DICTIONARY ONE.COM • More 'Exigent' Quotes from Famous Books

... capable of understanding him, some little interesting secret. Thus it is to Sainte-Beuve that he defines and explains the origin and real meaning of the Petits Poemes en Prose: Faire cent bagatelles laborieuses qui exigent une bonne humeur constante (bonne humeur necessaire, meme pour traiter des sujets tristes), une excitation bizarre qui a besoin de spectacles, de foules, de musiques, de reverberes meme, voila ce que j'ai voulu faire! And, writing to some obscure person, he ...

— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... last thought prepares for the statement of our view of the attitude a rational religion takes up in the solemn presence of death. "Stoicism shall not be more exigent," said Emerson of the new Church. We take no lax view of life and its responsibilities, but we refuse to magnify death into the one thing worth living for or thinking about. Homo liber de nulla ...

— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... of it than a finished disposition of the hair; and as soon as you acquaint yourself with the execution of carved marbles generally, you will perceive these massy fillets to be merely a cheap means of getting over a difficulty too great for Michael Angelo's patience, and too exigent for his invention. They are not sublime arrangements, but economies of labor, and reliefs from the necessity of design; and if you had proposed to the sculptor of the Venus of Melos, or of the Jupiter of Olympia, to bind the ambrosial ...

— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... her to believe that his first impulse, on hearing of her being in the house, had been to throw himself at her feet, it would have been well that this conversation should have been carried on out of her hearing. But Anty was not an exigent mistress, and was perfectly contented that as much of her recent history as possible should be ...

— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... had gifted me with an exigent conscience and a turn for oratory, I would, I like to think, have publicly confessed, at that first public performance, to all those tributary clarifying rills to the play's progress: but, as it was, vainglory combined with an aversion to "speech-making" to compel a taciturn if smirking ...

— The Jewel Merchants - A Comedy In One Act • James Branch Cabell

... moving; but it was an exercise of bodies rather than of minds. Swords flashed; barkers were flourished (though they never went off); feet twinkled in the dance, and Mr. MURRAY CARRINGTON took several astounding falls; but wits remained stationary. I do not wish to appear exigent, but as one who likes to be amused as well as entertained I could easily have done with a little ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various

... it would seem, that much should be left to burn. The old Due de Belle-Isle, Minister of War, was of another type, a fine and efficient soldier. He explained the situation frankly in a letter to Montcalm. Austria was an exigent ally, and Frederick of Prussia a dangerous foe. France had to concentrate her strength in Europe. The British fleet, he admitted, paralyzed efforts overseas. There was no certainty, or even probability, that troops and ...

— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong

... six years had been treated with easy indifference if not with contempt by the British Foreign Office had in a day become exigent and urgent, and the diplomatic details which ordinarily would have required months to adjust were now settled by cable in an hour. The first proposal for a Joint High Commission was made by Sir Edward Thornton on the 26th of January, ...

— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... He poised for one brief and immobile moment, deep in thought, before he swung about to the three exigent figures making signs for his attention. Then the thin-featured, many-wrinkled, weary-eyed face relaxed in an almost honest and ...

— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... Even like a man new haled from the rack, So fare my limbs with long imprisonment; And these gray locks, the pursuivants of death, Nestor-like aged in an age of care, Argue the end of Edmund Mortimer. These eyes, like lamps whose wasting oil is spent, Wax dim, as drawing to their exigent; Weak shoulders, overborne with burdening grief, And pithless arms, like to a wither'd vine That droops his sapless branches to the ground: Yet are these feet, whose strengthless stay is numb, Unable to support this lump of clay, Swift-winged with ...

— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]

... are lawless, because restless, are thy passions so extreme that thou canst not conceal them with patience? or art thou so folly-sick, that thou must needs be fancy-sick, and in thy affection tied to such an exigent,[1] as none serves but Phoebe? Well, sir, if your market may be made no where else, home again, for your mart is at the fairest. Phoebe is no lettuce for your lips, and her grapes hangs so high, that gaze at them you may, but touch them you cannot. Yet, ...

— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge

... which for six years had been treated with easy indifference if not with contempt by the British Foreign Office had in a day become exigent and urgent, and the diplomatic details which ordinarily would have required months to adjust were now settled by cable in an hour. The first proposal for a Joint High Commission was made by Sir Edward Thornton on the 26th of January, 1871; and the course of events was ...

— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... loves are lawless because restless: are thy passions so extreme, that thou canst not conceal them with patience? or art thou so folly-sick, that thou must needs be fancy-sick, and in thy affection tied to such an exigent as none serves but Phoebe? Well, sir, if your market can be made nowhere else, home again, for your mart is at the fairest. Phoebe is no lettuce for your lips, and her grapes hang so high, that gaze at them you may, but touch them you cannot. Yet Montanus I speak not this in pride, but in ...

— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... himself would have wished it hid. Great artists are always vain. To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A conceited man is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself. Any great artist is far too perceptive and too exigent to be satisfied with that effect, and hence in vanity he seeks solace. Goethe, you may be sure, enjoyed the hero-worshipful gaze focussed on him from all the tables of the Caffe' Greco. But not for adulation had he come to Rome. Rome was what he had come for; and ...

— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... said who knew him, of whose large soul so many large deeds were demanded that he had no time for little and inconsequent things—indeed, scarce knew that they existed. To think, to feel, to create, to achieve—these were his absorbing tasks; and so exigent were the demands on his great intellectual resources that he seemed never to know the existence of a ...

— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough

... perfection might come at last which the course of nature was to produce in obedience to the ordinances of the Creator. But he was a man who reverenced all laws,—and a law, if recognised as a law, was a law to him whether enforced by a penalty, or simply exigent of obedience from his conscience. This girl had been thrown in his way, and he had first pitied and then loved her from his childhood. She had been injured by the fiendish malice of her own father,—and that father had been an Earl. He had been strong in fighting for ...

— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope

... returned Sewell, grateful for this sign of animation, and not exigent of a more formal acceptance of his invitation. "You know," he said, "that literature is a trade, like every other vocation, and that you must serve an apprenticeship if you expect to excel. But first of all ...

— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... to morbid introspection, and are easily worried about their own indispositions or the illnesses of their friends. They are often timorous and apprehensive, and prone to pedantism. The moral sentiments are pronounced in most cases, and if they are, as a rule, somewhat exigent and egotistic, they have a lively sense of ...

— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.

... intelligence capable of understanding him, some little interesting secret. Thus it is to Sainte-Beuve that he defines and explains the origin and real meaning of the Petits Poemes en Prose: Faire cent bagatelles laborieuses qui exigent une bonne humeur constante (bonne humeur necessaire, meme pour traiter des sujets tristes), une excitation bizarre qui a besoin de spectacles, de foules, de musiques, de reverberes meme, voila ce que j'ai voulu faire! And, writing to some obscure person, he will take the trouble to be even ...

— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... not exigent. She brightened at Ruth's words as if they had been an authoritative pronouncement from ...

— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse

... of the wicked availeth not," 'tis said; yet never was the prayer of the righteous more quickly answered than is that of the Rebel General-in-chief! Johnston himself, alluding to this exigent moment, afterward remarks, in his report: "The expected reenforcements appeared soon after." Instead of Patterson's Union Army, it is Kirby Smith, coming up, with Elzey's Brigade, ...

— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan

... metaphor, averred that the German princes turned towards England as an inexhaustible milch-cow. The animal in this case could dictate her terms; and thus the relations of the three Powers resembled those of a rich but somewhat exigent employer to grumbling and distrustful employees. Holland also, in return for her sacrifices in men and money, demanded from Austria a better frontier on the side of Dutch Flanders and Maestricht, to which the Viennese Court opposed ...

— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... opportunity of exercising it. For a faculty to be repressed is hard just in proportion as its quality is noble. A caged canary is hardly a painful sight, but a caged eagle stirs one with regret. And the world has such need of all noble talent; such exigent and hungry need of the true teacher, statesman, seer,—of the word of inspiration and the act of leadership! How shall one who feels in him the power and sees the need; who grasps in his hand the keen sickle, yet is held back, while before his eyes the fields are white ...

— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... would talk to their hearts' content, and feel, as each day dawned upon their happiness, that they were free to go where they would, without being confronted at every turn by the troublesome duties of an exigent society. ...

— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford