Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'



Conception   Listen
noun
Conception  n.  
1.
The act of conceiving in the womb; the initiation of an embryonic animal life. "I will greaty multiply thy sorrow and thy conception."
2.
The state of being conceived; beginning. "Joy had the like conception in our eyes."
3.
The power or faculty of apprehending of forming an idea in the mind; the power of recalling a past sensation or perception. "Under the article of conception, I shall confine myself to that faculty whose province it is to enable us to form a notion of our past sensations, or of the objects of sense that we have formerly perceived."
4.
The formation in the mind of an image, idea, or notion, apprehension. "Conception consists in a conscious act of the understanding, bringing any given object or impression into the same class with any number of other objects or impression, by means of some character or characters common to them all."
5.
The image, idea, or notion of any action or thing which is formed in the mind; a concept; a notion; a universal; the product of a rational belief or judgment. See Concept. "He (Herodotus) says that the sun draws or attracts the water; a metaphorical term obviously intended to denote some more general and abstract conception than that of the visible operation which the word primarily signifies."
6.
Idea; purpose; design. "Note this dangerous conception."
7.
Conceit; affected sentiment or thought. (Obs.) "He... is full of conceptions, points of epigram, and witticism."
Synonyms: Idea; notion; perception; apprehemsion; comprehension.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Conception" Quotes from Famous Books



... Impulses well up from changes going on within him or from stimuli which come to him from without. He does not understand them. He does not know where they come from. He does not know what they mean. He is ill-prepared to face them, and now he goes one way and now the other. He has just about as clear a conception of the value of time as a child has. He has not outgrown childhood in that respect. He cannot possibly play a waiting game. That is the last thing that he can do. If the sun shines to-day it is always going to be bright weather. If the maiden of his adoration frowns to-day, the sun will never shine ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall

... the popular conception of Progress in Caesar and Cleopatra is that there is no reason to suppose that any Progress has taken place since their time. But even if I shared the popular delusion, I do not see that I could have made any essential difference in the play. ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw

... This conception of the merry Sphinx may seem strange to the dyspeptic philosopher pondering on the inscrutableness of the universe. But the prospectors in the mining camps of the Far West, and the builders of new cities understand what ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers

... and wasted man,—there floated an angel worthy of the dying Psalmist's imagining, so unearthly, so ethereal! What a full heart must the inspired painter have had as in his mind's eye he purely shadowed forth this most perfect conception of one of those who hold companionship with God! It was made up of all the rarest traits of beauty, yet its loveliness was not of the world: the veriest dullard looking on it would have paused in admiration; the most brutal have gazed into ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power

... maintain the argument against fifteen men of the greatest parts and capacity in both houses; and no advantage was ever obtained over him,[v] This was the scene above all others in which he was qualified to excel. A quick conception, a cultivated understanding, a chaste conclusion, a dignified manner; by these accomplishments he triumphed in all discussions ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... oscillations, by kneadings, by circular movements, in fact, by an almost endless variety of reciprocating and alternating motions, which, if described, would convey to the mind of the reader but a faint conception ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... into it a bit, this fits in with the true conception of prayer. In its simplest analysis prayer—all prayer—has, must have, two parts. First, a God to give. "Yes," you say, "certainly, a God wealthy, willing, all of that." And, just as certainly, there must ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon

... still held to the opinion that by keeping to the west from that point he should soon reach the coast of Cochin China, his conception of the position of Eden is thus pretty clearly indicated. He imagined it as situated about on the equator, upon a continental mass till then unknown, but evidently closely connected with the continent of Asia if not a part of it. If he had lived long enough ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... haughty, oppressive, profligate princes, who for centuries had trodden, with iron hoofs, upon the necks of their subjects. The accumulated hate of ages was poured upon his devoted head. The irresolute monarch had no conception ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... convenient or advantageous, has joined the nearest grange or lodge, and with his family has visited nearby friends and relatives and joined with them in social festivities; he has loyally supported these various interests, but until very recently, he has had little conception of the interrelations of these institutions in the life of the community or of the possible advantages of community development as such. But new wants and new problems have arisen which may only be met by the ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson

... the menace of the desolate, wild prairie, but he had no conception of the tumult of regret and despair which filled his wife's mind as she climbed into the wagon for their return journey. She was like a prisoner ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland

... mighty deeds in language which, in its calm majestic flow, unhasting, unresting, carries them on as irresistibly as Homer's own could do were they born readers of Greek, and their minds are filled with a conception of the heroic age, not indeed strictly true, but almost as near the truth as that which ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... to live. He had always wanted to live. So we all do—but in us the instinct serves a complex conception, and in him this instinct existed alone. There is in such simple development a gigantic force, and like the pathos of a child's naive and uncontrolled desire. He wanted that girl, and the utmost that can be ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad

... been selected, my responsibility ended with my doing the best I knew how. If I had sought the place, or obtained it through personal or political influence, my belief is that I would have feared to undertake any plan of my own conception, and would probably have awaited direct orders from my distant superiors. Persons obtaining important commands by application or political influence are apt to keep a written record of complaints and predictions of defeat, which are shown in case of disaster. Somebody must be responsible ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... chosen words more subtly calculated to establish the "influence." To have two such champions battling for possession of her soul was exciting enough in all conscience, but she was inexpressibly flattered by that dramatic conception of herself as a restless intellect struggling with the storms of doubt. It would be hard to say how Flaxman Reed came to believe in any real passion of thought behind Audrey's spiritual coquetry. His ministration to a living illusion was almost as touching as his devotion to a ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... the idea of religion, does not begin in a mystery or in some abstract conception, but in an assumed knowledge of certain concrete facts of experience. Man believes in the gods because of what he thinks he knows about them, not because of what he does not know. The talk of a mystery is the jargon of a priesthood which finds it profitable to keep the lay mind at a distance. ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... wins our admiration is Ruth's faith. She had been educated in the degrading worship of Chemosh, the supreme deity of Moab. Probably no conception of the one living God had been formed in her mind until her acquaintance with the Jewish youth, the son of Elimelech and Naomi. How long she had the happiness of a wife we are not informed. We know it was only a few years. But during that period she had learned to put such ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... scarcely reflected on the discovery that he had just made at the base of the city wall, ere his mind instantly reverted to the ambitious meditations which had occupied it in the morning; and the next moment, the first dawning conception of a bold and perilous project began ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... the decision of the hour. Then words have lost their power, rhetoric is vain, and all elaborate oratory contemptible. Even genius itself then feels rebuked and subdued, as in the presence of higher qualities. Then patriotism is eloquent; then self-devotion is eloquent. The clear conception, outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, the firm resolve, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the eye, informing every feature, and urging the whole man onward, right onward to his ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... he, "exalted objects of divine solicitude. Hopeless looks and dwarfish lives are fearful protests against the pitiless avarice of the faithless rich. This or that conception of the redemptive economy, or concerning the personnel of its central figure, may be tolerated, but there can be no hopeful sign for him who actively or ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee

... 25, 1798 and December 1799.) "From the very beginning of the Revolution, there never was, in the uproar of patriotic protestations, amidst so many popular effusions of devotion to the popular cause to Liberty in the different parties, but one fundamental conception, that of grasping power after having instituted it, of using every means of strengthening themselves, and of excluding the largest number from it, in order to center themselves in a privileged committee. As soon as they had hurried through the articles of their ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... band of Englishmen who waded into the sea to demand whether by his imperial visit he meant to assert any supremacy over England. Sigismund assured them he did not, and was allowed to land. We may look to this English parade of independence as our last reminder of the old mediaeval conception of the Emperor as being at least in theory the overlord of the whole ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... reading as possible before teaching this lesson. Notice that the four-toed horse the size of a fox lived not when the Tree-dwellers did, but at a much earlier period. It is not necessary for the child to get a clear conception of the time required for the changes pictured in these lessons. No adult can have a perfect conception of this. But even the child can get an idea of development, of change, which will prevent the formation of such static conceptions of life as are still ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp

... bursten Children, by declaring that his Father and Grandfather were [born [3]] bursten? But Charles Ingoltson, next Door to the Harp in Barbican, has made a pretty Penny by that Asseveration. The Generality go upon their first Conception, and think no further; all the rest is granted. They take it, that there is something uncommon in you, and give you Credit for the rest. You may be sure it is upon that I go, when sometimes, let it be to the Purpose or not, I keep a Latin Sentence in my Front; and I was not a little ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... Ahura Mazda and all his creatures, among which are mentioned the law of Zarathustra, the fire (and five different fires are named), the soul of the ox, and pure deeds, along with the Amesha-Spentas, the heavenly bodies, and good men. This collection shows vagueness in the conception of the divine and the sacred, and, to say the least, leaves it uncertain whether the singer does not think of the fire simply as a ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... that Jesus was not perfect. If Jesus was in error concerning conditions of his own time and exhibited no knowledge of our modern problems, his authority will be lessened. Searchers after the true way of life will not continue to worship a person whose conception of the physical and spiritual world was erroneous. If Jesus made mistakes, he is neither the Son of God nor an ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd

... of a chicken, must also be consistent with them. The doctrine of Evolution, therefore, does not even come into contact with Theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine. That with which it does collide, and with which it is absolutely inconsistent, is the conception of creation, which theological speculators have based upon the history narrated in the opening of ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley

... the mind," but as both father and mother are necessary in the generation of a child, so also there must be both idea and mind before a thought can be conceived. As semen germinated in the positive male organ is projected into the negative uterus at conception, so ideas are generated by a positive Human Ego in the spirit-substance of the Region of abstract Thought. This idea is projected upon the receptive mind, and a conception takes place. Then, as the spermatozoic nucleus draws upon the maternal body for material to shape a body appropriate to its ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel

... opened. Mr. Worcester took his place in the shade of his shack, and proceeded to the distribution of red calico, beads, combs, mirrors, and other small stuff, the people coming up by rancherias (settlements or villages); none of the highlanders seem to have any conception of tribal organization, a condition no doubt due to the absence of communications. A cabecilla, or head man, would receive two meters, his wife one, and others smaller measures. This sort of thing was carefully studied out, so far as ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... supposed that the abstract, naked, and incommunicable conception possesses an innate sagacity to clothe itself with a verbal garb, at best of capricious and ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam

... to the effect that Bergson owes the germ-ideas of his first book to the 1884 article by James On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology, which he neither refers to nor quotes. This particular article deals with the conception of thought as a stream of consciousness, which intellect distorts by framing into concepts. We must not be misled by parallels. Bergson has replied to this insinuation by denying that he had any knowledge of the article by James when he wrote Les donnees immediates de la ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... common saying among cadets that "first-class camp is just like furlough." I rather think the assertion is an inheritance from former days and the cadets of those days, for the similarity at present between first-class camp and furlough is beyond our conception. There is none, or if any it is chimerical, depending entirely on circumstances. In the case of a small class it would be greater than in that of a large one. For instance, in "train drill" a certain number ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper

... regards Masonry as a system which originally contained an element of danger that has been eliminated in England whilst they regard it as a system originally innocuous into which a dangerous element was inserted on the Continent. Thus according to the former conception Freemasonry might be compared to one of the brass shell-cases brought back from the battle-fields of France and converted into a flower-pot holder, whilst according to the latter it resembles an innocent brass flower-pot holder which has been used as a receptacle ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... the Hidden Hand. The men of forty-one were not wanted last March. Mr. Lloyd George tells us that they are wanted now, or it would mean the loss of two Army Corps. The Germans, by the way, appear to be arriving at a just conception of their relative value. Lord Newton has informed the Lords that the enemy is prepared to release 600 English civilian prisoners in return for some 4,000 to 7,000 Germans. Parliament has developed a new grievance: Ministers ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... of the soul from itself—thither all religion comes at last, whether for the ranter or the philosopher. To the enriching of that conception, to the gradual hewing it out in historical shape, have gone the noblest poetry, the purest passion, the intensest spiritual vision of the highest races, since the human mind began to work. And the historical ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... loss of my husband and that I was an inmate of a madhouse in the North! It was altogether false; I never left the Hidden House in all those years until about two years ago. My life there was dreary beyond all conception. I was forbidden to go out or to appear at a window. I had the whole attic, containing some eight or ten rooms, to rove over, but I was forbidden to descend. An ill-looking woman called Dorcas Knight, between whom and the elder Le Noir there seemed to have been some ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth

... dis-satisfaction with her life, a yearning toward personal independence, a longing to be freed from the heavy guardianship of her father, but she had neither the power to realize these desires, nor the clear conception of their realization. But nature had its influence on her, and at the sight of young mothers with children in their arms Lubov often felt a sad and mournful languor within her. At times stopping before the mirror she sadly scrutinized in it her plump, fresh ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would laugh in one's face for staring at, while they are offering rewards for perfecting discoveries, of the principles of which we have not the least conception! If ever this book should come forth, I must expect to have all the learned in arms against me, who measure all knowledge backward: some of them have discovered symptoms of all arts in Homer; and Pineda(1462) ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... Under the free sky, in contact with the earth, in face of the peril and the sight of death, life seemed to him to take a sudden and strange expansion. 'From our life in the open air we have gained a freedom of conception, an amplitude of thought, which will for ever make cities horrible to those who survive the war.' Death itself had become a more beautiful and a more simple thing; the death of soldiers on whose dumb shapes he looked with pious eyes, as Nature took them back into her maternal care and mingled ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous

... you not only put a club into the hands of socialists, anarchists, and all the other anti-social forces, but you alienate the substantial middle class and the great body of religious people in all nations. You have no conception of the depth of feeling on this subject which exists in my own country, to say nothing of others; and if Germany stands in the way, the distrust of her which Americans have felt, and which as minister and ambassador at Berlin I have labored so hard to dispel, will be infinitely increased. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... my hat and coat, and left the office at a speed which must have given my superior the highest conception of my journalistic zeal. At a telephone station on the next corner I called up Mrs. Apperthwaite's house ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington

... immeasurable period during which the attractive forces predominating, cause universal concentration, and then an immeasurable period during which the repulsive forces predominating, cause universal diffusion—alternate eras of Evolution and Dissolution. And thus there is suggested the conception of a past during which there have been successive Evolutions analogous to that which is now going on; a future during which successive other Evolutions may go on—ever the same in principle but never ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London

... summit of the giant Mamrat. The whole troop now began to ascend the mountain; and, as they approached within sight of the stockaded palace, the escort commenced to fire their matchlocks. The view here is described as very lovely, and giving some conception of European variety of vegetation, with tropical luxuriance. Farm-houses, rich fields, foaming cascades, and bright green meadows covered with flowers, met the eye on every side; and above all towered the great Abyssinian range, some thousand feet perpendicularly overhead, with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... the conception due to du Tillet the banker, interrupting himself to say: "Oh, what a pretty, cunning, little foot; no one but you could have such a foot as that—Du Tillet, therefore, compromised. What an ear, too! You have been doubtless told that you had a delicious ear—And du ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac

... is a perfect hatcher, even barring accidents and the inherited imperfection of the egg, is not, I think, in harmony with our general conception of nature. Not only are eggs under the hens subject to unfavorable weather conditions, but the hen, to satisfy her whims or hunger, frequently remains too long away from the eggs, allowing ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings

... of the land, striving resolutely for the best, outwardly impassable and inwardly mobile, he was a man and his patience had bounds. There were conspirators in the atrium, there was death in the courtier's smile; and finding his favorites false, his life threatened, danger at every turn, his conception of rulership changed. Where moderation had been ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus

... Christiana and Mercy; as different from each other as Christian and Hopeful, and yet equally pleasing in their natural traits of character, and under the influence of Divine grace, each of them reflecting the light of Heaven in an original and lovely variety. His own conception of what constitutes a bright example of beauty and consistency of character in a Christian woman, Bunyan has here given us, as well as in his First Dream, the model of steadfast excellence in a Christian man. The delineation, in both Christiana and Mercy, is eminently beautiful. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... Doudney has no superior as a writer of high-toned stories—pure in style, original in conception, and with skilfully wrought-out plots; but we have seen nothing from this lady's pen equal in dramatic energy to her latest work, Under False ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty

... and nips its native candour and tenderness, escaped unblighted, through the saving influence of his faith, approving himself in the sight of all [224] an ideal judge, even according to the highest conception; because John Howard, opulent and free to enjoy his opulence and repose, was drawn thereby throughout the whole continent of Europe in quest of the hidden miseries that torture those whom the law has shut out, ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas

... a very different train of ideas from those upon which modern science is established—a fact which many investigators are prone to overlook. Still there seems to be good ground for believing that the conception of a bird, for instance, in the abstract as distinct from some particular kind or species would never be entertained by a people no further advanced in culture than their various relics prove the Mound-Builders to have been. ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw

... the welfare of his own, perhaps the ruin of other countries, as if this globe was insufficient for us all—and the courtier who is always watching the countenance of his prince in the hope of catching a gracious smile—can have very little conception. I have not only retired from all public employments, but am retiring within myself and shall be able to view the solitary walk, and tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction. Envious of none, I am determined to be pleased with all; and ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell

... rendering it all applicable to the point in question. My impressions of him and his order, imbibed among the prejudices of England and the libels of France, was that of frivolity and flutter—an idle life and a stagnant understanding. I never was more surprised at the contrast between this conception and the animated and accomplished prince before me. He seemed to know not merely the persons of all the leading men of Europe—which might have naturally been the case with one who had visited every capital—but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various

... may be entrusted to them. Reserves and regulars are treated as equivalent pieces on the board, and no one seems to suppose that some are less effective than others. A great danger lies in this mechanical conception. ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi

... English squire, one of that "happy breed of men" to whom his native land—"this little world, this precious stone set in a silver sea"—was dearer than the blood of kings, was destined to inaugurate a new epoch in the {8} annals of the Abbey. To this man, Oliver Cromwell, it is that we owe the first conception of this church as a fitting burial-place for our national worthies. From the State obsequies of Admiral Blake, which were held here by Cromwell's command, has germinated the seed which has borne fruit in the public funerals ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith

... than perception, because the word perception seems to imply that the mind is passive in respect to the object; whereas conception seems to express an activity ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza

... treatise "On Traffic in Holy Things"; the second his great, elaborate work, "The Church."1 In the first he denounced the sale of indulgences, and declared that even the Pope himself could be guilty of the sin of simony. In the second, following Wycliffe's lead, he criticised the whole orthodox conception of the day of the "Holy Catholic Church." What was, asked Hus, the true Church of Christ? According to the popular ideas of the day, the true Church of Christ was a visible body of men on this earth. Its head ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... distant countries fairer and sunnier than my own. And upon that summer day those gray and crumbling stones, defaced by the sun and weather, and overgrown with mosses, gave me for the first time an indefinable impression of the persistence of things; a vague conception of existences antedating my own, ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti

... the futility of attempting any argument in ethics with Arthur, and she received in silence whatever flings at her beliefs he chose to indulge in. She had even come hardly to heed words which in the early days of her married life would have wounded her to the quick. She had readjusted her conception of her husband's character, and if she still cherished illusions in regard to him, she no longer believed in the possibility of changing ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates

... to me a lesser play than "The Heather Field," and it now leaves me even colder than of old. Nor, though I can see how fine in conception was the character of Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted Sea," does that one character seem to me, now, to redeem the undeveloped possibilities of the situations of the play, the incomplete characters of Guy and Mask and the failure of the dialogue assigned to the characters to approach ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... pandal or shed, rubbing the couple with turmeric and oil, and the tying on of kankans or wrist-bands. A girl going wrong before marriage may be wedded with full rites so long as she has not conceived, but after conception until her child is born she cannot go through the ceremony at all. After the birth of the child she may be married simply with the rite for widows. She retains the child, but it has no claim to succeed to her ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... touched, but with no conception of the depths from which he spoke.... "I never meant to tell at all if it hadn't been ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... found an awakened consciousness of provincialism, and a detached view of the home town such as had never before been shared by many. Seeing home from without was so general as to constitute, not a mere experience, but a mass emotion. And upon this new conception, this prejudice against every man's Main Street, the book grasped, and thrived. In like manner, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" grew great upon its conception of slavery. "Robert Elsmere" swept the country because of its exploitation of freedom in religious ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... not at once that this conception of the Church as the inheritor of the rights of Rome to the obedience of mankind took form. It grew slowly and against opposition. But at the end of the eleventh century, through the genius of Pope Gregory VII., the ideas hitherto disputed, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... more, that he could have understood her, many tears would have been spared her. Oftentimes, things comparatively trifling to him would wound the sensitive nature of Ellen most painfully, and he of course would have no conception why they ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur

... living, of which the outdoor life of working side by side with nature, called gardening, is one of the chief. When a garden is inherited, the traditions of the soil or reverence for those who planned and toiled in it may make one blind to certain defects in its conception, and beginning with a priori set by another one ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright

... very finest of modern dramas. Perhaps, among all Schiller's plays, it is the one which evinces most of that quality denominated genius in the strictest meaning of the word. Wallenstein embodies more thought, more knowledge, more conception; but it is only in parts illuminated by that ethereal brightness, which shines over every part of this. The spirit of the romantic ages is here imaged forth; but the whole is exalted, embellished, ennobled. It is what the critics call idealised. The heart must be cold, the imagination ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... that's been written about my flight," he said. "Most of it has been nonsense. How could laymen newspaper reporters have any conception of what I may encounter aloft? They've tried to make something of the recent passage of the Earth through an area of so-called shooting stars. They've speculated until they're black in the face as to the true nature ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks

... God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of the other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer. One is the great Outward God; the other is the Inmost God. The first idea was perhaps developed most highly and completely in the God of Spinoza. It is a conception of God tending to pantheism, to an idea of a comprehensive God as ruling with justice rather than affection, to a conception of aloofness and awestriking worshipfulness. The second idea, which is opposed to ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... being a servant for the whole of his life. To have to be subject to the will of others, even to the small extent to which American servants are subordinate, is offensive to an American's pride of citizenship, it is contrary to his conception of American equality. He is a servant only for the time, and until he finds something better to do. He accepts a menial position only as a stepping stone to some more independent employment. Is it to be wondered at that American servants have different manners from their brethren in other ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang

... not be a "baseless fabric." After the quartettes of earth, and the interludes of angels, came the grand finale, when every creature which is in heaven, as well as on the earth, was heard ascribing "Blessing and honour and glory and power to Him who sitteth upon the throne." Assuredly, our conception of a choir worthy to render that chorus is not of an elect handful of "saints," or contracted souls, embraced within any Calvinistic covenant, but of an innumerable multitude of ennobled, purified, and expanded beings, convoked from every satellite and planet, every sun and star, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... Personally, I would sooner write two plays than one novel; less expenditure of nervous force and mere brains would be required for two plays than for one novel. (I emphasise the word "write," because if the whole weariness between the first conception and the first performance of a play is compared with the whole weariness between the first conception and the first publication of a novel, then the play has it. I would sooner get seventy-and-seven novels produced than one play. But my immediate object is to compare ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett

... alarm or discourage them—they serve to draw them out and make them more invincible. But youth who are satisfied to be just what they are to-day, no larger, broader, or better, live and die mere ciphers. They are destitute of ambition and the spirit of enterprise. They have no just conception of their mission in this world. They do not understand themselves,—what they are for and what they can be if they choose. What is worse, they have no desire to know these things; the effort to know them is too much for their ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer

... if not approved, at least tolerated in the past which are not in accord with the ethical conception ...
— The New York Stock Exchange and Public Opinion • Otto Hermann Kahn

... of the tower men watched and steel glistened, and as Brian rode up to the low gateway, it was flung open and a man strode out. This man hardly came up to Brian's conception of an outlaw, except ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones

... from which it came she had no previous conception: she had known evil only in its effects—in sins of herself and others—known it as a man passing through a hospital ward sees flushed or pale faces, or bandaged wounds. Now she caught some glimpse of its essence, in ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson

... seamen feel as I do; but I have witnessed so many miraculous escapes, so many sudden reverses, so much, beyond all hope and conception, achieved by a reliance upon Providence and your own exertions, that, under the most critical circumstances, I never should despair. If struggling in the centre of the Atlantic, with no vessel in sight, no strength remaining, and sinking ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat

... her. She is the will to live; and if she ultimately consents to follow him into the shadowy land, it is for love of him. But of his desire for death she understands nothing; all through the duet it is she who desires to quench this desire with kisses. That was her conception of women's mission, and that was her own life with Owen; it was her love that compelled him to live down his despondencies. So her Isolde would have an intense and a personal life that no Isolde ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... inspire with an all-conquering courage; to vitalize the whole manhood. By making the individual rich within he creates value without. For all things are first thoughts. Tools, fabrics, ships, houses, books are first ideas, afterward crystallized into outer form. A great picture is a beautiful conception rushing into visible expression upon the canvas. Wake up taste in a man and he beautifies his home. Wake up conscience and he drives iniquities out of his heart. Wake up his ideas of freedom and he fashions new laws. Jesus Christ is here to inflame man's ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... Simon-pure panel thief is generally a young and pretty female, who has been initiated into the mysteries of the game by either a gambler or a lover, and of whom she is the mistress. It is the conception of a man's brain, needing the assistance of an attractive woman to carry out the scheme, and was probably originally devised by some broken-down gambler to secure enough funds wherewith to resume play. No woman would ever have dreamt of practicing such an intricate ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... of more importance in the temporary oblivion we are enabled to throw over the refuse of the body, it is thus we arrive at the majesty of man. That sublimity of conception which renders the poet, and the man of great literary and original endowments "in apprehension like a God," we could not have, if we were not privileged occasionally to cast away the slough and exuviae of ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... favour the production of a healthier and stronger frame both in the mother and in the child. A good figure is also insured to the Indian woman, from her contemning, perhaps at the bid of necessity, arising from her poverty, though, I verily believe, from a well-grounded conception of their deforming tendencies, the absurdly irrational measures, which, adopted by many among ourselves to promote ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie

... represent and deify. I had shrunk into insignificance in my own eyes, as I considered the multitudinous beings these stone demigods had outlived, but this after-thought restored me to dignity in my own conception. The sight of the poetry eternized in these statues, took the sting from the thought, arraying it only in ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... arrayed in her winter dress, we could form but a faint conception of her summer loveliness when clothed in her gayest green. Hills were seen rising up, sometimes almost perpendicularly from the stream, and sometimes skirted with fertile fields extending to the river's edge. Here a house on the brow of a hill, and there ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies

... at 343-349 South Lincoln Street, Chicago, in a handsome and well-equipped building. It is connected with a medical school. The history of its origin is best told in the words of the woman to whom the conception of such an institution first came, Dr. Mary Weeks Burnett, for several years ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... stillness so intense is like that of some vast primeval forest at midnight. The ceiling is so low at one place you can touch it with your hands. With rock above and on both sides of you and water beneath, you think you have a faint conception of Hades. You hear no sound but the gentle splash of the water struck by the oars, or the labored and rapid breathing of the more ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand

... the highest importance for you to have in mind a clear conception of the end you wish to achieve by your speaking. This purpose should characterize all you say, so that at each step in your speech you will feel sure of making steady progress toward the ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser

... to make me see that the monkeys were enchantingly graceful and clever, and that a mother's blind idolatry could not be more ingeniously ridiculed; I held to the opinion that the conception was monstrous, and the indignation of the old academicians who demanded the expulsion of this intolerable work, seemed to me most justifiable. But the Academy, instigated by the public and by the newspapers, which talked of opening a subscription to send ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac

... declare to you, Ethel, that I had no conception of what I was going to do! I never dreamt that I was in for it. I knew she was—was attractive—and that made me hate to see Harry with her, and I could not bear her being carried off to this horrible place—but as to myself, I never thought of it till I saw her—white ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... kissed father and mother good night and went upstairs to the room in which they had slept ever since their childhood. The certain nearness of the first home-breaking, of the first going away from their dear ones, and a new conception of the tenderness of the parents, who were sacrificing so much for them, had taken such possession of their hearts that they were too full for words. For Barbara and Bettina were dear, thoughtful daughters ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt

... be degraded to the foolery of so scandalous a subject. The Zauberfloete will ever remain his greatest work, for in this he showed himself the true German composer." Of Cherubini's Requiem he said, "as regards his conception of it, my ideas are in perfect accord with his and sometime I mean to compose a Requiem in that style." (Later in life his opinion of Cherubini was greatly modified). He seldom spoke of Haydn, and had nothing of that ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer

... civilized world, it had become what their lives describe. The model of religious life for the fifth century, it remained a model for succeeding centuries; on the lives of St. Antony and his compeers were founded the whole literature of saintly biographies; the whole popular conception of the universe, and of man's relation to it; the whole science of daemonology, with its peculiar literature, its peculiar system of criminal jurisprudence. And their influence did not cease at the Reformation among Protestant divines. The ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley

... as 1832 in his treatise The Gaps in the Hegelian System), and by Zeller (p. 589). But the movement first became general after F.A. Lange in his History of Materialism had energetically advocated the Kantian doctrine according to his special conception of it, after Helmholtz[1] (born 1821) had called attention to the agreement of the results of physiology with those of the Critique of Reason, and at the same time Liebmann's youthful work, Kant and the Epigones, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... met a woman who so entirely realised my conception of what a woman should be, nor one who exercised so great a charm over me. Her strength and dignity, her softness and dependency, to say nothing of her beauty, fitted her with the necessary weapons for my complete and utter subjugation. And utterly subjugated I was—there was no use in denying ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman

... conception of liberty negative 291 Influence of the Revolution upon the conception of liberty 293 Why present-day conservatives advocate the eighteenth century view of liberty 295 Liberty to the framers meant the limitation of the power of the majority 297 The doctrine of ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith

... among the lowest classes, to have more children than can be decently cared for. To some extent this evil can be remedied by the dissemination of information concerning proper methods of preventing conception [Footnote: There is, however, a danger in the general dissemination of such information- the danger of increasing prostitution by lessening one of the chief deterrents there from.]; to some extent by moral training to self-control and a sense of ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... sent down from the heavenly plains to aid him in subduing the Central-Land-of-Reed-Plains; about a crow eight feet long which was sent to guide him in his expedition, and about the deities with tails who in several places were encountered. To our conception they seem meaningless, and do not in any measure contribute to the progress of the story. They bear evidence of a later invention, and do not belong legitimately ...
— Japan • David Murray

... architectural detail, in which he idealised all the gods of Olympus. Each fair young goddess, each strong and perfect god, stood in its particular niche and indicated its penchant by a tripod, a peacock, an apple or a caduceus, as clue to the proper name. Such airy beauty, such dainty conception, makes of the gods rulers of aesthetics, if not of fate. This series of Mantegna was the inspiration two centuries later of the Triumphs of the Gods, and similar hangings of the ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... are steep beyond conception. Where Vallejo street ran up Russian Hill it progressed for four blocks by regular steps like a flight of stairs. It is unnecessary to say that no teams ever came up this street or any other like it, and grass grew long ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... important in the sight of God, he becomes sacred to his fellow. The more grand and far-reaching are the divine claims, the greater is our conception of the scope and worth of being. Human rights become respected in the ratio in which human responsibility is felt. Whatever objections men may hold to Puritanism—their theory since the days of ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher

... length. The familiar outline of London crumbled suddenly away, the blotches of shadow and the coloured shafts of light striking between the gaps in the crowds, the violet-lit tubes, the traffic, faded into the conception of twenty-five thousand years. All this many-angled, many-coloured modern spectacle that was a few thousand years removed from cave dwellings, was rolled flat and level, merging into this grey formless carpet ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne

... had become the headquarters of men who secretly leagued themselves in antagonism to the North. Men and women who felt that their Northern brethren had grievously wronged them planned to undermine the stability of the government. The schemes at this time were gigantic in their conception and far-reaching in their scope and ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)

... in face of the House of Lords. The ostensible function of the Budget is to provide a schedule of taxation for the coming year in order to meet the current needs of the country. Lloyd George's plan was to put forward his own conception of "the needs of the country" and then to raise the money on account of them. He purposed to bring about a wholesale readjustment between rich and poor and to use the readjustment as a basis for developments in the future. That was his bold and carefully devised plan of action. It will ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot

... the quiet and moral portion of our community can form no adequate conception of the extent to which those who sell liquor, and otherwise trade with our slaves, are now plying their illegal and demoralizing traffic. At no period within our recollection has it prevailed to such an ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams

... Mr. Rawlinson. "The Mahdi announces, indeed, that he will conquer the whole world, but he is a wild man who has no conception of anything. He never will take Egypt, as England would not ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... celebrated without banns or licence in the Fleet Prison, had been one of the crying scandals of the middle and lower classes; and in the second half, the nocturnal flittings to Gretna Green of young couples who could afford such a Pilgrimage of Passion lowered the whole conception of marriage. It was through the elopement of Miss Child—heiress of the opulent banker at Temple Bar—from her father's house in Berkeley Square (now Lord Rosebery's) that the ownership of the great banking business passed eventually to the present Lord Jersey; ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... as a sort of test, to try if my own conception of myself tallied with his; and it didn't—not in the very least. In fact, the description he gave of me would have done very well for the typical goblin of fairy-tale, which, as I told him, was precisely how I saw him. ...
— The Psychical Researcher's Tale - The Sceptical Poltergeist - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • J. D. Beresford

... have imagination, born not of fancy, but of feeling; a conception of the beautiful, not merely in poetry, music, art and nature, but in human beings. I have insight into human nature, derived not only from a courageous experience, but also from imagination; and I have a clear though distant vision, down dark, ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... recommender, whoever he be, and no less to you for your flattering faith in the recommendation; and thinking, as I do, that among many volumes of praiseworthy German poems, the "Louisa" of Voss, and the "Faust" of Goethe, are the two, if not the only ones, that are emphatically original in their conception, and characteristic of a new and peculiar sort of thinking and imagining, I should not be averse from exerting my best efforts in an attempt to import whatever is importable of either or of both ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles

... that there is no reason absolutely to despair of some advance towards a conception of the nature and reason of the universe. And it is certain that Mr. Wells's God would stand a better chance of satisfying the innate needs of the human intelligence if he had not (apparently) given up as a bad ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... procured for him, through the strategic employment of a passing servant, something to eat, and we staid in concealment there until the function had come to an end, and his wife had begun to search for him. He was quite happy, consuming his salad and beer behind the stairs and telling me in detail his conception of certain of the figures of Celtic mythology which he had had in ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman

... heard the Chromatic Fantaisie a score of times? In his hands It became a veritable Soliloquy on Life and Destiny, which each repetition invested with new meaning and beauty. What player has ever surpassed his poetic conception of Schumann's Papillons, or the Chopin Nocturnes, which he made veritable dream poems of love and ecstasy. What listener has ever forgotten the tremendous power and titanic effect of the Liszt Rhapsodies, especially No. 2? When Paderewski ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower

... The speech is really a portion of Webster's oration on Adams and Jefferson, delivered in Faneuil Hall, Boston, August 2, 1826, less than a month after the death of Adams and Jefferson. The "Supposed Speech" is Webster's conception of how Adams might have answered a speaker who had argued against the passing of ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... lecture-room. Nor had I suspected one in whom cynicism and distrust of undergraduates (of my sort) seemed so ingrained, of such idealism. He did not pour it out in preaching; delicately, unobtrusively and on the whole rather humorously he managed to present to me in a most disillusionizing light that conception of the university held by me and my intimate associates. After I had left him I walked the quiet streets to behold as through dissolving mists another Harvard, and there trembled in my soul like the birth-struggle of a flame something of the vision later to be immortalized ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... as of himself, and everyone can see that without this appearance man would have no will and understanding, thus no affection and thought, also no reception of any good and truth from the Lord. It follows that without this appearance there would be no rational conception of God, no charity and no faith, consequently no reformation and regeneration, and therefore no salvation. Plainly, this appearance is granted to man by the Lord for the sake of all these uses and particularly that he may have the power to receive and reciprocate ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg

... believed that Jesus was God, the corner-stone of this whole structure of belief, as an intellectual conception, is gone. The void is concealed for a while by intermediate theories,—that Jesus was a kind of inferior deity, that he was at least a supernatural messenger. Frankly say that he was a man only, and we have ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... rival of Homer, I believe, if Homer can have a rival, is Jean Jacques Rousseau. A young man embraces entire the opinions of a favourite writer, and Mr. Fuseli has not had leisure to bring the opinions of his youth to a revision. Smitten with Rousseau's conception of the perfectness of the savage state, and the essential abortiveness of all civilization, Mr. Fuseli looks at all our little attempts at improvement, with a spirit that borders perhaps too much upon contempt and indifference. One of his favourite positions is the divinity of genius. This is ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin

... have been already referred to above. Their very intellectuality is alien to the spirit of the original. In Tennyson's conception they afford the central meaning of the poem, and also of the completed Idylls. We must bow to the will of God who brings all things in their due season. Good customs too deeply rooted are like ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... vile in the reverend gentleman's utterance and emphasis of this oath that the two men, albeit both easy and facile blasphemers, felt shocked; as the purest of actresses is apt to overdo the rakishness of a gay Lothario, Father Wynn's immaculate conception of an imprecation was something terrible. But he added, "The law ought to interfere with the reckless use of camp-fires in the woods in such weather by ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... have no conception whatever, and never have had any. I know no cause for trouble that should ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... and structure of organic beings to their surroundings; physiological and anatomical evolution; intellectual progress, and moral development itself, which we formerly used to explain by so many different causes, were embodied by Darwin in one general conception. We understood them as continued endeavours—as a struggle against adverse circumstances—for such a development of individuals, races, species and societies, as would result in the greatest possible fulness, variety, and intensity ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... Immaculate Conception of the most sainted Virgin has greatly increased among all the people. As soon as the ship from Nueva Espana arrived, bringing the news of the elaborate demonstrations that had been made in all Espana in honor of this Lady, they began to place on all the corners ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various

... communed face to face with man in those early days, or, as others maintain, that man mistook his wild and wandering thoughts for a revelation from heaven. Be that as it may, certain it is that the natural uncleanness of woman at her monthly periods is a conception which has occurred, or been revealed, with singular unanimity to several ancient legislators. The Hindoo lawgiver Manu, who professed to have received his institutes from the creator Brahman, informs us that the ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... Jesus Christ; and that in the whole depth of His humiliation, and even in regard to His cross and passion. We have here set forth, as the pattern to which the Christian life is to be conformed, the deepest conception of what our Lord's career ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... triumphant Sungod—and the earthly bull, sacrificed for the good of humanity were one and the same; the god, in fact, SACRIFICED HIMSELF OR HIS REPRESENTATIVE. And Mithra was the hero who first won this conception of divinity for mankind—though of course it is in essence quite similar to the conception put forward by ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... stellar knowledge have been here deliberately fed to warring communities? He asked Loketh about the possibility of space-borne explorers. But to the Hawaikan that was a totally foreign conception. The stars, for Loketh, were the doorways and windows of the Shades, and he treated the suggestion of space travel as perhaps natural to those all-powerful specters, but certainly not for beings like himself. There was no ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... and his reconciliation to me on the blessed terms, not the harsh terms, but the privileged terms, of my being reconciled to Him. Oh, what an error to think any thing harsh or hard in the requirements of the gospel! It is a mercy beyond man's conception, that we are commanded, "Be ye holy, for ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall

... "The conception was bold, and the denouement—the time and place in which the hero of it existed considered—not much out of keeping; yet it must be confessed that it required a delicacy of handling, both from the author and the performer, so as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various

... meditations of which make us roam like botanists through the vast fields of thought, the fruitful comparison of human ideas, the enthusiasm given by a clear conception of works of genius, came to be the inexhaustible and tranquil joys of the young man's solitary and dreamy life. Flowers, ravishing creatures whose destiny resembled his own, were his loves. Happy to see ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac

... before words beginning with u long. It is used before one. An must be used before words WHERE the h is not silent, if the accent is on the second syllable; as, an heroic action, an historical account."—Ib. This explanation, clumsy as it is, in the whole conception; broken, prolix, deficient, and inaccurate as it is, both in style and doctrine; has been copied and copied from grammar to grammar, as if no one could possibly better it. Besides several other faults, it contains ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... Observe this sweet Madonna, by Murillo! I prefer it to the one in the Munich Gallery. It may not boast Titian's glow of colour, or Raphael's grandeur of design,—in delicate angelic beauty, it may yield to the delightful efforts of Guido's or Correggio's pencil,—but surely no human conception can ever have more touchingly portrayed the beauteous resigned mother. The infant, too! how inimitably blended is the God-like serenity of the Saviour, with the fond and graceful witcheries of the loving child! How little we know of the beauties of the Spanish school! Would I ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... tyrannical," whose "kingdom is more despotic, and more contracted in principle, than the present government of the Russian empire," Ib. p. 61. He adds, "The Old Testament idea of a Deity is the outgrowth of the despotic stage of human mental development," and "a superannuated monotheistic conception," Ib. p. 62. In their opinion, "the developments of republicanism, and of mental happiness among men, depend very much upon the absence of these dogmatical compilations, or fossil relics, of an old Hebrew and Chaldean theology," Ib. p. 70. With them "the Bible account of creation is a very ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss

... woman, a few weeks after conception, makes a mental picture of the sex of the child she is going to bring forth into the world, of the physical and moral qualities with which she desires to see it endowed and if she will continue during the time of gestation to ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue

... of the conception of Our Lord fell on the same day as that of his death; and thus there coincided the promise and the fulfilment of the promise of the greatest of mysteries. Then Holy Friday became still holier. It was called Great Friday, and on that day such as entered the ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... almost demi-gods to my youthful enthusiasm," he said, "and doubtless I exaggerated their virtues, estimable as is the record they have left. But the ideals this conception of them set up in my mind I have clung to as closely as I could, and whatever the trials of public life—I will tell you more about them some day—the rewards are great enough if no one can question your sense of public duty, if no accusation ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton

... thought, that a woman could take on the new rights, the aristocratic attitude, so much more completely than a man. Miss Hitchcock was a full generation ahead of the others in her conception of inherited, personal rights. As the dinner dragged on, there occurred no further opportunity for talk until near the end, when suddenly the clear, even tones of Miss Hitchcock's voice brought his idle ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... educational organization is clearly evident. Before the French armies brought French governmental ideas and organization to Italy almost nothing had been done. Then, during the first six decades of the nineteenth century, the transition from the church-school idea to the conception of education as an important function of the State was made, and the resulting system is largely French ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... world as seen by the intellectuals of his own day. These men had lost the sense of life's value. They spoke of the world as a vast place governed by iron laws of necessity. Chesterton felt in it the presence of will, while the mere thought of vastness was to him about as cheerful a conception as that of a jail that should with its cold empty passages cover half the county. "These expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... be meant to represent some sort of matted stuff. This painting is not the work of a native artist; it is unlikely that it could be the work of Malays, in the third place there is in its position and its peculiar appearance such a striking touch of an European conception, mingled with barbaric surroundings, that one is almost inclined to the belief that we are here in the presence of a subject of ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc

... could be followed than to contemplate the serious—yes and ludicrous—findings of the philosophers in their attempts to define humor and to explain laughter. Consider Hobbes: "The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from the sudden conception of eminency in ourselves by comparison with the inferiority of others, or with our own formerly." According to Professor Bain, "Laughter results from the degradation of some person or interest possessing ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... authorities for the conception of love which I have ascribed to the ancients in the preface to the second edition of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... between the English and the Hollanders," and the French are obtaining a foothold. Portuguese India has but inadequate means of defense against the Dutch and other foes. An interesting and picturesque account is given of the religious fiestas held in Manila to celebrate the festival of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary; the chief features are processions, dramatic representations, dances, fireworks, etc.—to say nothing of the bull-fights and masquerades of the laity. Fearful earthquakes, with considerable loss of life, have occurred in the islands, especially in Ilocos and Cagayan of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair

... the banner of liberty, thus impregnating the social vitality of the Nation. But very few have succeeding in preserving their European education and culture while at the same time assimilating themselves with American life. It is difficult for the average man to form an adequate conception what strength, energy, and perseverance are necessary to absorb the unfamiliar language, habits, and customs of a new country, without the loss ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... felicitate myself, there comes news of a crushing master-stroke devised by the Government. Though I do not disguise my discomfiture, I would not withhold my tribute of admiration at the brilliancy of the stroke, of the genius of its conception, and of the completeness with which it has been dealt. I have been here more than a week, and have delivered four speeches. The Government and their friends on the platform and in the press affect to sneer at my efforts and their influence. Still, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various

... for centuries had not admitted the existence of souls. Its conception embraced nothing but electrons, protons and molecules, and still was struggling desperately for some shred of evidence that thoughts, will power and consciousness of self were nothing but chemical reactions. However, it had gotten no further than the negative ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan

... the reader some faint conception of the odious character of this creature (for adjectives are weak to describo it) when I say that, in talking to strangers from abroad, I have never thought it necessary to speak of sunstroke, jaguars, or the assassin's knife, but have never omitted to warn them of the ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... saw something moving about, and at length I discovered that it was a monkey. He kept jumping about from branch to branch, very much astonished at finding himself floating down the river. He was evidently longing to get back to his woods, but how to manage it was beyond his conception. I pointed him out to Duppo. "He do," he said, nodding his head. It was a great question, however, whether we should reach the floating island. Even when close to it the current might sweep us off in another direction. Still, as we had drawn so ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston

... from an excess of delicacy, rarely specifies his personal sufferings; but one really requires to know something of them, in order to make a proper estimate of his magnanimous resolution in fulfilling his instructions, and to entertain a just conception of the self-denial which such an expedition demanded. We shall be aided by the following particulars, which, besides, imply the very extensive distress of the whole crew: "A great number of our people were afflicted ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr



Words linked to "Conception" :   part, invention, fertilization, abstract, innovation, design, misconception, law of nature, notion, conceptualization, sexual activity, hypothesis, concept, conceptional, excogitation, section, creative thinking, possibility, conceive, whole, beginning, creation, construct, idea, fecundation, abstraction, contrivance, division, fact, law, natural law, Immaculate Conception, creativeness, sexual practice, creativity



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com