"Sureness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when, recovered from all that, Augustin speaks to us of the Divine love, he will know fully the infinite value of it from having gone through all the painful entrancements of the other. And he will say to us, with the sureness of experience: "The pleasure of the human heart in the light of truth and the abundance of wisdom—yea, the pleasure of the human heart, of the faithful heart, and of the heart which is holy, stands alone. You will find nothing ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... death. Unless he chanced to hear, through other and fiercer sounds the soft flow of the myriad kernels, he would have no means of knowing that one desperate way was being opened to him. Even then his single hope would lie in quickness of perception and a sureness of judgment that acted flawlessly and smoothly under a ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... thinking, 'It's rather queer, this crowd. And these Prices with all their money might do so much better. That Fosdick is a silly fellow. The Senator is worn of course, but still important!' And yet Conny, with all her sureness, did not know all her own mental processes. For she, too, was really looking for a mate, weighing, estimating men to that end, and some day she would come to a conclusion,—would take a man, Woodyard ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... that we are able to get real knowledge about the mind. This may seem at first sight a useless question to raise, seeing that our minds are, in the thought of many, about the only things we are really sure of. But that sort of sureness is not what science seeks. Every science requires some means of investigation, some method of procedure, which is more exact than the mere say-so of common sense; and which can be used over and again by different investigators and under different conditions. This gives a high ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... it was the awful disappointment of knowing Father couldn't come, and being so miserable myself (not one line yet from that person named William Spencer Sloane, who is probably married to an elderly woman by this time), and because of my sureness that no human being could be depended on in time of temptation, especially vigorous, aggressive temptations that come out of the West, that I gave help where help seemed to be needed, and now again I am in everybody's mouth. Also my ankles are still ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... error in grammatical construction, failure to cooerdinate or subordinate sentences and parts of sentences properly, cannot be treated with so much sureness as the two preceding faults; yet certain definite instruction may be given. And, but, for, or, and nor are called cooerdinating conjunctions; that is, they are used to connect words, phrases, and clauses of equal rank. If one uses and to connect a noun ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... coolie falling overboard last night, sir," replied Peter guardedly. As long as no direct accusation came, he felt safer. He was reasonably sure, basing his opinion of skippers on many past encounters, that this one would go typically to his subject. In his growing cock-sureness, Peter expected no rapier-play. It would be a case, he felt sure, of all the cards on the table at once; a ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... as to the best and safest arrangement of the party. We agreed that it was best for Croz to go first, and Hadow second; Hudson, who was almost equal to a guide in sureness of foot, wished to be third; Lord Douglas was placed next, and old Peter, the strongest of the remainder, after him. I suggested to Hudson that we should attach a rope to the rocks on our arrival at the difficult bit, and hold it as we descended, as an additional protection. He approved ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... like an Arabian Night's phantom with one red eye in the middle of its body, places himself just in advance of the locomotive. He trots nimbly along, defending himself from incessant death by the sureness of his legs, and after a long race guides up to the station the clattering train, which is all the time threatening to catch him by the heel. "Wilmington!" shouts the brakesman. Every train into Wilmington is thus attended, as the palfrey of an Eastern ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... miles Bruce never lifted his eyes, straining them as he wielded his sweep for the deceptive, submerged granite boulders over which the water slid in a thin sheet. Immovable, tense, he steered with the sureness of knowledge and grim determination until the boat ceased to leap and ahead lay a little stretch ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... the coolest man on the force next to Inspector Kedsty, the most dreaded of catechists when questioning criminals, the man who had won the reputation of facing quietly and with deadly sureness the most menacing of dangers, had been beaten—horribly beaten—by a girl! And yet, in defeat, an irrepressible and at times distorted sense of humor made him give credit to the victor. The shame of the thing ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... Milner to Mr. Chamberlain from Capetown on February 6th, 1901. Among all the notable documents which he furnished to his official chief, none affords more convincing evidence of cool judgment, mastery of South African conditions, and sureness of statecraft than this. It is a letter, and not a despatch, and as such it contains some personal details which would not have found a place in more ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... behind in Monterey to wait while Pepe worked, was sorrowful. As sometimes happens to us when we are confronted by the certainty of great happiness, she was possessed by a gloomy sadness that came of dark forebodings in her mind. The very greatness and sureness of this happiness awed her into doubt. She knew that to take her good fortune in this faint-hearted way was not wise in itself, and was not what Pepe would approve; and that she might please Pepe she berated herself roundly and tried to laugh away her fears—though they scarcely amounted to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... him. It was a big thing; suppose it took him years? Well, there would be portraits to keep him alive. Meanwhile it was true enough what he had said to Madame de Pastourelles. As a painter he had never been properly trained. His values were uncertain; and he had none of the sureness of method which men with half his talent had got out of study under a man like, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... soaring high into the air, to be caught expertly as it descended swiftly toward the earth. A few of the regulars were out, and it was easy even for a stranger to distinguish them by the deftness and quick sureness of their actions. The others sometimes missed hard catches, but these veterans, with clocklike precision, were always in position to make the most difficult catches without even ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... his Chinese hero in "The Poppies of Wu Fong," dramatized Oriental inscrutability with Occidental suavity and sureness, and set off the Oriental gentleman in American surroundings, he brought together the nations in a new vision of the brotherhood of man. This story was preferred, for the reasons implied, by Frances Gilchrist Wood, who sees in Wu Fong's garden the subtle urge of acres of flowers, asleep ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... dew' I come to the cloak—you are quite right—and I give up that fancy. Will you, then, take one more precaution when all proper safe-guards have been adopted; and, when everything is sure, contrive some one sureness besides, against cold or wind or sea-air; and say 'this—for the cloak which is not here, and to help the heart's wish which is,'—so I shall be there palpably. Will you do this? Tell me you will, to-morrow—and ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... of the things that are said here are finally said; they exhaust their subject. Of one thing we are certain—that there is no work in English devoted to the interpretation of poetic experience which can claim the delicacy and sureness of Mr. Bradley's." ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... scores of my operas himself, he had them performed for him by Saint-Saens, whom he apparently patronised. I thus learned to appreciate the skill and talent of this young musician, which was simply amazing. With an unparalleled sureness and rapidity of glance with regard to even the most complicated orchestral score, this young man combined a not less marvellous memory. He was not only able to play my scores, including Tristan, by heart, but could also reproduce their several parts, whether they were leading or minor ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... wire fence, leaps the ditch, dashes through a closing gate, or escapes an infuriated enemy at a moment's notice. This natural wisdom is exercised spontaneously in him, it is the result of inborn theorems of which he may not even be aware, but which he uses with a sureness that defies the book-learning of all our teachers of mathematics. He uses speed, force, space, mass, and time with so small an effort, and by the ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... which requires skill with the hands is her work on the typewriter. Although she has used the typewriter since she was eleven years old, she is rather careful than rapid. She writes with fair speed and absolute sureness. Her manuscripts seldom contain typographical errors when she hands them to Miss Sullivan to read. Her typewriter has no special attachments. She keeps the relative position of the keys by an occasional touch of the little finger on the outer edge ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... mother. Then he seized the head of the boar, and bare it to Atalante, and said, "Take, maiden, the spoils are rightly thine. From thy spear came the first wound which smote down the boar; and well hast thou earned the prize for the fleetness of thy foot and the sureness of thy aim." ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... nothing to do. In choosing them he manifested, no doubt, something of the same defiance of authority, and the same self-willed preference for his own not too well-educated opinion, which brought him to grief in his encounter with Wallis. But when he had once left his starting points, his sureness of reasoning, his extreme perspicacity, and the unerring clearness and certainty with which he kept before him, and expressed exactly what he meant, made him at once one of the greatest thinkers and one of the greatest writers of England. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... opportunity, and the country is to be congratulated that he did not think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with his setting-pole where the main current was, and keep steadily to that. He is still in wild water, but we have faith that his skill and sureness of eye will bring him ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... pleasure in playing the role of a psychologist for his personal satisfaction, in taking apart and re-assembling the machinery of a work, in separating the pieces forming the structure of a compound exhalation, and his sense of smell had thereby attained a sureness that ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... into the haze, and there he saw those whom he called "his people" walking across a neat English park toward a peaceful little English church. To them came presently a young person; a young person clad in pink cotton, who walked with a certain demure sureness of tread, as if she knew her own mind and other things besides. Her path came into the park from the left, and among the trees into which it disappeared behind her there stood the red chimneys of a ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... less assured; there was something antique and laboured in his determined grasp at the amenities of the occasion. It was the only heaviness. To the other contest between them he brought an amazing sureness, a suppleness, power, and audacity beyond praise. He directed his battle, and at his elbow Tom Mocket, sandy-haired and ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... dexterously crossing one leg over the other when taking a seat. Also, his mildness of diction, his discreet moderation of word and phrase, survived in, if anything, increased measure, and he bore himself with a skill which caused his tactfulness to surpass itself in sureness of aplomb. And all these accomplishments had their effect further heightened by a snowy immaculateness of collar and dickey, and an absence of dust from his frockcoat, as complete as though he had just arrived to attend a nameday festival. Lastly, his cheeks and chin were of such neat ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... black suit and traveling-hat, alighted at the Burlington depot in Lincoln. She drove to the Lindell Hotel, where she had stayed two years ago when she came up for Emil's Commencement. In spite of her usual air of sureness and self-possession, Alexandra felt ill at ease in hotels, and she was glad, when she went to the clerk's desk to register, that there were not many people in the lobby. She had her supper early, wearing her hat and black jacket down to the dining-room ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... into her own household. Like a spider in the blackness of night an unseen hand had begun to run these dark lines, to turn and twist them about her life, to plait and weave a web. Jane Withersteen knew it now, and in the realization further coolness and sureness came to her, and the fighting courage of ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... he discovered that he was lost. Then came the usual confusion of mind and the hurry to get somewhere. Mexico was anxious to redeem the situation, twisting with alacrity along the tortuous labyrinths of the jungle. At the moment his master's sureness of the route had failed his horse had divined the fact. There were no hills now that they could climb to obtain a view of the country. They came upon a few, but so dense and interlaced was the brush that scarcely could a rabbit penetrate the mass. They ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... the arroyo, followed it a mile, seeking a crossing, then doubled straight north toward the Cimarron. Captain Jack hung to her trail like a hound. In the blackness that preceded the storm she could not lose him. With almost uncanny sureness he picked her out—following, following, never giving the maverick a moment's rest. Yet it seemed that the distance she kept ahead was measured, so alert and watchful was she always. Both were dripping with sweat. Try as he would, it seemed impossible for Captain Jack to win those few yards ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... Morris spent at architecture, he considered as nearly a waste of time, but it was not so in fact. As a draftsman he had developed a marvelous skill, and the grace and sureness of his lines were a delight to Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown and others of the little artistic circle in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... modern Danish prose, no author who unreservedly appealed to me; in German Heinrich Kleist, and in French Merimee, were the stylists whom I esteemed most. The latter, in fact, it seemed to me was a stylist who, in unerring sureness, terseness and plasticism, excelled all others. He had certainly not much warmth or colour, but he had a sureness of line equal to that of the greatest draughtsmen of Italian art. His aridity was certainly not winning, and, in reading him, I frequently ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... dress nice? Would it do? Unluckily, since Lucy's rise in the social scale which had marked the last few years, the sureness of her original taste in dress had somewhat deserted her. Her natural instinct was for trimness and closeness; but of late her ideals had been somewhat confused by a new and more important dressmaker with 'aesthetic' ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... feeling a shrinking, hidden terror of him, ever since her eavesdropping of the previous night. At the memory of that scene she grew hot, then cold—hot with anger, icy at the sinister power and sureness which had vibrated in his voice. What kind of life was she entering where men spoke of strange women with this assurance and hinted thus of ownership? That he was handsome and unconscious of it, she acknowledged, and had she met him in her accustomed circle of ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... leaning back. His eyes were closed, one could not tell in that moment that he was blind, but it was more than the dimness, the blankness in his eyes, more than scarred eyeballs, made for the change in Karl's face. He and life did not dwell together as they had once; a freedom and a gladness and a sureness had gone. The loss of those things meant the loss of something fundamentally Karl. And the sadness—and the longing—and the marks of struggle which the light of ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... was furious with herself for feeling a just perceptible response to his virile personality and his absolute sureness. Anything he wanted—— Then she bent her mind resolutely upon a ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... will ever forget her. Not only was she a vision of rare loveliness, but there was in her every glance and movement that stateliness and grace that poise and sureness of herself that marks the high-born woman the world over when she finds herself ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... you know that with such sureness?" she cried. "No, no, Major Carew; in your heart you know otherwise. But you just let her go away without a word, without a hope, and one or two of us know what this hasty engagement means. Diana calls it martyrdom. She wrote me to send Meryl an in memoriam card instead of congratulations, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... loved Paolo, he was so finished in his being, detached, with an almost classic simplicity and gentleness, an eternal kind of sureness. There was also something concluded and unalterable about ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... apologetic little preamble, he would sit down and play these rococo bits of trailing sound with fingers dipped in lightning, fingers that flashed over the keys in perfect evenness and with perfect sureness. ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. In ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... slippery. There was only just room for the chair to pass, and at the sudden turns it had often to be canted to one side to permit of its passage. We were high above the river in the mountain gorges. The comfort of the traveller in a chair along this road depends entirely upon the sureness of foot of his two bearers—a false step, and chair and traveller would tumble down the cliff into the foaming river below. Deep and narrow was the mountain river, and it roared like a cataract, yet down the passage a long narrow junk, swarming with passengers, was ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... criticism. When I finished, he had me read it over a second time, and a third. We fell into discussion—philosophy, science, evolution, religion. He betrayed the inaccuracies of the self-read man, and, it must be granted, the sureness and directness of the primitive mind. The very simplicity of his reasoning was its strength, and his materialism was far more compelling than the subtly complex materialism of Charley Furuseth. Not that I—a confirmed and, as Furuseth phrased it, a temperamental idealist—was to be compelled; ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... Munkacsy's picture of "Christ before Pilate," and notes Richard's astonishment at it. He considered it himself as one of the finest of existing pictures. He also expresses the great pleasure he derived from Jacquemart's water-colors, their brilliancy and sureness of execution. ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... a critic. The most remarkable thing about his violent political prejudices is the success with which he dissociated his literary estimates from them. Such a serious limitation in a critic as deficiency of reading in his case only raises our astonishment at the sureness of instinct which enabled him to pronounce unerringly on the scantest information. Never was there a critic of nearly equal pretensions who had as little of the scholar's equipment. If, as he tells us, he applied ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... will be apprehended and always made to pay the penalty for their crimes. Toward the achievement of this ideal we have as yet done very little. We are still woefully behind such a country as England, where justice is administered with relative rapidity and sureness. Second, the reform of criminal procedure aims to prevent the law from bearing with undue weight upon the poor and ignorant. Here we are making greater progress. Let us notice what is being done to guarantee justice to persons who ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... Every gesture bespoke authority and arrogance of body. Even in this moment of geniality, "Obedience and no explanations" was written all over him. He was a man who believed his acceptable importance to be a verity established beyond the pale of challenge. Yet there was something lacking—a sureness of refinement, a last considerateness. With the first word he had spoken, Tabs had detected that ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... are such as for immemorial times have spired from the sod; the boughs publish their annual book of many a verdant scroll without apprehension of having become commonplace at last; the bobolink pours his warble in cheery sureness of acceptance, unmindful that it is the same warble with which the throats of other bobolinks were throbbing before there was a man to listen and smile; and night after night forever the stars, and age after age the eyes of women and men, shine on without apology, or the least ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... imagination or trying to extend by guess-work her social purview. Her women in general, whether satiric and unpleasant like Mrs. Norris in "Mansfield Park" or full of winning qualities like Catherine Moreland and Anne Eliot, are drawn with a sureness of hand, an insight, a complete comprehension that cannot be over-praised. Jane Austen's heroines are not only superior to her heroes (some of whom do not get off scot-free from the charge of priggishness) ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... this time forgotten that she was resting, and now she began to ride as she never had ridden before, throwing a series of difficult backward turns, landing each time with a sureness that ...
— The Circus Boys Across The Continent • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... admit it to herself, but she set about doing it. With the sureness of instinct that great affection brings, the awkward, ignorant girl contrived immediately to find the road by which she might reach her beloved's heart. She did not turn directly to him. But as soon as she was better and could once more walk about the house she approached Louisa. ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... got to work, displaying a quiet activity and sureness of himself that at once excited the young Englishman's amazement and admiration. Bidding the Indians to stand back a few paces, and taking the lighted lantern from them, the American deposited a mahogany case upon the ground, which, upon being opened, proved to contain a complete surgical ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... when he suddenly rallies, and proposes that, as death is certain, they shall all go and have a hot bath. In the little confusion that follows, the narrator and his friend slip quietly away. This scene of exquisite fooling is quite unique in Greek or Latin literature: the breadth and sureness of touch are almost Shakespearian. Another fragment relates the famous story of the Matron of Ephesus, one of the popular tales which can be traced back to India, but which appears here for the first time in the Western world. ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... Marise and the children a damn sight more. And not only Marise and the children. He hadn't let himself lay it all on their backs, and play the martyr's role of the forcibly domesticated wild male. No, he wanted the life he had, outside the family, his own line of work; he wanted the sureness of it, the coherence of it, the permanence of it, the clear conscience he had about what he was doing in the world, the knowledge that he was creating something, helping men to use the natural resources of the world without exploiting either ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... called "a pretty tune," she knew nothing whatever of music, understood less. And yet, almost from that first moment, she understood Ben Cohen, realising him as lover and child: understood him better, maybe, then than she did later on: losing her sureness for a while, shaken and bewildered; everything blurred by her own immensity of love, longing; of fearing that she did ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... consider Parliament; he was not master himself. He thought that if they were to meet the requirements of the public as they were anxious to do, they must proceed in the course in which they were moving at present—with steadiness and sureness, and not promise things which it was impossible ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs
... cabin with an astounding freedom and sureness, chuckling as he handled bottle and glasses and measured out ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... with Him. There is no other way by which the externals can be made right than by setting a watch on the door of our hearts and minds, and this inward discipline must be put in force before there will be any continuity or sureness in the outward aim. We want, for that direction of the life of which I have been speaking, a clear perception and a concentrated purpose, and we shall not get either of these unless we fall back, by thought and meditation, upon the truths ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... rapidity (though her manner was by no means rapid), the largeness of the field of knowledge, the compressed outcome of which she was at any moment ready to bring to bear on the topic in hand; the sureness and lucidity of her induction; the clearness of vision, to which muddle was as impossible and abhorrent as a vacuum is supposed to be to nature; and all this lighted up and gilded by an infinite sense of, and capacity for, humour,—this was what rendered her to me a marvel, and an object of inexhaustible ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... made a great stride towards common sense, for instead of dreaming of liberating popes, he was now imagining a renovating statesman, and he had inscribed Cavour's name under his new portrait. In a book published in Paris, Gioberti drew the Cavour of the future with a penetration and a sureness of touch which would make a reader, who did not know the date, suppose that the words were written ten years later. Men of great talent, he said, rarely threw aside the chance of becoming famous; rather did they snatch it with avidity; and what fame more splendid could now be won than that ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... you to make you do more'n say it. I got to make sure you are it. Hell-fire won't take the sureness out ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... had her thoughts as well as Malcolm. Already life was not what it had been to her, and the feeling of a difference is often what sets one a-thinking first. While her father lived, and the sureness of his love overarched her consciousness with a heaven of safety, the physical harmony of her nature had supplied her with a more than sufficient sense of well being. Since his death, too, there had been times when she even fancied an enlargement of life in the sense ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... with what ingenuity and sureness dragon-flies distinguish, follow, and catch the smallest insects on the wing. Of all insects, they have the best sight. Their enormous convex eyes have the greatest number of facets. Their number has been estimated ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... animals to habits intelligently acquired and hereditarily transmitted, it is not clear how this sort of explanation could be extended to the vegetable world, where effort is never intelligent, even supposing it is sometimes conscious. And yet, when we see with what sureness and precision climbing plants use their tendrils, what marvelously combined manoeuvres the orchids perform to procure their fertilization by means of insects,[68] how can we help thinking that these are ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... and arms which come from athletics, and the roundnesses which denote that superb animal, the well-developed woman. But it was only as he stood by the side of the carriage that he saw and felt the mingled dignity and frankness, the sureness and lightness of touch, with which she acted or refrained from acting; the lack of haste, the temperateness of gesture and intonation, which bespoke in a moment that type of woman ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... detail, and inlaid with the bronze eagle from an Imperial pfennig. There are many such ringsmiths among the privates at the front, and the severe, somewhat archaic design of their rings is a proof of the sureness of French taste; but the two we visited happened to be Paris jewellers, for whom "artisan" was really too modest a pseudonym. Officers and men were evidently proud of their work, and as they stood hammering away in their cramped smithy, a red gleam lighting up the ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... fashion, and procure me some sort of bone, crooked like a gooseneck, and hollow. Also, walk humbly, but have eyes awake to the lay of pots and pans and cooking contrivances. And remember, mine is the white man's wisdom, and do what I have bid you, with sureness and despatch.' ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... Macaulay none the less because his cock-sureness and loquacity came dangerously near to making him a bore; Dr. Johnson grows in interest when I learn that he found it a continual and almost hopeless struggle to become an early riser, that he ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... my girl!" said the soldier-teacher. "It's lucky for you sexton pupils there was one among you could reply; for, with all your cock-sureness, you were about to ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... spoke intellectual superiority; the quick, and yet firm, deep glances left the observer in doubt whether they gave or received more; an expression of suffering lent a soft grace to the clear features. She moved in a dark dress, light almost as a shadow, but also with freedom and sureness; her greeting was as easy as it was kindly. But what struck me most was the sonorous and mellow voice which seemed to swell from the inmost depths of the soul, and a conversation the most extraordinary that I had ever met with. She threw out, in the most ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... this soul had dried away slowly, but with fatal sureness. When the heart is dry, the eye is dry. On his departure from the galleys it had been nineteen years since he had shed ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... periods of his life, and his playing was highly esteemed from one end of Europe to the other. A contemporary writer says of him: "As a virtuoso he is unanimously placed in the very first rank. In rapidity and sureness of execution, in a mastery of the greatest difficulties, it would be hard to find a pianist who surpasses him; in neatness and precision of execution, possibly one (John Cramer, of London); in soul, expression and delicacy, certainly ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... possible to man. He might have posed for some god or hero,—his aspect was one of absolute power and calm self- poise,—other men might entertain doubts of themselves at the intention of their lives, but this one in his mere bearing expressed sureness, strength and authority. He wore his cowl thrown back, and from where I sat in my secluded corner I could see his features distinctly, and could watch the flash of his fine steadfast eyes as he turned them upon ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... ledgers, made office-fires, swept out stores—anything and everything that his will compelled, and his necessities made imperative. And they had done it all forcefully and willingly, with the persistence and sureness of machines accomplishing a certain output in so many hours. Joyfully too, sustained and encouraged by the woman he loved and whose heart through all his and her vicissitudes ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... you for giving me your confidence and employing my services! Tonight—the most important night of my destiny—Fate has determined that I shall perform the greatest task of all you have ever allotted to me; and that with swiftness and sureness in the business I shall kill the King! He is my marked victim! I am his chosen assassin!" Here interrupting himself with a bright smile, he said: "Will someone restrain my two friends, Max Graub and Axel Regor from ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... tables, cushion our chairs, and clothe our bodies; machines of which Vulcan never dreamed, to point a needle, bore a rifle, cut a watch wheel, or rule a series of lines, measuring forty thousand to an inch, with sureness which the unaided hand can never equal. Machinery is a triumph of handicraft as truly as sculpture and architecture. The fingers which can plan and build a steamship or a suspension bridge, which can make the Quinebaug ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... face—the one of the deep, earnest eyes and tender lips—had been toned and perfected and rechiseled by the magic hand of Time. She was taller by several inches; a lissome creature who moved with the sureness and grace of an ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... innocent of any musical training whatsoever. Monsigny (1729-1817) is a particularly striking instance of natural genius triumphing in spite of a defective education. Nothing can exceed the thinness and poverty of his scores, or their lack of all real musical interest; yet, by the sureness of his natural instinct for the stage, he succeeded in writing music which still moves us as much by its brilliant gaiety as by its tender pathos. 'Le Deserteur,' his most famous work, is a touching little story of a soldier who deserts in ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... married him I had never thought out fully what marriage meant, even though I knew. It was idiotic of me—there is no excuse. I was old enough, and I thought I was very experienced. So I rushed on, when I had got into that training school scrape, with all the cock-sureness of the fool that I was! ... I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one had done so ignorantly! I daresay it happens to lots of women, only they submit, and I kick... When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... them, as vigorous as they, strode Adoniram Purdon behind his team, the reins tied together behind his muscular neck, his hands grasping the plow with the masterful sureness of the successful practitioner of an art. The hot, sweet spring sunshine shone down on 'Niram's head with its thick crest of brown hair, the ineffable odor of newly turned earth steamed up about him like incense, the mountain stream beyond ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Now, mechanically, she began to pat and arrange the little curls upon her forehead, then to take out and replace a hairpin or two, so as to fasten the golden mass behind a little more securely. The white fingers moved with an exquisite sureness and daintiness, the lifted arms showed all the young curves of the ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... tenderness and understanding with human weaknesses and shortcomings, no one had less of the crowd spirit. As he said, he kept aloof—not from aloofness but from embarrassment and shyness. Later he overcame most of this and was able to face a crowd or an audience with composure and sureness. With this picture in mind another is recalled, one of him here at Riverby on summer days, scraping corn to make corn cakes. With an armful of green corn that he had picked, I can see him seated and with one of Mother's old aprons tucked under his beard. ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... Renoir. His comprehension of light is a special one, his technique is not in accordance with the system of colour-spots; it observes the theory of complementary colours and of the division of tones without departing from a grand style, from a classic stateliness, from a superb sureness. Manet has not been the inventor of Impressionism which co-existed with his work since 1865, but he has rendered it immense services, by taking upon himself all the outbursts of anger addressed to the innovators, by making a breach in public opinion, through which his friends have ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... that in purely poetic quality—in aerial freedom and space, in radiant purity of light or depth and variety of colour, in penetrating and subtle sweetness of music, in supple mastery of the instrument, in vivid spontaneity of imagination, in clean-cut sureness of touch—Wordsworth is not surpassed by men who were below him in weight and greatness? Even in his own field of the simple and the pastoral has he touched so sweet and spontaneous a note as Burns's Daisy, or the Mouse? When men seek ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... suddenly opened the Gates of Memory, whether she might be truly Mirdath. And I, utter weak and shaken strangely because of this splendour of fulfilment, could make no instant answer. And she asked again, but using mine old love-name, and with a sureness in her far voice. And still I was so strangely dumb, and the blood to thud peculiar in mine ears; and this to pass; ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... Cambrai, with English troops on their right, who shared their success. General Currie, who became the Canadian Corps Commander, did not spare his men. He led them forward whatever the cost, but there was something great and terrible in his simplicity and sureness of judgment, and this real—estate agent (as he was before he took to soldiering) was undoubtedly a man of strong ability, free from those trammels of red tape and tradition which swathed round so ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... test under full load! Well, what of it? they demanded one of another; wouldn't another day do as well as this one? And they worked as they growled, worked with swift sureness and skill, and the final instruments took their place in the ship that she might roll from the hangar complete under that ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... must be done at once—no guide marks or trial shots allowed; nothing but sureness of eye. The man must have a compass in his eye, as the saying goes; that ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... am too sure he will not return. The first months comprise all the shocks of disappointment that are likely to disgust a new-comer. The sphere of opportunity opens slowly, but to a man of his abilities and culture—rare enough here—with the sureness of chemistry. The Giraffe entering Paris wore the label, "Eh bien, messieurs, il n'y a qu'une bete de plus!" And Oxonians are cheap in London; but here, the eternal economy of sending things where they are wanted makes a commanding claim. Do not suffer him to relapse into London. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... for that day at least. The party were to make the trip to "Picnic Hollow," as Arline had named their destination, in Elfreda's and Arline's automobiles. During the past year the latter had become greatly interested in automobiles, and drove her own high-powered car with the sureness of an expert. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... fencing-master but like a Viking, with a broad Berserker blade. He hews, he hacks, he gashes. There is blood in his veins, and he does not spare the ink. But examine closely these little prints—some of them miracles of printing—and you may discern their delicate sureness, subtlety, and economy of gesture. Fitzroy Carrington quotes the Parisian critic Henri Marcel, who among other things wrote of the Zorn etchings: "Let us only say that these etchings—paradoxical in their coarseness of means ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... style is regular because the matter he deals with is the somewhat uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not imaginative, and unambitious in its speculative flight? Even in Steele himself we may observe with what sureness of instinct the men of that age turned aside at the contact of anything likely to make them, in any ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... either doubt it the moment it had vanished, or it would grow to you as one of the common things of your daily life—which are indeed in themselves equally wonderful. Evidently, if visions would make us sure, God does not care about the kind of sureness they can give, or for our being made sure in that way. A thing that gained in one way, might be of less than no value to us, gained in another, might, as a vital part of the process, be invaluable. God will ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... the music of Macaulay's prose had often a metallic sound, and that it suffered from excess of epithet and addiction to antithetical phrases. In pithiness of style, sureness of touch and dispassionate judgment, he contrasted Acton as an historical writer with Macaulay, to the latter's disadvantage. He found every page of Acton packed with thought, every essay richly freighted with ideas. Moreover, Acton was sternly impartial and impersonal in his ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... faith which it cherished with sincerity and sureness. If half the nation has fallen away from this,—if half the remaining moiety is doubtful, skeptical about it,—if, therefore, we are already a house divided against itself and tottering to its fall,—to what is all due? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... to the English Club, a simple little frame house, to play pool. There was a great deal of talking, laughing, and betting, but some very poor play, except on the part of Miller, who had drunk as much as any of them, all far younger than he, but had kept unimpaired the keenness of his eye and the sureness of his hand. He pocketed the young men's money with humour and urbanity. After an hour of this I grew tired and went out. I crossed the road and came on to the beach. Three coconut trees grew there, like three moon maidens waiting for their ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... entertaining, more intoxicating. We have said that it is carelessly written, but that is part of the author's superb self-confidence, and when he is fortunately inspired, he obtains here an ease of style, a mastery which he had never found before. The sureness of his touch is seen in the epigrams which strew the pages of Lothair, and have become part of our habitual speech—the phrase about eating "a little fruit on a green bank with music"; that which describes the hansom cab, "'Tis the gondola of London." This may lead us on to the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... this as in many other ways was that red cross abused. He wastes his time who tries to teach the Boers some new trick. In this war they have amply proved that in that matter they have nought to learn, except the unwisdom of it all, and the sureness of the retribution it involves. Even in battle and battle ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... about the room with a certain sureness of touch, swift and relentless and quiet. She knew she could not cope with him. He would escape like a weasel out of her hands. Yet without him her life would trail on lifeless. Brooding, she ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... Persisted in, the pupil acquires a permanent tendency to fumble, to gaze about aimlessly, to look for some clew of action beside that which the subject matter supplies. Dependence upon extraneous suggestions and directions, a state of foggy confusion, take the place of that sureness with which children (and grown-up people who have not been sophisticated by "education") confront the ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... February 3d. Real had taken the precaution to have an escort of gendarmes for the prisoner whom Georges and his followers might try to rescue. The detachment was commanded by a zealous and intelligent officer, Lieutenant Manginot, assisted by a giant called Pasque, an astute man celebrated for the sureness of his attack. They left Paris at dawn by the Saint-Denis gate and took ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... fuller than when we had last seen them bare. Then, to get the graceful, noble bearing of the Moors, she practised day after day carrying a pitcher of water on her head as they do, until she could do this with perfect ease and sureness. In this habit the Don, who was mightily pleased with her looks, took her to the house of his friend and employer, Sidi ben Ahmed, where she ingratiated herself so greatly with the women of his household that they ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... directness of the means employed as for the clearness with which the results are brought out—results which any one may verify now that the way to them is pointed out, and which, surprising as they are, lose half their wonder in the ease and sureness with which they seem to ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... Messianic aspect of Christ's mission, on the mystery and poetry of that long national expectation, on the pathos of Jewish disillusion, on the sureness and beauty of Christian insight as faith gradually transferred trait after trait of the Messiah of prophecy to the Christ of Nazareth. At first there was a certain amount of hesitation, a slight wavering hither and thither—a difficult choice of words—and then the soul freed itself from man, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
