"Expressiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... over Friday; and was still in eager consultation that night, when the King said to him, with a certain expressiveness of glance: "BON SOIR, then;—To-morrow morning about four!" And on the morrow, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... husband's side—very pretty, but apparently very ill... Have you not met her at the well? She is of medium height, fair, with regular features; she has the complexion of a consumptive, and there is a little black mole on her right cheek. I was struck by the expressiveness of her face." ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... them. She soared away to loftier topics; so that the second interview, though it lasted two or three hours, was all occupied by her mystical, theological, transcendental, necromantical discourse, in which she displayed the expressiveness, if not the glowing ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... for their beauty; and large stones selected for their shape may have an aesthetic worth of hundreds of dollars. And large stones form the skeleton, or framework, in the design of old Japanese gardens. Not only is every stone chosen with a view to its particular expressiveness of form, but every stone in the garden or about the premises has its separate and individual name, indicating its purpose or its decorative duty. But I can tell you only a little, a very little, of the folk-lore of a Japanese garden; and if you want to know ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... painter. Only the frequent personification (anthropomorphism) when the sea breathes, the sky gazes, the steppe barks, nature whispers, speaks, mourns, and so on—such metaphors make your descriptions somewhat monotonous, sometimes sweetish, sometimes not clear; beauty and expressiveness in nature are attained only by simplicity, by such simple phrases as "The sun set," "It was dark," "It began to rain," and so on—and that simplicity is characteristic of you in the highest degree, more so perhaps than ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... take, lists of killed and wounded, fatally injured, columns of engineers dying at their posts, to penetrate the spiritual safe where poets are keeping their souls to-day, untouched of the world, and bring home to them some sense of the adventure and quiet splendor and unparalleled expressiveness of the engineer's life. He is a man who would rather be without a life (so long as he has his nerve) than to have to live one without an engine, and when he climbs down from the old girl at last, to continue to live at all, to him, is to linger where she is. He watches the track ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... little boy who belonged to Mrs. Dow. What was he doing here in Butternut Street? Matilda's steps slackened. The boy knew her, for he looked and then grinned, and then bringing a finger alongside of his nose in a peculiar and mysterious expressiveness, he repeated his ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... neatly and definitely put out of the way. She looked neither more nor less than her age, which was eight and twenty. At first sight her features struck one as hard and unsympathetic, though tolerably regular; watching her as she talked or listened, one became aware of a mobility which gave large expressiveness, especially in the region of the eyebrows, which seemed to move with her every thought. Her lips were long, and ordinarily compressed in the line of conscious self-control. She had a very shapely neck, the skin white and delicate; her facial complexion was admirably ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... intended journey through Spain, and his delight at meeting a traveler all the way from California, and whatever else came into his head—all in such mixed-up broken English that the meaning must have been utterly lost but for the wonderful expressiveness of his face and the striking oddity of his motions. It came to me mesmerically. He seemed like one who glowed all over with bright and happy thoughts, which permeated all around him with a new intelligence. His presence shed a light upon others like the rays that beamed from the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... picture. Asselijn's angry swan is an excellent companion piece. We wish that we could describe the Jan Steens, the Dous, the Mierises, and other sterling Dutch painters. There is the gallery of Dutch and Flemish primitives about which a volume might be written; their emaciated music appeals. In expressiveness the later men did not excel them. The newest acquisition, not mentioned in the catalogue supplements, is the work of an unknown seventeenth-century master, possibly Spanish, though the figures, background, and accessories are Dutch. Two old ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the man who was still aiming his weapon at my head, then waived back those behind him, and presently advanced towards me, looking me straight in the eyes with a steadiness and intensity of gaze far exceeding, both in expressiveness and in effect, the most fixed stare of the most successful mesmerists I have known. I doubt whether I should have had the power to resist his will had I thought it wise to do so. But I was perfectly aware that, however successful in repelling ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... Greeks could the better effectuate, from their preference of the sublime, or serious stile; which, having so much less of quickness or rapidity of execution, than the comic dance, admits of more attention to the neat expressiveness of every motion, gesture, attitude, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... forgetful of all surroundings, he would read out his poems or sing his songs to me. Not that he had much of the gift of song in his voice; but then he was not altogether tuneless, and one could get a fair idea of the intended melody.[36] When with eyes closed he raised his rich deep voice, its expressiveness made up for what it lacked in execution. I still seem to hear some of his songs as he sang them. I would also sometimes set his words to music ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... she sat down or crossed her feet, which drove the finest ladies of the young generation to despair. Her voice had remained in her head during one-third of her lifetime; but she could not prevent a descent into the membranes of the nose, which lent to it a peculiar expressiveness. She still retained a hundred and fifty thousand livres of her great fortune, for Napoleon had generously returned her woods to her; so that personally and in the matter of possessions she was a ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Aristotle; and Duccio and Cimabue and Giotto must go the same way as soon as St. Francis of Assisi or Luther or Calvin puts into words what they meant. It is its own success that is fatal to Art; for just in proportion as the expressiveness it insists upon is shown to be pervading, universal, and not the property of this or that shape, the particular manifestation is degraded. Color and form are due to partial opacity; the light must penetrate to a certain depth, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... lay staring at the swell which was steadily growing heavier. Both men had covered themselves with rugs, after dutifully bundling up Miss Julia. As I walked back and forth on the deck, I was struck by their various degrees of in-expressiveness. Opaque brown eyes, almond-shaped and only half open; wolfish green eyes, close-set and always doing something, with a crooked gleam boring in this direction or in that; watery grey eyes, like the thick edges of broken skylight ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... flexibility and expressiveness of dialect lies largely in its ability to change its verbal form and pronunciation from a speech very broad indeed to something approaching standard English. For example, "You'm a fool," is playful; "You'm a fule," less so. "You're a fool," asserts the fact without blame; ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... Blake's design of the Morning Stars singing together, in the series of the Book of Job, yet it is little more than a vertical arrangement of figures with uplifted and intercrossing arms. The linear plan gives the main impetus to the expressiveness of the design, and is the basis of the beauty, which culminates in the rapture of ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... its impressions in a synthetic and ideal form. Intuition will then represent, at least symbolically, an actual situation. Grimace and gesture and ceremony will be modified by a sense of their effect; they will become artful and will transform their automatic expressiveness into ideal expression. They will become significant of what it is intended to communicate and important to know; they will have ceased to be irresponsible exercises and vents for passing feeling, by which feeling is dissipated, as in tears, without being embodied and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... selected specimens of them hang in a long row in the Metropolitan Museum, and I assure you, upon my word as a lifelong student of drawing, they are quite as ugly and as silly as they look. There is not a touch in them that has any truth to nature, not a line that has real beauty or expressiveness. They represent the human figure with the structure of a jellyfish and the movement of a Dutch doll; the human face with an expression I prefer not to characterize. If they be not the symptoms of mental decay, they can be nothing but the means of a ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... unyielding physician with medicine from a jar that might have been visited by Morgiana, a musician playing upon an instrument like a huge and stringless harp. But it is the happy tomb of Thi that lingers in your memory. In that tomb one sees proclaimed with a marvellous ingenuity and expressiveness the joy and the activity of life. Thi must have loved life; loved prayer and sacrifice, loved sport and war, loved feasting and gaiety, labor of the hands and of the head, loved the arts, the music of flute and harp, singing by the lingering and plaintive voices which seem to express the essence ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... on my study table, I gazed at it almost in wonder. The russet coat, turning grey with age, was eloquent of the brown earth, the sere leaf, and the colourless calm of twilight, and told me of the creature's times and seasons. The big, dark eyes, their marvellous beauty and expressiveness dimmed by death, and the long, sensitive ears, one ripped by the falcon's talon and both slightly bent at the tip with age, were suggestive of persecution, and of a haunting fear banished only with the coming of night, when, perchance, ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... whoredom in the case of the children of Israel also.—The reason why the whoredom is here attributed to the face, and the adultery to the breasts, is well given by Manger: "We need not have any difficulty about seeing adultery attributed to the very face and breasts. There is a certain expressiveness in this conciseness which demonstrates, as it were before our eyes, that, in her whole deportment, the wife was given over to sensuality, and that her whole aim was only to excite to it, and to practise it. For the face is, with women, the sign of dissolute lasciviousness—as Horace ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... lightly and as imperceptibly as possible, without any unnecessary sweep of the moving foot, and in all changes that foot should be moved first which does not support the weight of the body. All action should be graceful in mechanism and definite in expressiveness. The speaker should keep his place—all his motions may be easily made in one square yard, but the stage or dramatic action ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... principle of significance may be pushed too far, just as the principle of decorative or purely formal beauty may be emphasized too exclusively. But is there any real antagonism between the elements of form and significance, beauty and expressiveness? This question has been debated ever since the time of Winckelmann and Lessing. The controversy over the work of such artists as Wagner, Browning, Whitman, Rodin has turned largely ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Cantor, of which Mr. Sowerby sprang, set her mouth and fan at work to delineate total distinctions, as it were from the egg to the empyrean. Her stature was rather short, all of it conversational, at the eyebrows, the shoulders, the finger-tips, the twisting shape; a ballerina's expressiveness; and her tongue dashed half sentences through and among these hieroglyphs, loosely and funnily candid. Anybody might hear that she had gone gambling into the City, and that she had got herself into a mess, and that by great ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... forerunners of the great masters of its close, and often reach perfection, within the narrow limits which they chose to impose on their work. Their sculpture shares with the paintings of Botticelli and the churches of Brunelleschi that profound expressiveness, that intimate impress of an indwelling soul, which is the peculiar fascination of the art of Italy in that century. Their works have been much neglected, and often almost hidden away amid the frippery of modern decoration, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... to throw off numerous intellectuals, as much at home in English as their fellow Americans, but critical of the American emotions, and the American way of thinking, as only a brain formed by different traditions can be. Soon the Mediterranean races domiciled here will pass into literary expressiveness. It is as impossible that we should not have criticism of the national tradition expressed in our literature as that an international congress should agree upon questions ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... which the Italian masters treated figure-subjects in their pen-and-bistre studies. And just as he had imitated the Rogers vignettes in his boyhood, now in his youth he tried to emulate the fine abstract flow and searching expressiveness of the etched line, and the studied breadth of shade, by using the quill-pen with washes. At first he kept pretty closely to monochrome. His object was form, and his special talent was for draughtsmanship rather than for colour. But it was this winter's study of the "Liber ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... was much pleased with Susan's contralto. "You do not know how to sing," said he. "You sing in your throat and you've got all the faults of parlor singers. But the voice is there—and much expressiveness—much temperament. Also, you have intelligence—and that will make a very little voice go a ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... the modulation and use of the voice. Indeed, gymnastic exercises are indispensable aids to proper training in reading, which, as an art of a high order, is immediately dependent upon position, habits of breathing, the consequent power of voice, and expressiveness of tone. I am fully satisfied that much more may be done in the early period of school life than is usually accomplished. In the district mixed schools the primary pupils receive but little attention, and they are not infrequently occupied from one to three years in obtaining an imperfect knowledge ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... and expansion of mind. Immediately above Reason is a region producing Pliability and Versatility, which greatly assists the reasoning faculty in mastering unfamiliar truth. Admiration, adjacent to Imagination, gives great power of appreciation and recognition of merit. Sincerity and Candor or Expressiveness also add much to the capacity for attaining truth; and Liberality, between Foresight and Benevolence, adds much to the expansion of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... expressiveness of single lines as symbols of the grandest phases of human Life. And when one studies Greek Art, the whole motive of it seems so childlike and so simple that the impulse to seek for that little Naiad which is the fountain and source of it all is irresistible. Look at the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... often pause, while showing some expressive gestures, and say, smiling: "But you Americans do not express yourselves in gestures. You do not 'move' as much as we do." And again, when insisting on the expressiveness of the shoulders when raised ("the shoulders are the thermometer of passion," said Delsarte) she would conclude: "But all this is not American; you Americans do not shrug ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... it that constituted the value of this tribute—the beauty and expressiveness of the action? She gave her Lord the best thing she had! She felt that to Him, in addition to what He had done for her own soul, she owed the most valued life ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... now and then one comes across a German word untranslatable in its compact volume of expressiveness. How weakly am I forced to render Freundschaft here! "Outmarching," though a literal, is a poor equivalent for Ausmarsch. In the old Scottish language we find an exact correspondent for aus; the "Furthmarch" gives the ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... succeeded so well that in three or four hundred years they had changed the very face of Europe. They had covered the country with beautiful sumptuous buildings, expressing the genius of free unions of free men, unrivalled since for their beauty and expressiveness; and they bequeathed to the following generations all the arts, all the industries, of which our present civilization, with all its achievements and promises for the future, is only a further development. And when we now look to the forces ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... exercise. He has fancy, and he frequently stutters into imagination; but the imp that controls his heart corrupts his taste and taints his sense of beauty, and the result is that he has a malicious satisfaction in deliberately choosing words whose uncouthness finds no extenuation in their expressiveness, and in forging elaborate metaphors which disgust rather than delight. His description of a storm at sea is among the least unfavorable specimens of this perversion of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... to have done more than very moderate justice to the exceeding grace and dignity and the inexhaustible expressiveness of which this kind of metre is capable; but I can say that I have never attempted to write in it in the absence of that one justification of and prime qualification for its use, namely, the impulse of some thought that "voluntary ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... skill, but it is not to be compared with even the small works of the composer's mature period, which commences with his Opus 47. Its character, however, is altogether strong and virile, containing many passages of pure tonal beauty and eloquent expressiveness. The orchestra is written for with skill and imagination and is on equal terms with the solo instrument. The only fault of the work is that its pianoforte part is ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... is a thing which is generally composed of brass or iron. It has frequently a violent resemblance to the "human face divine," or the ravenous expressiveness of a beast of prey. It assumes a variety of phases under peculiar vinous influences. A gentleman, in whose veracity and experience we have the most unlimited confidence, for a series of years kept an account of the phenomena of his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the Hull-House residents to the pre-Raphaelites recognized that they above all English speaking poets and painters reveal "the sense of the expressiveness of outward things" which is at once the glory and the limitation ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams |
