"Attribute" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... satisfactorily the exact period of its introduction, or even that of its final extinction, (for it appears to have merged gradually into the pure and unmixed pointed style of the thirteenth century,) we have perhaps no remains of this kind to which we can attribute an earlier date than that included between the years 1130 and 1140, unless we except the intersecting arches at St. Botulph's, Priory Church, Colchester, which may be a few years earlier; and it appears to have prevailed, in conjunction or intermixed with the Norman ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... supposition of the "historic mission (Beruf) attributed to certain people or persons." The study of historic facts does not even make for the popular newspaper theory of the continuous and necessary progress of humanity, it shows only "partial and intermittent advances, and gives us no reason to attribute them to a permanent cause inherent in collective humanity rather than to a series of local accidents." But the historian's path is still like that of Bunyan's hero, bordered by pitfalls and haunted by hobgoblins, though certain ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... moment Leonard wondered how it was that they did not slide back to the bottom of the slope, there to remain till they perished, for without ropes and proper implements no human being could scale it. Then he saw that a chance had befallen them, which in after-days he was wont to attribute to the ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... name, the title of German Baroness, the proverbial wealth of the bankers of Frankfort, to whom the people were accustomed to attribute everything that was singular and bizarre, had been most admirably combined by the Count de Fersen, to account for anything strange or remarkable in the appearance of the royal equipages; nothing, however, excited attention, and they arrived without interruption at Montmirail, a little ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... ravish'd fancy vivifies the form; While judgment toils to analyze its charm; While admiration spreads her speaking hands; The lofty artist undelighted stands. He longs to ravish from the bless'd abodes The seal of heaven, the attribute of gods; To give his labour more than man can give, Breathe Jove's own breath, and bid ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... to attribute the persistence of this belief in the supernatural? It is useless replying that its persistence is evidence of its truth. That clearly begs the whole question at issue. Mere social heredity will doubtless count for much in this direction. ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... have we done to justify so intense desire of our destruction? Certainly those who have shown themselves so much our enemies, never received any private wrong from us; for, had we wished to injure them, they would not have had an opportunity of injuring us. If they attribute public grievances to ourselves (supposing any had been done to them), they do the greater injustices to you, to this palace, to the majesty of this government, by assuming that on our account you would act unfairly to any of your citizens; and such a supposition, ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... say, Hugh," he added, "that your presence in the capital should not be advertised as connected with this—legislation. They will probably attribute it to us in the end, but if you're reasonably careful, they'll never be able to prove it. And there's no use in putting our cards on the table at ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... hour passed and they came not, the desperado began heartily to curse their sloth—for to no other cause was he enabled to attribute the delay, as he knew the house, the destined scene of the outrage, to be deserted by all for the night, except by the three ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... those amongst the Native Princes who were too enlightened to believe that we intended to force our religion upon them and change all their customs, felt that their power was now merely nominal, and that every substantial attribute of sovereignty would soon disappear if our notions of progress continued to ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... so sure that when we truly attribute a sunset, or the moonlight rippling on a lake, to the chemical and physical action of material forces—to the vibrations of matter and ether as we know them, that we have exhausted the whole truth of things? Many a thinker, ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... snuffed out by a woe. But it is the weakness of the heart rather than the strength of the feeling which has in such cases most often produced the destruction. Some endurance of fibre has been wanting, which power of endurance is a noble attribute. Everett Wharton saw something of this, and being, now, the heir apparent of the family, took his sister to task. "Emily," he said, "you make us all unhappy when we look ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... on behalf of the captors, as to the place of capture. Yet to this day it has never been done. The brig Fanny was alleged to be taken within five miles from our shore; the Catharine within two miles and a half. It is an essential attribute of the jurisdiction of every country to preserve peace, to punish acts in breach of it, and to restore property taken by force within its limits. Were the armed vessel of any nation to cut away one of our own from the wharves of Philadelphia, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... felt for my magic stone. It hung safely under my knitted shirt. I trusted in the security it gave me, and my courage was renewed. The way out of my predicament was so hopeless, my danger so great, that I solemnly resolved, should I ever reach home again, to attribute my escape from this peril to the intervention of the ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... attribute my recovery to you, at all events; and so will my good mother, who I hope will some day be able to thank you in person for all that you've ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... own strain, and we may be betrayed into thinking that the cynic is the best judge of life. It is the imagination exercising itself among things real, but not of the first order of importance. If you attribute to them that importance, you are guilty of false sentiment. The facts of ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... what we name space—sphere of unnumbered spirits; Illustrious the mystery of motion, in all beings, even the tiniest insect; Illustrious the attribute of speech—the senses—the body; Illustrious the passing light! Illustrious the pale reflection on the new moon in the western sky! Illustrious whatever I see, or hear, ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... seconds every green blade and leaf upon his tiny domain, for which he pays an enormous rental, sometimes as much as L12 sterling an acre. Yet the contadino takes his chances with a seraphic resignation that we do not usually attribute to the southern temperament. After the eruption of 1872, which covered the rich Paduli with a deep coating of grey ashes, a young peasant girl was heard deploring the loss of her carefully tended gourds and melons; ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... line there is a great deal of knowledge to be gained—we shall find that the point at which spiritual power or thought-force is translated into etheric or atomic vibration will always elude us. Therefore we must not attribute the origination of ideas to molecular displacement in the brain, though, by the reaction of the physical upon the mental which I have spoken of above, the formation of thought-channels in the grey matter of the brain may tend to facilitate ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... and introduce supplementary causes as well as principal causes. About the only result, however, is that sickness often accompanies loss of employment, and that loss of employment often accompanies sickness or accident. It is clearly seen in this whole table how disposed applicants for relief are to attribute their distress to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... what correllated the force? According to this logic life came from the antecedent motion; that is, from the motion of dead atoms. But motion itself is the manifestation of energy, and there must of necessity be something behind it to which it belongs as an attribute. Do you say it was dead atoms, or matter without life? Then dead atoms set dead atoms into motion and produced life! Can you believe this? If you can, you need find no trouble in believing in the most orthodox hell. Can you get more out ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... attribute of poetry," said he, "is that of bringing tears. Let me weep awhile, fellows, and then I'll give you the last stanza. Last ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... Britannica is as terse and simple as ever about him. "Grasshoppers," it says, "are specially remarkable for their saltatory powers, due to the great development of the hind legs; and also for their stridulation, which is not always an attribute of the male only." To translate, grasshoppers have a habit of hopping ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... the desire of happiness a universal practical law on the ground that the desire is universal, and, therefore, also the maxim by which everyone makes this desire determine his will. For whereas in other cases a universal law of nature makes everything harmonious; here, on the contrary, if we attribute to the maxim the universality of a law, the extreme opposite of harmony will follow, the greatest opposition and the complete destruction of the maxim itself and its purpose. For, in that case, the will of all has not one and the same object, but everyone has ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... read this curious controversy between the ministerial board and the Court of Directors, common candor obliged me to attribute their tenacious adherence to the estimate of 1781 to a total ignorance of what had appeared upon the records. But the right honorable gentleman has chosen to come forward with an uncalled-for declaration; he boastingly tells you, that ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... monastery, and was within an ace of becoming a monk. He seems to me to have betrayed unconsciously, and so early, that timid despair which leads so many in our unhappy society, who dread cynicism and its corrupting influences, and mistakenly attribute all the mischief to European enlightenment, to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... seems disposed to attribute the difficulty that he experienced in supplying his army with food to the condition of the roads rather than to the lack of mules, packers, teamsters, and wagons. In an interview with a correspondent of the Boston "Herald" at Santiago on August 25 he is reported as saying: ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... that life is motion and is an attribute of matter; yet that is something wholly different from what is understood by the term. Thus far science has pointed out no distinction between dead and living protoplasm, and the affirmation that the primordial cells are the source of life is ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... are consequently unable to demonstrate the baselessness of the ideas of the waking state from those ideas themselves, they attempt to demonstrate it from their having certain attributes in common with the ideas of the dreaming state. But if some attribute cannot belong to a thing on account of the latter's own nature, it cannot belong to it on account of the thing having certain attributes in common with some other thing. Fire, which is felt to be hot, cannot be demonstrated to be cold, on the ground ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... pattern and shape, containing on one and sometimes two sides long stone benches, which served doubtless as the resting-place of their Buddhist occupants. The "Chaitya Vihara" or chapel cave alone is worth a visit. Pillars and pilasters with eight-sided shafts and waterpot-bases, which scholars attribute to the period B. C. 90 to A. D. 300, stand sentinel over verandahs stretching away into darkness on either side of the main aisle. Their capitals are surmounted with crouching animals, twin elephants, a sphinx and lion, twin tigers, all ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... gathered; but the statuettes of Phœnician idols, forming part of those proofs, with the arts and skill required for the maritime enterprise it required, betray the civilisation of a period more advanced than that to which we should be disposed to attribute such rude structures as the Nuraghe and the Sepolture. In this uncertainty, it may be worth an inquiry, whether these ancient monuments did not exist before the colonists landed on the shores of Sardinia,—in short, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Whether anything further was done is uncertain. No supplementary orders have been found bearing date previous to the outbreak of the Dutch war. But there exists an undated set which it seems impossible not to attribute to this period. It exists in the Harleian MSS. (1247, ff. 43b), amongst a number of others which appear to have been used by the Duke of York as precedents in drawing up his famous instructions of 1665. To begin with it ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... of high figures cannot be called cheap at half that sum, after it has been worn considerable, and perhaps passed out of fashion. The peculiarity of the dresses is that the most of them are cut low-necked—a taste which some ladies attribute to Mrs. Lincoln's appreciation of ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... ignorance where ignorance is absurd, and knowledge where knowledge is shame, and what is worse, this distressing criticism has been forced upon him, and he has arrived at the conclusion that beauty without intelligence is the most valueless attribute of a woman. Alas, the world is an argus-eyed, many-headed, sleepless, heartless monster. The independent man, if he would retain his independence, must retire with his wife to his own home, and it would be a pity ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... lord," said Master Sean without looking up from his work. "It's in the blood. Some attribute it to the Dedannans, who passed through Scotland before they conquered Ireland three thousand years ago, but, however that may be, the Talent runs strong in the Sons of Gael. It makes me ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... value, not in itself, but for what it represents. That thing you know. You have twice held it in your hands. I have twice taken it from you. Well, I am entitled to believe that, when you tried to obtain possession of it, you meant to use the power which you attribute to it and to use it ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... nevertheless—the child of his marvelous gift. We don't create any of our traits; we inherit all of them. They have come down to us from what we impudently call the lower animals. Man is the last expression, and combines every attribute of the animal tribes that preceded him. One or two conspicuous traits distinguish each family of animals from the others, and those one or two traits are found in every member of each family, and are so prominent as to eternally and unchangeably ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... They acknowledged, he said, in all duty and thankfulness acknowledged, that, before they called, her "preventing grace" and "all-deserving goodness" watched over them for their good; more ready to give than they could desire, much less deserve. He remarked, that the attribute which was most proper to God, to perform all he promiseth, appertained also to her; and that she was all truth, all constancy, and all goodness. And he concluded with these expressions: "Neither do we present our thanks in words or any outward sign, which can be no sufficient ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... had long since given Dick up as an irresponsible and irreclaimable imp. One large section declared the boy to be 'a bit gone,' which was generally Waddy's simple and satisfactory method of accounting for any attribute of man, woman, or child not in conformity with the dull rule of conduct prevailing at Waddy. Another section persisted in its belief that 'the boy Haddon' was possessed with several peculiar devils ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... the Pharisee; "let us hasten: for this generosity in the heathen is unwonted; and fickle-mindedness has ever been an attribute of the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... so completely the soul's sufficiency that the flesh has little scope or sway any more, and there is no longer need of furious struggle against it, "like a serpent between two rocks, trying to pull off his old skin!"[18] In his Heavenly Jerusalem in Us, he says: "It is an attribute of God that He is the Eternal Peace which is longed for by us men, but found by few because they do not mind Christ, who is the Way. God has not grounded either thy Peace or thy Salvation on thy running hither and yon, nor on thy works and thy creaturely ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... Airs, the remainder Calm. In the A.M. died John Trusslove, Corporal of Marines, a man much esteem'd by every body on board. Many of our people at this time lay dangerously ill of Fevers and Fluxes. We are inclinable to attribute this to the water we took in at Princes Island, and have put lime into the Casks in order to purifie it. Wind South-West by South to South-South-East; course South; distance 4 miles; latitude 9 degrees 34 minutes South; longitude 256 ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... other. Some one or other, not over-stocked with penetration has objected to the same artifice being twice used in entrapping them; the drollery, however, lies in the very symmetry of the deception. Their friends attribute the whole effect to their own device; but the exclusive direction of their raillery against each other is in itself a proof of a growing inclination. Their witty vivacity does not even abandon them in the avowal of love; and their behaviour only assumes a serious appearance for the purpose ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... of the unfeminine attribute of holding her tongue and reserving her comments. She refrained from comment now, rocking gently backward and forward on her heels—a habit associated ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... just; that his justice can not sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become practicable by supernatural influences! The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest."[4] And must we prove, that Jesus Christ is not in favor of what universal Christendom is impelled to abhor, denounce, and oppose; is not in favor of what every attribute of Almighty God is ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Sadrock's letter and am surprised by its tone. If Mr. Sadrock did not make use of the words that I attribute to him how could I have set them down? Because I was writing unobserved all the time he was talking, and I could produce the notes if they were, to others, legible enough for it to be worth while; surreptitious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... hand holds all existence beneath its dominion undoubtedly produces in the depths of His wisdom those great events which astonish the world and of which the most presumptuous, though instrumental in accomplishing them, dare not attribute to themselves the merit. But the finger of God is still more peculiarly evidenced in that happy, that glorious revolution which calls forth this day's festivity. He hath struck the oppressors of a free people—free and peaceful, with the spirit of delusion which renders the wicked artificers ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... dissolution of her engagement to lord Gartley. The mother was troubled: it is the girl that suffers evil judgment in such a case, and she knew how the tongue of the world would wag. But those who despise the ways of the world need not fret that low minds attribute to them the things of which low minds are capable. The world and its judgments will pass: the poisonous tongue will one day become pure, and make ample apology for its evil speaking. The tongue is a fire, but there is a stronger ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... ask Mr. K. who gave him authority to attribute thus the deliverance of this people, to who and what prayers he please, I suppose it would not be easy for him to answer. The text saith not that the prayers of these women procured the blessing. But Mr. K. hath here a woman's meeting to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... expropriations and bequests the experiment has been many times tried, and always with the same results. The wealth that could not be assimilated and administered has always left the receiver or grasper in all essentials poorer than he was before. Wealth is an attribute of personality. It is not interchangeable like the parts of a standardized machine. The futility of dispossessing the middling rich would be ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... but the depths of the Great Beyond it fathoms to a nicety. It gives no grasp upon the truths of Time; but it is the all-sufficient hold on Eternity. It leads to the discovery of no important principle here; but it holds the keys to the secret chambers of divinity! It is an attribute of childish development now. It is to indicate ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... water again will not explain the difference of the structure and distribution of scales in Flounder and Plaice, considering the variety of squamation in fishes confined to fresh water. Still less can we attribute any of the peculiarities of scales to utility. We can discover no possible benefit of the condition in one species which would be absent in the case of other species. We can go much further than this, and maintain that there is no reason to believe that scales in general in Teleosteans, ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... the change in her and did not attribute it entirely to the thickness of the air. Rossland's inexplicable rudeness had disturbed her more deeply than she had admitted, ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... to amuse me; his happiness to make me happy. And I in return loved him with all my childish heart. Nay, with something deeper and more romantic than a childish love—say rather with that kind of passionate hero-worship which is an attribute more of youth than of childhood, and, like the quality of mercy, blesseth him that gives even more than ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... under the same outward circumstances, it is reasonably supposed that one cause, whatever it may be, is common to them all. And this is the whole business of the student of nature, to place together results which are so similar, that we may attribute them to a common cause, without assuming to know what that cause is. The sole office of science is the theory, not of causation, but of classification. It is all reducible to natural history, the essence of which ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... something in common between the sun's corona and cometary matter was shown by the last solar eclipse observed in South Pacific Ocean, where the spectrum of sun's corona was found to be the same as that of a comet's tail. Are we to attribute in any degree the different appearances of the sun's corona to the presence or absence of a comet at its perihelion? At the eclipse of the sun seen in Upper Egypt two or three years ago, a comet was seen close to the sun, but I have seen no account of the appearance of the corona ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... fame I attribute, first to the studious depreciation of Sterne and Walpole, and secondly to a refinement of snobbishness on the part of the travelling crowd, who have an uneasy consciousness that to listen to common ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Death's sullen shroud, A sunbeam streaming through a stormy cloud; An angel hovering o'er the paths of life, But sought in vain amidst its cares and strife; Claimed by the many—known but to the few Who keep thy great Original in view; Who, void of passion's dross, behold in thee A glorious attribute ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... acquire that character of violence, ambition, and turbulence, which distinguished the whole family, till, six hundred years after, the last of the race shed her blood on the scaffold of the Tower of London. It therefore seems appropriate here to give the strange, wild story to which they were wont to attribute their family temper, though it is generally told of one who came later in the line. It was said that the count observed that his wife seldom went to church, and never at the celebration of mass; and believing ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... found a Scotchman with a little literature very disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The Scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... classical Mythology, than by the intriguing enchantresses of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments; as the unfortunate Beder, when under the displeasure of the vicious queen Labe, experienced to his great inconvenience. The love for the supernatural, combined with an anxious desire to attribute its operations to material and visible agencies, forms one of the most singular features of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... imply "egotism," though it must be confessed that in Montaigne's case, though not in Goethe's, there may have been a touch of that less generous attribute. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... the village laments the death of the reverend vicar; and there are many who regard him as a real saint, worthy of religious honors, and who attribute miracles to him. I know not how that may be, but I do know that he was an excellent man, and that he must have gone straight to heaven, where we may hope to have in him an intercessor. With all this, his humility, his modesty, and his fear of God were such that he spoke ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... attracted a little attention from those observers who were able to observe anything except the heat. The coat was shaped delicately; it outlined the wearer, and, fitting him as women's clothes fit women, suggested an effeminacy not an attribute of the tall Corliss. The effeminacy belonged all to the tailor, an artist plying far from Corliss Street, for the coat would have encountered a hundred of its fellows at Trouville or Ostende this very day. ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... under what are called the fourteen stazioni or stations of the cross, (places where our Saviour is supposed to have halted, or fainted under his load, on his way to Calvary.) Stanzas we were at first profane enough to attribute to Metastasio, but afterwards found that it was only the metastasis of his metre adapted to the use of the church. They are much better than most of our sacred poetry, as it is strangely miscalled, which is frequently ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Spirit in relation to the Son is called "vicaria vis". The element of personality in the Spirit is with Tertullian merely a result arising from logical deduction; see his successor Novatian de trin. 29. Hippolytus did not attribute personality to the Spirit, for he says (adv. Noet. 14): [Greek: Hena Theon ero, prosopa de duo, oikonomia de triten ten charin tou hagiou pneumatos; pater men gar eis, prosopa de duo, hoti kai ho huios, to de triton to hagion ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... annual progress, the solstices and equinoxes. Garments of a peculiar wool, and feathers of a peculiar color, were reserved to the Incas. I can not identify the blue, red, yellow, and black, but it is worthy of remark that the rainbow was his special attribute or scutcheon, and that the mere fact that his whole life was passed in accordance with the requisitions of astronomical festivals, and that different colors were reserved to him and identified with him, establishes a strange analogy ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a mistake," wrote that sagacious and well-informed observer, D'Argenson, so early as 1753, "to attribute the loss of religion in France to the English philosophy, which has not gained more than a hundred philosophers or so in Paris, instead of setting it down to the hatred against the priests, which goes to the very last ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... convictions. A man of real ability, who is actively engaged in politics without being submerged by merely political intrigues, can hardly fail to wish at least to institute some kind of research into the principles which guide his practice. To such a desire we may attribute some very stimulating books, such, for example, as Bagehot's Physics and Politics or Mr. Bryce's philosophical study of the United States. What I propose to do is to suggest a few considerations as to the real value and proper direction of these arguments, ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... attribute the recent night stampede of sheep in the Midlands, when thousands of them jumped their hurdles, to the influence of a large number of people concentrating on a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... necessities that compass our chaotic sense when we ascend by continual abstraction to the absolute, without entangling ourselves vainly in those wildernesses that no created intellect can range or measure—even one sole attribute of God, His holiness, makes it as impossible for Him to proceed except by certain steps as it would be impossible for a man, though a free agent, and apparently master, as he feels and thinks, of his own life, to cut his ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... he had fallen so into the habit of going to the forester's house that he was oftener there than at his own; and the Head Forester, not knowing to what love of fishing to attribute these visits, often found himself embarrassed at being obliged to refuse the multiplicity of presents which the worthy ex-magistrate (he himself being very much at home) begged of him to accept in compensation ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... HIMSELF.) What must I do? Stay; one more argument suggests itself to me. When you see a Straight Line—your wife, for example—how many Dimensions do you attribute to her? ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... fact, in his haste to attribute to me errors which I have not committed, Mr. Gladstone has given away ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... thing that wearied me above and more than all others, was the changeless monotony of my existence; every day a tiresome repetition of another, which forced me to attribute little or no value ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... Drinkwotter: pairfection is an attribute, not of West Coast captains, but of thr Maaker. And there are gentlemen and gentlemen in the world, espaecially in these latitudes. Which ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... What is to be guarded against is the notion that tedium is inseparable from the scientific method. I have always been of the opinion that the dulness commonly looked upon as the prerogative of scholarly inquiries, is not an inherent attribute. In most cases it is conditioned, not by the nature of the subject under investigation, but by the temper of the investigator. Often, indeed, the tediousness of a learned disquisition is intentional: it is considered one of the polite ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... entitled The Origin of Attic Comedy, the author reckons the Doctor among the stock Masks of the early Greek Theatre, and assigns to this character the precise role which later survivals have led us to attribute to him. ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... mind and body may derive more benefit than from books and school? Many people go to sleep to escape from idleness; the Spaniards do; and, according to the French account, John Bull, the 'squire, hangs himself in the month of November; but the French, who are a very sensible people, attribute the action, 'a une grande envie de se desennuyer;' he wishes to be doing something say they, and having nothing better to do, he has recourse ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... himself to it might do the same things." Yet the very same power of abstracting the attention, when employed upon scientific and literary subjects, would excite our astonishment; and we should, perhaps, immediately attribute it to superior original genius. We may surely educate children to this habit of abstracting the attention, which we allow depends entirely upon practice. When we are very much interested upon any subject, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... attribute the success of the "ghost" to his own particular talent in that line, and when finally Mrs. White insisted that every one go to bed, echoes of laughter would peal out from behind closed doors, and the girls promised ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose
... could afford no indication of time, because a pole-star moves very slowly, and the pole-star of Cheops' day must have been in view through that tunnel for more than an hour at a time. But, apart from the mystical significance which an astrologer would attribute to such a relation, it may be shown that this slant tunnel is precisely what the astrologer would require in order ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... hospital. She was here taking care of a sick baby, and helping to nurse her sister Molly, who, it seems, is subject to those fits, about which I spoke to our physician here—an intelligent man, residing in Darien, who visits the estate whenever medical assistance is required. He seemed to attribute them to nervous disorder, brought on by frequent child bearing. This woman is young, I suppose at the outside not thirty, and her sister informed me that she had had ten children—ten children, E——! Fits and hard labour in the fields, unpaid labour, labour exacted with stripes—how ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... wondered whether Patty could be right. Was it not possible that Eve had gratified her vanity by representing her friend as a servant—a lady's-maid? Yet why should he attribute such a fault to her? It was an odd thing that he constantly regarded Eve in the least favourable light, giving weight to all the ill he conjectured in her, and minimising those features of her character which, at the beginning, ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... regretting that his enthusiasm for that remote epoch should oblige him to make this concession to an enemy of the Church. He shuddered to think of those sacrilegious books that nobody had seen, but whose paternity Rome was accustomed to attribute to this Sicilian Emperor—especially Los Tres Impostores (The Three Imposters), in which Frederick measured Moses, Jesus and Mahomet, by the same standard. This royal author was, moreover, the most ancient journalist of history, the first that in the full thirteenth century had dared ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a man incited me to infidelity, But I refused, for all the talk wherewith they set on me. I am a man in whom good faith's a natural attribute; The deeds of every upright man should ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... sayin' as I got most to the boat landin', "the phosphorescence that ignorant sailors attribute to electricity in the air is really a minute ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... nobler animal) is leading in the chase; and he is ready to weep as he realises his loss. And the rest of the Free Company, — the pony, the cows, the great cart-horses, — are ever shaming him by their unboastful exercise of some enviable and unattainable attribute. Even the friendly pig, who (did but parents permit) should eat of his bread and drink of his cup, and be unto him as a brother, — which among all these unhappy bifurcations, so cheery, so unambitious, so purely contented, so apt to be ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... nothing if not sympathetic, and every one of the ten stories is not only thoroughly readable, but is instinct with sentiment; for Mr Scott still retains a wonderful enthusiasm, usually the attribute of youth. 'Drifting' is a very fresh and convincing narrative, founded, we understand, upon truth, and containing within a small compass the materials for a very stirring drama. 'A Cross of Heather,' too, is a charming romance, told with ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... we expect to find a thief?—And now you had better get your coffee. Because we have lost a treasure, there is no reason for starving. For my part, I shall break my fast with white wine. I feel unaccountably heated and thirsty to-day. I can only attribute it to the shock of the discovery. And yet, you will bear me out, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which startled me out of my wits and brought my horse to a standstill, it rushed apparently towards us, and finally disappeared behind the clouds. It was some time before either horse or driver regained the nerve which had for a time forsaken them; and even then I was inclined to attribute this wonderful meteoric shower to a display of fireworks in a neighbouring village, so close to us had this last rocket-like shooting star appeared to be. A meteor which is sufficiently brilliant to frighten a horse and make him stop dead is of ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... at tea that afternoon that Mrs. Ascher put in an appearance for the first time. She was a tall, lean woman, with dark red hair—Gorman called it bronze—and narrow eyes which never seemed quite open. Her face was nearly colourless. I was inclined to attribute this to her long suffering from seasickness, but when I got to know her better I found out that she is never anything but pallid, even when she has lived for months on land and has been able to eat all she wants. ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... made known to me. But I am more resigned than I was, and I am doing my best to set my worldly affairs in order. My one great anxiety is that Rachel should be kept in ignorance of the truth. If she knew it, she would at once attribute my broken health to anxiety about the Diamond, and would reproach herself bitterly, poor child, for what is in no sense her fault. Both the doctors agree that the mischief began two, if not three years since. I am sure ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... no doubt because of the influence (here noted) of the Greek Romance itself, but more because of the increased frequency and importance of actual correspondence in life and society. We need not, however, attribute too much to this influence of imitation in seeking for the cause or causes which made Richardson adopt the form: nor need we even put down to Richardson's own popularity, abroad as well as at home, the very general further adoption ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... spectacle of the saloon keepers formally resolving to help the police instead of hindering them; of the prison ward in Bellevue Hospital standing empty for three days at a time, an astonishing and unprecedented thing, which the warden could only attribute to the "prompt closing of the saloon at one A.M."; and of the police force recovering its lost self-respect,—we had found out more and greater things than whether the excise law was a good or a bad law. We understood what Roosevelt meant when he insisted upon the "primary ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... achieved," replied Uncle Chris, with the dignity of a Captain of Industry confiding in an interviewer, "I attribute ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... the actions are exaggerated, so are their consequences, the speeches of the characters are exaggerated, and therefore at every step the possibility of artistic impression is interfered with. Whatever people may say, however they may be enraptured by Shakespeare's works, whatever merits they may attribute to them, it is perfectly certain that he was not an artist and that his works are not artistic productions. Without the sense of measure, there never was nor can be an artist, as without the feeling of rhythm there can not ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... character of a tutelary divinity that we attribute to the winged bull is indicated in the clearest manner in the cuneiform texts: "In this palace," says Esarhaddon, "the sedi and lamassi (the Assyrian names for these colossi) are propitious, are the guardians of my royal promenade and the rejoicers of my heart, ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... here is a concise, unadorned account of the wourali poison. It may be of service to thee some time or other shouldst thou ever travel through the wilds where it is used. Neither attribute to cruelty, nor to a want of feeling for the sufferings of the inferior animals, the ensuing experiments. The larger animals were destroyed in order to have proof positive of the strength of a poison which hath hitherto been doubted, and the smaller ones were killed with ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... should be conveyed by the highest channels, and I feared she would think this ought to have been sent through her lady then in waiting, Lady Harcourt. Mr. Fairly, too, however superior to such small matters for himself, is most punctiliously attentive to them for her. I could attribute this only to haste. But my difficulty was not alone to have received the intelligence-the conclusion of the note I was sure would surprise her. The rest, as a message to herself, being without any beginning, would not strike her; ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... mysteriously, never corresponding with nor answering a letter of the king's, so that his majesty was frequently doubtful whether the general designed to act for himself or for the king: an ambiguous conduct which I attribute to the power his wife had over him, who was in the opposite interest. The general, in his rough way, presented him a large paper, with about seventy names for his privy council, of which not more than two were acceptable. "The king," ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... say that women love, and that love predominates in their nature, because, my friends, love is the only immortal principle in the universe. Love is to endure forever. Faith will be swallowed up in knowledge after a while, and hope in fruition, but love abides forever. It is peculiarly an attribute of our feminine nature to love our offspring over everything else; for them we would peril our lives; and for the men of this nation, under our form of government, to say to us that we shall not have the power which will enable us through laws and legislation to ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... another House wherein the Overseer liveth. When I was there, in August last, the Valley, and the Mountains too, out of which the Mercury was dug, were of as pleasant a verdure, as if it had been in the midst of Spring, which they there attribute to the moistness of the Mercury; how truly, I dispute not. That Mine, which we went into, the best and greatest of them all, was dedicated to Saint Barbara, as the other Mines are to other Saints, the depth of it was 125. paces, every pace of that Country ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... breach than the observance. This heavy-headed revel east and west Makes us traduc'd and tax'd of other nations: They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase Soil our addition; and, indeed, it takes From our achievements, though perform'd at height, The pith and marrow of our attribute. So oft it chances in particular men That, for some vicious mole of nature in them, As in their birth,—wherein they are not guilty, Since nature cannot choose his origin,— By the o'ergrowth of some complexion, ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... in holes and corners, dogs run mad; Man knows a braver remedy for sorrow: Revenge, the attribute of gods; they stamp'd it, With their great image, on our natures. Die! Consider well the cause, that calls upon thee: And, if thou'rt base enough, die then. Remember, Thy Belvidera suffers; Belvidera! Die—damn first—What! be decently interr'd ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy • Thomas Otway
... interested in those which appear to be in the process of active development or retrogression. Suffice to say, I was terribly cut up over the way my first serious affair of the heart turned out, and tried my best to hate myself for letting it worry me. Somehow I was able to attribute the fiasco to an inborn sense of shyness that has always made me faint-hearted, dilatory and unaggressive. No doubt if I had gone about it roughshod and fiery I could have played hob with the excellent jeweller's peace of mind, to say the least, but alas! I succeeded ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... have been the daughter of a wandering, pioneer missionary, but the king, I mean Dingaan, murdered her parents, of whom he was jealous, after which she went mad and cursed the nation, and it is to this curse that they still attribute the death of Dingaan, and their defeats and ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... any Young Woman in Town. It is in my Power to enjoy it in all its Vanities, but I have, from a very careful Education, contracted a great Aversion to the forward Air and Fashion which is practised in all Publick Places and Assemblies. I attribute this very much to the Stile and Manners of our Plays: I was last Night at the Funeral, where a Confident Lover in the Play, speaking of his Mistress, cries out: Oh that Harriot! to fold these Arms about the Waste of that Beauteous ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... How can they know that these men were inspired in a wonderful manner, without ascribing to themselves a still more wonderful inspiration? Therefore they extend the gift of inspiration to the fathers of the church; they attribute to them those very things which the majority have incorporated in the canons of the councils; and there again, when the question arises how we know that of fifty bishops twenty-six were inspired and twenty-four were not, they finally take the last desperate step, and ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... set up in the Church of God, and the same desolation, which Christ prophesied to come, stood openly in the holy place. What if some thief or pirate invade and possess "Noah's ark?" These folks, as often as they tell us of the Church, mean thereby themselves alone, and attribute all these titles to their own selves, boasting, as they did in times past which cried, "The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord;" or as the Pharisees and Scribes did, which craked they ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... resultant noise, always explosive, resembled the snort of a bullock or the klock of a strangulated suction-pump. With these interjections Mrs Polsue on the one hand, Farmer Best on the other, punctuated the following dialogue. And this embarrassed the company, which, obliged in politeness to attribute them to purely physical causes, could not but own inwardly that they might be mistaken for the comments—and ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... one Face alone I see, With every attribute of beauty in it blent; Still, still the Godhead's face entrances me, Yielding transcendency of ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... sanguine to be made melancholy by these affairs. She was of a naturally cheerful nature—an attribute she inherited from her father. It took more than the faded-out lady to cause ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... accounts, whose terrible disarrangement I had aided, five years before, in remedying, still hung over the dying man's head, like a nightmare. He could not die, he said, with the thought in his mind, that any one might attribute this disorder to intentional maladministration—"to fraud, ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... wants of the state; but as often as the expense exceeded the revenue, or the revenue fell short of the computation, an additional tax, under the name of superindiction, was imposed on the people, and the most valuable attribute of sovereignty was communicated to the Praetorian praefects, who, on some occasions, were permitted to provide for the unforeseen and extraordinary exigencies of the public service. The execution of these ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... mothers, uncles and aunts, would sacrifice themselves a second time, after they had once sat through it.) For very young children do not want humour or whimsicality or delicate fancy or any of the delightful properties which we attribute to the ideal children's play. I do not say that they will rise from their stalls and call loudly for their perambulators, if these qualities creep into the play, but they can get on very happily without them. All that they want is a continuous procession of ordinary everyday events—the arrival ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... on heredity by M. Ribot, I find him saying, "Some recent authors attribute a memory" (and if so, surely every attribute of complete individuality) "to every organic element of the body;" among them Dr. Maudsley, who is quoted by M. Ribot, as saying, "The permanent effects of a particular virus, ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... said, "It is not right that other than Kanmakan should be our Sultan, but the throne of his grandfather shall revert to him as it began." Meanwhile Sasan went in to his wife, Nuzhat al-Zaman, who said to him, "I hear that the folk talk of nothing but Kanmakan and attribute to him such qualities as tongue never can." He replied, "Hearing of a man is not like seeing a man. I have seen him, but have noted in him none of the attributes of perfection. Not all that is heard is said; but folk ape one another in extolling and cherishing him, and Allah maketh ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... supreme passion of the working-man, the inevitable consequence is drunkenness and all that is generally called demoralisation. The physical enervation and the sickness, universal in consequence of the factory system, were enough to induce Commissioner Hawkins to attribute this demoralisation thereto as inevitable; how much more when mental lassitude is added to them, and when the influences already mentioned which tempt every working-man to demoralisation, make themselves felt here too! There is no cause for surprise, therefore, that ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... verge. Accurst be thou! Inveterate wolf! whose gorge ingluts more prey, Than every beast beside, yet is not fill'd! So bottomless thy maw! —Ye spheres of heaven! To whom there are, as seems, who attribute All change in mortal state, when is the day Of his appearing, for whom fate reserves To chase her hence? —With wary steps and slow We pass'd; and I attentive to the shades, Whom piteously I heard lament and wail; And, 'midst the wailing, one before us heard Cry out "O blessed ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... when he began to talk. I knew by the raised tone of his voice—he was speaking quite a third above his ordinary pitch—that he was pleasantly excited by our interview with Anne: an excitement that he now wished either to conceal, or, if that were impossible, to attribute to ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... approach to our notion of the posture of respect, and this among people whose manners in general struck one as so good and, in particular, as so cultivated. The office of the saint—of which the festa is but the annual reaffirmation—involves not the faintest attribute of remoteness or mystery. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... "O earth, cover not thou my blood."—Job, xvi, 18. "O thou sword of the Lord, how long will it be ere thou be quiet?"—Jeremiah, xlvii, 6. In these instances, the objects addressed do not appear to be figuratively invested with the attribute of sex. So likewise with respect to the first person. If, in the following example, gold and diamond are neuter, so is the pronoun me; and, if not neuter, of what gender are they? The personification ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... occurrence as this: it is impossible that in such circumstances one can extend the slightest sympathy with a race of men who probably had a hard struggle for existence, especially when the fishing or the harvests were bad. The most one can do is to attribute such unreasoning and unwarranted cruelty to the ignorance and the coarseness which had been bred in undisciplined lives. Out of that seething, vicious mob there was only one man who had a scrap of humanity, and even he could not prevent his fellows from one of the worst crimes in the long ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... and lay helplessly on her side. Several others passed her without taking any notice, but soon one came up, examined her carefully with her antennae, and carried her off tenderly to the nest. No one, I think, who saw it could have denied to that ant one attribute of humanity, ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... pack animals of themselves, and trudge on, they knew not where, perhaps to only a lingering death, the keen edge of disappointment cut close, and they realized how desolate they were. They felt much inclined to attribute all their troubles to the advice of the Mormons. Some said that the plan was thus to wipe so many more hated Gentiles out of the way, and wishes were deep and loud that the Mormons might all be buried out of sight in the Great Salt Lake. They thought Lot's wife must have been turned ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... Comic Muse, long sick, is now a- dying,' wrote Garrick in his prologue to She Stoops to Conquer, and she had not to apologise, like Charles the Second, for the unconscionable time she was about it. It is a little crude to attribute her demise to Jeremy Collier and his Short View—a block painted to look like a thunderbolt. It is not a matter of decency, of alteration or improvement in manners. A comedy might be wholly Congrevean without a coarse word from beginning to end. It is a matter of the ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... was about to make its appearance. But although this last work has occasioned me the most bitter persecution, literature does not appear to me to be less a source of enjoyment and respect, even for a female. What I have suffered in life, I attribute to the circumstances which associated me, almost at my entry into the world, with the interests of liberty, which were supported by my father and his friends; but the kind of talent which has made me talked of as a writer, has always been ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein |
