"Define" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... against itself, for the Dean of Triston said he would give more latitude than his very reverend brother. You ought not to define in an infant mind a rigid outline of creed. In fact, he did not acknowledge any creed, he was not obliged to by law and was disinclined to by his reason. He would rather allow the inner seeds of natural light—the glorious all-pervading efflorescence of the Deity in all men's hearts, to grow ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... away. She watched him. Then she called him to her. Something in the man attracted this strange nature. She could not analyse or define the attraction. But the impelling ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... up that question of his marriage day. She, when she had accepted him, had done so with a stipulation that she should not be hurried; but we all know what such stipulations are worth. Who is to define what is and what is not hurry? They had now been engaged a month, and the Squire was clearly of opinion that there had been no hurry. "September was the nicest month in the year," he said, "for getting married ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... he kept silent. Professor Razzler did indeed ask him straight across the table what he thought about the final breaking of the Hindenburg line. But he asked it with that same fierce look from under his bushy eyebrows with which he used to ask Tom to define the path of a tangent, and Tom was rattled at once. He answered something about being afraid that he was not well posted, owing to there being so little chance over there to ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... and auxiliary characters, not indispensable to the theme, but simply convenient for filling in the canvas and carrying on the action. It is not always possible to decide whether a character is essential or auxiliary—it depends upon how we define the theme. In Hamlet, for example, Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude are manifestly essential: for the theme is the hesitancy of a young man of a certain temperament in taking vengeance upon the seducer of ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate. Somebody in Shakespeare—Touchstone, ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... strangely warm and winning to the touch, but as cold of heart as the drifting snow that suffocates a poor lost lamb. She has had a strange influence over me; a puzzling, baffling attraction. A suggestion of something delicate and subtlely charming, which, when one seeks to seize and to define, retires icily behind the drawn curtain of ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... reviewed the whole circle traversed by criticism during the present century, and are in a position to define its limits and extent. We have seen that a change of method was at once the cause and indication of a change in spirit and in aim. The narrow range of the eighteenth century was enlarged on the one hand by the study of new literatures, and on the other hand by that ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... It is as little worth the while to try to define its nature, as it is to analyze wit. We all know that the world laughs, and what it laughs at, and what the droll saws, anecdotes, rhymes, quips, and facetiae are, which give fame to a Bebel, or a Frischlin, a Tom Brown, and a Joseph Miller. Leave labored analysis ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... all things are rounded and full. It is only in modelling that we really draw,—in other words, that we detach things from their surroundings and put them in their due relief. The proper distribution of light can alone reveal the whole body. For this reason I do not sharply define lineaments; I diffuse about their outline a haze of warm, light half-tints, so that I defy any one to place a finger on the exact spot where the parts join the groundwork of the picture. If seen near by this sort of work has a woolly effect, and is wanting ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... objective of which would be the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire; for, unless the Ottoman Empire disappeared, the Greek hold on Smyrna would not be very firm. It was further stipulated that the Allies should define the territorial compensations as well as the facilities regarding money and war material which they would accord Greece in order to enable her to do her part of belligerent efficiently. On these conditions Greece would assume the obligation ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... higher, green masses begin to glimmer among the grays; the outlines of the forest summits commence to define themselves through the vapory light, to left and right of the great glow. Only the city still remains invisible; it lies exactly between us and the downpour of solar splendor, and the mists there have caught such radiance that the place seems hidden ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... little cot— Quite a miniature affair— Hung about with trellised vine, Furnish it upon the spot With the treasures rich and rare I've endeavoured to define. Live to love and love to live— You will ripen at your ease, Growing on the sunny side— Fate has nothing more to give. You're a dainty man to please If you are not satisfied. Ah! Take my counsel, happy man; Act upon ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... one definition has satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species. Generally the term includes the unknown element of a distinct act of creation. The term "variety" is almost equally difficult to define; but here community of descent is almost universally implied, though it can rarely be proved. We have also what are called monstrosities; but they graduate into varieties. By a monstrosity I presume is meant some considerable deviation of structure, generally injurious, ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... With chearefull semblance, and sweet Maiestie: That euery Wretch, pining and pale before, Beholding him, plucks comfort from his Lookes. A Largesse vniuersall, like the Sunne, His liberall Eye doth giue to euery one, Thawing cold feare, that meane and gentle all Behold, as may vnworthinesse define. A little touch of Harry in the Night, And so our Scene must to the Battaile flye: Where, O for pitty, we shall much disgrace, With foure or fiue most vile and ragged foyles, (Right ill dispos'd, in brawle ridiculous) The Name of Agincourt: ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... lightning, the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed. It does not define the limits of sense, or analyze the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling. The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... as rather strange that American and English sportsmen have hunted and shot for a century, and until 1908 formulated practically nothing to establish and define the ethics of shooting game. Here and there, a few unwritten principles have been evolved, and have become fixed by common consent; but the total number of these is very few. Perhaps this has been for the reason that every free and independent sportsman prefers to be a law unto himself. Is it not ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... he could not define passed through his memory. He felt his heart beating. The air of command ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... in-told—intelligence— recognized wisdom. We breathe in wisdom and grow in intelligence. All growth, mineral, plant, animal, man or god, conscious or unconscious—ALL growth is by this process. It is DESIRE that makes us breathe. Everything cries out for more, more!—it cannot define always what it wants, but it wants, with insatiable craving. It is more wisdom the whole creation groaneth and travaileth to get. "Give me more understanding or I die!"—the visible eternally cries out to the Invisible. Desire is the ceaseless life-urge ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... common was far greater than the element peculiar to each, or, to put it in another way, they in large measure overlapped each other. Perhaps we are in a position now to characterize colloquial Latin and to define it as the language which was used in conversation throughout the Empire with the innumerable variations which time and place gave it, which in its most highly refined form, as spoken in literary circles at ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... grating noise struck his ears. It was to him like the sound made by a nailed boot upon rock. It was as if another were following him down the face of the cliff. In a second he was upon his feet, his weariness a thing forgotten. Overhead, against the starlit sky, he could define the line of rock with its sharp, broken angles and uncouth turns. Not thirty feet above him something was moving. His first feeling was one of intense fear. Every climber knows that it is easier to pass a difficult corner than to stand idle, watching another do it. Slowly the dark ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... to get a scientific name. We are a mixed-blooded animal; we have no distinct race, no race name. The only people who have any right to establish race names and define them are the ethnologists. They have the human race divided into several distinct classes. If there is no houseroom in any class for the man of several different bloods, then we must get a new name. But ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... for they always stick. To keep good company, especially at your first setting out, is the way to receive good impressions. If you ask me what I mean by good company, I will confess to you that it is pretty difficult to define; but I will endeavor to make you understand it as ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age,' he says of him, on but a slight and partial acquaintance), or by Wordsworth when the Lyrical Ballads are confusing all judgments, and he can pick out at sight 'She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways' as 'the best piece in it,' and can define precisely the defect of much of the book, in one of those incomparable letters of escape, to Manning: 'It is full of original thought, but it does not often make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the characteristics of her mountain people? Is the individuality of the characters strongly marked or are they more frequently general types? In what parts of the South are the scenes of the stories of Cable, Page, Allen, and Craddock chiefly laid? How should you define "local color" in terms of the work ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... When it had once received its impulse from above—when it had once been infused into the minds of its first teachers—when it had gained full possession of the reason and affections of the favored few—it might be—and to the Protestant, the rationa Christian, it is impossible to define when it really was—left to make its way by its native force, under the ordinary secret agencies of all-ruling Providence. The main question, the divine origin of the religion, was dexterously eluded, or speciously conceded by Gibbon; his plan enabled him ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... Coleridge's monologues at Hampstead. Carlyle has told us, in a famous chapter of his Life of Sterling, what they went out to see: at once a reed shaken by the wind and a great expounder of transcendental truth. The fact that Coleridge exerted a very great influence is undeniable. To define precisely what that influence was is impossible. His writings are a heap of fragments. He contemplated innumerable schemes for great works, and never got within measurable distance of writing any. He poured himself out indefinitely upon the margins of other men's books; and the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... development of the last century; almost, one might say, of the last twenty-five years. In that time there has been composed a great volume of this sort of verse upon which a number of the minor poets have based their claims to remembrance. It is difficult to define vers de societe; in fact, the only way it can be described is through examples. Its characteristics are a gracefulness of thought and style, a fluency in expression, a vein of delicate humor or sentiment and a subject which falls within ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... in Ruth herself. She was conscious of it though she could not define it, and did not dwell upon it. Life had become significant and full of duty to her. She delighted in the exercise of her intellectual powers, and liked the idea of the infinite amount of which she was ignorant; for it was a grand pleasure to ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... moment, therefore, the question of the relation of man to the lower animals resolves itself, in the end, into the larger question of the tenability, or untenability of Mr. Darwin's views. But here we enter upon difficult ground, and it behoves us to define our exact position ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... and Great Britain remark that it is a condition of peace, not of armistice. But Clemenceau makes it a question of regard and consideration for France. France would not understand there being no mention of it; there was no desire to define anything, only just to mention it, and in three simple words. "I ask you," says Clemenceau, "to put yourselves into the spirit of the people of France." At once the British representative notes the necessity of a clear statement ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... followed by periods of turbulence and stress, it stands out in my life as an incredible moment, a soothing dream. Perhaps a faint defect, so small as to be almost unnoticed, was a feeling of solitariness—an inevitable concomitant of my position—but this was so slight that I could not even define it as loneliness and like many another defect it merely heightened the charm ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... ancients thought these opposite heights, so impregnable, so sentinel-like, were gates set by the gods to define earth's outer boundaries, beyond which the most ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... To define Azuma-zi was beyond ethnology. He was, perhaps, more negroid than anything else, though his hair was curly rather than frizzy, and his nose had a bridge. Moreover, his skin was brown rather than black, and the whites of his eyes were yellow. His broad cheekbones and narrow chin gave his face something ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... offspring. It is a grand and a noble sentiment, and no man lives who will ever comprehend it; but when a man loves as I loved then, he can appreciate its fullness, even though he may not understand it; he can recognize its existence and presence, even though it would be impossible for him to define it. ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... Miriam was in some mysterious fashion different from other people. I think everyone who met her felt the same way. Yet it was a feeling hard to define. For my own part I simply felt as if she belonged to another world, and that part of the time she—her soul, you know—was ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... boil down to a scheme of symbols, of mathematical equations." He admits that this mathematics of nature does not explain anything. They do not define reality, they only define the relations that exist between the phenomena of reality. So far does he go, and then his limited mind, our Martian perceives, meets an obstacle that he cannot explain. He, therefore, abandons the formula and returns ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... gawky and somewhat guilty joy that spends itself in sighs and blushes and Heaven knows what of self-discovery. Thus Grant in Laura's autograph album after all his versifying on the kitchen table could only write "Truly Yours" and leave her to define the deep significance of the phrase so obviously inverted. And she in his autograph album could only trust herself—though naturally being female she was bolder—to the placid depths of "As ever your friend." ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... these are very apt to be misconstrued or misinterpreted unless one is very careful to define one's position; and, after what I have said, I should do myself an injustice if I did not make certain that my position is clear. I believe in experimentation in education. I believe in experimental schools. But I should wish these schools to be interpreted as experiments ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... is a comparatively new word, it may be well to define it at the beginning of this paper. Webster says "It is the transmission of mental or physical characteristics or qualities from parent to offspring, the tendency of an organism to reproduce the characteristics ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... may seem remarkable, that Aristotle, who is so fond and free of definitions, hath not thought proper to define the Ridiculous. Indeed, where he tells us it is proper to comedy, he hath remarked that villany is not its object: but he hath not, as I remember, positively asserted what is. Nor doth the Abbe Bellegarde, who hath written a treatise on this subject, though he shows us many species ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... drop. All I allude to now is, the shocking murder of Miss Ray(353) by a divine. In my own opinion we are growing more fit for Bedlam, than for Mahomet's paradise. The poor criminal in question, I am persuaded, is mad—and the misfortune is, the law does not know how to define the shades of madness; and thus there -are twenty outpensioners of Bedlam, for the one that is confined. You, dear Sir, have chosen a wiser path to happiness by depending on yourself for amusement. Books and past ages draw one into no scrapes, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... the boats, and the stooping figures of the fishermen, the perspective of the distant shore, and the wonderful grouping in the foreground, keep their charm in the tapestry as they do in the picture. Even the mystery of the twilight is rendered, with the subtle effect we feel, but can scarcely define, in ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... moral man, to the philosopher or the business man, to any one who is a cog in the wheel of some republic, all these things exist for the sake of something else. He must explain or make use of them, or define his relation to them. He spends the whole agony of his existence in an endeavor to docket them and deal with them. Hampered as he is by all that has been said and done before, he yet feels himself driven on to summarize, and wreak himself ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... a screw define, A screwing motion, six; For four will give the axial line, One more the pitch will fix; And hence we always can contrive One ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... or Germanised-English, we know not which to call it, but certainly neither German nor English,) from the perusal of which they carry away nothing but some very obscure terms, on which they themselves have superinduced a very vague meaning. These terms you in vain implore them to define; or, if they define them, they define them in terms which as much need definition. Heartily do we wish that Socrates would reappear amongst us, to exercise his accoucheur's art on these hapless Theaetetuses and Menos of our day! Many such youths might no doubt reply at first to the ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... a definition signifies via the signs that serve to define it; and the definitions point the way. Two signs cannot signify in the same manner if one is primitive and the other is defined by means of primitive signs. Names cannot be anatomized by means of definitions. (Nor can any sign that has a meaning ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... not eaten for ten days,—hardly since that day;" and Margarita and her mother exchanged looks. It was not necessary to further define the day. ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... those paltry limits, far away over all the spires and chimney-tops, where the sky was so bright and blue, life, real life, unfolded itself under many a varied aspect, and with this suspicion, sprung up a lingering dissatisfaction, a longing for something which no words of mine could define. ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... tremulous quality of her gladness was due to the knowledge that she should see Senator North within five more days and the light of approval in his eyes. Exactly what her feeling for him was she made no attempt to define. She did not care. It was enough that the prospect of seeing him made her happier than she ever had felt before. That might go on indefinitely and she would ask for nothing more. Her recent contact with the serious-practical side of life—as ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... Meanwhile separation and silence had clothed him in my mind with something of the mistiness of a half-remembered dream. Yet the instant Washington Flagg mentioned his name the boyish features began rapidly to define themselves behind the maturer mask, until he stood before me in the crude form in which my memory ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the 12th instant, in the last sheet (not the half sheet), last page, omit the sentence which (defining, or attempting to define, what and who are gentlemen) begins, 'I should say at least in life that most military men have it, and few naval; that several men of rank have it, and few lawyers,' &c. &c. I say, omit the whole of that sentence, because, like the 'cosmogony, or ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... become aware of a quality which exists in all good art and is absent in all bad art, and without whose presence those impressions summed up as beauty, dignity, grandeur, are never to be had. This peculiarity, which most people perceive and few people define—explaining it away sometimes as truth, or taking it for granted under the name of quality—this peculiarity I shall call for convenience' sake harmony; for I think you will all of you admit that the absence or presence of harmony is what ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... copy or copies of an article or articles published in any issue of a periodical, the publication date of which is more than five years prior to the date when the request is made. These guidelines do not define the meaning, with respect to such a request, of ". . . such aggregate quantities as to substitute for a subscription to ...
— Reproduction of Copyrighted Works By Educators and Librarians • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... collocates species, are far from being always absolutely limited in Nature, though they are necessarily represented to be so in systems. >From the necessity of the case, the classifications of the naturalist abruptly define where Nature more or less blends. Our systems are nothing, if not definite. They express differences, and some of the coarser gradations. But this evinces not their perfection, but their imperfection. Even the best of them are to the system ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp," all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... their hearts like children. Lamb lays a spell upon us such as no other writer can work; he plays upon the strings of our hearts, now surprising us into wholesome laughter, now melting us to tears. You may know his essays by heart, but you can't define ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... said, 'don't think I want to be preachy or a beast in any way, but I want to what Father calls define the situation. ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... an Aesthetic which I have elsewhere proposed to call mystic. This Aesthetic avails itself of those negative terms, to define art as a spiritual form without a practical character, because it is theoretic, and without a logical or intellective form, because it is a theoretic form, differing alike from those of science and of philosophy, and superior to both. According to this ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... began Lepany, "to define the Ideal—in other words, to define the indefinite, which alas! whether from a metaphysical, a philosophical, or an aesthetic point of view, is a task transcending immeasurably my circumscribed powers ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... of those intermediate phases, hard to define, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult, and which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... mysterious faculty, by which, in coming calamities, the dread of some fearful evil is anticipated, and that it is possible to catch a dark presentiment of the sensations which they subsequently produce. For my part I can neither analyze nor define it; but on that day I knew it by painful experience, and so have a ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... poetry of Shakespeare, with the novels of Scott or Dickens,—in short, with some of the best books that the world has ever produced. We know, therefore, what literature is, and that it is an excellent thing which ministers to the joy of living; but when we are asked to define the subject, we are in the position of St. Augustine, who said of time, "If you ask me what time is, I know not; but if you ask me not, then I know." For literature is like happiness, or love, or ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... cousin's manners and exterior, however, was much more difficult to define by Miss Bellairs than what there was not. She began the renewal of their intercourse with very high spirits, herself—the simple nature and unpretendingness of his address awakening only an unembarrassed pleasure at seeing ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... again, there are stationary conditions, such as colour and patterns, or scales and armour, which may he useful in the life of an animal or flower, but are not mechanisms of moving parts like a bird's wing, or secreting organs like mammary glands. Unless we choose or invent some new term, we must define adaptations apart from all questions of evolution as any structures or characters in an organism which can be shown either by their mere presence, or by their active function, to be either useful or necessary to the animal's existence. We must be on our guard against assuming that the word 'adaptation' ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... of the story occur upon the water, and possess that exciting and captivating character for which this author's books are famous. But the author hopes that something more than exciting incidents will be found upon his pages; that though he has seldom, if ever, gone out of his way to define the moral quality, or measure the moral quantity, of the words and deeds of his characters, the story will not be found wanting in a ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... world, with a camp fire for its hub; and as we dreamed on, half conscious of the moonlight and shoutings, the deep inner beauty of the night stole upon us. A mystical, elusive beauty. difficult to define, that lay underneath and around, and within the moonlight—a beauty of deep nestling shadows, crooning whispers, and ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... come from the Cyclops, and have made the same journey as Ulysses, though in a different manner. It must be remembered that he has had his struggle with the giant Polyphemus, one of the Cyclops, whereof he will hereafter give the account. But the chief matter of the communication of Pallas is to define to Ulysses the position and character of Arete, evidently a woman after her own heart. In this way the Goddess, taking the part of a prattling maid, gives the royal pedigree, and especially dwells on ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... is all that which they try to express, and vastly more. The trouble is these men talk about the attributes of God, and confound these with the being and personality of the Great Parent. I may describe the scent of the rose, but that does not define the rose itself. I cannot separate the rose from its color or form or odor, any more than I can divorce music from the instrument. These vague and incomplete definitions have had much to do with the unbelief in ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... boundary which defines the shadow, so that the observation of an eclipse cannot be sufficiently precise to form the basis of an important and accurate measurement.[23] Still greater difficulties accompany the attempt to define the true moment of the occurrence of the eclipse as it would be seen by an observer in the vicinity of the satellite. For this we should require a far more perfect theory of the movements of Jupiter's satellites than is at present ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... sum of thirteen millions of francs, of which it would be very difficult for you to define the precise ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... {114c} Certainly only you and I and Thackeray understand it. When men like Spedding quote to me such a passage as 'Athanasius alas is innocent of many smiles, etc.,' they shew me they don't understand it. The beauty—if one may dare to define—lies more in such expressions as 'adjusting the beaks of the macaws, etc.' I have laughed outright (how seldom one does this alone!) at the Bishops' meeting. 'Mr. Talboys—that candle behind Dr. Allnut—really that I should be obliged—.' I suppose this would be the most ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... between several emotions, none of which she was able clearly to define. If she refused, it might seem ungracious, because already, half in earnest, half in play, she had partly promised Nick to go some time and have a glimpse of Lucky Star ranch and city. Yet, less than ever did she wish to be indebted ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... "Ah! you define diplomacy," murmured d'Alcacer. "A little of it here would do no harm. But our picturesque visitor has none of it. I've a ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... few hereditary characteristics of a marked kind, some of which are most desirable and others greatly the reverse; I shall also describe new methods of appraising and defining them. Later on in the book I shall endeavour to define the place and duty of man in the furtherance of the great scheme of evolution, and I shall show that he has already not only adapted circumstance to race, but also, in some degree and often unconsciously, race to circumstance; and ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... "All love is instinct in the germ. Can you define the yearnings that the mother feels toward her child, the tie that binds son to father? Then you can define the sentiment that attaches me to the land from whose breast I have drawn life. The love of country is more invisible, more imponderable, more inappreciable than the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... I cannot define what it was about Mary that made her little speeches, half argumentative, all-pleading, so wonderfully persuasive. Her facts were mere fancies, and her logic was not even good sophistry. As to real argument and reasoning, there was nothing of either ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... when you have lived such different lives. It's not merely an ordinary family likeness of feature, you know, but a sort of interchangeable individuality; the suggestion of the other man's personality in your face like an air transposed to another key. But I'm not attempting to define it; it's beyond me; something altogether unusual and a trifle—well, uncanny," ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... fern-leaf, bending Upon the brink, its green reflection greets, And kisses soft the shadow that it meets With touch so fine, The border line The keenest vision can't define; So perfect ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... It would seem that the soul of man is not carried away to things divine. For some define rapture as "an uplifting by the power of a higher nature, from that which is according to nature to that which is above nature" [*Reference unknown; Cf. De Veritate xiii, 1]. Now it is in accordance ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... spurn, Has known to sour the precious sweets to turn On which I lived, for which I burn and pine. Though since, the vain attempt has oft been mine That future ages from my song should learn Her heavenly beauties, and like me should burn, My poor verse fails her sweet face to define. The gifts, though all her own, which others share, Which were but stars her bright sky scatter'd o'er, Haply of these to sing e'en I might dare; But when to the diviner part I soar, To the dull world a brief and brilliant light, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... distance from them, is furnished by the great Goethe's elaborate study of plaster-casts and pencil-drawings at Weimar. I mention Margaret Fuller here because a glimpse of her state of mind—her vivacity of desire and poverty of knowledge—helps to define the situation. The situation lives for a moment in those few words of Mr. Lathrop's. The initiated mind, as I have ventured to call it, has a vision of a little unadorned parlour, with the snow-drifts of a Massachusetts winter piled up about its windows, and a group of sensitive and serious people, ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... with General Foch. Up and down the long line, now here, now there; the British and Belgians on the north, the French and Americans on the south, first one, then the other, then together, the Allies drove forward with hammer blows on the yielding German armies. That subtle force, so hard to define, the morale of the invaders, was broken down. Their confidence was gone. They knew they were defeated. The one hope of their leaders was to get safely back to Germany, and soon a general retreat was ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... discovery. There are many opinions as to its real nature, but the essential point in our view of the cell is to look upon it as a self-contained or independent living unit. It is, in the words of Brucke, "an elementary organism." We may define it most precisely as the ultimate organic unit, and, as the cells are the sole active principles in every vital function, we may call them the "plastids," or "formative elements." This unity is found in ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... known as Whigs, who scouted the idea of being bound by the acts of any national convention. He was a very large slave-owner, and thus identified in interest, and presumably in sympathy, with the South; but he could not be induced to define his position. His active supporters were chiefly from the slave-holding States and those free States which had generally given Democratic majorities, while the men most violent in their opposition to the Wilmot proviso were his most conspicuous followers; but the Whigs from the free States vouched ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... waters. "We have heard," he wrote in August to his cousin, Mr. Stratford Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the ambassador at Constantinople, "that Lord Cochrane is gone to the Mediterranean; whether it be really so, we know not." He then proceeded to define the bearing of English and international law in the existing circumstances. "Lord Cochrane may enter the Greek service, and continue therein. He may even, as a Greek commander, institute (as he did in Brazil) blockades which British officers will respect, and exercise ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... name is pretty. It suggests roseate skies, bows of promise, flowery fields, messages swiftly borne and full of portent. The name invites to music and to radiant raiment, and it serves its purpose. Mascagni and his librettist do not seem to have been able to find a term with which to define their creation. They call it simply "Iris"; not a "dramma per musica," as the Florentine inventors of the opera did their art-form; nor a "melodramma" nor a "tragedia per musica"; nor an "opera in musica," of which the conventional ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... her. Seen by daylight, she was more attractive than ever. She looked so small and neat and wholesome, so extremely unlike Miss Daisy Leonard's friend. And such was the reaction from what might be termed his later Reigelheimer's mood that if he had been asked to define feminine charm in a few words, he would have replied without hesitation that it was the quality of being as different as possible in every way from the Good Sport. Elizabeth fulfilled this qualification. She was not only small and neat, but she had a soft ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... voice building is to produce beautiful tone we must start with the right idea of tone. This is where the first and greatest difficulty appears. To most people a tone is intangible and difficult to define. One will rarely find a student that can formulate anything approaching a definition of a musical tone and I fancy many teachers would find it far from easy. Unless one has a grasp of the psychology of voice, and a great many have not, he will begin to work with what he can see. Here enters the ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... guttural Breton speech, "'Tis the blessed St. Yvon aids him." Everybody liked him in the village, and he took a kind of lead among the other lads, but, whether it was the grave gaze of his blue eyes, or his earnest, outright speech, or some other quality about him less easy to define, they all had the same kind of feeling in regard to him that his uncle had. He was different from themselves. There were indeed some among them in whom this acknowledged superiority inspired envy and ill-will, ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... is both narrowed and enlarged; and a good or bad sense will subsist side by side with a neutral one. A curious effect is produced on the meaning of a word when the very term which is stigmatized by the world (e.g. Methodists) is adopted by the obnoxious or derided class; this tends to define the meaning. Or, again, the opposite result is produced, when the world refuses to allow some sect or body of men the possession of an honourable name which they have assumed, or applies it to them only ...
— Sophist • Plato
... was sudden and ferocious. For the moment he was very quiet; he talked neither of prohibiting performances nor of seizing books, of imprisoning authors, or of suppressing anything. Calm and severe, he saw in Napoleon only Taine's 'condottiere' who kicked Volney in the stomach. Everybody wished to define the true Napoleon. Count Martin, in the face of the imperial centrepiece and of the winged Victorys, talked suitably of Napoleon as an organizer and administrator, and placed him in a high position as president of the state council, where his words threw light upon obscure questions. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... already, in his "Some Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs," attempted to re-define the distinctions of Whig and Tory. The latter, he urged, was of that party which pronounced for the principles of loyalty to the Church and the preservation of the Protestant succession in the House of Hanover. Swift felt that the majority of the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... light, are overpowered by its splendour. Long and sharp was the controversy whether singing ought to be used in public worship; whether the seventh day of the week or the first was to be consecrated; whether ministers were to be paid for their services; and in this case, to define the privileges and duties of women as helpers in the gospel; and it is surprising that this question is almost as new now as it was then. It is thus stated—"Whether it is the duty of the women of the churches ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... said, "I see your drift exactly. You say what is the Ballplatz? I reply quite frankly that it is almost impossible to answer. Probably one could best define it as the driving power ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... we may provisionally define it as any species of error which counterfeits the form of immediate, self-evident, or intuitive knowledge, whether as sense-perception or otherwise. Whenever a thing is believed on its own evidence ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... had delivered, but it was mortifying to them not to receive a word of acknowledgement, not even the tithe of a gracious smile; they accordingly said not a word, but they had seen enough to convince them that all was not right. A reserve, the cause whereof they could not define, and a coldness towards them, for which they could in no wise account, marked the conduct of the once spirited and good-natured chief of Badagry, and prepared them to anticipate various difficulties in the prosecution of their plans, which they were persuaded would require much art and influence ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... often plainly influenced by chains of affinities. Nothing can be easier than to define a number of characters common to all birds; but in the case of crustaceans, such definition has hitherto been found impossible. There are crustaceans at the opposite ends of the series, which have hardly a character in common; ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... OF SPEECH, AND SENTENCE ELEMENTS. What are the four kinds of sentences? What are the different parts of speech? Define each. What is the difference between a clause and a phrase? What is the difference between a principal clause and a subordinate clause? Illustrate. Illustrate an adverbial clause. An adjective clause. Illustrate ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... Mohammedans are one because they have a common religion and a common law. The Christians are one, because at least one point of faith is common. But the Hindus have neither faith, nor practice, nor law to distinguish them from others. I should therefore define a Hindu to be one born in India, whose parents so far as people can remember were not foreigners, or did not profess a foreign religion like Mohammedanism or Christianity, and who himself has not embraced ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... avoid being taken as soldiers, the effect of the law of 955 was that from now on the Buddhists were put under regulations which clarified once and for ever their position within the framework of a society which had as its aim to define clearly the status of each individual within each social class. Private persons were no more allowed to erect temples and monasteries. The number of temples per district was legally fixed. A person could become monk only if the head of the family ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... poetical about a forge I am not singular in this opinion: various individuals have assured me that they can never pass by one, even in the midst of a crowded town, without experiencing sensations which they can scarcely define, but which are highly pleasurable. I have a decided penchant for forges, especially rural ones, placed in some quaint, quiet spot—a dingle for example, which is a poetical place, or at a meeting of four roads, which is still more ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... list of his polemics he gradually finds opportunities to define his views somewhat; circumstantially, for instance, in the answers to Alberto Pio, of 1525 and 1529. Subsequently it is always done in the form of an Apologia, whether he is attacked for the Colloquia, for the Moria, Jerome, the Paraphrases ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... said Madison. "This, in regard to the peace establishment: Do we apply a war congress to a state of peace, I fear we shall too clearly define its limits. The States may refuse obedience, and then the poor invalided body will fall into ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... shine Of moral pow'rs an' reason? His English style an' gesture fine Are a' clean out o' season. Like Socrates or Antonine, Or some auld pagan heathen, The moral man he does define, But ne'er a word o' faith in That's right ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... be satisfactory if we could fix with exactness the great Ostrogoth's birth-year, but though several circumstances point to 454 as a probable date, we are not able to define it ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... and his hair was a silvered iron-grey. I took him to be nearer sixty than fifty, but he was upright, hearty, and robust. From the moment of his first speaking to us his voice had connected itself with an association in my mind that I could not define; but now, all at once, a something sudden in his manner and a pleasant expression in his eyes recalled the gentleman in the stagecoach six years ago on the memorable day of my journey to Reading. I was certain ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... sources of the books of Samuel, or the twofold authorship of Isaiah, or that all after the ninth verse of the last chapter of St. Mark's Gospel is spurious; and, as regards the whole encyclical, the distinguished Jesuit dwelt significantly on the power of the papacy at any time to define out of existence any previous decisions which may be found inconvenient. More than that, Father Clarke himself, while standing as the champion of the most thorough orthodoxy, acknowledged that, in the Old Testament, "numbers must be expected to ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... encountered as I sat in the great Chorus Hall. I say my eyes. It is hard perhaps for you to realize what an organ can be in a creature, so apparently, as we are, little more than gaseous condensations. The physiology and morphology of a spirit is not an easy thing to grasp or define. I am yet ignorant upon many points. But dimly, at least, I may make your natural senses ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... thing, therefore, you have to learn in landscape, is to outline; and therefore we must now know precisely what an outline is, how it ought to be represented; and this it will be right to define in quite general terms ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... weak. Then I bowed and withdrew, leaving them to mutter and disperse. I felt well content with the trend of events—I who wished to impress the public and the financiers that I had broken with speculation and speculators, could I have had a better than this unexpected opportunity sharply to define my new course? And as Textiles, unsupported, fell toward the close of the day, my content rose toward my normal high spirits. There was no whisper in the Street that I was in trouble; on the contrary, the idea was gaining ground that I had really long ceased to be ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... and we both of us kissed the keyhole with the greatest affection—I patted it with my hand, I recollect, as if it had been her honest face—and parted. From that night there grew up in my breast a feeling for Peggotty which I cannot very well define. She did not replace my mother; no one could do that; but she came into a vacancy in my heart, which closed upon her, and I felt towards her something I have never felt for any other human being. It was a ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... place its mass, and the other constants which define its properties, are absolutely invariable; the individual molecule can neither grow nor decay, but remains unchanged amid all the changes of the bodies of which it may ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... lies the secret of the charm of anything that lives is mostly difficult. Especially is it so with regard to a man of poetic genius. All are agreed, for instance, that D. G. Rossetti possessed an immense charm. So he did, indeed. But who has been able to define that charm? I, too, knew Rossetti well, and loved him well. Sometimes, indeed, the egotism of a sorrowing memory makes me think that outside his own most affectionate and noble-tempered family, including that old friend in art at whose feet he sat as a boy, no man loved Rossetti ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... and Peter each define two different and distinct baptisms following closely after each other. First John's baptism of water, then Christ's baptism of the Holy Spirit. Our Saviour also testified to these two independent baptisms but to no other baptism as the result ...
— Water Baptism • James H. Moon
... exception, (viz., the Hypostatic Union, which is the climax of all graces), external is inferior to, because a mere preparation for, internal grace, which aims at sanctification. We are concerned in this treatise solely with internal grace. Hence, proceeding a step further, we may define grace as a gratuitous, supernatural, internal gift of God, derived from the merits of ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... and oppressive anxieties that come and cast a shadow over our hearts, that if we could once define, and put into plain words, we should find that we vaguely fancied them a great deal larger than they were, and that the shadow they flung was immensely longer than the thing that flung it. Put your anxieties into definite speech. It will reduce their proportions to your own apprehension very often. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... extended. As it now melts it drops its various burdens to the ground; bowlders are the milestones marking the different stages of its journey; the terminal and lateral moraines are the frame-work which it erected around itself as it moved forward, and which define its boundaries centuries after it ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... depend far less upon their sight than upon their hearing and sense of smell. Neither the fox nor the dog is capable of much discrimination with the eye; they seem to see things only in the mass; but with the nose they can analyze and define, and get at the most subtle shades of difference. The fox will not read a man from a stump or a rock, unless he gets his scent, and the dog does not know his master in a crowd until he ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... of the great Cathedral closed round him. He was conscious of nothing but his own personality, and, as it seemed, of Meynell's. They two seemed to be alone together in a world outside the living world. Dornal could not define it, save that it was a world of reconciled enmities and contradictions. The sense of it alternated with a disagreeable recollection of the table in the Library and the men sitting round it, especially the cherubic face of the Professor; the thought also of the long, signed ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... against great odds, to revive in words the impressions of difference which came to me in those first hours, as I scanned her face. They furnish forth no real portrait of the dear lady: how could I hope they should? But they help to define, even if dimly, the changes toward strength and self-control I ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... while the natural man has the breeding and evolution of ages represented in his character. But what are the possibilities of this spiritual organism? What is yet to emerge from this chrysalis-case? The natural character finds its limits within the organic sphere. But who is to define the limits of the spiritual? Even now it is very beautiful. Even as an embryo it contains some prophecy of its future glory. But the point to mark is, that "it doth not yet appear what it shall be." Natural Law, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... is little of manhood about him. Of a man he is made a soldier, which is a man-destroying machine in two senses,—a thing for the prosecuting or repelling an invasion like the block of stone in the fortress or the plate of iron on the side of the Monitor. They are alike. I have tried in vain to define a difference, and I see only this. The iron-clad with its gun is the bigger soldier: the more formidable in attack, the less liable to destruction in a given time; the block the most capable of resistance; both are equally obedient to officers. Or the more perfect is the ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... shared the girls' lives for the past ten years. Cherry had bullied Peter since her babyhood, ruined his piano with sticky fingers, trampled his rose-beds, coaxed him into asking her father to let her sit up for dinner. For some reason she could not, or would not, define, Anne liked the idea of Cherry and Peter ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... and strolled into the other room. Hollingsworth, lounging away from the window, had joined himself to a languidly convivial group of men to whom, in phrases as halting as though they struggled to define an ultimate idea, he was expounding the cursed nuisance of living in a hole with such a damned climate that one had to get out of it by February, with the contingent difficulty of there being no place to take one's yacht to in winter but that other played-out ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... hot cream, may be considered open to censure by the philosopher who places women (and girls, i.e. unmarried women) in the rank of responsible or even rational creatures. But in this disposition he would be clearly wrong. Before venturing to define the precise capacity of either an individual or a class, their own opinion on the subject should assuredly be consulted; and we are quite sure that there is not one of the lady Tiptoes who would not recoil with horror from the suspicion of advancing or even of entertaining ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... corporations. Senator Smith of Michigan was chairman of the committee. At the hearings there was repeated inquiry apparently seeking to demonstrate that the Standard Oil Company, to a degree, was responsible for the Madera revolution. There also was considerable inquiry, apparently hostile, seeking to define ulterior reasons why the Mormons should have chosen Mexico as an abiding place. The investigation covered all parts of Mexico where American interests had suffered, and only incidentally touched the Mormon settlements. There was ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... panic of war there appears to descend on all who have a share in it, whether active or passive, a kind of numbed indifference as to danger; a kind of callousness as to consequences, which I find it difficult to define in words, but which, nevertheless, impresses itself on the observer's mind as a definite and tangible fact. The soldier gets it, and it enables him to endure his own discomforts and sufferings, and the discomforts and sufferings of his comrades, without visible mental ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... it is this same issue of Democracy which has long been the dividing line between the Socialist Party and the I. W. W. Like the Bolshevists of Russia, the I. W. W. have championed Democracy but we have refused to allow the capitalist thinkers to define it for us. We have practiced Democracy in our organization and we have sublimated it into the most perfect of Democratic organizations. But always, it has been a Democracy only of proletarians. We have ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... her bonnet, and Maurice helped Marguerite to count the pieces of luggage. Just as Esperance was getting out to help her old companion, she had a feeling of reaction, her face grew pale with fright at an impression she could not define: two long arms were stretched towards her. And she recalled the hallucination or vision she had seen in her own mirror at home, on the day when she had tried ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... courses was to do what you had to but no more. One day an English prof called upon me to define the difference between a novel and ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... broken jug bout a year. You see he sponsible for key. Seem like I member right where we go beat that rice. Pine tree saw off and chip out make as good a mortar as that one I got. Dan'l, Summer, Define! Define the oldest brother my fadder have. Young Missus Bess, Florence, Georgia, Alice. Those boys the musicianer—go round ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... love with a young lieutenant who was attached to the King's suite. The Prince who was called Otto, for short, by the family, because he actually had eleven names—the Prince had been much interested. For some time afterward he had bothered Miss Braithwaite to define being in love, but he had had no really ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... it not happen to others? There seems, however, to have been necessary a certain state of the souls of the disciples to make them see what they thought they saw; but in all this there is found a psychic and subjective factor in operation—a factor whose potency is very difficult to define and to mark its boundaries. It would have been a fact of a wonderful nature if the souls of the disciples, from within, became suddenly and without intermediary convinced of the continuation of the life and the presence of the Master: all this would have ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... his successful sales, he found a changeling. His wife was not so different in looks or words as in a subtle something he could not define. She laughed at his jokes, and even, in a gentle way, ventured pleasantries of her own; but a strange languor hung about her. It might have been called patience, an acceptance of a situation rather than her ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... to science, we have still to enquire how it stands related to religion. But the view we take of that relation will necessarily be coloured by the idea which we have formed of the nature of religion itself; hence a writer may reasonably be expected to define his conception of religion before he proceeds to investigate its relation to magic. There is probably no subject in the world about which opinions differ so much as the nature of religion, and to frame a definition ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... fumes of the wine out of your head. Poetry is a respectable art, though it wants the precision of the exact sciences, and the natural beneficence of the physical. Considered in reference to the wants of life, I should define poetry as an emollient, rather than ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... mental phase of behavior, the needed play of individuality—or freedom—cannot be separated from opportunity for free play of physical movements. Enforced physical quietude may be unfavorable to realization of a problem, to undertaking the observations needed to define it, and to performance of the experiments which test the ideas suggested. Much has been said about the importance of "self-activity" in education, but the conception has too frequently been restricted to something merely internal—something excluding the free use of sensory and motor organs. Those ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... happiness in all sorts of pleasures, but only in those that in themselves are good and honest. There is a party among them who place happiness in bare virtue; others think that our natures are conducted by virtue to happiness, as that which is the chief good of man. They define virtue thus, that it is a living according to Nature, and think that we are made by God for that end; they believe that a man then follows the dictates of Nature when he pursues or avoids things according to the direction of reason; they ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... on the young: I thought that a fairer era of life was beginning for me, one that was to have its flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils. My faculties, roused by the change of scene, the new field offered to hope, seemed all astir. I cannot precisely define what they expected, but it was something pleasant: not perhaps that day or that month, but at ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... at a public meeting lately expressed a sentiment which is more or less carelessly repeated by many. I quote it, as helping me to define the principle to which I have referred, which marks the difference between an offence or crime committed by an individual against the law, and an offence or crime sanctioned, permitted, or enacted by a State or Government itself, or by public ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... I repeat, use the word virtue in the ordinary acceptation and meaning of the term, and do not let us define it in high-flown language. Let us account as good the persons usually considered so, such as Paulus, Cato, Gallus, Scipio, and Philus. Such men as these are good enough for everyday life; and we need not trouble ourselves about those ideal characters which ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... experiences, it is very doubtful whether you can really convey your meaning to anyone else. "Plaisante justice qu'une riviere borne. Verite, au deca des Pyrenees, erreur au de la," says Pascal. If what is good in the world depended on our ability to define it we should be ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... doubtless considered equally trustworthy on the slavery question. The organic act invested the governor with very comprehensive powers to initiate the organization of the new Territory. Until the first legislature should be duly constituted, he had authority to fix election days, define election districts, direct the mode of returns, take a census, locate the temporary seat of government, declare vacancies, order new elections to fill them, besides the usual and permanent powers ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay |
