"Discursive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... its objects are not things of reflection, association, discursion, discourse in the old sense of the word as opposed to intuition; "discursive or intuitive," as Milton has it. Reason does not indeed necessarily exclude the finite, either in time or in space, but it includes them eminenter. Thus the prime mover of the material universe is affirmed to contain all motion ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... life seems to have culminated, the little doubts she has thrust out or tried to overlive. Somehow she appears to have worked a great and unwitting change in the Grandon family. Once, when Denise was in a discursive mood, she told Violet of Mr. Wilmarth's proposal of marriage. What if she had married him? Violet thinks now. Marcia talks about her "Vulcan" with a curious pride, and he certainly is indulgent. In that case Violet would have marred ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... and discursive article[84] by T. Baden, containing a description and analysis of the gestures and posture of a number of familiar figures from comedy exemplified in some collections of statuettes (chiefly those in Borgia's ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoon of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive talk ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... essence is characterized by reason, this our summit is rational, and though it subsists in energy, yet it has a remitted union with things themselves. Though too it energizes from itself, and contains intelligibles in its essence, yet from its alliance to the discursive nature of soul, and its inclination to that which is divisible, it falls short of the perfection of an intellectual essence and energy profoundly indivisible and united, and the intelligibles which it contains degenerate from the transcendently ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... advanced satirists; you imagine you can sit down comfortably for a couple of decades saying daring and startling things about the age you live in, which, whatever other defects it may have, is certainly not standing still. The whole of the Sherard Blaw school of discursive drama suggests, to my mind, Early Victorian furniture in a travelling circus. However, you will always have relays of people from the suburbs to listen to the Mocking Bird of yesterday, and sincerely imagine it is the harbinger of something new ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... head, mebby he would also see my faults too plain. If he could hear in winter midnights the murmur of dancin' waters and the melogious voice of the south wind blowin' over roses and voyalets, he might also hear the voice of Distrust. If he had the wisdom of Solomon he might also have his discursive fancies, his various and evanescent attachments. But as it is, his love is stiddy and as firm as a rock. So the gouts and the twits evened each other up after all, and the yarn run ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... not so much with our likeness to tree and herb as with the likeness of tree and herb to us; and furthermore, it will go into the whole subject, systematically and at length. Meanwhile, it is open even to an amateur to offer something, in a general and discursive way, upon so inviting a theme, and especially to call attention to ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... notion of religious truth as purely moral and practical is that it is itself abstract and one-sided. The universe as it appears to discursive thought, with its vast system of seemingly uniform laws, which operate without much consideration for our wishes or feelings, must be at least an image of the real universe. We cannot accept the irreconcilable dualism between the will-world and ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... was struck by this; that eight years had made little or no alteration in my idea of the matter: it seemed to me that I really had brought in nearly all worth remembering, and had really condensed the whole into a much compacter Image than the original. This is what I think I can do, with such discursive things: such as all the Oriental things I have seen are. I remember you thought that I had lost the Apologues towards the close; but I believe I was right in excluding them, as the narrative grew ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... little to the merriment of the party. He was quiet, and even thoughtful, and let the talk and laughter go by him without any attempt to take part in it. After dinner he went to his own room; while Valentine and the ladies sat round the fire in the orthodox Christmas manner, and after a good deal of discursive conversation, subsided into the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... Much discursive reading is not only injurious to the faculty of memory, but may be positively destructive of it. The vast extent of our modern world of reviews, magazines and newspapers, with their immense variety of subjects, dissipates the ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... volume will show it takes up a number of subjects, some of which are merely touched in most books on Missions, and others not at all. Reminiscences, especially when they spread over many years, and embrace great events, admit of very discursive treatment. They leave the writer unfettered to take up any subject within his wide scope which he may deem fitted to interest his readers. I have allowed myself the freedom thus afforded me. My aim has been to take my readers ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... of the American Notes complete), and will try to make the parcel better worth its long conveyance. With regard to Maclise's pictures, you certainly are quite right in your impression of them; but he is "such a discursive devil" (as he says about himself) and flies off at such odd tangents, that I feel it difficult to convey to you any general notion of his purpose. I will try to do so when I write again. I want very much to know about —— and that charming girl. . . . Give me full particulars. Will you remember ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... Elderkin is of course ready with a hearty, outspoken word of cheer for his minister. Nay, the very religion of the Squire, which the parson had looked upon as somewhat discursive and human,—giving too large a place to good works,—was decisive and to the point in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... The combining, discursive imagination proceeds from details to the vaguely-perceived unity. It starts from a fragment that serves as a matrix, and becomes completed little by little. An adventure, an anecdote, a scene, a rapid glance, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... partly distinguished exceptions, not a development of Hooker, but either a development of Sidney or a fresh style, resulting from the blending in different proportions of the academic and classical manner with the romantic and discursive. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... characteristics proper to each, which there is no mistaking. The former, for instance, contains but few metrical passages, whereas the latter is composed of poetry and prose in almost equal proportions. The ethical part continually addresses the reader himself in the second person singular, while the discursive section never does. In a word, internal evidence leaves no doubt that, whether the dislocation of the chapters was the result of accident or design, this was the ground plan ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... that the Nature-worship which seems coming will be all the more crushing and slavish, because we know so much better how vast and glorious Nature is; and that the superstitions will be more clumsy and foolish in proportion as our Saxon brain is less acute and discursive, and our education less severely scientific, than ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... AND SOURCES.—The following table, which presents the plays in chronological order,[32] the times when they were written, as nearly as can be known, and the sources whence they were derived, will be of more service to the student than any discursive remarks upon ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... intellect which delighted in the investigation of complex problems with a spiritual and emotional nature manifesting itself in swift and simple solutions of those problems; it united an analytic or discursive power supplied by the head with an intuitive power springing from the heart. He employed his brain to twist and tangle a Gordian knot in order that in a moment it might be cut with the sword of the spirit. In the earlier poems his spiritual ardours and ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... sentences? Whatever could be done by adjusting points, is, therefore, silently performed, in some plays with much diligence, in others with less; it is hard to keep a busy eye steadily fixed upon evanescent atoms, or a discursive ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... leading to the unmasking of Canalis' selfish character and to Modeste's marriage with La Briere are handled in a less Balzacian way than the introductory chapters, which, however, are more than usually tortuous. But the whole story is pleasing; and, in the discursive paragraphs, there is less dogmatism and a more delicate sense of contrasts than the novelist is wont to exhibit when astride a hobby-horse. The following passage has an aroma of Shelley's Defence of Poetry in it, which merits our attention. The ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... string of quotations, and that is a very complimentary thing to say about any novel. Written in diary form, on the whole successfully, it tells little of doing and much of being, and a great deal more of feeling than of either. It is scarcely necessary after that to add that it is discursive. As a matter of fact I found that for me that half of its charm which did not lie in being whisked off, as it were by magic, to sit in the sunshine of Switzerland lay in its author's reflections upon subjects quite ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... to be conversational I have only managed to be unduly discursive. I have never been very well acquainted with the art of conversation—that art which, I understand, is supposed to be lost now. My young days, the days when one's habits and character are formed, have been rather familiar with long silences. Such voices as broke into them were ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... pleasurable, and so conducive to health, and a knowledge of the art of such evident utility, that it is strange that in sea-girt England we should possess no treatise on the subject at all commensurate with its importance. There is a large work on the subject by Bernardi, a Neapolitan, too voluminous and discursive for general use; and by being in the Italian language, a sealed book to the English reader. A translation of this work into German was reviewed in the 67th number of the Quarterly Review; and after the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 528, Saturday, January 7, 1832 • Various
... glanced down his beard, and Razumov, whose tension was relaxed by that unexpected and discursive turn, murmured with ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... fact concerning Mr. Philip Spruce, that his method of telling a story ("Which reminds me," always meant a story with him) is very discursive. He may be said to resemble Jeremy Bentham, who, according to Hazlitt's criticism, fills his sentence with a row of pegs, and hangs a garment upon each of them. Let us omit some portion of his tediousness, and allow him to go on ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... part of "the winter of the deep snow," Lincoln became acquainted with one Denton Offutt, an adventurous and discursive sort of merchant, with more irons in the fire than he could well manage. He wanted to take a flat-boat and cargo to New Orleans, and having heard that Hanks and Lincoln had some experience of the river, he insisted on their joining him. John ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... lobes of his freckled ears. On these occasions Mr. Shrimplin inclined to a certain sad conservatism as he discussed with his son those events of the week last passed which had left their impress on his mind. But what pleased Custer best was when his father, ceasing to be gently discursive and becoming vigorously personal, added yet another canto to the stirring ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... was buried at Guildford, his native place, where he had endowed a hospital with lands to the value of L. 300 a year. Abbot was a conscientious prelate, though narrow in view and often harsh towards both separatists and Romanists. He wrote a large number of works, the most interesting being his discursive Exposition on the Prophet Jonah (1600), which was reprinted in 1845. His Geography, or a Brief Description of the Whole World (1599), passed through numerous ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... moral being constituing one living total of head and heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude,—shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty, sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. In all the Shakespearian women there is essentially the same foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety are merely the ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... have recorded the green memories of an old man, as told while seated by his humble "ingle nook" have endeavoured to adhere to his own words and mode of narration—hence the somewhat rambling and discursive style of these "Recollections"—a style which does not, in the opinion of many, by any means detract from their ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... The discursive story began to narrow and concentrate itself when at last it reached Mexico. The sister changed her position in her chair, and crossed her knees when Tehuantepec was mentioned. It was from that place that Joel ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... first formal meeting of the Club Charlie Leland was chosen President. He was the intellectual leader among the boys, now that the old Class had gone; he was a lad of good principles, bright, generous, and popular. As may be judged from the somewhat discursive dialogue on the piazza, he had a subject well matured in his mind for the literary exercises of ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... SADLY discursive as I have already been, I must still further entreat the reader's patience, as I am about to string together, without any attempt at order, a few odds and ends of things not hitherto mentioned, but which are either curious in themselves or ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... be discursive in a little book which seeks to hit the nail on the head in every paragraph, drive it home in every page, and clinch it in every chapter, and there would be no excuse, therefore, for sketching, even in brief ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... fundamentally it is an affectionate song of praise of the Mediterranean and the dwellers on its littoral, especially the fiery and hardy sailors of Spain, and of Spaniards, in particular the Valencians and Catalonians. Signor IBANEZ' method is distinctly discursive; he gives, for instance, six-and-twenty consecutive pages to the description of the inmates of the Naples Aquarium and is always ready to suspend his story for a lengthy disquisition on any subject, person or place that interests him. This puts him peculiarly at the mercy of his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... put under inspiration, delivered a discursive homily upon the "New Dispensation" which was at present vouchsafed to the citizens of Foxden. He testified to the great relief of getting clear of the "Old Theology,"—meaning thereby such interpretations of Scripture as are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... to ponder in his old friend's counsels. They were discursive and many-fronted, and whenever he seemed to be penetrating or defeating the particular considerations under examination the others in the background had a way of appearing invincible. He had a strong persuasion that Likeman ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... intelligible truth from the variety of compound things; and secondly, because they do not understand intelligible truth discursively, but by simple intuition. Whereas the intellect of the human soul, on the contrary, acquires intelligible truth from the things of sense, and understands it by the discursive action ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... certainly with more thoroughness. The war is accentuating, developing, defining. Previously our discussions and poses and movements had merely the air of seeking to accentuate and define. What was apparently being brought about by discursive efforts, and in a mighty controversy and confusion, is coming about now as a matter ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... specialists. He surpasses the school of Antiphon in perspicuity, the school of Lysias in verve, the school of Isocrates in variety, in felicity, in symmetry, in pathos, in power. Demosthenes has at command all the discursive brilliancy which fascinates a festal audience. He has that power of concise and lucid narration, of terse reasoning, of persuasive appeal, which is required by the forensic speaker. His political eloquence can worthily image the majesty ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... De Legibus Naturae, disquisitio philosophica contra Hobbium instituta, appeared in 1672. The book is important as a distinctly philosophical disquisition, but its extraordinarily discursive character renders impossible anything like analysis. His chief points will be presented in a ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... which places they find themselves at home. Nor is it a lack of dignity and composure in the parlor or at the table. Nor is it a lack of sense of propriety in meetings of worship. But it is in matters ethical, civic and deliberate, and in the free and discursive meetings of men, in which new and intricate questions are to arise; in positions of trust, in which the highest considerations of social responsibility constitute the trust; in these, the men and women ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... discursive intellect,—not gifted with that power, Homeric in kind and more than Homeric in degree, which might meet the old mythic imaginations on, or rather above, their own level, and out of them, together with the material which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... sheets of cartridge-paper and blotting-paper interposed between their writing and their desks! Pads are taken into confidence on the tenderest occasions, and oftentimes when I have made a business visit, and have sent in my name from the outer office, have I had it forced on my discursive notice that the officiating young gentleman has over and over again inscribed AMELIA, in ink of various dates, on corners of his pad. Indeed, the pad may be regarded as the legitimate modern successor of the old forest-tree: whereon these young knights (having no attainable ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... seventeenth century and the great development of the novel. Thackeray calls Addison 'the most delightful talker in the world', and his essays have precisely the charm of the conversation of a well-informed and thoughtful man of the world. They are entirely discursive; he starts with a certain subject, and follows any line of thought that occurs to him. If he thinks of an anecdote in connexion with his subject, that goes down; if it suggests to him abstract speculations or moral reflections he gives us those ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... became a text-book for students, and reached a nineteenth edition in 1851. Their faults, considered as philosophical treatises, are palpable. They have the wordiness of hasty composition, and the discursive rhetoric intended to catch the attention of an indolent audience. Brown does not see that he is insulting his hearers when he apologises for introducing logic into lectures upon metaphysics, and indemnifies them by quotations from Akenside and the Essay ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... than the boot-jack; the parting remarks of six drenched cats are spirited and harmonious; but the animals depart to different quarters of the universe, and your hydraulic measure, so far from bringing order out of chaos, merely evokes a wailing chaos out of comparative order. These discursive observations aim at showing that a cat has a haughty spirit of independence which centuries of partial submission to the suzerainty of man have not eradicated. I do not want to censure the ancient personage who made friends with the creature which is a thing ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... spreading gold leaf, by flattening out good material. That is 'padding,' a device as dangerous as it is unworthy; it is much better to make your story a pollard—to cut it down to a mere anecdote—than to get it lost in a forest of verbiage. No line of it, however seemingly discursive, should be aimless, but should have some relation to the matter in hand; and if you find the story interesting to yourself notwithstanding that you know the end of it, it will ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... remarked, after a discursive, fitful, but very spicy preface of ten minutes' duration, "why they couldn't find somethin' I hed done, instead of tuckin' some other feller's job on me? I hev had difficulties, but this here one's just one more than I knows on. Like 'nuff some ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... neither talked much, but having obtained the necessary stock of perch, they landed at the favourite spring, and prepared a fry. While seated on the grass, alternating be tween the potations of punch, and the mastication of fish, these worthies again renewed the dialogue in their usual discursive, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... "Sakalat, or "Saklatun", whence Mr. Skeat would derive "scarlet." This note is from the voyage of F. Pyrard, etc. London. Hakluyts, M.dccc.lxxxvii.; and the editor quotes Colonel Yule's M. Polo (ii. chapt. 58) and his "Discursive Glossary s. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... classes of the period Phelps was a perpetual anxiety to the others, who followed closely the printed lessons, and beheld with alarm his discursive efforts to get into freer air and light. His remarks were the most refreshing part of the exercises, but were outside of the safe path into which the others thought it necessary to win him from his "speckerlations." The class were one day on the verses ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... subsequent five Parts. These, (being 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, of the Apologia,) are here numbered as Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 respectively. Of the Appendix, about half has been omitted, for the same reason as has led to the omission of Parts 1 and 2. The rest of it is thrown into the shape of Notes of a discursive character, with two new ones on Liberalism and the Lives of the English Saints of 1843-4, and another, new in part, on Ecclesiastical Miracles. In the body of the work, the only addition of consequence is the letter which is found at p. 228, a copy of which has ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... never designed, nor can it be easily adapted, for instruction. It is a philosophical discussion of the subject, containing many historical citations and illustrations, which show the reader his authorities without fortifying his positions. For a text-book, therefore, it lacks arrangement, and is too discursive. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... at the cost of much pain. Owen Sandbrook was spending his vacation at the Holt, and Miss Charlecote looked so bright as she walked to church leaning on his arm, that Phoebe had no regrets in leaving her. Indeed, the damsel greatly preferred the Holt in his absence. She did not understand his discursive comments on all things in art or nature, and he was in a mood of flighty fitful spirits, which perplexed her alike by their wild, satirical mirth, and their mournful sentiment. She thought Miss Charlecote ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... axiom in anthropology that what is needed is not discursive treatment of large subjects but the minute discussion of special themes, not a ranging at large over the peoples of the earth past and present, but a detailed examination of limited areas. This work I am undertaking for Australia, and in the present volume I deal briefly with some of the ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... One." Plotinus combined, in unusual measure, the intellect of the metaphysician with the temperament of the great psychic, so that he was able to analyse with the most precise dialectic, experiences which in most cases paralyse the tongue and blind the discursive reason. His sixth Ennead, "On the Good or the One," is one of the great philosophic treatises of the world, and it sums up in matchless words the whole mystic position and experience. There are two statements in it which contain the centre of the writer's thought. ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... many. In fact the mind pays little heed to the consideration of balance until a complication of many units forces the necessity upon it. The painter who esteems lightly the subject of composition is usually found to be the painter of simple subjects—portraits and non-discursive themes, but though these may survive in antagonism to such principles their authors are demanding more from the technical quality of their work than is its mission ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... Frenchman was in great feather: he was discursive and pompous to every one. In Moscow too, I remembered, he had blown a great many bubbles. Interminably he discoursed on finance and Russian politics, and though, at times, the General made feints to contradict him, he did so ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to discuss these great topics on the first night of the session; awaiting the discussion in the commons. The Duke of Richmond endeavoured to bring on a debate; but ministers were taciturn; and after a long and discursive speech delivered by Lord Brougham, which touched upon the subjects of the Oregon dispute, the corn-laws, and Irish affairs, the address was carried. In the course of the evening, the Duke of Richmond wished the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... reader has a right to demand, in the first place, discursive or logical clearness, that is, on the basis of conceptions, and, secondly, intuitive or aesthetic clearness, by means of intuitions, that is, by examples or other modes of illustration in concreto. I have done what I could ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... with characteristic energy to the presentation of his case, and prepared a memoir wherein all the most serious grievances of the Upper Canadian people were set forth in detail. In this document the writer adopted a discursive and rhetorical style which, as the Colonial Secretary justly remarked, were "singularly ill adapted to bring questions of so much intricacy and importance to a definite issue." The facts were nevertheless pretty comprehensively embodied, and were generally speaking of such a character ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... singularly catholic outlook. His learning is profound, but he is not overburdened by it, and he preserves his native gaiety of style even when solving crabbed problems of bibliography. He is at times discursive, but he is never tedious; and he shows no trace of that philological pedantry and narrowness or obliquity of critical vision which the detailed study of literary history has been known to breed in English ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... to Scripture, "No man shall see God and live" (Exod. xxxiii. 20). Now all discursive exercises of prayer, or even of active contemplation, regarded as an end, and not as a preparation for the passive, are exercises of life by which we cannot see God, that is, become united to Him. All that is of man, and of his own industry, however noble and elevated ...
— A Short Method Of Prayer And Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... singularly trying. Indeed, I am not sure that I was not distinctly grateful when the final evening arrived. When one has to perform a painful duty there is no use in lingering over it; and when one is secretly troubled, a spoken and too discursive sympathy only irritates our mental membrane. How could Job, for example, tolerate the sackcloth and ashes, and, worse still, the ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... appointed rector of the college at Gratz. During this time the Archduke Ferdinand chose him as his confessor. Not long afterwards he was accused to the General of being a courtier, an imputation so vague as to need a discursive reply. But his long letter of self justification addressed to Father Aquaviva is interesting on account of the vivid scenes it lays before us. ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... digesting data that are of special significance for the question of survival or elimination of traits in the modern populations. Little of a tangible character can therefore be offered in support of the view here taken, beyond a discursive review of such everyday facts as lie ready to hand. Such a recital can scarcely avoid being commonplace and tedious, but for all that it seems necessary to the completeness of the argument, even in the meager outline in which it is here attempted. A degree ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... without warning in some gulf of grave discussion opening out deceptively from the sparkling stream of the story, or stranded on some lofty sentiment never dreamt of in their philosophy. For the author's mind is, in the best sense of the word, a discursive one. It is full of positive thought, and strikes out right and left like a school-boy who must needs relieve his superabundant spirits by pinching his sister's ear, thrusting his fists in his brother's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... of the people who express admiration for it know nothing of the essay except a delicious passage at the end, like a draught of fragrant wine, about the gowned figures evaporating into the twilight, and the nightingale heard among the flowering chestnuts of Jesus. But the talk itself is discursive and somewhat pompous. However, it is not of that that I wish to speak, it is rather of the passage from Digby's Godefridus which is read aloud by the narrator, which sets out to analyse the joyful and generous temperament of Youth. "They [the young] ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... than of writing; wherever you open the pages there is always a witty, well-informed Irishman discoursing to you, who tells his story admirably, when he has one to tell, and, failing that, never fails to be pleasant. Irish talk is apt to be discursive; to rely upon a general charm diffused through the whole, rather than upon any quotable brilliancy; its very essence is spontaneity, high spirits, fertility of resource. That is a fair description of ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... claims our attention. Unique of its kind, and, in spite of its shortcomings, possessed of no small poetic interest, William Browne's Britannia's Pastorals may be regarded at pleasure either as a pastoral epic or as a versified romance. It resembles the prose romances in being by nature discursive, episodic and inconsequent, and like not a few it remained unfinished. Little would be gained by giving any detailed analysis of the plot developed through the leisurely amplitude of its 10,000 lines, while any attempt to deal, however slightly, with ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Shelley could picture the ideal goals of life, the ultimate joys of experience, better than a discursive critic or observer could have done. The circumstances of life are only the bases or instruments of life: the fruition of life is not in retrospect, not in description of the instruments, but in expression of ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... this day forth, acquired an interest in Danyers's eyes. She was like a volume of unindexed and discursive memoirs, through which he patiently plodded in the hope of finding embedded amid layers of dusty twaddle some precious allusion to the subject of his thought. When, some months later, he brought out his ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... copper and iron, the bronze and the steel, they manipulate so finely, to its beautiful soul—to its natural though hereditary aristocracy, its "golden" humanity, its kings, in whom Wisdom, the light, of a comprehensive Synopsis, indefectibly resides, and who, as being not merely its discursive or practical reason, but its faculty of contemplation likewise, will be also its priests, the [252] medium of its worship, of its intercourse with ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... subject has been somewhat discursive, it may be admitted that a great population following callings related to the sea is, now as formerly, a great element of sea power; that the United States is deficient in that element; and that its foundations can be laid only in a large ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... purchase, removed, too, by his present rank, and the pension for his wound, from being likely to become chargeable to him; so he had written such brotherly congratulations, that good honest Fred was quite affected. He was even discursive enough to mention some connexions of the young man who had been with Fred in the Crimea, a Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy, a very good sort of fellow, who gave excellent dinners, and was a pleasant yachting companion. His wife was said to ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was only twenty-four; and at intervals during the next seventeen years he issued four additional volumes, the result of prolonged study both of Nature and of almost all the great paintings in Europe. The completed book is a discursive treatise, the various volumes necessarily written from more or less different view-points, on many of the main aspects, general and technical, of all art, literary as well as pictorial. For Ruskin held, and brilliantly ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... is chiefly concerned and which he thinks has been unduly neglected. This, as hinted, has its merits, and not only or chiefly for Philosophy, but also, and perhaps primarily, for the conduct of life. If he convinces men, should they need convincing, that they cannot be saved by the discursive reason alone, he will have done a good service to his generation, and to the philosophers among them who may (though they ought not to) be tempted to ignore the ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... as to the life and works of Keats. My concluding notes are, I suppose, ample in scale: if they are excessive, that is an involuntary error on my part. My aim in them has been to illustrate and elucidate the poem in its details, yet without travelling far afield in search of remote analogies or discursive comment—my wish being rather to 'stick to my text': wherever a difficulty presents itself, I have essayed to define it, and clear it up—but not always to my own satisfaction. I have seldom had to discuss the opinions ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... and crossed them the other way. The old lady began to seem to him a thought too discursive, if ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... many things, which, having no corporeal evidence, can be perceived and comprehended only by the discursive energies of reason. Hence the ambiguous nature of matter can be comprehended only by adulterated opinion. Matter is the principle of all bodies, and is stamped with the impression of forms. Fire, air, and water derive their origin ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... arrangements. We placed her on the floor and told her to lie still. We adjusted some rubber cloth under the dead arm. Her husband and three children stood watching with expressionless faces. Two monkeys, tied to a board in a corner were playing and fighting together. A large parrot was making discursive comment on the whole affair, while a little lame dog seemed to be the most interested spectator. The secretary took the bistoury from the bowl containing the sublimate and handed it to me with a bow. With a piece of cotton I washed the intended ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... the least attractive of the papers in the London University Magazine, we ought also to run over the lighter portions of its pages. These are "A young head, and, what is still better, a young heart,"—discursive enough—"A Tale of the Irish Rebellion—the Guerilla Bride, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... pluralistic procedure in using subjects and predicates as we do is fundamentally irrational, an example of the desperation of our finite intellectual estate, infected and undermined as that is by the separatist discursive forms which are our only categories, but which absolute reality must somehow absorb ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... chairs a little farther out into the darkness, smoking cigars and drinking some rather wonderful coffee. The doctor had gone off to see a patient, and Von Ragastein was thoughtful. Their guest, on the other hand, continued to be reminiscently discursive. ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... end to these discursive sentences, let me add this poetic morsel in my own vein. Mr. Butler of Philadelphia was quite right in his judgment of my indoles: I "write by impulse on occasion." Here is a very recent instance in point. ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Our discursive muse must now take her place in the little britzska in which Clive Newcome and his companions are travelling, and cross the Alps in that vehicle, beholding the snows on St. Gothard, and the beautiful region through which the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unrest. This perpetual taking up of new subjects, new occupations, made thoroughness the one thing unattainable. Mrs. Corfield was a woman who went in for everything. She was by turns scientific and artistic, a student and a teacher, but she was too discursive to be accurate, and she was satisfied with a proficiency far below perfection. In philosophy she was what might be called a woman of antepenultimates, referring all the more intricate moral and intellectual phenomena to mind and spirit; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... so far applies very well to the cosmic Intelligence, the [Greek: nous] of the Neo-Platonists. It represents thought as embracing the highest and most fundamental principles of existence, upon which all mediate and discursive and inferential thinking depends. Its content corresponds to the Ideas of Plato. But the further account of the Intelligence must at least in a part of it refer to the individual human faculty of that name, ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... are discursive and desultory enough, as a reader, to have pleased even the late Lord Iddesleigh. It was "Aucassin and Nicolette" only a month ago, and to-day you have been reading Lord Lytton's "Strange Story," I am sure, for you want information about ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... signs of recovery in Ovid's face, Carmina detected a faint return of colour. She was so relieved that she was able to listen to the doctor's oddly discursive talk, and even to join in it. "Some of our friends used to think I was like my father," ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... anyone has a right to indulge in the convenience of indented headings when writing a discursive article, I may claim a share in the privilege. When I retired from the editorship of a morning newspaper, a not obtrusively friendly commentator wrote that my chief claim to be remembered in that connection was that ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... The discursive Thoughts on the Future of the Human Race, published in 1866, by W. Ellis (1800-81), a disciple of J. S. Mill, would have been remarkable if it had appeared half a century earlier. He is untouched by the ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... my tale," declared Brick, "and them as has heard it once can take it or leave it." He was discursive, circumstantial, and it was a long time before he led them in fancy to the door of the boat-house and showed them Red Feather and Gledware disappearing forever beneath the ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... out and noted for an appendix to those lively and instructive discourses of his On the Art of Writing that it is a jolly difficult thing to write a play; that an act is not a chapter of a novel, still less a compote of bits of many chapters; that, while to be charmingly discursive is a paramount quality of the higher type of novelist, the same attribute in a play, whose very breath of life is essential brevity, makes it appear to go on crutches, like his own discomfited hero. It bemuses an audience and gravels the players—as the queer ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... MAUD DIVER'S latest novel, Strange Roads (CONSTABLE); but it is only fair to say that Derek Blunt (ne Blount), second son of the Earl of Avonleigh, is no prig, but, on the contrary, a very pleasant fellow. For a protagonist he obtrudes himself only moderately in a rather discursive story which involves a number of other people who do nothing in particular over a good many chapters. We are halfway through before Derek takes the plunge, and then we find, him, not in the slums of some industrial quarter, but in Western Canada, where class distinctions are founded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... learning all that was to be learned from the text-book, any attempt to supply the deficiency, by drawing upon his own resources, would be sure to be followed by the plainest marks of dissatisfaction or merited rebuke on the part of Professor Long. Never indulging in the diffuse or the discursive himself, he never tolerated such a course on the part of the student. A mere glance at the man was sufficient to indicate the richest and most solid type of mind. Those who sat under his instruction, and were capable of appreciating it, will ever remember his efforts in ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... but in the discursive manner natural to her; till, coming to one of the paths descending towards the shore, she darted down, without saying ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... of a Regatta; and taking their courage in their hands had sought an interview with Sir Felix, to entreat his patronage for the scheme. They had found him in his most amiable mood, and within an hour—the old gentleman is discursive—he had consented to become Patron and President and to honour the gathering with his presence. But observe; the idea cannot have originated before August the 12th, on which day the trio arrived from London; ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... people who considered the most sweetly distilled essence of living to be the minute investigation of the fine points of logical discourse, engaged in on the basis of an incredibly multiplied logic structure composed of thirty-seven separate systems of discursive regulations, the very first of which was based on a planetary absolute, the rejection and ridicule of all persuasive techniques and those who ...
— The Glory of Ippling • Helen M. Urban
... interpretations of life; but, knowing that Miss Mellins had been invited for the sole purpose of keeping her company she continued to cling to the dress-maker's side, letting Mr. Ramy lead the way with Evelina. Miss Mellins, stimulated by the excitement of the occasion, grew more and more discursive, and her ceaseless talk, and the kaleidoscopic whirl of the crowd, were unspeakably bewildering to Ann Eliza. Her feet, accustomed to the slippered ease of the shop, ached with the unfamiliar effort of walking, and her ears with the din of the dress-maker's anecdotes; ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... light that Shakespeare has done. However fine or profound the thought, we know what was coming, whereas the effect of reading Shakespeare is 'like the eye of vassalage encountering majesty'. Chaucer's mind was consecutive, rather than discursive. He arrived at truth through a certain process; Shakespeare saw everything by intuition, Chaucer had great variety of power, but he could do only one thing at once. He set himself to work on a particular subject. His ideas were kept separate, labelled, ticketed and parcelled ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... rite among the people spoken of and the Indians of North America, yet, did space admit, a discussion might profitably be entered upon regarding the details of it among the ancients and the origin of the ceremony. As it is, simple narrations of cremation in the country, with discursive notes and an account of its origin among the Nishinams of California, by Stephen Powers,[48] seem to be all that is ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... back, and lifting her face upward in the discursive fulness of her fancy, 'I feel I am not robbed. 'Il y a des miracles, et j'en ai vu'. One's life seems more perfect when one has seen what nature can do. The fellow was stupendous! I conceive him present. Who'll ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was in the wrong. He seems to have been, from first to last, an unquestioning believer in the doctrines of the Christian religion, and he viewed with great disfavour any one who ventured to question any part of its creed. As a lecturer he was eloquent and though discursive, always interesting. None of his lectures were written, so that to-day they are only a fading memory to those who heard them delivered. Though found acceptable at the time, it is hardly likely that, if delivered at the present day, they would enjoy so high a degree of popularity. ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... the most genuine, biography of Burns is furnished by his own writings. His letters will, if carefully studied, disprove many of the positions taken up so confidently by would-be interpreters of his history. It is not the purpose of this discursive paper to take up the details of the Clarinda episode; but philandering is scarcely the word by which to describe the mutual relations of the lovers. As for Mrs. M'Lehose, the severest thing that can with justice be said ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... tempted to ward off a just verdict of unsuitableness and of incompetency by bringing many and grievous charges against their flocks. "A mania for church-extending"; "a hankering for architectural splendor"; "or for discursive and satirical preaching"; "or for something florid or profound": these and the like imputations have been put forward, as a screen, by many an unsuccessful preacher, who failed,—simply failed,—not in selling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... competitor who has gone to college will, perhaps, not be doing this. He will probably be "resting his mind" with an ephemeral novel or the discursive hop-skip-and-jump reading of current periodicals. Thus he will day by day be weakening his strength, diminishing his resources. At the very same time you, by the other method, will hourly be adding to your powers, daily ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... fast becoming the arch-interpreter of Holy Russia. In The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary (Macmillan) he returns with even more than his customary zeal to his good work, wishing herein specifically to interpret Russian Christianity to the West. A passionate earnestness informs his discursive eloquence. I cannot resist the conviction that he has the type of mind that sees most easily what it wishes to see. He moves cheerily along, incidentally raising difficulties which he does not solve, ignoring conclusions which seem ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... best brains and fervent hearts to be found in that city, and some of the leading laymen revered him as their spiritual father. Sometimes he was betrayed into eccentricities, and his vivid imagination often carried him away into discursive flights; yet he never soared out of sight of Calvary's cross, and never betrayed the precious Gospel committed to ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... itself. A throng of members—chiefly elderly gentlemen in expanded uniforms—assembles in the smoking-room, occupying all the chairs, and even overflowing on to the tables and window-sills. They are not the discursive, argumentative gathering of three years ago. They sit silent, restless, ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... he seemed to forget the terrors in store, and strolled along, stopping now and again to admire some particular oak or view; chatting all the while in a discursive manner, which, though somewhat aimless, was by no means without its charm. He made a capital companion for a silent man like Harold Quaritch who liked ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... I most cordially coincide, and at the same time bring these somewhat rambling and discursive reminiscences to ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... domicile, Hampton Court. The most interesting portion of the work is the gossip it contains on the state of things in the French capital, on the return of Napoleon, in 1815, and in Brussels, before and after the battle of Waterloo. Nevertheless, as the whole is indiscribably discursive, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... substance is so elusive and requires such alert attention on the part of the listener, cannot continually present new material[17] without becoming diffuse; but instead, must make its impression by varied emphasis upon the main thought. Otherwise it would become so discursive that one could not possibly follow it. From these historical facts as to the structure of music certain inferences may be drawn; the vital importance of which to the listener can hardly be exaggerated. As polyphonic treatment (the imitation and interweaving of independent ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... Planet had been in the nature of a discursive essay rather than an informative article, although I had enlivened it with some account of my experiences at Upper Crossleys. But at the moment that I had set pen to paper I had realized the difficulty of expressing, within the scope of a ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... introduction—(This is my friend, N or M; if he steals anything, I will be responsible for it): a form of introduction, by the way, too sweeping in its suretyship for prudent men to use in Riverina—I shall describe the group, severally, with such succinctness as may be compatible with my somewhat discursive style. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Coburg, who accompanied their guests to the Duke's other domain of Gotha. The way led through Queen Adelaide's country of Meiningen, and at every halting-place clergymen with addresses more or less discursive, and "white and green young ladies," literally bombarded the travellers with speeches, flowers, and poems. At last the Duke of Coburg's territory was again entered after it was dark; and the party ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... of the Press is not clear. Unlike his earlier An Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704), A Vindication does not seem to have been occasioned by a specific situation, and in it Defoe is not alone concerned with freedom of the press, but writes on a more general and discursive level. His opening paragraph states that "The very great Clamour against some late Performances of Authorship, and the unprecedented Criticisms introduc'd" make such an essay as he writes "absolutely necessary." Yet there is no clear indication of just what works occasion this necessity. The ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe |
