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adjective
Refined  adj.  Freed from impurities or alloy; purifed; polished; cultured; delicate; as; refined gold; refined language; refined sentiments. "Refined wits who honored poesy with their pens."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Refined" Quotes from Famous Books



... surprising, mystifying, and utterly inexplicable changes that leave the masculine being so helpless in the hands of his feminine master. Before Christie opened the door her face underwent a rapid transformation: the gentle glow of a refined woman's welcome suddenly beamed in her interested eyes; the impulsive courtesy of an expectant hostess eagerly seizing a long-looked-for opportunity broke in a smile upon her lips as she swept across the room, and stopped with her two white outstretched ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte

... deck," ordered Cleo, in mock severity, when cracker tins and tea cups were being worked to the point of refined cruelty. ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis

... But the degree of restriction is variable and depends much upon the kind of matter of which the brain and body are composed; for the physical atoms vary greatly, and as they come and go in the passing years the body may either become purified and refined or it may grow grosser and coarser. By careful attention to food and drink, and by control of the emotions, the limitations of physical matter may be lessened and a much higher and more efficient state of consciousness in the physical body ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers

... pretty picture to study. Her rich costume of seal brown, plush with ruchings of feathers, the coquettish hat to match with the jaunty ostrich plume were becoming in the extreme and gave an air of richness and refined elegance. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... the first struggle with his unchangeable brutality it had been easier: for into his degenerate brain there had come a faint understanding of the real situation and of her. He had kept his side of the gulf, but gloating on this touch between the old luxurious, indulgent life, with its refined vices, and this present coarse, hard life, where pleasures were few and gross. The free Northern life of toil and hardship had not refined him. He greedily hung over this treasure, which was not for his spending, yet was his own—as though ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker

... written in Arabic, and the translations into Hebrew, made by the scholars of Southern France, did not appear until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Though the Spanish Jews did not yet cultivate the allegoric and mystic exegesis, their philosophic sense was rather refined and they did not always approach the study of the Bible without seeking something not clearly expressed in the text, without arriere-pensee so to speak. Rashi's exegesis was more ingenuous and, ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber

... like Mauritius extremely. It is so comfortable to live in a place with good servants and commodious houses, and the society is particularly refined and agreeable, owing chiefly to the mixture of a strong French element in its otherwise humdrum ingredients. I have never seen such a wealth of lovely hair or such beautiful eyes and teeth as I observe in the girls in every ball-room here; and when you add exceedingly charming—alas! that I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... what barbarians!" cried the little doctor, as they walked down the Bridges. "And this is my dream of refined quiet ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... cancellation of certain agreements, whereby, through purchases of stock in other companies, the American Sugar Refining Company, had "acquired," it was conceded, "nearly complete control of the manufacture of refined sugars in the United States." The question of the validity of the act was not expressly discussed by the Court, but was subordinated to that of its proper construction. So proceeding, the Court, in pursuance of doctrines of Constitutional ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... But there's a lot of things possible for her. Why, Mrs. Charmond is wanting some refined young lady, I hear, to go abroad with her—as companion or something of the kind. She'd ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... carry me away, and not until I had come to mature age was I able to free myself to any extent from this failing. Then I confirmed myself in my opinion that the applause of the public is not all refined gold, and I became able to separate the gold from the dross in the crucible of intelligence. How many on the stage are ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles

... interesting occasional poems.[1] For the summer of this year she was the guest in England of the Countess of Huntingdon, whose patronage she had won by an elegiac poem on George Whitefield; in conversation even more than in verse-making she exhibited her refined taste and accomplishment, and presents were showered upon her, one of them being a copy of the magnificent 1770 Glasgow folio edition of Paradise Lost, which was given by Brook Watson, Lord Mayor of London, and which is now preserved in the library of Harvard University. In the ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... idealized to harmonize with silks and satins. The cornemuse of shepherds and rustic swains became the fashionable instrument, but as inflating the bag by the breath distorted the performer's face, the bellows were substituted, and the whole instrument was refined in appearance and tone-quality to fit it for its more exalted position. The Hotteterre family and that of Chedeville were past masters of the art of making the musette and of playing upon it; they counted among their pupils the highest and noblest in the land. The cult ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... carrying bows and arrows, their coarse features worse disfigured by war-paint and a gaudy headdress of feathers, their heads shaven, with the exception of one long scalp-lock, their gleaming bodies nearly naked or draped with dirty buffalo or beaver skins. What allies for a refined grand seigneur of France! It was a costly burden to feed them. Sometimes they made howling demands for brandy and for bouillon, by which they meant human blood. Many of them were cannibals. Once Montcalm had to ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong

... I felt the power of its beauty, and only wondered that she should belong to such people at all; her hands were white and shapely as my own, her figure was slender and graceful. I began to talk to her, and found her well educated, refined, intelligent—all, in fact, that ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)

... speak nor did she eat; she was depressed. Wherefore? She had wished to come; she knew that she was coming to a simple home; she had formed no poetical ideas of those peasants, but she had perhaps expected to find them somewhat more polished, refined. She recalled her own mother, of whom she never spoke to anyone—a governess who had been betrayed and who had died of grief and shame when Madeleine was twelve years old. A stranger had had the little girl educated. Her father without ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant

... life of art and beauty, and taste and delight, but she has her fevers of blood and fury, her awful reactions of raw brutality, her hidden sores of strange crime. Of all cities, Paris is the most refined, the most progressive in the highest way, the most delicately sensitive; of all cities, too, when the spasm is on her, she is the most mediaeval in her violence, her lust for blood, her horrible 'inhumanity to man'—Burns might have written those ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford

... about their work, and Schmucke looked on precisely as an idiot might have done. Broken down with sorrow, wholly absorbed, in a half-cataleptic state, he could not take his eyes from the face that seemed to fascinate him, Pons' face refined by the absolute repose of Death. Schmucke hoped to die; everything was alike indifferent. If the room had been on fire ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac

... U.S.A., and also in Peru, Ceylon, China, Persia, and Thibet. The commercial product is obtained from the native borax (known as "tincal") by dissolving in water and allowing the solution to crystallise. The Peruvian borax sometimes contains nitre. For testing the purity of refined borax the following simple tests will usually suffice. A solution of the borax is made containing 1 part of borax to 50 parts of water, and small portions of the solution are tested as follows: Heavy ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith

... and St Cyprian with equal triumph. Well, indeed, might Theophilus of Antioch, in his letter to Autolycus, place the Christian opinions concerning women in startling contrast with the revolting scheme proposed in relation to them by the most refined philosopher of antiquity. Well might the matrons of Antioch refuse to gratify Julian by a sacrifice to gods whose votaries had steeped their sex in impurity and degradation. The death of Hypatia is indeed a blot in Christian annals, but she fell the victim of an infuriated multitude; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... especially for sideboards, are extremely attractive, mainly by reason of their austere simplicity. Robert Adam was no doubt at first led to turn his thoughts towards furniture by his desire to see his light, delicate, graceful interiors, with their large sense of atmosphere and their refined and finished detail, filled with plenishings which fitted naturally into his scheme. His own taste developed as he went on, but he was usually extremely successful, and cabinetmakers are still reproducing his most effective designs. In his furniture he ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... debate on popular sovereignty was renewed. This time Jefferson Davis, a senator from Mississippi, attacked this position as incompatible with the Constitution and the laws. Mr. Davis was a skillful debater. His mind was singularly graceful and refined. He was eloquent, logical, and courageous. His career as soldier and statesman, as War Minister under Pierce, and as senator for Mississippi, made him a prominent figure. He was cultured, classical, and well rounded, equipped by leisure and long study for the career before him. He had vanquished ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall

... There is no mistake; I know whereof I speak when I say that just such villains as I have described are to be found in, and leaders of, the select dancing school, in the ball room and at the parlor dance, figuring in what is called the best society, as the most refined and highly polished society gentlemen of ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner

... obtained her first situation, for Mrs. Mortlock was glad to feel her soft young hand, and her gentle and refined tones had an instant and soothing effect on the ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade

... "Wish to leave! why, I thought, Thompson, you were very comfortable with me!" Thompson (who is extremely refined). "Ho yes, mum! I don't find no fault with you, mum—nor yet with master—but the truth his, mum—the hother servants is so orrid vulgar and hignorant, and speaks so hungrammaticai, that I reely cannot live in the same ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... almost a prayer, but a prayer that included a thousand meanings Daylight strove to feign sheepishness, but his heart was singing too wild a song for mere playfulness. All things had been in the naming of his name—reproach, refined away by gratitude, and all compounded ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... chapel (1502), is composed of purely classic elements. In the P.Giraud (Fig. 166) and the great Cancelleria Palace, pilasters appear in the external composition, and all the details of doors and windows betray the results of classic study, as well as the refined taste of their designer.[24] The beautiful courtyard of the Cancelleria combines the Florentine system of arches on columns with the Roman system of superposed arcades independent of the court wall. In 1506 Bramante began the rebuilding of St. Peter's for ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... rejected, the offscum and the offscouring of the very dregs of your society.... All hands are extended to thrust them out, all fingers point at their dusky skin, all tongues, the most vulgar as well as the self-styled most refined, have learned to turn the very name of their race into an insult and a reproach."[51] Marshall Hall expressed himself as "utterly at a loss to imagine the source of that prejudice which subsists against him [the negro] in the Northern states, a prejudice unknown in the South, where the domestic ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... newcomer's refined and musical voice breathed the very soul of affability. "I am an individual who is so unfortunate as to be in ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various

... woman who had betrayed such agitation at sight of him lingered naturally enough with the newcomer. Though, as I stated, not much less than thirty years of age, Mademoiselle V—, one of his own nation, and of highly refined and delicate appearance, had kindled a singular interest in the middle-aged gentleman's breast, and her large dark eyes, as they had opened and shrunk from him, exhibited a pathetic beauty to which hardly any man could ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy

... an enigma!" Miss Stuart said to herself, half a dozen times during the morning. "What the doctor says is true! The child is almost refined. It is marvelous! In spite of her ignorance, she ...
— The Automobile Girls in the Berkshires - The Ghost of Lost Man's Trail • Laura Dent Crane

... who would treat her as her father treated his wife, and here she found herself in those few months as enmeshed as her mother had ever been. Aye! even more so. Hers was a position even more to be feared, because it was more subtle, more intangible, more refined, and John's rule as determined and unyielding ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... was off like a shot to the wheat pit; he gave it to another white-haired young-faced man of cultured, refined, even scholarly bearing, so different from the ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter

... Like to a harpstring stricken by the wind, The sound of her lament shall, rising o'er The Seraph voices, touch the Almighty Mind. Meantime I, humblest of thy sons, and of 20 Earth's dust by immortality refined To Sense and Suffering, though the vain may scoff, And tyrants threat, and meeker victims bow Before the storm because its breath is rough, To thee, my Country! whom before, as now, I loved and love, devote ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... and of great beauty. Others are as rude and wild as any of those already figured in this work, from the churches of St. Georges or Gournay. The mysteries of Christianity, and the fables and allegories of heathenism, the latter, as well in its most refined as its most barbarous forms, occur in endless variety in almost every part of the edifice. One of the capitals contains a representation of the fabulous Sphynx, with her tail ending in a fleur-de-lys: upon another, ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman

... poet of Princeton in his day, quite the gentleman Bohemian. "He was," writes Leland, "quite familiar, in a refined and gentlemanly way, with all the dissipations of Philadelphia and New York." His easy circumstances made it possible for him to balance his ascetic taste for scholarship with riding horse-back. To which ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker

... ourselves. It is the touchstone of experience, after all, that tries all things in both worlds, and experience in the spiritual world may be long delayed; it is power of mind that makes wide generalizations in both; and the conception of spiritual law is the most refined as perhaps it is the most ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... pace, all a-hobble though it be; I let myself go, just as it happens. The parlance I like is a simple and natural parlance, the same on paper as in the mouth, a succulent and a nervous parlance, short and compact, not so much refined and finished to a hair as impetuous and brusque, difficult rather than wearisome, devoid of affectation, irregular, disconnected, and bold, not pedant-like, not preacher-like, not pleader-like." That fixity which Montaigne could not give to his irresolute ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... out of her quiet home, where her heart had bled in secret; she came out into society again; and she did every thing she could, in her gentle, quiet way. She joined temperance societies,— helped push 'em forward with her money and her influence. With other white-souled wimmen, gentle and refined as she was, she went into rough bar-rooms, and knelt on their floors, and prayed what her sad heart wus full of,—for pity and mercy for her boy, and other mothers' boys,—prayed with that fellowship of suffering that made her sweet voice as pathetic as tears, and patheticker, ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... women upon the stage, and their increased attendance at theatres has somewhat modified the nature of the performance; even the "refined vaudeville" now begins to show the influence of women. It would be no great advantage to have this department of human life feminized; the improvement desired is to have it less masculized; to reduce the excessive influence of one, and to bring out those ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... I knew Surbiton. I knew its elegances and petty refinements. I knew its pathetic apings of Curzon Street and Grosvenor Square. I knew its extremely dull smartness of speech and behaviour. I foresaw that I should enjoy myself as much as I did at the Y.M.C.A. concert where everybody sang refined songs and stopped the star from going on because he was about to sing the "Hymn to Venus," which was regarded as "a little amorous." The self-conscious waywardness, the deliberate Bohemianism of Surbiton, I said to myself, is not for me. I shall either overplay it or underplay ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... Vice brings forward refined arguments, and Virtue allows them to pass unchallenged. bolt to sift or separate, as the boulting-mill separates the meal from the bran; in this sense the word (also spelt boult) is used by Chaucer, Spenser ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton

... good hearted but not over refined young man, is brought in touch with the aristocracy. Of sprightly wit, he is sometimes a merciless analyst, but he proves in the end that manhood counts for more than ancient lineage by winning the love of the fairest ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... much to distinguish it from the Chinese. At first purely theurgic, the practice was later characterized by acupuncture and a refined study of the pulse. It has an extensive literature, largely based upon the Chinese, and extending as far back as the beginning of the Christian era. European medicine was introduced by the Portuguese and the Dutch, whose "factory" or "company" physicians were not without influence ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... somewhat rakish for the occasion; and it appeared that sarongs were not being sported by the more refined class of male diners, who affected as a mass the sombre black of dinner jackets. At all Hong Kong hotels the custom is evening dress for dinner, and Peter felt shabby and shoddy in his silk suit, his low shoes, his ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts

... Boston, and after ninety years it is still the family home. Here was born, February 22, 1819, James Russell Lowell, with surroundings most propitious for the nurturing of a poet-soul. Within the stately home there was a refined family life; the father had profited by the unusual privilege of three years' study abroad, and his library of some four thousand volumes was not limited to theology; the mother, whose maiden name was Spence and who traced her Scotch ancestry back ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... rich man, the customer, to the humble shop-keeper, the jeweler's wife. Had he loved her? Why should he have made friends with these tradespeople if he had not been in love with the wife? He was a man of education and fairly refined tastes. How many a time had he discussed poets and poetry with Pierre. He did not appreciate these writers from an artistic point of view, but with sympathetic and responsive feeling. The doctor had often smiled at his emotions which had struck him as rather silly; now he plainly saw that ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... writes: "If I were obliged to choose between this method" (the system here advocated) "and that of comparative philology, it is the former that I would adopt without the slightest hesitation. This method alone enables us to explain the fact, which has so often provoked amazement, that people so refined as the Greeks,... or so rude, but morally pure, as the Germans,... managed to attribute to their gods all manner of cowardly, cruel and disorderly conduct. This method alone explains the why and wherefore of all those strange metamorphoses of gods into beasts and plants, and even stones, which ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... accumulated a small fortune. This must have been too small, I fear, at that time to allow him even a philosopher's comforts: for some part of it, invested in the French funds, had been confiscated. I was grieved to see a man of so much ability, of gentlemanly manners, and refined habits, and with the infirmity of deafness, suffering under such obvious privations; and I once took the liberty, on a fit occasion presenting itself, of requesting that he would allow me to send him some books which he had been casually regretting that he did not possess; for I ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... from her own earnings. The poet was educated at Eton and Cambridge; at the latter place, he resided for several years after his return from a continental tour, begun in 1739. He was small and delicate in person, refined and precise in dress and manners, and shy and retiring in disposition. He was an accomplished scholar in many fields of learning, but left comparatively little finished work in any department. He declined the honor of poet ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... his dragoman; "for I have frequently met with nobility in distress; and, indeed, the more exalted and refined the mind, the unhappier is frequently the owner thereof, for to him are visible a thousand cruelties and mean injustices which ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy

... clubs indulged in, was not injurious to men engaged in the barn and at the plough. A well-ordered mind will be strengthened, as well as embellished, by elegant knowledge, while over those naturally barren and ungenial all that is refined or noble will pass as a sunny shower scuds over lumps of granite, bringing neither warmth ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... young woman as its future Mother Superior. Her seminary in Georgetown averaged from thirty to thirty-five pupils, and there are those living who remember the troop of girls, dressed uniformly, which was wont to follow in procession their pious and refined teacher to devotions on the Sabbath at Holy Trinity Church. The school comprised girls from the best Colored families of Georgetown, Washington, Alexandria, and surrounding country. The sisters of the Georgetown convent ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... a very ordinary organist, but an admirable teacher. A veritable galaxy of talent came from his class. He had little to say, but as his taste was refined and his judgment sure, nothing he said lacked weight or authority. He collaborated in several ballets for the Opera and that gave him a good deal of work to do. It sounds incredible, but he used to bring his "work" to class and ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens

... literally paralysed with horror. Then my dismay gave place to indignation. "But, damn it!" I exclaimed, starting up—"I beg your pardon—but could anyone have the infernal audacity to insinuate that that gentle, refined lady murdered her uncle?" ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... on the veranda in a handsome Prince Albert suit of gray with a broad-brimmed gray hat to match. He looked like some of the pictures of Western Congressmen she had seen, only more refined and gentle. He wore his coat unbuttoned, and it had the effect of draping his tall, erect frame, and the hat suited well with the large lines of his nose and chin. It seemed to her she had never seen a ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland

... dining one day at the Turk's Head Tavern, was much annoyed by a gentleman in the adjoining box, who had just ordered fish for dinner, and was calling on the waiter for every species of fish sauce known to the most refined epicure. "Waiter," said he, "bring me anchovy sauce, and soy; and have you got Harvey's? and be sure you bring me Burgess's;—and waiter—do you hear?—don't omit the sauce epicurienne." How many more he would have enumerated it is difficult to ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various

... to be quite an original. One of his whims was, that he would never go into the kitchen nor yet into a poor man's cottage; but he formed a habit of visiting by himself at the country houses in the neighbourhood of Cromer, and his refined manners and intelligence made 'Speaker' a welcome guest wherever ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... were supposed to be secured to us, without the mischiefs attending on perpetual intrigue, and a distinct canvass for every particular office throughout the body of the people. This was the most noble and refined part of our constitution. The people, by their representatives and grandees, were intrusted with a deliberative power in making laws; the King with the control of his negative. The King was intrusted with ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke

... readiness to wait as long as might be desired, and sat down, his hat balanced elegantly on his knees. The handsome shop-manager had got himself up and perfumed himself to excess: his every action was accompanied by a powerful whiff of the most refined aroma. He arrived in a comfortable open carriage—one of the kind called landau—drawn by two tall and powerful but not well-shaped horses. A quarter of an hour later Sanin, Klueber, and Emil, in this same carriage, drew up triumphantly at the steps of the confectioner's shop. Madame Roselli resolutely ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev

... said to himself, 'This is the true way to preach,' albeit he felt misgivings lest such a simple style of exposition might not suit so well a cultured refined city congregation. He had yet to learn how the enticing words of man's wisdom make the cross of Christ of none effect, and how the very simplicity that makes preaching intelligible to the illiterate makes sure that the most ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson

... too refined for utterance, Ethereal as the air, Crowd through the brain's dim labyrinths, And leave their impress ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster

... because it did not seem to her like pride, since the distinction, whatever it was, did not consist in rank; she would have had a horror of valuing herself on being a baronet's daughter, but this more subtle difference flattered her more refined feelings of vanity; and though she was far from being conscious of it, greatly influenced her frame of mind, and her conduct towards her cousins. It was not without reason now that Caroline thought ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... apparent. There was a change of view, but no relaxation of purpose. The problem, it was seen, could be solved by no single heroic effort, but by the patient approximation of gradual improvements. Astronomers, accordingly, looked round for fresh means or more refined expedients for applying those already known. A new phase of ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... a British company—the "Yengarie"—was started with a large capital for the purpose of acquiring cane-juice all over the Colony and extracting from it highly-refined sugar. The works, fitted with vacuum-pans and all the latest improvements connected with this class of apparatus, were established at Mandaloyan, about three miles from Manila up the Pasig River. From certain parts of Luzon Island the juice was to be conveyed to ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... he fell in love. He saw one other woman to place in his heart and memory beside his mother. His wife was Saskia van Ulenburg, the daughter of an aristocrat, refined and rich. He met her through her cousin, an art dealer, who had ordered Rembrandt to paint a portrait of his dainty cousin. Rembrandt could have been nothing but what was delightful and good, since he was loved by so charming a girl ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon

... indeed, suggest the ritual, but it proves only a morning prayer or offering. Is this poem of a "singularly refined character," or "preeminently sacerdotal" in appearance? One other example (in still a different metre) may be examined, to see if it bear on its face evidence of having been made with "reference to ritual application," ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... was on the scale of the rest of the place; high light commodious and decorated with such refined old carvings and mouldings that it seemed rather a bower for ladies who should sit at work at fading crewels than a parliament of gentlemen smoking strong cigars. The gentlemen mustered there in considerable force on the Sunday evening, collecting mainly at one end, ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James

... prove that the minds of early men were chiefly concerned with the increase of vegetation, and that their fancy played so much round the mysteries of plant growth that they made them their holiest arcana. Hence it appears that the savages were far more modest and refined than our civilised contemporaries, for almost all our works of imagination, both in literature and art, make human love their theme in all its aspects, whether healthy or pathological; whereas the savage, it seems, thought only ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... summer, all contributed to irritate the young man's already excited nerves. The reeking fumes of the dram shops, so numerous in this part of the city, and the tipsy men to be seen at every point, although it was no holiday, completed the repulsive character of the scene. Our hero's refined features betrayed, for a moment, an expression of bitter disgust. We may observe casually that he was not destitute of personal attractions; he was above middle height, with a slender and well-proportioned figure, and he had dark auburn hair ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... for Mr. Hanbury!" "Be quiet, damn you, why don't you shut up?" These and other similarly emphatic shouts reached Robertson's ears. He hunted for his last pencil in his vest-pocket, and when he looked up again, he saw through the cloud of smoke a tall, refined person standing on ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff

... remember that my school-days were unhappy—indeed I recall a good lot of fine mixed fun in them—but I cannot without grave risk of misinterpretation declare that we were at all nice and refined. We fought much, not sound formal fighting, but "scrapping" of a sincere and murderous kind, into which one might bring one's boots—it made us tough at any rate—and several of us were the sons of London publicans, who distinguished ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... studded with anecdotes and stories, some of them of great pith and humor; the well-bred gentleman was either too dull to feel their point, or too decorous to indulge in hearty merriment; the honest parson, on the contrary, who was not too refined to be happy, laughed loud and long at every joke, and enjoyed them with the zest of a man who has more merriment in his heart ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving

... demands of society, in this respect, that one wins rewards and commendation. Of course, if one likes to throw in a few ornamental extras, so much the better; it keeps up appearances and the aspect of refined sentiment—but the main point——" ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... she must be a Radical. Certainly she did not belong to these "refined" English—women or men. She was quite sure of that, seeing them gathered together, English Church-people ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson

... would have to be refined to pure aluminum oxide before it could be smelted," George said. "And you can't smelt aluminum ore in an ordinary furnace—only in an electric furnace with a generator that can supply a high amperage. And we would have to have cryolite ore ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin

... despised. Out of these explanations grew by degrees a variety of narratives, whose true object and meaning were gradually forgotten. And when these were abandoned, and philosophy resorted to definitions and formulas, its language was but a more refined symbolism, grappling with and attempting to picture ideas impossible to be expressed. For the most abstract expression for Deity which language can supply, is but a sign or symbol for an object unknown, and no more truthful and adequate ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... other hand, to the doctrine as it came from the lips of Christ, we find ourselves in an entirely different region. He makes no attempt to project the material into the immaterial. The old elements, however refined and subtle as to their matter, are not in themselves to inherit the Kingdom of God. That which is flesh is flesh. Instead of attaching Immortality to the natural organism, He introduces a new and original factor which none of the secular, and few even of the theological theories, seem ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... Alix further revealed. "They used to take dignified walks on Sundays. I used to tease her, and she'd get so mad she'd ask Dad to ask me to be more refined. She said that Mr. Little was a most unusual man, and it was belittling to his dignity to have me suppose that a man and a woman couldn't have an intellectual friendship. This in May, my dear, and after the thing was settled and Anne had cried, and written notes, and Justin ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris

... had passed away; and the days were gone, too, when the monastery had stood as the sole centre of light in a dark age, at once the substitute for school, college, hospital, and alms-house, as well as the home of painting, literature, music, and all the refined arts. When any custom or institution, however beautiful, becomes effete, the ruthless hand of progress sweeps it away, and supplants it with something else, leaving us only ivy-covered ruins to show us what our forefathers loved ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil

... nobler than the capacity of friendship? In these he not only shines as a cultivated scholar, but as a great statesman and patriot, living for the good of his country, though not unmindful of the luxuries of home and the charms of country retirement, and those enjoyments which are ever associated with refined and favored life. We read here of pictures, books, medals, statues, curiosities of every kind, all of which adorned his various villas, as well as his magnificent palace on Mount Palatine, which cost him what would be equal in our money to two hundred ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord

... too, the few choice pictures upon the walls, the ingenious bookcase and the more ingenious plate and cup-rack displaying honest delf and some bits of choice china, the draping curtains of muslin and cretonne, all spoke of cultivated minds and refined tastes. Staring wants there were, and many discrepancies and incongruities, but no vulgarities nor coarseness nor tawdriness. What they had was fitting. What was fitting but beyond their means these brave home-makers did without, and all things unfitting, however cheap, they scorned. And Shock, ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor

... little daughter, remained in the less splendid but more moral and refined metropolis of her paternal domain. A mother's solicitude and prayers, however, followed her son. Antony consented to retain as a tutor for Henry the wise and learned La Gaucherie, who was himself strongly attached to ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... pouring a strong spirit of Nitre on the rectified Oyl of the Butter of Antimony, and then distilling off all the liquor, that would come over, &c. This Menstruum (called by the Author Peracutum) being put to highly refined Gold, destroyed its Texture, and produced, after the method prescribed in the book, a true Silver, as its whiteness in colour, dissolublenes in Aqua fortis, and odious Bitterness, did manifest: which change of ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various

... sold them said, from the very garden in which berries and vegetables were "pulled" for Queen Mary three hundred years ago. One evening Professor Blackie, of the Edinburgh University, dined with Mrs. Nichol. At my reception he had said he did not want to "see refined, delicate women going down into the muddy pool of politics," and I asked him if he had ever thought that, since the only places which were too filthy for women were those where men alone went, perhaps they might be so from lack of women. At dinner Mrs. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... season affect this branch of revenue, yet weighing all probabilities of expense as well as of income, there is reasonable ground of confidence that we may now safely dispense with all the internal taxes, comprehending excise, stamps, auctions, licenses, carriages, and refined sugars, to which the postage on newspapers may be added to facilitate the progress of information, and that the remaining sources of revenue will be sufficient to provide for the support of Government, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson

... she was in real danger and by her reproof of the others when they had shown their ingratitude, stepped into the firelight, fully dressed. She did not look at all as if she belonged with the others. She was more refined, gentler, and sweeter in every way. Dick Crawford stared at her in astonishment. Jack had told him about her, but, since seeing the others, he had thought that Jack had made a ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters - or Jack Danby's Bravest Deed • Robert Maitland

... these come forth, seeking the shade, searching for moisture, they form like small sponges on a coral reef; but growing, spread and change to meet the changing contours of the land they win, and with every victory or upward move, adopt some new refined intensive tint that is the outward and visible sign of their diverse inner excellences and their triumph. Ever evolving they spread, until there are great living rugs of strange textures and oriental ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton

... "Madame Firmiani? Isn't she from Antwerp? I saw her ten years ago in Rome; she was very handsome then." Individuals of the species Attache have a mania for talking in the style of Talleyrand. Their wit is often so refined that the point is imperceptible; they are like billiard-players who avoid hitting the ball with consummate dexterity. These individuals are usually taciturn, and when they talk it is only about Spain, Vienna, Italy, or Petersburg. Names of countries act like springs in their mind; ...
— Madame Firmiani • Honore de Balzac

... in this to some extent, as he afterwards came to confess to himself, for among his men there were two or three minds worth cultivating, noble and shrewd, and deep, too, though not educated or refined. But at the time of which we write, Jack did not know this. He went ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne

... been her companion for years. She has left us to be married to an officer, who has taken her to India; and we are utterly at a loss how to fill her place. The good old lady doesn't want much. A nice-tempered refined girl, who can sing and play to her with some little taste and feeling, and read to her now and then when her eyes are weary—there is what we require; and there, it seems, is more than we can get, after advertising for a week ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins

... Its waters are continually being renewed. And the forest, though not a leaf moves, is, we know, straining with all the energy of life for food and light, for air and moisture. So by this jewel of a pool in its verdant setting we have a sense of an activity which is gentle and refined. The glen's is a shy and intimate Beauty, especially congenial to us after the forceful Beauty of the river and the bold, proud Beauty of the cliffs. But it is no insipid Beauty: in its very ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... and a Burne-Jones throat; and a thin, lanky and immensely tall man of uncertain age, with pale brown, very straight hair, large white ears, thick ragged eyebrows, a carefully disarranged beard and mustache, and an irregular refined face decorated with a discreet but kind expression. These were Mrs. Willie Chetwinde, who had a wonderful house in Lowndes Square, and Mr. Esme Darlington, bachelor, of St. James's Square, who was everybody's friend ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... smallest incident. Some of the joking was a little rough, as when some merry jester poured alcohol over a bully's head, touched a match to it, and chased him out of camp yelling, "Man on fire—put him out!" It is evident that the time was not one for men of very refined or sensitive nature, unless they possessed at bottom the strong iron of character. The ill-balanced were swept away by the current of excitement, and fell readily into dissipation. The pleasures were rude; the life was hearty; vices unknown to their possessors came to the surface. The most significant ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White

... most forms of danger and to a good many forms of suffering. He was kind-hearted and generous, capable of feeling sincere sympathy for others, and under certain circumstances of being deeply wounded himself. He had indeed a far more refined nature than he himself suspected and on this memorable day he had experienced more emotions than he remembered to have felt in the ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford

... a furnace into which passed an air-blast pipe, through which a stream of air was forced into the mass of melted metal. He produced refined iron. Following this he made what is now called a "converter," in which he could refine fifteen hundred pounds of metal in five minutes, effecting a great saving in time and fuel, and in his little establishment the old processes were thenceforth dispensed with. It was locally known as "Kelley's ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele

... baccalaureate address was preached by the Rev. Alexander Ellis, of Savannah. The large audience, which filled our flower-decked chapel, were said, by a resident, to be "the best colored people of Savannah." Certainly the sight of this large company of refined and intelligent persons of the Negro race might have served as an inspiration to ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 48, No. 7, July, 1894 • Various

... anxious that the other should not accept, and the other accepting only from the fear of giving offence by refusal. There is an element of charity in all this too; and it will be the business of a just and refined nature to be sincere and considerate at the same time. This will be better done by enlarging our sympathy, so that more things and people are pleasant to us, than by increasing the civil and conventional part of our nature, so that we are able to ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps

... danger at their pleasure. This countrey is so fruitfull, that it causeth the women as other creatures to bring foorth one, two, and oft-times three at a birth. Fiue miles southwarde of Cairo is a place called Matarea, where the balme is refined: and therefore some will say, that the trees which beare the balme growe in the said place, wherein they are deceiued: for the sayde trees growe two dayes iourney from Mecca, in a place called Bedrihone, which yeeldeth balme in great plenty, but saluage, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt

... I, my darling, that said the five hundred would be better spent on wedding-clothes or house-linen. That delicate and refined suggestion was your father's. It was his lordship made ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... that chances offered was only transcended by his readiness to kindle with a fitful excitement now and then. Faith was much more equable. 'If you were not the most melancholy man God ever created,' she said, kindly looking at his vague deep eyes and thin face, which was but a few degrees too refined and poetical to escape the epithet of lantern-jawed from any one who had quarrelled with him, 'you would not mind my coolness about this. It is a good thing of course to go; I have always fancied that we were ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... to the pretty place, and heartily liked the people. There was nothing oppressive or ostentatious in the attentions he received, but just the cordiality, grace, and charm of an old-established society of most refined traditions, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... since the colonization of the island; but in that time climate and civilization had transfigured the black woman. "After one or two generations," writes the historian Rufz, "the Africaine, reformed, refined, beautified in her descendants, transformed into the creole negress, commenced to exert a fascination irresistible, capable of winning anything (capable de tout obtenir)." [40] Travellers of the eighteenth century were confounded by the luxury of dress and of jewellery ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... to Troy with his family about July, 1860, and resided with them there for more than seven years. They are all now residents of the city of Washington, D.C. Nalle and his family are persons of refined manners, and of the highest respectability. Several of his children are red-haired, and a stranger would discover no trace of African blood in their complexions or features. It was the head of this family whom H.F. Averill proposed ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford

... do Thy will always! Make pure our hearts like thrice-refined gold, And these, our prayers, accept as in ...
— Hebrew Literature

... attention and solicitude. We may as well here observe, that although so favoured by nature, still there would have been considered something wanting in him by those who had been accustomed to move in the first circles, to make him the refined gentleman. His movements and carriage were not inelegant, but there was a certain retinue wanting. He bowed well, but still it was not exactly the bow of a gentleman. The nursery-maids as they passed by said, "Dear me, ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat

... the masses that surrounded him. But in the struggles of his life he lost all selfishness, he lost almost everything which was personally dear to him; and at last came to set little value upon the individual, while the need of living for the whole grew stronger and stronger in him. With the most refined selfishness he had desired the greatest things for himself, and unselfishly at last he gave himself for the common good and the happiness of the humble people. He had entered upon life as an idealist, and even the most terrible experiences had not ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... oppressor falls twice as heavy upon the head of the innocent himself?... What does it matter that, thinking that he has to deal with noxious giants, Don Quixote attacks useful windmills?... Nothing of the sort can ever happen with Hamlet: how could he, with his perspicacious, refined, sceptical mind, ever commit such a mistake! No, he will not fight with windmills, he does not believe in giants ... but he would not have attacked them even if they did exist.... And he does not believe in ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... spred a cloth of murry silke and carnation: with Roses white, redde, Damaske, Muske, and yealow cast vppon the same. And presently new wayters brought in (apparrelled in the same colours) sixe pieces of bread cut for euery one, tossed and dressed with refined marrow, sprinckled ouer with Rose water, Saffron, and the iuice of Orenges, tempering the taste and gilded ouer, and with them sixe pieces of pure manchet were set downe. And next vnto them a confection, of the iuice of Lymons tempered with fine Sugar, the seedes of Pines, Rose water, ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna

... wondered what their childhood had been, to what disastrous home influences they had been subjected to bring them to such degradation as this. Most of them were coarse and vulgar-looking wantons, with rouged cheeks and pencilled eyebrows, but others seemed to be modest girls, refined and well bred. These were plainly in their novitiate. Surely, he pondered, such a shameless calling must be revolting to them; the better instincts of their womanhood must rebel at the very shame of it. He believed that here and there, behind the rouge and forced hilarity, he could ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow

... time my own feeling that I had rarely met a man who was personally more attractive to me than General Johnston. His mode of viewing things was a high one, his thoughts and his expression of them were refined, his conscientious anxiety to do exactly what was right in the circumstances appeared in every word and act, his ability and his natural gift of leadership showed without effort in his whole bearing ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... such a beastly lie. The clergy are beginning to think that it is hardly manly to frighten children with a detected falsehood. Sheol is a great relief. It is not so hot as the old place. The nights are comfortable, and the society is quite refined. The worms are dead, and the air reasonably free from noxious vapors. It is a much worse word to hold a revival with, but much better for every day use. It will hardly take the place of the old word when people step on ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... drinking, hard-riding, hard-swearing, fox-hunting English parsons about the same time," said Ferris. "Besides, the abbate di casa had a charm of his own, the charm of all rococo things, which, whatever you may say of them, are somehow elegant and refined, or at least refer to elegance and refinement. I don't say they're ennobling, but they're fascinating. I don't respect them, but I love them. When I think about the past of Venice, I don't care so much to see ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells

... be advanced against a gravitating Aether, then I must differ from those scientists who advance such an objection. My contention is that the gravitating properties of the Aether have already been made the subject of some of the most refined and delicate experiments that have been made ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... the other, with intervals between for the liquor to flow through to the tube. On these rows a layer of stout reeds is first placed, and over them another layer composed of the leaves of these reeds. On this bed the coarse reha earth is placed without being refined by the process described in the text above. Some coarse common salt (kharee nimuck) is mixed up with the reha. The tank is then filled with water, which filters slowly through the earth and passes out through the tube into pans, whence it is taken to another tank upon a wider terrace ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman

... your luck, but I hadn't realized it. There wasn't any one in the whole theatre who looked the lady more—'pon honor; you'd have no cause to blush in the company of duchesses. In fact I know a duchess or two who don't look near so refined. I was quite surprised. Do you know, if any one had told me you used to live up ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... intolerable than they will suffer who make use of their fellow-men, in the image of God, for the purposes of selfishness and sin; while those who feel their accountableness in this relation, and discharge it in the spirit of the Bible, will find their hearts refined and ennobled, and the relationship will be, to all concerned, a source of blessings whose influences will bring peace to their souls when the grave of the slave and that of his owner are looking up into the same ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams

... and, next, those sights that ape The absolute presence of reality, Expressing, as in mirror, sea and land, And what earth is, and what she has to shew. 235 I do not here allude to subtlest craft, By means refined attaining purest ends, But imitations, fondly made in plain Confession of man's weakness and his loves. Whether the Painter, whose ambitious skill 240 Submits to nothing less than taking in A whole horizon's circuit, do with power, Like that of angels or commissioned spirits, Fix ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... politically and theologically, when crossed by opponents; is eloquent when earnest; talks rubbish like everybody else at times; has a strong clear voice; is a good preacher; is moderate in his action; has never, even in his fiercest moments, injured the pulpit; has a refined, rather affected, and at times doubtful pronunciation; gets upwards of 300 pounds a year from the Church; has been financially lucky in other ways; has a homely class of parishioners, who would like to see him at other times than on Sundays; is well respected on the whole, and ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... interested in her school-work. She stood well with her teachers, and was an acknowledged force in her form. She came from a very refined and cultured home, where intellectual interests were cultivated both by father and mother. Her temperament was naturally artistic; she was an omnivorous reader, and could devour anything in the shape of literature that came her way. The bookcase in her dormitory was filled with beautiful volumes, ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil

... figure at the foot of a staircase and his having been announced to us by our conductor or friend in charge as likely to be there; and what a charm I found in his cool loose uniform of shining white (as I was afterwards to figure it,) as well as in his generally refined and distinguished appearance and in the fact that he was engaged, while exposed to our attention, in the commendable act of paring his nails with a smart penknife and that he didn't allow us to interrupt him. One of my companions, I forget which, had advised me that in these ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... to themselves wives from among the neighbouring Indians, they had in process of time grown into a formidable tribe, having one mission in life, and one only, namely, to harry the Spanish settlements generally, and to destroy, with every circumstance of the most refined and diabolical cruelty, every Spanish man, woman, or child who might be so unfortunate as to fall into their hands. Dyer knew something of these terrible blacks, having already met them in Drake's company; he knew that ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood

... a reward for intelligence and efficiency. Danvers was offered and accepted a commission. He felt that life was good. Fears and homesickness had long since disappeared; the longings for other and more congenial, refined and feminine associates came but seldom; still, the desire for the understanding of one alone, for a loved wife and a son to bear his name was not dead—it was simply dormant ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman

... new method of mining on account of the quicksands, which are found all through our mines at home. Taking a suggestion from the oil wells, I bored just such a well down into the sulphur beds. Ordinarily the sulphur is brought up in powder or rock form, and refined in vats on the surface, so that not only do the miners have to go down into the sulphurous heat, but the caldrons in which the sulphur is refined give out gases that are unendurable to human throats and lungs. In our mines, the sulphur is now refined sixty or a hundred feet below the surface of ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post

... promised land of God's people. Down at the feet of Jesus she must lay her all. And what of that novel she had written? Could she carry that over into this heavenly Canaan? "The fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is." Hers would perish, she knew that well. Highly moral, highly refined and scholarly, but what of its doubts, its shadows, its sorrows without hope, its supernatural gloom? Beth was a master-artist in the field of gloom. She knew how to make her readers shudder, but would that story of hers bring more joy into the world? Would ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt

... Italian critics, and your English Reynolds, have turned your head. They are so fond of their 'gusto grande,' and their 'ideal beauty that speaks to the soul!'—soul!—IS there a soul? I understand a man when he talks of composing for a refined taste,—for an educated and intelligent reason; for a sense that comprehends truths. But as for the soul,—bah!—we are but modifications of matter, and painting is modification of ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... any price. Never before had he realized what a precious possession is the fearlessness of innocency; weighed against it, the thick packet of bank-notes in the tramp's bundle, and all that it might stand for, were as air-blown bubbles to refined gold. Yet he would not go back; he could not go back. To restore the money would be more than a confession of failure; it would be an abject recantation—a flat denial of every article of his latest social creed, and a plunge into primordial chaos in the matter of theories, out of ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... greater magnitude, while the soldier has become more refined, and it is not to be denied that both war and the fighting man are losing ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... money, and wept to think, after all her devotion, of having to take another place; and Mrs. Prentiss, the housekeeper, who was cynical, and expounded Lady Mary's kindness to her servants to be the issue of a refined selfishness; and Brown, who had sworn subdued oaths, and had taken the liberty of representing himself to Mary as "in the same box" with herself. Mary had been angry, very angry at all this; and she had not by ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant

... you are a young gentleman named Richard Roe desirous of entering upon a formal courtship with some refined young girl of fashion. You are also, being a college graduate, engaged in the bond business. One morning there comes into your financial institution a young lady, named Dorothy Doe, who at once ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart

... abated and deducted from the duties imposed upon such commodities one —— part thereof; but if they shall import the same indirectly from any European port, they shall pay the duties in full, according to the tariff. It is particularly agreed, that all raw and refined sugars, not in loaves, when imported by the citizens of the United States as above by a direct navigation shall be ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various

... under his management it became one of the most ably conducted papers in the kingdom, and had a wide-spread circulation. Mr. Baines represented Leeds as successor to Mr. Macaulay, and as representative of that town was one of the most useful members of parliament. He was not a man of refined bearing or mental cultivation; as a public speaker he was ungainly in manner, his pronunciation common and provincial, his voice monotonous, and his style dry and commonplace; but he was serviceable, practical, pertinent, experienced; and the soundness of his judgment, and the weight ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... hearty the relations between Daudet and his Anglo-Saxon readers certainly were. Whether it was that some of us saw in him that hitherto unguessed-at phenomenon, a French Dickens—not an imitator, indeed, but a kindred spirit—or that others found in him a refined, a volatilized "Mark Twain," with a flavour of Cervantes, or that still others welcomed him as a writer of naturalistic fiction that did not revolt, or finally that most of us enjoyed him because whatever he wrote was as ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... some wonder and fascination into the face of the youth who spoke. It was a refined and beautiful face, notwithstanding the evidences of long exposure to sun and wind. The features were finely cut, sensitive and expressive, and the eyes were very luminous in their glance, and possessed strangely penetrating powers. In stature the young man was ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... once hear the missionary account, in palliation at least, of such clamant enormities. "They have no partitions in their houses; but it may be affirmed, they have in many instances more refined ideas of decency than ourselves; and one long a resident, scruples not to declare, that he never saw any appetite, hunger and thirst excepted, gratified in public. It is too true, that for the sake of gaining our extraordinary curiosities, and to please our brutes, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... His clothes never by any chance fit him (in the eyes of more refined people), and his boots are always three sizes too large; but then he thinks he is getting more for his money. If he must needs buy boots, he takes care that he invests his money in quantity, not quality, ...
— The Boer in Peace and War • Arthur M. Mann

... me proceed. My family is an old one, they tell me, in this part of Virginia; and my father, whose portrait you see before you, on the mantel-piece, was what is called an 'aristocrat.' That is to say, he was a gentleman of refined tastes and habits; fond of books; a great admirer of fine paintings; and a gentleman of social habits and feelings. 'Fonthill'—this old house—had been, for many generations, the scene of a profuse hospitality; my father kept up the ancient rites, entertaining all comers; ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke

... she said; "smothered him with a pen-wiper. I saw him do it, but I said nothing for Angela's sake, she's so refined." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various

... however, left the delegates unconvinced and with the feeling that his argument was over-refined. They felt that there could be no objection to endeavouring to ascertain the source of Pax's power—the law of self-preservation seemed to indicate such a course as necessary. And it had, in fact, already been discussed vaguely by several less conspicuous delegates. ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train

... exercise the prerogatives of government in Europe in modern times. The nobles then were military chieftains, living in camps or in walled cities, which they built for the accommodation of themselves and their followers. These chieftains were not barbarians. They were in a certain sense cultivated and refined. They gathered around them in their camps and in their courts orators, poets, statesmen, and officers of every grade, who seem to have possessed the same energy, genius, taste, and in some respects the same scientific skill, which have in all ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... to see that Love and the man had met. Never before in all his life had she seen him so beautiful—his broad, white forehead, his bright contemplative eyes, his sweet, loving, thoughtful face breaking into kind smiles, his gentle manner, and his scrupulously refined dress made a picture of manhood that appealed to her first, as a mother, and secondly, as a woman. And in her heart an instantaneous change took place. She put her hands on his shoulders and lifted her face ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... temperament and position, as in the course of several months his intimacy with her husband had revealed them to him. He did it well, with acuteness and philosophical relish. The situation presented itself to him as an extremely refined and yet tragic phase of the religious difficulty, and it gave him intellectual pleasure to ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... though—it may well be—much less intense, emotion. The impulse which leads the female animal, as it leads some African women when found without their girdles, to squat firmly down on the earth, becomes a more refined and extended play of gesture and ornament and garment. A very notable advance, I may remark, is made when this primary attitude of defence against the action of the male becomes a defence against his eyes. We may thus explain the spread of modesty ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... the rare personality of this Edith Brennan had reached and influenced me in those few hours we had been thrown together as that of no other woman had ever done. Possibly this was so because the long years in camp and field had kept me isolated from all cultured and refined womanhood. This may, indeed, have caused me to be peculiarly susceptible to the beauty and purity of this one. I know not; I am content to give facts, and leave philosophy to others. My life has ever been one of action, of intense feeling; and there ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish



Words linked to "Refined" :   mincing, debonaire, gentlemanly, graceful, debonnaire, niminy-piminy, patrician, processed, prim, polished, overrefined, civilised, cultivated, sophisticated, gracious, suave, couth, delicate, civilized



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