"Abstruse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... years before Saint Thomas settled the Church dogma, a monk of Citeaux or some other abbey, a certain Alain of Lille, had written a Latin poem, as abstruse an allegory as the best, which had the merit of painting the scene of man's creation as far as concerned the mechanical process much as Thomas seems to have seen it. M. Haureau has printed an extract (vol. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... that would not move and the little city in which Hope had taken lodgings for a while, and he went to work with ruler, scale and dividers, and the hard wood template for drawing the curves he had constructed for the tangent-balance by a very abstruse mathematical calculation. That was right, at all events, only, as it was to be reversed, he laid it on the paper with ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... continuous chain extending from a prehistoric past to an invisible future. We have here a writer who in one chapter handles complicated statistics and economical calculations with obvious relish, and turns from them with equal pleasure to abstruse disquisitions on the filiation of ideas ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the fate of hapless lexicography, that not only darkness, but light impedes and distresses it; things may be not only too little, but too much known, to be happily illustrated. To explain, requires the use of terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained, and such terms cannot always be found; for as nothing can be proved but by supposing something intuitively known, and evident without proof, so nothing can be defined but by the use of words too ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... that Macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher besides. He had at least one vanity: the claim that he knew every word in the English dictionary, and he made it good. The younger man tried repeatedly to discover a word ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... cabinet. Mr. Burke raised himself from an obscure situation, by the greatness of his abilities, and his unrivalled genius. Never was distinction more nobly earned. Of every species of literary composition he is equally a master. He excels alike in the most abstruse metaphysical disquisition, and in the warmest and most spirited painting. His rhetoric is at once ornamented and sublime. His satire is polished and severe. His wit is truly Attic. Luxuriant in the extreme, his allusions are always ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... him a harper (citharoedus), our only hope of executing his commission lies in you, whom we know to be accomplished in musical learning. For it will be easy for you to choose a well-skilled man, having yourself been able to attain to that high and abstruse study". Then follow a string of reflections on the soothing power of music, a description of the five "modes" [97] (Dorian, Phrygian, Aeolian, Ionian, and Lydian) and of the diapason; instances of the power of music drawn from the Scriptures and from heathen ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... truth about Lowe's part in the drugged liquor and the schoolteacher had received pointed advice to leave the town. He lost no time. Dr. Carson and Jack Shives were alternately confronting each other with abstruse problems; John and Hannah Higginbotham were building an addition to their house and getting a hired girl; and old man Boyd was worrying over a possible extension of the road to Deadwood, which ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the Doctor was deeply interested in what we would call speculative philosophy. I say by degrees, for the experience I am now writing down embraces the winters of five or six years. Most of the books that composed his library were abstruse treatises on metaphysics, philosophy, and religion. I believe that in his collection could have been found the Bible of every religious faith. Sometimes he would read aloud a passage in the Bhagavadgita, of which he had a manuscript copy interleaved with ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... he to keep faith with the Dean? This was Lord George's first trouble after his reconciliation with his brother. The Dean was back at the deanery, and Lord George mistrusted his own power of writing such a letter as would be satisfactory on so abstruse a matter. He knew that he should fail in making a good story, even face to face, and that his letter would be worse than spoken words. In intellect he was much inferior to the Dean, and was only too conscious of his own inferiority. In this condition of mind ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... magazines, and books caused a widespread habit of reading, which before this time was not common among the large numbers of the uneducated and the poor. The masses, however, did not care for uninteresting or abstruse works. The majority of books drawn from ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... specific forms I'll show: He that the way to honesty will learn, First what's to be avoided must discern. Thyself from flatt'ring self-conceit defend, Nor what thou dost not know to know pretend. 20 Some secrets deep in abstruse darkness lie: To search them thou wilt need a piercing eye. Not rashly therefore to such things assent, Which, undeceived, thou after may'st repent; Study and time in these must thee instruct, And others' old experience may ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... verses run together and are extremely abstruse. There can be no doubt that the commentator is right. The construction is this: Yam sadacharam asritya samsritanam swakarmabhih (sahitam) tapah ghoratwam agatam, tam (sadacharam) puranam puranam saswatam dhruvam dharmeshu cha sutritamkitichit ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... had opinions gathered at first hand from influential minds of every land and creed to contribute to the talk when it flowed in narrowing channels; and he himself came thither for refreshment from abstruse studies, out of a quiet cell in the convent of the Servi, while seemingly unaware that many a stranger begged for an invitation to the palazzo Morosini in the hope of an introduction to this "miracle ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... had now evolved a plan for transporting sixty thousand oaks to France, from a territory on the Russian frontier belonging to Count Georges Mniszech and his father. He was anxious that M. Surville should undertake the matter, as, after abstruse and careful calculations—which have the puzzling veneer of practicality always observable in Balzac's mad schemes—he considered that 1,200,000 francs might be made out of the affair, and that of course the engineer who arranged the transport would ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... things that he did not, I should think. But this is a bit of personal experience—not abstruse teaching. David was "exceeding glad"—and what made him glad? that ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... a rich uncle late in life; and then his career began. He went to Egypt at the time when men who knew things had their chance to do things. His information was general and discursive, but he had a real gift for science: an inheritance from a grandfather who received a peerage for abstruse political letters written to the Times and lectures before the Royal Institution. Besides, he had known well and loved inadvertently the Hon. Lucy Gray, who kept a kind of social kindergarten for confiding man, whose wisdom was as accurate as her face was fair, her ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... then I remembered that some months ago I said that it would be a good thing for all the officers going South to have some knowledge of navigation so that in emergency they would know how to steer a sledge home. It appears that "Cherry" thereupon commenced a serious and arduous course of abstruse navigational problems which he found exceedingly tough and now despaired mastering. Of course there is not one chance in a hundred that he will ever have to consider navigation on our journey and in that one chance the problem ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... Minister, there were also three men of letters, and I have never heard that those three were greater simpletons than their neighbours. There is a Commission now at work on that very important and abstruse subject—the Currency. I am told that no one there displays so acute an intelligence of the difficulties that are to be met, and so ready an apprehension of the important arguments that are brought forward, and the practical ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... unseasonable ostentation of learning. It may be discovered either in the choice of a subject, or in the manner of treating it. He is undoubtedly guilty of pedantry, who, when he has made himself master of some abstruse and uncultivated part of knowledge, obtrudes his remarks and discoveries upon those whom he believes unable to judge of his proficiency, and from whom, as he cannot fear contradiction, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... too deeply absorbed in his calculations to notice these comings and goings. Apparently he had been led into the most abstruse mathematical regions. Nothing short of the triple integration of transcendental functions should have been adequate to produce those lines of anxious care in his face as he slowly covered sheet after ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... the printing of this pamphlet was evolved through a letter from John Stuart Mill. Henry George knew he was right in his conclusions, but he felt that he needed the corroboration of a great mind that had grappled with abstruse problems; so he sent one of his editorials to Mill, the greatest living ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... of the most acute speculative theologians produced by the later Protestant church. His style is as complex as Ullmann's is simple. It is amusing that, in one place, he even enters into a justification of his technical and abstruse writing. Applying himself to dogmatic investigations, the fruit of his labor is his Doctrine of the Person of Christ. Christianity was the world's great want, and all the religions of the natural man could not supply its place. But Christianity is vague unless the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Motley's "Dutch Republic," and of witnessing in her flushed cheeks and sparkling black eyes proof of an excitement all too great for one in her frail health. She had the unusual gift of relating in an easy, simple way what she read; and many a book far too abstruse and dull for my boyish taste became an absorbing story from her lips. One of her chief characteristics was the love of flowers. I can scarcely recall her when a flower of some kind, usually a rose, was not within her reach; and only periods of ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... his work in the field of historical syntax. He assumed that his students could read Greek as easily as they could read French, and the really important tasks he set them had to do with the most abstruse fields of philology. For work of this kind Page had little interest and less inclination. When Professor Gildersleeve would assign him the adverb [Greek: prin], and direct him to study the peculiarities of its ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... candles manufactured by this eminent firm (Stearine & Co.) were placed end to end, they would reach 2 and 7-8 times around the globe. Of course," continued Mr. Jaffrey, folding up the journal reflectively, "abstruse calculations of this kind are not, perhaps, of vital importance, but they indicate the intellectual activity of the age. Seriously, now," he said, halting in front of the table, "what with books and papers and drives about the country, I do not find the days too long, though I seldom ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... characters. These characters, as any one might readily guess, form a cipher—that is to say, they, convey a meaning; but then, from what is known of Kidd, I could not suppose him capable of constructing any of the more abstruse cryptographs. I made up my mind, at once, that this was of a simple species—such, however, as would appear, to the crude intellect of the sailor, absolutely insoluble ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... nation was not affected in the same degree by both of them. Common sense and obvious reflection had discovered to the people the advantages of a reformation in discipline; but the age was not yet so far advanced as to be seized with the spirit of controversy, or to enter into those abstruse doctrines which the Lollards endeavored to propagate throughout the kingdom. The very notion of heresy alarmed the generality of the people: innovation in fundamental principles was suspicious: curiosity was not, as yet, a sufficient counterpoise to authority; and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... filled the anatomical chair at the Royal Academy, is no less abstruse and instructive than pleasant and amusing. His illustrative anecdotes are always excellent, and his way of telling them quite dramatic. We have found him even more agreeable as a private talker than ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... "How can the understanding be said to have five properties? How again, can the five senses be spoken of as properties (of the five elementary entities)? Expound to me, O grandsire, all this that seems to be very abstruse." ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... "The Origin of Language" is typical of his quality. Treating of an abstruse, though enticing problem,—almost profound, and that in comparison with the soundest and sincerest thinking of our time,—it is yet so clear and broad, its details are so perfectly held in solution by the thought, the thought itself moves ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... You should hear some of his more abstruse speculations, concerning generation and birth and the development of the embryo; and his distinction between man, the laughing creature, and the ass, which is neither a laughing nor a carpentering nor a ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... spirits or genii, Amchaspands, on one side, and Ahriman with the Devs (who may represent the infernal crew of Christendom) on the other. Egypt, in the Mosaic and Homeric ages, seems to have attained considerable skill in magic, as well as in chymistry and astrology. As an abstruse and esoteric doctrine, it was strictly confined to the priests, or to the favoured few who were admitted to initiation. The magic excellence of the magicians, who successfully emulated the miracles of Moses, was apparently assisted by a legerdemain similar to that of the Hindu ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... mill, and he agreed with Humphrey that California was very rich in gold. He, too, went to work, and, being an excellent prospector, he was of great service in teaching the newcomers the principles of prospecting and mining for gold—principles not abstruse, yet not likely to suggest themselves at first thought to men entirely ignorant of the business. Baptiste had been employed by Captain Sutter to saw lumber with a whipsaw, and had been at work for two years at a place, since called Weber, about ten miles eastward from Coloma. When ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... Tragedy," "King Victor and King Charles," even of the less perfect achievement, "Strafford"; or, passing to the smaller poems, of "The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," "The Laboratory," and "The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's";—will at once realize to the memory of all readers an abstruse ideal never lost sight of, and treated to the extreme of elaboration. As regards this point, we address all in any manner acquainted with the poet's works, certain of receiving an affirmative answer even from those ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... is not astonishing, that one looking upon the Indian character, from Mr. ——'s point of view, should entertain such sentiments. The object of his intercourse with them was, to make them apprehend the mysteries of a theology, which, to the most enlightened, is an abstruse, metaphysical study; and it is not singular they should prefer their pagan superstitions, which address themselves more directly to the senses. Failing in the attempt to christianize, before civilizing them, he inferred, ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... the city is not greater than the prosperity of the largest number of its component individuals," replied the mayor, in a somewhat altruistic and economically abstruse argument on the floor of the council ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... the fortunes of Jansenism. He outlived his Cartesianism and became its most influential spokesman. His Provinciales (1656) rendered abstruse questions of theology more or less intelligible, and invited the general public to pronounce an opinion on them. His lucid exposition interested every one in the abstruse problem, Is man's freedom such as not to render grace superfluous? But Pascal perceived that casuistry was not the only ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... fire, energy, melancholy, despair, caprice, hope, delicacy and startling vigor which they imperiously exact; as thorough master of the complicated instrument to which he devoted his best powers; as an erudite and experienced possessor of that abstruse and difficult science, music; as a composer of true, deep, and highly original genius,—this dedication ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... were very anxious to win over Mr. Cotton, and about a week later held a meeting at Boston and solemnly catechised Cotton on many abstruse points. The storm of theological rancor was at its height. Harsh words were hurled about, and by some orthodox ministers Mrs. Hutchinson and her friends were denounced as Familists, Antinomians, etc., after certain early sects who cherished the doctrines ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... electrical arts, that they serve to present a picture of the whole development effected in the last fifty years, the most fruitful that electricity has known. The effort has been made to avoid technique and abstruse phrases, but some degree of explanation has been absolutely necessary in regard to each group of inventions. The task of the authors has consisted largely in summarizing fairly the methods and processes employed by Edison; and some idea of the difficulties ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... was a juggler, a political prestidigitateur. He did things before the eyes of the Senate and the nation. His balm for the healing of the nation's wounds was a patent medicine so cleverly concocted that experts alone could show what was in it. So abstruse and twisted were some of Mr. Douglas's doctrines that a genius alone might put them into simple words, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... single poems are linked inseparably with the most intimate personal relationship of his life. Hardly one of the Romances, as we saw, but had been read in MS. by Elizabeth Barrett, and pronounced upon with the frank yet critical delight of her nature. In the abstruse symbolic title, too,—implying, as Browning expected his readers to discover, "sound and sense" or "music and discoursing,"—her wit had divined a more felicitous application to ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... But now they are to study bottomy, algierbay, and have to demonstrate supposition of sycophants of circuses, tangents and Diogenes and parallelogramy, to say nothing about the oxhides, corostics, and abstruse triangles!" Thus saying, the old lady leaned back in her chair, her knitting work fell in her lap, and for some minutes she seemed ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... not only by definition but by etymology a reasoned knowledge or theory of a God or gods, it becomes desirable, before we proceed further, to define the sense in which I understand and shall employ the word God. That sense is neither novel nor abstruse; it is simply the sense which I believe the generality of mankind attach to the term. By a God I understand a superhuman and supernatural being, of a spiritual and personal nature, who controls the world or some part of it on ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... as Persia and Sweden, has made antiquarian researches in the islands of the Mediterranean, has visited parts of America, and has won reputation as a scholar and writer by a number of works on such abstruse questions as Oriental philosophy and religion, the cuneiform inscriptions and the distinctions of race. The present book is merely a novel, yet it was clearly intended to embody the deepest and maturest thoughts of the author in regard to "the proper study of mankind," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... criminal. Whence we are to derive metes and bounds of the state power is a subject to the confusion of which, I regret to say, I have contributed—comforted in the acknowledgment, however, by recalling that this Amendment is so enigmatic and abstruse that judges more experienced than I have had to reverse themselves as to its effect on state power. The thesis now tendered in dissent is that the 'liberty' which the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects against denial ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... to enter into a long recapitulation of arguments sufficiently familiar to those inquiring minds, whom alone a writer on abstruse subjects can be conceived to address. Perhaps the most clear and vigorous statement of the intellectual system is to be found in Sir William ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... fertilized, weeded and pruned them, with something like religious care. They were of the rarest character, and had been planted by the learned and famous Dr. Swinnerton, who, on his death- bed, when he left his dwelling and all his abstruse manuscripts to his favorite pupil, had particularly directed his attention to this row of shrubs. They had been collected by himself from remote countries, and had the poignancy of torrid climes in them; and he ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... astronomy, every comet that has come back upon predicted time—not that, essentially, there was anything more abstruse about it than is a prediction that you can make of a postman's periodicities tomorrow—was advertised for all it was worth. It's the way reputations are worked up for fortune-tellers by the faithful. The comets that ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... to be than a yellow primrose by the river's brim?" David finished for her. "I don't know, I'm sure. I'm a mere man and such questions are too abstruse for me, as I told your Aunt Margaret the other day. Now I think of it, though, you don't look unlike a yellow primrose yourself ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... A problem lies large before us—complicated, abstruse even, yet—suitably to the subject—a delicate one! To hunt down an elusive word, and a more elusive notion! It is to find a set of determinings which, laid together, shall form a circle fitted to confine that inconfinable spirit—a Fairy; or, if you better like ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... engineer to understand the fundamentals thoroughly than to use a complex formula that may be misapplied." However, many readers undoubtedly read only the lead paragraph, sagely nodded their heads when they reached the word "fictitious," which confirmed their half-formed conviction that anything as abstruse as the Coriolis component could have no bearing upon a practical problem, and turned the page to the "practical ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... messenger half a spy?—And, having finished burnishing his arms, he sate down patiently to compute how much half a dollar per diem would amount to at the end of a six-months' campaign; and, when he had settled that problem, proceeded to the more abstruse calculations necessary for drawing up a brigade of two thousand men on the principle of ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... and relations by one particular sect of religion, or passing four years of "toil and trouble" in another university, where he is kept wallowing and smothering in the darkness of metaphysics or the more abstruse and higher! branches of mathematics; both sciences as utterly useless to him in any situation of life as a knowledge of the precise language that the devil tempted Eve in, and which some ecclesiastical writers have laboured to prove was High Dutch. I have been several times to ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... was so extremely metaphorical, was founded on such abstruse passages, and was delivered in so broad a dialect, that it was caviare to Mr. Verdant Green and his friends; but it seemed to be far otherwise with the attentive and crowded congregation, who ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... be genteel enough; many young men, who had chambers in the Temple, made a very good appearance in the first circles, and drove about town in very knowing gigs. But I had no inclination for the law, even in this less abstruse study of it, which my family approved. As for the navy, it had fashion on its side, but I was too old when the subject was first started to enter it; and, at length, as there was no necessity for ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... left the time-worn paths of beauty and success, and became young, and fresh, and whole-hearted as he; tackling abstruse problems with a childlike, vigorous air; holding him spell-bound with her own charm of conversation one moment, and leading him on to talk with ease ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... by Josiah Royce illustrates how clearly a most abstruse topic can be handled by a man willing to ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... by superstition. In Greece, there being no caste of priests, philosophy embraced those studious minds addicted to a species of inquiry which rejected the poetical form, as well as the poetical spirit. It may be observed, that the more limited the reading public, the more abstruse are generally prose compositions; as readers increase, literature goes back to the fashion of oral communication; for if the reciter addressed the multitude in the earlier age, so the writer addresses a multitude in the later; literature, therefore, commences with poetical ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... are of an electrical nature, because they are bent out of their normal path if a magnet is brought near them. And this fact led to a further discovery: to one of those sensational estimates which the general public is apt to believe to be founded on the most abstruse speculations. The physicist set up a little chemical screen for the "Beta rays" to hit, and he so arranged his tube that only a narrow sheaf of the rays poured on to the screen. He then drew this sheaf of rays out of its course with a magnet, and he accurately measured the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... that he succeeded in settling any medical points of a knotty character that might be hovering in his brain, and certain it is that he had become quite absorbed in an abstruse matter connected with physiology, when his ears were startled, and he was at once aroused to a full consciousness of where he was, and why he had come there, by the distant sound of ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... ... if Hildreth has a tooth-ache, or anything that the rest of us women accept as a matter of course, she runs to Mubby, as she calls him ... and, as if it were some abstruse, philosophical problem, they talk on, hour after hour ... like German metaphysics, there's no end to it. They've been at it since ten and they'll go on till four, if they follow precedents ... Penton ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... to see you, smug and spruce, There at Chicago, burrowed in a Chair, Not made to measure and a deal too loose, And see you lift your little arm and swear Democracy shall be no more! If it's a fair And civil question, and not too abstruse, Were you elected as a "robber baron," Or as a Communist whose teeth ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... abstruse discussion of this problem see Alan H. Gardiner, "Personification (Egyptian)," Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, pp. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... natural strength. By this sensuous, form-loving spirit of the age, working so widely and deeply, Dante, too, was largely swayed. With the eye of his imagination he seized objects so distinctly that he could reproduce them in sharp outline. Thence we see before us the most abstruse and unusual, drawn, as it were, after nature." In recognition of the same characteristic, Coleridge says, "In picturesqueness Dante is beyond all other poets, ancient or modern, and more in the stern style of Pindar than of any other. Michael Angelo is said to have made a design ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... on them for himself? No. Are they one of them laid down directly in Scripture, like the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, or the Creeds? No. They are every one, as it seems to me, whether they be right or wrong, abstruse deductions, delicate theories, built up on single and obscure texts. Surely, if they had been necessary for salvation, the Lord would have spoken on them in a tone and in words about which there should be no more mistake than about the thunders of Sinai, and the tables of stone fresh from the finger-mark ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... what he has done is due to nothing but industry and patient thought; and, indeed, long consideration is so necessary in such abstruse inquiries, that it is always dangerous to publish the productions of great men, which are not known to have been designed for the press, and of which it is uncertain, whether much patience and thought have been bestowed ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... as a kind of prologue to the bloody comedy of the Fronde, sharpened the malice and even fired the passions of the Parisians. This confusion was not displeasing to them. Indifferent to the causes of the quarrels which were abstruse for them, they were not so with regard to individuals, and already began to regard the party chiefs with affection or hatred, not on account of the interest which they supposed them to take in the welfare ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... rendered any subjects, immediately connected with feeling, a source of pain and disquiet to me." In 1818 he writes: "Poetry is out of the question. The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of acute feelings from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion, presents an asylum." But theory worked with a natural tendency in keeping him for the most part away from any attempt to put his personal emotions into verse. "A sound promise of genius," he considered, "is the choice of subjects ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... weakened, and better found in their rooms to confirm what is there said. He shewed finely whence it happens that good writers are not admired by the present age; because there are but few in any age that do mind anything that is abstruse and curious; and so longer before any body do put the true praise, and set it on foot in the world, the generality of mankind pleasing themselves in the easy delights of the world, as eating, drinking, dancing, hunting, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... persistence, feller-niggers," said Sam, with the air of one entering into an abstruse subject, "dis yer 'sistency 's a thing what an't seed into very clar, by most anybody. Now, yer see, when a feller stands up for a thing one day and night, de contrar de next, folks ses (and nat'rally enough dey ses), why he an't persistent,—hand me dat ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... diplomatic history is more eccentric than the long sermons upon abstruse points of divinity and ecclesiastical history which the English ambassador delivered from time to time before the States-General in accordance with elaborate instructions drawn up by his sovereign with his own hand. Rarely has a king been more tedious, and he bestowed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... a Debating Club, exceeding wise and great; On grave and abstruse questions it would eagerly debate. Its members said: 'We are so wise, ourselves we'll herewith dub The Great Aristophelean Pythagoristic Club.' And every night these bigwigs met, and strove with utmost pains To solve recondite ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... a cure if the malady be not wholly discharged; if repentance were laid upon the scale of the balance, it would weigh down sin. I find no quality so easy to counterfeit as devotion, if men do not conform their manners and life to the profession; its essence is abstruse and occult; ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Horrox had to encounter may be best described by quoting his own words. He writes: 'There were many hindrances. The abstruse nature of the study, my inexperience and want of means dispirited me. I was much pained not to have any one to whom I could look for guidance, or indeed for the sympathy of companionship in my endeavours, and I was assailed by the languor and weariness which ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... found time for philosophical speculations to which we owe the scientific inquiries which built up the theology of the Middle Ages. His famous works were the first attempts of any Christian thinker to elicit the idea of God from the very nature of the human reason. His passion for abstruse thought robbed him of food and sleep. Sometimes he could hardly pray. Often the night was a long watch till he could seize his conception and write it on the wax tablets which lay beside him. But not even a fever of intense thought such as this could draw Anselm's heart from its ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... the book contributed to its momentary effect. The literary, impressive, even bombastic style secured for it a very large public and was a constant relief after the long years of abstract and abstruse Hegelianism. The same result also proceeded from the extravagant glorification of love, which in comparison with the insufferable sovereignty of pure reason, found an excuse, if not a justification. What we must not forget is, that just on these two ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... short, be abolished by Act of Parliament. Upon this all the authorities I have consulted are perfectly agreed. What has grown up during the process of so many generations, cannot be now put on one side. This, gentlemen, is rather an abstruse part of the question, being one which recommends itself for consideration to the purely legal intellect. It is a matter, too, of high state policy which rises above the knowledge of the common herd. We may take it for granted, and pass on from the general to the special aspect of this ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... leap for that chair and no sooner landed than he at once proposed to Mr. Gladstone this startling question: "As the bishop of the old Catholic Church in Germany does not recognize the authority of the pope, how can he receive absolution?"—and some other abstruse theological questions. This at once aroused Mr. Gladstone, who, when once started, was stopped with difficulty, and there was no pause until the host announced that the gentlemen should join the ladies. I made it a point at the next dinner given for ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... hour of the night. It was this passion of his for the stars which showed him his work as a boy. That started him fabricating glasses to see them better. He has a supreme eye for light, circles and foci, and a brain that just plays with heavy mathematics—the most abstruse calculations. Yet, you see, he carries it all with the ease of a boy. I think men who come with a task to do are like that. It's part of them. They don't feel the weight of what they know, because it's all through them—not localized. You might be with Spenski an hour or a week and never know that ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... of such abstruse, far-off things," observed Mrs. Rexford; "it does harm; but with no nursery, no ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... the individual. Charles did not see this distinction between seeking and proving; for how can we prove except by seeking (in Scripture) for reasons? He put the question in another form, and asked if the Christian Religion allowed of private judgment? This was no abstruse question, and a very practical one. Had he asked a Wesleyan or Independent, he would have had an unconditional answer in the affirmative; had he asked a Catholic, he would have been told that we used our private judgment ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... day, the small pretenders to science talk of the absurdities of alchemy and the dream of the Philosopher's Stone, a more erudite knowledge is aware that by alchemists the greatest discoveries in science have been made, and much which still seems abstruse, had we the key to the mystic phraseology they were compelled to adopt, might open the way to yet more noble acquisitions. The Philosopher's Stone itself has seemed no visionary chimera to some of the soundest chemists that ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... published in the 'Edinburgh' and 'Quarterly Reviews,' in the 'Oxford Essays,' in 'Macmillan's' and 'Fraser's Magazines,' in the 'Saturday Review,' and in the 'Times.' In writing them my principal endeavour has been to bring out even in the most abstruse subjects the points of real interest that ought to engage the attention of the public at large, and never to leave a dark nook or corner without attempting to sweep away the cobwebs of false learning, and let in the light of real ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... Bewildered amid abstruse researches, metaphysical and historical, Mr. Cargill, living only for himself and his books, acquired many ludicrous habits, which exposed the secluded student to the ridicule of the world, and which tinged, though they did not altogether obscure, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... consort), on her visit to her parents, it is likewise imperative that we should comply with all the principles of etiquette, so that were words of this kind to be used, they would besides be coarse and inappropriate; and may it please you to fix upon something else more recondite and abstruse." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... might as soon think of filling his stomach with sweetmeats, as going through a long debate filled with pompous epithets and sounding language. If we have any doubt of its being ridiculous, let us only suppose a man arguing an abstruse subject in metaphysics, in the blank verse of Milton, or the exact rhymes of Pope. The absurdity is the same, only different in degree. I would not be understood to cut off an extempore speaker from ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... cap that had been then available could not be worn in the sun of June. There had been sundry incidental calls for money. Mother Carey had been disappointed in the sale of a somewhat ambitious set of groups from Fouque's "Seasons," which were declared abstruse and uninteresting to the public. She had accepted an order for some very humble work, not much better than chimney ornaments, for which she rose early, and toiled while Babie was out driving with her friends. When she had the money for this she would ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her anxiously, but made no attempt to force her confidence, and let her talk to him of books, school discipline, parish stories, and abstruse questions as much as she pleased, always replying in a practical, sobering tone, that told upon her, and soothed her almost like Violet's mild influence, and to her great delight, she made him ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... published during those years. We see him jotting down everything that comes into his head, for his own amusement, and certainly without any thought of publication; engaging in learned controversies, writing treatises on abstruse mathematical problems, composing comedies to be acted before Count Waldstein's neighbours, practising verse-writing in two languages, indeed with more patience than success, writing philosophical dialogues in which God and himself ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... little, and kisses the child again, and places her gently upon the ground, and then he glances at Hermia. But her face is impassive as usual. No faintest tinge deepens the ordinary pallor of her cheeks. She has the sugar tongs poised in the air, and is apparently sunk in abstruse meditation. ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... does the same high authority say about Shakespeare? He had "a deep technical knowledge of the law," and an easy familiarity with "some of the most abstruse proceedings in English jurisprudence." And again: "Whenever he indulges this propensity he uniformly lays down good law." Of Henry IV., Part 2, he says: "If Lord Eldon could be supposed to have written the play, I do not see how he could be chargeable with having forgotten ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... disposition, and his averseness from the choice of any profession. One of the most singular qualities of his mind was the rapidity with which it was able to seize and master almost any subject, however abstruse or novel, that was offered to its speculation. To this quickness of apprehension was joined an extraordinary power of memory, so that he was able to recall at pleasure most passages of a book, which ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... were infallible; from his decisions there was no appeal. The wisdom of experienced age was his, and he always stood willing to impart it to the youngest. No question was too trivial for him to consider, and none too abstruse for him to answer. He did not tell Johnnie to "never mind" or wait until he grew older, but was ever willing to pause in his work to explain things. And his oracular qualifications were genuine. He had traveled—had even been as ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... rests upon the idea of Divine power. Reason and faith meet together upon the lofty heights of truth. But let us not enter too far into the difficulties of philosophy. Let us confine ourselves to considerations of a less abstruse order. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... never has been a seemingly more abstruse subject for the human mind to grasp than the theories involving a true conception of space-time. Yet, doubtless, to those of Tako's realm, inheriting, let me say, the consciousness of its reality, there was ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... Babel had very little power over them. In the memories of each there were garnered scraps from a score of spoken languages, and when these failed, they could always draw on the unlimited vocabulary of the gestures and the eyes. And for points that were really abstruse, or which required definite understanding, there always remained the charcoal stick and the explanatory drawing on the face of a ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... assistance in the earlier portion of my task. And to Mr. A. Venis, the learned Principal of the Benares Sanskrit College, I am indebted for most instructive notes on some passages of a peculiarly technical and abstruse character. Nor can I conclude without expressing my sense of obligation to Colonel G. A. Jacob, whose invaluable 'Concordance to the Principal Upanishads' lightens to an incalculable degree the task of any scholar who is engaged in work bearing on ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... adhere to one point, whatever the form, it should rather be called a disquisition than a conversation. Most writers of dialogue take but a single stride into questions the most abstruse, and collect a heap of arguments to be blown away by the bloated whiffs of some rhetorical charlatan, tricked out in a multiplicity ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... 'The Ghostseer' is a well-told and readable yarn, with only just philosophizing enough to give it a touch of dignity. In the second book it runs off into a quagmire of abstruse speculation, Schiller had got the idea—and it interested him for personal reasons—of carrying his hero through a debauch of skepticism. This he thought would give weight and distinction to the book. So the Prince's philosophic demoralization is described at tedious ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... predicted "conical refraction," afterwards experimentally proved by another Irishman, Humphrey Lloyd. He twice received the Gold Medal of the Royal Society: (i) for optical discoveries; (ii) for his theory of a general method of dynamics, which resolves an extremely, abstruse problem relative to a system of bodies in motion. He was the discoverer of a new calculus, that of Quaternions, which attracted the attention of Professor Tait of Edinburgh, and was by him made comprehensible to lesser mathematicians. It is far ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... own kind of strength. To be compelled to be so quick-minded as the simians would be torture, to cows. Cows could dwell on one idea, week by week, without trying at all; but they'd all have brain-fever in an hour at a simian tea. A super-cow people would revel in long thoughtful books on abstruse philosophical subjects, and would sit up late reading them. Most of the ambitious simians who try it—out of pride—go to sleep. The typical simian brain is supremely distractable, and it's really too jumpy by nature to endure ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... writing the passage in the text, I have met with the following in The Speaker, of London: "Everybody knows that when an important work is published in history, philosophy, or any branch of science, the editor of a respectable paper employs an expert to review it; . . . indeed, the more abstruse the subject of the book, the more careful and intelligent you will find the review. . . . It is equally well known that works of fiction and books of verse are not treated with anything like the same care. . . . A good poem, play, or novel is at least as fine an achievement ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... boldest spake, 'Father, these are not pine-trees—these are oaks.' And Cuthbert answered, 'Oaks, good sooth, they are! In youth I knew the twain apart: the pine Wears on his head the Cross.' Instruction next He gave them, how the Cross had vanquished sin: Then first abstruse to some appeared his words. 'Father,' they answered, 'speak in parables! For pleasant is the tale, and, onward passed, Keeps in our hearts thy lesson.' While they spake, A youth rich-vested tossed his head and cried: 'Father, why thus ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... the world-religions which, springing from an abstruse system of metaphysics, brought forth such practical fruits as truthfulness, honesty, loving-kindness and universal pity, spread with extraordinary rapidity not only throughout the Indian continent but over the entire civilised world. Its apostles[150] visited ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... asked: What sort of instrument is Chinese for the expression of thought? As a medium for the conveyance of historical facts, subtle emotions or abstruse philosophical conceptions, can it compare with the languages of the Western world? The answers given to this question have varied considerably. But it is noteworthy that those who most depreciate the qualities of Chinese are, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream; not as a being of the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being; not as a thing to admire, but to analyze; not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation. And now—now I shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her approach; yet, bitterly lamenting her fallen and desolate condition, I called to mind that she had loved me long, and, in an evil moment, I ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Seaton worked in the laboratory, either alone or superintending and assisting the men at work there. Every night when Crane went to bed he saw Seaton in his room in a haze of smoke, poring over blueprints or, surrounded by abstruse works upon the calculus and sub-atomic phenomena, making ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... the end of life, she says that it was then as vividly present to her in all its circumstances as at the time of its occurrence, adding in her own simple way, that "great things like this are never forgotten." It has been observed that the terms in which she speaks of the most abstruse mysteries of faith, are too clear, top precise, too strictly in accordance with the teaching of theology, to have come within the natural lights of a woman of ordinary education; therefore while the style of the narrative has excited the admiration of the learned, it has left them without a ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... of the old nobility,—made a young man of the present day a finished gentleman. Accordingly, Paul took a fencing-lesson every morning, went to the riding-school, and practised in a pistol-gallery. The rest of his time was spent in reading novels, for his father would never have allowed the more abstruse studies now considered necessary to finish ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... dedicated his work to Dr. Chalmers, who approved of its original plan. We confess this to be too extensive for us to explain in a few lines, although we do not hesitate to say, that a more amusing book upon abstruse subjects has scarcely ever met our attention. It is literally filled with facts and closely-packed inquiries, and these are so attractively arranged as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... of copyright is abstruse, and is not to be mastered in a few days or in a few months. Long as this letter is, I have stated only a single phase of the question. I could better have dealt with the matter in a short address, and I very much regret that the Executive of the Council did not afford me the opportunity ...
— The Copyright Question - A Letter to the Toronto Board of Trade • George N. Morang
... whirl of indignation, Mrs. Hanway-Harley burst in upon Senator Hanway. That ambitious gentleman was employed in abstruse calculations as to tariff schedules, and how far they might be expected to bear upon his chances in the coming National Convention. Senator Hanway was somewhat impressed by Mrs. Hanway-Harley's visit; his study had never been that lady's favorite lounge. Moreover, her face ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... and deliberations were, in this alarming interim, no Hansard gives us a hint. Faint and timid they needed, at first, to be; such unfavorable winds having risen, blowing off at a sad rate the smoke of that abstruse Institution.—"JARNI-BLEU!" snuffles the Feldzeugmeister to himself. But "SI DEUS EST NOBISCUM," as Grumkow exclaims once to his beautiful Reichenbach, or NOSTI as he calls him in their slang or cipher language, ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... Pascal, a man of marvellous genius and depth of thought, and Racine, the chief French dramatic poet. Their chief director, the Abbot of St. Cyran, was however, a pupil of Jansen, a Dutch ecclesiastic, whose views on abstruse questions of grace were condemned by the Jesuits; and as the Port-Royalists would not disown the doctrines attributed to him, they were discouraged and persecuted throughout Louis's reign, more because he was jealous of what ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... added substance to his polemics and treatises. He tells us himself that he read in those days all that he could lay hands on. He is very proud of having read by himself and understood without any assistance from a master, the Ten Categories of Aristotle, which was considered one of the most abstruse works of the Stagirite. In an age when instruction was principally by word of mouth, and books comparatively rare, it is obvious that Augustin was not what we call an "all-devouring reader." We ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... approaching land, might easily make all the difference between perfect safety and her total loss, together with that of all hands. Hence, during those early days, when the sense of grave responsibility lay heavy upon my young shoulders, I could think of nothing but more or less abstruse astronomical problems. ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... never been surpassed. In bringing it forward Mr. Gladstone spoke five hours, and during that length of time held the House spellbound. The speech was delivered with the greatest ease, and was perspicuity itself throughout. Even when dealing with the most abstruse financial detail his language flowed on without interruption, and he never paused for a word. "Here was an orator who could apply all the resources of a burnished rhetoric to the elucidation of figures; who could make pippins and cheese interesting ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... has been said, nearly related to those of Greece; they underwent as great modifications, while the opinions of her philosophers were equally abstruse, varied, and difficult to understand. The author above quoted, treating of the notion of the soul and a future state entertained by the Roman philosophers, proves their ideas to have been extremely vague and ill- defined. Still, there were not wanting ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... approaches for stimulation criteria, in biological research—a very abstruse field—even your multiplex machines with elaborate means of intercommunication are not sophisticated enough—or ever will be—to cope with the complexities inherent in the numerous interacting biosyntheses on the subcellular ultratopographical ...
— On Handling the Data • M. I. Mayfield
... hopes, fears, doubts, and high enthusiasm of every person connected with the discovery. His delineation of Kepler is especially genial and striking. By following this method he infuses his own enthusiasm into the reader, bears him willingly along through the most abstruse processes of science, and at the end leaves him without fatigue, and ready for ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... learned lecturer on geology who had addressed a small but deeply attentive audience at the village hall, "I have tried to make these problems, abstruse as they may appear, and involving in their solution the best thoughts, the closest analysis, and the most profound investigations of our noblest scientific men for many years; I have tried, I say, to make them seem comparatively simple and easily understood, in ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... united, the Protestants were shamefully divided upon the most trivial points of discipline, or upon abstruse questions in philosophy above the reach of mortal minds. It was as true then, as in the days of our Saviour, that "the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light." Henry IV., of France, who had not then embraced the Catholic faith, was ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... therefore, now, as usual, by way of flapper, to put you in mind of yourself. Doctor Swift, in his account of the island of Laputa, describes some philosophers there who were so wrapped up and absorbed in their abstruse speculations, that they would have forgotten all the common and necessary duties of life, if they had not been reminded of them by persons who flapped them, whenever they observed them continue too long ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... of any service to those of his family who might have survived. The house was deserted, and had been one of those assigned to the invading strangers quartered in London. I saw his astronomical instruments put to strange uses, his globes defaced, his papers covered with abstruse calculations destroyed. The neighbours could tell me little, till I lighted on a poor woman who acted as nurse in these perilous times. She told me that all the family were dead, except Merrival himself, who had gone mad— mad, she called it, yet on questioning her further, ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... introduction, I am reminded of a brother artist, who, although a caricaturist, was entirely devoid of guile, and, in addition, was as absent-minded as the popularly-accepted type of ardent scientist or professor of ultra-abstruse subject. Well, this curious species of satirist was setting forth on travels in foreign climes, and in order to lighten in some measure the vicissitudes inseparable from peripatetic wandering, he was provided with a letter of introduction to a certain British consul. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... to the New World which now any little boat can follow. Ages of experience and genius are stored up in a locomotive, but quite an unlettered man can drive it. It is the work of genius to render difficult matters plain, abstruse thoughts clear. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... too busy with our small plans and daily struggles, to take any interest in Locke or Gibbon or Hume, therefore the ageing philosopher sat forlornly among his faded, musty books, dreaming his days away on some abstruse ethical problem, or carving with his patient knife some quaintly ornate piece of furniture, while my own father (at the opposite pole of life) weeded his garden, read the daily paper or played cinch with the ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... should take pleasure in transacting business with him: a circumstance which was principally owing to the method and perspicuity of his calculations, and to the extreme facility with which he arranged and explained the most abstruse and difficult combinations ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... nostoc, and he thereupon concluded that too much learning had turned my brain, and, fully persuaded of his own complete knowledge of nature, was pleased to be very facetious at my expense. Finally, he graciously advised me to pay some regard to the opinions of people skilled in these abstruse matters, and not to expose myself on my return by publishing ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... being complete, all that remained was to find a suitable medium for its publication. This was not so easy. Distinguished mediums would not lend themselves to contradictions of Grampus, or if they would, Merman's article was too long and too abstruse, while he would not consent to leave anything out of an article which had no superfluities; for all this happened years ago when the world was at a different stage. At last, however, he got his rejoinder printed, and not on hard terms, since the medium, in every sense ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... unfold; And thou the cause of it hast likewise ask'd. And I reply: I in one God believe, One sole eternal Godhead, of whose love All heav'n is mov'd, himself unmov'd the while. Nor demonstration physical alone, Or more intelligential and abstruse, Persuades me to this faith; but from that truth It cometh to me rather, which is shed Through Moses, the rapt Prophets, and the Psalms. The Gospel, and that ye yourselves did write, When ye were gifted of the Holy ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age. When at long intervals we turn over their abstruse pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few, these great spiritual lords who have walked in the world,—these of the old religion,—dwelling in a worship which makes the sanctities of Christianity look parvenues and popular; for "persuasion is in ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... never read of nor discover in another. Aristotle, I confess, in his acute and singular book of physiognomy, hath made no mention of chiromancy: yet I believe the Egyptians, who were nearer addicted to those abstruse and mysti- cal sciences, had a knowledge therein: to which those vagabond and counterfeit Egyptians did after pretend, and perhaps retained a few corrupted principles, which sometimes might ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... of talent, and knew the world, but he knew nothing of the navy; and when I had got him out of his depth, I served him as I did the usher: that is, I soused him and his company head over heels in the horse-pond of their own ignorance. Such is the power of local knowledge and cunning over abstruse science ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the sake of argument, that the only available book for the instruction of a class of boys was that excellent but abstruse work known as 'Bradshaw's Railway Guide.' The modern schoolmaster would draw up an exhaustive and complicated scheme. So much time would be devoted to parsing every sentence through the book. The figures would be added up, and subtracted, ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... your memorialists venture to point out the entire unsuitableness, in their judgment, of works in learned languages, on abstruse subjects or in black letter, to the objects ...
— Three Centuries of a City Library • George A. Stephen
... of Goethe's superb prose style was reached in "Dichtung und Wahrheit," which stands as one of the most charming autobiographies of all times. Goethe's versatility as a writer and man was shown not only by his free use of all literary forms, but also by his essays on such abstruse subjects as astrology, optics, the theory of color, comparative anatomy and botany. Shortly before his death, the poet finished the greatest of his works, the tragedy "Faust." He died in the eighty-third year of his life, uttering the words "More Light." Goethe was entombed in the ducal vault at ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... in your regiment. Only I will beg you to remember in future that I am the judge as to the capabilities of movement of the units composing this column. But let us discuss the prospects of peace, or some other less abstruse subject than the Mount Nelson Light Horse. In the meantime, colonel, just to emphasise what I have said, my Intelligence officer has orders to go out to those farms over there to see if he can get suitable guides. I have ordered him to ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... the company's expert apparently well satisfied, and the professor beamed upon the stones as they came from the sieve, talked learnedly of their origin and the peculiarities of the deposit they were found in, and passed a great deal of time in abstruse calculations as to the probable yield of the fields, based upon the rich finds they were making, and the genuineness of which he, ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... moment believe that their requirements, not as high as those demanded for an ordinary New England high school, and by no means equal in thoroughness, quantity, or quality to that demanded for entrance at Yale, Amherst, Dartmouth, or Brown, are too high or abstruse to be compassed by negroes, some of whom have successfully stood all these, and are now pursuing their studies in the best institutions ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... all the powers of the mind on abstruse study!" Abishai muttered to himself as he descended the hill. "Hadassah is going mad; her judgment is giving way under ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... not confined to his endeavours to meet with a lady rectoress. He sometimes surprised his hearers with the originality of his abstruse theories. One morning he called me into the stable yard to join in consultation with his gardener as to the advisability of killing a pig. There were two, and it was not easy to decide which was the fitter for the butcher. The rector selected one, I the other, and the gardener, who had nurtured ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... and they proceed in the most cautious manner from point to point, from axiom to axiom—debating at every step, and coming to no decision without unanimous conviction. Some are professors of the university, devoted to abstruse studies; some are clergymen; and some authors and artists. Now, at the meeting in question—which we take merely as an example, for all are alike—when the hour struck which terminates their proceedings for the evening, the jaded philosophers retired to the refreshment-room; and here ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... other room, and selected a book for perusal; it chanced to be a work on metaphysics, and after poring over its abstruse pages for some time, she became drowsy, and finally fell into a dreamy sleep. In her fitful slumbers, she was visited by a dream or vision of extraordinary vividness, which made an indelible impression upon her mind, because she felt personally ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... and statistics. By keeping some of these in my brain in an easy place to get at them when wanted, I was able to formulate rules and plans for almost any condition that might arise. By unloading abstruse and unusual facts at the proper time and place I gained the reputation of being a very shrewd fellow, but I was always careful to introduce subjects in which my assertions were likely to go unchallenged. I had established the habit of reasoning by deduction and analogy, and would ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... philosophy, as that science was then understood. It dealt, in the first place, with the laws and forms of thought and knowledge, with language, in which Latin formed the basis, or with grammar and rhetoric, as also with the highest problems and most abstruse questions of physics, and comprised even a general knowledge of natural science and astronomy. A complete study of all these subjects was not merely requisite for learned theologians, but frequently served as an introduction to that of law, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... most effectually read his Creator's works, will regard with especial interest all that can tend to facilitate the translation of its principles into explicit practical forms." So, for the moment turning away from algebraic formulae and abstruse calculations, wrote Ada, Lady Lovelace, in her twenty-eighth year. See "Translator's Notes," signed A. A. L., to A Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq., ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... science known as geometry, and study therein the nature of that curve which the discovery of Kepler has raised to such unparalleled importance. The subject, no doubt, is a difficult one, and to pursue it with any detail would involve us in many abstruse calculations which would be out of place in this volume; but a general sketch of the subject is indispensable, and we must attempt to render it such justice as may be compatible ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... the striking qualities which caught the public eye, he was a man of profound knowledge of our political history, of a sure literary taste, and of great capacity as an orator. He studied and worked out for himself very abstruse questions, on which he formed his own opinions, usually with great sagacity. How far he was affected in his position by the desire for public favor I will not undertake to say. I think the constitution of his mind was such that matters were apt to strike him in much the same way as they were apt ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... discovered, among other great scientific facts, the functions of the lever. The solution of an abstruse problem having occurred to him while in the bath, he leaped out of the water, and ran naked through the city, ...
— 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.
... of this little work the writer has kept one end in view, viz.: To make it serviceable for those for whom it is intended, that is, for those who have neither the time nor the opportunity, the learning nor the inclination, to peruse elaborate and abstruse treatises on Rhetoric, Grammar, and Composition. To them such works are as gold enclosed in chests of steel and locked beyond power of opening. This book has no pretension about it whatever,—it is neither a Manual of Rhetoric, expatiating on the dogmas of style, nor a Grammar full of arbitrary ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin |
