"Intangible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the agencies which have most to do with promoting the ascent of the soul? The first is atmosphere. In a bright, clear, sunshiny atmosphere the body attains its most healthful growth. So with the soul. Atmosphere is one of those intangible things that every one understands and no one can easily define. It is composed of a thousand different elements. The atmosphere of a household is the spirit by which it is pervaded. Are all reverent, earnest, cheerful, optimistic? Do love and mutual helpfulness ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... genuinely shocked. What a tangle he had fallen upon! Once again there seemed to confront him a colossal Juggernaut, a moving, crushing, intangible thing, beyond ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... of lighting the faint glow of the fragile insect that flies in the twilight of a summer night. Obedient as it has now been made by the ingenuity of modern man, docile as it may seem, obeying known laws that were discovered, not made, it yet remains shadowy, mysterious, impalpable, intangible, dangerous. It is its own avenger of the daring ingenuity that has controlled it. Touch ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... broken in upon so frequently by his attempts to write poetry. His poems were love poems, inspired by Ruth, but they were never completed. Not in a day could he learn to chant in noble verse. Rhyme and metre and structure were serious enough in themselves, but there was, over and beyond them, an intangible and evasive something that he caught in all great poetry, but which he could not catch and imprison in his own. It was the elusive spirit of poetry itself that he sensed and sought after but could not capture. It seemed a glow to him, a warm and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Corot. The work that he did after he attained freedom and swung away from Claude and Constable has an illusive, intangible, subtle and spiritual quality that no imitator can ever catch on his canvas. Corot could not even copy his own pictures—his work is born of the spirit. His effects are something beyond skill of hand, something ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... recognition or identification, except by guesswork, or the locality where they were found. Articles of domestic use scattered through the rubbish helped to tell who some of the bodies were. Part of a set of dinner plates told one man where in the intangible mass his house was. In one place was a photograph album with one picture recognizable. From this the body of a child near by was identified. A man who had spent a day and all night looking for the ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... of a just proportion; red tresses lay like a crown over her brow; her eyes, of a very golden brown, held mine with a look; and her face, which was perfectly shaped, was yet marred by a cruel, sullen, and sensual expression. Something in both face and figure, something exquisitely intangible, like the echo of an echo, suggested the features and bearing of my guide; and I stood awhile, unpleasantly attracted and wondering at the oddity of the resemblance. The common, carnal stock of that race, which had ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all these pretences of content lay a hollow sense of desolation. It was not the want of butter nor the diminished meat; it was the total removal from life of that intangible splendour of hope produced by the lottery ticket. Ah! every day was drawn blank now. This gloom, this gnawing emptiness at the heart, was worse than either had foreseen or now confessed. Malicious Fate, too, they felt, would even crown with the grand prix ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... as the gates of Milton's other place. It was my gold that helped to make those hinges. And this I endured merely for the sake of enjoying the society, not of my dear newly-found cousins, but of two phantoms, intangible, unsatisfactory, unreal that hovered over their heads,—the phantom of wealth and the still more empty phantom of social position. But all this, understand, was before I rode ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... they gave out no odor even while burning. I burned them all, cleaned off all the blood-spots, ventilated the room, opened the windows, and will turn it to a workshop. No more sighing for the unattainable, no more grasping at the intangible, no more clutching at the impalpable. I am no poet, and we don't want poetry. Our civilization isn't old enough. Poets, like other maggots, will be produced when fermentation comes. I am going about the humdrum and the useful. I am about as low in the public estimation as ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... solemnly. The detectives, in spite of their usual roughness and the bitterness of their resentment against Lupin, acted with reserve and discretion, astounded as they were at being allowed to touch that intangible being. ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... fall of the year the Caucasus resembles a gorgeous cathedral built by great craftsmen (always great craftsmen are great sinners) to conceal their past from the prying eyes of conscience. Which cathedral is a sort of intangible edifice of gold and turquoise and emerald, and has thrown over its hills rare carpets silk-embroidered by Turcoman weavers of Shemi and Samarkand, and contains, heaped everywhere, plunder brought from all the quarters of the world for the delectation of ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... basis enough for all manner of theory and conjecture, none of them to Forrest's advantage, and Elmendorf felt that the more he could make of them the better for his own cause and the worse for Forrest. There had been an intangible something in Allison's manner to warn the tutor that just so soon as the guests were out of the way he might look out for squalls. Allison had greeted him with utter absence of cordiality, and Elmendorf ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... thing was to let her talk freely, to encourage her by a gentle friendly interest, such as a girl friend might have shown, and to give her the relief of expression for these vague troubles and perplexities which, when uttered, seemed intangible and entirely inexplicable to her. Not once did she so much as imply any reproach to her husband, and it was plain that she felt unconscious of any ground for complaint. She alluded to him frequently and ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... three of them: Mantar Falusaine at Hesperidum, Pietro Corrallani at Mars City and Cheng I K'an at Ophir. Among them, by a vast intangible network of communication, they discussed strategy and the situation on ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... frequent—the smooth, inward-toed track of moccasins. The thicket grew more dense and difficult as he went on, yet he seemed to glide through its density and darkness—an obscurity that now seemed to be stirred by other moving objects, dimly seen, and as uncertain and intangible as sunlit leaves thrilled by the wind, yet bearing a strange resemblance to human figures! Pressing a few yards further, he himself presently became a part of this shadowy procession, which on closer scrutiny revealed itself as ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... library, museum, gallery, and cathedral tangible records of the creativeness of the world's masters. Soon I think we are to possess—thanks to Edison and the cinematographers—intangible records—or at least suggestions—of the modest creativeness of our masters by proxy. Some day every son with this inspiring sort of mother will have as complete means as science and his purse affords, of perpetuating her voice, her changing look, her walk, her tender smile. Thus ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... something which possesses certain influences over us?—a something which is utterly unrepresented to us by the senses. And now this word "substance," which formerly expressed a thing so well known, and every moment handled and looked at, is transformed to an invisible, intangible, imperceptible substratum—an unknown upholder of certain qualities, or, in more exact language, an unseen power clothing itself in our attributes—an existence far more resembling what is popularly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... a being destined to perpetuate the race, but the strange and mysterious product of all our complicated desires which have been accumulating in us for centuries but which have been turned aside from their primitive and divine object and have wandered after a mystic, imperfectly perceived and intangible beauty. There are some women like that, who blossom only for our dreams, adorned with every poetical attribute of civilization, with that ideal luxury, coquetry and esthetic charm which surround woman, a living statue ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... him from under her lashes. What could she do with this man? Nothing affected him. He seemed to have crossed some intangible barrier and to stand closer to her than any other man had ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... but by the principle of life in which its individuality consists, which is to make it a new being, instead of a fellow-cell with those that build up the body of the parent animal and remain component parts of it. This intangible something is the subtile element that eludes our closest analysis; it is the germ of the immaterial principle according to which the new being is to develop. The physical germ we see; the spiritual germ we cannot see, though ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... north. It is the same, Martha says, if you is on a quest fur a father or a mother, only you have got to be worthy of that there quest, she says. The first time you meet the right one you are drawed jest like the witch hazel. That is the Intangible Something working on you, she says. Martha had learnt a lot about that. The book that had fell in the crick was like that. She lent it ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... apathy had settled upon his nerves. He saw things as in a dream. His brain worked swiftly, but everything that passed before his eyes was, as it were, in a kaleidoscope, vivid and glowing, but yet intangible. His brain told him that here before him was a woman into whose life he had brought its first ordeal and humiliation. But his heart only felt a reflective sort of pity: it was not a personal or immediate realisation, that is, not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a steady-eyed seriousness in which, too, she recognized the intangible quality that made him seem to her different from all the other men ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... looked forward daily, hourly, to the anguish of her departure. She would vanish out of his life, intangible as a melted snow-flake, and only memory would stay behind to tell him he had known and loved her. Why should this be so hard to bear? If she stayed, he dared not tell her she was dear to him; he dared not stretch forth his hand to help her. In all the world there ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... third class of things on which the best civilisation does permit privacy, does resent all inquiry or explanation. This is in the case of things which need not be explained, because they cannot be explained, things too airy, instinctive, or intangible—caprices, sudden impulses, and the more innocent kind of prejudice. A man must not be asked why he is talkative or silent, for the simple reason that he does not know. A man is not asked (even in Germany) why he walks slow or quick, simply because he could not answer. A man must take ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... dawn of manhood he stands looking wide-eyed into the long vistas opening before him; when he first becomes conscious of the awakening and quickening of strange desires and unknown powers; when what he sees and feels is still shadowy and mystical enough to be intangible, and, so, more beautiful; when his imagination is unsullied, and his faith new and whole—then it is that love wears a halo. The man who has not loved before he was fourteen has missed ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... like opening a grave now to raise its cover. The man almost shuddered as he bent over and looked in, curious as though these things had never before met his gaze. There was a dull odor of dead flowers long boxed up. A faint rustling as of intangible things became half audible, as though spirits passed out at this contact with the ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... not had lain there on the dewy grass, looking up at the sky, as he had come on her sometimes. Poor Alicia! And once he had been within an ace of marrying her! A life spoiled! By what, if not by love of beauty! But who would have ever thought that the intangible could wreck a woman, deprive her of love, marriage, motherhood, of fame, of wealth, of health! And yet—by ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... vibrations. The whole room grew luminous. The Robot, seated now at a table, showed for a moment as thin as an apparition. All this room—Mary lying beside me, the mechanism, myself—all this was imponderable, intangible, unreal. ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... have willingly sacrificed to an indefinite extent to be furnished with the preconcerted watchword, so that I might have enlarged myself in the eyes of this consecrated being's unapproachable esteem, I had already decided that the competition was too intangible for one whose thoughts lay in well-defined parallel lines, and it fell to another to reply, "To ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... about the action made her conscious that there was a change in his feelings. It checked her rising emotions and made her curious. What was he embarrassed about? The girl stole a look at him, which left him still more disturbed and uneasy. It was an intangible thing upon which she could not remark and yet could not fail to recognize. Luther had never been awkward in her presence before. Their association had been of the most offhand and informal character. As a boy of fifteen he had carried her, a girl of eleven, over many ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... was a being afar off, inaccessible, almost intangible,—like the millionaire employer to his humble workman, covered with sweat and grime, at the bottom of ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... were as much compelled as the men to lead a respectable life. According to a tendency common to all civilizations, public feeling set them up as symbols; they were, by their austere magnificence, to represent both the splendour of wealth and its intangible. The old habits of gallantry had been reformed, Tut fashionable lovers were now secretly replaced by muscular labourers or stray grooms. Nevertheless, scandals were rare, a foreign journey concealed nearly all of them, and the Princesses of ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... knew its devious ways; the number of such warders was limited. Now it would be impossible to get any man to keep a lonely watch; sentinels must be posted in groups for mutual comfort and assistance, seeing that the tangible danger of Basil's dagger was to be feared as much as the intangible perils that sprang from the imagination. To group the watchers was to narrow the guarded area, and it was plain to the council that, at night especially, little of the rolling tract of hill and valley could be patrolled; the foe would have ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... he asked the question, and Ladue received the question as stolidly as an Indian. Yet for a swift instant they looked into each other's eyes, and in that instant an intangible something seemed to flash out from all the body and spirit of Joe Ladue. And it seemed to Daylight that he had caught this flash, sensed a secret something in the knowledge and plans behind the ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... inanimate. The Rev. S. R. Riggs who, for forty years, has been a student of Dakota customs, superstitions etc., says, "Tahkoo Wahkan," p. 55 et seq. "The religious faith of the Dakota is not in his gods as such. It is in an intangible, mysterious something of which they are only the embodiment, and that in such measure and degree as may accord with the individual fancy of the worshipper. Each one will worship some of these divinities, and neglect ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... Jewett, by Kielland or Bjornson, by Maupassant, by Palacio Valdes, by Giovanni Verga, by Tourguenief, in one of those little frames seems to me of an exquisite color and texture and of an entire literary preciousness, not only as regards the diction, but as regards those more intangible graces of form, those virtues of truth and reality, and those lasting ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... nature. From being a mere ear of corn it becomes a revelation of design and beauty. No change has taken place in the ear of corn, but a most important change has been wrought in the boy. Such a change is so subtle, so delicate, and so intangible that it cannot be measured in terms of per cents; but it is no less real for all that. It is a spiritual process and, therefore, aptly illustrates the accepted definition of education. Though it defies analysis and the rule ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... term is a prime example of {ha ha only serious}. People actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense attachments to their tools, even when the tools are intangible. The most constructive thing one can do when one stumbles into the crossfire is mumble {Get a life!} and leave — unless, of course, one's *own* unassailably rational and obviously ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Worth to force The King's Basin Land and Irrigation Company to make a large contribution to the railroad builder's personal fortune. The people sensed something in the whole transaction that they could not clearly grasp, an intangible, mysterious something, as great as it was indefinite. They felt blindly that they were being used without their consent in a game played by these master financiers, and they resented being sacrificed as dumb pawns in a move, the purpose of ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... him than Jean were grateful to Geoffrey Stonor when he smiled. They felt relieved from some intangible responsibility for the order ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... has been always the favourite psalm sung in cathedrals for all Christian conquerors, but neither psalms nor the paid pastor's praises of the Emperor will satisfy the German people, who have made awful sacrifices for intangible victories. ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... anxiety and discomfort to be those of guilt in a girl too young to be happy in criminal deceit. With his experience of life, and with his usually just perceptions, he ought to have known better; but there is some quality in a few men or women, intangible and yet unmistakable, which makes us instinctively suspect present, or foretell future, moral evil; and poor Molly was one of these. What it was, on the other hand, which made her trust Sir Edmund and drew ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... such force and reality these grotesque and weird fancies, these vague horrors, and these deep oppressions required a powerful imaginative grasp of the intangible, and a ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... Flemish, part French, which it now possesses—a population which, when it has consumed its five or six heavy meals, smoked a dozen or two pipes, and slept its long sleep of repletion, considers it has done its duty to God and man, and troubles itself little with such intangible matters as poetical reveries or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... window a light is flickering where some good burgher is mending his boots, or a baker drawing a batch of dough. O night and powers of heaven, how perfect is the blackness of your infinite vault—how lofty, how remote its inaccessible depths where it lies spread in an intangible, yet audible, silence! Freshly does the lulling breath of night blow in your face, until once more you relapse into snoring oblivion, and your poor neighbour turns angrily in his corner as he begins to be conscious of your weight. Then again you awake, but this time to find ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... salutation of "How dee?" Amanda detected a change of tone, and thereafter took flight whenever she heard his step at the kitchen door. So Monday forenoon passed; Caleb brought water for her tubs and put out her clothes-line, but they had hardly spoken. The intangible monster of a misunderstanding had crept between them. But when at noon he asked as usual, though without looking at her, "Goin' to Sudleigh with the butter to-day?" Amanda had reached the limit of her endurance. It seemed to her that she could ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... women and of one man only, letting a superficial friendship towards all other men veil impassable abysses of separation, and a man must in the same way have one sole woman intimate. To all other women he must be a little blind, a little deaf, politely inattentive. He must respect the transparent, intangible, tacit purdah about them, respect it but never allude to it. To me that is an intolerable state of affairs, but it is reality. If you live in the spirit of any other understanding you will court social disaster. ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... his affection there was indeed, to display to the eyes of her world. But it was for intangible proof that Susan's heart longed day after day. In spite of comment and of envy from the office, in spite of the flowers and messages and calls upon which Auntie and the girls were placing such flattering significance, ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... in a transitional state; the first kind of teacher is always a little uncertain of her ground and a little fearful that she is not quite "up-to-date," while the second class of teacher is sometimes a little timid, and not quite sure that she is prepared to account for the rather subtle and intangible outcome of her work. ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... the town he saw the green-patched farm, the little gray cabin where his mother and Lucy slept, no doubt dreaming of the hopes he had fostered in them. Some doubt, some fear, intangible and inexplicable, passed over him as he looked. Would all be well with Lucy? There was indeed much to be feared, and he could never give happiness full rein until he had her safe away ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... this peculiar whining buzz. As he listened it rose in a sudden thin crescendo that rippled along his spine like a file rasping over naked nerve-ends. For one shuddering second there seemed to be an intangible living quality in that metallic drone, as though some nameless creature sang in horrible exultance. Then abruptly ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... of the four could have said that the day was enjoyable. There was an intangible something in the air which they all could feel but none ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... her fought squarely against this obsession of the intangible; but it persisted and prevailed. The mocking shadows crowded about her, compelled her to a discomfortable realisation of her solitude in a station needing the perpetual alertness of armed men to ensure ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... aside, or a contest for victory over an opponent, except in isolated episodes now and then. Mastery of chess will not help in the mastery of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle where the forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are much more vague and varied and intangible than are those of the chessboard. Life is cooeperation with other lives. We win when we help others to win. I suppose business is more often like a game than is life—your gain is often the other man's loss, and you deliberately ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... and gives one the right keynote for its apprehension; but the real quality of all work which, like Mr. Rodd's, aims, as I said, at a purely artistic effect, cannot be described in terms of intellectual criticism; it is too intangible for that. One can perhaps convey it best in terms of the other arts, and by reference to them; and, indeed, some of these poems are as iridescent and as exquisite as a lovely fragment of Venetian glass; others as delicate in perfect workmanship and as single in natural motive ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... Trinity is not ours; it consists of the Mother, the Father (Saint Joseph), and the Child—with Saint Anne looming in the background (the grandmother is an important personage in the patriarchal family). The Creator of all things and the Holy Ghost have evaporated; they are too intangible and non-human. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... that automatic movement so noticeable in most child dancers. When she went thus or so, or flitted from side to side of the stage, she clearly knew just why she did it, why she went up-stage instead of down. But she had more than mere technical perfection: she had personality, that strange, intangible something so rare in the danseuse, that wanders over the footlights. The turn of a foot, the swift side look, the awakening smile, the nice lifting of an eyebrow—these things were spontaneous. No amount of rehearsal or managerial thought could have produced ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... dejected air showed that a deadly blow had been dealt to the project to which she had devoted all her resources since the beginning of the march. She, too, had begun to doubt. Here, in the desert, the buried treasure was an intangible thing. In England, the promises of the Greek's dying message were satisfying by their very vagueness. In Africa, face to face with the tremendous solitude, they became unbelievable, a dim fable akin to the legends ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... fact a great strategic change in the world during the past year. That precious intangible, the initiative, is becoming ours. Our policy, not limited to mere reaction against crises provoked by others, is free to develop along lines of our choice not only abroad, but also at home. As a major theme for American policy during the coming year, let our joint determination be to hold ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... stepped into that chamber that had been sacred to him before—the holy of holies—and fumbled with a steel. The sparks showed him his hands trembling, but at first he did not dare to look behind him for fears intangible. The dried heather stems caught the flame of the tinder; there was but a handful of them; they flared up in a moment's red glare on the interior, then died out crackling. It was enough to show him the place was empty. It showed him, too, his lantern, the poor companion of his ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... in its own way and from motives known only to itself the particular branch of legislation assigned to it. The only semblance of responsibility attaching to the committee is found in the party affiliation of the majority of its members with the majority in the House. But ineffectual and intangible as this is, it is rendered even more so by the fact that the opposition party is also represented on each committee. This allows the dominant party to escape responsibility, since it can claim that its failure to satisfy the popular demand has been ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... of all that vast assemblage had not given up victory for Philadelphia. I had not dared to look at Old Well-Well for a long, while. I dreaded the nest portentious moment. I felt deep within me something like clairvoyant force, an intangible ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... the chance of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's vested ideas,—blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible private truth. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... ether begins in billions. Between them there is a gulf of vibrations that has not yet been bridged. For that reason science divides matter into two "planes," or octaves, of vibration—the matter of this visible and tangible plane being called prakriti and that of the invisible and intangible plane being called etheric. Across this gulf the two planes respond to each other, note for note, the note in trillions chording when the note in thousands is struck. Note for note, chord for chord, they answer one another, and the minutest and the most complex phenomena are alike the result of this ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... been no flirting on her part. Never had she given him the smallest ground to think her in love with him. On the contrary, she had maintained between them for all her gentleness, from beginning to end, that soft, intangible barrier which at once ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... will object, there must be some relation between language and culture, and between language and at least that intangible aspect of race that we call "temperament". Is it not inconceivable that the particular collective qualities of mind that have fashioned a culture are not precisely the same as were responsible for the growth of a particular linguistic morphology? This question ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... formation of the Yugoslav State, a sympathetic or antipathetic episode of the War, or a subsidiary effect of it, have failed to detect its inner meaning." As for the Treaty of London which was concluded against the enemy, it was not to be regarded as intangible against a friendly people. By special grants of autonomy, as at Zadar, or by arrangements between the two States, he would see the language and culture of all the trans-Adriatic sons of Italy assured. ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... her mouse-like coloring, but once your eye was arrested, then, like looking at some rare bit of delicate enamel, you began to perceive undreamed-of graces which soothed the sight until you were filled with the consciousness of an exquisite beauty as intangible as her other charm—distinction. An infinite serenity was in her atmosphere, a promise of all pure and tender things in her great soft eyes. The mystery and freshness of the night seemed always to hang about her. Her ways were noiseless—the most creaking ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... of the power of thought beyond the power of muscle; it is evidence that the intangible forces of mind are superior to the external material powers of muscle, and sword, and bullet. It is reassuring to forecast that, spite of the present inefficacy, or but very limited success of woman's protest against barbarous laws and usages, and the destructive errors and vices of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me, leading me, grasping me.... Once and again in my life I have seen myself suspended in a trance over the abyss; once and again I have found myself at the cross-roads, confronted by a choice of ways and aware ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... spirit of gifted writers is something too intangible to be firmly grasped, yet its presence is felt as a pervasive and delightful atmosphere. A work is sometimes suffused with the divine touch of genius, as the delicate and indescribable hues of autumn glorify the valleys and mountains. While hovering near the earth for a time, ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... and civilization before the Spanish conquest, and he even intimated that they had retrograded rather than advanced under Spanish tutelage. But such an extreme view must be ascribed to patriotic ardor, for Rizal himself, though possessed of that intangible quality commonly known as genius and partly trained in northern Europe, is still in his own personality the strongest refutation of such ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... are boiled in a pot and then allowed to cool in the same vessel or poured out to cool in a large earthen or wooden bowl. Then Mr. Tao together with Mrs. Tao and all the young Taos squat on their heels around the mixture and satisfy that intangible thing called the appetite. They do not use chop sticks as the Chinese do, but the rice and fish are caught in a hollow formed by the first three fingers of the right hand. The thumb is then placed behind ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... spirit in itself, as usually understood (apart from its power of originating action) is a higher and holier existence than matter. It seems to me that very much from a wrong idea that it is, come those vague, unreal, intangible notions as to the Christian Heaven, which do so much to make it a chilly, unattractive thing, to human wishes and hopes. It is hard enough for us to feel the reality of the things beyond the grave, without having the additional stumbling-block cast in our way, of being told ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... idolatry; and yet they parted ten days after marriage with these words of wroth and madness. Something had come between them. What was it? Another man? No. Another woman? Still no. What then? A ghost, an intangible, almost an invisible but very real and divorce-making co-respondent. ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... a little while did the wretched king strive to resist the decrees of fate. And in her own chamber, where so short a time before the little princess had known the joy of something inexpressible—something most exquisite—intangible—unknown—she sat, like a flower broken by the ruthless storm, sobbing pitifully, dry-eyed, with sobs that strained her soul, for the shameful, hideous fate that the ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... amiable young man. Perhaps she was a bit tired of amiable young men. His face was thin, and refined, and strong—the strength of level brows, straight nose and square chin, with a pair of paradoxical lips, which were curved and womanish in their sensitiveness; the refinement was an intangible expression which belonged to no particular feature but pervaded the whole face. As to his eyes, she was left to speculate upon their color, since she had not seen them, but she reflected that many a girl would give a good ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... of the East—that stretched out a yellow hand to the West. It was symbolic of the subtle, intangible power manifested in Dr. Fu-Manchu, as Nayland Smith—lean, agile, bronzed with the suns of Burma, was symbolic of the clean British efficiency which sought to ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... mocked my hungry soul; thy gilded fruits have crumbled to ashes in my grasp. In lieu of the holy faith of my girlhood, thou hast given me but dim, doubtful conjecture, cold metaphysical abstractions, intangible shadows, that flit along my path, and lure me on to deeper morasses. Oh, what is the shadow of death, in comparison with the starless night which has fallen upon me, even in the morning of my life! My God, save me! Give me light! Of myself ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... arm. She only knew that her mind no longer dwelt on danger, but it had marvelously opened to receive the image of the grim but ineffable beauty of this wild land through which she rode. She felt secure, and she began to have an intangible but ever-increasing delight ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... you tantalise me, and I begin to think you are after all a fairy or a wood nymph, or something intangible of ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... stayed here?" I asked. She had now taken the chair fronting me. We were stiffly seated as if for a business interview. I had a desire to take the poor figure in my arms, but I felt as if she were as intangible as a spirit. When mental pain has devoured the body, as physical pain so often does, there is something thrice as ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... indications of life. Experience of dreams led men to believe that the "soul" could also leave the body temporarily and enjoy varied experiences. But the concrete-minded Egyptian demanded some physical evidence to buttress these intangible ideas of the wandering abroad of his vital essence. He made a statue for it to dwell in after his death, because he was not able to make an adequately life-like reproduction of the dead man's features upon the mummy itself or its wrappings. Then he gradually ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... the acquiescence in certain possible things which might be supposed to happen to his soul, which, after all, he was comfortably certain never would happen, or the acquiescence in certain supposititious sacrifices for the good of that most intangible of all abstractions, Being in general, it was a dry, calm subject. But when it concerned the immediate giving-up of his slave-ships and a transfer of business, attended with all that confusion and loss which he foresaw ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... explorer, who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and Henry Irving, and many another whose name remains, though the owners of those names are all dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are only a part of that intangible fabric which we call the past.'—[Clemens had first known Stanley as a newspaper man. "I first met him when he reported a lecture of mine in St. Louis," he said once in a conversation where the name of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... back to the saint. There is far more to be learned from the sinner. We cannot go back to the philosopher, and the mystic leads us astray. Who, as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere, would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for that formless intangible Being which Plato rates so high? What to us is the Illumination of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision of Bohme, the monstrous Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg's blinded eyes? Such things are less than the yellow trumpet of one daffodil of the field, far less than ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... only the intangible shadow of pomp and luxury, while the substance was actual penury. But her inborn fertility of invention, her abundant resources, her tact in accommodating herself to circumstances, and her inexhaustible energy, had endowed ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... talk awhile ago—of the intangible, unseen nature of a Christian's strength. The moment his defence is worn on the outside, that moment there is a failure of strength within. His real armour of proof is nothing more 'rigid,' Miss Essie, than 'the girdle of truth,' 'the breastplate ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... romances in which he is, by common consent, our greatest practitioner, to be placed first indeed of all who have written fiction of whatever kind on American soil, Hawthorne never forsakes—subtle, spiritual, elusive, even intangible as he may seem—the firm underfooting of mother earth. His themes are richly human, his psychologic truth (the most modern note of realism) unerring in its accuracy and insight. As part of his romantic endowment, he prefers to place plot and personages in the dim backward ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... she slipped inside of her glove, and dropping the remainder into her pocket, left the building, and walked on toward Union Square. Absorbed in grave reflections, and oppressed by some vague foreboding of impending ill, dim, intangible and unlocalized—she moved slowly along the crowded sidewalk—unconscious of the curious glances directed toward her superb form, and stately graceful carriage, which more than one person turned and looked back to admire, wondering when she had ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Single Tax a candidate whose private character was generally respected, even by those who most hated his economic teachings. The mere thought that such a Radical should be proposed for Mayor scared, not merely the Big Interests, but the owners of real estate and intangible property. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... is a tangible and measurable cause, sufficient to account for all losses heretofore ascribed to an intangible, immeasurable, and wholly imaginary cause, viz., ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... disappeared in that fatal moment that no one had ever seen or handled—his self-consciousness, his intelligence, his will, his affections, his moral sense: with these he was a person; without them, he is a corpse. If, then, it is these unseen, intangible qualities, and not flesh and bones, muscle and "nerve structure," that constitute human personality, is it not rather childish to argue that, unless God possesses a body of some sort, the Divine Personality is a contradiction in terms? If we can validly affirm in the Deity qualities corresponding ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... daintiness and comfort, and paying for themselves many times over by the atmosphere of nicety and refinement which they create. For it is these touches, unobtrusive by their very delicacy, which introduce that intangible but very essential quality known as ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... whereas the men who dislike Ray in the regiment are of the opposite stamp. Among themselves they pick him to pieces with comparative safety, but outside their limited circle, the damnation of faint praise, the covert insinuations, or that intangible ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... familiar—as though you and I had ridden together through such a country once before; I even seem to know those great redwoods well. I—I think I dreamed it, but there is another intangible memory in ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... nothing more. Out of his obliquely-set eyes he regarded us indifferently, but he nodded to our guide, who returned the salutation with a sly laugh. For some inexplicable reason that laugh fired my suspicions. It was—so to speak—an open sesame to a chamber of horrors, the more horrible because intangible and indescribable. Ajax said afterwards that he was similarly affected. The contagion of fear is a very remarkable thing, and one little understood by the physiologists. I remember I put my hand into my pocket, because ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... knowledge that she had succeeded in doing what she wished, while often the results and effects were so subtile and remote as to be imperceptible to others. Life was to her a toy with which she amused herself, and she found her chief enjoyment in trying experiments upon it of which the results were intangible to ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... control. But at the same time the necessity for decided action, if I was to save his life, came to me with an intense relief. No matter what animated him for the moment, Shorthouse was only a man; it was flesh and blood I had to contend with and not the intangible powers. Only a few hours before I had seen him cleaning his gun, smoking his pipe, knocking the billiard balls about with very human clumsiness, and the picture flashed across my mind with ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... greater evil than war, even than civil war, with its red, fratricidal hands?—Slavery. But, could that be destroyed, it would be the first great evil ever overcome by force of arms. They fight tangibly with an intangible foe; tangible issues rise between them; the black, intangible phantom hovers safe behind. But even should they visibly succeed, is there not left the very root of the matter to put forth fresh growth,—that moral condition in which the thing lived at all? An evil that has its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... upon the scenes of scriptural story here represented, wore his sword and buckler, in readiness to repel an attack which he feared from his competitor. The story is very vague, and I hunted it down in divers authorities only to find it grow more and more intangible and uncertain. But it gave a singular relish to our daily walk through the old cloister, and I added, for my own pleasure (and chiefly out of my own fancy, I am afraid, for I can nowhere localize the fable on which I built), that the rivalry between the painters was partly ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... work. I saw some of it. Miss Strange, if I could get you into that house for ten minutes—not to see her but to pick up the loose intangible thread which I am sure is floating around in it somewhere—wouldn't ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... stood together as the aircar passed over the Kraggork Swamps—pleasantly close together, von Schlichten realized. For the moment, he could almost forget the queer, intangible tension that had been growing steadily, and the feeling that things were nearing a breaking point of ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... size is correlated with longer life. The lessons of experience come to it over and over again, and it can and must learn them. It is the intelligent, remembering, thinking type. The insect had begun to peer into the world of invisible and intangible relations, the vertebrate will some day see them. This much is prophecied in his very structure. He must be heir to an ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... help. Yet, with all his heart and will, he was silently assuring himself that all would go well—must go well. He must not even fear failure, think failure, imagine failure. Strong confidence on his own part, he fully believed, would be definite, if intangible, ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... smear, father." Maggie spoke slightingly, but with a tone of doubt. It was not the sort of picture that eighteen has been taught to like—yet the picture did possess an intangible something that provoked doubt as to its quality. "You sure do look ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... greenwood hid thy gracious head? Veiled with what visions while the grey world grieves, Or muffled with what shadows of green leaves, What warm intangible green shadows spread To sweeten the sweet twilight for thy bed? What sleep enchants thee? what delight deceives? Where the deep dreamlike dew before the dawn Feels not the fingers of the sunlight yet Its silver web unweave, Thy footless ghost on ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... no cause for suspicion but his own intuition and the intangible evidence of tone and look all as obvious to the others as to him. But he was at once doubtful and relieved when the haggard wretch at the door, mustering his courage, replied: "Know Royston McGurny! None better. Knowed ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... specter of the battlefield, whose torturing spirit was breaking away from his still gilded body; "it is not on Reason that the Bible of History stands. Else are the law of majesties and the ancient quarrel of the flags essentially supernatural and intangible, or the old world is built ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... sixty thousand is commonly brought forward as the probable number of prostitutes not only in Berlin, but also in London and in New York. It is absolutely impossible to say whether it is under or over the real number, for secret prostitution is quite intangible. Even if the facts were miraculously revealed there would still remain the difficulty of deciding what is and what is not prostitution. The avowed and public prostitute is linked by various gradations on the one side to the respectable girl living at home who ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... contempt of the average islander for things Teutonic, whether they're Bocklin or my veterinary surgeon. 'Oh, Bocklin,' they say; 'he strains after beauty, he peoples Nature with gods too consciously.' Of course Bocklin strains, because he wants something—beauty and all the other intangible gifts that are floating about the world. So his landscapes don't come ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... secret inquiries during the past two had satisfied him that his wife's name was written in the books of no shop in San Francisco that she would condescend to visit. Therefore, this maddening but intangible barrier had nothing to do with a change of habit that had not caused an hour of tears and sulks. Helene had a quick temper but a gay and sweet disposition, normally high spirits, little apparent selfishness, and a naive adoration ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... "I cannot think of another example of such rapid success," continued Finot, looking from des Lupeaulx to Lucien. "There are two sorts of success in Paris: there is a fortune in solid cash, which any one can amass, and there is the intangible fortune of connections, position, or a footing in certain circles inaccessible for certain persons, however rich they may be. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... and thirty years ago Torricelli discovered that the atmosphere, the space surrounding the earth, which seemed more intangible than a dream, had weight and substance, and invented the barometer, the tiny tube and drop of mercury by which it could be seized and held and weighed as accurately as a pound of lead. As soon as this invisible air was proved to be matter, the whole force of scientific ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... York, Berwick, Wells, Winter Harbor, Brookfield, Amesbury, Marlborough, were all more or less infested, usually by small scalping-parties, hiding in the outskirts, waylaying stragglers, or shooting men at work in the fields, and disappearing as soon as their blow was struck. These swift and intangible persecutors were found a far surer and more effectual means of annoyance than larger bodies. As all the warriors were converts of the Canadian missions, and as prisoners were an article of value, cases of torture were not very common; though now and then, as at Exeter, they would roast some ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... affirming that there must be many; but he did not receive the four of Empedocles, nor his principles of Love and Hate, nor the homoeomeriae of Anaxagoras. He also denied that the primary elements had any sensible qualities whatever. He conceived of all things as being composed of invisible, intangible, and indivisible particles or atoms, which, by reason of variation in their configuration, combination, or position, give rise to the varieties of forms: to the atom he imputed self-existence and eternal duration. His ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... spite of the vilest betrayals? Love is indeed often the inspirer of subjective visions, creating in the beloved object the qualities it admires and the virtues it adores, powerless to accept what it is not willing to see, dwelling in a fortress guarded by intangible, and therefore indestructible, fiction and proof against the artillery of facts. Unorna's confidence was, however, not misplaced. The man whose promise she had received had told the truth when he had said that he had never broken any ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... men and nations has always been and is the unseen, intangible, underlying force, the resultant of all the spiritual forces of a certain people, or of all humanity, which finds its outward expression ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... the spell. Jove and his brotherhood of gods, tottering with the giant assailings, I can bear, for the soul's hopes are not struck at in such contests; but your Oriental almighties are too much types of the intangible prototype to be meddled with without shuddering. One never connects what are called the "attributes" with Jupiter. I mention only what diminishes my delight at the wonder-workings of "Kehama," not what impeaches its power, which I confess ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... ground for tracks and pitfalls and sticks, that might crackle. Louis, with his whole face pricked forward, trusted more to his eyes and ears and that sense of "feel," which is—contradictory as it may seem—utterly intangible. Once the Indian picked up a stick freshly broken. This was examined by both, and the Indian smelt it and tried his tongue on the broken edge. Then both fell on all fours, creeping under the branches of the thicket and pausing ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... was destined not to be undisturbed. Something awoke me. What! Was this night given over to ghosts and spirits intangible? Again the forms of men were gliding noiselessly about me. Above were the twinkling stars, around were busy men, and silence everywhere. With instinctive cautiousness I lay motionless, furtively noting the curious scene. A moment's careful attention explained it in ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... can see, smell, handle, or intimidate—such as a horse, a motor-car, a dog, or a lackey. Slossons, those crack solicitors, like the crack nerve specialists in Harley Street and the crack fortune-tellers in Bond Street, sold their invisible, inodorous and intangible wares of advice at double, treble, or decuple their worth, according to the psychology of the customer. They were great bullies. And they were, further, great money-lenders—on behalf of their wealthier clients. In obedience to a convenient theory ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... his theories by making great performers of Maria and Clara, his daughters—two sisters more gifted in a musical way have never been born. Germany excels in philosophy and music—a seeming paradox. Music is supposed to be a compound of the stuff that dreams are made of—hazy, misty, dim, intangible feelings set to sounds—we close our eyes and they take us captive and carry us away on the wings of melody. And so it may be true that music is born of moonshine, and fragrant memories, and hopes too great for earth, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... at her searchingly. There was a change in Essie Tisdale. She had a new confidence of manner, a cool poise that was older than her years, while that intangible something which she could never crush looked at her more defiantly than ever from the girl's sparkling eyes. She had a feeling that Essie Tisdale welcomed her coming. Certainly her assurance and animation was strangely at variance with her precarious position. What had happened? Dr. Harpe intended ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... The intangible and shapeless suspicions which Ethel had caught from Leonora took a misty form and substance, only to be immediately dispelled in that inconstant mind by the sudden refreshing sound of Milly's voice: 'We've called to take Ethel home, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... nothing in this simple remark to arrest Cyril's attention; but somehow Audrey's tone implied a good deal, and, though no further word passed between them on the subject, Cyril was left with an uncomfortable impression, though it was too vague and intangible ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... might be understood. Thus five thousand pounds invested would speedily bring five thousand pounds per annum. Diana had often dreamed of the City of London as the seat of magic; and taking the City's contempt for authorcraft and the intangible as, from its point of view, justly founded, she had mixed her dream strangely with an ancient notion of the City's probity. Her broker's shaking head did not damp her ardour for shares to the full amount of her ability to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... voluptuous woman and the calculating full-blooded man. Whitney, for his part, seemed almost fascinated by her gaze. He rose as she bowed, and, for a moment, I thought that he was going over to speak to her, as if drawn by that intangible attraction which Poe has so cleverly expressed in his "Imp of the Perverse." For, clearly, one who talked as Whitney had just been talking would have to be on his guard with that woman. Instead, however, he returned her nod and stood still, while Kennedy bowed ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... of course to be taken in the euphemistic sense which the term has under the code duello governing "affairs of honour." It carries no connotation of honesty, veracity, equity, liberality, or unselfishness. This national honour is of the nature of an intangible or immaterial asset, of course; it is a matter of prestige, a sportsmanlike conception; but that fact must not be taken to mean that it is of any the less substantial effect for purposes of a casus belli than the material assets of the community. Quite the contrary: "Who ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... analysing. The man's hickory shirt, his warped boots, his blue jean trousers, his heavy buskins were mean and earth-stained, but inherent in the quality of his low, musical voice and courteous manner was an intangible suggestion of something different, some bigger and happier past, to which, go where he would and clothe himself as he might, voice and manner ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... passengers. On them he broods. His achievement is more complete than Melville's; his scope is less. When the physicists have resolved, as apparently they soon will do, this earthy matter where now with our implements and our machinery we are so much at home, into mysterious force as intangible as will and moral desire, some new transcendental novelist will assume Melville's task. The sea, earth, and sky, and the creatures moving therein again will become symbols, and the pursuit of Moby Dick be renewed. But now, for a while, science has pushed back the unknown to the horizon and ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... he told how he had thought of the unknown tribes beyond the Alleghanies, living in the gloom of paganism and perishing in darkness, till an intangible sympathy inclined him toward them,—till, as it seemed to him, their great desire for light had entered into and possessed him, drawing him toward them by a mysterious and irresistible attraction. He felt called of God ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... a little gesture of despair, "Scotland Yard has its limitations. We cannot investigate the cause of intangible fears. If you are threatened we can help you, but the mere fact that you fancy there is come sort of vague danger would not ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... underlying conditions have material as well as intangible dimensions. Ongoing U.S. efforts to resolve regional disputes, foster economic, social, and political development, market-based economies, good governance, and the rule of law, while not necessarily focused on combating terrorism, contribute to the campaign by addressing underlying ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - February 2003 • United States
... this friend had assured him, emphatically; "collecting the premiums is another matter... If your fire-insurance premiums aren't paid up inside of two months, the policies are canceled. But they let the others drag on until the cows come home. There's nothing so intangible in this world as insurance. And people hate to ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... If he offended Elizabeth he should not see her again, except at a distance as real as the intangible space always between them now. And if he were silent, he ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... gleaming transfigured, silvery and present under the night-blue sky, throwing dark, substantial shadows, but themselves majestic and dimly present. She, like glimmering gossamer, seemed to burn among them, as they rose like cold fires to the silvery-bluish air. All was intangible, a burning of cold, glimmering, whitish-steely fires. He was afraid of the great moon-conflagration of the cornstacks rising above him. His heart grew smaller, it began to fuse like a bead. He knew he ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... have undertaken. When they have destroyed the Press, they have yet to destroy Paris. When Paris is fallen, there remains France. Let France be annihilated, there still remains the human spirit—a thing intangible as the light, inaccessible as ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... year old—a long-familiar and dreamy state—but its meaning had not been revealed to him until just a moment past. Everything had changed when she looked out with that sweet, steady gaze through the parted veil and then slowly closed it. She had changed. There was something intangible about her that last moment, baffling, haunting. He leaned against a crooked old gate-post that as a boy he had climbed, and the thought came to him that this spot would all his life be vivid and poignant in his memory. The first sight of a blue-eyed, sunny-haired girl, a year and ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... of the most wonderful and perfect spectacles that could be seen in any town on this old earth of ours. While of a different order of architecture, built of other elements and standing under sterner skies, it should have been as precious to man, as sacred and as intangible as the Piazza di San Marco at Venice, the Signoria at Florence or the Piazza del Duomo at Pisa. It constituted a peerless specimen of art, which at all times wrung a cry of admiration from the most indifferent, ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... free; and yet, in open day, and amid ten thousand flaming guardians of freedom,[227] he escapes with perfect impunity! Is he not a most marvelous proper rogue? But perhaps the reason the abolitionists do not lay hands on him is that he is an imaginary being, who, though intangible and invisible, will yet serve just as well to create an alarm and keep up a great excitement as if ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... have, in fact, entered into direct communion with it, "united" with its reality. But this very recognition of the living growing plant does and must entail for you a consciousness of deeper realities, which, as yet, you have not touched: of the intangible things and forces which feed and support it; of the whole universe that touches you through its life. A mere cataloguing of all the plants— though this were far better than your old game of indexing your ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... Englishman. This feeling of his childhood recurred to him now with irresistible force. The throb of the motor of human life was pulsating in his ears; but added to it was something more, something elusive, intangible, but all-powerful. The moment he had arrived within the city limits he had felt the first trace of its presence. As he approached the centre of congestion it had deepened, had become more and more a guiding influence. ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... confined to literary publications; it finds numerous and powerful advocates in men of scientific pursuits, who strive to make the worse appear the better cause. The chemist has never found in his crucible that intangible something which men call spirit; so, in the name of science, he pronounces it a myth. The anatomist has dissected the human frame; but, failing to meet the immaterial substance—the soul—he denies its existence. The physicist has weighed the ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... the room, something intangible went with him. Will felt his moral stamina crumbling. He waited until he heard his brother leave the hotel. Then he went downstairs and returned with a bottle of whiskey. He drank, hid the bottle, and went to bed. He knew that without the whiskey he would have been unable ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... friendship where it will be honorably returned. Austria, then, must be freed from her oppressive alliance with the maritime powers. She has youth and vitality enough to shake off this bondage, and strike for the new path which shall lead her to greatness and glory. There is a moral and intangible greatness, of whose existence these trading Englishmen have no conception, but which the refined and elevated people of France are fully competent to appreciate. France extends to us her hand, and offers us alliance on terms of equality. Cooperating with France, we shall defy the enmity ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... that there was such a book! Oh, I think it is even more extraordinary from the woman's point of view than from the man's. There is something almost terrifying about it. To have had such an influence on the destiny of someone you've never heard of! There's a kind of intangible ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland |
