"Tone down" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Miss Baby only had known it, was a throne before which knelt her two adoring subjects. Polly had said the baby would be like Kate. Its hair and colouring were like hers, but it had the brown eyes of its father, and enough of his facial lines to tone down the too generous Bates features. When the baby was five months old it was too pretty for adequate description. One baby has no business with perfect features, a mop of curly, yellow silk hair, and big brown eyes. One of the questions Kate and Adam discussed most ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... as his chief adviser, but he surrounded himself with reforming ecclesiastics from beyond the Alps. Thus fortified he issued edicts against simoniacal and married clergy; but finding that their literal fulfilment would have emptied all existing offices, he was obliged to tone down his original threats and to allow clergy guilty of simony to atone their fault by an ample penance. But Leo's contribution to the building up of the papal power was his personal appearance, not as a suppliant but as a judge, beyond the Alps. Three times in ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... know Talboys. When I first met him, before he started building, he was a cheerful soul with a kindly word for everyone. The builder assures him that in another twenty years, when the colour has had time to tone down, his house will be a picture. At present it makes him bilious, the mere sight of it. Year by year, they tell him, as the dampness wears itself away, he will suffer less and less from rheumatism, ague, and lumbago. He has a hedge round the garden; it is eighteen inches high. To keep the boys out he ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... time. The chief obstacle to a coalition, he said, was Fox's support of French principles, which must preclude his taking the Foreign Office immediately. The remark is noteworthy as implying Pitt's expectation that either Fox might tone down his opinions, or the Revolution might abate its violence. Further, when Loughborough reminded him of the ardour of his advocacy of the Abolitionist cause, he replied that some concession must be made on that head, as the King strongly objected to the way in which ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... robes of fine woven stuff made in their primitive looms, which would seem to be incapable of turning out such textures. The addition of blocks of graphite, some curiously carved into the shape of elephants, and the more prosaic agricultural productions, such as cotton, cinnamon, matting and baskets, tone down the color and exhibit the fact that the English possession has the mercantile side. Antlers of the Ceylon deer, tusks of elephants and boars, contrast with the richness and the sobriety of the other contents of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... have at once a picture of manners not unlike those of the Afghan tribes, though very differently treated. The poet is at no pains to put on any moral varnish, or to tone down the roughness romantically; because he is writing, or reciting, for people of much the same way of thinking as his heroes, who are fierce chiefs quarrelling over captured women; and the whole plot is developed by sheer pressure of circumstance and character. Then on the Trojan side ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the mastiff may grip, and then, if you happen to be an ex-convict and deserter from their Colonial Police, and supposing you have one or two other little things against you ... the most honest of speculators being occasionally compelled to dirty his hands, if only to tone down those immaculate extremities to something approaching the colour of other people's—then what becomes of the risky but profitable business of gun-running from the English ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... tone down the crudeness of Hungerford's language. It contents me to think that the solidity of his character and his worth will appear even through the crust of free-and-easy idioms, as they will certainly be seen in his acts;—he was sound at heart and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... simplicity and sanctity; had not her own father declared her to be "as pure as a flower on the altar of the Madonna;" and yet the evil had been in her, and nothing had eradicated it; for even religion, with her, was a mere graceful sham, a kind of theatrical effect used to tone down her natural hypocrisy. My own thoughts began to harass and weary me. I took up a volume of philosophic essays and began to read, in an endeavor to distract my mind from dwelling on the one perpetual theme. The day wore on slowly enough; and I was glad when the evening closed ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... "And you might tone down the family notes for him," suggested Fairy. "We don't really care to know when Mrs. Kelly borrows eggs of the editor's wife and how many dolls Betty got for Christmas and Jack's grades in high school. We can get ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... something tragic, too. It was all very well for that young Jew to burn himself up with his talk about freedom, his feverish searching for new gods. "In five years," Roger told himself, "Mr. Isadore Freedom will either tone down or ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... certain precautions, he has once spoken, has expressed, for all the ages, a part of the immutable, absolute, and eternal Truth. It is this that makes the papal pretensions so extraordinary and so enormous. It is also this that gives them their charm. Catholic apologists, when they try to tone down those pretensions and to explain them away, forget that it is in their very exorbitance that their fascination lies. If the Pope were indeed nothing more than a magnified Borough Councillor, we should hardly have heard so much of him. It is not because he satisfies the reason, but because ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... often exclaimed, 'to get a dress that will tone down your hair and a hat that will tone up your nose, when the first is red and the last a snub! My nose is the root of all evil; it makes people think I'm saucy before I say a word; and as for my hair, they think I must be peppery, no matter if I were ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to the peace of their society; and now they had a good occasion. Nor was it to be expected that the champion and apostle of Atheism—and Shelley was certainly both, in spite of Hogg's attempts to tone down the purpose of his document—should be unmolested in his propaganda by the aspirants to fat livings and ecclesiastical dignities. Real blame, however, attaches to these men: first, for their dulness to discern Shelley's amiable qualities; and, secondly, for the prejudgment ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... explanation of mine ever reaches my neighbours' eyes, I humbly hope they will have the humanity either to take away or tone down that tablet. They cannot conceive what I suffer when curious visitors insist, as they do every day, on spelling out the words from our windows, and asking me ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... appear crude and exaggerated because they are unaccompanied by the forceful delivery of a glowing speaker before an audience heated to attentive enthusiasm. So in preparing your speech you must not err on the side of mild statement—your audience will inevitably tone down your words in the cold grey of afterthought. When Phidias was criticised for the rough, bold outlines of a figure he had submitted in competition, he smiled and asked that his statue and the one ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... himself stated in the memorandum written nineteen years afterwards, which is inserted at the end of it, the opinion he entertained of him at this time was unjust. But he at the same time decided 'to leave it as it is, because it is of the essence of these Memoirs not to soften or tone down judgments by the light of altered convictions, but to leave them standing as contemporary evidence of what was thought at the time they were written.' These are his ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... sensuously unstrung, is emancipated and set free by matter. The soft and graceful beauty, to satisfy this twofold problem, must therefore show herself under two aspects—in two distinct forms. First, as a form in repose, she will tone down savage life, and pave the way from feeling to thought. She will, secondly, as a living image, equip the abstract form with sensuous power, and lead back the conception to intuition and law to feeling. The former service she does to the man of nature, the second to the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... it difficult to get any further; he knew himself that all he was about to describe was plain, unvarnished fact—but how would it strike a stranger's ear? He found himself seeking ways in which to tone down the glaring improbability of the thing as much as possible, but in vain; "I don't know how I shall ever get it all out," he told himself at last; "if I think about it much longer I shall begin to disbelieve in ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... habitually did two men's work. He did not do it with any idea of trying to ingratiate himself with his keepers: no inmate of the institution at Walla Walla made any such mistake as that. He did it purely because he could not tone down his mighty strength and energy to stay even with his fellows. To-day Sprigley, the guard in first command of the gang, had placed him opposite Judy, the burly negro, but the latter was being driven straight toward absolute exhaustion. Yet Kinney at least knew how to subdue and direct the ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... which at a man's birth is devoid of impressions, I hold that the imagination is a vast plain, capable of comprehending all that nature may bring forth, besides innumerable illusions, fancies, and poetic figures. A writer's pen is his brush, and words are his colors, which he must blend, heighten, or tone down, so that each object may assume a natural living form. The best poet will so paint his pictures that his readers will see the originals reflected as in a mirror. If his imagination be vivid, words grow eloquent, he feels all that he sees: he is impelled onward like a madman, and he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... inspired its architects to surpass this temple to God and Mohammed;" but when he comes to the Taj itself he is lost in rapture. There is nothing, however, which the critics—those men who have failed in literature and art—will not venture to attack, and I thought it advisable to tone down my expectations by taking a dose of carping criticism. Unfortunately for me, however, when I had got fairly in with a writer who assures me "the design is weak and feeble," the "shadows are much too ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... merriment, her rude interruptions of her elders, her pert remarks, her sarcastic jokes, are all the manifestations of mere overflowing animal spirits, of warm-blooded youth and hearty health. She will tone down. She is the most startling and incalculable child I ever heard of. No one could anticipate her eccentricities. There is an originality of invention about her pranks which amazes me. But I am sure she will turn out all that I ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... tin or new shingles do not look handsome on an old roof, but they serve their purpose in keeping out the rain and snow and preventing moisture from rotting the timbers. The weather will soon tone down the color of the new shingles so that they will not be noticeable and you will have the satisfaction of having a dry roof over your head. There is only one thing worse than a leaky roof and that is a ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... her with visible admiration, 'and I don't think anything on earth could possibly improve you—except perhaps a judicious course of differential and integral calculus, which might possibly serve to tone down slightly your exuberant and excessive vitality. Still, you know, from the point of view of society, which is a force we have always to reckon with—a constant, in fact, that we may call Pi—there can be no doubt in the world that to have been on the Continent is a differentiating factor ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... arrangement would be of service to them and a saving of time for the Review. So Christophe left his proofs to Mannheim and asked him to correct them carefully. Mannheim did: it was sport for him. At first he only ventured to tone down certain phrases and to delete here and there certain ungracious epithets. Emboldened by success, he went further with his experiments: he began to alter sentences and their meaning: and he was really skilful in it. The whole art of it consisted in preserving the general ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... her sister's praises almost ad nauseam. Among the girls she was a distinct favourite; her patience was endless, and her good temper unflagging. What she lacked in brains she made up for in warmth of heart, and though she faithfully upheld discipline, she was apt somewhat to tone down the severity of the rules, and indeed sometimes surreptitiously to soften the thorny ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... sir," I said to break the ice—"for the season of the year," I added by way of a saving clause, to tone down the absoluteness ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu |
