"Facile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... towns taken, and provinces overrun with a rapidity much less honorable to France than disgraceful to Holland. No victory was gained—no resistance offered; and it is disgusting to look back on the fulsome panegyrics with which courtiers and poets lauded Louis for those facile and inglorious triumphs. The Prince of Orange had received the command of a nominal army of seventy thousand men; but with this undisciplined and discouraged mass he could attempt nothing. He prudently retired into the province of Holland, ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... of genius now as we did a generation ago, we can yet recognize the difference between the fervor of that divine birth and the cantering of the livery Pegasus forth and back, along the vulgar boulevards over which facile talent rides his daily hack. Only once or twice, in his own private note-book, or in a letter to his wife when it was needful, in sickness and loneliness, to strengthen her will and his by testifying his own deepest consciousness of power, did he whisper ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... name of Caliban as the alert and witty chroniqueur of the Figaro and as the facile rhymester of its lyre comique, has written a few serious poems of direct and vigorous expression, especially under the inspiration of the memory of the war ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... succinct, and may be worth giving for its academic flavour:—'Jam inde a pueritia literarum studio imbutus, et in celeberrimo Etonensi gymnasio informatus, ad nostram accessit academiam, ubi morum honestate, pietate, et pudore nemini aequalium secundus, indole et ingenio facile omnibus antecellebat. Summis deinde nostrae academiae honoribus cumulatus ad res civiles cum magna omnium expectatione se contulit; expectatione tamen major omni evasit. In senatus enim domum inferiorem cooptatus, eam ad negotia tractanda ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... "Ravenshoe" in this year of 1917, and to me the world seems to have travelled so far since its publication in 1862, that its aims, its ideals, and its point of view, are hardly credible. Through it all runs that facile spirit of optimism which seems to me to have distinguished much of the thought of the mid-Victorian era, that air of "All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds," that insular pride of which I have been speaking, but which to us now appears the narrowest and worst form ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... fraction of one second,—thrills to us out of endlessness;—and the force of infinity dwells in its lightest tremor; the weight of eternity presses behind its faintest shudder. To that phantom-Touch, the tinting of a blossom or the dissipation of a universe were equally facile: here it caresses the eye with the charm and illusion of color; there it bestirs into being a cluster of giant suns. All that human mind is capable of conceiving as possible (and how much also that human ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... us, and that it lives among the glories of language as a published oration. I find, on looking through the Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, that in his estimation the Pro Milone was the first in favor of all our author's orations—"facile princeps," if we may collect the critic's ideas on the subject from the number of references made and examples taken. Quintilian's work consists of lessons on oratory, which he supports by quotations from the great orators, both Greek and Latin, with whose speeches ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... Erasmus scorning to make money out of his facile talents and enviable knowledge of the humanities, daring indigence so as to be able to realize his shining ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... 1. de aulico. Est in unoquoque nostrum seminarium aliquod stultitiae, quod si quando excitetur, in infinitum facile excrescit. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... ingenium posse. Quodsi[14] regum atque imperatorum animi virtus[15] in pace ita ut in bello valeret, aequabilius atque constantius sese res humanae haberent, neque aliud alio[16] ferri, neque mutari ac misceri omnia cerneres. Nam imperium facile his artibus retinetur, quibus initio partum est. Verum ubi pro labore desidia, pro continentia et aequitate libido atque superbia invasere, fortuna simul cum moribus immutatur. Ita imperium semper ad optimum quemque[17] ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... doubtless contributed greatly, and recruiting went on very slowly. There was substantially no military tradition in the country. Thirty years of peace had seen the disappearance of the officers whom the War of Independence had left in their prime; and the Government fell into that most facile of mistakes, the choice of old men, because when youths they had worn an epaulette, without regarding the experience they had had under it, or since ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... scepticism, and thus to refuse in thought to entertain either a probability or an improbability concerning the existence of a God; or else to incline in thought towards an affirmation or a negation of God, according as his previous habits of thought have rendered such an inclination more facile in the one direction than in the other. And although, under such circumstances, I should consider that man the more rational who carefully suspended his judgment, I conclude that if this course is departed from, neither the metaphysical teleologist nor the scientific atheist has any ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... story of Lady Mary's career, with its vicissitudes and singularities, may be read in Lord Wharncliffe's edition of her Life and Letters. She is a prominent figure in the literature of the period, and made several passing contributions to it, but apart from a few facile and far from decent verses her letters are the sole legacy she has left behind her for the literary student. Some of them, and especially those addressed to her sister the Countess of Mar, are often coarse; ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... herself, outside of her, far away like the stars, and she felt now as she did whenever she looked at the stars. Was her character essentially weak, and was she liable to all these influences, these facile assimilations? Was there nothing within her, no abiding principle, nothing that she could call her own? She walked up the room, and tried to understand herself—what was she, bad or good, weak or strong? If she only knew what she was, then she ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... the clergy most naturally lead them to prefer the formal statement, the studied elaboration of ideas, which their own training cannot but render facile and dear to them. And there is here and there a man who, in virtue of extraordinary genius, can infuse new life into worn-out phrases,—a man or two who can for a moment or for an hour, by the very weight and excellence of their thoughts, and because ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... part of the recognized art-folk-music of Germany; his vocal works, solos, part-songs, &c., enjoyed an extraordinary vogue all over Europe in the middle of the 19th century, but in spite of their facile tunefulness have few qualities of lasting beauty. Abt was kapellmeister at Bernburg in 1841, at Zurich in the same year and at Brunswick from 1852 to 1882, when he retired ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Gradual changes had crept into the spirit of the party. Accumulations of habit and custom that had collected upon them in the dense life of towns were dropping away. As the surface refinements of language were dying, so their faces had lost a certain facile play of expression. Delicate nuances of feeling no longer showed, for they no longer existed. Smiles had grown rarer, and harder characteristics were molding their features into sterner lines. The acquired deceptiveness of the world of men was leaving them. Ugly things that they once would have ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... details of her new existence, the dirt, the roughness, were beginning to sink in on her. She paced back and forth, lips compressed, eyes black. Kut-le stood with his back against a cottonwood eying the slender figure with frank delight. Now and again he chuckled as he rolled a cigarette with his facile finger. His hands were fine as only an Indian's can be: strong and sinewy yet supple with ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... also passed as a man of order and humanity, not continue to support Danton after the suppression of the Hebertists, as he had supported him before? The common and facile answer is that he was moved by a malignant desire to put a rival out of the way. On the whole, the evidence seems to support Napoleon's opinion that Robespierre was incapable of voting for the death of anybody in the world on grounds of personal enmity. And his acquiescence in the ruin ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... illusion occurs in every age of transition. It was notably so in the eighteenth century, which represented a highly important stage in the emancipation of women. To some that century seems to have been given up to empty gallantry and facile pleasure. Yet it was not only the age in which women for the first time succeeded in openly attaining their supreme social influence,[85] it was an age of romantic love, and the noble or poignant love-stories which have reached ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... summits has a scowl of terror in its overhanging brows, yet is it a pleasing fear to look upon its savage solitudes through the barred nursery-windows in the heart of the sweet, companionable village.—And how the mountains love their children! The sea is of a facile virtue, and will run to kiss the first comer in any port he visits; but the chaste mountains sit apart, and show their faces only in the midst of their ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... for the funeral of our friend. His years were but little more than threescore and ten, and his step was light, and his heart was young, and we hardly thought of him as an old man. Nor is it because his work seemed to us completed, that we think of the measure of his days as satisfied. His facile pen dropped upon a new page; and before him, as he ceased to labor, were tasks midway, and others just begun. It is because our first feeling is so unsatisfied, it is because there was so much more which he wished, and we wished him to do, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... His methods in nature and history—is that other idealism which patiently bows to the yoke of the actual, and endures the agony of keeping true at once to the heavenly vision and to the imperfect earthly form. Iconoclastic zeal against outworn or corrupt institutions fires our facile enthusiasm. Let us recognize also the spiritual passion that suffers unflinchingly the disparity between the sign and the thing signified, and devotes its energies, not to discarding, but to restoring ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... "A facile use of the pen will always be serviceable to you," he said to George. "No one can become too skilful in wielding it. But it requires ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... papers, expects five hundred pounds, and his associates think him not unreasonable, especially after he agrees to pay one fourth himself; and with all his prudence and shrewdness he begins to count on the profits of the magazine with something of Webster's facile hope. ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... simply secular socialists of the more modern and educated type, with their ignorances and credulities accentuated, but not otherwise altered, by the solemnities of religious language, and a vague religious sentiment which achieves a facile intensity because it ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... he asserted repeatedly before this, from which it appears that he adheres to his old error. Et non diserte tollit causam sine qua non seu debitum, sine cuius persolutione sit impossibile quemquam servari, quod toties antea asseruit; facile patet, eum pristinum illum suum errorem retinere." (Schlb. 7, 266; Preger 1, 398.) Flacius demanded an unqualified rejection of the statement, "Good works are necessary to salvation"—a demand with ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... coarsened in mind as well as in appearance. I do not know if it was due to my own development since the old days at Oxford, and to my greater knowledge of the world, but he did not seem to me so brilliant as I remembered. His facile banter was rather stupid. In fact he bored me. The pose which had seemed amusing in a lad fresh from Eton now was intolerable, and I was glad to leave him. It was characteristic that, after asking me to dinner, he left me in a lordly way ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... but be unable to express them in such a way as to appeal to others, consequently he cannot exert the full force of his intellectuality nor leave the imprint of his character upon his time, whereas many a man but indifferently gifted may wield such a facile pen as to attract attention and win for himself an envious place among ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... diminutive talent to perfection. Poverty was always putting temptation in her way. She knew that she had chosen the most expensive and the least remunerative form of her delightful art. She knew that there were things she could do, concessions she could make, sacrifices, a thousand facile extensions of the limit, a thousand imponderable infidelities to the perfection she adored. But they were sins, and though poverty pinched her for it, she had never committed ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... choise of none, but such as represent the fairest images: They are no lesse sollicitous to diversifie their words by agreeable modifications, their inflexion hath very little uneasie in it, it is all of it aequally facile and gay; their diminutives are exceedingly rellishing, because there is something more than ordinarily pretty in them, they are rich in derivatives, and compounds, not only because their pronunciation is more harmonious, but also ...
— A Philosophicall Essay for the Reunion of the Languages - Or, The Art of Knowing All by the Mastery of One • Pierre Besnier
... great and successful lawyer, but his original taste was for literature rather than law. Few men were more before the public than he, and yet he loved privacy more than publicity. He had acquaintances numberless, and facile and gracious manners, but his heart was open to very few. His eloquence was luxuriant and efflorescent, but he was also a close and compact reasoner. He had a vein of playful exaggeration in his common speech, but his temperament was earnest, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... we shall all be burned in our beds.' Had the British party in the room been awake, Mr. Williams would have roused a mutinous protest against this arrogant mandate. But Germans are generally mild and facile in their tempers; so the light was complaisantly extinguished. Yet, as there were no curtains, it struck the Germans that the danger was really none at all; for bed-clothes, massed upon each other, will no more ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Howard," Mrs. Pendleton was wont to say with her facile sympathy. "So hard for her to have to take strangers into her home. I believe she was left without anything at her husband's death; mighty hard for a woman at ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... Beecher's preaching. The only difference is, that the latter finds an audience that through intellectual facility is able to follow him in any path; while Spurgeon, on the other hand, finds his audience destitute of any such facilities, yet finds them facile in every direction where he can bring into alliance with his power their emotions or their peculiar modes of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... mind and body were separated: neither were of any use to me. I owe everything to you. My case cannot be defined merely as that of a priest who gave up his religion because a pretty woman came by. He who says that does not try to understand; he merely contents himself with uttering facile commonplace. What he has to learn is the great oneness in Nature. There is but one element, and we but one of its many manifestations. If this were not so, why should your whiteness and colour and gaiety remind me always of ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... velvet-skinned aristocracy. By the way, I wish you would see in future that my undergarments are of a silken texture. My flesh rebels at anything approaching to harshness," and then he went complacently back to his library to weave and fashion the graceful phrases which flowed from his facile pen. ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... to Walpole, of the 28th of October, Madame du Deffand draws the following portrait of General Conway:— "Selon l'id'ee que vous m'en aviez donn'ee, je le croyais grave, s'ev'ere, froid, imposant; c'est l'homme le plus aimable, le plus facile, le plus doux, le plus obligeant, et le plus simple que je connaisse. Il n'a pas ces premiers mouvemens de sensibilit'e qu'on trouve en vous, mais aussi ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... pecuniary institutional structure and of its amelioration is the greater facility of peaceable and orderly exploitation; but its remoter effects far outrun this immediate object. Not only does the more facile conduct of business permit industry and extra-industrial life to go on with less perturbation; but the resulting elimination of disturbances and complications calling for an exercise of astute discrimination in everyday affairs acts to make the pecuniary class itself superfluous. ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... the general electric influence is the main remedial agency, there is no reason why the possible—or, I should say, probable—good to be obtained from its local influence should not be realized—the less so that it is so facile to obtain this in the bath, by means of the surface board. While individual cases will undoubtedly call for modifications, I have found the following plan to answer best in certainly more than half the cases that have come under my observation: The first five minutes of the bath may be occupied ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... Mr. Browning's new poem came before the critical tribunals, public and private, recognised or irresponsible, there was much lamentation even in quarters where a manlier humour might have been expected, over the poet's choice of a subject. With facile largeness of censure, it was pronounced a murky subject, sordid, unlovely, morally sterile, an ugly leaf out of some ancient Italian Newgate Calendar. One hinted in vain that wisdom is justified of her children, that the poet must be trusted to judge ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... open a shop;" and, after all, St. Paul's Cathedral is in a manner of speaking a kind of shop, isn't it?—the goods, at any rate, should be obtainable there. The phrase "there is no health in us" does not constitute the whole liturgy. Down with facile optimists by all means, but, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... of the garden, to that airy drawing-room which he has furnished in pale yellow and dark blue. On the walls are examples of the great modern masters—Manet and Monet. That view of a plain by Monet—is it not facile? It flows like a Japanese water-colour: the low horizon evaporating in the low light, the spire of the town visible in the haze. And look at the celebrated "Lecon de Danse" by Degas—that dancer descending the spiral staircase, only her legs are visible, the staircase cutting the picture ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... a facile learner; her thorough ease in the rudiments of arithmetic and in the handling of her own language delighted him. His plan of tutelage, although the result of long contemplation, and involving many radical ideas regarding the training of children, ideas which had been slowly developing in his ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... has believed in both poetically and pleasantly, sometimes almost positively, as real and beautiful individualities. He almost credits the poet of his own country, who speaks of hearing "the downward beat of angel wings." In his facile faith in the substance of picturesque and happy shadows, he sometimes tries to believe that the phoenix may have been, in some age and country, a real, living bird, of flesh and blood and genuine feathers, with long, strong wings, capable of performing the strange ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... gifted with the power of facile adaptation, and he unobtrusively bent his efforts toward convincing his new acquaintances that, although he was alien to their ways, he was sympathetic and to be trusted. Once that assurance was given, the family talk went on much as though he had been absent, and, as he sat ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... and thus the marquis had designedly explained his matrimonial programme for my benefit. It was a snare to catch the bird. I felt indignant that he should suppose me so wanting in delicacy of feeling and nobility of character as to be dazzled by the life of display and facile pleasure which he had depicted. I had disliked him at first, and now I despised him; for it was impossible to misunderstand the shameless proposal concealed beneath his half-jesting words. He offered me my liberty ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... Nath. Facile precor gellida, quando pecas omnia sub vmbra ruminat, and so forth. Ah good old Mantuan, I may speake of thee as the traueiler doth of Venice, vemchie, vencha, que non te vnde, que non te perreche. Old Mantuan, old Mantuan. Who vnderstandeth thee not, vt re ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... facile, syllogistic sentences in which it was established that Austria-Hungary was already moribund, that Germany could never win, that Rumania must go in with the Entente—it was like the first scene from some play of European society and politics: ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... What is too conservative for one will be too revolutionary for another, and the aesthete will scornfully tell us that we have no fibre. When we show that what awaits us is no fools' paradise, but the danger of a temporary reverse of humanity and culture, then the facile Utopianist will shout us down with his two parrot-phrases,[4] and when we, out of a sense of duty, of harmony with the course of the world and confidence in justice at the soul of things, tread the path of danger, precipitous though it be, ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... principle than can be imputed to The Prince of Machiavel." But the unaccustomed hyperbole had been hazarded a century before in the obscurity of a Latin dissertation by Feuerlein: "Longe detestabiliores errores apud alios doctores politicos facile invenias, si eidem rigorosae censurae eorum scripta subiicienda essent." What has been, with us, the occasional aphorism of a masterful mind, encountered support abroad in accredited systems, and in a vast and successful political movement. The recovery of Machiavelli has been essentially ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... carried home from his brother sir Robert Melvil, then ambassador to England, on his return from that country, after announcing the birth of the prince of Scotland. "Item, that her majesty cast not off the earl of Northumberland, albeit as a fearful and facile man he delivered her letter to the queen of England; neither appear to find fault with sir Henry Percy as yet for his dealing with Mr. Ruxbie," (an English spy in Scotland) "which he doth to gain favor at court, being upon a contrary faction to his ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... interpolation perceptible to the most careless and undeniable by the most perverse of readers is supported by the public judgment of men qualified to express and competent to defend an opinion, have I thought it allowable to adopt this facile method of explanation. No scholar, for example, believes in the single authorship of Pericles or Andronicus; none, I suppose, would now question the part taken by some hireling or journeyman in the arrangement or completion for the stage of Timon of Athens; ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... "Citius Maevii Aeneadem quam Scribleri istrus tragoediam hanc crediderium, cujus autorem Senecam ipsum tradidisse haud dubitarim:" and the great professor Burman hath styled Tom Thumb "Heroum omnium tragicorum facile principem:" nay, though it hath, among other languages, been translated into Dutch, and celebrated with great applause at Amsterdam (where burlesque never came) by the title of Mynheer Vander Thumb, the burgomasters ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... parcels and letters by post when he might bring them himself did not strike the official. On the contrary, he believed it to be a masterstroke of cunning. Fired by jealousy and Flip's indifference, he "deemed it his duty"—using that facile form of cowardly offensiveness—to ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... that crown of honor with which the mother of a family should be invested! In the picture presented by a young girl abandoned by her betrayer, there is something imposing, something indescribably sacred; here we see oaths violated, holy confidences betrayed, and on the ruins of a too facile virtue innocence sits in tears, doubting everything, because compelled to doubt the love of a father for his child. The unfortunate girl is still innocent; she may yet become a faithful wife, a tender mother, and, if the past ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... questions for the exercise of the critical imagination. That which attracted Byron to Pulci's writings was, no doubt, the co-presence of faith, a certain simplicity of faith, with an audacious and even outrageous handling of the objects of faith, combined with a facile and wanton alternation of romantic passion with a cynical mockery of whatsoever things are sober and venerable. Don Juan and the Vision of Judgment owe their ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... I despise that I love her, even when I know that it is only a convention and that she will not be deceived by it. I have never bent my knee to the ground when my heart did not go with it. So that class of women known as facile is unknown to me, or if I allow myself to be taken with them, it is without knowing it, and through ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... committee, and subsequently second Vice-President of the General Fair organization, General Rosecrans being President, and the Mayor of the city, first Vice-President. To the furtherance of this work, Mrs. Mendenhall devoted all her energies. Eloquent appeals from her facile pen were addressed to loyal and patriotic men and women all over the country, and a special circular and appeal to the patriotic young ladies of Cincinnati and the Ohio valley for their hearty co-operation ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... launch in a few moments. He seated her in the stern of the boat, where she half reclined with her wings spread out a little behind her. So assiduous was she—and so facile—in her task of learning English, that before she would let him start the motor she had learned the names of many of the new objects in sight, and several verbs connected with ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... Simms is characterized by facile vigor rather than by fine poetic quality. The following lines, which represent his style at its best, bear a lesson ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... will"—it was the inevitable corollary of the facile analysis which traced all the woes of mankind not to "nature," but to kings, priests, and institutions. Shelley's missionaries of liberty preach to a nation of slaves, as the apostles of the Salvation ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Rachmaninoff was born at Novgorod, Russia, April 1st, 1873. At the Moscow Conservatory he was placed under the instruction of Siloti who had been one of the favorite Russian pupils of Franz Liszt. This master imparted a very facile technic to Rachmaninoff and made him so thoroughly acquainted with the best literature of the instrument that his compositions became recognized at once as those of a thorough master of the keyboard. His ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... the Hebrews, and the Apocalypse "have been received into the canon on evidence less complete" than that belonging to the others. The very general admission of the fourth gospel as the apostle John's, is a curious example of facile traditionalism. Biblical criticism, however, scarcely existed in the first three centuries. It is for us to set the subject in another light, because our means of judging are superior. If the resources of the early fathers were inadequate to the proper sifting ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... uneasy reflections. He bad not thought of it before breakfast, but now it struck him that much in that pungent article on the men of to-day might perchance apply to the character and conduct of his own son. "A habit of facile enthusiasm, not perhaps altogether insincere, but totally without moral value . . . convictions assumed at will, as a matter of fashion, or else of singularity . . . the lack of stable purpose, save only in matters of gross self-interest ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... "Don't pr-r-r-r-ess th' ball." He had been chosen from among other candidates because of his accent. He richly endowed his words with r's, making more than one grow where only one had grown before. It was this vocal burriness that drew the facile notice of Wilbur. He delighted to hear John McTavish talk, and hung about the new clubhouse, apparently without purpose, until John not only sanctioned but besought his presence, calling him Laddie and luring him with tales of the ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... had already joined the "Westminster Review," and had inured myself to the labour of translation—and I could get any amount of scientific work I wanted—so there was a living, though a scanty one, and amazingly hard work for it. My pen is not a very facile one, and what I write costs me a ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... qui rationis est particeps, per quam conse- quentia cernit, & causas rerum videt, earumque progressus, et quasi antecessiones non ignorat, similitudines, comparat, rebusque prsentibus adiungit, atque annectit futuras, facile totius ...
— The Schoolmaster • Roger Ascham
... exact from her depleted enemies in Europe; and if Germany loses or half loses she may decide to retrieve her desperate fortunes in this tempting and undefended field. With her African empire hopelessly lost to her, where more naturally than to facile America will she turn for her coveted ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... died? All my life-time I never felt or thought of the existence of such a bone! On the other hand, I object to having the same worn muscles, the same shrivelled skin with which I may happen to die. Why give me the same body as that? Why not rather my youthful body, which was strong, and facile, and capable? The matter in the muscle of my arm at death would not serve to make half the muscle I had when young. But I thank God that St. Paul says it will not be the same body. That body dies—up springs another body. I suspect myself that those are right ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... record: Ante viginti & plus eo annos ab Henrico Kneuetto Equite Anglo nomine Regis Henrici arram accepi, qua conuenerat, Regio sumptu me totam Asiam, quoad Turcorum & Persarum Regum commendationes, & legationes admitterentur, peragraturum. Ab his enim duobus Asi principibus facile se impetraturum sperabat, vt non solm tut mihi per ipsorum fines liceret ire, sed vt commendatione etiam ipsorum ad confinia quoque daretur penetrare. Sumptus quidem non exiguus erat futurus, sed tanta erat principi cognoscendi auiditas, vt nullis pecunijs ad hoc iter necessarijs se diceret ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... given her love to Pierre Philibert. She had given it without stint or measure, and with a depth and strength of devotion of which more facile natures ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... tried to like the music of Bach and Beethoven, but found himself compelled to give them up—they bored him too much. Nor was he more successful with the other great composers; Haydn, for instance, was a sort of Horace, an agreeable, facile man of the world, while Mozart, who must have loved Handel, for he wrote additional accompaniments to the Messiah, failed to move him. It was not that he disputed the greatness of these composers, but he was out of sympathy ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... Pouvoir Royal: Liege, 1830, p. 10. Le liberalisme, ayant la pretention de se fonder uniquement sur les principes de la raison, croit d'ordinaire n'avoir pas besoin de tradition. La est son erreur. L'erreur de l'ecole liberale est d'avoir trop cru qu'il est facile de creer la liberte par la reflexion, et de n'avoir pas vu qu'un etablissement n'est solide que quand il a des racines historiques.—RENAN, 1858, Nouvelle Revue, lxxix. 596. Le respect des individus et des droits existants est autant au-dessus du bonheur de tous, qu'un interet ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... the verge of death, we shall hereafter see him calmly assent to the surrender of Athenian liberties. In short, Aristophanes perhaps mingled more truth than usual with his wit, when even in the shades below he says of Sophocles, "He was contented here—he's contented there." A disposition thus facile, united with an admirable genius, will, not unoften, effect a miracle, and reconcile prosperity ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... happen, tragedies do occur, and heroes and heroines do appear in unexpected quarters to meet emergencies, and she occasionally transfers such events to her pages, thereby enlivening them without sacrificing the reality of her pictures. But the triumph of her art consists in her facile handling of simple incidents and everyday men and women and her power to carry them without a hint of sentimentality to a natural, artistic, effective climax, heightened usually by a touch of either humor ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... persuadet ut ad quam plurimas infantum insontium caedes eas alliciat.... Unctionis ritu peracto, abiturientes, ne forte a maritis in lectis desiderantur, vel per incantationem somnum, aurem nimirum vellicando dextra manu prius praedicto unguine illita, conciliant maritis ex quo non facile possunt excitari; vel daemones personas quasdam dormientibus adumbrant, quas, si contigeret expergisci, suas uxores esse putarent; vel interea alius daemon in forma succubi ad latus maritorum adjungitur qui loco uxoris est.... Et ita sine omni remora insidentes baculo, furcae, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... monastic life; its petty jealousies, its petty trials, its tribulations and temptations, and its indescribably petty miracles. Bazzi was well fitted for the execution of this task. He had a swift and facile brush, considerable versatility in the treatment of monotonous subjects, and a never-failing sense of humour. His white-cowled monks, some of them with the rosy freshness of boys, some with the handsome brown ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... the writer is wholly with the child, and the child's absolute indifference to his own sufferings. It might have been safely predicted that this man, should he ever attain to pathos, would be free from the facile, maudlin ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... perhaps to be noticed: it is the accentuation of the Latin. Adverbs, for instance, are generally accented on the last syllable, e.g., doctiu's, facile', qua'm, eo', quo': the rule, however, is by no means regularly kept. But this has evidently nothing to do with the peculiar conditions under which Campion's book was produced, and is to be accounted for by the use of accents in other ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... place for it in the new state system with which they hoped to endow the world. More than once they were on the point of giving it official recognition. There was no preliminary testing, sifting, or examining by these empiricists, who, finding Bolshevism on their way, and discerning no facile means of dislodging or transforming it, signified their willingness under easy conditions to hallmark and incorporate it as one of the elements of the new ordering. From the crimes laid to its charge they were prepared to make ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... like nature's. He feeds us out of a horn, of plenty. This, unfortunately, is possible only to writers of the first order. The others, when they attempt profusion, become fluent rather than abundant, facile of ink rather than generous of golden grain. Who does not agree with Pope that Dryden, though not Shakespeare, would have been a better ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... important to insist on this point, because the extreme difficulty (or rather impossibility) of determining the true relations of becoming and being, of time and eternity, is constantly tempting us to adopt some facile solution which really destroys one of the two terms. The danger which besets us if we follow the line of thought natural to speculative Mysticism, is that we may think we have solved the problem in one of two ways, neither of which is a solution at all. Either ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... this faith? Argue with them, educate them up to your standard if you like—but is it fair, is it just, is it in accordance with that spirit of liberalism and tolerance which their opponents profess, to taunt, abuse, and bully to the full length that words will permit? They are not facile at expression, these same men of the soil. The flow of language seems denied to them. They are naturally a silent race—preferring deeds to speech. They live much with inarticulate nature. It may be, after all, they have learnt some useful and abiding lessons from that intercourse. The old ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... dark and musty—no time to light the lamps; but Mr Armitage, the facile, the adroit, a perfect Mercury and old in experience, called in four linkmen waiting by their ladies' empty chairs in ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... the Renaissance who printed their histories could make the same woodcut on the cover serve for all their portraits. By merely altering the name beneath, they changed all there was to change; one and the same block did duty in turn for Romulus or Robert the Devil.[574] Specimens of this facile art swarm indefinitely; they are scattered over the country, penetrate into hamlets, find their way into cottages, and make the people acquainted with the doughty deeds of Eglamour and Roland. We now find ourselves really in ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... out. But this labored picking the way along the rugged path of knowledge, stumbling and halting at the nouns, and verbs, and surmounting the polysyllables a letter at a time, seemed to give the reader a deeper feeling of the value and meaning of each word, than is usually gained by the more facile scholar. As Rachel listened she became aware that Aunt Debby was reading that wonderful twelfth chapter of St. Luke, richest of all chapters in hopes and promises and loving counsel for the lowly and oppressed. She had reached the thirty-fifth verse, and read onward with a passionate earnestness ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... dog has four, the cat three, and the rest of the story is amplified with its secondary incidents duly sought and depicted. This literary expression is possibly the most marked characteristic of a facile and able draughtsman. He studied his subject as no one else ever studied it—he must have played with it, dreamed of it, worried it night and day, until he knew it ten times better than its author. Then he portrayed it simply and ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... a limit to his powers. Within the College this would be well enough understood, but to explain a disagreeable fact is not to change it; his name was written in pitiful subordination. And as for the public assembly—he would have sacrificed some years of his life to have stepped forward in facile supremacy, beneath the eyes of those clustered ladies. Instead of that, they had looked upon his shame; they had interchanged glances of amusement at each repetition of his defeat; had murmured comments in their melodious speech; had ended by losing all interest in him—as intuition apprised ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... for passion frightens you, and 'tis pleasure more than love that you commend to the young. Lydia and Glycera, and the others, are but passing guests of a heart at ease in itself, and happy enough when their facile reign is ended. You seem to me like a man who welcomes middle age, and is more glad than Sophocles was to "flee from these hard masters" the passions. In the fallow leisure of life you glance round contented, and find all very good save the need to leave all behind. ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... sick. He had never in his life felt such repulsion as toward what seemed to him this facile, theatrical remorse. If Guion was really contrite, if he really wanted to relieve the world of his presence, he could blow his brains out. Ashley had known, or known of, so many who had resorted to this ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... international law, a man of the world and familiar with its usages, accustomed to associate with dignity and tact on friendliest terms with sovereigns, eminent statesmen, and men of letters; endowed with a facile tongue, a fluent pen, and an eye and ear of singular acuteness and delicacy; distinguished for unflagging industry and singular aptitude for secret and intricate affairs;—he had by the exercise of these various ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... constitutional question appears to be whether Congress can authorize such a corporation to manufacture, the process of manufacturing not being an activity of an interstate character. In any event, the difficulty could be surmounted by a constitutional amendment. In these days of facile amendment such a thing seems quite ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson
... murmured, striving to keep back her tears. "And why? Why?" she repeated, as infinite grief for love that was lost seemed to overwhelm her. It was revolting to think that Riasantzeff had always lied to her in such a facile, heartless way. "And not only he, but all the others lied, too," she thought. "They all of them professed to be so delighted at our marriage, and said that he was such a good, honest fellow! Well, no, they didn't actually lie about it, but they simply didn't think it ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... have subscribed to Voltaire's assertion that history is largely "un ramas de crimes, de folies, et de malheurs," his view of the significance of man's sufferings is different and almost approaches the facile optimism of Pope—"whatever is, is right." He regards all the race's actual experiences as the indispensable mechanism of Progress, and does not regret its mistakes and calamities. Many changes and revolutions, he observes, may seem ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... months his work had seemed to clog up in details and slow down. The early days of broad, rapid outlines and facile sketching in of details were gone. Now the endless indignities, invasion of personal rights and freedom, the hamstringing of his work, the feeling of being cut off from the main currents of his field, filled him ...
— Security • Ernest M. Kenyon
... Washington was the animating spirit of the struggle in the colonies, Franklin was its ablest champion abroad. To Franklin's cogent reasoning and keen satire, we owe the clear and forcible presentation of the American case in England and France; while to his personality and diplomacy as well as to his facile pen, we are indebted for the foreign alliance and the funds without which Washington's work must have failed. His patience, fortitude, and practical wisdom, coupled with self-sacrificing devotion to the cause of his country, are hardly less noticeable than similar ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... successfully rise against their English rulers, who had brought them out of a state of anarchy and constant warfare and misery, and had established peace and prosperity in their country. Their ignorance and gross superstition made them the facile tools ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... abominable fictions? In what state were the people who could not look at the pure processes of Nature without being reminded of the most hideous and unnatural offences? Once more: "The physical interpreters do not even agree in their physical interpretations". All these are equally facile, equally plausible, and equally incapable of proof. Again, Eusebius argues, the interpreters take for granted in the makers of the myths an amount of physical knowledge which they certainly did not possess. For example, if Leto were only another name for Hera, the character of Zeus ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... opposite grounds at once. It is condemned for being pessimistic, it is blamed for being optimistic. From this position Chesterton deduces that it is the only rational religion, because it steers between the Scylla of pessimism and avoids the Charybdis of a facile optimism. Regarding presumably the early Church she has also kept from extremes. She has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered to the adventurous road of orthodoxy. She has avoided the Arian materialism by ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... classes and the governed, only one class remains over whom all men can exercise sovereignty—namely, the women. Hence a shuddering dread runs through society at the proposal to also abolish this last refuge of facile domination." ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... Casareas venire, et sua negocia tractare, et ad suam patriam redire sine impedimento, vt in literis excelsissimi, potentissimi, et inuictissimi et semper Augustissimi Casaris ad vestram sacram Regiam Maiestatem datis facile patet, tranquille et pacifice possunt. Ego autem imprimis diligentem operam et fidele studium et nunc eodem confirmando nauaui, et in futurum quoque vsque in vltimum vita spiritum in negotijs potentissimi et inuictissimi ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt |
