversing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... the profundity of these moral truths. She perceived that she had senses. A second was enough to bring about this discovery, to change her soul, to alter her whole life. To have learned to know herself was at first a delight. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... of all things, the independent Monarch of nature is the master of his favors; that he owes nothing to his creatures; that he can dispose of them as he pleases, without any injustice, and without their having any right of complaint; that man is incapable of sounding the profundity of his decrees; and that his justice is not the justice of men. But all these answers, which divines have continually in their mouths, serve only to accelerate the destruction of those sublime ideas which they have given us of the Deity. ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... the Empress held a reception. The Bulletin of Lyons thus described it: "The assembly was most brilliant. As our sovereign has exhibited in his audiences profundity, affability, exact and varied learning, and true greatness, so his august wife has shone with grace, courtesy, and gentleness. Thus we witness a revival of that old French urbanity and politeness of manners which have always distinguished our court, and have ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... passions in this young man, as in most of the men who live in that way, of amazing profundity,—passions too vast to be drawn into petty incidents. His want of means compelled him to lead an ascetic life, and he conquered his fancies by hard work. After paling all day over figures, he found his recreation in striving ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... we take the Buddha as the type of them; and expect not only a life and character that we can recognise as flawless, but also a profundity of revelation in the philosophy and ethics. But if no two blades of grass are alike, much less are two human Souls; and in these Great Ones, it is the picture of Souls we are given. When we think that if all men were perfect, all would be alike, we err with a wide ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... and are disposed to confound the tinsel and bombast of the phraseology with want of weight in the thoughts. Thus, from the imposing and oracular nature of the style, people are tempted at first to imagine that our author's speculations are all wisdom and profundity: till having found out their mistake in some instances, they suppose that there is nothing but common-place in them, concealed under verbiage and pedantry; and in both they are wrong. The fault of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... inundated with pamphlets full of infidelity and discontent, fanned by the French Revolution, then passing through its worst stages of cruelty, atheism, and spoliation. Burke about the same time wrote his "Reflections," which are immortal for their wisdom and profundity; but he wrote for the upper classes, not merely in England, but in America and on the continent of Europe. Hannah More wrote for the lower classes, and in a style of great clearness and simplicity. Her admirable dialogue, called "Village Politics," by Will Chip, a country carpenter, exposed the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... invention? Will a jealous and dogmatic democracy respect the unintelligible insight of the few? Will a perhaps starving democracy support materially its Soviet of seers? But let us suppose that no utilitarian fanaticism supervenes, and no intellectual surfeit or discouragement. May not the very profundity of the new science and its metaphysical affinities lead it to bolder developments, inscrutable to the public and incompatible with one another, like the gnostic sects of declining antiquity? Then perhaps that luminous modern thing which until ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... only sounds are those of the branches swaying in the breeze, or of a bough crashing to the ground through decay, or the occasional voices of the wandering birds; and these seem but to increase the silence by their inadequateness of contrast. Alone in this profundity of gloom it is difficult for the traveller to resist the sense and feeling of a supernatural Presence, and he comes to understand in what way such eerie legends and grim traditions have grown up about the forest, and why to ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... of my visit to Bridges was to turn me out for more profundity. Hugh Vereker, as I saw him there, was of a contact so void of angles that I blushed for the poverty of imagination involved in my small precautions. If he was in spirits it wasn't because he had read my review; in fact on the Sunday morning I felt sure he hadn't read ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James |
