"Countervail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that execution is everything, and the class or subject nothing. The highest subjects, equally well executed (which, however, rarely happens), are the best. But the power of execution, the manner of seeing nature, is one thing, and may be so superlative (if you are only able to judge of it) as to countervail every disadvantage of subject. Raphael's storks in the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, exulting in the event, are finer than the head of Christ would have been in almost any other hands. The cant of criticism is on the other side of the question; because execution depends ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... And the inadequacy of all mere human teaching to resist this current of evil, and save the young men of the age from ruin, is touchingly and mournfully confessed by Plato. "There is not, there never was, there never will be a moral education possible that can countervail the education of which these are the dispensers; that is, human education: I except, with the proverb, that which is Divine. And, truly, any soul that in such governments escapes the common wreck, can only escape by the special favor of heaven."[924] ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... historian must with regret pronounce a very different judgment. There will always be a strong presumption against the sincerity of a conversion by which the convert is directly a gainer. In the case of Dryden there is nothing to countervail this presumption. His theological writings abundantly prove that he had never sought with diligence and anxiety to learn the truth, and that his knowledge both of the Church which he quitted and of the Church which he entered was of the most ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... statement of the proof, by which the mere matter of fact is established, which induced the Legislature of Connecticut to hail the late Dr. Horace Wells as a public benefactor. With this accumulation of evidence on one side, bearing directly upon the point, and nothing to countervail it on the other, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that he was the fortunate author of this great discovery, unless one or the other of two propositions can be established, namely, either that such a paralysis of the nervous ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... to countervail the design of her husband, she instantly commences a system of manoeuvring to carry her point. We must consider her now as under a particular temptation, and evidently acting inconsistently with the natural ingenuousness ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... and Fletcher have been in all their plots, Mr Rymer has discovered in his criticisms. Neither can we, who follow them, be excused from the same, or greater errors; which are the more unpardonable in us, because we want their beauties to countervail our faults. The best of their designs, the most approaching to antiquity, and the most conducing to move pity, is the "King and no King;" which, if the farce of Bessus were thrown away, is of that inferior sort of tragedies, which ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... steps, and soul boiling in anger. Nay, twice even then did he charge amid the enemy, twice drove them in flying rout along the walls. But all the force of the camp gathers hastily up; nor does Juno, daughter of Saturn, dare to supply him strength to countervail; for Jupiter sent Iris down through the aery sky, bearing stern orders to his sister that Turnus shall withdraw from the high Trojan town. Therefore neither with shield nor hand can he keep his ground, so overpoweringly from all sides comes upon him the storm of weapons. ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... lamentations over the fatal workings of emancipation. And truly if emancipation has really done so much mischief in Jamaica as they claim, it is a most damaging fact. Testimony of opposite results in the smaller islands would hardly countervail it. Such testimony would be good to prove that the freedom of the negro works well in densely peopled insular communities, where the pressure of population compels industry. The opponents of emancipation are willing sometimes to acknowledge that where ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various |
