"Insight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of whose ledger fail by one cent of balancing, spares neither time nor money in searching out and correcting the error; the merchant brings to bear upon his business a care and insight so unceasing and laborious that his locks are soon sprinkled with premature silver; the machinist works to plans from which the variation of a thousandth part of an inch can not be allowed to pass uncorrected; but the dairyman too often stumbles along ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... full of correct, impartial, well-digested, and well-presented information as an egg is of meat. One can only recommend it heartily and without reserve to all who wish to gain an insight into German life. It worthily presents a great nation, now the greatest and ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... even to those not possessed of the scientific insight of James Thomson, that some such fact is to be anticipated. It is, however, easy to be wise after the event. It appeals to us in a general way that as water expands on freezing, pressure will tend to resist ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... as of art, a wisdom of life born of wide and keen observation; put not into the form of aphorisms, but of shrewd comment, of keen criticism, of nice discrimination between the manifold shadings of insincerity, of insight into the action and reaction of conditions, surroundings, social and ethical aims on men and women. The stories written in his later years are full of the evidences of a knowledge of human nature which was ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... retained in pay, to attend Ballard in his journey to France, and had thereby got a hint of the designs entertained by the fugitives. Polly, another of his spies, had found means to insinuate himself among the conspirators in England; and, though not entirely trusted, had obtained some insight into their dangerous secrets. But the bottom of the conspiracy was never fully known, till Gifford, a seminary priest, came over and made a tender of his services to Walsingham. By his means, the discovery became of the utmost importance, and involved the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... proprieties and discretions demanded by his position as he had himself. And yet each, before the close of the interview, understood the point of view of the other. What he recognised was that, though she had not seen Sir Nigel since her childhood, she had in some astonishing way obtained an extraordinary insight into his character, and it was this which had led her to take her present step. She might not realise all she might have to contend with, but her conservative and formal action had surrounded her and her sister with a certain barrier of conventional protection, at once ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to seek where she is not guided by Prudence, the mean of virtue must be defined, not by the reason of the buffoon Pantolabus, or of Nomentanus the spendthrift, but as a prudent man would define it, given an insight into the case. ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... Indians, insight into the character of, acquired by Washington while surveying, i. 58; their views of French and English claims, i. 66; necessity of conciliating, urged by Washington, i. 193; power of, for mischief, i. 207; necessity of employing, to oppose Indians, i. 210; anecdote ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... one of relief to hear—for she did not dare to see—that he was departing. Her consciousness was in a delicious confusion, with the one definite thought in it that she had won her lover at last. The tone of Trefusis's voice, rich with truth and earnestness, his quick insight, and his passionate warning to her not to heed him, convinced her that she had entered into a relation destined to influence her ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... legitimate, that of knowledge, grows into the illegitimate authority of prescription, calling itself Orthodoxy. Then Private Judgment comes forth again to criticise and reform. It thus becomes the duty of each individual to judge the Church; and out of innumerable individual judgments the insight of the Church is kept living and progressive. We contribute one such private judgment; not, we trust, in conceit, but in the hope of provoking other ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... He was admittedly {179} a good physiognomist. Abulfazl wrote of him that 'he sees through some men at a glance,' whilst even Badauni admits the claim, though with his usual inclination to sneering at all matters bearing on the Hindus, he declares that Akbar obtained the gift of insight from the ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... weak, for those who, in the barbarous and semi-barbarous state—and out of that last we are only just emerging—how much has she done; an earnest of much more which she will do? She has delivered the insane—I may say by the scientific insight of one man, more worthy of titles and pensions than nine-tenths of those who earn them—I mean the great and good Pinel—from hopeless misery and torture into comparative peace and comfort, and at least the possibility of cure. For children, she has done much, or ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... beauty grace and dignity. Competent teachers instructed her daughter's intellect, while the mother cultivated her heart. Early accustomed to care and want, this child had not the giddy, thoughtless disposition usually characteristic of girls of her age. She had too early gained an insight into the uncertainty and emptiness of all earthly magnificence, not to appreciate the littleness of those things upon which young girls usually place so high an estimate. Her thoughts were not occupied with the ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... conscious truth, which renders even egotism respectable and delightful: whether he describes the fervent and tender emotions of his juvenile fancy, or delineates his situation in the decline of life, when he had to struggle with calamity and peril, the more insight he affords us into his own sentiments and feelings, the more reason we find both to ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... a worthless element in life when idle, but when otherwise, is it not the mainspring of the watch? Think of the manifold results of "mere curiosity," when rightly persevered in! But then we change the name—it becomes insight—research—it becomes a power which can climb the dizziest height, and dive the deepest depths, to bring to ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... tune came into his head. But when he recognized that they were serenading the little harness maker, and that so far as they thought of John Barclay and his power and his achievements, it was with scorn, he had a flash of insight into his relations with the world that illumined his soul for a moment and then died away. The great Mr. Barclay, alone, sitting in the dingy little harness shop, can hear the band strike up the old familiar tune again, and hear the crowd cheer and roar its applause at the little harness maker, ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... anything else established the truth of the assertion that he had not become weaker in Alexandria and had not delayed there out of voluptuousness. For how could he have won that victory so easily without employing a great store of insight and great force? When now Pharnaces had fled he was preparing to conduct a campaign at once against the Parthian, but as certain quarrels were taking place there he withdrew rather unwillingly, but settled this dispute, ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... insight of a man of the world, from one glance at this lady's appearance Vronsky classified her as belonging to the best society. He begged pardon, and was getting into the carriage, but felt he must glance at her once more; not that she was very beautiful, not on account ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... nature even at its worst has tracts other than those on which there has been careless sowing among thorns, moral possibilities below those of its abused or neglected surfaces. Let us mark this depth, which the Prophet's insight has already reached. Much will come out of it; this is the matrix of all developments by himself and others of the doctrine of man and his possibilities under God. And for all time the truth is valid that ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... sacred authority which bid us "die to ourselves," and which proclaim the necessity of a veritable new birth. This mystic death and birth is the key-note of all profound religious teaching; and that which distinguishes the ordinary religious mind from spiritual insight is just the tendency to interpret these expressions as merely figurative, or, indeed, to ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... special providence. God bless her, and spare her to us and her many friends. She is a noble creature, all tenderness and strength. When I first became acquainted with her, I saw at once that her heart was of the very finest, richest quality, and her wisdom and insight are, as ever must be in such a case, exactly correspondent' (ibid. p. 397). Such words from one so penetrative, so indeceivable, so great in the fullest sense as was the daughter of the COLERIDGE, makes every one long to have the same service done for Miss FENWICK ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... concatenation of effects. I would be able by some means to render my soul transparent to the eyes of the reader, and for this purpose endeavor to show it in every possible point of view, to give him every insight, and act in such a manner, that not a motion should escape him, as by this means he may form a judgment of the principles that ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... me," he assured her, "an insight into many things in life which I had found most perplexing. You see, you have traveled and I haven't. You have mixed with all classes of people, and I have gone steadily on in one groove. You have told me many things which I shall find very ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... course she might gain what she wished without endangering her safety. All this had occurred to her long before, and she had regarded it in all its bearings. Nevertheless, she had decided against it, and had chosen rather to encounter the risk of her present action. It was from a certain profound insight into the future. She thought that it was best for Lady Chetwynde to go to Chetwynde Castle, not to Pomeroy Court. By such an act scandal would be avoided. If Lord Chetwynde did not come, well and good; if he did, why then he must be met face ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... least, I do not at present see into Shakespeare's motive, his rationale, or in what point of view he meant Brutus' character to appear. For surely—(this, I mean, is what I say to myself, with my present quantum of insight, only modified by my experience in how many instances I have ripened into a perception of beauties, where I had before descried faults;) surely, nothing can seem more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... he was still unable to perceive the meaning of his insight and his misery. He did not know, and there was nobody to tell him, that this emptiness of his was the emptiness created by the forerunners and servants of Love, who sweep and purify the death-chamber where a soul has died and another soul is waiting to be born. For in the house of Love there is ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... acquaintance the girl had interested him—and yet it was more than mere interest or feminine attraction. Her culture, her keen analysis of events and men, her knowledge of conditions informed and instructed him. Her subtle humor and droll insight into the characters of those who attempted to pose in the public eye entertained him, for he lacked humor. But, most of all, her satire gave him a truer perspective. Fresh from the north country, where his knowledge of public men had been limited to the information which newspapers ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... comprehensive, subtle spirit. He probably was crushed by the powerful individuality of his father. As he is closely in touch with the people, and knows their aspirations, Alexis judges the work of his father with delicate insight: "My father hopes," he says, "to do everything in a great hurry. One, two, three, and the affair is settled. He does not realize that things done hastily do ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... Lincoln listened for hours one night, speaking only at rare intervals to tell a pithy story, until the clock struck one. Then, after a long silence, he said: "I can't spare this man. He fights." It was Lincoln's marvelous insight and sagacity that saved Grant from the storm of popular passion, and gave us the greatest ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... disinterested goodwill carried through with more tenacity and sincerity and skill, and with less thanks either asked or given. The ungrateful Governments of Europe owe much more to the statesmanship and insight of Mr. Hoover and his band of American workers than they have yet appreciated or will ever acknowledge. The American Relief Commission, and they only, saw the European position during those months in its true perspective and felt towards it as men should. It was their efforts, ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... to repress a living interest and appreciation of living literary text. How much more effective the hour in English literature would have been if the entire act had been assigned with a view to giving the students an insight into the dramatic structure of each scene in this act and of the act as a whole. All the questions would then bear on dramatic movement, on the dramatist's technique, on his way of arousing interest in his story, on devices for giving the cause and the development of the action. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... general disposition of the town, namely, the nature and spirit of its individuals, forming, so to say, the town's own soul. This is a point that should not be overlooked, as the Dutch character and demeanour are two things often misunderstood, which certainly require some insight and explanation in order to ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... the theater, on the performance of the previous day; she at once began herself to discuss Motchalov, and did not confine herself to sighs and interjections only, but uttered a few true observations full of feminine insight in regard to his acting. Mihalevitch spoke about music; she sat down without ceremony to the piano, and very correctly played some of Chopin's mazurkas, which were then just coming into fashion. Dinner-time came; Lavretsky would ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... keen insight foresaw a time when oil, timber, coal, and iron must become the stay of a vastly expanding industrial system, and bent their energies to secure the chief sources of supply. From the nature of their work the men who built railways first became aware of the riches ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... truths in Nature. In the first two respects, which are merely practical, the drawing-book, if judiciously prepared, might do somewhat to assist us; but in the last and most important, only the experienced and thoughtful artist, standing with us before Nature, can give us further insight into her system of expression. A good picture may do a little, but it is Nature's own face we need to study, and that neither book nor picture can very deeply interpret for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... felt for him was all the more genuine from its being my first friendship with a man of my own age. The pleasure which I derived from this intimacy gave me a new insight into life, and revealed capacities and needs of the soul of which I had hitherto been ignorant. As I could never wholly break away from that love of chivalry which had been implanted in me in early childhood, it pleased me to look upon him as my "brother in arms," and I expressed a wish that ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... protest. Yet she feared him too. It was from him that she fled. She admitted this to her honest mind while she watched the spreading radiance of the new day. She feared the candor of his steady eyes more than the wiles and hypocrisies of Bower and her false friend, Millicent. By a half miraculous insight into the history of recent events, she saw that Bower had followed her to Switzerland ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... beauty and sacredness of an ideal home life should receive emphasis, so that the pupils may be impressed with the importance of conscientious work in the performance of their daily household duties. They should have some insight into the sanitary, economic, and social problems that are involved in housekeeping, so that they may develop an increased appreciation of the importance of the ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Science in Rural Schools • Ministry of Education Ontario
... deeper insight into human nature than the beggar's. Their knowledge of the passions of men is so extensive, that I have often thought it would be of no little service to a politician to have his education among them. ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... might," he conceded. "Trevor wouldn't—being a man of considerable insight. Tell you what, though, if you want to satisfy yourself on the score of Chris's happiness, we will get them to put us up for a night when we leave here for town three weeks hence. How will ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... consciousness of the effect of his words, but it needed a subtler insight, a finer imagination than his, to interpret the pale, beautiful, harassed face which studiously avoided looking towards him as he paused before stepping out on to the pavement. The rest of the evening, the hours of night that followed, passed for Clara in ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... to tell us something about Grayson," said Mr. Goodnight, in a most kindly tone; "not what all the world knows, those superficial facts which the most careless observer may glean, but something intimate and personal; we want you to give us an insight into his character, from which we may judge what he is likely to do or become. You know that he is from the West, the Far West, likely to be afflicted with local and provincial views, not to say heresies, and great vested interests within ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... drink from a cup too large for it, and they saw how the water spilt; they saw its hopes that were never realized; they saw its hours of intellectual blindness, men call sin; they saw its hours of all-radiating insight, which men call righteousness; they saw its hour of strength, when it leaped to its feet crying, "I am omnipotent;" its hour of weakness, when it fell to the earth and grasped dust only; they saw what it might have been, but never ...
— Dreams • Olive Schreiner
... because you know nothing of the case," answered I. "You simply visit this place for a half hour each day, at a time that everything is moving along smoothly, and merely get a surface view of matters. It is my earnest hope that you may never get a practical insight into these things by being placed in the same position as myself or these other poor fellows all around me. If all the poor unfortunates I have seen carried out of this ward, corpses, have died for want of the same kind of will power I require, then all I can say is that the doctors here ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... of heroes. Thou art unable to understand truly the sense of the scriptures. If thou wert really acquainted with duty, then thou couldst have understood that words such as these ought not to have been addressed to me by even one possessed of the clearest insight into the meaning of the scriptures and acquainted with the truths of religion. That, however, which thou hast said unto me, induced by fraternal affection, has been fit and proper, O son of Kunti! I am, for that, pleased with thee, O Arjuna! There is no one equal to thee in the three worlds in all ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... life, despite his trend towards caricature, Jonson has shown himself a genuine realist, drawing from the life about him with an experience and insight rare in any generation. A happy comparison has been suggested between Ben Jonson and Charles Dickens. Both were men of the people, lowly born and hardly bred. Each knew the London of his time as few men knew it; and each represented it intimately and in ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... in 1685 and the scene at his deathbed encouraged in England suspicions of Catholic policy and in France hope that this policy was near its climax of success. Though indolent and dissolute, Charles yet possessed striking mental capacity and insight. He knew well that to preserve his throne he must remain outwardly a Protestant and must also respect the liberties of the English nation. He cherished, however, the Roman Catholic faith and the despotic ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... his arraignment, for if sin be under the view of an eye that hates it, and loves God, much of its power and virtue, which be in darkness, is taken away. I press this the more because I verily apprehend it to be the plague of many Christians, who have some general insight into the matter of good and evil, and espy some more gross corruption in themselves, and have some affection to good. Yet this estrangedness to our own hearts, and the vein or strain of them, the not unbowelling ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... eugenics. It is not wholly new. The early Greeks gave much thought to it, and with the insight which characterized them, they rightly put the emphasis on the constructive side; they sought to breed better men and women, not merely to accomplish a work of hygiene, to lessen taxes, and reduce suffering, by reducing the number of unfortunates among them. As early as the first ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... there had been nothing said or done to prevent this consummation so devoutly to be wished until the advent of Seymour. Then, too, Talbot, calm and confident in the situation, had not noticed Seymour's infatuation, and was entirely ignorant that the coveted prize had slipped from his grasp. The insight of the confident lover was not so keen as that of the ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Government was able to quench. He was besides beginning to understand the perplexities which beset the administration, to appreciate the problem which confronted the great statesman who was at the head of the nation. He was getting a clear insight into the workings of Lincoln's mind, and into the causes which gave to his political pilotage an air ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... creed by ROLAND G. USHER, an American Professor of History. With an almost cynical candour and detachment the author analyses the origins, assumptions, justifications and pretensions, and foreshadows with some insight the miscalculations, of those who have essayed to direct the destinies of modern Germany. It is as well that this essay comes from a neutral pen; it would else be discredited as a freak of prejudice. Pan-Germanism, as here seen, is the reductio ad absurdum ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... to Richard Travis, as it comes in the great crises of life and death, to every strong man, and he saw dimly, ghostily, into the shadow; and the shadow stopped at the terrible abyss which now barred his ken; and he felt, with the keen insight of the dying eagle on the peak, that ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... the overweening pride, generosity, courage, and fervent heat of the "Great Commoner," as well as his indomitable will. Like him, she despised difficulties, and ignored the word "impossibility." Her romantic ideas were also combined with keen insight into character, and much practical sagacity. These were the qualities which made her for many years a power among the wild tribes of Lebanon, with whom she was in 1810 proceeding to take up ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... was a man of real insight; he divined that Mery was a heaven-inspired dancer, and devoted himself to the development of her genius. She did not say he had taught her to dance; she said he encouraged and developed her natural ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... engrossing and constantly increasing interest to citizens of the United States as the first philosophic and comprehensive view of our society, institutions, and destiny. No one can rise even from the most cursory perusal without clearer insight and more patriotic appreciation of the blessings of liberty protected by law, nor without encouragement for the stability and perpetuity of the Republic. The causes which appeared to M. de Tocqueville to menace both, have gone. The ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Dramatick, but all other Poets must yield to him in that Point. For these are drawn exactly to the Life, perfectly just, truly proportionably, and fully kept up to the last; and as for their being natural, Rapin says, That no Man living had a greater insight into Nature than he. The more a Man looks into 'em, the more he must admire 'em; he'll find there not only such Beauty in his Images, but also such excellent Precepts of Morality, such solid Sense in each Line, such depth of Reasoning in each Period, and such close arguing between ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... to-night was to apply the law of self-interest by which this man had lived and waxed mighty, and to-morrow he could take the woman be loved in his arms, move into his palace its master and hers. There could be no mistake about Nan's feelings. He had read the yearning of her heart with unerring insight. Visions of a life of splendour, beauty and power with her by his side swept his imagination. A sense of fierce, exultant triumph filled his soul. But most alluring of all whispered joys was the dream of their love-life. The years of suffering and denial, of grief and ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... to block your game when you thought you had me down and out—not through any particular kindness of heart or chivalry, but because he had the gift of insight into character—the discernment to recognize a safe loan—will take your place. Abram Pantin, if he wants it, will be this bank's ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... had made no mistake; his keen insight was well nigh infallible; but his triumph was costly. The luscious fruit of professional success left an acrid flavor; the pungent dead sea ashes sifted freely. He set his heel on the embroidered butterfly, and in his heart cursed the hour he had first seen it. His coveted bread was petrifying ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... fiction. The book takes its name from the heroine, a charming type of the gentle-born Irish-woman. In the development of the romance, the attempts for Ireland's freedom, and the dire failures that culminated at Ballingary, are told in a manner which give an intimate insight into the history of the Young Ireland movement. If the book cannot be considered autobiographical, the reader will not forget that the author was contemporary with the events described, and will have little difficulty in perceiving that many of the principal characters are strongly ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... of detail. But, though easy, it would be a thankless task. It is scarcely too much to say that the dominant impression of most readers after perusing this book will be one of astonishment and admiration at the insight and breadth of view displayed by the author. When it was written the subject was a particularly thorny one to handle, and it undoubtedly required much courage to tackle the origin and development of the human race ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... Young Captain's Pluck. This story of stirring doings at one of our well-known forts in the Wild West is of more than ordinary interest. The young captain had a difficult task to accomplish, but he had been drilled to do his duty, and does it thoroughly. Gives a good insight into army ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... breakdown. It is for this reason that, thanks largely to the stimulus of the war—which has created a practical demand for such machines—aeroplanes are now being built, and flown with success, which are fitted with duplicate motors. With such machines, which give us a first insight as to the aircraft of the future, engine failure begins to lose its perils—particularly in regard to war. More than once during the great campaign, when flying a single-engine machine, an aviator has found his motor fail ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... induced Bartolozzi to write a letter of persuasion, partly dictated by himself; and, confident of its effect, he set out for Italy to bring Schiavonetti over. During his absence Bartolozzi gained an insight into his real character and interested views, and, on his return with his protege, told him that his house was no longer open to him, but that Schiavonetti was welcome to consider it his home. Testolini, however, having found a house in Sloane Square, soon ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... sympathies with humanity, from its proudest to its humblest forms. It will be read with great avidity by his admirers—and there are few at this day who do not belong to that class—as affording them a deeper insight into the mind of Wordsworth than any of his other works. It is divided into several books, named from the different situations or stages of the author's life, or the subjects which at any period particularly ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... insight than Mr. Oxford had at his disposal to see that Priam Farll was taking the ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... the beauty remained. The spoken words of protest made her a woman. Never again would she, nor any other creature of the earth, appear to Thorpe as she had in the silver glade or the cloistered pines. He had had his moment of insight. The deeps had twice opened to permit him to look within. Now they had closed again. But out of them had fluttered a great love and the priestess of it. Always, so long as life should be with him, Thorpe was destined to see in this tall graceful girl with the ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... service from the fields and workshops. Remember that the veritable bravery also, as the philosopher sees it, is a form of that "knowledge," which in truth includes in itself all other virtues, all good things whatever; that it is a form of "right opinion," and has a kind of insight in it, a real apprehension of the occasion and its claims on one's courage, whether it is worth while to fight, and to what point. Platonic knighthood then will have in it something of the philosophy which resides in plenitude in the class above it, by which indeed ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... of insight is his Heart among the gods. Ho to me! Heart of mine; I am in possession of thee, I am thy master, and thou art by me; fall not away from me; I am the dictator whom thou ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... in his pen, a magnetic attraction in his descriptions, a fertility in his literary resources which are characteristic of Dumas alone, and the seal of the master of light literature is set upon all his works. Even when not strictly historical, his romances give an insight into the habits and modes of thought and action of the people of the time described, which are not offered ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... from a more general cause: simply an underfeeling I have that at the most propitious moment the distance to the possibility of sorrow is so short that a man's spirits must not rise higher than mere cheerfulness out of bare respect to his insight. ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... readers, they are placed above his works of fiction. They certainly constitute the most original portion of his entire literary output. It is astonishing that this young Scotchman should have been able to make so many actually new observations on a game so old as Life. There is a shrewd insight into the motives of human conduct that makes some of these graceful sketches belong to the literature of philosophy, using the word philosophy in its deepest and broadest sense. The essays are filled with whimsical ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... other people into their fathers' houses, specially in the old age of the latter; but John Mortimer was not only confident of his own supreme influence, but he was more than commonly attached to his father, and had long been made to feel that on his own insight and forethought depended almost all that ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... order of Alexander are still extant; we allude to the voyage of Nearchus. Of this voyage we are now to speak; and as it is curious and important, not merely on account of the geographical knowledge it conveys, but also from the insight it gives us into the commercial transactions of the countries which he visited, we shall give rather a full abstract of it, availing ourselves of the light which has been thrown upon it by the learned and judicious researches ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... as I wrote, and I remember speaking to Horne about his good points. Phrenologists look gravely at that great scull, by the way, and hope, in their grim manner, that its owner made a good end. He looks quietly, now, out at the green little hill behind. I have no little insight to the feelings of furniture, and treat books and prints with a reasonable consideration. How some people use their pictures, for instance, is a mystery to me; very revolting all the same—portraits obliged to face each other for ever,—prints put together ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... stock in trade for securing subsequent tourists. Yet it cannot be doubted that this system has robbed the Eastern tour of some of its most salient and striking peculiarities, and has deprived the traveler of much opportunity for insight into the real life of the Oriental, only to be seen while he is journeying from place to place, since his own house is generally closed against the stranger, and it is only in the khan that a glimpse of his mode of life ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... has its roots deep down in the heart of humanity.... The actions of the Deity make no appeal to any special sense. We are deaf and blind, therefore, to the imminent grandeur around us unless we have insight enough to appreciate the whole and to recognize the woven fabric of existence flowing steadily from the loom of an infinite ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... indispensable attribute to a well-rounded life. "No man can be a gentleman," he once declared, "who does not have a sense of humour." Only he who possessed this gift, Page believed, had an imaginative insight into the failings and the virtues of his brothers; only he could have a tolerant attitude toward the stupidities of his fellows, to say nothing of his own. And humour with him assumed various shades; ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... judgment can at this instant be formed of the intended movements of the enemy. A course of Dunlap's papers will convey to you a general insight into the posture of our military affairs. It is not probable that any considerable decision in the field will take place this fall; and the councils in Britain appear to be for relinquishing the mad project of ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... artistic culture than her own. This was the civilisation of Greece. We need not dwell upon the character of Hellenic culture. Anyone who has made acquaintance with the richness of Greek literature, the clear sureness of Greek art, the keen insight of Greek science and philosophy, and the bold experiments of Greek society—especially as represented by Athens—will understand at once what is meant. When the Romans, more than two hundred years before our date, conquered Greece, in so far as they were ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... wits, and where, to readers and critics of a mystical and transcendental turn, his peculiar genius strongly commended him. To form a notion of what manner of man Calderon was, we must imagine a writer hardly inferior to Shakespeare in fertility of invention and dramatic insight, inspired by a religious fervour like that of Doune or Crashaw, and endowed with the wild and ethereal imagination of Shelley. But the religious fervour is Catholic, not Protestant, Southern, not Northern: ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... stolidity, the Indian is not so stupid as to be misled by talk like this. With a full knowledge of the situation— forced upon him by various events—the badinage of the brilliant militario does not for a moment blind him. Circumstances have given him enough insight into Uraga's character and position to know that the tatter's motives should somewhat resemble his own. He has long been aware that the Lancer colonel is in love with his young mistress, as much as he himself with her maid. Without this knowledge ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... by the repeated avowal of the unfaithfulness of the woman he loved, it was because he had always made the observation and experience of others give way to the dominance of his own insight. No array of contradictory facts ever shook his belief or unbelief; like all egotists, he accepted them as truths controlled by a larger truth of which he alone was cognizant. His simplicity, which was but another form of his egotism, was so ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... impressive words, Mr Pecksniff passed over to the bedside, where, after patting the counterpane once or twice in a very solemn manner, as if by that means he gained a clear insight into the patient's disorder, he took his seat in a large arm-chair, and in an attitude of some thoughtfulness and much comfort, waited for his waking. Whatever objection the young lady urged to Mrs Lupin went no further, for nothing more was said to Mr Pecksniff, and Mr Pecksniff ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... pay a small tribute to my father by way of personal gratitude for this, his first prose work, which was published nearly fifty years ago. Though unknown to many lovers of his greater writings, none of these has exceeded it in imaginative insight and power of expression. To me it rings with the dominant chord of ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... Falkirk. And yet this supervision was generally pleasant. As he wrought, nothing had the air of espionage—merely of care; and so I think, Wych Hazel liked it, and felt all the more free for all sorts of undertakings, secured against consequences. Sometimes, indeed, his quick insight was so astonishing to the young mischief-maker, that she was ready to cry out treachery!—and the suspected person in this case was always Gotham. Yet when she charged upon Gotham some untimely frost which had nipped her budding plans, ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... trouble and excitement. Grant found his duties at the office increased, and it was pleasant to see that his employer reposed confidence in him. His relations with others in the office were pleasant, now that Willis Ford was away, and every day he seemed to get new insight into the details of the business. Whether Jim Morrison and Tom Calder were in the city, he did not know. At all events, they were never seen in the neighborhood of Wall Street. Grant was not sorry to have them pass out of his life, for he did not ...
— Helping Himself • Horatio Alger
... concentration, which ever lifts the thinker into the special soul atmosphere of each separate mentality, by the power of attraction and repulsion, verily, by the cosmic law of life, gaining thereby deeper insight into what seemeth best to think and to do for self and ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... portraitures of character, sketched with freedom and animation. His reflections are piquant, and often rise to a philosophic tone, which discards the usual trammels of the age; and the progress of the story is varied by a multiplicity of personal anecdotes, that give a rapid insight into the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... recalled her evident excitement and preoccupation when she came in from her walk with Leigh. If her interview with the young man had been what he feared, it was natural she should have lain awake long into the night, and his heart misgave him at this additional confirmation of his insight. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... him, that unlike Charlemagne and Alfred he could not draw his lessons from a past whose evening glow was still visible in the horizon, we are tempted to treat as exaggerated the history of his times, and to be sceptical of so much political insight having been born ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... us an insight into the main political and social principles that actuated House in his companionship with President Wilson. Through it runs the note of social democracy reminiscent of Louis Blanc ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... minute or two Bell did not speak. Then, with deeper insight into her daughter's heart than her husband, in spite of his greater knowledge of the events that had happened ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... understandable human creatures. All others were merely objective. As we, to a certain extent, happened to fall in the former category, he was as pleasant to us as possible—that is, he was pleasant to us in his way, but had not insight enough to guess at how to be pleasant to us in our way. But as soon as he got out of his own class, or what he conceived to be such, he considered all people as "outsiders." He did not credit them with prejudices to rub, with feelings ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... of the unity of all life. When Goethe in a flash of insight saw the structure of the entire tree in a single leaf, and of the complete skeleton of the animal in the skull of a sheep, he gave the mind of man a new assurance of the unity that pervades the whole creation. And when scientific men asserted the universality of law, they made ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... Mr. McCunn was what is known as a great reader. He read slowly and fastidiously, and sought in literature for one thing alone. Sir Walter Scott had been his first guide, but he read the novels not for their insight into human character or for their historical pageantry, but because they gave him material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys. It was the same with Dickens. A lit tavern, a stage-coach, post-horses, the clack ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... upon neither criticism nor comment, whose role throughout all these pages is but that of a showman, although I trust one not altogether devoid of insight into the ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... amiable inertia. Albemarle, the baby, had spilled bacon gravy over her dress that very morning, and I had heard her console him immediately with the assurance that there was "a plenty more in the dish." But possessed though she was with that peculiar insight which discerns in every misfortune a hidden blessing, in stepmothers, I found, and in stepmothers alone, she could discern nothing ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... almost involuntary submission to his will.... Then her thoughts passed on to their walk home from the hospital—she recalled his sober yet unsparing summary of the situation at Westmore, and the note of insight with which he touched on the hardships of the workers.... Then, word by word, their talk about Dillon came back...Amherst's indignation and pity...his shudder of revolt at ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... plenipotence in so ordering and moving the several characters of a play as that they may best draw out each other by mutual influences, and set off each other by mutual contrasts. The persons are thus assorted and attempered with perfect insight both of their respective natures and of their common fitness to his purpose. And not the least wonderful thing in his works is the exquisite congruity of what comes from the persons with all the circumstances and influences under which they are represented as acting; ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... portraits. Hogarth carried this native tradition to a high point of excellence. He painted plain, good-natured-looking people in an unaffected and straightforward way. But he was a humourist in paint, and as great a student of human nature as he was of art. His insight into character and his great skill with the brush, combined with his sensitiveness to fun, make him in certain respects a unique painter. In the National Gallery there is a picture of the heads of his six servants in a double ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... of us have ever got to know a wild animal? I do not mean merely to meet with one once or twice, or to have one in a cage, but to really know it for a long time while it is wild, and to get an insight into its life and history. The trouble usually is to know one creature from his fellow. One fox or crow is so much like another that we cannot be sure that it really is the same next time we meet. But once in awhile there arises an animal ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... is struck, when Christian and Hopeful are seen coming, shoulder-high, through a thicket of green shrubs—box, perhaps, or perfumed nutmeg; while behind them, domed or pointed, the hills stand ranged against the sky. A little further, and we come to that masterpiece of Bunyan's insight into life, the Enchanted Ground; where, in a few traits, he has set down the latter end of such a number of the would-be good; where his allegory goes so deep that, to people looking seriously on ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... plays. That is apparently what he means by this peroration, which once closed an article in the Nineteenth Century: "O human life! so varied, so vast, so complex, so rich and subtle in tremulous deep organ tones, and soft proclaim of silver flutes, so utterly beyond our spell of insight, who of us can govern the thunder and whirlwind of thy ventages to any utterance of harmony, or pluck out the heart of thy eternal mystery?" Does Mr. Jones, I wonder, or the distinguished critic, really hear any ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... furnish a parallel in the material order. They are the house of God and the home and possession of every member of the Church militant without distinction of age or rank or learning. But they are not the same to each. Every one brings his own understanding and faith and insight, and the great Church is to him what he has capacity to understand and to receive. The great majority of worshippers could not draw a fine of the plans or expound a law of the construction, or set a stone in its place, ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... it must be to write that which will do good. A Raphael may boast of inspiration when he paints a Madonna, but not when his brush stoops to a Cyprian or a Satyr. The Pharisees of old prayed unctuously in the market-places: so the George Sands of our day boast of their superior insight into the beautiful and true. We doubt whether both are ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... Pantheism that seems to have been imperfect. But in Spinoza we have a man who, inheriting by birth the tradition—I might even say the apostolic succession—of the Jewish prophets, and gifted with an insight into the consummation of that tradition in Jesus Christ, was driven by a commanding intellect to divorce the spiritual life he prized from creeds that had become to him Impossible, and to enshrine ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... reaction of his thought upon the matter received from his teachers. Again, the decline of the sovereignty of the people would be the negation of all rule, if it meant that the uninstructed many should govern themselves by their own insight, and that the instructed few should simply be their servants and their instruments. But where the people are not recognized as the ultimate source of power, where their consent is not in any regular way made necessary to the proceedings of their ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... life quite conservative and academic, it should not be thought that these essays show no sympathy with liberal ideas. He was also appreciative of the first works of new writers, and had good and prophetic insight. His favorable reviews of the first works of Howells and James, and the subsequent career of these two men, indicate the sureness of Lowell's critical mind. Many readers will enjoy, in these days of the ouija board and messages from the dead, the raps at spiritualism here ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... insurance; subscribing to Liberty bonds; telling what you would like to be in the army; where you wanted your remains shipped; getting your finger-prints taken, and also getting your first jab in the arm which gave the first insight into ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... which may suffice to inspire you with caution, until you can come here and examine for yourself. No other information can give you a true insight into the state of things; but you will have no difficulty in understanding them when on the spot. In the mean time, accept my friendly salutations and cordial ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... his experience in the Edinburgh courts was of immense benefit to him. In the first place, his study of the Scotch statutes, statutes which had taken form very gradually under the pressure of changing national conditions, gave him an insight into the politics and society of the past not otherwise to have been obtained. Of still more value, perhaps, was the association with his young companions in the profession, and daily contact with the racy personalities which traditionally haunt ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... a dead stop in the middle of the street. In one sudden flash of insight, all the pieces of the case he'd been looking at for so long fell together and formed one consistent picture. The pattern ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... Morris, "she has a wonderful spiritual insight, if I may call it so. She often shocks me by her remarks, but if I lay a subject before her upon which I have been pondering deeply but have not succeeded in elucidating, she grasps its meaning at once and explains it to me in simple ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... a flash of chilling insight that in future many problems would be thus negatively solved for him; but as he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. "After that I suppose ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... The insight into this higher truth did not come by inspiration, but was gradually imparted during long summer days, when I wandered from dawn to dark among the fields and woods. Hoping at first no more than to tire the mind with the body and so win a whole repose, I became by degrees receptive of a new learning ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... licenses to teach. My sister's fat baby taught me things about the origin and ultimate destiny of dimples that were not in any of my school-books. Mr. Casey, of the second floor, who was drunk whenever his wife was sober, gave me an insight into the psychology of the beer mug that would have added to the mental furniture of my most scholarly teacher. The bold-faced girls who passed the evening on the corner, in promiscuous flirtation with the cock-eyed youths of the neighborhood, unconsciously revealed ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... fellow-students, who had sought in vain a great awakening light in those sacred precincts of learning, but, their confidence betrayed, were now floundering in the devouring morass of materialism. To her keen insight the University stood revealed as the great panderer to this latest century's obsessing idea that the true function of education is expressed in the imparting of changing, human information and a training for the business of earning one's daily bread according to the infamous code of the world's ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... does make one different; I saw that clearly in Dora; when she was madly in love with Viktor, and the way she's relapsed now!! She is learning Latin again, to make up for lost time! Ada does not speak to her about her plans because Dora lacks true insight! Only to-day she mentioned before Dora that whatever happened she wanted to come to Vienna in the autumn so that she could often go to the theatre. And Dora said: You are making a mistake, even people who live in Vienna don't go to the theatre ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... poultry and his dogs. It was a long hour's ramble that they took there, well improved on both sides, for Andrew of course knew it to be for his interest to please the brig's owner; and Mr. Maurice, who prided himself on having a singularly keen insight into character, studied the young man's every word and gesture, for it was not often that he came across such material as this out of which to make his captains; and to what farther effect in this ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... in the ordinary "shop," who is learning there at present, to our regret, only a portion of his craft, and who should be given an insight into the whole, and into the fairyland ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall |
