"Congruous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Fear.—It is no ways congruous that God should be frightening men into truth who were made to be wrought upon by calm evidence and ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... know by the result whether it was present. The poet rapt into unconsciousness would soon betray himself. Under the power of the imagination, all his faculties waken to a higher life; his fancies are more vivid and clear; all the suggestions that come to him are more apt and congruous; and his faculties of selection, his perceptions of fitness, beauty, and appropriateness of relation are more keen and watchful. No lapse in what he writes at such times indicates aught like dreaming or madness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... fact that in the old creeds, as in the still extant creed of the Otaheitans, every family has its guardian spirit, who is supposed to be one of their departed relatives; and that they sacrifice to these as minor gods—a practice still pursued by the Chinese and even by the Russians. It is perfectly congruous with the Grecian myths concerning the wars of the Gods with the Titans and their final usurpation; and it similarly agrees with the fact that among the Teutonic gods proper was one Freir who came among them by adoption, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... who appeared—just in the first glimpse—to carry out the idea of help. He uttered a lively ejaculation, which, however, in its want of finish, Biddy failed to understand; so pertinent, so relevant and congruous, was the other party to ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... the second half of the century." To my mind, without any doubt, they and A Happy Boy are the best work Bjoernson has ever done in fiction, or is ever likely to do. For they are simple, direct, congruous; all of one piece as a flower is of a piece with its root. And never since has Bjoernson written a tale ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Latin, and French exactly, and could perfectly read in these three languages." As he lived precisely five years, all he did was done at that little age, and it comprised this: "He got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius's 'Janua,' ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... saying as mere personal feeling. But the case is this: when, in a distant region of the world, I sought for and eagerly read anything I could find relating to country scenes and life in England—the land of my desire—I was never able to get an extended and congruous view of it, with a sense of the continuity in human and animal life in its relation to nature. It was all broken up into pieces or "bits"; it was in detached scenes, vividly reproduced to the inner eye in many cases, but unrelated and unharmonized, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... their unspeakable wearisomeness and despair, for, he says, not to be beloved and yet retained is the greatest injury to a gentle spirit. Our present doctrine of divorce, which sets the household captive free on payment of a broken vow, but on no less ignoble terms, is not founded on the congruous, and is indeed already discredited, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... the long nose, the prim mouth and joined lips, the elevated brow, and beneath it the quiet contemplative eye, contemplative not of heaven or hell, but of this world as it had seen it, in its most worldly point of view, yet twinkling with a flashing thought of incongruity made congruous, are the indices of the inner man. Most of our wits, it must have been seen, have had some other interest and occupation in life than that of 'making wit:' some have been authors, some statesmen, some soldiers, some wild-rakes, and some players of tricks: Selwyn ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... proper, appropriate, congruous, adequate, expedient, congruent, apposite, qualified, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Providence, Nature, chance, life, fatality, spirit, or matter, the mystery remains unaltered; and from the experience of thousands of years we have learned nothing more than to give it a vaster name, one nearer to ourselves, more congruous with our expectation, with ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... so congruous, so consistent in every detail, came trippingly and without the least hesitancy from her tongue. Andreuccio remembered that his father had indeed lived at Palermo; he knew by his own experience the ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... system of pension legislation was faulty. Mere individual effort on the part of the President to screen the output of the system was scarcely practicable, even if it were congruous with the nature of the President's own duties; but nevertheless Cleveland attempted it, and kept at it with stout perseverance. One of his veto messages remarks that in a single day nearly 240 special pension bills were presented to him. He referred them to the Pension Bureau for examination ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... prevalent desires have produced. The social state at any time existing, is the resultant of all the ambitions, self-interests, fears, reverences, indignations, sympathies, &c., of ancestral citizens and existing citizens. The ideas current in this social state must, on the average, lie congruous with the feelings of citizens, and therefore, on the average, with the social state these feelings have produced. Ideas wholly foreign to this social state cannot be evolved, and if introduced from without, ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... the order of grace is more congruous than the order of nature. Now according to nature a thing is not moved in contrary directions; thus if a stone be naturally moved downwards, it cannot naturally return upwards from below. But according to the order of grace it is lawful to pass from the religious to the episcopal state. Therefore ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... requisite to fashion the Bones, Veines, Arteries, Nerves, Tendons, Feathers, Blood, and other parts of a Chick; and not only to fashion each Limbe, but to connect them altogether, after that manner that is most congruous to the perfection of the Animal which is to Consist of Them? For to say, that some more fine and subtile part of either or all the Hypostatical Principles is the Director in all this business, and the Architect of all this Elaborate structure, ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... as the white and yolk of an egg into such a variety of textures, as is requisite to fashion the bones, veins, arteries, nerves, tendons, feathers, blood, and other parts of a chick? and not only to fashion each limb, but to connect them all together, after that manner, that is most congruous to the perfection of the animal, which is to consist ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... according to our spirit language by numbers most convenient for certain communications. As the communication requires, also the hour is selelected by my leaders in which they draw me into the inner state in which they show me, what is congruous to my mission. They put me, in that instance, from my sleep into the inner state of knowledge of what was going on. In this state I not see the female, although I was conscious, that she was surrounded by enemies of her happiness. ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... materialist, save his even greater wariness and scepticism? Berkeley at this time—long before days of "Siris" and tar-water—was too ignorant and hasty to understand how inane all spiritual or poetic ideals would be did they not express man's tragic dependence on nature and his congruous development in her bosom. He lived in an age when the study and dominion of external things no longer served directly spiritual uses. The middle-men had appeared, those spirits in whom the pursuit of the true and the practical never leads to possession of the good, but ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... any one present, they were hardly strong enough to grow without the aid of much daylight and ill-will. The common-looking, wild-eyed old man, clad in serge, might have won belief without very strong evidence, if he had accused a man who was envied and disliked. As it was, the only congruous and probable view of the case seemed to be the one that sent the unpleasant accuser safely out of sight, and left the pleasant serviceable Tito just where ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... hitherto unknown. It was not always a panic of contrition, sweeping the joyous out of the sunlight into a monastic shade, which brought the troubled into a new way of peace, but sometimes a quiet joy in renunciation, congruous with a timid mood, leading by gradual allurement to cloisters of shadowy lanes and cells which were forest bowers. The new faith gave open sanction to evasion of the banquet, and thus fortified and increased those who loved not the ceremonial day. ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... inconceivability of the negation. Tried by this test, as by all others, realism is superior to idealism, though in that "transfigured" form which implies objective existence without implying the possibility of any further knowledge concerning it,—hence in a form entirely congruous with the conclusion ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... these two kinds one is legitimate and the other not. It may stand for two distinct attitudes of mind, one of them obstructive and the other not. It may mean the deliberate suppression or mutilation of an idea, in order to make it congruous with the traditional idea or the current prejudice on the given subject, whatever that may be. Or else it may mean a rational acquiescence in the fact that the bulk of your contemporaries are not yet prepared either to embrace the new idea, or to change their ways of living ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... A big thought! yet suggesting, perhaps, from the first, in still, small, immediately practical, voice, a freer way of taking, a possible modification [142] of, certain moral precepts. A primitive morality,—call it! congruous with those larger primitive ideas, with that larger survey, with the earlier ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... scheme. Ruin that approach, and how much else do you ruin of a thing which—done perfectly by masters, and done by them here as nowhere else could they have done it—ought to be guarded by us very jealously! How to raise on this irregular and 'barbarous' ground a quarter that should be 'polite', congruous in tone with the smooth river beyond it—this was the irresistible problem the Brothers set themselves and slowly, coolly, perfectly solved. So long as the Adelphi remains to us, a microcosm of the eighteenth century is ours. If there is any meaning ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... conscience. There were, it is true, deliberative assemblies, chosen by the people; and confederate cities, of which, both in Asia and Africa, there were so many leagues, sent their delegates to sit in Federal Councils. But government by an elected Parliament was even in theory a thing unknown. It is congruous with the nature of Polytheism to admit some measure of toleration. And Socrates, when he avowed that he must obey God rather than the Athenians, and the Stoics, when they set the wise man above the law, were very near ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... adj.; fit, suit, adapt, accommodate; graduate; adjust &c. (render, equal) 27; dress, regulate, readjust; accord, harmonize,. reconcile; fadge[obs3], dovetail, square. Adj. agreeing, suiting &c. v.; in accord, accordant, concordant, consonant, congruous, consentaneous[obs3], correspondent, congenial; coherent; becoming; harmonious reconcilable, conformable; in accordance with, in harmony with, in keeping with, in unison with, &c. n.; at one with, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... superstitions—that so stand over out of the alien past among these democratic peoples is the institution of property. As is true of preconceptions touching the supernatural verities, so here too the article of use and wont in question will not bear formulation in mechanistic terms and is not congruous with that mechanistic logic that is incontinently bending the habits of thought of the common man more and more consistently to its own bent. There is, of course, the difference that while no class—apart from the servants of the church—have a material interest ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... accomplished. It was an age more favourable, upon the whole, to vigour of intellect than the present, in which a dread of being thought pedantic dispirits and flattens the energies of original minds. But independently of this, I have no hesitation in saying that a pun, if it be congruous with the feeling of the scene, is not only allowable in the dramatic dialogue, but oftentimes one of the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... insufficient. "Would Pomponius," says he, with a sarcastic application, "hear milder reproaches if his father were living?" To answer the doubt, we must examine wherein Comedy goes beyond individual reality. In the first place it is a simulated whole, composed of congruous parts, agreeably to the scale of art. Moreover, the subject represented is handled according to the laws of theatrical exhibition; everything foreign and incongruous is kept out, while all that is essential to the matter in hand is hurried on ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... metaphor which it is meant to convey, may be questionable. The word rendered 'vessel' is a wide expression, meaning any kind of equipment, and in other places of the Old Testament the whole phrase rendered here, 'ye that bear the vessels,' is translated 'armour-bearers.' Such an image would be quite congruous with the context here, in which warlike figures abound. And if so, the picture would be that of an army on the march, each man carrying some of the weapons of the great Captain and Leader. But perhaps the other explanation is more likely, which regards 'the vessels of the Lord' as being an ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... these additions and the rest of Daniel is by no means so great as has sometimes been imagined. The opinion of one of the latest commentators on Daniel (Marti, Tübingen, 1901, p. xx) may be taken as a fair sample of this view. He thinks these pieces by no means congruous with the canonical Daniel: "Den Abstand dieser apokryphischen Erzählungen von dem in hebraram. Dan. aufgenommen Volkstradition kann niemand verkennen." So far as these additions to the contents of Daniel are concerned, he would agree with the exaggerated ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... interior cleared and all the courts. Everything in this place of perpetual gayety was now desolate; even the fountains had ceased to play, and the seared autumnal leaves of the trees, some already fallen, seemed congruous with the sentiment of the hour. Most of the shops were also shut and the stalls deserted. Still there was no ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and others of the fathers. They understood the words of Christ as addressed to them with the meaning, "Arise, leave the things of this world, have faith, and go forward to thy abiding home in heaven." Such an interpretation is entirely congruous with the general tone of thought and feeling exhibited in many other common paintings in the catacombs. But later Romanist writers have attempted to connect its interpretation with the doctrine of the Forgiveness of Sins, as embodied in what is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... why not hurry off at once to study astronomy? No indeed. No astronomy for me. I draw a ring about that subject and say, "Precious subject, fundamentally valuable for all men. But I will remain ignorant of it, because it is not quite congruous with the studies I already have on hand." That must be my test: not how important is the study itself, but how important is it for me? How far will it help me to accept and develop those limitations to which I ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... it for the season, but till the beginning of her 'let' there was a month; and, after much persuasion, she had consented to allow the strangers to hire it and her services as bonne, by the week, for a sum more congruous with the old and primitive days of Barbizon than with the later claims of the little place to fashion and fame. As the lovers stood together in the salon, exclaiming with delight at its bare floor, its low ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... venture to say this, that the working of the miracles was 'impossible' in the absence of faith and the presence of its opposite, regard being had to the purposes of the miracle and of Christ's whole work. It was not congruous, it was not morally possible, that He should force ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... previous verse, where we have a double description of those who are thus hidden in the inaccessible light of His countenance. They are 'such as fear Thee,' and 'such as trust in Thee.' Now, that latter expression is congruous with the metaphor of my text, in so far as the words on which we are now engaged speak about a 'hiding-place,' and the word which is translated 'trust' literally means 'to flee to a refuge.' So they that flee to God for refuge are those whom God hides in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... tradition, or invent such fables as are congruous to themselves. If as poet you have to represent the renowned Achilles; let him be indefatigable, wrathful, inexorable, courageous, let him deny that laws were made for him, let him arrogate every ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... 3. It is perfectly congruous with the habits of fishermen and the character of the instruments which they employ. As fishers drop the net over a certain space, and, without making any pretence of discriminating between good and bad, ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... season seasoned are," so is all dress (or it should be) seasonable and comprehensive, congruous and complete. The one great secret of the success of the French as artists and magicians of female costume is that they consider the entire figure and its demands, the conditions of life and of luxury, the propriety of the substance, and ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... its contrasts, its force or its weakness, its swiftness or slowness, its abruptness or smoothness, its excitement or repose, its success or failure, its seriousness or play. Then, in addition, as we shall see, all modes of emotion that are congruous with this abstract form may by association be poured into its mold, so that the content of music becomes not a mere form of life, but ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... only many-sided, but abounding. It is not congruous with God's wealth, nor with His love, that He should give scantily, or, as it were, should open but a finger of the hand that is full of His gifts, and let out a little at a time. There are no sluices on that great stream so as to regulate its flow, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... colthood—though if all had their rights, he ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been picking the herbage of some Eastern plain instead of tugging here—had trodden this road almost daily for twenty years. Even his subjection was not made congruous throughout, for the harness being too short, his tail was not drawn through the crupper, so that the breeching slipped awkwardly to one side. He knew every subtle incline of the seven or eight miles of ground between Hintock and Sherton Abbas—the market-town ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... of war in this respect is that it is so congruous with ordinary human nature. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors; so the most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army in the field, is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness toward his precious person he may bring with him, and may easily ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... Memphis and come hither no more. She will soon be comforted, if she is not already betrothed. Egypt needs thee—the Hathors have bespoken good fortune for thee—and thou art justified in aspiring to nothing less than the hand of a princess. Come back to Memphis and let her heal thee with her congruous love." ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... of opinion as to the scope of Logic and the foundations of knowledge. Mill was dissatisfied with the "congruity" of concepts as the basis of a judgment. Clearly, mere congruity does not justify belief. In the proposition Water rusts iron, the concepts water, rust and iron may be congruous, but does any one assert their connection on that ground? In the proposition Murderers are haunted by the ghosts of their victims, the concepts victim, murderer, ghost have a high degree of congruity; yet, unfortunately, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... weight of the great conception. Literally rendered, the words are—'to all generations of the age of the ages'—a remarkable fusing together of two expressions for unbounded duration, which are scarcely congruous. We can understand 'to all generations' as expressive of duration as long as birth and death shall last. We can understand 'the age of the ages' as pointing to that endless epoch whose moments are 'ages'; but the blending of the two is but ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Paris. But when ruins became fashionable in the last decade of Queen Victoria, it was necessary for St. Raphael to have an ancient monument. An arch of the aqueduct was imported to the beach with as little regard for congruous setting as Mr. Croesus-in-Ten-Years shows in importing an English lawn to his front yard at Long Branch and a gallery of ancestral portraits to his dining-room on ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... carving, too, in deference to the more sensitive tastes and better skill of this age, is far more artistic and natural than in the old originals. Flowers in stone are made to resemble flowers, and heads are fashioned after a human pattern, and clusters of figures are modeled in a congruous and modern manner. But aside from changes of this kind, the new and magnificent edifice upon Hempstead Plains is a perfect example of the elaborate and picturesque Gothic ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... brightness, resulting from effused good, by ideas, seeds, reasons, shadows, stirring up our minds, that by this good they may be united and made one." Others will have beauty to be the perfection of the whole composition, [4475]"caused out of the congruous symmetry, measure, order and manner of parts, and that comeliness which proceeds from this beauty is called grace, and from thence all fair things are gracious." For grace and beauty are so wonderfully annexed, [4476]"so ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... treating his subject, it is not likely that he would have thought of more than one work for his imitation. The fact is, Sir David Wilkie's pictures show that he did carry this practice too far—for there is scarcely a picture of his that does not show patches of imitations, that are not always congruous with each other; there is too often in one piece, a bit of Rembrandt, a bit of Velasquez, a bit of Ostade, or others. The most perfect, as a whole, is his "Chelsea Pensioners." We do not quite understand ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... than I deserve, and no doubt it is good for me to be humbled and set aside; but work I will get of some kind! I looked in at a great factory the other day, and longed to apply for a superintendent's place, only I thought it might not be congruous with ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cogency other arguments, which are manifold, might be readily adduced, as of congruous force, to vindicate our claim in favour of analytical knowledge over blind experience in the methods of Herbal cure, especially if this be pursued on the broad lines of enlightened practice ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... floating essence it is to contain. On the one hand, was the teeming, still fluid world, of old beliefs, as we see it reflected in the somewhat formless theogony of Hesiod; a world, the Titanic vastness of which is congruous with a certain sublimity of speech, when he has to speak, for instance, of motion or space; as the Greek language itself has a primitive copiousness and energy of words, for wind, fire, water, cold, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... collection the beautiful lines, cited above, called "Good Counsel of Chaucer." And when, at last, the Elizabethan era properly so-called began, the proof was speedily given that geniuses worthy of holding fellowship with Chaucer had assimilated into their own literary growth what was congruous to it in his, just as he had assimilated to himself—not always improving, but hardly ever merely borrowing or taking over—much that he had found in the French trouveres, and in Italian poetry and prose. The ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... Ode to Duty, or of Laodamia. And yet both the simplicity of the earlier and the pomp of the later poems were almost always noble; nor is the transition from the one style to the other a perplexing or abnormal thing. For all sincere styles are congruous to one another, whether they be adorned or no, as all high natures are congruous to one another, whether in the garb of peasant or of prince. What is incongruous to both is affectation, vulgarity, egoism; and while the noble style can be interchangeably childlike or magnificent, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... live,—with this rich plain where the great river flows forever onward, and links the small pulse of the old English town with the beatings of the world's mighty heart. A vigorous superstition, that lashes its gods or lashes its own back, seems to be more congruous with the mystery of the human lot, than the mental condition of these emmet-like Dodsons ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot |
