"Comprehension" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her meaning and comprehend her soul. Moreover, this contemplation of Nature will have evoked from within himself much that he had never suspected he possessed, and thereby his own soul also he will have learned to understand. And from this completer comprehension of his own soul and hers will have emerged a fuller community of heart between him and Nature. He will have come to worship her with a still more ardent devotion, and through the intensity of his love discovered richer and ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... stirring trade was established within six months of the opening day. By this time Mr. Brown had learned to be silent on the subject of advertising, and had been brought to confess, more than once, that the subject was beyond his comprehension. ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... sympathetic comprehension. "I know; but it's worst when you've nothing left to pawn. As for clothes, they give you nothing on them, at least round here. But you want to know the time." She opened the window and listened a moment. "It's ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally shortsighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... ordinary senses, and particularly the one of eye-sight, is liable?—and if they should think so, let them not, at least, deny me the resources I possess. I shall not, however, persist further in a description of that situation, those circumstances and those consolations, which the all-feeling comprehension of the poet hath so justly caught in one of its diviner ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... best to ourselves. Evan was a Yakut whom my friend brought from the Lena country. He was intelligent and active, and assisted greatly to soften the asperities of the route. With my few words of Russian, and his quick comprehension, we understood each other ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... not so the frog which jumps with a spring, the wooden hammers which fall alternately on their wooden anvil by the simplest of contrivances, and the horseman without legs, whose horse has a whistle instead of a tail. How any one of these articles could be sold for a sou passed my comprehension until I learned details so surprising as to throw this one quite ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... nevertheless kept her head. She had not the faintest comprehension of his meaning, but she was naturally quick-witted, and felt it imperative to "keep her end up" as ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... inevitable, or indeed necessary. "The good gods sigh for the cost and pain," and as, growing older ourselves, we become spectators of such a conflict, with eyes able to see the real goodness and truth of both combatants, how often must we exclaim: "Oh, just for a little touch of sympathetic comprehension on either side!" ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... Hawke's gesture the secret sign of a hidden friend, and he threw up his hand in a Parisian gesture of gratitude and comprehension, and failed not to report to his mistress, who saw Hawke's fine method ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... sign of comprehension. He supposed that the difficulty had arisen from the conduct of one or more of the regular customers. He felt that he would very much like to meet the man whose undesired attentions had driven his companion from ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... after something of this sort; yes," answered the scientist, "but he has no comprehension, of course, of what a Triceratops is. I believe he told his Mexican and Indian helpers, who assisted us from time to time, that ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... show. Not even AEschylus, the most Hebraic of Hellenes, has any passages in which he loses control of his artistic sense. Neither he nor any other Hellene sees ecstatic visions or dreams ecstatic dreams. There is no place in the Greek comprehension for that state of mind which can beget visions like these: "And I looked, and behold! A whirlwind came out of the north, a gray cloud and a fire enfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire"—with the ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... bestowal of his youthful affections on Lieutenant Brandis—henceforward to be called "Coppy" for the sake of brevity—Wee Willie Winkie was destined to behold strange things and far beyond his comprehension. ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... of comprehension, my good man. I repeat, that, if the Prophet's animals have killed your horse, the Prophet himself has been badly wounded; so you may cry quits. In other words, you owe him nothing, and he owes you nothing. Now do ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Belgium and Poland are still under the yoke. The Russians, it is true, occupy some fifteen thousand miles of our country, but this is really nothing, for the Germans occupy five-sixths of it, and the desolation passes all comprehension. ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... to wrong us," they cried, "though we had a seal as broad as the house-floor it would not serve the turn, for there would be means enough found to recall or reverse it. . . . We must rest herein on God's providence, as we have done before." Not lacking in comprehension of the world's ways and in canny shrewdness ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... startled her; and although she had had no comprehension of the argot of Happy Fear, the sense of a mysterious catastrophe oppressed her; she was sure that something horrible had happened. She went to the window; touched the shade, which disappeared upward immediately, and lifted ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... both of his bathtubs and his appearance. He was doubtless under the delusion that a pongee coat, being worn for comfort, was entirely successful when it achieved that end; and as for his business, it was beyond his comprehension that a Pendleton could have reason to blush for a bathtub or for any other object that afforded him an ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... more hard to 'count all things but loss,' and to give up ourselves, that we may follow Him. The sad and feeble and weary who may be half despairingly seeking for alleviation of outward ills, and the young and strong and ardent whose souls are fed with high desires, have but little comprehension of one another, but Christ knows them both, and loves them both, and would ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... vindictive, it is to the credit of the Pilgrim colony of Plymouth that the cargo of the Mayflower contained no seeds of persecution, and throughout the long administration of Governor William Bradford the colony he guided had, in his time at least, a clear comprehension of the meaning of religious and political freedom, and did not descend into the harrying of so-called heretics, the scourging of Quakers, nor the burning of witches. Whatever intolerance of this sort ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... Miss Betham,—I have been pleased with your friends, tho' (which is not singular) they sometimes fly higher than my imagination can follow. I think the author ought to mix more, I will not say with Fools, but with People of Common Comprehension. His own intellect would be as bright, and what emanated from it more clear. This is perhaps a very impertinent Remark for me to venture at making, but your indulgence ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... pathos and satire above the ordinary, it became one single play, the sublimest of all dramas. To regard it as a collection of separate small plays is a fatal mistake—fatal both to our understanding of the single scenes and to our comprehension of ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... who was evidently familiar with classic authors, but surely never was scholarship pressed into such a service! The confusion of metaphor, the suddenness of transition, the illogical muddles were bad enough, but the chief obstacle to comprehension was that the author's whole scope and purpose, the whole circle of his ideas, were outside Charmides altogether. He was not attracted any more than he was at the meeting, but he was a little piqued because Paul had certainly ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... not accustomed them to him and tales of his uncanny understanding filtering through, richly embroidered, to the village from the house, did not tend to lessen the awe with which he was regarded. They marvelled, without comprehension, at the partiality of his mistress; he was the "black French devil" to more households than that of Major, the gamekeeper, an "unorranary brute" to ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... his previous remark, had thought it likely he should be above his listener's comprehension, looked surprised. What pursuits, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ingenuity has supported the notion of the emanation of souls from God. That "something cannot come out of nothing" is an axiom resting on the ground of our rational instincts. And seeing all things within our comprehension held in the chain of causes and effects, one thing always evolving from another, we leap to the conclusion that it is precisely the same with things beyond our comprehension, and that God is the aboriginal ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... twice or thrice she had tried to reveal her overstrained heart in broken sections; but on her approach to the very outer confines of the matter, Clotilde had always behaved so strangely, so nervously, in short, so beyond Aurora's comprehension, that she invariably failed to ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... promising to call again shortly. "Rather a formal epistle," he concluded, on reading it through. He was unable to force the note: he could never write or talk otherwise than he felt, and this cousin, after all, was rather remote, self-centred, and difficult of comprehension. "It must go as it is," he decided. "To be quite frank, she's not exactly encouraging either. Asks such queer questions. What on earth did she mean by that conundrum about illegitimacy, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... monstrous that the innocent child, who seemed not even to have inherited her father's looks or temper, should be brought up with the perpetual sense of her disgrace before her, should be forced to listen to explanations of her father's crimes and tutored to the comprehension of an inherited shame. From the first Mary Goddard had concealed the whole matter from the little girl, and when Walter was at last convicted, she had told her that her father was dead. Dead he might be, she thought, before twelve years were ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... the long run, His great purpose. He works His own purpose out of a tough tangled network of contrary purposes; but in doing it never infringes upon man's liberty of action. He yields and bends, and, with a patience beyond our comprehension, waits, that in the end He may win through our consent. And so not only is His purpose saved, but man is saved and character is made ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... and could not justly be deprived of it, except by instruction and persuasion. It was also affirmed that it was not the English practice to inquire into men's consciences. It would have been difficult, however, to make that very clear to Philip's comprehension, because, if men, women, and children, were scourged with rods, imprisoned and hanged, if they refused to conform publicly to a ceremony at which their consciences revolted-unless they had money enough to purchase non-conformity—it seemed to be the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... at Rouen to assert "that his dicta evinced neither the purity of the Academy, nor the depth of the Lyceum"—although, mark me, his doctrines were by no means very generally comprehended, still it did not follow that they were difficult of comprehension. It was, I think, on account of their self-evidency that many persons were led to consider them abstruse. It is to Bon-Bon—but let this go no farther—it is to Bon-Bon that Kant himself is mainly indebted for his ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... be let alone," I said, but not unkindly. I didn't mean to be disagreeable to her, and I think she understood,—she is so quick of comprehension! ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... expressed," he said, "to be in accordance with Scripture, and I have always held to them without teasing my brains with the precise decrees of reprobation, foreknowledge, or the like, as matters above my comprehension. I have always counselled Christian moderation. The States of Holland have followed the spirit of his Majesty's letters, but our antagonists have rejected them and with seditious talk, sermons, and the spreading of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... solicited to the study of this branch of Natural History. An intimate acquaintance with the wonders of the Bee-Hive, while it would benefit them in various ways, might lead them to draw their illustrations, more from natural objects and the world around them, and in this way to adapt them better to the comprehension and sympathies of their hearers. It was, we know, the constant practice of our Lord and Master, to illustrate his teachings from the birds of the air, the lilies of the field, and the common walks of life and pursuits of men. Common ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... fancy-sick poet, a pale-blooded creature given to blue devils and nightmare conjecture, he might have come somewhere near an understanding. But being plain Mark King, a straightforward, healthy, and unjaundiced man, his comprehension found never a clue to a condition which in Gloria was hardly other than an inevitable result of all that ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... northwest road, I ask him if this is the koon lo to Sam-shue; for answer he bestows upon me an expansive but wholly expressionless grin, and points silently toward Canton. These repeated failures to awaken the comprehension of intelligent-looking Chinamen, or, at all events, to obtain from them the slightest information in regard to my road, are somewhat bewildering, to say the least. So much of this kind of experience crowded into the first day, however, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... their excessive improbability. Such ingenuity seems misplaced, we see more absurdity than talent in representing a sheep as talking to a wolf. To us fables now present, not what is strange and difficult of comprehension, but mentally fanciful folly. In some few instances in La Fontaine and Gay, the wisdom of the lessons atones for the strangeness of their garb, and the peculiarity of the dramatis personae may tend to rivet them in our minds. There ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... correction or explanation. When his attention is strongly engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theobald and of Pope. Let him read on, through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... in our grandfathers' portfolios in the library, and in some other apartments of the house, where the caricatures used to be pasted in those days, we found things quite beyond our comprehension. Boney was represented as a fierce dwarf, with goggle eyes, a huge laced hat and tricolored plume, a crooked sabre, reeking with blood: a little demon revelling in lust, murder, massacre. John Bull was shown kicking him a good deal: indeed he was prodigiously kicked all through that series ...
— John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character • William Makepeace Thackeray
... visual perception, independently of words, and such condition is exemplified in those born deaf, who are consequently dumb: to whom the business of life is a mere pantomime, who only communicate the impulses of passion, and expose their want of comprehension. ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... time, this independence is rendered absolutely insecure by the imposition of conditions, whose meaning is well known and perfectly understood in all the countries conquered by the Scandinavians, but utterly beyond the comprehension ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... the destruction of that which is odious or irksome to any of our senses. Why do you crush the crawling spider with your heel? You fear not its venom; inspect it, and the mechanism of its make, the architecture of its own fabrication, are, to the full, as wonderful as anything within your comprehension; but yet, without knowing why, with an impulse given you, as it would seem, from infancy, you seek its destruction with a persevering industry, which might lead one to suppose you had in ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... "penetrated into the whole mass, and into every department of the universe of things, and subjected to the comprehension its scattered wealth; and the greater number of the philosophical sciences owe to him their separation and commencement." [Footnote: Hagel is said to have comprehended Aristotle better than any modern writer, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Minna Planer had no comprehension of the genius of her husband; that her two feet were always flatly planted on earth, and her head never reached the clouds; and true it is that she was a weary weight to him for the twenty-five years they lived together. Still ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... remarkable as those others of Gifford, Jeffrey, and Wilson, of Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott. Much more recently Mr. Courthope has used Crabbe as a weapon in that battle of his with literary Liberalism which he has waged not always quite to the comprehension of his fellow-critics; Mr. Leslie Stephen has discussed him as one who knows and loves his eighteenth century. But who reads him? Who quotes him? Who likes him? I think I can venture to say, with all ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... brought Levins' eyes open, and he stared upward, stupidly at first, then with a bright gaze of comprehension. He struggled and sat up, swaying from ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... powerfully affected. An intense patriot, something remote and solitary in his nature had caused him to undertake this most dangerous of all trades, to which he brought an intellectual power and comprehension that few spies possess. As Harry had discovered long since, he was a ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... he first revealed the peculiar traits of his military genius, clear discernment of possibilities, comprehension of the requirements of the situation, strategical instinct, accurate estimate of the enemy's motive and plan, sagacious promptness of action in exigencies, staunch resolution, inspiring energy, invincible poise. For ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... Halifax's drawing-room in Paris six months earlier it would have filled him with the purest, amusement. He would have added the circumstance to his conception of the type of young woman who enacted it, and turned away without stopping to consider whether it flattered her or not. His comprehension of human nature was too catholic very readily to permit him impressions either of wonder or contempt—it would have been a matter of registration and a smile. Realizing this, Kendal was the more at a loss to explain to himself the feeling of irritation which the recollection ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... every Fish that dwells therein. We allow it, said the Chaldean. The Indian, adds he, and the Cathayan, acknowledge one supreme Being, or first Cause, as well as you. As to what that profound worthy Gentleman the Grecian has advanc'd, is, I must own, a little above my weak Comprehension, but I am fully persuaded, that he will allow there is a supreme Being on whom his favourite Matter and Form are entirely dependent. The Grecian, who was look'd upon as a Sage amongst them, said, with Abundance of ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... felt slightly overawed. "Bless her! What a beautiful young lady she is!" thought the good woman. "But the ways of the Irish beat all comprehension." ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... triumph was gained over him only by the greatest exertions of the greatest orators. His labored speeches, as will be testified to by all who have perused them, are rich in profound thought, a clear discernment and comprehension of events, causes, and results, and occasionally in passages of stately and brilliant eloquence. Graceful rhetoric and shrewd logic appear to be ever at his command, as he has occasion, in the course of argument, to resort to one or the other, to illustrate or to enforce ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Deacon Pembrook can perform the experiments successfully. In other words, to come down to your comprehension, he succeeds in living so pure and careful a Christian life that he has the respect and confidence of everybody. What if he can't preach? He can practice. However, I am willing to admit that the dear old man would be more edifying if he would ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... We are loth to be embarrassed with a multiplicity of particulars, and apparent inconsistencies. In theory we profess the investigation of general principles; and in order to bring the matter of our inquiries within the reach of our comprehension, are disposed to adopt any system. Thus, in treating of human affairs, we would draw every consequence from a principle of union, or a principle of dissention. The state of nature is a state of war, or of amity, and men are made to unite from a principle ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... not now speak of the eternal blessings of Heaven, which the blessed enjoy in the perfect vision of God; or father, I do speak of them in faith, and in so far as they some within our comprehension. For this seventh image is Jesus Christ, the King of glory, rising from the dead; even as, in His Passion and death. He formed the seventh image of evils.[72] Here there is nothing at all of evil; for "Christ, being risen from the dead, dieth ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... wholly beyond my comprehension—I know not how to act. It is excessively distressing. I wish, on my soul, I had never meddled in the business. Can I see the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... authority, not often in the intermediate light of guiding friend, or gentle guardian; and it affected Norman exceedingly to find himself, a tall schoolboy, watched and soothed with motherly tenderness and affection; with complete comprehension of his feelings, and delicate care of them. His father's solicitude and sympathy were round him day and night, and this, in the midst of so much toil, pain, grief, and anxiety of his own, that Norman might well feel overwhelmed ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... excess of cost over the estimates is due to purchases of land which were never included in the estimates; to interest paid on the city subscriptions; to the cost of additional height and breadth of the Bridge; and the increase in strength rendered necessary by a better comprehension of the volume of traffic between the two cities. The items covered by the original estimate of $7,000,000 have thus been raised to $9,000,000, so that $2,000,000 represents the ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... their true characters; and it was this which made the damage done to a single picture in the National Gallery of London, by some poor lunatic or cripple, a mere matter of newspaper notoriety and wonder for some few days. This, then, establishes a fact evident to the meanest comprehension—that any given number of thousands of individuals, in the humblest walks of life in this country, can pass through the national galleries or museums in seasons of holiday-making, without damaging, in the slightest ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... the endeavour to push his discoveries into those remote and frozen regions. He bears the name of the most distinguished of the philosophers of this country; and nature has stamped on his features—by one of those secret laws which just as much baffle our means of comprehension, as the greatest of all our mysteries, the incarnation of the Son of God—a resemblance that, of itself, would go to show that they are of the same race. Any one who has ever seen this emprisoned navigator, and who is familiar with the countenances of ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... also, in addition to other arts, the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages, through the conspicuous and rare ability and industry of the learned Philip Melancthon, for the furtherance of the right and Christian comprehension of Holy Scripture.' To each of these two men he now gave a hundred gulden as an addition to his salary as professor, which in Luther's case had hitherto amounted to two hundred gulden. At the same time he released Luther from the obligation of lecturing, and, indeed, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... higher planes and states of being, on this earth and on other spheres, until it reaches a point incomprehensible to the mind of man of today, and then still on and on, until finally the souls will pass into the plane of the Absolute, there to exist in a state impossible of present comprehension, and transcending not only the understanding but also the imagination of the mind of ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... palsied many an arm lifted to advance the good of the Church; and zeal without funds, accomplishes as little as rusty machinery stiff from lack of oil. If Dr. Douglass could only control even a hundred thousand dollars, what shining monuments he would leave to immortalize him! Indeed, it passes my comprehension how persons who could so easily help him, deliberately turn a deaf ear to the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... before, that this Dance consisted of several groups of two or more figures, one of which was always Death in the act of claiming a victim; and for the clear comprehension of what follows, it is necessary to anticipate a little, and remark, that there is no doubt that the Dance was first represented by living performers. Strange as this seems to us, it was but in keeping with the spirit of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... permit this translation of the Ars Grammaticae to be of use in both these areas of scholarship I have made an effort to reduce to a minimum those places where a knowledge of either Japanese or Latin is required for the comprehension of the translation. It is sincerely hoped that the result is not an effort that is satisfying to neither, and thus to ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... without comprehension. "Who is it?" I asked with difficulty. There was a band drawn ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... character of Miss Lorna Doone McCarty had been completely unfolded to the reverential Dink. He saw her, he conversed with her, he knew her. She was a sort of heavenly being, misunderstood by her family—especially her brother, who had not the slightest comprehension. She was like Dante's Beatrice, as the pictures, not the dreadful text, represent that lady—and only seven years older than Mr. John H. Stover. There was Napoleon, who had married a woman older than he was—Napoleon and hosts ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... School was a well-educated man, but of slow comprehension, who had imbibed a wariness in his speeches and actions, from having suffered by his collisions with his more mercurial and apt brethren who had laid the foundations of their practice in the Eastern courts, and who ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... them. At the same time he is less able to observe facts, because they are too much magnified by the glasses through which they are seen. The common logic says 'the greater the extension, the less the comprehension,' and we may put the same thought in another way and say of abstract or general ideas, that the greater the abstraction of them, the less are they capable of being applied to particular and ...
— Meno • Plato
... Heaven, and in the act of "demonstration," thumbs and index fingers are joined. Ferguson points out that within the grey lattice of each lotus-bell dagoba, the right palm of the enthroned Buddha curves over the left hand. This restful posture indicates the state of final comprehension, when the aspiring soul, raised to the different spheres of Nirvana by steps of ascending sanctity, receives increasing peace and satisfaction from gradual absorption into the Infinite. No creed passes unaltered ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... was not a man of quick comprehension, he was, at all events, honest in his density. He never said that he understood when he did not do so. When he received a telegram in barracks at Dover to come up to London the next day and meet Cornish at his club at one o'clock, the major merely said that he was in a state of condemnation, ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... the code of war, upon which the Elector's mode of action is based, still lies too remote from his comprehension; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... for the words one has. This girl's extremity was very great, not to be set in words. Words cannot bring to earth that which, ethereal, defies our comprehension as life and death defy it and, like life and death, to our comprehension only sublimely IS. Words only can say her spirit, bursting from bondage, streamed up to cleave to his; how tell the anguish, how the ecstasy? Words only can say her spirit, like a live part of her drawn out ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... yet very far from the time when a reasonable hope could be entertained of reducing all that is perceived by our senses to the unity of a single principle; but the partial solution of the problem—the tendency towards a general comprehension of the phenomena of the universe—does not the less continue to be the high and enduring aim of ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... of the Bonito were about to separate. She was walking to and fro in the dusky grove with a flower in her hair, and singing softly to herself, when suddenly, within a foot of her, the lieutenant appeared from behind a tree. She bounded aside like a startled fawn, but Heemskirk, with a lucid comprehension of what she was there for, pounced upon her, and, catching her arm, clapped his other ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... cannot be doubted. Its pages are packed full of these fascinating renderings. The accounts of each composer are succinct and yet sufficient. The author has done a genuine service to the world of music lovers. The comprehension of orchestral work of the highest character is aided efficiently by this volume. The mechanical execution of the volume is in harmony with its subject. No worthier volume can be found to put into the hands of an amateur or a ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... doctors are nibbling away the New: nothing escapes but the apocrypha: yet these same skeptics believe the impudent lies, and monstrous arithmetic of geology, which babbles about a million years, a period actually beyond the comprehension of the human intellect; and takes up a jaw-bone, that some sly navvy has transplanted over-night from the churchyard into Lord knows what stratum, fees the navvy, gloats over the bone, and knocks the Bible ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... subject on which the mind has long brooded with affection, as in the tribute to Oxford at the beginning of the Essay on Emerson. Sometimes, on the other hand, a certain pedagogic stiffness appears, as if the writer feared that the dullness of comprehension of his readers would not allow them to grasp even the simplest conceptions without a patient ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... simply on this account, that it is revealed; if the subject of the revelation be mysterious or incomprehensible, this does not annul our obligation implicitly to believe it, because sufficient reasons may exist in the Eternal Mind for the concealment of its nature, or it may surpass the comprehension of our limited capacities; but if it be naturally capable of investigation—if it be not only a fact, but a fact in proof of which evidences may be adduced, and explanations furnished, our minds cannot be better employed, than in thus superinducing ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... compensatory exercises, beginning as far down as the grammar-schools and continuing right through the universities and professional schools into general business and civic life. This war has opened our eyes; it should be a warning, and it ought to result in a far broader comprehension of what physical condition and physical education really mean. It is in this way only that we can meet the demands of modern civilization without an accompanying deterioration of the physical condition of our people. No one has set ...
— Keeping Fit All the Way • Walter Camp
... slower start, with new studies, than most of my classmates," Dan continued, speaking more rapidly now, but in a most respectful manner. "Once I begin to catch the full drift of new studies I believe that I will overtake some of my classmates who showed a keener comprehension at the first. I think, sir, and gentlemen, that my record, as contrasted with the records of some of my classmates who achieved about the same standing I did for last year will ...
— Dave Darrin's Second Year at Annapolis - Or, Two Midshipmen as Naval Academy "Youngsters" • H. Irving Hancock
... a quick eye and comprehension, and he is extremely colour sensitive, but healthily ignorant of book learning, while Richard, how we do not know, has learned to read in a fashion of his own, not seeming yet to separate letters or words, but "swallowing the sense in ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... discontents. He is to inflict, perhaps on a great majority of the population, what, whether we choose to call it persecution or not, will always be felt as persecution by those who suffer it. He is, on account of differences often too slight for vulgar comprehension, to deprive the State of the services of the ablest men. He is to debase and enfeeble the community which he governs, from a nation into a sect. In our own country, for example, millions of Catholics, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... during a severe operation. The request was granted; the test was made on October 16, 1846, in the presence of several of the foremost surgeons of the city and of a body of medical students. The patient slept quietly while the surgeon's knife was plied, and awoke to astonished comprehension that the ordeal was over. The impossible, the miraculous, had ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... dream of its bare possibility, which absorbed all the gloom and horror of my situation. Yet when I stepped securely on what, to me, was hallowed ground, an adequate appreciation of the circumstance was far from realised in my feelings. New sights and sounds began to share my thoughts and engross my comprehension. In a moment the past vanished, with all its disquietude and alarm; and I entered on the new scene with a taste akin to the appetite of a convalescent. If I felt any deep emotion, it was only when my mind recurred to the fate of my comrades, or the feelings ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... Queen. And then he remembered that, unless she willed it, no one in the world of N3 could see her, since it was for her, as it was for him now, to make herself visible or invisible as she chose to pass on to or beyond the lower Plane of Existence. These things were quickly becoming more plain to his comprehension, although, as will be readily understood, it was not a lesson to be ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... from the cheerful sunlight to pass the days of happy boyhood in wading through heaps of useless learning, tutored in a philosophy which demands age and experience for its perfect comprehension; of what use can all this Talmud delving be to you, when once life summons you to more practical duties? And yet how much better this training, confusing and bewildering though it be, than the absolute ignorance, the unchecked ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... with this way. I've offered her a very generous thing, and she knows it, and she's a fool, that's what she is, a fool I say!" He brought his big fist down heavily on the table, and jarred the dishes; and the children looked up in premature comprehension, storing up the epithet for future use. "She's no end of a fool, going off with those crazy kids. Some one ought to warn their guardian about her. Why, she has no more idea of how to take care of two high and mighty good-for-nothings like that than ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost bones, set him before ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... with which the significant moment had endowed him leaped to the simple comprehension of another thought—that this revelation of intimacy, of the woman-appeal lying unguessed beneath the comradeship of everyday life, was after all only a matter of chance. It had been revealed to him by the accident of a moment's faintness, by which ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... incurred general contempt, and was looked upon with disgust by his own soldiers, while the enemy, with the exception of one man, thought him utterly without warlike enterprise. That man was Hannibal himself. He alone perceived Fabius's true generalship and thorough comprehension of the war, and saw that either he must by some means be brought to fight a battle, or else the Carthaginians were lost, if they could not make use of their superiority in arms, but were to be worn away and ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... to a close, and I do so with two remarks. First, they are adapted to a primitive, unsophisticated state of society. He is a good counsellor for the father of a family, the chief of a clan, and even the head of a small principality. But his views want the comprehension which would make them of much service in a great dominion. Within three centuries after his death,the government of China passed into a new phase. The founder of the Ch'in dynasty conceived the grand idea of abolishing ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... was he could not see. The Gargantuan facade itself was enough to smother comprehension. It was laid out in the form of a triangle, one end of which was open towards the city; the two sections of the facade met under a huge, arched opening— the door itself. Watson recognised the structure as the ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... while he fed three small children standing at his knee with bread and molasses. How he managed with one arm to keep the baby from squirming on to the floor, the plate from upsetting, and to feed the hungry urchins who stood in a row with open mouths, like young birds, was past my comprehension. But he did, trotting baby gently, dealing out sweet morsels patiently, and whistling to himself, as if to ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... progress of the disease which he cannot comprehend, and Dr. Macmichael shows us what those circumstances are; but Dr. Macmichael does not exhibit to us what does come perfectly within Mr. Jukes's comprehension, but which is not quite so suitable to the doctor's purpose. This omission I shall take the liberty to supply from an official letter from Mr. Jukes in the Bombay Reports:—"I have had no reason to think ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... the honour of enlightening you, then. The anagorical is what the dictionaries call the anagogical sense. A sense beyond this world; a sense above the senses; a spiritual sense making common things divine. It is hard to be arrived at and difficult of comprehension. Now in the matter of the nice little boy's question about the Giant and the carraway seed, (for none but a nice little boy could have excogitated any thing so comical), I have set my heart upon talking to you about it in the four above mentioned senses. And having ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... to avoid this error; and, by rendering a similar work more light and obvious to general comprehension, to escape the rock on which my ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... be able to tolerate stupidity and lack of comprehension when they are simple and wholly natural, but what of an utter obtuseness of understanding which dresses itself up and becomes rhetorical? Can anything ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... place, I have no right whatever to give any kind of advice to the Prince," said Mariette, and gave Nekhludoff a look that somehow established a full comprehension between them of their attitude in relation to the Countess's words and evangelicalism in general. "Secondly, I do not ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... school in the city where he had been teaching all day, and naturally, by the time evening arrived, his none too placid temper had been stretched to breaking-point. He was extremely impatient with any non-comprehension of his complicated method of instruction; and he would pass from row to row, after his dictation had been finished, snatching away the papers from his paralysed pupils and tearing them into fragments had the exercise ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... promise of—of comparative merit; but now his writing, in my opinion, is altogether beneath consideration; how Rackett could be so benighted as to give him The Study—especially after a man like Henry Hawkridge—passes my comprehension. Did you read a paper of his, a few months back, in The Wayside, a preposterous rehabilitation of Elkanah Settle? Ha! Ha! That's what such men are driven to. Elkanah Settle! And he hadn't even a competent acquaintance with his paltry subject. Will you credit that he ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... despatch of May 4th was written at white heat, but the opinions which it expressed were in no less a degree the mature and measured judgments of a mind fully informed upon every detail germane to the issue. So much is this the fact that all that is essential for the full comprehension of the second Reform Movement at Johannesburg—the salient features of which have been outlined above—is to be found within the limits of this brief and ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... They sat together by the wooden cage, put their fingers in between the bars for the fat sparrow to peck at, lounged of a morning, now that winter was coming on, by the half warm stove, and looked at each other with as much comprehension as if they had been two sages instead of a pair of poor hopeless fools. You can see at times two wild beasts locked in together looking at each other in just the same way; according to the mood of the observer, their gaze will seem dull, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Canterbury 1851, and of Christ Church 1858, and Dean of Westminster 1864. He was also Prof. of Ecclesiastical History at Oxf. 1856. His ecclesiastical position was Erastian and latitudinarian, and his practical aim in Church politics comprehension. He gave great offence to the High Church party by his championing of Colenso, W.G. Ward, Jowett, and others, by his preaching in the pulpits of the Church of Scotland and in other ways, and his latitudinarianism made him equally obnoxious to many others. On the other hand, his singular ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... proper season for rabbit-shooting; so Walter, who was never to be tempted by the best chance of killing game even a day out of season, would not permit either Harry or himself to shoot at the objects of Ugly's furious energy until it was legitimate. That conduct of Walter and Harry was beyond Ugly's comprehension. I have often seen him try to understand it. The chase having ended as usual in a safe burrow, I have noticed Ugly—who, after a very short experience, had learned not to waste his time in vain digging—turn ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... enough, one may go out and kill something. But his fine days are the best for stopping at home, to read, to think, to muse—even to dream; in fact to live fully, intensely and quietly, in the brightness of comprehension, in that receptive glow of the mind, the gift of the clear, luminous and ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... full milk-jug or opening a wine-bottle. Above the clatter of the dishes and the stirring of spoons arose the thick Normandy voices, deep alto tones, speaking in strange jargon of speech—a world of patois removed from our duller comprehension. It was made somewhat too plain in this country, we reflected, that a man's stomach is of far more importance than the rest of his body. The kitchen yonder was by far the most comfortable, the warmest, and altogether the prettiest room in ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... applied equally to both classes) are fully alive to the beauties of Nature in all her varied moods, but, when those beauties are depicted on the canvasses of others, are somewhat prone to discover a comprehension of those beauties inferior to their own! So, too, with actors, the majority of whom possess the feeling, though they may not always express it, that, although Mr. Garrick Siddons's efforts were distinctly good, there are people, not a hundred miles off, who might ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... understand was that he should not find consolation in possessing their millions, and they could only account for the fact by calling him a person of the deepest feeling—a feeling, indeed, quite past their comprehension. ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... members of the Indo-European family, gave way to the more active deities, Indra, Zeus and Odin, divinities of the storm and the wind, but which, after all, are merely other aspects of the ancient deity, and occupied his place to the religious sense.[1] It is essential, for the comprehension of early mythology, to understand this twofold character, and to appreciate how naturally the one merges into and springs out ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... not, of course, for a poor limited masculine mind to utter heresies regarding the great question of woman's rights. But as things stand at present, as, in fact, the forenamed rights are to-day situated, women have not found comprehension of the dual life. The dual life is led solely by men, and until women have found out its full compass and meaning, they can never lead in the world. There is the public life and the private; and the men who are most successful in the former are the most exclusive in the latter. Women have only learned ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... the etiquette of the quarter-deck to a hair, he got into blue water the moment he approached the finesse of deportment. He was exactly of that school of elegants who fancy drinking a glass of wine with another, and introducing, are touches of breeding; it being altogether beyond his comprehension that both have especial uses, and are only to be resorted to on especial occasions. Still, the worthy master, who had begun life on the forecastle, without any previous knowledge of usages, and who ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... complacent illusions on the other. Relph's horror of remorse—painted with a few strokes of incomparable intensity, like his 'Get you behind the man I am now, you man that I used to be!'—is beyond the comprehension of the friendly peasants; Clive's "fear" is as much misunderstood by his auditor as his courage by the soldiers; the "foolishness" of Muleykeh equally illudes his Arab comrades; the Russian villagers, the Pope, and the lord have to fumble through a long process ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... important of the facts of eastern physics in the study of its metaphysics. The mathematical and physical proof that the physical earth is 50,000 miles in diameter should not be passed over lightly in our haste to get on, for the perfect understanding of all this fact implies makes easy the comprehension of how we live etherically in the solar etheric globe, of how we live pranically in the stellar pranic globe, and how we live manasically in ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... should have made an extraordinary commotion over the mere matter of getting killed. He would die; he would go to some place where he would be understood. It was useless to expect appreciation of his profound and fine senses from such men as the lieutenant. He must look to the grave for comprehension. ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... greatly more proud was I when in time you taught me several Latin words, and then whole sentences, both in prose and verse, pasting a strip of paper over, or obscuring with impenetrable ink, those passages in the poets which were beyond my comprehension, and might perplex me. But proudest of all was I when you began to reason with me. What will now be my pride if you are convinced by the first arguments I ever have opposed to you; or if you only take them up and try ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... expressly to commemorate their circumstances and wrongs. He wrote a few; but, in those days of prosecution for libel, they could not be printed. They are not among the best of his productions, a writer being always shackled when he endeavours to write down to the comprehension of those who could not understand or feel a highly imaginative style; but they show his earnestness, and with what heart-felt compassion he went home to the direct point of injury—that oppression is detestable as being the parent of starvation, nakedness, and ignorance. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... abundance of bees and musical insects, the childhood familiarity of the well-known birds, even the pleasantly fickle aspects of the skies. But the North wraps itself in a mantle of awe. Great hills rest not so much in the stillness of sleep as in the calm of a mighty comprehension. The pines, rank after rank, file after file, are always trooping somewhere, up the slope, to pause at the crest before descending on the other side into the unknown. Bodies of water exactly of the size, shape, and general appearance we are accustomed ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... under any stress of circumstances, have conferred—or have attempted to confer—such powers upon a municipality is beyond comprehension. The statement, if unsustained by the official State records, ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... this account. He is in no more desperate state about her than the rest of them; and secretly Lillie has as little pity for lovers' pangs as a nice little white cat has for mice. They amuse her; they are her appropriate recreation; and she pats and plays with each mouse in succession, without any comprehension that it may be a serious ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to take any part in the hideous drama. She sat on the ground, a crouching thing with glittering eyes. It was past comprehension that the sun could shine and the world go on with her man dead before her. Judith had become the force that planned and did to save the family pride. While her hands were busy with preparations for the dead, she rehearsed what she would say to this and that one to account for Jim's absence. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... He zealously studied the life of antiquity, but understood nothing of the life going on around him. Raisky felt himself drawn to this young man, at first because of his loneliness, his reserve, simplicity and kindness; later he discovered in him passion, the sacred fire, profundity of comprehension and austerity of thought and delicacy of perception—in all that pertained to antiquity. Koslov on his side was devoted to Raisky, whose vivacious temperament could not be permanently bound by anything. The outcome was the great gift of ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... obliged to leave the following morning. He noticed a slight change of expression on the diplomatist's face when he mentioned that he had come over in a hurry to discuss some business matters with his sister. A moment later M. Delacour was smiling perfect approval and comprehension and moving towards the door. At the door he lingered to express a hope that Harold would stay for the ball. He said that Mildred must do her best to ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... even an outward heaven, is the guerdon of the soul; but a larger possession of Him who alone fills the heart, and fills the heart alone. Other riches may be counted, but this is 'exceeding great,' passing comprehension, and ever unexhausted, and having something over after all experience. Both these aspects of God's preciousness are true for earth; but we need a shield only while exposed to attack. In the land of peace, He is only ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... that she idealised him, that in ordinary aspects he was a happy, easy man-of-the-world; but that was not the essential; the essential in him was the pity, the tenderness, the comprehension that had responded to her great need. He was very unconscious of aims or ideals; but when the time for greatness came he showed it as naturally and simply as a flower expands to light. The thought of him henceforth was bound up with the thought ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... likewise Sweeney did not stir. For a second his slow brain failed to grasp the truth, the deliberate challenge of the refusal; then of a sudden, in a blinding, maddening flood, came comprehension, came action. Swifter than any human being would have thought possible, unbelievably ferocious even in this land of licence, something took place, something which the staring onlookers did not realise until it was done. They only knew that with a mighty backward leap the cowman had reached the ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... that the thoughts of men are not widened with the progress of the suns. The woman who can share the aspirations, the thoughts, the complete life of a man, who can understand his work thoroughly and support him with the sympathy born of perfect comprehension, will exert a far vaster influence over him than the milk-and-water ideal who was advised "to smile when her husband smiled, to frown when he frowned, and to be discreetly silent when the conversation turned on subjects of importance." It is a ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... exclaimed the visitor. "I have an object in view, and both my inclination and my duty are urging me to carry it out. How your boat happened to capture the Magnolia is beyond my comprehension up to the present moment, though I think the principal reason was the lack of a sufficiently osseous vertebra on the part of your worthy uncle, Colonel Passford. Then the officer in charge of the ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... first duty of the soul to become as happy, complete, independent, and great as lies in its power.' Herein is no egoism, or pride. To become effectually generous and sincerely humble there must be within us a confident, tranquil, and clear comprehension of all that we owe to ourselves. To this end we may sacrifice even the passion for sacrifice; for sacrifice never should be the means of ennoblement, but only the sign of our ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... for all this change in her son possessed Helen, varied by flashes of impulse to seize Palla and shake her into comprehension of her ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... had no real comprehension of the world-forces against which her husband was contending; to Lizzie, life consisted of three babies, whom it was her duty to feed and protect, and a husband, who was her instrument for carrying out this duty. The world outside of these ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... philosophy is itself an intimate part of the universe, and may be a part momentous enough to give a different turn to what the other parts signify. It may be a supreme reaction of the universe upon itself by which it rises to self-comprehension. It may handle itself differently ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... JOURNAL with the noble and impressive program which you develop. It shows your consciousness of the new duties of the rich, free and powerful American Jewry, your readiness to assume fully the moral responsibilities which your privileged position imposes upon you, and your comprehension of the needs of the present hour. Your journal seems the promising beginning of that organization in which we are so sorely wanting and without which we will achieve nothing in the forthcoming deep transformations ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... such a degree, as to set up a Levee for any thing but a direct Farce? But such is the Weakness of our Nature, that when Men are a little exalted in their Condition, they immediately conceive they have additional Senses, and their Capacities enlarged not only above other Men, but above human Comprehension it self. Thus it is ordinary to see a great Man attend one listning, bow to one at a distance, and call to a third at the same instant. A Girl in new Ribbands is not more taken with her self, nor does she betray more apparent Coquetries, than even a wise Man in such a Circumstance ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... dissuade Tump from drinking the fiery "singlings" of the moonshiners crossed Peters mind, but he put it aside. Tump was a habitue of the glade. All the physiological arguments upon which Peter could base an argument were far beyond the ex-soldier's comprehension. So Tump turned off through the dark trees. Peter watched him until all he could see was the white blur of Cissie's underwear swinging against ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... could he much longer curb his curiosity. In his mind he was fully satisfied that he was walking straight to the portals of the nearest station. In all his career as a housebreaker, he had never before been caught, and now to be captured in such a way and treated in such a way was far past comprehension. Ten minutes before he was looking at a stalwart figure with a leveled revolver, confidently expecting to drop with the bullet in his body from an agitated weapon. Indeed, he encountered conditions so strange that he felt a doubt ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... wrote to Mrs. Hanbury Smith, explaining that her darling niece Lucinda was about to be married to Sir Griffin Tewett, and that, as she had no child of her own, Lucinda was the same to her as a daughter. And then, lest there might be any want of comprehension, she expressed her own assurance that her friend would be glad to have an opportunity of reciprocating the feelings which had been evinced on the occasion of her own marriage. "It is no good mincing matters now-a-days," ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... little more pseudo-chivalry at one end of his life, and a little more piety at the other, than the rest. There is a decidedly heroic element in his courage, hardihood, and enthusiasm, softened to the modern observer's comprehension by the humorous contrast between his achievements and his estimate of them. Between his actual deeds as he relates them, and his noble sentiments, there is also sometimes a contrast pleasing to the worldly mind. He is just one of those characters who would be more ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... clearer comprehension of the honor and interests of the city, which were identical with those of Sicily, answered him indignantly, and neither counsellors nor citizens hesitated for a moment whether to prostitute Messina to the stranger or bid her share the freedom of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... no doubt that with many people this feeling of reverence has been in the way of the truest understanding of Jesus, and ofttimes those who have clung most devoutly to a belief in his deity have missed much of the comfort which comes from a proper comprehension of ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... towering masts and the great sails of vessels that had come from such distant lands beyond the seas. Nothing so astonished the Indians of that day as the roar of artillery. It was something entirely beyond their comprehension, and filled them with terror. They had no guns or knowledge of their use. So, when a cannon was fired, they were ready to believe that men who could do such things were possessed ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... understand us, and when they spoke, which was very seldom, their language was utterly beyond our comprehension; but we got on pretty well by signs, after a few ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... their cause; but, apart from the fact that this supposition rests on no very solid foundation, events of this nature are rare and infinitesimal, compared with the vast mass of others that elude comprehension; and all, the pettiest and the most sublime, the best known and the most inexplicable, the nearest and the most distant, come to pass in a night so profound that our blindness may well be almost as great as that we ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... fiercely, desperately, as Norah had seen starving cattle drink when released after a long journey in the trucks. Again and again he drank—until Norah grew afraid and begged him to lie down. He obeyed her meekly and smiled a little, but there was no comprehension in the fevered eyes. She put her hand on his forehead and ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... Hun comprehension elude, They're so cleverly crass, so painstakingly crude; For, in spite of his cunning and forethought immense, He is often incurably stupid and dense To the point of allowing his patriot zeal To put a large spoke in his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... herself; and while Dirk painted bad pictures, she went marketing, cooked the luncheon, sewed, occupied herself like a busy ant all the day; and in the evening sat in the studio, sewing again, while Dirk played music which I am sure was far beyond her comprehension. He played with taste, but with more feeling than was always justified, and into his music poured all his honest, ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... intelligent work of the soul is that by which it builds up, nourishes, repairs, developes, and finally reproduces the body it dwells in. Yet in all this it is almost as passive and unconscious as a vegetable. The effect is (as far as our comprehension of it goes) altogether preternatural and inexplicable; yet it is far less our effect than what we do by reason and by taking thought. What we pay for in dignity we lose in efficiency. While Nature carries us in her arms we move swiftly enough, but when she sets us on our feet ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... to personal services in Brazil, it is nevertheless essential, in order to their comprehension, briefly to recapitulate a few events which more immediately led to my connection with the cause of ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... encumbrance. He always figures in the corner of the scenes in which she distinguishes herself, separated from her by something like the gulf that separated Caliban from Ariel. He has his hands in his pockets, his head poked forward; what is going on is quite beyond his comprehension. He vaguely wonders what his wife will do next; her manoeuvres quite transcend him. Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns always succeeds. She is never at fault; she is as quick as the instinct of self-preservation. She is the little London lady who is determined ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... him, but she gave no sign of comprehension; once only she started and winced, when he said his Highness the Duke, otherwise she remained unmoved and unresponding as one deaf. He waited a moment for her to speak, then slowly ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... forget his present discomfort in recalling past happiness, as he described the chateau, the gardens, the burly tutor, and beautiful Madame, or laughed over his childish remembrances of the toad's teeth in Claude Mignon's pocket; whilst Monsieur Crapaud sat well-bred and silent, with a world of comprehension in his fiery eyes. Whoever thinks this puerile must remember that my hero was a Frenchman, and a young Frenchman, with a prescriptive right to chatter for chattering's sake, and also that he had not a very highly cultivated ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... you must not be excited," Carne answered, in the manner of a father; "powerful as your comprehension is, for the moment these things are beyond it. Your meaning is excellent, very good, very great; but to bring it to bear requires further information. We will sit by the side of the sea to-morrow, darling, if you grant me a view of ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... I display any talent, will it not owe its success to you, who have animated and inspired it? Love, poetry, and religion, all that is born of enthusiasm, is in harmony with nature; and in beholding the azure sky, in yielding to the impression which it causes, I have a juster comprehension of the sentiments of Juliet, I am more worthy of Romeo." "Yes, thou art worthy of him, celestial creature!" cried Lord Nelville; "'tis only a weakness of the soul, this jealousy of thy talents, this desire to live alone with thee in the universe. Go, receive the meed of public homage, ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... Norgate, who had followed meekly in his wake, stood listening for a moment to the confused stream of explanations. He understood well enough what had happened, but with Selingman at his elbow he assumed an air of non-comprehension. ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
