"Definable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... world with many other gifts, this last and least definable gift of popularity was added to complete them all. Nobody criticised her, nobody was jealous of her, her very rivals lent her their new music and their lovers; and her own discarded wooers always sought her to be a bridesmaid ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... opinions; but it is no mere change of opinions. It is not a perpetual leaping from one position to another like that of Mr. George Moore. It is a quite continuous advance along a quite solid road in a quite definable direction. But the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the fact that it has been upon the whole in advance from more startling opinions to more humdrum opinions. It has been even in some sense an advance ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... has its characteristics which are already quiescent, those which are active, and those which are not yet definable. ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... Draper published a bulky volume entitled "A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe," in which his professed purpose was to show that nations or races pass through certain definable epochs of development, analogous to the periods of infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, and old age in individuals. But while announced with due formality, the carrying out of the argument was left for the most part to the headings and running-titles of the several chapters, while in ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... space and time, in their ideal infinity, may be very far from describing truly the medium and groundwork of the universe. That is a question for investigation and hypothesis, not for intuition. But in the life of intuition, when that life takes a mathematical turn, empty space and time and their definable structure may be important themes; while, when the same life becomes a discipline of the affections, we see by this latest example, as well as by many a renowned predecessor of M. Benda, that infinite Being may dominate ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... other traits and qualities, definable and indefinable, Gorman had the power of assuming the appearance either of a burglar of the lowest type, or a well-to-do contractor or tradesman. A slight change in dress and manner were sufficient to metamorphose him ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... difference, a higher and a lower; and the lower, relatively to the higher, must always be an evil. The scale upon which the higher and lower both are makes no difference. The supremest bliss would not be bliss if it were not definable bliss—that is to say, in the sense that it has limits, marking it out from something else not so supreme. Perfectly uninterrupted, infinite light, without shadow, is a physical absurdity. I see a thing because it is lighted, but also because of the differences of light, ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... his first chance of cooeperating with it, or getting into the course of it, is to know with his whole soul that it is; that it is good, and alone good! This is the soul of Islam; it is properly the soul of Christianity;—for Islam is definable as a confused form of Christianity; had Christianity not been, neither had it been. Christianity also commands us, before all, to be resigned to God. We are to take no counsel with flesh-and-blood; give ear to no ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... couldn't." We cannot recall whence we came, nor tell how we began to be. We know approximately how far back we can remember, but have no idea how far back we may not have forgotten. Certainly we knew once much that we have forgotten now. My own earliest definable memory is of a great funeral of one of the Dukes of Gordon, when I was between two and three years of age. Surely my first knowledge was not of death. I must have known much and many things before, although that seems my earliest memory. As in what we ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... analysis of the proper course to pursue was tortuous, not definable, or to be explained in concise phraseology; but the one thought that rose paramount over all others was, that he must take his iniquitous punishment like a man. He had fought so strongly to shield the brother of the girl he loved that the cause ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... even no essential, definable difference between those two great branches, prose and poetry. For prose may have rhythm. All that can be said is that verse will scan, while prose will not. The difference is purely formal. Very few poets have succeeded in being so poetical as Isaiah, Sir Thomas Browne, and Ruskin ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... accompany ideation we have also found to be unitary and vital; only just as for practical purposes it is necessary to abstract and discriminate the contribution of one sense from that of another, and thus to become aware of particular and definable impressions, so it is natural that the diffused emotional tone of the body should also be divided, and a certain modicum of pleasure or pain should be attributed to each idea. Our pleasures are thus described as the pleasures of touch, taste, smell, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... the boundary question to this study is better understood when it is recognized that the so-called Fair Play system of government in lands beyond the Provincial limits must have a definable locale. It is this writer's firm conviction that Fair Play territory extended from Lycoming Creek, on the north side of the West Branch of the Susquehanna, to the Great Island, some five miles west of Pine Creek. The foundation for the establishment of Lycoming Creek as the Tiadaghton, ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... essence of the human body (last Prop.), which, therefore, is necessarily something appertaining to the essence of the human mind (II:xiii.). But we have not assigned to the human mind any, duration, definable by time, except in so far as it expresses the actual existence of the body, which is explained through duration, and may be defined by time - that is (II:viii.Coroll.), we do not assign to it duration, except while the body endures. Yet, as there ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... which they had begun,—on such safer topics as the problem of the social work of modern churches. Her aromatic presence, and in this setting, continually disturbed him: nature's perfumes, more definable, —exhalations of the sea and spruce,—mingled with hers, anaesthetics compelling lethargy. He felt himself drowning, even wished to drown, —and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... which might render it deleterious, we soak and agitate a handful for some hours, with four or five times its bulk of warm soft water. From a good fresh-water peat we obtain, by this treatment, a yellow liquid, more or less deep in tint, the taste of which is very slight and scarcely definable. ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... forms the inner reality underlying all the phenomena of life and nature, is not in itself affected by time; but that, on the other hand, time is necessary for the objectification of the will, for the will as presented in the passing phenomena of the world. Time is thus definable as the condition of change, and the present time as the only point of contact ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... actor deals with nature for the most part generalised, with things palpably absurd, with characteristics that strike the intelligence, not with emotions that touch the heart or the senses. He comes to more definite and to more definable results, on which he may rest, confident that what has made an audience laugh once will make it laugh always, laughter being a physiological ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Sometimes it spreads out its branches horizontally, forming a perfectly flat top, as if it had grown under a platform; again it forms an irregular pyramid, most commonly leaning from an upright position. It has usually no definable shape, often sending out one or two branches greatly beyond the rest, some directed obliquely downwards, others twisted and horizontal. This tree, if it had no other merit, would be prized for its eccentricities; but it is not without beauty. It possesses a fine glossy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the exact arithmetical proportions of the dinner bill. After a short cessation of hostilities, during which our commercial friends despatched their London letters, and Bob and the English Spy, to escape the suspicion of not having any definable pursuit, emigrated to the High Street; we returned to our quarters, and found the whole party debating upon a proposition of the bon vivants, to have another bottle, and make a night of it by going to the theatre at half price; ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... with a contemporaneous tendency in which I profoundly believe, and yet I have to talk like a professor to you who are not students. Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind! I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... of the number who were heard to express them, I should apprehend that a large majority of those men, whose previous attention has never been fairly and fully directed to the great subject of religion, approach the gates of death, it may be with solemnity, or with terror, but without any definable or tangible conviction of the fact that after death ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... correct. Malthus simply urges against Condorcet that our inability to fix limits precisely does not imply that there are no limits. This, it would seem, must be admitted on all hands. Evolution implies definite though not precisely definable limits. Life may be lengthened, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... benumbing every other sensation, and she bade him good-bye with hardly a sign of emotion. His reiterated promises to return seemed almost wounding. She had no doubt that he intended to come back; her doubts were far deeper and less definable. ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... off the hands of the bride; it was altogether another proposition to sit there and wait for the man she had admired for four or five years with a constancy that surprised even herself. Her reflections at this specific hour were scarcely definable. Chief among them was a doubt—this doubt: Would Harry Green remember her? It seemed such an absurd doubt that she laughed at it—and yet cultivated ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... fretfulness, and quietness, feebleness and firmness, luxury and purity, pride and modesty, and all other such habits, and every conceivable modification and mingling of them, may be illustrated, with mathematical exactness, by conditions of line and color; and not merely these definable vices and virtues, but also every conceivable shade of human character and passion, from the righteous or unrighteous majesty of the king to the innocent or faultful simplicity of ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... idiosyncrasies of each as hardly any other writer's influence has done in other times; while his technical shortcomings had unquestionably a fatal effect on the weaker members of the school. But there is also noticeable in them a separate and hardly definable influence which circumscribes their class even more distinctly. They were, as I take it, the last set of poets anywhere in Europe to exhibit, in that most fertile department of poetry which seeks ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... qualities of Chopin's playingare not so easily defined as the technical ones. Indeed, if they are definable at all they are so only by one who, like Liszt, is a poet as well as a great pianist. I shall, therefore, transcribe from his book some of the most important remarks bearing ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... conditions acting on species A give rise to a new species, B; the difference between the two species is a certain definable amount which may be called A-B. Now I know of no evidence to show that the interval between the two species must NECESSARILY be bridged over by a series of forms, each of which shall occupy, as it occurs, a fraction of the distance between A and B. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... kinsman's words "a long-backed Scotchman." He was so intensely Scottish that he made his brother look and sound the same, whereas ordinarily neither air nor accent would have shown the colonel's nation, and there was no definable likeness between them, except, perhaps, the baldness of the forehead, but the remains of Lord Keith's hair were silvered red, whereas Colin's thick beard and scanty locks were dark brown, and with a ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as well, whether actually attained or not. Nor was this preference of certain forms arbitrary, but it followed the plain indications written on every particle of matter. What we call brute matter is whatever is means only, not showing any individuality, or end within itself. A handful of earth is definable only by its chemical or physical properties, which do not distinguish it, but confound it with other things. By itself it is only so much phosphate or silicate, and can come to be something only in a foreign organism, a plant or an animal. In form is seen the dawning of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... figures which came within the scope of my dramatic or poetic design.' Of Bothwell, the longest of the three plays—indeed, the longest play in existence, Swinburne says: 'That ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive piece of work is of course less properly definable as a tragedy than by the old Shakespearean term of a chronicle history.' Definition is not defence, and it has yet to be shown that the 'chronicle' form is in itself a legitimate or satisfactory dramatic form. Shakespeare's use ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... itself with function, Physiology—so that we may conveniently speak of these two senses, or aspects, of "species"—the one as morphological, the other as physiological. Regarded from the former point of view, a species is nothing more than a kind of animal or plant, which is distinctly definable from all others, by certain constant, and not merely sexual, morphological peculiarities. Thus horses form a species, because the group of animals to which that name is applied is distinguished from all others in the world by the following constantly associated ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... concept or idea, which expresses the essence of the human body (last Prop.), which, therefore, is necessarily something appertaining to the essence of the human mind (II. xiii.). But we have not assigned to the human mind any duration, definable by time, except in so far as it expresses the actual existence of the body, which is explained through duration, and may be defined by time—that is (II. viii. Coroll.), we do not assign to it duration, except while ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza |
