"Disproportionate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... crowd below him and trying to collect his mind. He was extraordinarily astonished at this run of mishaps. Were the people really so annoyed? Everybody seemed angry with him. No one seemed interested or amused by his arrival. A disproportionate amount of the outcry had the flavour of imprecation—had, indeed a strong flavour of riot. Several greatly uniformed officials in cocked hats struggled in vain to control the crowd. Fists and sticks were shaken. And when Bert saw a man on the outskirts ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... accept my assurance, that whatever the number and extent of the passages which I publish that are necessarily in themselves of more interest to myself personally than to the public generally, they are altogether disproportionate to the number and extent of those I withhold. I cannot, however, resist the conclusion that such picture as they afford of a man beyond the period of middle life capable of bending to a new and young friend, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... examination, that De Foe had discovered in 'Robinson Crusoe' precisely the field in which his talents could be most effectually applied; and that a very slight alteration in the subject-matter might change the merit of his work to a disproportionate extent. The more special the idiosyncrasy upon which a man's literary success is founded, the greater, of course, the probability that a small change will disconcert him. A man who can only perform upon the drum will have to wait for certain combinations ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... tragedy of his position and the embarrassment of yours. There was not one hint about him of the beggar's emphasis, the outburst of revolting gratitude, the rant and cant, the "God bless you, Kind, Kind gentleman," which insults the smallness of your alms by disproportionate vehemence, which is so notably false, which would be so unbearable if it were true. I am sometimes tempted to suppose this reading of the beggar's part, a survival of the old days when Shakespeare was intoned upon the stage and mourners keened beside the death-bed; to think ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it ordinarily discharges into the Mississippi is vastly disproportionate to its length, or the number and size of its tributaries. I have seen less than six feet depth of water at St. Charles at a low stage, and it was once forded by a soldier, at Bellefontaine, four miles above its junction with ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... with which they had occasionally bombarded Paris since 23 March. These annoyances would have been serious; but the British public paid itself a very bad compliment when it seemed to assume that the distant bombardment of London would have an effect upon the war disproportionate to that of Paris; and the notion that an impetus which carried the Germans to Calais would transport them across the Channel was merely another illustration of the comprehensive popular ignorance of the meaning of sea-power. Nieuport or Dunkirk might have taken ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... in the direction indicated, and saw a long low-hulled craft, cutter-rigged, with what struck me as a set of spars altogether disproportionate ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... 1208. As to the order in which its parts were composed, it is likely that Absalon's original instruction was to write a history of Absalon's own doings. The fourteenth and succeeding books deal with these at disproportionate length, and Absalon, at the expense even of Waldemar, is the protagonist. Now Saxo states in his Preface that he "has taken care to follow the statements ("asserta") of Absalon, and with obedient mind and pen to include both his ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... after "grace" Harcourt made a poor witticism, at which the majority laughed with an immoderateness quite disproportionate. Mrs. Marchmont and her brother joined in the mirth, though evidently vexed with themselves that they did. Even Hemstead saw that Harcourt's remark was but the transparent excuse for the inevitable laugh at his expense. Lottie looked around ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... quotation lies the spirit and the letter of all etiquette regarding courtship. The passion of love generally appearing to everyone save the man who feels it, so entirely disproportionate to the value of the object, so impossible to be entered into by any outside individual, that any strong expressions of it appear ridiculous to a third person. For this reason it is that all extravagance of feeling should be carefully repressed as ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... checked only by vice and misery, and producing, according to its encouragement a greater quantity of vice and misery; and this error the author has not been at sufficient pains to do away. Another thing, in which Mr. Malthus attempted to clench Wallace's argument, was in giving to the disproportionate power of increase in the principle of population and the supply of food a mathematical form, or reducing it to the arithmetical and geometrical ratios, in which we believe Mr. Malthus is now generally admitted, even ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... such things as premonitions. At any rate he had an altogether disproportionate sense of the significance of the afternoon's adventure,—which after all was a very small adventure indeed. A mere talk. His mind refused to leave her, her black furry slenderness, her dark trustful eyes, the sweet firmness of her perfect lips, her appealing simplicity that was yet somehow ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... broken with its chains. The ideas, aspirations and manly instincts of liberty have taken hold upon the colored people and are becoming controlling. The intellectual progress of the many, the political and national prominence of the few, the acquisition of wealth, and the marvelously disproportionate increase in their numbers, serve to awaken the colored race to self-consciousness and a sense of power. It is beginning to demand its rights and to be impatient of their resistance and suppression. The Samson of the past, bound, shorn and blinded, stands to-day ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... objects in life, and spent none of his forces on the pleasant distractions which the rest of us sought on the way. He had been born with a sort of reposeful energy, which had always impressed me with the conviction that no ordinary situation was enough for him; and at college there was something disproportionate in his position among light-hearted boys, so that I never wondered that he found our aims trivial. He possessed to the full that force of character by which a man masters himself, always keeps himself in check, and in times of risk and extremity of peril can suffice ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... Our party consisted of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Moore, and Rogers. Five poets of very unequal worth and most disproportionate popularity, whom the public probably would arrange in the very inverse order, except that it would place Moore above Rogers. During this afternoon, Coleridge alone displayed any of his peculiar talent. He talked much and well. I have not for years seen him in such excellent health ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... can have no scruple in giving you my opinion that it would not be right. I have never been, and cannot conscientiously be, a party to an arrangement of that kind, because I think this is quite clear, that if the salary of the office is disproportionate to the labour of it, and can bear to be taxed to the amount of 200l., the public should benefit, and the emoluments of the ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... esve, trained to the performance of services congenial to their natural habits, however dissimilar to Terrestrial species, had not the same air of singularity, or rather of monstrosity. But in the creatures bred to furnish wool, feathers, or the like, some single feature was always exaggerated into disproportionate dimensions. Thus the elnerve is loaded with long plumes, sometimes twice the length of the body, and curled upward at the extremity, so that it can neither fly nor run; and though its plumage is exquisitely beautiful, the creature itself ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... sex. The fountains from which life springs may flow through that channel but they flow from a depth far below these physical or magnetic agitations. And it is only the abysmal cunning of the inert malice, which opposes itself to creation that tempts philosophers and artists to lay such a disproportionate stress upon this thing. The great artists are always known by their power to transcend sex and to reduce sex to its relative insignificance. In the greatest of all sculpture, in the greatest of all music, in the greatest of all poetry, ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the question of education, M. Labitte told his hearers of three instances in which small communes had been made to expend sums inordinately disproportionate to their resources upon what he called 'scholastic palaces,' although a great majority of the people in each instance distinctly refused to send their children to the lay schools established in these 'palaces.' One case ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... that the mathematics are already well represented in our courses of instruction, then much of Mr. Spencer's eloquent appeal is simply wasted by misdirection. All that he had really to claim is, that a disproportionate time is now surrendered to the studies of the symbols, as such, and too often to characteristics of them not yet brought in any way into scientific cooerdination, nor of a kind having practical or peculiarly disciplinary value. If Mr. Spencer had insisted on a more just division of the school studies ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... to send two of their associates to the General Assembly in the decade after Lexington and Concord.[38] These two, Robert Fleming and Frederick Antes, constituted a disproportionate representation, when one considers the limited population of the Fair Play community and the general under-representation of the frontier counties at this period. In fact, a few hundred families in and around the West ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... of the Rhone, what an immense quantity of stones, of sand, and fragments of rock, must have travelled in the bed of that river, or bottom of that valley which receives the torrents coming from the mountains! The excavation of this great valley, therefore, will not be found any way disproportionate to that which is more evident in the branches; and, though the experience of man goes for nothing in this progress of things, yet, having principles in matter of fact from whence he may reason back into the boundless ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... at this rather disproportionate length on the structure and teaching of Culture and Anarchy, partly because it was to men who were young in 1869 a landmark in their mental life, and partly because it gives the whole body of Arnold's ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... much interested in the success of experiments of this kind, in which the grand desideratum has always been to produce POSITIVE PROOF OF HAVING REACHED BOTTOM by bringing up a portion of its substance, hitherto unattempted on account of the great length of time required for the experiment, and the disproportionate strength of the line to the enormous weight employed, should any sudden jerk ensue from the heave of the sea. Captain Stanley had at length succeeded in contriving a very ingenious apparatus by which, upon striking soundings, the eight ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... the harvest is over the grain fields should be gleaned of shattered grain, and the straw left in the field should be gathered and housed, but if there is little to be gained by such work, and the expense is disproportionate, the stubble should be grazed: for in farming it is of the greatest importance that the expense of an operation shall not exceed ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... perpetually lamented by English Ministers; Lord Palmerston, Lord Clarendon, Lord Aberdeen, all told the same tale; and it was constantly necessary, in grave questions of national policy, to combat the prepossessions of a Court in which German views and German sentiments held a disproportionate place. As for Palmerston, his language on this topic was apt to be unbridled. At the height of his annoyance over his resignation, he roundly declared that he had been made a victim to foreign intrigue. He afterwards toned down this accusation; but the mere fact that such ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... his Royal Highness, this House will take into their early consideration the propriety of abolishing sinecures and unmerited pensions and grants, the reduction of the civil list, and of all salaries which are now disproportionate to the services, and especially, that they will take into their consideration the Reform of this House, agreeably to the laws and constitution of the land, this House being decidedly of opinion that justice and humanity, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... all expectation, soon began to sate itself upon vain imaginings. For the rational plans and pursuits she had been accustomed to make and to carry out with the boys, she had nothing to substitute but dreams; and on these she lived, finding an idle distraction in them, until the habit grew disproportionate, and began to threaten the fine balance of her other faculties: her reason, her power of accurate observation and of assimilating every scrap of knowledge that came in her way. To fill up her empty days, she surrounded herself with a story, among the crowding incidents ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... appear that Germans were less sensible to the ludicrous—and we are far from saying that this may not have its compensatory advantages—than either the English or the French. And what is the source of this sensibility, if it be not an instinctive perception of the incongruous and disproportionate? Among all races, the English has ever shown itself most keenly alive to the fear of making itself ridiculous; and among all, none has produced so many humorists, only one of them, indeed, so profound as Cervantes, yet all masters in ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... been possessed by them in happier days; and though packages of such things have been sent by the charitable for distribution by Father Damiens, it is not possible for island benevolence fully to meet an emergency and needs so disproportionate to the population and resources of the kingdom. Besides the two Catholic churches, there are a Protestant chapel, with a pastor, himself a leper, who is a regularly ordained minister of the Hawaiian Board, and two school-houses, where the twenty-two children of the settlement ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... his cows as large as the houses, his blades of grass waving above the tops of the trees, and all things similarly disproportionate. Or, worse, imagine a disease of the retina which caused a like curious change in the landscape itself wherein a mountain appeared to be a mole-hill, and a ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... very commonly increased, and often created. Captiousness, sensitiveness, and a Martha-like care for the things of this world, are often the direct fruits of education. All these faults of the character, and they are amongst the greatest, may be summed up in a disproportionate care for little things. This is rather a growing evil. The painful neatness and exactness of modern life foster it. Long peace favours it. Trifles become more important, great evils being kept away. And so, the tide of small wishes and requirements gains upon ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... her remaining guests came in all together; and in another five minutes Audrey was suffering from that kind of nightmare in which some grave issue—you don't know precisely what—hangs on the adjustment of trifles, absurdly disproportionate to the event, and which disarrange themselves perversely at the dramatic moment. Everything seemed to go wrong. She had relied on Knowles and Miss Gladys Armstrong for a brilliant display of intellectual fireworks; but beyond ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... mind and character. He was small, with a large head, a short thick neck, broad chest, and high shoulders; his thighs and legs were long and thin; and as his face also was ugly—and was only redeemed by the dignity and force of his glance—and all his limbs were disproportionate with one another, he had rather the appearance of a monster than a man. Such was he whom Fortune was destined to make a conqueror, for whom Heaven was reserving more glory than he ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of Heaven, more than all that flesh could do unto him. He was alarmed more at the fear of being overcome by temptation, than from a reluctance to undergo derision or persecution. The peculiarity of this description of Christians must be traced back to constitution, habit, first impressions, disproportionate and partial views of truth, and improper instructions; these, concurring with weakness of faith, and the common infirmities of human nature, give a cast to their experience and character, which renders them uncomfortable to themselves, and troublesome to others. Yet no competent ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... covered with a green paper with pink patterns on it, hung three immense oil paintings. One depicted a setter-dog with a blue collar, bearing the inscription: 'This is my consolation'; at the dog's feet flowed a river; on the opposite bank of the river a hare of quite disproportionate size with ears cocked up was sitting under a pine tree. In another picture two old men were eating a melon; behind the melon was visible in the distance a Greek temple with the inscription: 'The Temple of Satisfaction.' ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... a modicum of success will give a disproportionate sense of confidence and power. The man to whom success has always come easily is not baffled by problems that would appall those who, in middle life, "lie among the failures at the foot of the hill." As Goethe, who had always been miraculously successful, said to one who came to complain ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... imitate the ideals of the public schools. In the elementary schools we have all the ethical prejudices and exaggerations of Eton and Harrow carefully copied for people to whom they do not even roughly apply. We have the same wildly disproportionate doctrine of the effect of physical cleanliness on moral character. Educators and educational politicians declare, amid warm cheers, that cleanliness is far more important than all the squabbles about ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... tyranny of the Lexicon and the Dictionary, had got the schoolboys of England in their grasp, and the boy "was suffocated with the nonsense of grammarians, overwhelmed with every species of difficulty disproportionate to his age, and driven by despair to pegtop or marbles"; while the British Parent stood ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... to make its square blank whiteness visible for a quite considerable distance out to sea. Built upon the site of some older and larger structure, it was blessed—or otherwise—with a system of vaults and cellars wholly disproportionate to its existing size. One of these, by means of a roughly ceiled and flagged passage, gave access to a heavy door in the sea-wall opening directly on ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... dealer, paying in a stake for Game, while the dealer has to contribute a double stake to make a pool for Matrimony, and a single stake for Intrigue. He is sometimes called upon to con[88]tribute to Game also, but that is putting a tax upon him disproportionate to what is ...
— Round Games with Cards • W. H. Peel
... in this kingdom, whose government and defense the king, our sovereign, was pleased to entrust to me—certainly a trust greatly disproportionate to my poor strength—I have ever watched over its conservation and perpetuation, as being a new land, in the midst of infidel and idolatrous enemies; and I have even peopled the greater part of it with them; and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair
... responsible—along with others of his epoch—for the encouragement of that deplorable modern heresy which finds in bric-a-brac and what are called "objets d'art" a disproportionate monopoly of the beauty and wonder of the world. One turns a little wearily at last from the silver mirrors and purple masks. One turns to the great winds that issue forth out of the caverns of the night. One turns ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Nonconformists known as Baptists; and the profession of faith was the curious rite of baptism by complete immersion, the importance claimed for which by this sect is, perhaps, from a Christian point of view, made the less disproportionate by another condition attaching to it,—the condition that not till years of individual judgment have been reached is one eligible for the sacred rite. With that rationalism which religious sects are so skilful ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... of the weakness of the place, but he had not expected to find such a pitiful remnant of men. Twenty-three soldiers and an officer! These were the precious creatures who had cost him so much, and whom their lady was so anxious to save! He smiled at the disproportionate preparations made by his hammers and saws, and glanced back to see if the timbers were being carried in. They were, at the rear of his force, but behind them intruded Father Vincent de Paris wrapped in a blanket which one of the soldiers had provided for him. The scantiness ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... his disapprobation of ornamental architecture, such as magnificent columns supporting a portico, or expensive pilasters supporting merely their own capitals, 'because it consumes labour disproportionate to its utility.' For the same reason he satyrised statuary. 'Painting (said he) consumes labour not disproportionate to its effect; but a fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... together with the unsuitableness of the Circus for such sports, from its being divided into two compartments by the spina, a low wall surmounted by pillars, obelisks, and other ornamental erections, as well as from its disproportionate length, which rendered it ill adapted to afford a general view to all the spectators, determined Julius Caesar, in his dictatorship, to construct a wooden theatre in the Campus Martius, built especially for hunting, "which was ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... debauch political conventions and fraudulently overcome public sentiment, especially in the "rotten borough" districts—those where the party is not strong, and where the office-holders in consequence have a disproportionate influence. This was done by the Republican Administration in 1912, to the ruin of the Republican party. Moreover, there are numbers of States and municipalities where very little has as yet been done to do away with the spoils system. But in the National Government scores of thousands of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... under the name of law, thus far recited, were still further aggravated in a majority of the rebellious States by the exaction of taxes from the colored man to an amount altogether disproportionate to their property. Indeed, of property they had none. Just emerging from a condition of slavery in which their labor had been constantly exacted without fee or reward of any kind, it was impossible that they could be the owners of any ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... act according to that principle or inclination which for the present happens to be strongest, and yet act in a way disproportionate to, and violate his real proper nature. Suppose a brute creature by any bait to be allured into a snare, by which he is destroyed. He plainly followed the bent of his nature, leading him to gratify his appetite: there is an entire ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... on the due proportion of the different branches of productiveness to one another. Thus, Spain, for instance, has remained poor under the most advantageous circumstances in the world,(337) because it allowed a disproportionate preponderance of personal services. The character of the Spanish people has always given them a leaning towards aristocratic pride and economic idleness. Tradesmen, in that country, sought, as a rule, to amass merely enough to enable them to live on the interest of their capital; after which ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... that, in most instances, the terms of leases taken out then are rigorously exacted. Neither can the remission of yearly arrears be said to strike at the root of the evils under which they suffer. The fact of the disproportionate rent hanging over them is a disheartening circumstance, that paralyzes their exertion, and sinks their spirits. If a landlord remit the rent for one term, he deals more harshly with the tenant at the next; whatever surplus, if any, his former indulgence leaves in the tenant's hands, instead ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... with his eyes fixed upon his foolscap; but presently found himself reading the same sentence over and over again without understanding one word in it. He dropped the document, rose and picked himself out a cigar, with deliberation and attention disproportionate to the business. He cut, stabbed and lighted the cigar, and stood by the mantelpiece, smoking ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... strength of the National Guard; and for the selection of a National Army by draft from men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty years inclusive. The determination to raise a draft army was based upon the belief that in this way successive and adequate supplies of men could be found without disproportionate calls on any section of the country and without undue disturbance of the industrial life of the nation. Although the plan ran counter to American practice during most of our history, the draft army became deservedly popular as a democratic and efficient method of finding men. Officers were ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... will) is of necessity myself; since I cannot be supposed to have put triumphant arguments into any speaker's mouth, unless they had previously convinced my own understanding. Finally, let me entreat the reader not to be impatient under the disproportionate length (as he may fancy it) of the opening discussions on Value: even for its own sake, the subject is a matter of curious speculation; but in relation to Political Economy it is all in all; for most of the errors (and, what is much worse than errors, most of the perplexities) prevailing ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... consequence of a return to classical literature was the worship of human greatness. Roman literature, which the Italians naturally mastered much earlier than Greek, dealt chiefly with politics and war, seeming to give an altogether disproportionate place to the individual, because it treated only of such individuals as were concerned in great events. It is but a step from realising the greatness of an event to believing that the persons concerned in it were equally great, and this belief, fostered by the somewhat rhetorical ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... the neglect of the navy, both in its material and in drills, during the antecedent months of peace, owing to the practice of a misplaced, if necessary, economy. But that economy, it is justly argued, would not have been required to a disabling degree, if so disproportionate an amount of money had not been expended upon the army, by a state whose great colonial system could in war be sustained only by a fleet. "In more than a year," writes a captain in the Spanish Navy, "we have had only one target practice, and that limited in extent, ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... themselves, which the prevailing Puritan rigor severely condemned. What, then, of that vague and exceeding sinfulness of which he so bitterly accuses and repents himself? It was that vision of sin, however disproportionate, which a deeply wounded and graciously healed spirit often has, in looking back upon the past from that theological standpoint whence all want of conformity to the perfect law of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... and syphilis, when contracted, is successfully treated with indigenous herbs. Like their neighbours of Tahiti, from whom they have perhaps imbibed the error, they regard leprosy with comparative indifference, elephantiasis with disproportionate fear. But, unlike indeed to the Tahitian, their alarm puts on the guise of self-defence. Any one stricken with this painful and ugly malady is confined to the ends of villages, denied the use of paths and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a philological one. A comparative absence of grammatical inflexions, and a disproportionate preponderance of monosyllabic words, characterize the language ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... population might be induced to receive a certain percentage of these adjuncts to civilisation, one or two on each ship, say, with results satisfactory to all concerned. Everyone knows that, in towns, the demand is grotesquely disproportionate to the supply. The Board of Trade could deal with the question ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... luxuriantly on rich land, but then the foliage becomes a mere mask under which the flowers are concealed. There is not one of the Tom Thumb class that may not be treated as a hardy annual, and all afford opportunity of making a gorgeous show of colour at a cost ridiculously disproportionate to the effect obtained. They are also admirably adapted for pot culture, making shapely plants covered with bloom for ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... Form master once said to me, 'You may give up Latin Verse for this term, if you will: but I warn you, no one can be a real scholar who does not constantly practise verse.' He was mistaken, belike. I hold, for my part, that in our Public Schools, we give up a quite disproportionate amount of time to 'composition' (of Latin Prose especially) and starve the boys' reading thereby. But at any rate we do give up a large share of the time to it. Then if we insist on this way with the tongues of Homer and Virgil, why do we avoid it with the tongue ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the impressions made upon us by Mr. Masson's work as a whole, we are inclined rather to regret his copiousness for his own sake than for ours. The several parts, though disproportionate, are valuable, his research has been conscientious, and he has given us better means of understanding Milton's time than we possessed before. But how is it about Milton himself? Here was a chance, it seems to me, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... a considerable difference of opinion. It is much easier to state what notebook work should not be than to outline precisely how it should be conducted. Certainly it should not be overdone. It should not be an exercise usurping time disproportionate to its value. It should not be required primarily for exhibition purposes, although such notes as are kept should be ...
— The Teaching of History • Ernest C. Hartwell
... ever produced any finer long poem, except "Pippa Passes," which is a lyrical drama, and neither exactly a 'play' nor exactly a 'poem' in the conventional usage of the terms. Artistically, "Paracelsus" is disproportionate, and has faults, obtrusive enough to any sensitive ear: but in the main it has a beauty without harshness, a swiftness of thought and speech without tumultuous pressure of ideas or stammering. It has not, in like degree, the intense human insight of, say, "The Inn Album," ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... human endeavor which had indicated the forward direction. But I was most eager to know whether Tolstoy's undertaking to do his daily share of the physical labor of the world, that labor which is "so disproportionate to the unnourished strength" of those by whom it is ordinarily performed, had ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... was twisted up at the back of the head; the front locks being plaited and drawn off the forehead. Their skins were of a light brown colour, smooth and glossy. They wore ear-rings of some mixed metal, of a size very disproportionate to their small figures, and very far from becoming. Their countenances, if not pretty, were highly good-humoured and pleasant. The younger women were diligently employed in pounding rice in mortars of large dimensions. There were groups of children playing in the verandah, who at first ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... on me for days together, so as to deprive me of all my cheerfulness. It is probable that a man's private and personal connexions and interests ought to be uppermost in his daily and hourly thoughts, and that the dedication of much hope and fear to subjects which are perhaps disproportionate to our faculties and powers, is a disease. But I have had this disease so long, and my early education was so undomestic, that I know not how to get rid of it; or even to wish to get rid of it. Life were so flat a thing without enthusiasm, that if for a moment it leaves me, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... art and literature of Asia are still treated with ignorant indifference in cultured circles—an ignorance and indifference which are extraordinary in Englishmen who have so close a connection with India and devote a disproportionate part of their education to ancient Greece and Rome. I have heard a professor of history in an English university say that he thought the history of India began with the advent of the British and that he did not know that China had any history at all. And Matthew Arnold in speaking of Indian ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... quaint," does not reconcile us to its extravagant effect. To be quaint in art is, as I have said before, to be funny without intending it; and these curtains are funny by their absence of all intention or perspective, and when hung they make everything in the room look disproportionate to the unnatural size of the foliage. (Plate 85.) Specimens of this work are to be found in most English country houses. It has lasted till now, partly because the crewels first manufactured in the sixteenth ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... the obstacles which the constitution threw in the path of its progress, and effect the regeneration of Rome and even of Italy by means of ordinances elicited from the people. The social question was here as elsewhere the efficient cause; but it left results which seemed strangely disproportionate to their source. The career of Gracchus had shown that the leadership of the people was encumbered by two weaknesses. These were the packing of assemblies by dependants of the rich, whose votes were known and whose voices were therefore under control, and the impossibility ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... do not carry your resentment into a displeasure so disproportionate to the offence. For that would be to expose us both to the people below; and, what is of infinite more consequence to us, to Captain Tomlinson. Let us be able, I beseech you, Madam, to assure him, on his next visit, that we ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... it might be pleaded, that by it no license was given to wrong; there was only a concession of disproportionate power to one section, fairly outweighed in the scale of the public good by the establishment of a great political order. But the action on the slave trade was the deliberate sanction for twenty years of man-stealing of the most ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... observation should be jealously kept subordinate to the primary substantial lesson which each parable contains. On the one hand, I desire that these secondary and incidental views should not by their beauty draw to themselves a disproportionate share of our attention; and on the other hand, I am disposed to respect every earnest, sober, and reverential suggestion which any believing inquirer may throw out, regarding the lateral references and under-current secondary meanings of the Lord's discourses; ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... the total effect, there is yet about the lyrics of Jonson a certain stiffness and formality, a suspicion that they were not quite spontaneous and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... had excited was out of all proportion to its merits, Johnson's unqualified condemnation was more than equally disproportionate to its defects. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... of the capital of the country, it was the only means you had for concentrating and directing it upon industrial enterprises. It was in this way a most potent means for exaggerating the chief peril of the private enterprise system of industry by enabling particular industries to absorb disproportionate amounts of the disposable capital of the country, and thus prepare disaster. Business enterprises were always vastly in debt for advances of credit, both to one another and to the banks and capitalists, and the prompt withdrawal of this credit ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... that they would never be fulfilled. They had raised an image of Mirah changing; and however he might protest that the change would not happen, the protest kept up the unpleasant image. Altogether poor Hans seemed to be entering into Deronda's experience in a disproportionate manner—going beyond his part of rescued prodigal, and rousing a feeling quite distinct ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... money, a ducal estate may be purchased, and by a very little more, and moderate labor, a family be maintained upon it with raiment, food and shelter. The luxurious and minute comforts of a city life are not yet to be had without effort disproportionate to their value. But, where there is so great, a counterpoise, cannot these be given up once for all? If the houses are imperfectly built, they can afford immense fires and plenty of covering; if they are small, who ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... Julian said, "and I feel that it would be not only ungrateful but wrong for me to refuse this noble gift. But you will admit that it is natural that I should for a time be overwhelmed by it. I am not so ungracious as to refuse so magnificent a present, although I feel that it is altogether disproportionate, not to the service I was fortunate enough to render, but to my action in rendering it. Well, Mr. Linton, I can only thank you for the part you have taken in the matter. Of course, I shall write at once to the count ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... involving so glossy a brownness of eye, so manly a crispness of curl, so red-lipped a radiance of smile, so natural a bravery of port, prescribed to any response he might facially, might expressively, make a sort of florid, disproportionate amplitude? The explanation, in any case, didn't matter; he was going to mean well—that she could feel, and also that he had meant better in the past, presumably, than he had managed to convince ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... causes for this excessive love of interference among women. The one is the narrowness of their lives and objects, by which insignificant things gain a disproportionate value in their eyes; the other, their belief that they are the only saviors of society, and that without them man would become hopelessly corrupt. And to a certain extent this belief is true, but surely with restrictions. Because the clearer moral sense and greater physical ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... stood so long that Mr. Russell's Hound had time to make himself acquainted with every smell within twenty yards. He turned over a snail that sat—round and striped like a peppermint bull's-eye—on the short grass, he patted a little beetle that pushed its way across a world of disproportionate size, and then, by peevishly pulling the end of his whip which hung from Mr. Russell's pensive hand, he suggested that the pursuit should continue. So they walked to the crest of wood that stands at the top of the Ring, a compressed tabloid forest, fifty yards ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... succeeds. A refined taste for the best kind of music is not consequent upon the erection of an opera-house, nor is it a feeling to be created at will. Even in the metropolis of England, with a capital so disproportionate, and possessing such superior facilities for the attainment of novelty, did the continuance of this refined amusement depend solely upon the love of good music, it would quickly die, ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... Nelson again lived in the minister's house, bearing a large, if not a disproportionate, share of the expenses. When they returned to England in 1800, Hamilton was L2,000 in his debt. The intimacy and the manner of life, in the midst of the Neapolitan court, whose corruptness of manners both ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... was leaning back against the oak under which she sat, watching with parted lips and a gaze of the purest delight and wonder the movements of a nut-hatch overhead, a creature of the woodpecker kind, with delicate purple gray plumage, who was tapping the branch above her for insects with his large disproportionate bill, and then skimming along to a sand-bank a little distance off, where he disappeared with his ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... before Albuquerque declared his ultimatum. Although the forces under his orders were very disproportionate in numbers, the Capitam mor imperiously demanded that Ormuz should recognize the suzerainty of the King of Portugal and submit to his envoy, if it did not wish to share the same fate as Mascati. The King, Seif-Ed-din, who was then reigning over Ormuz, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... way of imposing on the uninquiring mind and passing themselves off at an inflated value. No process is more familiar than that by which words in the course of a long life lose all their original power, and yet they will sometimes continue to exercise a disproportionate authority. Then comes the original mind, which, looking straight at the thing instead of accepting the specious title, discovers the incongruity between the pretence and the reality, and in the first shock of the disclosure annoyingly overturns our settled ideas. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... of the Greek insurrection against the Turks, is the event in contemporary history concerning which it is most difficult to form a precise and correct idea. Causes and effects seem, to the ordinary observer, to be utterly disproportionate. Its progress set the calculations of statesmen at defiance; and while congresses, ambassadors, and protocols, were attempting to fetter it in one direction, it generally advanced with increased speed in some other, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... my part, know them; but, considering their feeble number, I keep asking myself what part they play in a harem so disproportionate to their forces. A few figures will show us what my hesitations ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... remains that, despite the attraction of the scent, the Flesh-fly does not expose her worms to disproportionate falls. Can she know beforehand that, when the chrysalids break, her winged family, knocking with a sudden flight against the sides of a tall chimney, will be unable to get out? This foresight would be in agreement with the rules which order maternal instinct ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... blame. There may, on various occasions, have been some small dereliction of duty. But you'll have been observing that in the recent exposition of my philosophy I have not laboured the point of duty to disproportionate exaggeration." ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... are to be printed in small type. In fact, I am thinking of casting the whole of this sirocco—material into an appendix. Too much, you think? Surely the number of words is not disproportionate to the subject? The south wind is a good slice of Nepenthe, is it not? . . . Look! That cloud has made up its mind to come our way after all. There will be another shower of ashes. Sirocco, you observe. . ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... The mounts, however, had in no way been picked; there were little horses and big horses, fat horses and thin horses. They looked the result of a wild conscription. Coleman noted the faces of the troopers, and they were calm enough save when a man betrayed himself by perhaps a disproportionate angry jerk at the ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... Sounds, Colors, and Proportions, delights the Senses, 214 Harmonious Development of the Christian Graces, 215 Effects of the Disproportionate Development of Character, 217 How Young Christiana ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... Bible, an equally massive illustrated volume on the Holy Land, a few landscapes in cold, bluish milk and water colors, and rigid heads in crayons—the work of pupils—were presumably ornamental. An imposing mahogany sofa and what seemed to be a disproportionate excess of chairs somewhat coldly furnished the room. Jack had reluctantly made up his mind that, if Sophy was accompanied by any one, he would be obliged to kiss her to keep up his assumed relationship. As she entered the room with Miss Mix, Jack advanced and soberly saluted her on ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... on the right or on the left side of the street. In reality it would have been impossible for him to re-enter his interest, his enthusiasm; impossible even for him to have accomplished the mechanical labour of the trade save at an utterly disproportionate expense of ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... In striking contrast to the narrow forehead and low vault of the skull, the face of the criminal, like those of most animals, is of disproportionate size, a phenomenon intimately connected with the greater development of the senses as compared with that of the nervous centres. Prognathism, the projection of the lower portion of the face beyond the forehead, is found in 45.7% of criminals. ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... however, must astonish the kindly-disposed observer and vex him a little; that is, the capricious and disproportionate manner in which oaths are paid for, the inequality of the prices that M. Bonaparte places on this commodity. For example, M. Vidocq, if he were still chief of police, would receive six thousand francs per annum, M. Baroche receives ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... if the supply of these things was always unlimited, as is the air we need to breathe, it would not be necessary to see that each one had his share, but the supply of wealth being, in fact, at any one time limited, it follows that if some have a disproportionate share, the rest will not have enough and may be left with nothing, as was indeed the case of millions all over the world until the great Revolution established economic equality. If, then, the first right of the citizen is protection ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... however many feet they may give them at a random guess. Huge overhanging cliffs are to them steps within the reach of human legs; yawning crevasses are ditches to be jumped; and foaming waterfalls are like streams from penny squirts. Everyone knows the avalanches on the Jungfrau, and the curiously disproportionate appearance of the little puffs of white smoke, which are said to be the cause of the thunder; but the disproportion ceases to an eye that has learnt really to measure distance, and to know that these smoke-puffs, represent a cataract of crashing ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... and he had looked into her chamber in just the same way. The present room was much humbler, but what struck him about it was the abundance of books lying everywhere. Their number and quality made the meagre furniture that supported them seem absurdly disproportionate. Some, indeed many, must have been recently purchased; and though he encouraged her to buy in reason, he had no notion that she indulged her innate passion so extensively in proportion to the narrowness ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... Herod, a Caesar, the fulfiller of this dream of world-conquest? There is only one thing which can be called the Jew conquering the world. It is that which, as I believe, is meant here, viz. Christ's conquest. Apart from that, I know of nothing which would not be ludicrously disproportionate if it were alleged as fulfilment of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... in the Friend, has illustrated the matter we are now considering, in discussing the origin of a proverb, "which, differently worded, is to be found in all the languages of Europe," viz., "Fortune favors fools." He ascribes it partly to the "tendency to exaggerate all effects that seem disproportionate to their visible cause, and all circumstances that are in any way strongly contrasted with our notions of the persons under them." Omitting some explanations which would refer the error to mal-observation, or to the other species of non-observation ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... One might imagine that it would take just twice as much coal to go ten miles an hour as would be required to go five; but in reality it takes more than four times as much—the higher rate of speed requiring a very disproportionate expenditure of power. ...
— Rollo in London • Jacob Abbott
... town-histories are written in the tone and style of Mr. Poole's "Little Pedlington,"—the epithet Little being suppressed in the title, but obtruded on every page. The intensity and emphasis of our historic strain appear to foreigners to be disproportionate to the subject-matter of the story. Mr. Punch always represents a Yankee as larger than his garments. His trousers never cover his ankles; his cuffs stop far short of his wrists; his long neck extends beyond the reach of even his capacious collar; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... intention of the above authors to claim an entire absence of the grotesque method of treatment in specimens of the Mound-Builder's art, since elsewhere they call attention to what appears to be a caricature of the human face, as well as to the disproportionate size of the heads of many of the animal carvings. Not only are the heads of many of the carvings of disproportionate size, which, in instances has the effect of actual distortion, but in not a few of the sculptures nature, ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... in State politics marked the beginning of a new era. The increased majority in New York City in 1866, so disproportionate to other years, and the naturalisation of immigrants at the rate of one thousand a day, regardless of the period of their residence in the country,[1129] indicated that a new leader of the first magnitude had appeared, and ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... bad qualities had still the power to appreciate social duty, we appealed to her, by that, to renounce motherhood. Some of the few worst types were, fortunately, unable to reproduce. But if the fault was in a disproportionate egotism—then the girl was sure she had the right to have children, even that hers would ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... stage villain at all if you can help it. The life is too harassing and the remuneration altogether disproportionate to the risks ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... however, does not fit their grade of intelligence as well as the elementary and grammar schools. High schools probably enroll a disproportionate number of pupils in the I Q range above 100. That is, the average intelligence among high-school pupils is above the average for the population in general. It is probably not far from 110. College students are, of course, a still more selected ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... lamentable error been harped on by the slaveholders, and by their advocates in the free states. The impression of constitutional favor to the slaveholders would, of itself, naturally create for them an undue and disproportionate influence in the control of the government; but when to this is added the arrogance that the possession of irresponsible power almost invariably engenders in its possessors—their overreaching assumptions—the contempt that the slaveholders entertain for the great body of the people of the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... proved that the strength and wealth of the one are not the causes of the weakness and poverty of the other. But union is still move difficult to maintain at a time at which one party is losing strength, and the other is gaining it. This rapid and disproportionate increase of certain states threatens the independence of the others. New York might, perhaps, succeed with its two millions of inhabitants and its forty representatives, in dictating to the other states in ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... will enumerate as briefly as I can the groups of facts which seem to demand connection; but certain subjects, not hitherto discussed, must be treated at disproportionate length. In the Second Part the hypothesis will be given; and we shall see, after considering how far the necessary assumptions are in themselves improbable, whether it serves to bring under a single point of ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... the memory of the darling minister, has been placed at the south side of Hanover Square. It is of bronze, and stands on a granite pedestal, of size disproportionate to the height and bulk of the figure. The artist is Mr. Chantrey: the work being at the cost of the nobility of the land, and a few ardent admirers of "the system" introduced by Mr. Pitt into the government of this country. We have long had festal ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... deny that the owner of a factory did manage it, that he was the superintendent, entitled as such to some reward. It was easy enough to say that he got a disproportionate share, but who was to decide just what ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... agonising sight. I beheld my son - Augustus George - in Mrs. Prodgit's hands, and on Mrs. Prodgit's knee, being dressed. He was at the moment, comparatively speaking, in a state of nature; having nothing on, but an extremely short shirt, remarkably disproportionate to the length of his usual outer garments. Trailing from Mrs. Prodgit's lap, on the floor, was a long narrow roller or bandage - I should say of several yards in extent. In this, I SAW Mrs. Prodgit tightly ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... along and Christopher came to find in them great contentment. Perhaps his serenity was due in part to the fact that the weakness of his eyes shut him out so completely from almost every other diversion that he welcomed any sort of companionship with disproportionate appreciation. He could not read, he could not write, he could go neither to the theater nor the movies. And while he thus halted and marked time, the world and everybody in it marched along without giving him a thought. What marvel, therefore, that he attached ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... Tories as were in the system above mentioned, such of them as deserted soon after from us, and such of the Whigs as had upon this occasion deserted to us, seemed equally convinced of the unreasonableness, and even of the impossibility, of continuing the war on the same disproportionate footing. Their universal sense was, that we had taken, except the part of the States General, the whole burden of the war upon us, and even a proportion of this; while the entire advantage was ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... desire to amuse her, Michael introduced into her room a fat mongrel puppy with disproportionate legs and an alarmed expression. His wish to provide her with what he was pleased to call a "divarsion" was, like many of his other good intentions, not entirely successful. He had deposited the excited animal on the bed, and in the course of its ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... is responsible for evil as well as for good; and it appears utterly irreconcilable with our notions of justice that he should punish another for that which he has, in fact, done himself. Moreover, just punishment bears a proportion to the offence, while suffering which is infinite is ipso facto disproportionate to any finite deed. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... something it is very difficult to do during a campaign. It was in this matter that the Emperor was most often deceived, for the corps commanders were so afraid of displeasing him that they risked being committed to facing an enemy force disproportionate to their own numbers, rather than admit that sickness, fatigue and the need to forage for food had caused many soldiers to drop out. So Napoleon, in spite of his authority, never knew the exact number of combatants available to him on ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... 17th August, the two fleets, so vastly disproportionate in number, size, equipment, and military force—eighteen galleons and galleys, with four or five thousand fighting men, against eleven small vessels and twelve or fourteen hundred sailors—met in that narrow ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... conspicuous among the last the young man observed a large overall of the most costly sealskin. In a flash his mind reverted to the advertisement in the Standard newspaper. The great height of his lodger, the disproportionate breadth of his shoulders, and the strange particulars of his instalment, all pointed to the ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... and admiration. My mother, whose face had luckily advanced her to a condition above her birth, thought no evil so great as deformity. She had not the power of imagining any other defect than a cloudy complexion, or disproportionate features; and therefore contemplated me as an assemblage of all that could raise envy or desire, and predicted with triumphant fondness the extent of my conquests, and the number of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... Sacramento had declined to receive her, but the majority accepted her return with local pride as a practical compliment to the educational facilities of Indian Spring. The Tuolumne "Star," with a breadth and eloquence touchingly disproportionate to its actual size and quality of type and paper, referred to the possible "growth of a grove of Academus at Indian Spring, under whose cloistered boughs future sages and statesmen were now meditating," in ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... contemporary historians generally enter into their views less than any one else, and it is only the result that proves their wisdom and far-sight. Moreover, their temptations and their sins are on a larger scale than those of other men, and some of the actions that they perform make a disproportionate impression by the cry that they occasion—the evil is remembered, not the good that their ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... trying to lead pupils to discover them. The lecture method, or telling method, should be used, then, to supply pupils with information they could not find out for themselves, or which they could find out only by spending an amount of time disproportionate to the importance of the facts. The teacher must use good judgment in discriminating between those facts which the pupils may reasonably be expected to find out for themselves and those facts which had better be told. Many teachers ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... straightforward letter and well fitted for the purpose to which Mr. Wilkins knew it would be applied—of being forwarded to the young man's father. One would have thought that it was not an engagement so disproportionate in point of station as to cause any great opposition on that score; but, unluckily, Captain Corbet, the heir and eldest son, had just formed a similar engagement with Lady Maria Brabant, the daughter of ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... like a chime of contralto bells. It made him think of Bernhardt. It imparted to the commonplaces she uttered a quite disproportionate intensity of drama and tragic depth. The way in which she had said, "Oh, no," reverberated in his memory as though the sound still lingered on ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... regard for science, and the worship of power, go hand in hand: that knowledge is power has been esteemed the grandest incitement to study. Yet the antidote to the disproportionate cultivation of science, is simply power in its crude form—breaking out, that is, as brute force. When science, isolated and glorified, has produced a contempt, not only for vulgar errors, but for the truths which are incapable of scientific proof, then, as we see in the French Revolution, the ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... revelation. On the contrary, all analogy shows that in theological, as in all other matters, the race has to feel its way gradually to truth through innumerable errors. In writing to a friend about the Manning article he explains himself more fully. Such articles, he says, give a disproportionate importance to the negative side of his views. His positive opinions, if 'vague, are at least very deep.' He cannot believe that he is a machine; he believes that the soul must survive the body; that this implies the existence of God; that those two beliefs make 'the whole ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... stated the young man to be extremely silly and weak, and that my mother had gained great influence over him; and were it not that the presence of the tutor, who seldom quitted the house, had proved a check, that there was little doubt but, as far as the young man was concerned, the disproportionate match would be readily acceded to; that the only person she had ventured to consult was her dear friend Mrs St. Felix, who had promised her, if the persecution did not cease, that she would make Mr Sommerville the tutor aware of what was going on. Virginia described ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... regarding food and alcohol, and air and exercise and diet, can readily demonstrate that the gout from which Mrs. Grundy suffers is also a penalty for sin; none the less because it is not so hideously disproportionate, in its measure and in its incidence, to the gravity of the offence. These moral distinctions between one disease and another have little or no meaning for medical science, and are more often ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... their voices. They are like Jeshurun, who waxed fat and kicked. Without special aptitudes for arithmetic one may calculate, with a rough approach to accuracy, the time when the process of mutual exhaustion will enable the neutrals to exert an absurdly disproportionate and possibly dangerous influence over the belligerents. That is a calculation which those optimists would do well to make who tell us that all is well because ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... fulfilment and corroboration of the good and the true in natural religion. It is not a question of clear separation and abstraction, but of distinction, emphasis, and proportion. I believe that things not characteristically Christian have acquired a disproportionate place in our religion as handed ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... manners;—he accepts all these without hesitation; the early hours also, naturally distasteful to him, which gave to actual morning, to all that had passed in it, when in more self-conscious mood he looked back on the morning of life, a preponderance, a disproportionate place there, adding greatly to the effect of its dreamy distance from him at this later time;—an ideal quality, he might have said, had he ever used ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... correspondingly full development of the individual principle. These are complementary principles of progress. Each alone is impossible. In proportion as either is emphasized at the expense of the other, is progress impeded. Arrested civilizations are due to the disproportionate and excessive development of one or the other ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... is irregular and disproportionate. The trunk, though small compared with the head, appears massive against the background of the diminutive extremities. The back is somewhat humped, arching at the waist-line, while the abdomen protrudes like a balloon, with a hernia, often, at the navel. The extremities ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... thousand were distributed in Paris, and in a circle of four leagues around it, including Versailles. You will undoubtedly ask me, even allowing for our extension of territory, what can be the cause of this disproportionate increase of distrust and depravity? I will explain it as far as my abilities admit, according to the opinions of others compared ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... of destination, set sail with ten ships of the line, and three frigates, in pursuit of them. It has been supposed that Nelson would not have engaged his enemy, had he met with them, his force being so disproportionate: but it is clear from his own words that he would have fought had he come up with them. "Take you each a Frenchman," he observed to his officers, "and leave the Spaniards to me: when I haul down my colours, I expect you to do the same." But Nelson was again doomed to be disappointed in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... history of thought there is always need for an apparently disproportionate expenditure of power, in order to produce an advance in the development. And it would appear as if a certain self-satisfied narrow-mindedness within the progressing ideas of the present, as well as a great measure of inability even to understand the past and recognise its own dependence on it, must ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... Meanwhile they may address each other by these titles, and all Catholics may consider and address them so unharmed. The bill, as modified passed to a second reading on the 22d of March, by 438 ayes to 95 nays—a majority of more than four to one. Such is the finale of the absurd and disproportionate agitation with respect to the "Papal Agression." Nobody is satisfied. The Church party, who mourned over the shortcomings of the bill as originally presented, are of course still less pleased with it as emasculated. The Catholics ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... to release it. I hope that the human race will not discover how to use this energy, he says, until it has brains and morality enough to use it properly, because if the discovery is made by the wrong people this planet would be unsafe. A force utterly disproportionate to the present source of Power would be placed at the disposal Or ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... and despite predicted disaster he saw a great increase in her material welfare and her standing in the academic world during the six years he was President. Within four years the attendance practically doubled from 652 in 1862-63 to 1,255 in 1866-67. This was due to the great and somewhat disproportionate growth of the two professional schools, which were now well under way, and to the reaction following the falling off of students during the Civil War. In 1864 a School of Mines was announced, but it did not prove successful and was soon absorbed in ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... he rose from his chair, and stood, leaning his arm on the marble mantelpiece: in that attitude his shape was seen plainly as well as his face; his unusual breadth of chest, disproportionate almost to his length of limb. I am sure most people would have thought him an ugly man; yet there was so much unconscious pride in his port; so much ease in his demeanour; such a look of complete indifference to his own external appearance; so haughty a reliance on the power of other qualities, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... scheme. The editors believe heartily with Pater that "the chief stimulus of good style is to possess a full, rich, complex matter to grapple with". Instruction in writing, it is to be feared, too often neglects this sound doctrine and places an emphasis upon formal matters that seems disproportionate, especially when form is made to appear as a thing apart. Form and content go together and one must not suffer at the expense of the other. But a sustained interest in the ways and means of correct expression is aroused only when the student feels that he ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... good reason, that the hedge-sparrows, etc., can be induced at all to sit on the egg of the cuckoo without being scandalised at the vast disproportionate size of the supposititious egg; but the brute creation, I suppose, have very little idea of size, colour, or number. For the common hen, I know, when the fury of incubation is on her, will sit on a single shapeless stone instead of a nest full of eggs that have been withdrawn: and, moreover, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... also. Out of their wigwams issue sounds of boisterous hilarity, as though they were celebrating some grand festival, with now and then a peal of laughter that might have proceeded from the lungs of a stentor. Disproportionate as is the great strength of a Fuegian to his little body, his voice is even more so; this is powerful beyond belief, and so loud as to be audible at almost incredible distances. Such a racket as these wild merry-makers within the wigwams are keeping up ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... the classics superior to that gained from the study of the natural sciences? Should the study of Greek and Latin be considered of greater importance in respect to culture and utility than the study of French and German? Does the study of Greek occupy a disproportionate place in the ordinary college course? Should Greek be considered as essential to a liberal education? or, Should Greek be elective in a college course? Matson, p. ...
— Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Debate Index - Second Edition • Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
... pulled a manuscript from his pocket and read from it as follows: "The quantity of light decreases with disproportionate rapidity by reduced consumption; for, as experiments have shown, when consuming only two feet per hour, eighty-five per cent. of the gas is lost; with two and a half feet the loss is sixty per cent.; and with three and a half feet it is thirty-four per ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various |
