"Incompleteness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... came back. Her voice, her smile, the very gown and cap she wore, and the needlework she carried in her hand, came sensibly before her. Yet how long ago it seemed! Christie remembered how many times she had taken it with her to the fields, when the incompleteness of their fences during the first year of their stay on the farm had made the "herding" of the sheep and cows necessary that the grain might be safe. She had read it in the woods in spring-time, by the firelight ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... man, whom she divided into three classes: les trompeurs, les trompes, les trompettes. According to her judgment, man is either fatiguing or, if brilliantly endowed, usually false or jealous; but she realized, also, her own shortcomings, the incompleteness of her faculties. "The force of her thought does not reach talent; her intelligence is active and responsive, but fails to respond. She often shows a sovereign disdain for herself, everybody, and everything. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... the little dinner took place—and I promise you we shall come to it in the very next chapter—a tall and elegant middle-aged gentleman, who might have passed for an earl but that there was a slight incompleteness about his hands and feet, the former being uncommonly red, and the latter large and irregular, was introduced to Mrs. Timmins by the page, who announced him as ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... is also clear how unsuccessful this attempted philosophy is in many ways; and with what difficulties and mysteries it is burdened. At best it can prescind from finalism by a confession of incompleteness and philosophical bankruptcy; by resolutely refusing to face the problem of the whole—of the ultimate whence and whither. If it would positively exclude theism or finalism it must ascribe all seeming order and adaptation to the persistence ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... sunshine of love and light and bliss pours in, when the part feels its oneness with the whole, and the One Life thrills each vein. This is the noble truth that gives vitality to even the crudest presentation of the "forgiveness of sins," and that makes it often, despite its intellectual incompleteness, an inspirer to pure and spiritual living. And this is the truth, as seen in ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... up the form, size, habits, periods, belonging to an animal never beheld by human eyes, even to the mingling contrasts of scales and wings, of feathers and hair. Through the combined lenses of science and imagination, we look back into ancient times, so dreadful in their incompleteness, that it may well have been the task of seraphic faith, as well as of cherubic imagination, to behold in the wallowing monstrosities of the terror-teeming earth, the prospective, quiet, age-long labour of God preparing the world with all its humble, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... do struggle confusedly, with pitiful leaders and infinite waste and endless delay; that it is to our indisciplines and to the dishonesties and tricks our incompleteness provokes, that the prolongation of this war is to be ascribed, I readily admit. At the outbreak of this war I had hoped to see militarism felled within ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... memoir for any thing like a conception of the character; consequently we can better judge of its probable effect upon other minds. We pronounce it a portrait successfully taken—a piece of uncommonly skillful biography. There is no gaudy exaggeration in it,—no stiffness, no incompleteness. We see the individual character we are invited to see, and in contemplating it, we have all along a feeling of personal acquisition. We have found rare treasure; a true woman to be admired, a daughter whose worth surpasses estimation, a friend to ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... than I attempted to prove to the man who thought he was Christ that he was labouring under an error. I merely remark here on the fact that both cases have the same kind of completeness and the same kind of incompleteness. You can explain a man's detention at Hanwell by an indifferent public by saying that it is the crucifixion of a god of whom the world is not worthy. The explanation does explain. Similarly you may explain the order in the universe by saying that all things, even the souls ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... as the darkness of the shadows deepened, and the light of water and sky took on a deeper lucence before being extinguished, for the first time the sense of pain and the incompleteness of beautiful things entered his heart. The thing was wonderful; but it hurt. The sight of it filled him to the lips with a passion of uplift; and yet something lacked. And the lack of that ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... necessarily pure, communicates of its quality to whoever becomes aware of it, and thus in some measure counterweighs the lowering tendency. Moreover, the morally bad, deriving its character of evil from incompleteness, from the arresting or the perversion of good, like fruit plucked unripe, and being therefore outside the pale of the beautiful (the nature of which is completeness, fullness, perfection of life) cannot by itself be ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... money to all whom he could help or serve, from his literary friends down to the wretched libeller Ashe. Though impelled by the temper of his genius, by the period in which he lived, and by that fatality of his mission to which I have alluded, towards a poetic individualism, the inevitable incompleteness of which I have endeavored to explain, he by no means set it up as a standard. That he presaged the future with the prevision of genius is proved by his definition of poetry in his journal—a definition hitherto misunderstood, but yet the best I know: "Poetry ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... drawn from that evidence. So, here we must pass, in the first place, to the consideration of a matter which may seem foreign to the question under discussion. We must dwell upon the nature of the records, and the credibility of the evidence they contain; we must look to the completeness or incompleteness of those records themselves, before we turn to that which they contain and reveal. The question of the credibility of the history, happily for us, will not require much consideration, for, in this history, unlike those of human origin, there can be no ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... silently whatever conceit and insults may escape you. Perhaps we may become friends. But we cannot remain as we are. The blow you struck the other day must be answered for. I ask satisfaction, and the incompleteness and vulgarity of a pugilistic encounter will not suit me. I propose, therefore, as we cannot resort to the regular duel of pistols, (for reasons so good and evident that I need not name them), that after the example of the ancients, whose history we are now daily reading, ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... muscular operations of tone-production are concerned, and the laws of acoustics bearing on the vocal action, no new discovery can well be expected. But in this very fact, the exhaustive attention paid to the mechanical operations of the voice, is seen the incompleteness of Vocal Science. Attention has been turned exclusively to the mechanical features of tone-production, and in consequence many important facts bearing on ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... deportment of the manumitted four million slaves of the Southern United States later on, bore glorious testimony to the humanizing effects which the religion of charity, clutched at and grasped in fragments, and understood with childlike incompleteness, had produced within ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... undefiled, but was limited and obscured by the preponderance of dogmatic interests. Protestantism was not delivered from the womb of the western Church of the middle ages in full power and equipment, like Athene from the head of Jupiter. The incompleteness of its ethical view, the splitting up of its general conceptions into a series of particular dogmas, the tendency to express its beliefs as a hard and fast whole; are defects which soon made Protestantism appear to disadvantage in comparison with the wealth of ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... to sit at the window and watch the panorama of the street below. The broad, sunny Springtown thoroughfare, with its low, irregular wooden structures, likely, at any moment, to give place to ambitious business "blocks"; with its general air of incompleteness and transitoriness brought into strong relief against the near background of the Rocky Mountains, was alive with human interest. Yet, singularly enough, it was not the cowboy, mounted on his half-broken bronco that interested ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... any truth be called the "epitome of mankind." On the contrary, the distinguishing features of his life are its incompleteness, aimlessness, imperfection, insignificance, neglect of talents and waste of opportunities. "He saw and approved the best," says Brian Fairfax, "but did too often deteriora sequi." He is more severely but more justly judged by himself. In gay ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... by ourselves? Will there be no sense of incompleteness if the many are outside, missing it all because they missed their End? Will the glory make us glad if they are somewhere far away from it and God? Will not heaven be almost an empty place to one who has never tried to fill it? Yet there is room, oh so much ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... valuable episodes of the Lord's life. If the fourth Evangelist had treated the triple narrative in the way that many of us have treated it, regarding it as a sin against the Holy Spirit to suggest that there was any incompleteness or any misleading abbreviations in it, we should have lost the wonderful accounts of the conversation with Nicodemus and with the woman at the well." [Footnote: Inspiration and the Bible, ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... in after years, so we see that Nature often sketches, as it were, a living portrait, which she leaves in its rudimentary condition, perhaps for the reason that earth has no colors which can worthily fill in an outline too perfect for humanity. The sketch is left in its consummate incompleteness because this mortal life is not rich enough to carry out ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in [a]p is a final sound. With initial sounds the case is different. Let the lips be closed, and let an attempt be made to form the syllable pa by suddenly opening them. The sound appears incomplete; but its incompleteness is at the beginning of the sound, and not at the end of it. In the natural course of things there would have been a current of breath preceding, and this current would have given a vibration, now wanting. All the sound that is formed here is formed, not by the arrest ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... taken in the African race, and because of his belief in its future. He would also interest readers of the JOURNAL in his native island, Jamaica, where, although the creation still bears marks of human imperfection and incompleteness, a community has been brought into being in which the racial elements, in such fierce and embittered antagonism elsewhere, are gradually, but surely, blending into a whole of common citizenship. T.H. MACDERMOT, Editor of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... "in my experience—and I speak only of my own—testifies to the incompleteness of life, nay, even to its preponderating unhappiness. The strong body is found allied to a stunted soul. The soaring soul is chained by bodily weakness to the ground. Help turns to hindrance, or discloses itself too late in what we have ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... was blooming hard by the leg of an old, black table tombstone, and he stopped to contemplate the random apologue. They stood forth on the cold earth with a trenchancy of contrast; and he was struck with a sense of incompleteness in the day, the season, and the beauty that surrounded him—the chill there was in the warmth, the gross black clods about the opening primroses, the damp earthy smell that was everywhere intermingled with the scents. The voice of the aged Torrance within rose in an ecstasy. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has none in experience or in analogy. The general character of the works of nature is, on the one hand, goodness both in design and effect; and, on the other hand, a liability to difficulty and to objections, if such objections be allowed, by reason of seeming incompleteness or uncertainty in attaining their end. Christianity participates of this character. The true similitude between nature and revelation consists in this—that they each bear strong marks of their original, that they each also bear appearances ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... that had been obscure in her view of him rolled away like the mist in the garden, leaving the structure of his being bare and stark to her critical gaze. Nothing confused her now; nothing perplexed her in her knowledge of him. The old sense of incompleteness, of inadequacy, returned; but she understood the cause of it now; she saw with perfect clearness the defect from which it had arisen. He had missed the best because, with every virtue of the mind, he lacked the single one of the heart. Possessing every grace of character except humanity, ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... stand scattered and scraggy, like individual bristles on a bald pate. Their spring has been borrowed from summer, for the leafage here does not begin until late in June. The whole scenery seems to array itself for the tourist like a country wife, with many an incompleteness in its toilet, and with a kind of haggard apology for being late. Rough log-houses stand here and there among the laurels. The tanned gentlemen standing about look like California miners, as you see them in the illustrations to Bret Harte's stories. Through this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... down suddenly in a perfect uproar of applause, and drank water. In spite of the applause he was haunted by a sense of incompleteness. There was something he had left out of his speech, something he had particularly wanted to say. It seemed to him more vital, more important, than anything ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... definitely to dispose of the important subject committed to its charge, and presents this report for its own justification, and for the additional purpose of notifying the succeeding Congress of the incompleteness of its labors, and that they ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... the more strong, because the writer has told only that, and left the rest to our imagination. This illustrates one feature of the author's skill. He knows the effect producible by leaving circumstances in the incompleteness and obscurity in which they often present themselves to the senses of a single person; he tells just what that person could have perceived, and leaves the sketch to be finished by his reader. Thus, when Porteous is hurried away to execution, we attend ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... frame of mind to make love to a woman. He had pictured that scene as one of the great moments of life, so subtly beautiful and dramatic, so exalted and exulting, so perfect in its very incompleteness, that not a lifetime of suffering and disappointment could blur it. And he felt exactly like the flat tyre of Janet's distinguished vernacular. Even his body was worn out, for he had had but nine hours' sleep in two nights. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... shrug, wondering just where and how he had blundered. A sense of artistic incompleteness mingled with a keen personal sense of chagrin. Did the girl care less for him than he had thought? Or was it merely the instinct of self-preservation ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... fulness of His life. We have only been like goldseekers, who have contented themselves as yet with washing the precious grains out of the gravel of the river. There are great reefs filled with the ore that we have not touched. Thank God for the necessary incompleteness of our 'apprehending.' It is the very salt of life. To have realised our aims, to have fulfilled our ideals, to have sucked dry the cluster of the grapes is the death of aspiration, of hope, of blessedness; and to have the distance beckoning, and all experience 'an ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the Old and New Statistical Accounts of Scotland were full of significant, but wholly undigested details. How should I succeed where so many others had failed? Where should I find records which would enable me to complete incompleteness and reduce chaos to some comprehensive order? One afternoon, when I found myself alone in the house, I was thinking these things over in one of the silent libraries, and staring again at the backs of books I had already opened, when, purely out of curiosity, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... causes for admiration, the real greatness of America, could be found partly through facing its incompleteness and defects, partly through contemplating the character of the greatest and most typical ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... money, may go on, as in the interminable prolonging of a straight line, if its people forget to follow some spiritual design of life which curbs them and transforms them into an organic whole. For growth is not that enlargement which is merely adding to the dimensions of incompleteness. Growth is the movement of a whole towards a yet fuller wholeness. Living things start with this wholeness from the beginning of their career. A child has its own perfection as a child; it would be ugly if it appeared ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... in the period of the French revolution; (we find traces of it in the works of Rousseau and in Goethe's Werther); it was developed by the romanticists and represents the typical form of modern love with all its incompleteness and inexhausted possibilities. The achievement of this eagerly desired unity, which would be synonymous with the victory of personality over the limitations of body and soul, is the great problem of modern time in the domain of eroticism. The characteristic of this third stage ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... and admire it, and at the same time, in me at least, it always excites a kind of restlessness, a kind of uneasiness, even melancholy. What is the meaning of it? Is it that in the face of nature we are more vividly conscious of all our incompleteness, our indefiniteness, or have we little of that content with which nature is satisfied, but something else—I mean to say, what ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... is known by its fruits,—and the fruits of chance are incoherence, incompleteness, unsteadiness, the stammering utterance of blind, unreasoning force. A coherence that binds all the geological ages in one chain, a stability of purpose that completes in the beings born to-day an intention expressed in the first creatures that swam in the Silurian ocean or crept upon its shores, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... deal will fall to the ground. The dictionary portion of the Britannica is not to be compared with its {285} treatises; the part called Miscellaneous and Lexicographical in the Metropolitana[465] is a great failure. The defect is incompleteness. The biographical portion, for example, of the Britannica is very defective: of many names of note in literature and science, which become known to the reader from the treatises, there is no account whatever in the dictionary. So that the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... his terrible clutch on her conscience and her deepest dread; she writhed under the demonstrable truth of the character he had given to her conduct, and yet her whole soul rebelled against it as unfair from its incompleteness. He, meanwhile, felt the impetus of his indignation diverted toward Philip. He did not know how much of an old boyish repulsion and of mere personal pride and animosity was concerned in the bitter severity of the words by which he meant to do the duty ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... their worth. It is by his very perfection, by the very completeness of his triumph, that Racine loses. He is so absolute, so special a product of French genius, that it is well-nigh impossible for any one not born a Frenchman to appreciate him to the full; it is by his incompleteness, and to some extent even by his imperfections, that Moliere gains. Of all the great French classics, he is the least classical. His fluid mind overflowed the mould he worked in. His art, sweeping over the whole range of comic emotions, from the wildest buffoonery ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... boys—ay, and grown men and women too—got up from Tom Brown's School-days consciously the better from the reading of it! But there was withal a vague feeling of incompleteness, an unsatisfied longing. The story left off too soon. One wanted to know more of Tom after his school-days. And then, it was, after all, a novel, a fiction. One would have liked to come across that Tom, and perhaps felt half afraid that he might ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... our instruments, resulting in that incompleteness of which we just spoke, should once more suggest a reflection which, while in no wise original or startling, is specially relevant to the subject under discussion: for if God's knowledge necessarily and immeasurably transcends ours, if He knows more than we, does it not follow {106} ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the latter view seems truer to us only because we misunderstand the manner in which inspiration is limited. Possibly poets bewail the incompleteness of the flash which is revealed to them, not because they failed to see all the glories of heaven and earth, but because it was a vision merely, and the key to its expression in words was not given them. "Passion and expression are beauty itself," says William ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... frustrated by that fearful self-consciousness which made him dread the possibility of attracting attention. There was a slight shade of melancholy in his character. Life had been a disappointment to him, and he was haunted by a sense of the incompleteness ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... incomplete, and adding: "If he recovers, he may be able to finish what he began; if not, it is the opinion of most that know him that the treatment which he here complains of, and some others that he would have spoken of, have been the apparent cause of his disaster." There is no sign of incompleteness in the Appeal; and the Conclusion by the Publisher, while the author lay "in a weak and languishing condition, neither able to go on nor likely to recover, at least in any short time," gives a most artistic finishing stroke to it. Defoe never interfered ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... I have taken in something almost its parallel as part of certain picturesqueness of scenes in other countries. But I am LIVING with this and also, through relationship to Rosy, I, in a measure, belong to it, and it belongs to me. You and I may have often seen in American villages crudeness, incompleteness, lack of comfort, and the composition of a picture, a rough ugliness the result of haste and unsettled life which stays nowhere long, but packs up its goods and chattels and wanders farther afield in search of something ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... audience had broken up forthwith, under his abstract, pensive gaze. Men drifted off the verandah in pairs or alone without loss of time, without offering a remark, as if the last image of that incomplete story, its incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made discussion in vain and comment impossible. Each of them seemed to carry away his own impression, to carry it away with him like a secret; but there was only one ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... are strong that rules of conduct are not inherent in the human mind, that men become moral to the extent that they are taught the principles of justice, and grow one-sided in their ideas of virtue through incompleteness in their moral education. What we call sinfulness is largely a matter of custom and convention. Men cannot properly be said to sin when their actions are checked by no conscientious scruples, and what one people ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... maiden is obedient. By her acts she will link the past to the future, bind together the two eternities. But she is incomplete, this maiden, and being immature she is unaware of her incompleteness. Nevertheless she is the creature of the law of the race, and from her infancy she prepares herself for the task she is to perform. Hers is a certain definite organism, somewhat different from all other female organisms. Consequently ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... when lacking in stamina. Many who have grown beyond adult age are still undeveloped, so far as physical condition and vigor is concerned, and this lack of physical development or vitality means immaturity-incompleteness. It means that one is short on manhood or womanhood. This statement, that one's personality, under such circumstances, is not completely brought out, may seem strange to some; but careful reasoning will soon verify its accuracy. Success of the right ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... servants, broidered vestments of the priests and pallid torches of a hundred candles belonged to the Rome of Caesar Borgia and not to the Rome of Caesar Nero. Into that singular building, impressive in its incompleteness, crept no echo of the catacombs, and the sighing of the reed notes was voluptuous as a lover's whisper, and as far removed from the murmurs of the Christian martyrs. Here were pomp and majesty with all their emotional appeal. Mystery alone was lacking. The robes of Cardinal Pescara ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... the last and final and most precious reward All beggars, each in his own way Always an incompleteness somewhere, and the shadow Assent to what must be Ax on his shoulder proceeding toward a grindstone Beating the dirge of yesterday or the tattoo of to-morrow Begum, of Bengal, days out from Canton—homeward bound! Best friend I have ever had, but is the best man I have known Brown's Hotel Byron ...
— Widger's Quotations from Albert Bigelow Paine on Mark Twain • David Widger
... If he were glad Who cannot keep thy heart from care, Or shelter from the whip of pain The bosom where his head hath lain? Poor sentinel, that may not guard The door that love itself unbarred! Who in the sweetness Of his service knows its incompleteness, And while he sings Of life eternal, feels the coldness of ...
— Songs of Two • Arthur Sherburne Hardy
... most authoritative book on Italy written from a detached and impartial point of view say that "on the whole, one is bound to conclude that the Government has stretched the Law of Guarantees in its own interest, but that the brevity and incompleteness of the Law is chiefly responsible for the difficulty in construing it."[570] Undoubtedly it may be affirmed that the spirit of the Law has been observed with consistency, though the exigencies of temporal interest have compelled not infrequently ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... life as he was, so joyous in his deportment, so physically well-developed; he made no impression of incompleteness, of maimed or stinted, nature." Yet his friends "habitually allowed for him, exacting no strict obedience to conventional rules, and hardly noticing his ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... were struggling to make head against the abominable pettiness of German prejudice. But, withal, I cannot find that his life was great, as a whole; I cannot see him caring for his land, for the poor, for religion, for humanity; he was always a restless soul; and the ceaseless wear of incompleteness finally killed, as a maniac, him whom a broader Love might have kept alive as a ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... with her foibles. All was at an end—that double thread of brilliant good-nature and worldly selfishness, with the one strand of sound principle sometimes coming into sight. The life was gone from the earth in its incompleteness, without an unravelling of its complicated texture, and the wandering utterances that revealed how entirely the brother stood first with her, added poignancy to his regret for having been harsh with her. It could hardly be otherwise than that his censures, ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of comparatively modern times—certainly none in our history—has occurred so extraordinary in some of its phases, as the negro riot of 1741. We cannot fully appreciate it, not merely because of the incompleteness of some of its details, nor from the lapse of time, but because of our inability to place ourselves in the position or state of mind of the inhabitants of New York City at that period. We can no more throw ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... influence an unreal series of events, and in the case of the object of beauty in statue or painting by the impossibility of possession. The world of art is thus thought of as one of pure contemplation, a place of escape from the difficulties, the pangs, and the incompleteness that beset all action. It is true that the imagined world creates special conditions for emotion, and that the will does not act in respect to that world; but does this imply any radical difference in the ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... each severe in outline, plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as Botticelli's flowers always are. Botticelli meant all that imagery to be altogether pleasurable; and it was partly an incompleteness of resources, inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued and chilled it; but his predilection for minor tones counts also; and what is unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... is not finished, is not work at all; it is merely a botch. We often see this defect of incompleteness in a child, which increases in youth. All about the house, everywhere, there are half-finished things. It is true that children often become tired of things which they begin with enthusiasm; but there is a great difference in children about finishing what they undertake. A ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... life that great master of calculations the most abstruse could not accurately cast up a simple sum in addition. Nothing brought him to the end of his majestic tether like dot and carry one. Notable type of our human incompleteness, where men might deem our studies had made us most complete! Notable type, too, of that grandest order of all human genius which seems to arrive at results by intuition, which a child might pose by a row of figures on a slate, while it is solving the laws that link the stars to infinity! But revenons ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of its incompleteness, and very much regret much of its lack of more definite information regarding the distribution of certain species, and with regard to that portion of the Province in north and northeastern interior, which, I have no doubt, is ...
— Catalogue of British Columbia Birds • Francis Kermode
... father must know of it until he was gone. Lucie should be spared the pain of separation; and her father, always reluctant to turn his thoughts towards the dangerous ground of old, should come to the knowledge of the step, as a step taken, and not in the balance of suspense and doubt. How much of the incompleteness of his situation was referable to her father, through the painful anxiety to avoid reviving old associations of France in his mind, he did not discuss with himself. But, that circumstance too, had had ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... that drew him with all but resistless power was the deeper meaning between the lines. He knew that each day the incompleteness of her life had been borne in upon her with crushing force. He knew that the mad impulses which had expressed themselves in luxury, dress, extravagance, balls and bizarre entertainments were but the strangled cries of a sorrowing heart. And ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... This anaemic incompleteness of Emerson's character can be traced to the philosophy of his race; at least it can be followed in that philosophy. There is an implication of a fundamental falsehood in every bit of Transcendentalism, including Emerson. That falsehood consists in the theory of the self-sufficiency ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... he may be a good critic, but he is no painter. He must be absorbed in what he sees to the exclusion of everything else; impartiality is a virtue to all the world except him. There will always be a onesidedness; either the conception or the embodying of it halts, is only partially realized; some incompleteness, some mystery, some apparent want of coincidence between form and meaning is a necessity to the artist, and if he does not find it, he will invent it. Hence the embarrassment of some of the English Pre-Raphaelitists, particularly in dealing with the human form. They have no hesitation in pursuing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... the romantic spirit, mentioned by Dr. Hedge in common with many other critics, is the indefiniteness or incompleteness of its creations. This is a consequence, of course, of its sense of mystery and aspiration. Schopenbauer said that music was the characteristic modern art, because of its subjective, indefinite character. Pursuing ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... whole, when Sir Frederick Roberts sent me his view on the defence proposals, I was struck with the contrast between the completeness of the manner in which a defence scheme for India has been considered, and the incompleteness, to say the least of it, of all strategic plans at home. Sir Charles Macgregor put on record at the same time his view that a mere offensive on the North-West Frontier of India would be folly, if not madness, and that it would ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... genuine satisfaction is the growing feeling of fraternal regard and unification of all sections of our country, the incompleteness of which has too long delayed realization of the highest blessings of the Union. The spirit of patriotism is universal and is ever increasing in fervor. The public questions which now most engross us are lifted far above either partisanship, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... return, it is completed by less skilful hands, a less delicate conception, and, while the result is pleasing, the perfect harmony of proportion is wanting, and those who see it feel conscious of its incompleteness, yet scarcely ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... that of their behavior, mental life, and social relations. But certainly no one who is conversant with the behavioristic, psychological and sociological literature could do otherwise than emphasize its incompleteness and inadequacy. For our knowledge of behavior has come mostly from naturalistic observation, scarcely at all from experimentation; our knowledge of social relations is obviously meager and of uncertain value; and finally, ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... look at the Darwinian theory by itself, we see at once that it is incomplete, and the consideration of this incompleteness gravely modifies the conclusion which would otherwise be rightly drawn from it, and which, indeed, Darwin himself seems disposed to draw. For the theory rests on two main pillars, the transmission ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... matter was settled at a personal interview; in many cases the Prince prepared a memorandum of an important interview; but there are a considerable number of such correspondences, where no record is preserved of the eventual solution, and this incompleteness is regrettable, but, by the nature of ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... characteristic of Apicius for incompleteness and want of precise directions, without which the experiment in the hands of an inexperienced operator ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... pyramid-like foundation, was the site of this tower. On the west of the Euphrates, however, is a vast mound called Birs Nimrood, which used to be regarded as the ruins of the Tower of Babel. The fact that it early gave the impression of incompleteness favors this claim. Nebuchadnezzar says on a tablet that another king began it but left it unfinished. It fell into disrepair and was completed by Nebuchadnezzar and was used as one of the great temples. ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... century,) the four Evangelical narratives were collected into a volume and dignified with the title of "The Gospel,"—S. Mark's narrative was furnished by some unknown individual with its actual termination in order to remedy its manifest incompleteness; and that this volume became the standard of the Alexandrine recension of the text: in other words, became the fontal source of a mighty family of MSS. by Griesbach designated as "Alexandrine." But there will have been here and there in existence ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... numbers. The process of calculating general prices and changes in them has in it, inevitably, something of arbitrariness and incompleteness. For not all prices can be included, but only those of articles of somewhat standardized grades and those that are pretty regularly sold in markets where prices are publicly quoted. Any list of articles ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... those which are not finished. With this work such persons could have no concern. Yet, by what appears a great error of judgement, this worse than unfinished picture was made the subject of a public exhibition, though in a state of incompleteness which the artist during life would not permit his nearest friend to behold. And as if this violation of his wishes were not enough, a stolen and travestied copy soon appeared, and was heralded by placards, on which the words "Great Picture by Washington Allston" were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... to be in love with you," he said. "Because love hitherto has been one of the abominations. In the world I have destroyed love existed. It was the foul paradox of egoism. Man, feeling suddenly the torment of his incompleteness, embraced woman. He was inspired by the mania to transform his desires ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... related in my behoof, not indeed an entire story, for I would not seem to foist my stories in among those of so honourable a company as that with which I have made you acquainted, but a part of one, that its very incompleteness may shew that it is not one of them: wherefore, addressing my assailants, I say:—That in our city there was in old time a citizen named Filippo Balducci, a man of quite low origin, but of good substance and ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... who said, "Ecclesiam Andreae, paene vetustate dirutam, novam ex integro, ut hodie apparet, aedificavit," does not seem to suspect the incompleteness of Gundulf's work of which he gives the following quaint account. He tells how he "re-edified the great church at Rochester, erected the Priorie, and where as he founde but half a dozen secular priests" (the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... figure, for the little cockle-shell ducked, and dived, and rocked, and tipped, and curtseyed, and tilted, as I knelt first on one side and then on the other fitting her, till I was almost in despair; however, I got a sort of pattern at last, and by dint of some pertinacious efforts—which, in their incompleteness, did not escape some sarcastic remarks from Mr. —— on the capabilities of 'women of genius' applied to common-place objects—the matter was accomplished, and the little Dolphin rejoiced in very tidy back and seat cushions, covered with brown holland, and bound with green serge. My ambition ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... in, signifies "penetration," "motion towards," or simply "remaining in a place," or, again, "permanence." M, like the Latin ab or ex, indicates "motion from." R expresses "uncertainty" or "incompleteness," and is employed to convert a statement into a question, or a relative pronoun into one of inquiry. G, like the Greek a or anti, generally signifies "opposition" or "negation;" ca is, as aforesaid, intensitive, and is employed, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... Church was able to settle the real basis and the chief lines of its reformed constitution. It is not, as Mr. Gladstone says, "a heroic history"; there is room enough in the looseness of some of its arrangements, and the incompleteness of others, for diversity of opinion and for polemical criticism. But the result, in fact, of this liberty and this incompleteness has been, not that the Church has declined lower and lower into indifference and negation, but that it has steadily mounted in successive periods to a higher ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... than that "she was never suited to her fiance—far too good for him." Others "had always thought how it would be; it would take a good deal more yet to tame Livingstone." Sir Henry Fallowfield observed, "Nothing could be more natural and correct. The lady was a saint, and there is always a sort of incompleteness about saints if they are not made martyrs. Suffering is their ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... afterwards gave birth to a son, who was but one-half of a human being, having one arm, one leg, one eye, and so on. This child, SIMPANG IMPANG, whose only companions were the animals, often complained bitterly to his mother of his incompleteness. One day SIMPANG IMPANG discovered some PADI grain which the rat had hidden in a hole. He spread it out to dry on a leaf, which he put on top of a stump. On this the rat demanded the PADI back; and ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the center of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness. And although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained, is still an essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital part therein, yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are personal not ritual acts, the individual ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the full orchestra at the last 'philharmonic,' supplying the missing notes, the beginning and the end of some noble idea, now vainly struggling with the difficulties and incongruities of its new position, its maimed members mourning their incompleteness, its tortured spirit longing for the body given ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... by all the providences and events of our changeful lives. Our sorrows by their poignancy, our joys by their incompleteness and their transiency, alike call us to Him in whom alone the sorrows can be soothed and the joys made full and remain. Our duties, by their heaviness, call us to turn ourselves to Him, in whom alone we can find the strength to fill the role ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Do you think I'm such a fool that I don't see it? It's been coming on a long time. I know you're not happy. You're not satisfied with things as they are. As they are, you know, there's a sort of incompleteness, something wanting, isn't there?" ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... all regions, 'Not as though'; the higher up, the more clearly we see the summit. The ideal grows loftier, as partially realised. The mountain seems comparatively low and easy till we begin to climb. We should be continually driven by a sense of our incompleteness, and drawn by the fair vision of unattained possibilities. In all regions, to be satisfied with the attained is to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... far off upon the sea. Then—then I knew that I had only half my dream, and I was ungrateful, Maurice. I almost wished that I had never had this half, because it made me realize what it would be to have the whole. It made me realize the mutilation, the incompleteness of being in perfect beauty without love. And now—now I've actually got all I ever wanted, and much more, because I didn't know then at all what it would really mean to me to have it. And, besides, I never ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... a tantalizing incompleteness about his personal reminiscences. Elizabeth was one of those persons who like to begin a friendship with a full statement of their position, their previous life, and the causes which led up to their being in this particular spot at this particular time. At their next meeting, ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... of Doing And the other dream of Done; The first spring in the pursuing, The first pride in the Begun, First recoil from incompleteness in the face ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... considering the general relation between the inclination of planetoid orbits and their eccentricities, it is probable that among the orbits of these undetected planetoids are many of the most eccentric. But while recognizing the incompleteness of the evidence, it seems to me that it goes far to justify the hypothesis of Olbers, and is quite incongruous with that of Laplace. And as having the same meanings let me not omit the remarkable fact concerning the planetoids discovered by D'Arrest, that "if their orbits are figured ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... humanity, she would breathe into my soul renewed inspiration, saying, "Pity rather than blame those who persecute us." So closely interwoven have been our lives, our purposes, and experiences that, separated, we have a feeling of incompleteness—united, such strength of self-assertion that no ordinary obstacles, difficulties, or dangers ever appear to us insurmountable. Reviewing the life of Susan B. Anthony, I ever liken her to the Doric column in Grecian architecture, so simply, so grandly she stands, free ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west, Toll slowly! And I 'paused' to think God's greatness flowed around our incompleteness,— Round ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... and more masterful than the studied duplicity and elegant effeminacy of the Italians of the fifteenth century, and, after the battle of Fornovo, they returned to France justly proud and foolishly confident, notwithstanding the incompleteness of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... last of the series of historical festivals which mark the springtime of our Christian year. And without this one the rest would leave us with a sense of incompleteness; for we should be without its gift of the abiding and indwelling Spirit, and the ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... matron made any serious appeal to him. The actresses who have been often mentioned in connection with his name were, for the most part, mere passing favorites. The woman who in life was Dora made him feel the same incompleteness that he has described in his best-known book. The companion to whom he clung in his later years was neither a light-minded creature like Miss Beadnell, nor an undeveloped, high-tempered woman like the one he married, nor a mere domestic, friendly creature ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... of advanced age, wistful yet prophetic. The skin, too, has the rare ivory delicacy of old age, of old age gently dealt with and protected. The light is unobtrusive yet luminous—morning sunshine. The picture is utterly simple; the more so for its touch of incompleteness. The masses are broad, artless. It is tender, reverential, a sweet and solemn glorification of old age, and of the old ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... not taken that opportunity which the moment of victory gave us, of effectuating a government essentially strong and beneficial to the governed. The time therefore, we may expect, will come, when a second interference will be demanded, both by the recollection of our present conquest and the incompleteness of its consequences; and we shall be doomed to find, that we have won two hard-fought battles merely to enforce ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... Failing to find original observations adequate even to give a colour to the hypothesis, the reviewer sought to find flaws in the author's mode of reasoning, and concluded that "we are called upon to accept a hypothesis on the plea of want of knowledge." Defective information, vagueness, and incompleteness are charged upon the man whom we now delight to honour; "intellectual husks," we are told; are all that he offers. Professor Huxley, who lectured at the Royal Institution, on February 10, 1860, on "Species and Races and their Origin," ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... this twice and out of its scrappiness and incompleteness he gathered this much! that somebody who was about to be dismissed from an aeroplane factory for the very usual reason that he could not stand the terrific noise, had succeeded in either making or procuring plans of Uncle Sam's new aeroplane ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... capable of doing than by what he did. By serious students, however, the real worth of Coleridge will be differently estimated. For them his peculiar value to English literature is not only undiminished by the incompleteness of his work; it has been, in a certain sense, enhanced thereby. Or, perhaps, it would be more strictly accurate to say that the value could not have existed without the incompleteness. A Coleridge with the faculty of concentration, and the habit of method superadded—a Coleridge ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... of short sentences may be used with good results to describe rapid action. In conversation, also, sentences are generally short, and often grammatically incomplete, though they may be understood by the hearer. Sometimes this incompleteness is justified by the idiom of the language, but more often it is the result of carelessness on the part of the speaker. The hearer understands what is said either because he knows about what to expect, or because the expression is a familiar one. Such carelessness not only causes the omission of ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,"[2] are essentially and profoundly poetical. They have indeed a tragic inspiration. He is deeply imbued by the sense that human existence, at its best, is inadequate and disappointing. He feels, and submits to, its incompleteness and its limitations. With stately resignation he accepts the common fate, and turns a glance of calm disdain on all endeavours after a spurious consolation. All round him ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... most unfortunate that these real issues should be obscured by sex rivalry. There can be no real rivalry between a man's soul and his body, between science and religion, between man and woman. Such antagonisms rest back in the failure to realize the incompleteness of man or woman alone, for any purposes of life. And there is, too, that evil notion which still affects economics, that when two trade one must lose. The fact is that in all honest exchange buyer and seller gain alike, and ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... the top of a sheet of paper. The writing ended halfway down the page. Manifestly it was an abandoned beginning. And it was, it seemed to White, the last page of all this confusion of matter that dealt with the Second and Third Limitations. Its incompleteness made ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... of opulent companies which he knew were famous, and rooms where millionaires met in secret conclave, but the contrast awakened only his sense of humor. Yet he was always relieved after he had reached his own floor. Possibly its incompleteness and inchoate condition made it seem less lonely than the desolation of the finished and furnished rooms below, and it was only this recollection of past human occupancy ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... modesty among themselves. Custom regulates these matters, I suppose. I have never felt disposed to blush for my naked feet and arms while conversing with a lady on the beach at Long Branch, being snugly clad from head to foot in a flannel costume. But I confess to a shrinking sense of the incompleteness of the prescribed fig-leaves as I stand in the door of the bathing-machine at Tenby. To cover myself with the water as quickly as possible appears to be the only remedy, however, and I take a header from the doorsill. Ugh! The water is like ice! To one accustomed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... said in verse 17 is that when Sacrifices are done from a sense of duty, notwithstanding their incompleteness, they become efficacious. It is only when they are performed from desire of fruit that expiation becomes necessary if their completion be obstructed by any cause. Having thus applauded the Sacrifices (represented by acts) of the truly wise, other kinds of Sacrifices are indicated in verse 18. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Prussians were the better men was only a part, and a very small part, of the larger question. How do we discover which of any two nations is the purer in its life or in its aims? and, is not any judgment we form about it likely to be very defective, owing to the inevitable incompleteness of our premises? We are not now going to try to fix the place of either Prussia or the United States in the scale of morality, but to point out some reasons why all comparisons between them should be made by Americans with exceeding care and humility. ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... and traces, in a series of vigorously sketched scenes, the intrigue and counter-intrigue which hurry the action onward toward its logically prepared climax—a mutual reconciliation. The dialogue is pithy, simple, and sententious. Nevertheless the play, as a whole, makes the impression of incompleteness. It is a dramatic sketch rather than a drama. It marks no advance on Bjoernson's previous work in the same line; but perhaps ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... been true since the earliest days. Emerson himself, though a man of unusual discernment and a diligent drinker from German spigots, nevertheless remained a dilettante in both aesthetics and metaphysics to the end of his days, and the incompleteness of his equipment never showed more plainly than in his criticism of books. Lowell, if anything, was even worse; his aesthetic theory, first and last, was nebulous and superficial, and all that remains of his pleasant ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... United States new applications of electricity literally every day. Before the written page is printed some startling application is likely to be made that gives to that page at once an incompleteness it is impossible to guard against or avoid. There is a strong inclination to prophesy; to tell of that which is to come; to picture the warmed and illuminated future, smokeless and odorless, and the homes in which ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... of the higher education of the Negro would be the last to deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the present system: too many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality has sometimes been sought. But all this can be said of higher education throughout the land: ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... mediaeval relics; the market-place crowded with fruit-sellers and flower-girls in their high Norman caps. Above all, I saw the rare old Gothic Cathedral, with its wondrous wealth of antique sculpture; its iron spire, destined, despite its traceried beauty, to everlasting incompleteness; its grass-grown buttresses, and crumbling pinnacles, and portals crowded with images of saints and kings. I went in. All was gray, shadowy, vast; dusk with the rich gloom of painted windows; and so silent that I scarcely dared disturb the echoes by my footsteps. ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... very well, at another very ill:—well, when they have full time, full scope, and a sympathetic listener:—ill, when they fear interruption and are annoyed by the impossibility of exhausting the topic during that particular talk. The partial genius is flashy—scrappy. The true genius shudders at incompleteness—imperfection—and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not every thing that should be said. He is so filled with his theme that he is dumb, first from not knowing how to begin, where there seems eternally beginning behind beginning, and secondly from perceiving ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... of great beauty, the excessive mysticism, the straggling conduct of the story, and the extravagant praise of virginity in and for itself, in the early Graal history, have offended some readers. In the Merlin proper the incompleteness, the disproportionate space given to mere kite-and-crow fighting, and the defect of love-interest, undoubtedly show themselves. Although Merlin was neither by extraction nor taste likely to emulate the almost ferocious horror ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... without enlarging on these, one has only to say in conclusion that, suggestive and interesting as many of these poor fragments, these disjecti membra poetae, are individually, they leave us more and more impressed with a sense of incompleteness in our knowledge of Anaximander's theory as a whole. It may be that as a consistent and perfected system the theory never was worked out; it may be that it never was ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... be repeated. And no doubt the things which our ardent friend regarded as so fatal a disturbance of society were all inevitable and necessary, part of the great revolution of mind through which men grew out of the mediaeval incompleteness to a richer conception of life and ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... of the results obtained with extracts from pine wood. The incompleteness of fermentation of the products is certainly due in part to the presence of furfural-yielding carbohydrates, which are resistant to yeast. The pine woods contain 8-10 p.ct. of these constituents in their anhydride form ('pentosanes'). They yield readily to acid hydrolysis, and certainly ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... client with ruin, gentlemen of the jury," he began, "what is really damning for my client is one fact—the dead body of his father. Had it been an ordinary case of murder you would have rejected the charge in view of the triviality, the incompleteness, and the fantastic character of the evidence, if you examine each part of it separately; or, at least, you would have hesitated to ruin a man's life simply from the prejudice against him which he has, alas! only too well deserved. But it's not an ordinary case of murder, it's a case of parricide. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... by the way, to print it in the meanwhile as a fragment confessed ... sowing asterisks at the end. Because as a poem of yours it stands there and wants unity, and people can't be expected to understand the difference between incompleteness and defect, unless you make a sign. For the new poems—they are full of beauty. You throw largesses out on all sides without counting the coins: how beautiful that 'Night and Morning' ... and the 'Earth's Immortalities' ... and the 'Song' ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... afterward; I have pouring invitations to the most attractive places in England, Ireland, Scotland,—but "c'est admirable, mais ce n'est pas la paix." May I count on the "paix" where I so much enjoyed it? I hear with delight that Edith will be with you again,—that completes the otherwise incompleteness. Yes, the Rezzonico is what you Americans call a "big thing."... But the interest I take in its acquisition is different altogether from what accompanied the earlier attempt. At most, I look on approvingly, ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... are too little formed in religious habits either for heaven or for hell; yet there is no middle state when Christ comes in judgment. In consequence, it is obvious to have recourse to the interval before His coming, as a time during which this incompleteness may be remedied, as a season, not of changing the spiritual bent and character of the soul departed, whatever that be, for probation ends with mortal life, but of developing it in a more determinate ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... books or great men that do not sadden us by a sense of incompleteness. The writer, we feel, is better than his work. His full power only reveals itself by flashes. There are blemishes in his design, due to mere oversight or indolence; his energy has flagged, or he has alloyed his pure ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... have the advocates of infidelity usually been: nay, (as if they would make up in the number of objections what they want in weight,) they have frequently availed themselves not only of apparent contrarieties, but of mere incompleteness in the statements of two different writers, on which to found a charge of contradiction. Thus, if one writer says that a certain person was present at a given time or place, when another says that he and two more were there; or that one man was cured of blindness, when another says ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... believe that he who can say 'Thou art my God,' and who has said it, should ever by anything be brought to cease to say it. Death cannot kill love to God; and the only end of the religious life of earth is its perfecting in heaven. The experiences that we have here, in their loftiness and in their incompleteness, equally witness for us, of the rest and the perfectness that remain for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... are conditional upon her sterility. But when we come to ask what are her distinctive characters and utilities we find that they are all designed for the future of the race. She is, in fact, the ideal foster-mother, made for that service, complete in her incompleteness, satisfied with the vicarious fulfilment of the whole of motherhood except its merely physical part. The doctrine, therefore, that the individual is designed by Nature for parenthood, the individual being primarily devised for the race, finds ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... bliss! O pain to break At once from happiness so lately found, And four long years to feel for her sweet sake The incompleteness of all sight and sound! But bliss to cross once more the foaming brine— O bliss to come again ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... to making all statements correct and accurate as far as they go. Many of them are necessarily incomplete, on account of the elementary character of the work; but it is hoped that this incompleteness has never been allowed to become untruth, and that the pupil will not afterwards have to unlearn anything the book ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... "-ata", "being", denoting "incompleteness" or "present" time, "-ita", "having been", denoting "completeness" or "past" time, and "-ota", "about to be" (going to be), denoting "action not yet begun", or "future" time, are added to the root of the verb, as "ami", to love, "amata", ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... of suddenness and incompleteness and a natural pang of wonder and regret for a life so richly and so vitally endowed thus cut off in its prime. But for us it is not fitting to question or repine, but rather to rejoice in the rare possession that we hold. What is ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... particular mathematical idea is usually closely correlated with its intrinsic difficulty. Moreover, the ideas which are usually formed on these points at an early stage are incomplete; and, if the incompleteness of an idea is not realized, operations in which it is implied are apt to be purely formal and mechanical. What are called negative numbers in arithmetic, for instance, are not really negative numbers but negative quantities (S 27 (i.)); and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... with fresh experience and new trains of thought, considering how they worked, and how they ought to be modified in order to maintain what was really sound and valuable in their content. Hence, Mill is the easiest person in the world to convict of inconsistency, incompleteness, and lack of rounded system. Hence, also, his work will survive the death of many consistent, complete, ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... so complicated a character as George Sand's, we cannot be astonished at finding very different judgments and impressions; indeed we are prepared to feel in all of them some note of inadequacy and of incompleteness. But in our relation to her as a Great Writer, of this, as readers, we are assured, we know that it is no common matter to have come into contact with so gifted and great a nature, with a genius that possessed "a current of true and living ideas," and which ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... two longest, the fragmentary Quatre Facardins and the finished Le Belier, run each of them to 142 pages; the shortest, L'Enchanteur Faustus, has just five-and-twenty; while Fleur d'Epine, in its completeness, has 114, and Zeneyde, in its incompleteness, runs to 78, and might have run, for aught one can tell—in the mixed tangle of Roman and Merovingian history in which the author (possibly in ridicule of Madeleine de Scudery's classical chronicling) has chosen to plunge it—to 780 or 7800, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... or five years begun—there's a kind of sense to this book; it may help the Samoans, it may help me, for I am bound on the altar here for anti-Germanism. Then there's The Pearl Fisher about a quarter done; and there's various short stories in various degrees of incompleteness. De'il, there's plenty grist; but the mill's unco slaw! To-morrow or next day, when the mail's through, I'll attack one or other, or maybe something else. All these schemes begin to laugh at me, for the day's far through, and I believe the pen grows heavy. However, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
