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Inwardness

noun
1.
The choicest or most essential or most vital part of some idea or experience.  Synonyms: center, centre, core, essence, gist, heart, heart and soul, kernel, marrow, meat, nitty-gritty, nub, pith, substance, sum.  "The heart and soul of the Republican Party" , "The nub of the story"
2.
Preoccupation especially with one's attitudes and ethical or ideological values.  "Inwardness is what an Englishman quite simply has, painlessly, as a birthright"
3.
The quality or state of being inward or internal.
4.
Preoccupation with what concerns human inner nature (especially ethical or ideological values).  Synonym: internality.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Inwardness" Quotes from Famous Books



... to become more or less scenic; and yet in the instance I allude to, WITH the conveyance, expressional curiosity and expressional decency are sought and arrived at under quite another law. The true inwardness of this may be at bottom but that one of the suffered treacheries has consisted precisely, for Chad's whole figure and presence, of a direct presentability diminished and compromised—despoiled, that is, of its PROPORTIONAL advantage; so that, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James

... Freddy may be forgiven the manoeuvre that arranged a seance with her Dublin dentist for the date decided upon for the picnic, and may be felt to deserve the sympathy of those who can appreciate the inwardness of her position. And this last, improbable though it may seem to some people, was made immensely more difficult by the simple and irrelevant fact that she, on Sundays, betook herself to the Knock Ceoil Protestant church, while Larry went to the white chapel on the hill. It was to ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... himself if confession were not inveterate in man. The artist in his studio, the writer in his study, strive to tell their soul's secret; the peasant throws himself at the feet of the priest, for, like them, he would unburden himself of that terrible weight of inwardness which is man. Is not the most mendacious mistress often taken with the desire of confession ... the wish to reveal herself? Upon this bed rock of human nature the confessional has been built. And Owen admired the humanity of Rome. Rome was terribly human. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... known by its manifestations. The latter is the outcome, the effect of the former. The manifestations of life cannot by any means be more important than the life which makes them possible. Christianity is a religion of inwardness, it finds its root in the heart and soul of man, then effects the outward life. Whenever the inner or spiritual life is renewed, there follows from necessity a renewed exterior. There must be first life in the soul. Nor can there be ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma

... The inwardness and mystery of this attachment drives men of every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets and philosophers are not more intoxicated with their symbols than the populace with theirs. In our political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... importance of biological knowledge to educational theory. As the biologist defines play as "the natural manifestation of the child's activities," so Froedel says "play at first is just natural life." But to him the true inwardness of spontaneous play lies in the fact that it is spontaneous—so far as anything in the universe can be spontaneous. For spontaneous response to environment is self-expression, and out of self-expression comes selfhood, consciousness of self. If we ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith

... from the moral I wished to draw from the incident. The true inwardness of the situation lay in the indignation of this Britisher at finding a German railway porter unable to comprehend English. The moment we spoke to him he expressed this ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome

... eterni Dei,' in the mirror of the eternal God. Hence he took interest in her phases only as revelations of his God, noting one after another only to group them synthetically under the idea of Godhead. Hence too, despite his profound inwardness—'The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?' (Jeremiah)—human individuality was only expressed in ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... (the Maitrayana-Brahmana) says: "The happiness belonging to a mind, which through deep inwardness (1) (or understanding) has been washed clean and has entered into the Self, is a thing beyond the power of words to describe: it can only be perceived by an inner faculty." Observe the conviction, the intensity with which this joy, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... also, is but a small matter; yet doth it bear upon the inwardness of my feelings; for the memories of all my youth and of the many Beasts that I had seen to peer across the Light, did come upwards in my mind in that moment; so that I did give back a little, unthinking of what I did; but having upon me the sudden imagining ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... were given with a full consciousness of the inwardness of names. There was a spirit behind each new name; the revival of a name by a divine representative meant the return of the spirit. Each Bābī who received the name of a prophet or an Imām knew that his life was raised ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne

... have never written to or for a newspaper in their life, who would never talk of 'adverse climatic conditions' when they mean 'bad weather'; who have never trifled with verbs such as 'obsess,' 'recrudesce,' 'envisage,' 'adumbrate,' or with phrases such as 'the psychological moment,' 'the true inwardness,' 'it gives furiously to think.' It dallies with Latinity—'sub silentio,' 'de die in diem,' 'cui bono?' (always in the sense, unsuspected by Cicero, of 'What is the profit?')—but not for the sake of style. Your journalist at ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... to the word, and the larger scope which it shows its blighting influences to have had in humanity. Apart from the conviction of sin by the Spirit using the word proclaimed by disciples, the world has scarcely a notion of what sin is, its inwardness, its universality, the awfulness of it as a fact affecting man's whole being and all his relations to God. All these conceptions are especially the product of Christian truth. Without it, what does the world know about the poison of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... to him, and of the mere accidents of a particular time and place, imposed upon the range of effects open to the Greek sculptor limits somewhat narrowly defined; and when Michelangelo came, with a genius spiritualised by the reverie of the middle age, penetrated by its spirit of inwardness and introspection, living not a mere outward life like the Greek, but a life full of inward experiences, sorrows, consolations, a system which sacrificed so much of what was inward and unseen could not satisfy him. To him, lover and ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... psychology—how was I to tell my mother that it was her teaching that was directly responsible for my drunkenness? Had it not been for her theories about dark eyes and Italian character, I should never have wet my lips with the sour, bitter wine. And not until man-grown did I tell her the true inwardness of that disgraceful affair. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... Constance. "I adored my boys, but I was always enchanted to escape from them." She laughed like a girl. "Now you grasp the inwardness of my Christmas present—it is a coasting outfit. Won't she look lovely in ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... patrons of the game have begun to realize the true inwardness of scientific batting, as shown in the securing of single bases by well-timed place hits, safe taps of swiftly-pitched balls to short outfield, and skilful efforts in sacrifice hitting and bunting, ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick

... the following day, however—they were off by seven, leaving Punk in charge with instructions to have food and fire always ready—Simpson found it possible to tell his uncle a good deal more of the story's true inwardness, without divining that it was drawn out of him as a matter of fact by a very subtle form of cross examination. By the time they reached the beginning of the trail, where the canoe was laid up against the return journey, he had mentioned how Defago spoke vaguely of "something he called a 'Wendigo'"; ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood

... beloved Cousin Katherine, I recommend me unto you with all the inwardness of my heart. And now lately ye shall understand that I received a token from you, the which was and is to me right heartily welcome, and with glad will I received it; and over that I had a letter from Holake, your gentle squire, by the which I understand right well that ye be in good health ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... As not affecting the inwardness of things, which it was Mrs Verloc's principle to ignore, this curiosity was excusable. It bore merely on the methods. The old woman welcomed it eagerly as bringing forward something that could be talked about with ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... it is not for us to pick and choose—to say that God is the beauty of the beautiful, but not the ugliness of the ugly; the compassion of the compassionate, but not the cruelty of the cruel: if He is all, He is both, and for that very reason is neither. That is the real inwardness of a conception of the Deity which represents Him, with ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... the feast to be set before the laboring men of this country? Is that the real inwardness of the Trojan horse pushed forward against our tariff wall, in the name of humanity, to suffering Porto Rico? What a programme for the wise humanitarians who have been bewitching the world with noble statesmanship ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid

... sins, and, in so far as it was positive, it dealt entirely with ceremonial acts. Such a starved and surface conception of righteousness is essential to self-righteousness, for no man who sees the law of duty in its depth and inwardness can flatter himself that he has kept it. To fast twice a week and to give tithes of all that one acquired were acts of supererogation, and are proudly recounted as if God should feel much indebted to the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... human nature, and the consequent necessity for God's grace in order to obedience, were as deeply felt by the devout men of the Old Testament as by Apostles. They are felt by every man who has honestly tried to measure the sweep and inwardness of God's law, and to realise it in life. We need go but a very short way on the road to discover that temptations to diverge lie so thick on either side, and that our feet grow weary so soon, that we shall make but little progress without ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... title is justifiable. Conceding that this sudden 'good' ending looks like a concession and certainly is a constructive weakness, yet in the inwardness of the subject it is excellently motivated by the typically mediaeval attitude of Kolbein to salvation and the Church as its sole bestower. Notwithstanding the ambiguity of its victory, the Crozier has won. Another power than the moribund gods and the overstrained Teutonic conceptions ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various

... of Lerma, on Charles V., on Philip II., on Ignatius Loyola-Cervantes was the most devout of Catholics—and on the Inquisition, which, fortunately, did not think so. In fact, there is little or nothing which it has not meant in its time; and now, having attained that deep spiritual inwardness which we have been recently told is lacking in poor Goldsmith, we are requested by Mr. Shorthouse to refrain from all brutal laughter, but, with a shadowy smile and a profound seriousness, to attune ourselves to the proper state of receptivity. Old-fashioned, coarse-minded ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)

... discoveries had been certain curves or figures or something whose behaviour involved a new dimension. I gathered that this wasn't the ordinary Fourth Dimension that people talk of, but that fourth-dimensional inwardness or involution was part of it. The explanation lay in the pile of manuscripts he left with me, but though I tried honestly I couldn't get the hang of it. My mathematics stopped with desperate finality just as he ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... but mine, Shorty. It's a deal I have on. What I'm after is to corner every blessed egg in Dawson, in the Klondike, on the Yukon. You've got to help me out. I haven't the time to tell you of the inwardness of the deal. I will afterward, and let you go half on it if you want to. But the thing right now is to get the eggs. Now you hustle up to Slavovitch's and ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... in Palestinian and Alexandrian Judaism at the time of Christ, in virtue of the prophetic word and the Thora, influenced also, perhaps, by the Greek spirit which everywhere gave the stimulus to inwardness, the path was indicated in which the future development of religion was to follow. Jesus entered fully into the view of the law thus attempted, which comprehended it as a whole and traced it back to the disposition. But he freed it from the contradiction that adhered to it, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... of shattered things, I suppose—and he duly arrives. I take you to stand, Paul, for spiritual survival. You are the chosen retort of the White to the challenge of the Black, but I wonder if you have perceived the real inwardness of your ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer

... had to be approached by another road. The electromagnetic theory was a step in advance, but it comes to a standstill, so to speak, at the moment when the ether penetrates into matter. If we wish to go deeper into the inwardness of the phenomena, we must follow, for example, Professor Lorentz or Dr Larmor, and look with them for a mode of representation which appears, besides, to be a natural consequence of the fundamental ideas forming ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... vague, lovely shapes floating under dark depths of water. And he had said once that love for me was bringing out qualities he hadn't credited himself with possessing. I had taken that as one of Puck's pleasantries! But I knew the true inwardness of him now, as I had learned to know the true inwardness of Dierdre. Julian had had his chance to hurt me with his rival. He had used it instead to do me good. He had laughed the other day, "Well, I'll always be something to you anyhow, if only a brother-in-law." But ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... know from the perusal of the Blue Book the true inwardness of the happenings in the Ochori country in the spring of the year of Wish. Nor all the facts associated with the disappearance of the Rt. Hon. Joseph Blowter, Secretary of State ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace

... otherwise, or think they do. Evil grows in subtlety and in aggressiveness in our day, and probably will yet more. It seeks especially to make inroads among God's professing people. Yet evil is evil. Its true inwardness is quickly revealed by adding a "d" at the beginning of the word. And it grows increasingly repugnant in whatever guise, as we come to study more its inner spirit as revealed in these disclosures ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon

... ways'; so that both clauses set forth the familiar but solemn thought that a man's deeds react upon the doer, and apart from all thoughts of divine judgment, themselves bring certain retribution. To grasp the inwardness of this ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... only loose ends now to consider. Margaret has given us the true inwardness of the feeling of the other Queen!" He looked at her fondly, and stroked her hand as he said it. "For my own part I sincerely hope she is right; for in such case it will be a joy, I am sure, to all of us to assist at such a realisation ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker

... enormous topic of the night and day, arriving at no conclusion whatever, except that there was no conclusion—not even a theory of a conclusion. (And the Louis who now discussed the case was an innocent, reborn Louis, quite unconnected with the Louis of the previous evening; he knew no more of the inwardness of the affair than Rachel did. Of such singular feats of doubling the personality is the self-deceiving mind capable.) After a time it became implicit in the tone of their conversation that the mysterious disappearance in ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... now and again I had tasted the wine that was red, and that stood year in, year out, decanted on our sideboard. The true inwardness of St. Paul's prescription had been revealed to me; the attitude—sometimes sneered at—of those who drink it under doctor's orders, regarding it purely as a medicine, appeared to me reasonable. I had noticed ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... complete stop to Gorges's plans for a final proprietorship in New England. Gorges had acquiesced in the first grant by the New England Council because he thought it a sub-grant, like that to Plymouth, in no way injuring his own control. But when in 1632, he learned the true inwardness of the Massachusetts title and discovered that Warwick and the Puritans had outwitted him by obtaining royal confirmation of a grant that extinguished his own proprietary rights, he turned on Warwick, declared that the ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews

... villains, Basil and John, trying the kindling properties of the bracken, and he had promptly fallen in a swoon from sheer terror. By the common folk his account was believed ad literam, and not all the better sort saw the true inwardness of the occurrence. So the assembly had serious matter ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan

... many respects, had stirred him to the wider issues—that Ishmael must be made to take a hand in other affairs than the ordering of his estate and the upbringing of his son. He had watched with alarm the increasing inwardness of the man he loved, to him always the boy he remembered—an inwardness not towards egoism, for that Ishmael's distrust of individualism, would always prevent, but towards a vague Quietism that enwrapped him more and more. His son, deeply as he engrossed ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... ship-carpenter. He studied navigation in the forecastle, and found in its calm diagrams and tranquil eternal signs food for his thoughtful nature, and a refuge from the brutality and coarseness of sea-life. He had a healthful, kindly animal nature, and so his inwardness did not ferment and turn to Byronic sourness and bitterness; nor did he needlessly parade to everybody in his vicinity the great gulf which lay between him and them. He was called a good fellow,—only a little lumpish,—and as he was brave and faithful, he rose in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... telegraphic sentences, half swallowed at the ends, They hint a matter's inwardness—and there the matter ends. And while the Celt is talking from Valencia to Kirkwall, The English—ah, the ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... visualizer. But for that same reason, because he is "cinematographic," he is often by that much external and insensitive. For the people who have intuition, which is probably another name for musical or muscular perception, often appreciate the quality of an event and the inwardness of an act far better than the visualizer. They have more understanding when the crucial element is a desire that is never crudely overt, and appears on the surface only in a veiled gesture, or in a rhythm of speech. Visualization may catch ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... You'll find that those tenants are glad of a chance to tell their troubles to some one. Oh, of course, they'd spot you if you went poking in for no reason but curiosity, but anybody with tact and a desire to get at the real inwardness of things for the purpose of bettering them would find a welcome. Those ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston

... ought to have taken judicial notices. Instead of accepting everything that the officials had to say, the Committee's obvious duty was to tax itself to find out the real cause of the disorders. It ought to have gone out of its way to search out the inwardness of the events. Instead of patiently going behind the hard crust of official documents, the Committee allowed itself to be guided with criminal laziness by mere official evidence. The report and the despatches, in my humble opinion, ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi

... river, we stopped to see an old hunter who lived on the bank. He was a very shrewd, quaint old boy, "good for a novel." He examined Goshorn's spectacles with so much interest, that I suspect it was really the first time in his life that he ever fully ascertained the "true inwardness and utilitarianism" of such objects. He expressed great admiration, and said that if he had them he could get twice as many deer as he did. I promised to send him a pair. I begged from him deer-horns, which he gave me very willingly, expressing ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... still; the uses that they serve cannot be numbered, but one name covers them all. In the course of evolution they came in with the fishes and went out with man. What was their purpose and mission? What place have they filled in the scheme of things? In short, what is the true inwardness of a tail? ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... one may be, when regarded by itself. It would be difficult to know how to convey these to anyone in words: glances, movements, a certain "live appeal"—it would require a poet to catch and fix—in short—to idealize—telling us the true inwardness, so that we might indeed comprehend ... and even then he would, I fear, make for weariness, when grappling with what well may seem interminable.[20] Here ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann

... thinks that he is better than all other men; that is hopeless enough; but the paragon of hypocrisy is he who does not know that he is worse than all other men. And in his stone-blindness to himself, and consequently to all reality and inwardness and spirituality in religion, you see him intensely interested in, and day and night occupied with, the outside things of religion, till nothing short of a miracle will open his eyes. See him in the ministry, for instance, ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte

... doubt that Stefan had kept still, since he had been requested to. No one else in Carcajou knew anything as to the inwardness of the girl's coming, of Sophy's share in it, or of the discovery by the doctor of the latter's duplicity. And yet there was an element in Carcajou that frowned upon the young lady. Her accusation had been reported far ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick

... and an object of cognition is considered as internal when it is accessible only to ourselves. When these two characteristics are isolated from each other, one may have doubts; but when they co-exist, then the outwardness or inwardness appears fully evidenced. We see then that this distinction has nothing to do with the value of consciousness, and ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... calculated thing on the part of our dear parents as little as on that of Mr. Jenks himself. Therefore let it be recorded as still most odd that we should all have assented to such deficiency of landscape, such exiguity of sport. I take the true inwardness of the matter to have been in our having such short hours, long as they may have appeared at the time, that the day left margin at the worst for private inventions. I think we found landscape, for ourselves—and wherever I at ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... grasp the inwardness of that?" she said. "Their dear old hearts were laid bare by the trouble that had come upon them, and each of them spoke of the other, as each felt for the other. Probably neither of them had said Jacob or Jane in the whole course of their lives. But the Angel of the Lord descended and ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... state at once the true inwardness of the matter, as I have been led to see it. The cause of the South was the cause of small against large political aggregations; and the world regards the defeat of the South as righteous and inevitable, because instinct tells it that the welfare of humanity is to be sought in large political aggregations, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... mystic who, because he feels God, declines to reason about Him—for a Maimonides and a Mendelssohn, but also for a Nachmanides, a Vital, and a Luria' (M. Joseph, op. cit., p. 47). Used in a vague way, mysticism stands for spiritual inwardness. Religion without mysticism, said Amiel, is a rose without perfume. This saying is no more precise and no more informing than Matthew Arnold's definition of religion as morality touched with emotion. Neither mysticism nor an emotional touch makes religion. They are as often as not ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams



Words linked to "Inwardness" :   outwardness, spirituality, haecceity, spatial relation, cognitive content, position, bare bones, otherworldliness, cognitive state, quintessence, content, quiddity, hypostasis, spiritism, inward, state of mind, stuff, introversion, mental object, spiritualism



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