"Mastery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... refuse any of Sherlock Holmes' requests, for they were always so exceedingly definite, and put forward with such a quiet air of mastery. I felt, however, that when Whitney was once confined in the cab my mission was practically accomplished; and for the rest, I could not wish anything better than to be associated with my friend in one of those ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... outside of Illinois and Indiana. Judge Douglas had already taken a high place among the able men of his time of national and international reputation. In September, Lincoln's character was understood and his ability was recognized in all the non-slaveholding States of the Union. His mastery over Douglas had been complete. His logic was unanswerable, his ridicule fatal; every position taken by him was defended successfully. At the end Douglas had but one recourse. He misstated Lincoln's positions, and then ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... born without it. We know how gradually the infant acquires a mastery of its sensuous experience; and it is likely that for a long time after it has obtained command of its single experiences it remains unaware of its selfhood. In a classic passage of "In Memoriam" Tennyson ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... his "Raven," only shadows—a wonderful dance of shadows, all tricks of a verbal wizard. "The Bells," a really powerful poem, is his masterpiece, unique in English literature; but it has no intellectual content. Its appeal is to the eye and ear alone. It has a verbal splendor and a mastery over measure and rhythm far beyond anything in Shelley, or in any other poet of his time. It is art glorified; it is full of poetic energy. No wonder foreign critics see in Poe something far beyond that found in any other American, or in any ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... And he, too, had generally the advantage of understanding the game, while those with whom he was concerned did not, at any rate, more than half understand it. He could thus trade either on the timidity or on the ignorance of his colleagues. When neither of these sufficed to give him undisputed mastery, then he cultivated the cupidity of his friends. He liked young associates because they were more timid and less greedy than their elders. Lord Nidderdale's suggestions had soon been put at rest, and Mr Melmotte anticipated no greater difficulty with Sir ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... having two books at the head of the list of best-sellers. Not only did the story take with the fiction-readers, but those who read "The Shame of the Sun" with avidity were likewise attracted to the sea-story by the cosmic grasp of mastery with which he had handled it. First he had attacked the literature of mysticism, and had done it exceeding well; and, next, he had successfully supplied the very literature he had exposited, thus proving himself to be ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... famous in London during that eventful period of English history from the time of Charles I, onward through the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, to the Restoration: a time of civil commotions and wars, when political parties and religious sects, striving for mastery, or struggling for existence, made the lives and estates of men insecure, and their outlook in many respects a troubled one. Lifelong connections of families and neighbors were then rudely severed, and doubt, distrust, and discontent filled all minds, or most. Of this widespread commotion ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... blow at me, which I parried, and a moment later we were locked in one another's arms. I think that we must have been of equal strength, for we swayed up and down the room, neither gaining the advantage, till I felt my breath come short and my head dizzy. Nevertheless, I was slowly gaining the mastery. My grasp upon his throat was tightening. I had hold of his collar and tie, and I could have strangled him with a turn of my wrist. Just then the door opened. There was a quick exclamation of horrified surprise in a familiar tone. I threw him from me to the ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... discomfiture, to resign the ingrate and leave her hopeless, in case of her better dispositions obtaining the mastery over the darker side of her character, Mr Meagles, for six successive days, published a discreetly covert advertisement in the morning papers, to the effect that if a certain young person who had lately left home without reflection, would at any time apply to his address ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... eager to feast their eyes on a spectacle, where, whichever side were victorious, the defeat would fall on their enemies. *4 The Castilian women and children, too, with still deeper anxiety, had thronged out from Cuzco to witness the deadly strife in which brethren and kindred were to contend for mastery. *5 The whole number of the combatants was insignificant; though not as compared with those usually engaged in these American wars It is not, however, the number of the players, but the magnitude of the stake, that gives importance and interest ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... tell a wonderful story of the progress of the race in the mastery of the science of mechanics. They cover inventions of more or less importance in all the branches of mechanics, in chemical compounds, in surgical instruments, in electrical utilities, and in the ...
— The Colored Inventor - A Record of Fifty Years • Henry E. Baker
... and it was with great difficulty that Manuel managed to cast his noose over the mare's head; and, even when this had been accomplished, she seemed disposed to make him all the trouble possible; but, after a long time, he obtained the mastery, and led her out to share the fate of her ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... notion, that whoever found out the mystic word for anything attained to absolute mastery over that thing. The reverse of this is certainly true of poetic expression; for he who is thoroughly possessed of his thought, who imaginatively conceives an idea or image, becomes master of the word that shall most amply and fitly utter it. Heminge and Condell tell us, accordingly, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... understood among his immediate friends, that he has been—what few are—successful adventurer, having repaired in the saloons of Paris, in a great degree, the loss he sustained by the forfeiture of his church livings. His singular coolness, calculation, and self-mastery, give him an advantage in this respect over, perhaps, every other votary of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... is not a ghost; yet every nerve I have is unstrung: for a moment I am beyond my own mastery. What does it mean? I did not think I should tremble in this way when I saw him, or lose my voice or the power of motion in his presence. I will go back as soon as I can stir: I need not make an absolute fool of myself. I know another way to the house. ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... colonial days. He was graduated from Dartmouth in 1887, and went immediately to Boston University, where he took the medical course, and was graduated in 1890 as orator of his class. The entire time spent in primary, preparatory, college, and professional education, including the mastery of the English language, was seventeen years, or about two years less than is required by the ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... most delicate shades. Turgeneff is most renowned artistically for the landscapes which are scattered through his works, and principally portray the nature of his native locality, central Russia. Equally famous, and executed with no less mastery and art, are his portrayal and analysis of the various vicissitudes of the tender passion, and in this respect, he was regarded as a connoisseur of the feminine heart. A special epithet, "the bard of love," was often applied to him. Along with a series ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... To the mastery of the part of Lady Babbie Maude Adams now consecrated herself with a fidelity of purpose which was very characteristic of her. Then, as always, she asked ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... changed suddenly to anger, and he remembered, while he choked back an impulsive exclamation, the rage for mastery he had once felt when he found a horse whose temper had more than matched his own. "Did she tell ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... he used these gifts at all, it was to illustrate scientific problems. His real passion was perspective, and painting was to him a mere occasion for solving some problem in this science, and displaying his mastery over its difficulties. Accordingly he composed pictures in which he contrived to get as many lines as possible leading the eye inward. Prostrate horses, dead or dying cavaliers, broken lances, ploughed fields, Noah's arks, are used by him with scarcely ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... economic difficulties of the republics. One singular factor in the economic situation of Serbia and Montenegro is the continuation in office of a communist government that is primarily interested in political and military mastery, not economic reform. A further complication is the imposition of economic sanctions by the UN in 1992. Hyperinflation ended with the establishment of a new currency unit in June 1993; prices were relatively stable in 1994. Reliable statistics ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... adversary in the twinkling of an eye, unless he were a professor like himself. A stroke of wit will sometimes produce this effect, but there is no such power or superiority in sense or reasoning. There is no complete mastery of execution to be shown there; and you hardly know the professor from the impudent pretender or ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... inspirations of the moment—he can afford to indulge his relish for humour without let or hindrance at a select party or by his own fireside. In either of these situations his solid and volatile qualities appear to vie with each other for the mastery. With quips and jokes, apposite and sparkling, he "is wont to set the table in a roar." Hence his society is ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... feet, took his hand in both of his. 'Don't give in so, my old feller. Don't you know, when we were boys, how we all looked up to you; and although I could have doubled you up, with my big limbs, yet you always had the mastery over me. Ha! ha! Tim, don't you remember the old schoolmaster, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... Shad they were dignified and reserved. Neither could speak English, and Bob, who had a fair mastery of the ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... Thomas Sprat, admitted Scholar of Wadham in 1651. Of him Wood says that he was "an excellent poet and orator, and one who arrived at a great mastery of the English language." His reputation does not rest on his poetry: he was known by the strange and dubious title of "Pindarick Sprat." But his History of the Royal Society justifies Wood's encomium; and he wrote a 'Relation of ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things: now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: but I keep under my body, ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... that if he had written verse alone, his place would have been highly distinguished. His "Child's Garden of Verse" is a little masterpiece in a genre of his own invention. His verses in Scots are full of humour, and he had a complete mastery of the old Northern English of the Lowlands. His more serious poems often contain ideas and the expression of moods which he handled better, I think, in his prose. Even the story of "Ticonderoga" I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... house, and now he was fully under the influence of the melancholy part of his nature. Never before, even in childish anger, had he touched a human being with violence, and now he had exerted his strength, and had grappled with and struck a fellow-man in a brute struggle for animal mastery; he felt humiliated and abased. That the fellow's nature was low, and that he was compelled to act as he had done, was little comfort to him. He was glad that he decided not to punish or expel John. Darkness came, and he was aroused by a noise at the door. He unlocked it, and found Canfield ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... equity and chivalry demand that man at once establish for his wife and mother the corresponding proposition, that a woman's head is her head, her body is her body, her feet are her feet, and that all ownership and mastery over her person, property, conscience, and liberty of speech and action, are in violation of the supreme law ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Log-Cabin Lady is one of the annals of America. It is a moving record of the conquest of self-consciousness and fear through mastery of manners and customs. It has been written by one who has not sacrificed the strength and honesty of her pioneer girlhood, but who added to these qualities that graciousness and charm which have given ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... shout of triumph. Never had the thrill of mastery and of confidence surged through him more hotly than it did now. On his feet in open fighting he had the agility of a cat. The stranger was scarcely on his feet before he was at him with a straight shoulder blow that landed on the giant's jaw with crushing force. ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... to say that this way of looking at evil and good—at the latent capacities of evil and good in men, if a man once believes it, and if a man once practises it as a part of his daily practical interpretation and mastery of men, will soon put a new face for him on nearly every great human problem with which he finds his time confronted. We shall watch the men in the world about us—each for their little day—trying their funny, pathetic, curious little moral experiments, and we shall ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... youthful hopes, dreamy and wild adventures. He has tasted the savage love of woods and wilds, and the nature—which was born thousands of years ere the teachings of civilization had tamed the wild man into an educated, home-loving being—revives, and the two struggle for mastery in his heart. The bleak mountain-peaks, the wide-extended plain and its wild denizens, and the excitement these give, stirs his bosom, and the wish struggles up to return to them. But the gentler chords of his ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... that he could not give himself up to the absolute mastery of evil without one more struggle. Was there any chance? Was he capable of making ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... art. Digressions interrupt the narrative with slender excuse, or with none; there is, as with the English Sterne, an obtrusion of the author's personality; the style seems as wilfully crude as the mastery in word-building and word-painting is astonishing. On the other hand there is both greater variety and greater distinction in the characters, a more developed fabulation and a wonderful deepening and refinement of emotional description. Werther was not yet out of fashion and lovers ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of the earth, the heat of the sun, the inscrutable creation-spirit of nature, almost the divinity of God—these were all hers because she was a woman. That was the great secret, aloof so long. That was what had been wrong with life—the woman blind to her meaning, her power, her mastery. ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... his pride rose up within him, and rebuked this weakness. He remembered his firm resolve; and blushed to find himself so feeble. And the voice ceased; and yet he did not go. Pride had so far gained the mastery over affection. He lay down upon his bed, like a child as he was. All about him was silence, and the silence was holy, for she was near; so near that he could almost hear the beating of her heart. He knew now for the first time how ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 'dabones,' which in Greek and in medieval Latin were names given to those who were ever promising, ever saying 'I will give,' but never crowning promise with performance. Plautus, with his exuberant wit, and exulting in his mastery of the Latin language, is rich in these, 'fustitudinus,' 'ferricrepinus' and the like; will put together four or five lines consisting wholly of comic combinations thrown off for the occasion. [Footnote: Persa, iv. 6, 20-23.] Of the same ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... kept her up for a long time, but as the evening advanced despondency and weariness began to gain the mastery. Sibley came to her and said: "Miss Ida, I have your hand for the next waltz, but I see you are worn and tired. Let us go out on the cool ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... father quite as well as I do. But this is not as we think of Indians. They never scalp an unhurt prisoner, but would rather take him away alive, unless, indeed, the fierce wish for torturing should get the mastery of them. I fear nothing for my father's scalp, and little for his life. Could they steal on us in the night, we should all probably suffer in this way; but men taken in open strife are seldom injured; not, at least, until the time of ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... have to call his friends to help, Jack slipped away unseen, and Timberlake might have gained the mastery of his opponent, had not the gang at that ...
— Jack Wright and His Electric Stage; - or, Leagued Against the James Boys • "Noname"
... the afternoon was when Mildred Lancaster began to play, and her entire mastery of her instrument was a revelation to most of the girls. They had never before had the opportunity of listening to such ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... things"—He was more often than once in situations in which he knew he was afraid and held fear away only because, with his old habit of introspection, he knew it for fear,—a horrible thing that sought mastery of him and by sheer force of mental detachment must be held away where it could be looked at and known for the vile thing it was. In such ordeals, in Flanders, he got the habit of saying to himself between his teeth, "Six ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... one who sits confidently upon the back of a brave and spirited horse, is surely enviable. The mastery of a creature of such strength and capacity—whose neck is clothed with thunder—the glory of whose nostrils is terrible, gives to the rider a sense of freedom and power not often felt amidst the ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... happy future unrolled before him. His error hitherto had lain, not in exchanging Finsbury Pavement for scenes where the free elements had play, but in seeking to change himself and do violence to his own habits of mind and body. In the Islands he could practice, as a benevolent despot, that mastery of men which had given him power in the city; he could devote uncontradicted to the cause of philanthropy—or with only so much contradiction as lent a spice to triumph—those faculties which he had been sharpening all his life in quest of money. They remained sharp as ever, though ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... taught Spinoza the rudiments of the language that was to enable him to enter into the important current of modern ideas especially embodied in the philosophy of Descartes. Francis Van den Ende gave him a thorough technical, not literary, mastery of it. And Van den Ende taught Spinoza much more besides. He acquainted him with the literature of antiquity; he gave him a sound knowledge of the contemporary fundamentals of physiology and physics; and it was ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... Einar Tambarskelve was one of the most powerful men in Norway during the first half of the eleventh century. His mastery of the bow gave him the epithet Tambarskelve, "bow-string-shaker." He fought, when eighteen years old, on the Long Serpent at Svolder. After Erik and Svein were established in power as a result of that battle, ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... great power and skilful construction, suggesting Poe's "Ligeia" in its central theme. The plot is developed with much dexterity, and the climax comes so forcibly and unexpectedly upon the reader, that one cannot but admire Mr. Whittier's mastery of technique. Certain overnice critics may possibly object to the tale, as containing incidents which no one survives to relate; but when we reflect that Poe has similarly written a story without survivors, ("The Masque of the Red Death") we can ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... time the Jacobins were in a state of mind in which fury and despair struggled for the mastery. The outlook was as gloomy as before Valmy in September 1792. Bad news poured in from all sides. The Girondins, after the collapse of their power on 2nd June, appealed to the Departments, and two thirds of France seemed about to support them against the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... most surely happen to weak human nature that when an evil and jealous and unkind thought gets into the heart, that same thought, though quite unimportant at first, gradually increases in dimensions until it overshadows all other thoughts and gains complete and overwhelming mastery of the mind. Had any one said to Fanny Crawford a fortnight or three weeks before the Vivians' arrival at the school that she would have felt towards Betty as she now did, Fanny would have been the first to recoil at the monstrous fungus of hatred which existed in her mind. Had Betty been a ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... class appearance of the volume, particularly the excellence of the fine illustrations. Such expressions of approval would have been gratifying to the late W. H. MAYSON, who, as the maker of over 800 instruments, had attained complete mastery over his work. Therefore the reader can have every confidence in faithfully following all his methods and strictly adhering to every detail set ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... position to rake with her carronades; and, setting the foresail, sailed slowly across from left to right. In five minutes the "Boxer's" maintopmast and foretopsailyard fell. This left the "Enterprise" the mastery of the situation, which she continued to hold until ten minutes later, when the enemy's fire ceased. Her colors could not be hauled down, Blyth having nailed them to the mast. He himself had been killed at the first broadside, and almost at the same instant Burrows too ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... spell was still potent, with the moods of the day still strong, he found new viewpoints struggling for mastery. Clearly the girl had shown a deep interest in him, and entirely on her own initiative. If it was to be in the future an interest born of friendship, why, it should be, he told himself, an engaging future for him. ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... activity. Generally considered, we see that the course of his studies was such as in any circumstances he would himself have probably followed. Under no conditions would Goethe have been content to restrict himself to a narrow field of study and to give the necessary application for its complete mastery. As it was, the multiplicity of his studies supplied the foundation for the manifold productivity of his maturer years. In no branch of knowledge was he ever a complete master; he devoted a large part of ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... a chair before the fire and lit a cigar. In spite of himself Langham watched him, fascinated. There was such conscious power and mastery in everything the gambler did, that he felt the various purposes that were influencing him collapse with miserable futility. What ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... possessed; for in his impetuosity there was no foolish rashness, and in his passion no injustice. Besides, whatever violence there might be within, the explosion seldom came to the surface, and when it did it was arrested at once by the stern mandate of his will. He never lost the mastery of himself in any emergency, and in 'ruling his spirit' showed himself greater than ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... what kind of under-secretaries and officials William had. Silent officials and secretaries, I suppose; not wasting themselves in parliamentary talk; reserving all their intelligence for silent survey of the huge dumb fact, silent consideration how they might compass the mastery of that. Happy ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... in the same language, though with less practised mastery of it, and with that constitutional levity which, whatever the time or circumstances, occasionally gave a strange sort of wit, or queer, uncanny, devil-me-care vein of drollery, to his modes ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... moment the young girl observed, by the light which the chafing-dish cast upon Penellan's face, that despair and determination were struggling in his rough features for the mastery. She went to him, took his hands, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... of the unambitious pen we wield, to convey to the reader a just idea of the mixed emotions that struggled for mastery in the countenance of Ruth. The innate and never-dying sentiment of maternal joy was opposed by all those feelings of pride, that prejudice could not fail to implant even in the bosom of one so meek. There was no need to tell the history of the parentage of the little suppliant, who already looked ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... her. The moonlight played upon her pallid, quivering face, and showed that in her eyes which no man could look upon and turn away. Once more—yes, even then—there came over him that feeling of utter surrender to the sweet mastery of her will which had possessed him in the sitting-room of "The Palatial." Only all earthly considerations having faded into nothingness now, he no longer hesitated, but pressed his lips to hers and kissed her again and yet again. It was perhaps as wild and pathetic ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... striking "bronks"; had worked, with the sweat streaming like tears down his cheeks, to "gentle" them; had, with much patience, taught them the feel of saddle and cinch and had ridden them with much stress until they accepted his mastery and became the dependable, wise old "cow-horses" of the range; who had followed, spring, summer and fall, the wide wandering of the Double-Crank wagons, asking nothing better, secure in the knowledge that he, Charming Billy Boyle, was conceded to be one of the ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... had cared to analyse—the features, taken separately, with that one exception, were insignificant; but the face was singular, with its strange pallor, its intellectual mastery, and sarcastic decision. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... shown its stalwart strength. He is sure workingmen are incapable of managing large affairs? Let him look to the cigar-makers—their capacity for organization, their self-restraint as an industrial army, the soundness of their financial system, the mastery of their employers in the eight-hour question. He believes the intricacies of taxation and estimates of appropriation beyond the average mind? He may see a New England town meeting in a single day dispose of scores of ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... and vessels are handled with a deftness that shames our clumsy ways, and everything that they use is kept quite clean. This skilful orderliness is essential to fine craftmanship, and is a sign of mastery. ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... Caracci was Hendrik Goltzius, at Harlem, excellent as painter, but, like the Italian, pre-eminent as engraver. His prints show mastery of the art, making something like an epoch in its history. His unwearied skill in the use of the burin appears in a tradition gathered by Longhi from Wille, that, having commenced a line, he carried it to the end without once stopping, while the long and bright threads ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... at last to want is power, mastery; and, whether it be mastery over the subtleties of the intellect, as in Emerson himself, or over the passions and the springs of action, as in Shakespeare, or over our terrors and the awful hobgoblins of hell and Satan, as in Dante, or over vast masses ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... of genius in music, of the width and depth of mastery, is to be able to become familiar without ceasing to be strange. On the other hand, if in music to be great is always to be misunderstood, it is no less true, here as elsewhere, that to be misunderstood is not always to be great. And music may be merely strange, ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... education. Let us, then, say a word about the kind of education demanded. This question is settled very largely by the discussion we have just had about the need of this education. First of all, this education will give a fair mastery of the principles that govern proper soil management and plant and animal growth. This is fundamental. The farmer is dealing with natural laws, and he must know in them their applications. He cannot be blind to their dominance. They insist on recognition. ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... their approaching danger; they were checked in their mad anger for a few seconds and given a moment for reflection, that moment convinced them that they could not yet dispense with the services of their captain. With black rage and white fear striving for mastery in their hearts, they rose to their feet and faced him with menacing faces ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the people of New Orleans, have come together under one common impulse to render united homage to the memory which holds mastery in our minds, whether we turn with bitter regard to the past, or with prayerful and chastened aspirations ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... one of the least respected names in English literature, was one of the freest adapters of Shakespearean drama to the depraved taste of the day. Yet even he assigned to the master playwright unrivalled insight into the darkest mysteries of human nature, and an absolute mastery of the faculty of accurate characterisation. For once, Tate's literary judgment must ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... low, and chose a course through the screening walls of the jungle. It did not take him long to attain full mastery of the suit's controls, and soon he was gliding cleanly through the hollows created by the mammoth outthrusting treetops in a course crazy and twisted, but one which kept him pointing always towards Porno. Presently he found an easier highway ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... berth in the cabin Joseph West lay dying. Scurvy had acted more rapidly on his delicate frame than had been expected. Despite Tom Singleton's utmost efforts and skill, the fell disease gained the mastery, and it soon became evident that this hearty and excellent man was to be taken away ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... down on the other stone, his dark face swept by the shadows of the flames, and rolled a cigarette, not deftly, but like one who is learning the mastery of the art. It surprised Mary, watching his fumbling fingers. She decided that Jack must be ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... the occasional notes of the lituus, or cavalry trumpet, by which all their manoeuvres were directed; and the men, hardy and fine-looking figures, in the prime of life, bestriding with an air of perfect mastery their fiery chargers, and bearing the weight of their heavy panoply beneath the burning sunshine of the Italian noon, as though a march of thirty miles ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... native are confined almost entirely to his juvenile and youthful compositions, and after 1797 he only once employs the rhymed stanza, namely, in the poem "An Landauer."[54] As a boy of sixteen, he wrote verses in the Alcaic and Asclepiadeian measures,[55] and soon acquired a considerable mastery over them. At seventeen he composed in the latter form ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... the beauty and the glory of humanity. One must reside in France, as I have done for many years, to understand and admire as it deserves the incomparable lesson in courage, abnegation, firmness, determination, coolness, conscious dignity, self-mastery, good-humour, chivalrous generosity and utter charity and self-sacrifice which this great and noble people, which has civilized more than half the globe, is at the present moment teaching the ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... sovereign rights of all states in the conduct of their foreign affairs, and the establishment of this group of primates, amounted to a recognition of the doctrine that the powerful are, in law as well as in fact, entitled to be the overlords of the weak. If adopted, it legalized the mastery of might, which in international relations, when peace prevailed, had been universally condemned as illegal ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... coolly carried off the portmanteau, without waiting further remonstrance, leaving our hero in a state where disappointment and indignation struggled for the mastery. In a few minutes he heard a cart rumble out of the rugged courtyard, and made no doubt that he was now dispossessed, for a space at least, if not for ever, of the only documents which seemed to promise some light upon the dubious events ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... She wanted only to see the maverick run—to coax him to yield and run the filly merely to please the cheap vanity of her sex! No doubt also she counted on entertainment when, to-morrow, he would ride the outlaw for the first time. It would be a kind of show—the battle for mastery between himself and the high-bred untamed mare. The whole bunch—Old Heck, Parker, Ophelia, Carolyn June, the cowboys—yes, even that damned Chink—unquestionably would be crowded about the corral to watch the fear and pain of the maverick as she learned her first hard lesson of ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... speech in introducing the new tariff was well received and made a strong impression upon all who heard it. It was admitted, even by those who were opposed to the views he held, that he showed a great mastery of the details, and that he illustrated in a very clear manner the view that the country was suffering because the duties imposed upon foreign goods were not sufficiently ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... moments of passion, it may be wondered that I bore his dangerous neighbourhood with equanimity. As a matter of fact, it was for some time irksome; but it happened before long that I obtained over him so complete a mastery as ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... imagined bull-fighting to be something utterly distinct from what he had just witnessed; he had thought that always it would display the mastery of man over beast, and that the sword-thrusts would flash like lightning; that every moment of the struggle would bring forth something interesting and suggestive; and instead of a spectacle such as he had visioned, ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... ambushed under heavy brows; to the full lips, which the carefully arranged mustache did not at all conceal; to the projecting chin, with its little plume of an imperial. A strong face and a not unhandsome one, with a certain look of mastery about it—— ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... like their own stark sightlessness!— Let them get down to those white lowlands there, And so far plunge in the level that no skill, When sudden vision flashes on their fault, Can help them, though despair-stung, to regain The key to mastery held at yestereve! ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... anxiously—thrilled by the touch of that box. He read men as he read books, seeing much that was not in print, and feeling by a wonderful intuitive power emotions not visible in a face, and he believed that in David there were strange and conflicting forces struggling now for mastery. It was not in the surrender of the box that he had felt David's triumph, but in the voluntary sacrifice of what that box contained. He wanted to rid himself of the picture, and quickly. He was ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... after the total loss of word-memory, as in the remarkable and much-talked-of case of Lordat. Yet this case does not by any means prove that the formation of concepts of the higher order is possible without previous mastery of verbal language; rather is it certain that concepts rising above the lowest abstractions can be formed only by him who has thoroughly learned to speak: for intelligent children without speech are acquainted, indeed, with more numerous and more complex ideas than are very sagacious ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... her works is always a new amazing of her reader who turns back to review the harvest of her English. It must have been with rapture that she claimed her own simplicity. And with what a moderation, how temperately, and how seldom she used her mastery! To the last she has an occasional attachment to her bonds; for she was not only fire and air. In one passage of her life she may remind us of the little colourless and thrifty hen-bird that Lowell watched nest-building with her mate, and cutting short the flutterings and billings wherewith he would ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... itself, and ready to become once more the master of the empire which Akhnaton's doctrine of Peace and Goodwill had lost. Under his direction the purged worship of the old gods, which for him meant but the maintenance of some time-proved customs, had gained the mastery over the chimerical worship of Aton; without force or violence he had substituted the practical for the visionary; and to Amon and Order his grateful subjects were able to cry, "The sun of him who knew thee not has set, ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... Captain Thorn been properly regulated, the insult so wounding to savage pride would never have been given. Had he enforced the rule to admit but a few at a time, the savages would not have been able to get the mastery. He was too irritable, however, to practice the necessary self-command, and, having been nurtured in a proud contempt of danger, thought it beneath him to manifest any fear of a ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... head to foot: tell it not in Gath, I believe I was crying. In fact, the difficulties before me were far from being wholly imaginary; some of them were real enough; and not the least substantial lay in my want of mastery over the medium through which I should be obliged to teach. I had, indeed, studied French closely since my arrival in Villette; learning its practice by day, and its theory in every leisure moment at night, to as late an hour as the rule of the house would allow candle-light; ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the world, has always had an insatiable hunger for the earth, and a love for a life in the fields by stream or by roadside. Everywhere we find the highest type of civilization where man has gained the mastery of Nature by the work of his hands. The home of such a civilization is usually found where forests have been removed, and the wild vegetation of primitive times has been expelled to make room for the thousand and one productions of modern ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... language and history. Keichu (1640-1701), a Buddhist priest, explored and illumined the poems of the Many[o]shu. Kada Adzumar[o], born in 1669 near Ki[o]to, the son of a shrine-keeper at Inari, attempted the mastery of the whole archaic native language and literature. He made a grand beginning. He is unquestionably the founder of the school of Pure Shint[o]. He died in 1736. His successor and pupil was Mabuchi ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... poison than of the desolate exile! I rose, I opened the windows; I walked to and fro the room; I could decide nothing, think of nothing; all my mind was in an uproar. With a violent effort at self-mastery, I approached the table again. I resolved to force myself to my task, if it were only to re-collect my faculties and enable them to bear my own torture. I turned over the books impatiently, when lo! buried ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... also given. The child perfects himself by exercises in touching these surfaces, not only refining his capacity for perceiving tactile differences which are always growing more similar, but also perfecting the movement of which he is ever gaining greater mastery. ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... blissful lot! nor aught of grief remains Save for that friend, beloved, bewailed, revered, To whom my heart for thrice ten years was bound By truest love and gratitude endeared: The glory of his land, in whom were found Genius unmatched, and mastery of the soul, Beyond all human ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 28. Saturday, May 11, 1850 • Various
... made his first speech in parliament, recommending the house to receive a petition from the colonies, and was at once recognised as a new power. He was an Irishman, and was already known as a writer. He became Rockingham's secretary in 1765, and a seat was provided for him. Unsurpassed in his mastery of English prose, he exhibits to the full the splendour of the English language in his speeches and pamphlets. Nor is his thought unworthy of the gorgeous attire with which it is invested. His power and constant habit of discerning and expounding ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... lips to name it unless by his desire. But I beg and pray you, gentlemen, that you will go from my house, for I know not what may come of it if his rage should gain the mastery ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... constitution renders him almost impervious to the attacks of disease, and experience has given his judgment the soundness of almost infallibility. His mind is resolute, firm, and equal; all his functions are in the highest order; he assumes the mastery over business; builds up a competence on the foundation he has formed in early manhood, and passes through a period of life attended by many gratifications. Having gone a year or two past sixty, he arrives at a critical period in the ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... sensitive alone. The habit of yielding to the importunity of one idea, strengthens itself; every recurrence of it produces quicker sensibility to the next; deeper and deeper impression follows, till one form of mania supervenes—that which consists in the undue mastery and eternal presence ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... threatened the southern shores of England, landing at Southampton and in the Isle of Wight unopposed. In 1340 Edward returned to Flanders; on his way he attacked the French fleet which lay at Sluys, and utterly destroyed it. The great victory of Sluys gave England for centuries the mastery of the British channel. But, important as it was, it gave no success to the land campaign. Edward wasted his strength on an unsuccessful siege of Tournia, and, ill-supported by his Flemish allies, could achieve nothing. The French King in this year seized on Guienne; ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... century saw the rise of the new symbolism; the sixteenth century saw it slowly {150} gain the mastery; the seventeenth century saw it finally conquer the system that for two thousand years had dominated the arithmetic of business. Not a little of the success of the new plan was due to Luther's demand that all learning ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... that lay latent in Cecil under the tranquil gentleness of temper and of custom, woke and had the mastery; he set his teeth hard, and his hands clinched like steel on the bridle. "Oh, my beauty, my beauty!" he cried, all unconsciously half aloud, as they cleared the thirty-sixth fence. "Kill me if you ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... again. By this time the Syracusan counterwork had almost passed the end of the Athenian wall, and if it were carried a few yards further, the siege of Syracuse would be brought to a standstill. Roused by the imminence of the crisis, Nicias determined to make one more effort to regain his mastery in the field, and led his troops to the attack. The main body of the hoplites were soon hotly engaged on both sides, and in the midst of the action Gylippus directed his cavalry and light-armed infantry to make a sudden charge on the Athenian left. This movement was executed ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... of course, Cooper Edgecombe felt intense anxiety through all, but he contrived to keep fair mastery over his emotions, readily admitting that he himself could do naught towards visiting the ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... at Lytton's rhetoric, but very few dramatists have had a more complete mastery of theatrical situations, and that is a good thing to be master of. Why the word "theatrical" should have come to be used in a contemptuous sense I cannot understand. "Musical" is a word of praise in music; why not "theatrical" ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... human history, two iron-clad ships met in battle. The occasion was a memorable one, and its story is well worthy of being retold in our cycle of historic events. For centuries, for thousands of years, in truth, wooden vessels had been struggling for the mastery of the seas. With the first shot fired from the turret of the Monitor at the roof-like sides of the Merrimac, in the early morning of the day named, the long reign of wooden war vessels ended; that of iron monarchs of the deep began. England could no more ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... was often observed, however, that in such conversations he occasionally arranged the matter of those who could use only English to him, in such a way as proved pretty clearly that he must have possessed a greater mastery over that language than he acknowledged. We believe the fact to be, however, that Teddy, as an illicit distiller, had found it, on some peculiar occasions connected with his profession, rather an inconvenient accomplishment to know English. He had given some evidence in his day, and proved, or ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... protected the Buddhists; and he tried in every way to make the whole country culturally Chinese. As soon as Fu Chien had all north China in his power, as Liu Yuean and his Huns had done before him, he resolved, like Liu Yuean, to make every effort to gain the mastery over all China, to become emperor of China. Liu Yuean's successors had not had the capacity for which such a venture called; Fu Chien was to fail in it for other reasons. Yet, from a military point of view, his chances were not bad. He had far more soldiers under his command than the Chinese ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... the brother of the Earl of Mar's first wife, and of George, seventh Earl of Kinnoul, succeeded in obtaining mastery over his subdued nature. The lady of Colonel Hay, Margery, the third daughter of Viscount Stormont, was said, also, to have possessed her own share of influence over the mind of the Chevalier. Of the real existence of any criminal attachment between the Prince and Mrs. Hay, there is, however, considerable ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... not given a tiny movement, an almost imperceptible movement of recoil, Lupin might have thought that his presence on board was known to him, so great was the mastery which Shears retained over himself and so natural the ease with which he held out his hand ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... up by Foster, who was asking him to tell them exactly what it was that they were to discuss. Instinctively he looked at Martin as he spoke. As always, with the first word there came over him a sense of mastery and happiness, a desire to move people like pawns, a readiness to twist any principle, moral and ethical, if he might bend it to his purpose. Instinctively he pitched his voice, formed his mouth, spread his hands upon the broad arms of his chair ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... should come to his way of thinking. Much of the time, therefore, which he would otherwise naturally have spent in research, he spent in contending for and in endeavoring to popularize the facts of science. It was this desire to make his ideas prevail that led Huxley to work for a mastery of the technique of speaking and writing. He hated both, but taught himself to do both well. The end of all his infinite pains about his writing was not because style for its own sake is worth while, but because he saw that the only way to win men to a consideration of his message was to ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... type must conform to classical tradition—that all nature was to be remoulded in the form of antique sculpture. But it was also at this time, and owing to his stern apprenticeship to the study of form, that he acquired the mastery of drawing which served him so well when in the presence of nature; and with no other preoccupation than to reproduce his model, he painted the people of his time and produced his greatest works. For by a strange yet not unprecedented contradiction, ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various |
