"Generalized" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... before so much as heard; with willingness and spirit he communicates. much noteworthy information. He never seemed to think it a trouble to talk to me, and, I am sure, it was never a task to me to listen. It was not his way to treat subjects coldly and vaguely; he rarely generalized, never prosed. He seemed to like nice details almost as much as I liked them myself: he seemed observant of character: and not superficially observant, either. These points gave the quality of interest to his discourse; and the fact of his speaking direct from ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... a measure may be justly executed, it must be generalized; that is, the law which provides for it must decree also that interest on sums lent on deposit or on mortgage throughout the realm, as well as house and farm-rents, shall be reduced to three per cent. This simultaneous reduction of all kinds of income would be not a whit more ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... he had felt while he was employing it that he was working in a commoner material than the rest of Salome's character; but he had experimented with it in the hope that she might not notice it. The fact that she had instantly noticed it, and had generalized the dislike which she only betrayed at last, after she had punished him sufficiently, remained in the meshes of the net he wore about his mind, as something of value, which he could employ to exquisite effect if he could once find a scheme ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... grass house were armed with rifles. But Joan insisted that this reign of terror had been caused by the reign of fear practised by the white men. She had been brought up with the gentle Hawaiians, who never were ill-treated nor roughly handled, and she generalized that the Solomon Islanders, under ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... conversation, or preference for a particular subject for discussion, or form of legs or trunk or head or face or expression or complexion, or gait, or dress, or manners, or disposition, or any other human detail, inside or outside, that can rationally be generalized as "American." ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... remind young Obray of Erskyll that there were no such things as fundamental laws of socio-economics; merely usually reliable generalized statements of what can more or less be depended upon to happen under most circumstances. He resisted the temptation. Count Erskyll had had enough shocks, today, without adding to them by ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... vague words. Let us say, then, that a style which goes at once to the point, which is felt to get through business, and which carries with it no affectation, either real or apparent, is always a good style; and that no other style is good. This is the quality which may be generalized from the works of the great authors of all ages, as the prime characteristic of all good writing. Their style is always pregnant with a working activity—it impresses us with the feeling that real work is done here. We fear not to say that Milton himself owes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... it unconventionality. Bostonians thought it provincial. Henry Adams thought it charming. From the first sight, he loved the Governor, who, though sixty years old, had the youth of his sympathies. He noticed that Mr. Seward was never petty or personal; his talk was large; he generalized; he never seemed to pose for statesmanship; he did not require an attitude of prayer. What was more unusual — almost singular and quite eccentric — he had some means, unknown to other Senators, of ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... notion more or less applicable to a journey between Liverpool and Manchester was generalized into a pattern of the universe "for ever." This pattern, taken up by others, reinforced by dazzling inventions, imposed an optimistic turn upon the theory of evolution. That theory, of course, is, as Professor Bury says, neutral between pessimism and optimism. But it promised continual ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... sin against the canons of a sound inductive philosophy. Philology itself teaches us that this could not have been so. Father Dyaus was originally the bright sky and nothing more. Although his name became generalized, in the classic languages, into deus, or God, it is quite certain that in early days, before the Aryan separation, it had acquired no such exalted significance. It was only in Greece and Rome—or, ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... en jeune' in the Salon of 1884—found Florent as blind as at the epoch when they played cricket together in the fields at Beaumont. Dorsenne very justly diagnosed there one of those hypnotisms of admiration such as artists, great or small, often inspire around them. But the author, who always generalized too quickly, had not comprehended that the admirer with Florent was grafted on a friend worthy to be painted by La Fontaine or by Balzac, the two poets of friendship, the one in his sublime and tragic Cousin Pons, the other in that short but fine fable, in which is this verse, one of ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... agitation, and a subject for discussion. The former class of ills is to be met only by manly effort and energy; the latter may be corrected by associated effort. The former class of ills is constantly grouped and generalized, and made the object of social schemes. We shall see, as we go on, what that means. The second class of ills may fall on certain social classes, and reform will take the form of interference by other classes in favor of that ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... you have perhaps been looking for a generalized expression of general ideas—for some observations on marriage and divorce which should have the detachable and quotable quality of epigram. Yet suppose I were to observe, just here, that Marriage makes a promise to the ear and breaks it to the hope; ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... the capacity for parental care the fewer the offspring. This, however, comes to the same thing, since it is the higher organisms which possess the increased capacity for parental care. Putting it in the most generalized zoological way, diminished offspring is the response to improved environment. Thus in Man the decline of the birth-rate, as Professor Benjamin Moore remarks (British Medical Journal, August 20, 1910, p. 454), is "the simple ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... me!" fumed the young man, inwardly. He was angry, conscious of those unlucky wing-and-wing ears, vexed at his own boldness. "I have been offensive. She laughs at me." He generalized from long inexperience of a subject to which he had given acutely interested thought: ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... exclusively in portraiture, and it has been his fortune to paint more women than men; therefore he has had but a limited opportunity to reproduce that generalized grand air with which his view of certain figures of gentlemen invests the model, which is conspicuous in the portrait of Carolus Duran and of which his splendid "Docteur Pozzi," the distinguished Paris surgeon (a work not sent to the Salon), is ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... of enthusiasm and thus makes a more restricted appeal. In place of gaudy certainties he offers disconcerting questionings; in place of a neat and well-rounded body of doctrine he puts forward a sort of generalized contra-doctrine. Blasco is almost the typical Socialist—iconoclastic, oratorical, sentimental, theatrical—a fervent advocate of all sorts of lofty causes, eagerly responsive to the shibboleths of the hour. Baroja is the analyst, the critic, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... and less original or spontaneous than dreams. In my dreams my old friends often come back to me and speak in their characteristic manner,—more characteristic perhaps than I could represent them when awake,—but the responses of mediums are either evasive or too highly generalized to be of any particular value. The story of Mary Runnel, or Rondel, which Julian Hawthorne narrates, is an excellent case in point. Hawthorne had probably heard of that flirtation of his grandfather some time in ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... furnish the worker with a background for her trade and to help her to see her place in the working world of today. 1. A generalized view is taken of the main steps in the early progress of the race. 2. Textile materials are discussed as to their values, their uses, their cost, the processes of their manufacture, the comparison of foreign and domestic goods, with reasons for the differences, and ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman
... regard for his father was peculiar. It did not lead him to hide, it only led him to account for, his father's sordidness. The son generalized and inferred a moral maxim for the conduct of life from this behavior of the father's,—a maxim, which, as he thought, had done him great ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... maturity; appropriating what it needs, and avoiding or destroying what threatens it with injury. The interest so functions as to supply itself with the means whereby it may continue to exist and function. This is the principle of action which may be generalized from its behavior, and through which it may be distinguished within the context of nature. Now the term interest being construed in this sense, we may describe goodness as fulfilment of interest. ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... outline, provide an endless source of suggestion. It has been adapted in all manners, according to the fancy of the carver—sometimes long and drawn out, at others wide and spreading. Altogether it has been more thoroughly "generalized" than any ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... from that, the chief source of our error in this matter is due to the fact that in the historical accounts a whole series of innumerable, diverse, and petty events, such for instance as all those which led the French armies to Russia, is generalized into one event in accord with the result produced by that series of events, and corresponding with this generalization the whole series of commands is also generalized into ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... predictions when generalized and reduced to a system is not unmanageably large. They present themselves as a finite body of dogma which may be mastered within a reasonable time. It is a great mistake to be frightened by the ever-increasing number ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... they were the product of his own seething imagination, and therefore impregnated with that pleasurable exultation which is experienced in all energetic exertion of intellectual power; that in the same mood he had generalized the causes of 160 the war, and then personified the abstract and christened it by the name which he had been accustomed to hear most often associated with its management and measures. I should guess that the minister was in the author's mind at the moment of composition as ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... house with much more self possession than he had shown when entering it. Dr. Martineau had thrust him back from his intenser prepossessions to a more generalized view of himself, had made his troubles objective and detached him from them. He could even find something amusing now in his situation. He liked the immense scope of the theoretical duet in which they had indulged. He felt that most of it was entirely true—and, in some untraceable manner, absurd. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... birds. Then it was noticed that our common fish formed a fairly well-defined group, but that the ganoids, including the sturgeons, gar-pikes, and some others, had at least traces of amphibian characteristics. Such generalized forms, with the characteristics of the class less sharply marked, were usually by common consent placed at the bottom of the class. And this suited well their general structure, while in particular characteristics ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... social animals, on the contrary, are not thus restricted. Their intelligence is of a generalized character, and is capable of developing in new channels. None are tied down to special duties, each possesses the full powers of all, and they are thus more open to a continued growth of the intellect than the communal forms. To this class belongs the ape. Its intelligence ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... his great fault, like that of some others, lay in pushing his method too far. He began by detecting unclaimed dividends, and disclosing them to their right owners, exacting his fee before he made his communication. He then generalized into trying to get fees from all of the name belonging to a dividend; and he gave mysterious hints of danger impending. For instance, he would write to a clergyman that a legal penalty was hanging over ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... said that John Quincy Adams studied justice, honor and gratitude, not by the false standards of the age, but by their own true nature? He generalized truth, and traced it always to its source, the bosom of God. Thus in his defence of the Amistad captives he began with defining justice in the language of Justinian, "Constans et perpetua voluntas jus SUUM cuique tribuendi." He quoted on the same occasion from the Declaration of Independence, ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... their soil, and therewith satisfy the greatest part of their domestic wants, facts which certainly manifest their talents and aptitude to be employed in works of more taste and delicacy, manufacturing industry is nevertheless far from being generalized, nor can it be said to be placed with any degree of solidity on its true and proper basis. Hence arise those great supplies of goods annually imported into the country, for the purpose of making up the deficiencies of ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... authority, but through love and affection, is being evolved in certain classes of our society. The problem before our civilization is whether such a democratic ethical type of the family can become generalized and offer a stable family life to our whole population. It is evident that in order to do this there must be a considerable development, not only of the spirit of equality, but even more, a considerable development of social intelligence and ethical character ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... through a veil, is past; the matter-of-fact, investigating mind has lifted that veil, and now sees objects as if in mid-day; but, as no condition is stationary, I am told that the mind is gradually moving on in the world of art to a point where it will again see nature in a more subdued and generalized light, ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... was intrinsically square; and as for the square ones, he prophesied that, playing in a crooked game, they were sure to lose and in the long run go broke. His New York experience had opened his eyes. He tore the veils of illusion from the business game, and saw its nakedness. He generalized upon industry and society ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London |
