"Retentive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... makes the soil retentive of manures, because it has in itself a strong power to absorb, and retain[R] fertilizing matters. There is a simple experiment by which this power can ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... was definitely aware. He may have had little or no formal education, but his memory was retentive and capacious, and his caravan journeys, together with the scores of conversations he had held at the yearly fairs, as well as at Mecca, with many cultivated strangers, had packed his mind with a mass of highly valuable matter. In these ways he had learned ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... life which was everlasting because it was typical: the life not which had been relinquished by the one buried there, but the life which the world danced on, forgetful, round his ashes. The Romans, on the contrary, graver and more retentive folk than the Greeks, as well as more domestic, less coffee-house living, appear to have inherited from the Etruscans a desire to preserve the effigy of the dead, a desire unknown to the Greeks. But the Etrusco-Roman monuments, where husband and wife stare forth ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... were considerable. His memory was remarkably retentive and well-stored,—a quality, I should infer from all I have observed, common to most Sovereigns. By the multiplicity of persons they are in the habit of seeing, and the vast variety of objects continually passing ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... time he was successful. With one arm he was enabled to retain the tree in his powerful hug; while with the other he held the horse—his huge paw, with its retentive claws, being firmly fixed under the ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... of riches; for he was naturally inquisitive, and desirous of the conversation of those from whom any information was to be obtained, but by no means solicitous to improve those opportunities that were sometimes offered of raising his fortune; and he was remarkably retentive of his ideas, which, when once he was in possession of them, rarely forsook him; a quality which could never be communicated ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... third dervish came to his turn to speak, he said: 'My tale is but short, although story-telling is my profession. I am the son of a schoolmaster, who, perceiving that I was endowed with a very retentive memory, made me read and repeat to him most of the histories with which our language abounds; and when he found that he had furnished my mind with a sufficient assortment, he turned me out into the world under the garb of dervish, to relate them ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... any credulous foole that will weare it. You shall never observe him make any reply in places of publike concourse; hee ingenuously acknowledges himselfe to bee more bounden to the happinesse of a retentive memory, than eyther ability of tongue, or pregnancy of conceite. He carryes his table-booke still about with him, but dares not pull it out publikely. Yet no sooner is the table drawne, than he turnes notarie; by which meanes hee recovers the charge of his ordinarie. ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... far as I could judge, had been acquired through the theatre. The unacted plays were not familiar to him. Few people realize what a person of alert intelligence and retentive memory can learn of the best English literature through the theatre-going habit. Measuring Field's opportunity by my own, during the decade from 1873 to 1883, here is a list of Shakespearian plays he could have taken in ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... far easier thing to get into a house in Ireland than to get out of it again; for there is an attractive and retentive witchery about the hospitality of the natives of that country, which has no match, as far as I have seen, in the wide world. In other places the people are hospitable or kind to a stranger; but in Ireland the affair is reduced to ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... they obscured whole mines of truth and virtue. Having conceived a vague idea of his theme, he wrote hurriedly upon it. He was impelled by his previous notions and the excitement of the hour. He had a very retentive memory, but it was no aid to correct reasoning. When he saw one evil of the Fathers, a mistake of the church, or a defect in her doctrine, he generalized it until he believed error to be the rule instead of the exception. It has been said that, toward the close ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... amount of information they displayed concerning women, what retentive memories they had, and how very familiar they were with the subject of woman, her ways, and her sex nature. Their mental horizon was bounded on the north by the affairs of the ranch, on the east by the boss and his domestic concerns, on the south by woman as manifested by the various phases ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... she had small choice. She had looked into almost every device for increasing the sum of human knowledge and hastening the millennium, and she thought them all more or less valuable. Her memory, mercifully, was not a retentive one, therefore she remembered little of the beliefs she had outgrown; they never left even a deposit in the stretch of wet sand in which ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... have been born with the material for self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than Edward Gibbon. He had every gift which a great scholar should have, an insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry, a retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which enables a man to rise above the partisan and to become the impartial critic of human affairs. It is true that at the time he was looked upon as bitterly prejudiced in the matter of religious thought, but his views are ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... certainty and little loss of time. The best readers of serious matter have a similar eagerness to discover what the author has to say; they get the author's question, and press on to find his answer. Such readers are both quick and retentive. The dawdling reader, who simply spends so much time and covers so many pages, in the vague hope that something will stick, does not remember the point because he never got the point, and never got it because ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... unfashionably retentive memory bring me so much of sweetness, then am I happy in your being unfashionable." And as she fastened a few to her corsage, placing the remainder in a vase, she continued: "See, god-mother dear, my sweet tea-roses with their perfumed voice will ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... amen: I, Davy Dickey, of the County of ——, and State of Alabama, being of sound mind and retentive memory, but knowing the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death, do hereby make and ordain this—my last ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... was extraordinarily retentive, and he seemed, without conscious effort, to have stored in his mind almost every whimsical or ludicrous narrative which he had read or heard. "On several occasions," says Mr. Brooks, "I have held in my hand a printed slip while he was repeating its contents to ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... a librarian ought to be,—the organizing head, the vigilant guardian, the seeker's index, the scholar's counsellor? His work is not merely that of administration, manifold and laborious as its duties are. He must have a quick intelligence and a retentive memory. He is a public carrier of knowledge in its germs. His office is like that which naturalists attribute to the bumble-bee,—he lays up little honey for himself, but he conveys the fertilizing pollen from flower ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... his children under his own eye, till they could discern between good and evil; so, with the assistance of his generous master, my father ventured on a small farm on his estate. At those years, I was by no means a favourite with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot piety. I say idiot piety, because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time I was ten or eleven years of age, I was ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... something of the world, its sights and festivities, on his own account. True, also, that he tumbled into the river, and nearly ended his career at a very early age. Still he survived his river catastrophe; and, though he gained little book learning, possessed such a good and retentive memory, and was so observant, that his mind became stored with vivid impressions of the scenes and surroundings of his youth, which he related with great ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... Madge, with a retentive memory of the way Miss "Barbarous" had greeted her back in the mountains, stepped toward that much-astonished maiden, opened her red parasol straight in her face, and ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... reading and writing. Next follows arithmetic, with perhaps some rudiments of algebra and geometry. Afterward comes in due order the acquisition of languages, particularly the dead languages; a most fortunate occupation for those years of man, in which the memory is most retentive, and the reasoning powers have yet acquired neither solidity nor enlargement. Such are the occupations of the schoolboy in his ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... is small, shall be stored in tanks until a large volume has accumulated, and that it then be rapidly discharged over the soil. There is no objection to an actual saturation of the ground, provided the soil is not of such a retentive character as to be liable to become puddled, and so made impervious. The tanks being emptied, the flow ceases until they are again filled. During the interval, the liquid settles away in the soil, by which its impurities are removed. ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... professor of Greek. As professor of the mellifluous and most plastic of all the ancient tongues, he would undoubtedly have been proficient, as his college classics still remain fresh in his warm and retentive memory, and his literary taste is so severe and chaste as to make some of his scientific papers read like a psalm. But nature designed him for another, and some think a better, field, and endowed him with powers as a naturalist ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... place for the most part in large underground tanks excavated in the retentive clay. These remarkable tanks are often as much as 30 ft. in diameter by 60 ft. in depth, and hold from 5,000 to 8,000 barrels. In the construction of the tanks the alluvial soil, of which there is about 18 ft. or 20 ft. above the clay, is curbed with ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... happy constitution and genial humors carried him abroad into sunshine and enjoyment, Johnson's physical infirmities and mental gloom drove him upon himself; to the resources of reading and meditation; threw a deeper though darker enthusiasm into his mind, and stored a retentive memory ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... first pointed out that a certain amount of movement between the ends of a fractured bone favours their union by promoting the formation of callus, and advocated the treatment of fractures by massage and movement, discarding almost entirely the use of splints and other retentive appliances. We were early convinced by the teaching of Lucas-Championniere, and have adopted his principles ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... of nervous matter is its retentive power. In other words, the modifications which accompany any experience, besides taking on the permanent character referred to above, pre-dispose the system to transmit impulses again through the same centres. Moreover, ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... clay is made lighter and more porous, and the lightest sand is readily made retentive of moisture and extremely productive, by plowing in different kinds of crops as green manure, such as cow peas, soy beans, the vetches, etc.; crimson clover, winter oats, rye, turnips, and numerous other crops may be sown ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... his musical and vocal lessons, Maltravers gently took the occasion to correct poor Alice's frequent offences against grammar and accent: and her memory was prodigiously quick and retentive. The very tones of her voice seemed altered in the ear of Maltravers; and, somehow or other, the time came when he was no longer sensible of the difference in ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "The retentive power of humus is but half as great as that of calcareous sand. We will add that the power or retaining heat is proportional to the density. It has also a relation to the magnitude of the particles. It is for this reason that ground covered ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... Koenigsgraaf days in consequence of the resolutions which she herself had made. Now, as he often told himself, they were as completely separated as though each had determined never again to communicate with the other. Months had gone by since a word had passed between them. He was a man, patient, retentive, and by nature capable of enduring such a trouble without loud complaint; but he did remember from day to day how near they were to each other, and he did not fail to remind himself that he could hardly expect to find constancy in ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... wide open. I could plainly see its terrible fangs and poison glands. Then, holding its head close up to his lips, he injected the dark saliva into its throat, and once more flung it to the ground. Up to this time he had used no violence—nothing that would have killed a creature so retentive of life as a snake; and I still expected to see the reptile make its escape. Not so, however. It made no effort to move from the spot, but lay stretched out in loose irregular folds, without any perceptible motion ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... towns competed for the honor, Dr. Payson was associated with Chancellor Kent of New York, and Governor John Cotton Smith of Connecticut, as a committee to decide upon the rival claims. He is described as possessing a sharp, vigorous intellect, a lively imagination, a very retentive memory, and was universally esteemed as an able and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... He has paid the penalty of his misdeeds, and I see nothing to be gained by perpetuating them in connection with his own proper name. In all other particulars the foregoing narrative is as true as a tolerably retentive memory has enabled ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... insatiable thirst for knowledge, all the advantages of the village school were given him. His progress here was phenomenal. His eagerness to know truth; his power of mind to perceive, comprehend and analyze; his retentive memory, soon gave him first place among his fellows in the school in the village. A few years passed; he in the meantime having prepared himself, the master-mantle of the village school falls upon him. His work here caused a widening ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... rather retentive memory, and considerable powers of imagination, I was able at times to bring almost all the things of importance which I had met with in my reading, before my mind, and compare them both with each other, and with all that was already in my memory. And whatever appeared to me most rational, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... exercises:—And this was the more remarkable, that having turned his thoughts towards the ministry, he carried on his theological studies at the same time, and made great improvements therein, for his memory was so retentive, that he scarcely forgot any thing had heard or read. It was easy and ordinary for him to inscribe any sermon, after he returned to his chamber, at such a length, that the intelligent and judicious reader, who had heard it preached, would not find ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... through space which has a temperature of 200 deg. below zero; but we live, as it were, in a conservatory, in the midst of perpetual winter. We are roofed over by the air that treasures the heat, floored under by strata both absorptive and retentive of heat, [Page 95] and between the earth and air violets grow and grains ripen. The sun has a strange chemical power. It kisses the cold earth, and it blushes with flowers and matures the fruit and grain. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... dreary rattling of the box in demonstration of its retentive capacities. The mere force of the show stopped him from retorting; but when, to excuse Master Gammon for his tardiness, she related that he also had a money-box, and was in search of it, the farmer threw up his head with the vigour of a young man, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... lightly of this multifarious knowledge, and nothing can be more probable, than that attainment of many languages, with any approach to their fluent use, is beyond the power of man. But his diligence was exemplary, his memory retentive, and his understanding accomplished by classical knowledge; with those qualities, much might be done in any pursuit; and though modern orientalists protest against the superficiality of his acquirements, their variety has been admitted, and still ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... extraordinary powers of understanding, which were much cultivated by study, and still more by meditation and reflection. His memory was remarkably retentive, his imagination uncommonly vigorous, and his judgement keen and penetrating. He had a strong sense of the importance of religion; his piety was sincere, and sometimes ardent; and his zeal for the interests of virtue was often manifested in his conversation and in his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... but the work did not suit his strenuous nature, and he returned home and soon afterward received an appointment in this detective service. Job was known in the force as quiet, self-contained, observant, patient, and was possessed of an extraordinarily retentive memory. Rarely was it necessary for him to ...
— The Mystery of Monastery Farm • H. R. Naylor
... Fulton. I'm going along like an old man I used to know who used to start to tell a story about his grandfather. He had an awfully retentive memory, and he never finished the story, because he switched off into something else. He used to tell about how his grandfather one day went into a pasture, where there was a ram. The old man dropped a silver dime in the grass, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... names—geographical ones in particular—by the score, impressing them on stubborn memories through the aid of some easily-learnt rhyme, or comic association, that made even the dullest comprehension retentive ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... beautiful language in a badly-prepared lesson on Virgil, or expressing unreal indignation and unjustifiably exalted sentiments to evil doers, and one realizes his disadvantage against the quiet youngster whose retentive memory was storing up all these impressions for an ultimate judgment, and one understands, too, a certain relief that mingled with his undeniable emotion when at last the time came for young Benham, "the one living purpose" of his life, to be off to Minchinghampton ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... retentive mind had seized, long ago, on Rowlatt's recommendation at the Little Bear Inn, and he had developed, perhaps half consciously, a half sense of humour. A whole sense, however, is not congruous with the fervid beliefs and soaring ambitions ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... my friends from the superficial nature of my acquisitions, which being, in the mercantile phrase, got up for society, very often proved flimsy in the texture; and thus the gifts of an uncommonly {p.047} retentive memory and acute powers of perception were sometimes detrimental to their possessor by encouraging him to a ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... self-deceit, or the wish to deceive others; nervousness or fear, inducing reticence and concealment of faults, excess of modesty or the occasional tendency of persons of genius to underrate their own powers, inattention to studies, want of application, power to learn too easily, lack of retentive memory, exaggeration and boldness, bad temper, sullenness, disposition to quarrel, cowardice, cruelty, caprice as distinct from versatility, selfishness, greediness, laziness, and its various causes, and generally the germs of all faults and vicious propensities, ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... Massachusetts, October 18th, 1829, and received his education at the public school. He was one of the brightest scholars in his class, learned easily, was fond of books, never wearied of study, and never forgot what he acquired. At the start he was blest with a most marvelous and retentive memory, and a keen sense of the practical side of life. "It was thus," as one of his friends has remarked, "that his school days were profitable to him to a degree not common, and it was thus that his rapidly-growing ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... societies having a definite membership, with initiatory rites and reciprocal duties. Each society had its peculiar songs; and there were officials chosen from among the members because of their good voices and retentive memories, to lead the singing and to transmit with accuracy the stories and songs of the society, which frequently preserved bits of tribal history. Fines were imposed upon any member who sang incorrectly, while ridicule always and everywhere followed ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... principle, time-serving and irreverent. The lawyers and other professional men were to be found, for the most part, in Paris and in the towns. They had their livelihood in the irregularities of society, and, as a class, were retentive of ancient custom and present social habits. Although by birth they belonged in the main to the third estate, they were in reality adjunct to the first, and consequently, being integral members of neither, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... native, was at length made intelligible to our Barwan guide, and he shaped his course accordingly. He took us through scrubs, having in the centre those holes where water usually lodges for some time after rain, where some substratum of clay happens to be retentive enough to impede the common absorption. But the water in these holes had been recently drunk, and the mud trampled into hard clay by the hoofs of cattle. Thus it is, that the aborigines first become sensible of the approach of the white man. These retired spots, where ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... be acquired between the ages of ten and eighteen—rules of grammar, strings of vocables, dates, names of towns, rivers, and mountains, mathematical formulas, etc. All depends here on the receptive and retentive powers of the mind. The memory has to be strengthened, without being overtaxed, till it acts almost mechanically. Learning by heart, I believe, cannot be too assiduously practised during the years spent ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... decomposers are thoroughly inoculated with microorganisms that can consume cellulose and lignin. Even though it looks like humus, it has not yet fully decomposed. It does have a water-retentive, granular structure that facilitates the presence of air and moisture throughout the mass creating perfect conditions for microbial digestion to ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... objection, that the Iliad and Odyssey are too long to have been preserved by memory, it may be met by a simple denial. It is a strange objection indeed, coming from a man of Wolf's retentive memory. I do not see how the acquisition of the two poems can be regarded as such a very arduous task; and if literature were as scanty now as in Greek antiquity, there are doubtless many scholars who would long since have had them at their tongues' end. Sir G. C. Lewis, ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... Decomposing sandstone, and slate, known in Jamaica as rotten rock, mixed with vegetable mould, is one of the most favorable soils. The subsoil should be also carefully examined by a boring augur, for a stiff moist clay, or marly bottom retentive of moisture, is particularly injurious to the plant. A dark, rusty-colored sand, or a ferruginous marl on a substratum of limestone, kills the tree in a few years. In virgin lands, after the wood has been felled and cleared, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... has arrived, and the expansion given to the subject of the Day of Judgment. If we consider his language and manner, we remark the facility and copious flow of his poetic diction, but with a something that suggests the retentive mind of the student; his cumulation of old heroic phraseology not unlike the romantic poetry of Scott, joined occasionally with a departure from old poetic usage which seems like a slip on the part of an accomplished imitator.[134] Occasionally he has a Latin ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... useful, is pre-eminently so to the business man. It must be both retentive and quick. By proper training this faculty may be so cultivated that names, dates and events to a surprising number may be readily recalled. The ability to greet a customer by calling him by name is considered very valuable ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... of Montague, with Hurd, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, and the Rev. Mr. Arnold, as preceptor and sub-preceptor. During his education, common report spoke highly of the prince's quickness of apprehension, retentive memory, and general aptitude for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... integument of ragged cotton, or the long loose wool of a merino sheep yet unwoven into cloth. And as they forced their way through it—at times requiring strength to extricate them from its tough retentive hold—they could see the hideous forms of the huge spiders who had spun and woven these strangely patterned webs scuttling off, and from their dark retreats in the crevices of the trees looking defiant and angry at the intruders ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... sets of words. The first, which is related to the tain group (see below), has a key-syllable that means holding: tenant, tenement, tenure, tenet, tenor, tenable, tenacious, contents, contentment, lieutenant, maintenance, sustenance, countenance, appurtenance, detention, retentive, pertinacity, pertinent, continent, abstinence, continuous, retinue. The second has a key-syllable that means stretching: tend, tender, tendon, tendril, tendency, extend, subtend, distend, pretend, contend, attendant, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... I have a retentive memory. Of course I depend very largely upon it for all the small details that Roger has from time to time vouchsafed me in regard to his relations with Margarita, or I could not very well be writing these idle memories, but Roger was always a poor writer—that is to say, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... and plays full seven thousand pieces. In short, he plays every piece that he has ever heard. How almost godlike (it cannot be brought to human comparison) is this retentive, this perfect memory, as relating to all that is musical, ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... of learning, we exchanged our notions with great delight. I perceived that I had, every day, more of his confidence, and always found new cause of admiration in the profundity of his mind. His comprehension is vast, his memory capacious and retentive, his discourse is methodical, and his ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... comedy assumes naturally the form of the apophthegm—it is epigrammatic and compressed that it may be pungent and striking. Hence, no species of writing is more allied to or more likely to pass into household words, and to become proverbs among a people of quick retentive powers, such as the Greeks were, to whom we are perhaps indebted for this. I send you the extract from Alciatus; Emblemata, No. 162. Antverpiae, 18mo. 1584. ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... Euclid's Elements, both of which I found (to my almost equal wonder) he had managed to peruse: he was taking stock by the way, of the people, the products, and the country, with an eye unusually observant and a memory unusually retentive; and he was collecting for himself a body of magnanimous and semi-intellectual nonsense, which he supposed to be the natural thoughts and to contain the whole duty of the born American. To be pure-minded, to be patriotic, to get culture ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I was considered a very dull boy. My memory was not retentive, and I comprehended ideas and formulas expressed by others in a very imperfect manner. I needed a careful, judicious, and patient teacher, who understood the character of my mind, and who was able to come down to it with instruction in the simplest and clearest forms; thus helping me to ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... my violin and we played. Cecilia's musical memory is prodigious. Mine is also retentive and precise. But she had too much inventive genius for precision, unless the notes were before her, and sometimes I corrected her. Next, this delicious interlude over, I begged that the ladies would do me the honour to dine ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... and not too fast, leaning a little to talk with Miriam as he went. Their pace was regulated by her mother's, who advanced on the arm of Gabriel Nash (Nick Dormer was on her other side) in refined deprecation. Her sloping back was before them, exempt from retentive stillness in spite of her rigid principles, with the little drama of her lost and recovered shawl ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... garden is converted into front yard, building spot and back yard, containing all the usual necessary appendages to a dwelling place, so that here all traces of former days have passed from the spot, and only live inscribed upon the retentive tablet of Memory. On the east end was another small enclosure where we used to spend our leisure hours in the cultivation of flowers and medicinal plants. Here the tall lilac waved its graceful head beneath our bed-room window, and the morning sun, as he parted the rosy ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... some degree of curliness or waviness to the hair when it is naturally straight, and to render it more retentive of the curl imparted to it by papers or by other modes of dressing it, various methods are often adopted and different cosmetics employed. The first object appears to be promoted by keeping the hair for a time ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... action, must be known, and to be known must be observed; while in other forms of lessons the attention may be diverted for a moment to return to the consideration of exactly what was being observed before. It goes without saying that in one case quick and accurate observation, a retentive memory, and the association of causes and effects follow, and that in the other ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... Testament, and, at the Synagogue school, all the minutiae of the Jewish Law. The pupil was not allowed to write anything down; all was committed to the memory, which in consequence became extremely retentive. The perfect pupil 'lost not a drop from his teacher's cistern.' At the age of about fourteen the boy would be sent to Jerusalem, to study under one of the great Rabbis; in St. Paul's case it was Gamaliel. Under ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... to reach the school ideal, thus force herself to drive hard nails of fact into her vagrant thoughts. And with success. For she had, it turned out, a retentive memory, and to her joy learning by heart came easy to her—as easy as to the most brilliant scholars in the form. From now on she gave this talent full play, memorising even pages of the history book in her zeal; and before many weeks had passed, in all lessons except those in arithmetic—you ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... so happened that, in my schoolboy days, I had joined a class of young fellows who were learning what is called the "Sarvin' of Mass" and had impressed it so accurately on a pretty retentive memory, that I never forgot it. At length, Ned pulled, out his beads, and bedewed himself most copiously with the holy water. He then shouted out, with a voice which resembled that of a man in an ague fit, "Dom-i-n-us vo-bis-cum?" "Et cum spiritu tuo," I replied, in a husky sepulchral tone, from ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... take definite shape while she is speeding on a train to fulfill a concert engagement and she will jot it down in spite of the roar and vibration of railway travel. As the train rushes on the composition may be completely worked out in the composer's mind before the journey's end, and so retentive is Chaminade's memory that, when she returns to her villa in Vesinet, near the forest of St. Germain not far from Paris, she can seat herself at her table and copy the work from that mental vision of it which ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... thing that I am never able to cook anything without the aid of the book. Even if I prepare the same dish seven times a week I must have the printed instructions constantly before me, or I am lost. This is especially strange, because I have a retentive memory for other things. My mind is crammed with odd facts retained from casual reading. If you asked me, the date of the Tai-ping Rebellion (though you're not likely to) I could tell you at once that it originated in 1850 and was ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... must needs have subtle and accurate knowledge behind it; but the possessor of such knowledge is seldom able to impart it with any approach to lucidity. On the other hand, it frequently happens that one who has a retentive memory is able to impart information glibly and correctly, without possessing any real knowledge of ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... parts allotted to Ensign Bellefleur. It did not seem very much, so he felt a little encouraged, and taking Miss Clarissa's advice, set the book open on the table and began learning what he would have to say, while going on with his toilet. He had a really surprisingly retentive memory, and picked up a good bit even in that ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... was a brilliant and persuasive extempore speaker. He possest in high degree faculties essential to great oratory—a capacious mind, retentive memory, logical acumen, vivid imagination, deep concentration, and wealth of language. He had an extraordinary personal fascination, largely due to his broad sympathy ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... property at Sellerhausen near Leipzig. In 1636, his library and MSS. at Sellerhausen having been destroyed by fire, he removed to the Paulinum at Leipzig, where he died on the 17th of September 1658. Barth was a very voluminous writer; his works, which were the fruits of extensive reading and a retentive memory, are unmethodical and uncritical and marred by want of taste and of clearness. He appears to have been excessively vain and of an unamiable disposition. Of his writings the most important are; Adversaria (1624), ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... college-friend John Hall Stevenson, whose well-stocked library contained a choice but heterogeneous collection of books—old French "ana," and the learning of mediaeval doctors—books intentionally and books unintentionally comic, the former of which Sterne read with an only too retentive a memory for their jests, and the latter with an acutely humorous appreciation of their solemn trifling. Later on it will be time to note the extent to which he utilized these results of his widely discursive reading, and to examine the legitimacy ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... hair, a register of most of the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society within the last fifty years. So far indeed did his information extend, and so acutely retentive was his memory, that he was supposed to be the only man who could have told you who Julius Beaufort, the banker, really was, and what had become of handsome Bob Spicer, old Mrs. Manson Mingott's father, who had disappeared so mysteriously (with a large sum ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... very good girl. She has been to school all this summer, and has learned to read very fluently. She has committed to memory twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters in the Bible. She has a remarkably retentive memory and will make a ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... London the passage, in which he speaks of my illustrious friend. 'I must by no means omit Bolt-court, the long residence of Doctor SAMUEL JOHNSON, a man of the strongest natural abilities, great learning, a most retentive memory, of the deepest and most unaffected piety and morality, mingled with those numerous weaknesses and prejudices which his friends have kindly taken care to draw from their dread abode[802]. I brought on myself his transient anger, by observing that in his tour in Scotland, he ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... not affect the senses. Justice should not shut any door that leads to truth. No one will pretend that, because you do not believe in hell, your sight is impaired, or your hearing dulled, or your memory rendered less retentive. A witness in a court is called upon to tell what he has seen, what he has heard, what he remembers, not what he believes about gods and devils and hells and heavens. A witness substantiates not a faith, but a fact. In order to ascertain whether a witness will ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... undesirable. Let us, for example, go back quite beyond the invention of printing and try to imagine a man who had read all the rolls destroyed in the Library of Alexandria by successive burnings. (Some reckon the number of these MSS at 700,000.) Suppose, further, this man to be gifted with a memory retentive as Lord Macaulay's. Suppose lastly that we go to such a man and beg him to repeat to us some chosen one of the fifty or seventy lost, or partially lost, plays of Euripides. It is incredible that he ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... professors seem to have left any marked influence on his mind or character; indeed they had little opportunity for doing so, for after the first term his attendance at lectures almost entirely ceased. Though never a student, he must have been at all times a considerable reader; he had a retentive memory and quick understanding; he read what interested him; absorbed, understood, and retained it. He left the university with his mind disciplined indeed but not drilled; he had a considerable knowledge ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... among the emotions that grew round that child-like heart; shame, fear, and grief, however they might overshadow it for a time, left no taint of their presence on its bright, fine surface. Tender, perilously alive to sensation, strangely retentive of kindness as she was by nature, the very solitude to which she had been condemned had gifted her, young as she was, with a martyr's endurance of ill, and with a ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Count Platen now proved very serviceable. He passed the examination with great distinction, and in the course of it, to the surprise of the examiners, showed that he could repeat Euclid verbatim,—not by the exercise of the memory, which in Ericsson is not remarkably retentive, but from his perfect mastery of geometrical science. There is no doubt that it is this thorough knowledge of geometry to which he is indebted for his clear conceptions on all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the very next hotel they called at—an old-fashioned house in close proximity to the harbour. There was a communicative landlord there who evidently possessed and was proud of a retentive memory, and he no sooner heard the reason of Gilling's call upon him than he bustled into activity, and produced the register ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... than loamy or heavy lands? We answer—because, in the first place the rains which quickly descend through the open soil, wash down out of the reach of vegetation the soluble fertilizing matters, especially the nitrates, for which the soil has no retentive power; and in the second place, from the porosity of the soil, the air has too great access, so that the vegetable and animal matters of manures decay too rapidly, their volatile portions, ammonia and carbonic acid, escape into the atmosphere, ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... incomparably lucid moments of that brilliant intellect. All the particulars of classic reading which the year before he worked up in the new edition of the Adagia were still at his immediate disposal in that retentive and capacious memory. Reflecting at his ease on all that wisdom of the ancients, he secreted the ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... My memory, if a slow, is a retentive one. I acquire deliberately both knowledge and liking. The acquisition grows into my brain, and the sentiment into my breast; and it is not as the rapid-springing produce which, having no root in itself, flourishes verdurous enough for a time, but too soon falls withered away. Attention, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Practically, does all this help one much? It is possible that some who have passed for the deepest observers of human nature, owed their renown more to an acute observation of the phenomena of feeling, an intuitive knowledge of what people like and dislike, a retentive memory, and a happy knack of making all these available at the right moment, than to any profound reasoning on abstract principles. Like some untaught arithmeticians, their calculations came out correct, but ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... disquisition, and soon turned my thoughts to his other suggestion, a tale. His demands upon me were now frequent, and, to facilitate my labours, I bethought myself of the resource of translation. I had scarcely any convenience with respect to the procuring of books; but, as my memory was retentive, I frequently translated or modelled my narrative upon a reading of some years before. By a fatality, for which I did not exactly know how to account, my thoughts frequently led me to the histories of celebrated robbers; and I related, from time to time, incidents and ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... the most deservedly loved men of his generation, fell in the Boer War in 1901. If he had not been a great soldier, Colonel Laurie would have been a great historian. His knowledge of history, more especially of military history, was profound, and his memory was singularly retentive. He had, moreover, a very sound judgment in the marshalling of facts. He had written with a pen of light the history of his regiment, which he loved, and which loved him, and on which in life and in death ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie |
