"Preciousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which we have passed, the life-blood dearer than our own which has drenched distant fields, should remind us of the preciousness of distinctive American ideas. They who would seek in their foolish pride to establish the pomp of liveried servants in America are doing that which is simply absurd. A servant can never in our country be the mere appendage to another man, to be marked like ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... went on to tell stories from the lives of these boys, finding in each of them some illustration of a Christian virtue and conveying to his listeners a sense of the extraordinary preciousness of human life, so that there was no one who heard him but was fain to weep for those young bluejackets and marines taken in their prime. He inspired in Mark a sense of shame that he had ever thought of people in the aggregate, that he had ever walked along ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... that he drives us to the dilemma either of placing Mr. Choate in quite an unworthy rank as a scholar, or of concluding, that, in the case of these conversations, he bestowed upon his listener very little of any particular preciousness, or that what else was bestowed was not understood or remembered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... from the keys and, as it were, died in her lap. Jim Dyckman understood a woman for once, and in a gush of pity for her and of resentment for her disprized preciousness caught at her to embrace her. Her hands came to life. The wifely instinct leaped to the fore. She struck and wrenched and drove him off. She ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... at such length because it is so characteristic of American academic conditions at the present day. Graduate schools still are something of a novelty, and higher diplomas something of a rarity. The latter, therefore, carry a vague sense of preciousness and honor, and have a particularly "up-to-date" appearance, and it is no wonder if smaller institutions, unable to attract professors already eminent, and forced usually to recruit their faculties from the relatively young, should hope to compensate for the obscurity of the names of their ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... forget the inestimable preciousness of the new Promethean gifts because they have become familiar. Think first of the privilege we all possess now of preserving the lineaments and looks ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... buried their dead not only with their weapons and armour, but also with their most precious possessions; and in proportion to the rank and wealth of the deceased were the number and value of the offerings deposited with him in his tomb. We are amazed at the variety and preciousness of the golden ornaments found by Dr. Schliemann in the tombs at Mycenae; and every Etruscan cemetery that has been opened has yielded an immense number of most precious articles, which the devotion of the survivors sacrificed to the manes of their departed ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... informal measures of ejectment regarding the intruder. No; Diana could not risk that. She must wait till her mother's nerves and temper were at least in their ordinary state of wholesome calm, before she would shock them by the disclosures she had to make. And almost by their preciousness to herself, Diana gauged their unwelcomeness to her mother. It was always so. The two natures were so unlike, that not even the long habit of years could draw them into sympathy. They thought alike about nothing except the housewifely matters of practical life. So these evenings when Mrs. Starling ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... billions of humanity,—even so surely as sorrow lives,—feels and thinks in some special way unlike any other; and goodness in each has its unlikeness to all other goodness,— and thus its own infinite preciousness; for however humble, however small, it is something all alone, and God never repeats his work. No heart-beat is cheap, no gentleness is despicable, no kindness is common; and Death, in removing a life—the simplest life ignored,—removes what never will reappear through the ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... rejoiced in it long before the revision appeared, I should have owed the revisers endless gratitude, if for nothing more than the genuine reading of St. Matthew's report of the story of the youth who came to our Lord. Whoever does not welcome the change must fail to see its preciousness. ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... affectionately kissed his cheek. Thus a champion of liberty from the Old World and one from the New were linked in this little act of helpfulness. When he was an old man, Whitman still treasured the reminiscence as one of indescribable preciousness. ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... was borne along as silently as though she slept, being, I doubt not, still exhausted with her swoon. When I came close to Mistress Mary's chair, forth came her little hand, shining with that preciousness of fairness beyond that of a pearl, and "Master Wingfield," said she in a whisper, lest she disturb Catherine, "what, what, I pray thee, was it ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... precious to virtuous men. And let none talk of 'the play-game of a painted stone,' of 'the worthless honours of a bust.' The worth of honour lies in that same worthlessness. Fair money wage for fair work done, no wise man will despise. But that is pay, not honour; the very preciousness whereof—like the old victor's parsley crown in the Greek games—is that it had no value, gave no pleasure, save that which is imperishable, spiritual, and not to be represented by ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... lonely valley. But the time was now fast approaching when she must see him no longer,—or, what was still worse, behold him with eyes whose every look belonged to another, and there was a melancholy preciousness in these last moments, which made her heart cling to them as it would to life. During the latter part of the journey, indeed, she had sunk into a deep sadness from which nothing but the presence of the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... facts still found a response in the consciousness where they were once a rapture of novelty; but the response was faint and thin; he could not warm over the old mood in which he once treasured them all away as of equal preciousness. ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... portion of my Narrative, I would add some hints on a few passages of the word of God, both because I have so very frequently found them little regarded by Christians, and also because I have proved their preciousness, in some measure, in my own experience; and therefore wish that all my fellow-saints may share the ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... "all the king's horses," tried in vain to put him up again. This immemorial game, watched by Gyp a hundred times, had to-day a special preciousness. If he could be so ridiculously young, what became of her doubts? Looking at his face pulled this way and that, lazily imperturbable under the pommelings of those small fingers, she thought: 'And that girl ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the San Tome mine. The doctor was loyal to the mine. It presented itself to his fifty-years' old eyes in the shape of a little woman in a soft dress with a long train, with a head attractively overweighted by a great mass of fair hair and the delicate preciousness of her inner worth, partaking of a gem and a flower, revealed in every attitude of her person. As the dangers thickened round the San Tome mine this illusion acquired force, permanency, and authority. It claimed him at last! This claim, exalted by a spiritual detachment from the usual sanctions ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... under it, and drawing it gently to her, slid down with it. When she felt her feet firm on the floor, filled with the solemn composure of holy awe she carried the gift of the child Jesus to the candle, that she might the better admire its beauty and know its preciousness. But the light had no sooner fallen upon it than a strange undefinable doubt awoke within her. Whatever it was, it was the very essence of loveliness—the tiny darling with its alabaster face, and its delicately modelled hands and fingers! A long night-gown ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... not sure that Kitty Morrow is not a rarer contribution to knowledge. Of course, that sort of selfish girl has always been known, but she has not met the open recognition which constitutes knowledge, and so she has the preciousness of a find. She is at once tiresome and vivacious; she is cold-hearted but not cold-blooded, and when she lets herself go in an outburst of passion for the celibate young ritualist, Knellwood, she becomes fascinating. She does not let herself go without having assured herself that he loves her, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... new feeling of the preciousness of life to know keenly what it means to fail, to be like a tiny spark, struggling to maintain itself in the darkness, and finding that all it can do is not sufficient, and that it is sinking back into nothingness forever. ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... the Lord permitted him thus to try many broken cisterns, and to taste the wormwood of many earthly streams, in order that in after days, by the side of the fountain of living waters, he might point to the world he had forever left, and testify the surpassing preciousness of what he had ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... forth in all His untold preciousness and proclaims the glorious message, "Deliver him, that poor helpless sinner, from going down into the pit. I have found a ransom." [Footnote: ...
— The One Great Reality • Louisa Clayton
... exchange for the romantic barbarism which had underlain so much that was picturesque in the sixteenth century—a barbarism which had come down from the late Middle Ages, and which was really a dissolution of strong things outworn—to exchange for this a preciousness of quality as against mere rude bulk. It desired to introduce depth of purpose in the place of chaotic moral disorder, originality in place of a frenzied and incoherent eccentricity, and to found a solid structure upon ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... atmosphere—"perhaps," he mused, overflowing with sweetness—"perhaps the laws of Art Nouveau are divine!—perhaps angels and cherubim, unseen, watch fondly o'er my babes, lest all unaware they guiltlessly violate some subtle canon of Art, marring the perfect symmetry of eternal preciousness." ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... soft trustful face, and he felt, with a sense almost of awe, the preciousness of such a love as this, a love which, comprehending the terrible period of anxiety through which he had to pass, was not ashamed to seek to sweeten it for him by the simple charm of such an offering. Then, at the sound of returning footsteps in the hall, he let go her hands, and with her fond farewell ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... synods may order forms of prayer. They may get speeches to be spoken upward by people on their knees. They may obtain a juxtaposition in space of curiously tessellated pieces of Bible and Prayer Book. But when I speak of the rareness and preciousness of prayers, I mean such prayers as contain three conditions—permanence, capability jot being really prayed, and universality. Such prayers primates and senates can no more command than they can order a new Cologne Cathedral or another epic poem."—The ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... in the young man's heart. A disguised, beggared outcast, he had found out the value of an honest name; forsaken, unfriended, he had learned the preciousness of home and love; made a servant of, tyrannized over, and held in low esteem, he had been taught by hard experience the secret of true humility and charity—the esteeming of others better ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... wheel,' said the voice which had already grown dear to Curdie: its very tone was precious like a jewel, not as a jewel, for no jewel could compare with it in preciousness. ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... full of resource, so considerate and helpful, ever since the news of Sir Richard Calmady's desperate state had broken up the peace of the little party at Ormiston Castle, now five days ago, that she forgave him even his preciousness of speech, even his slightly irritating superiority of manner. She had ceased to be on her guard with him during these days of travel, had come to take his presence for granted and to treat him with the comfortable indifference of honest good-fellowship. So, it followed that now, speaking with ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet |
