"Sameness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... assauge it. Then beneficent healing passions came to his aid, though not, he knew, the spiritual ones. He descended upon scorn, and finally a cold acceptance of what she was. And then she seemed to have died, and in the inexorable sameness of the days and nights he dismissed her memory, and he meditated upon life and what might be made of it by men who had still the power to make. But now hurrying to her along the quiet street, one clarifying word explained her, and, unreasoningly, brought back his love. She had ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... night owl screech. Earth is the only dwelling place of noise. Death knows it not. Methinks a shriek were music, a sigh were melody, a groan a feast. But no. Time has almost used me to its sombre sameness. Is not time tired to have gone so long the same unchanging course? I cannot move. My joints are aching with continued rest. I cannot turn:—my sides are sunken in. Would I could turn and crush them into bones with my reclining weight. Is my heart sinful that it weighs down all my body. Is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... money-making fever always tends to panic. Panic is the great evil now, and panic needs a panacea. What better one can we invent than music? It were the very madness of economy to cut off that. Some margin every life must have, around this everlasting sameness of the dull page of necessity,—some opening into the free infinite of joy and careless ideality, or the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... rectangular patterns of roads and highways, cultivated fields and orangegroves, checkered towns and sprawling suburbs come to an abrupt stop where they were blotted out by the regimented uniformity of the onrushing grass. For miles we flew above its dazzling green until our eyes ached from the sameness and our minds were dulled from the lack of variety below. On the sea far ahead a frothing whitecap broke the monotony of color, a flyingfish jumped out of the water to glisten for a moment in the sun, loose seaweed floated on the surface, to change ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... fillets, painted like marble that cross the opening in such a way that in the middle rest the two parts and one of the bands, where medallions are placed, as shall be told in due course; and this has been done to avoid monotony, which is born of sameness. Now, at the head of the chapel, in the first opening, which is one of the smaller ones, is seen how the Omnipotent God in the heavens by the movement of His arms divides light from darkness. In the second space is how He created ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... "whether philosophers or ideots, act for themselves. Every one would then appear what he is; enterprize would be encouraged, and imitation abolished; genius would feel its superiority, and folly its insignificance; and then, and then only, should we cease to be surfeited with that eternal sameness of manner and appearance which at present runs through all ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... existence; and when Fernand essayed to console her, she responded by deep-drawn sighs. His love was based on those enduring elements which would have rendered him content to dwell forever with Nisida on that island, which had no sameness for him so long as she was there to be his companion; but her love subsisted rather sensually than mentally; and now that her fierce and long-pent up desires had experienced gratification, she longed to return to the land of ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... ever forget his first meeting with the sugar pine. In most coniferous trees there is a sameness of form and expression which at length becomes wearisome to most people who travel far in the woods. But the sugar pines are as free from conventional forms as any of the oaks. No two are so much alike as to hide their individuality ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... produces little alteration on the mind, and seems like the continuation of the same action; and as the continuation of the same action is an effect of the continued view of the same object, it is for this reason we attribute sameness to every succession of related objects. The thought slides along the succession with equal facility, as if it considered only one object; and therefore confounds ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... Since then four years have passed, during which the monotony of his duty in hunting Covenanters had been relieved by the office of Provost of Dundee, in which it is said he ruled severely, and the sameness of Jean's life at Dudhope by a visit to the Court of London, where she produced a vast impression, and was said to have been adored in the highest quarter. There were hours when she felt very lonely, although she would not have confessed this, being a woman of invincible spirit ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... travelled along the banks of the river, as the rubus and anthistiria were so thickly intermingled, that they could scarcely force a passage. After proceeding about eight miles, a bold rocky mount terminated on the river, and broke the sameness which had so long wearied us: we ascended this hill, which I named Mount Amyot, and from the summit had one of the most extensive views that can be imagined. On the opposite side of the river was another hill precisely similar to Mount Amyot, leaving a passage between them for the ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... that Berkeley here confounded sameness numero with sameness specie, that is, with exact resemblance, and assumed the former where there was only the latter; not perceiving that when we say we have the same thought to-day which we had yesterday, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... the changes of age in a human being. Under his hand young men and women grow older, cease to be young, grow old, with the noiseless regularity of life; their mutability never hides their sameness, their consistency shows and endures through their disintegration. They grow as we all do, they change in the only possible direction, that which results from the clash between themselves and their conditions. If I looked for the most beautiful illustration ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... no grievous fears their lives annoy, Is it not worse no prospects to enjoy? 'Tis cheerless living in such bounded view, With nothing dreadful, but with nothing new; Nothing to bring them joy, to make them weep, - The day itself is, like the night, asleep; Or on the sameness if a break be made, 'Tis by some pauper to his grave convey'd; By smuggled news from neighb'ring village told, News never true, or truth a twelvemonth old; By some new inmate doom'd with them to dwell, Or justice come to see that all goes well; Or ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... an apothecary's son, a regular shop-drudge," he raged inwardly, watching the youth of the Faubourg Saint-Germain pass under his eyes; graceful, spruce, fashionably dressed, with a certain uniformity of air, a sameness due to a fineness of contour, and a certain dignity of carriage and expression; though, at the same time, each one differed from the rest in the setting by which he had chosen to bring his personal characteristics into prominence. Each ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... runs through nearly all histories of bear-fights, and one Indian-fight might readily be mistaken for another. So also bear-fighters and Indian-fighters are akin in character, and the pioneers who appear in literature leave a sense of sameness upon the reader's mind. Nevertheless, one continues to read of them with considerable patience, and likes the stories because he liked their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... possible. Mr. Renour is bringing a friend with him, so that will make twelve. The coast is pretty, but I can't describe scenery, especially as all of this has been done dozens of times before, and also, though it is beautiful, it is rather of a sameness; and half the time, having been so long in the train we did not look out, there are such a number of amusing things to do ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... got rather tired of it, for there was an elegant sameness about these evenings that became intensely wearisome to the uninitiated, but she fancied that as each had his part to play he managed to do it with spirit. Night after night the wag told his stories, the poet read his poems, the singers warbled, ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... as it had been outside the woods in the open. Darkness indeed was impossible in this land; under all circumstances the light seemed the same—neither too bright nor too dim—a comfortable, steady glow, restful, almost hypnotic in its sameness. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... There is a remarkable sameness about the towns in the Philippines. They all have a large open square about the middle of the town, around three sides of which are Chinese stores, unless one side lies open to the sea, and on the fourth is the great stone ecclesia. ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... short of reality. It is not an easy task, however, to introduce the same character in four separate works, and to maintain the peculiarities that are indispensable to identity, without incurring a risk of fatiguing the reader with sameness; and the present experiment has been so long delayed quite as much from doubts of its success as from any other cause. In this, as in every other undertaking, it must be the "end" that will "crown ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... straight chaussees, paved in the middle, and bordered by equidistant poplars on either side, and leading from town to town, and the monotonous perspective of which is so desolating to heart and eye; backwards or forwards, it is always the same, with a flat sameness of outlook to right and left, and every 450 seconds the chime would boom and flounder heavily by, with a dozen sharp railway whistles after it, like swordfish after a whale, piercing it ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... modified specimen of the evil. Hence, in Falconer the obsolete mythological allusions—the names with classical terminations—the perpetual apostrophes—the set and stilted speeches he puts into the mouths of heroes—the bombast, verbiage, and sounding sameness of much of his verse. Nor do we greatly admire the story which he introduces with the poem, nor the discrimination of his characters, nor, what may be called strictly, the pathos of the piece. Indeed, considering the size of the poem, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... poor place. It consists of one long narrow, irregular street, lying along the Shannon, in which slated houses and thatched cabins delightfully relieve each other, and prevent the eye from being annoyed with sameness or monotony. The houses are mostly all shops, and even the cabins profess to afford "lodging and entherthainment;" so that it is to be presumed that the poverty of the place is attributable to circumstances ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... I had a settled scheme for going to travel and work in Egypt, and it would have been better for me than Scotland on account of the greater sameness of the effects. I mentioned this project to Mr. Ruskin, who said that he avoided travelling in countries where he could not be sure of ordinary comforts, such as a white table-cloth and a clean knife and fork; still, he would put up with a great deal of inconvenience ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... those who have dwelt in hell always smell of brimstone. Who can imagine the awfulness of it—the chains, the arduous and continual labour, the whip of the quarter-masters, the company of thieves and outcast ruffians, all dreadful in its squalid sameness? ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... had been during the last month, to the monotonous sameness of a low flat country, the banks of the river covered with mangroves overhanging the water, and in many parts, in consequence of its extraordinary height, apparently growing out of it; the lofty summit of Fernando Po, and the still loftier mountains ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... as we have seen, began, early in their course, to deviate into veins foreign to their original design: points of native humour and wit, and lines of personal interest were taken in to diversify and relieve the allegorical sameness; and these grew more and more into the main texture of the workmanship. As the new elements gained strength, much of the old treasure proved to be mere refuge and dross; as such it was discarded; while so much of sterling wealth as had been accumulated was sucked in, retained, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... broad road, with its white lines of curb-stones running on and on, and losing itself in the deep foliage of the plain. Its windings and turnings, though coming only at an interval of many miles, were a pleasant relief from the sameness of the journey. Occasionally side views of great fertility opened upon us. There were the small farms of the Lombard; and there was the tall Lombard himself, striding across his fields. If the farms were small, amends was made by the largeness of the farm-house. There was ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... beautiful, more noble, more varied. What a poor conception they have of their God, if their God existed, or if he had not created other things, elsewhere. Always woods, little woods, waves which resemble waves, plains which resemble plains, everything is sameness and monotony. And Man? Man? What a horrible ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... differences in individual opinions, sentiments, and beliefs. This is just the reverse of what one meets among primitive peoples, where diversity in external forms, as between different groups, is accompanied by a monotonous sameness in the mental attitudes of individuals. There is a striking similarity in the sentiments and mental attitudes of peasant peoples in all parts of the world, although the external differences are often great. In the Black Forest, in Baden, Germany, almost every ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... give to us liberty, you will have in this country a splendid diversity of individuality; but if on the contrary you say men shall think so and so, you will have the sameness of stupid nonsense. In my judgment, it is the duty of every man to think and express his thoughts; but at the same time do not make ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... spot, and not unpicturesque. North and south the mountains fell away in an undulating rhythmical sameness, with no abrupt gorges to break in and destroy the poetry of their scroll against the sky. The valley supplemented the effect of the mountains; for, from the peak of Sunset Rock, high up on the ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... subject, and a few minutes later he was following her rustling skirts up the broad centre aisle to the pew four rows back from the pulpit. He wished it had not been so far forward, because the worshippers interested him, if only by reason of their sameness of type. You could see they were all people of position, with regular incomes and hereditary political convictions, solid people of that slow-moving, tenacious class which is the real backbone of the country, holding, ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... a glare appeared on the sky, growing brighter and brighter until, at a turn of the river, abruptly we came abreast of vomiting furnaces, thousands of electric lights strung like beads over the crest of a hill, and, below these, dim rows of houses, all of a sameness, stretching along monotonous streets. A ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to their quaint costumes. It is a genuine delight to study and visit these lands, because they are the least, perhaps in Europe, affected by the leveling hand of cosmopolitan ideas. Go where you will,—to England, about Germany, down into Italy,—everywhere, the same monotonous sameness is growing more oppressive every year. But in Norway and Sweden there is still an originality, a type, if you please, that has resisted the growth of an artificial life, and gives to students a charm which is even more alluring than ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... remark in reference to all this glorious society, that there shall be perfect union among its members. That union will not be one of sameness; for there can be no sameness either in the past history, or in the intellectual capacity of any of its members. How vast must be the difference for ever between the history of Gabriel, the thief on ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... building into a drab night. A raw wind stabbed at him, and sent light clouds scudding across the face of the moon. Overhead, a night fighter growled its way through the lonely sky. The country spread around the base was flat with only a few hills to break the sameness. ...
— A Yankee Flier Over Berlin • Al Avery
... way this is to be done, this Author hath not made known to the Publick. And, though such Tables unto the Radius 10000000, had been brought to light, yet would they not be sufficient to prove the identity or sameness of the said two Lines, as to continue the comparison between them as far, as the one of them, videl. the Logarithmicall Tangent-line, is already calculated, that is; to ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... who sought a boon of the gods. For peace was over the world and all things savoured of sameness, and the man was weary at heart and sighed for the tents and the warfields. Therefore he sought a boon of the ancient gods. And appearing before them he said to them, "Ancient gods; there is peace in ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... before, repeat one another with but little difference; the sameness being of course intentional, as showing that they were not speaking for themselves, but as representatives of a prevailing opinion. Eliphaz, again, gives the note which the others follow. Hear this Calvinist of the old world: 'Thy own mouth condemneth thee, and thine own lips testify ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Ages. While Ruskin, in letters only, praised that decoration Rossetti and his friends repeated it. They almost made patterns of their poems. That frequent return of the refrain which was foolishly discussed by Professor Nordau was, in Rossetti's case, of such sadness as sometimes to amount to sameness. The criticism on him, from a mediaeval point of view, is not that he insisted on a chorus, but that he could not insist on a jolly chorus. Many of his poems were truly mediaeval, but they would have been even more mediaeval if he could ever have written such a refrain ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... whenever some identical quality or form or purpose is embodied in various elements of a whole—sameness in difference. The repetition of the same space-form in architecture, like the round arch and window in the Roman style; the recurrence of the same motive in music; the use of a single hue to color the different objects in ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... believers is entitled to interpret biblical literature, interpretation becomes a composite and diversified activity. There is little warrant in the Scriptures for the notion that the biblical revelation is to level men to any sort of sameness. There are diversities of endowments and varieties of expression; but the united judgment of the body of believers is the supreme authority in interpreting the scriptural revelation. This is what we mean by saying that the church is to interpret the Scriptures. We mean that no matter ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... confidence and reasonably expect the patronage sought, there must be merit in the claims of the seeker. The business enterprise must present no appearance of hazard or mere adventure; for the mere matter of sameness of race does not warrant one in taking risks as a partner or patron in "wild-cat schemes." No man should expect or receive patronage solely because he is black; for your patron, besides generally being poor, is also black, and might as justly look for favors of you upon that score as you ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... These doctrines, the sameness of human nature and the omnipotent lawgiver, left no room for anything resembling a theory of Progress. If not held afterwards in the uncompromising form in which Machiavelli presented them, yet it has well been pointed out that they ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... whaler skippers a little about the tundra that fringes the Polar Sea, the vast desolation frozen hard in summer a few inches below the surface, on which nothing beyond the mosses ever grew. It was easy to understand the brain-crushing sameness and monotony of an existence chequered only by times of dire ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... country was of a deadly and a deceitful sameness, devoid of landmarks and lacking well-defined water-courses. The unending mesquite with its first spring foliage resembled a limitless peach-orchard sown by some careless and unbelievably prodigal hand. Out of these false acres occasional knolls and low stony hills lifted ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... lay in my cubicle, the heavy robe I wore day and night, the scanty vegetables I ate, the bell that called me from my sleep in the darkness to go to the chapel, the fastings, the watchings, the perpetual sameness of all I saw, all I did, neither saddened nor fatigued me. I never sighed for change. Can you believe that, Domini? It is true. So long as Dom Andre Herceline lived and ruled my life I was calm, happy, as few people in the world, or none, can ever be. But Dom Andre ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... heart of God's true servant by our uncharitableness; not putting little things in the place of great, nor great things in the place of little; not neglecting the unity of the Spirit; not stickling for a sameness in the form. Or, if we carry our views a little wider; if we look out upon the world at large, and hear of rumours of wars, and see the signs of internal disorders, and perhaps may think that the clouds ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... don't suppose I find this sort of thing particularly amusing, do you? Hasn't it ever occurred to you that there must be a terrible sameness about people who have been brought up amongst exactly the same surroundings and taught to regard life from exactly the same point ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a full day on the job, dreaming how he could ruin his employer, shake the foundation of human civilization, and force ten thousand billion humans to change their comfortable habit patterns and their belief in the unchangeable sameness of men. He was, he ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... a main theme in the treatment. He has also had recourse to that method of violent contrast which has been previously illustrated; on the one hand the publicity of detected wrongdoing, on the other the hidden and unsuspected fact; here the open shame and there the secret sin, whose sameness in a double life is expressed by the identity of the embroidered letter and the flesh-wrought stigma. But it is superfluous to illustrate further the genesis of this romance out of Hawthorne's art and matter in his earlier work, showing how naturally it rose by a concentration ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... men whose eyes, pale with the foam, watched for a landfall, that unmistakable good sight which the wind brings us to, the cloud that does not change and that comes after the long emptiness of sea days like a vision after the sameness of our common lives. To them the land they so discovered ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... even to those who have little reading and no knowledge at all of matters of rhythm or metre, are the grave Dorian music, the stately verses rolling in each after the other like great ocean waves in eternal difference, in eternal sameness. The ignorant ear hears and rejoices, with a delight that passes understanding, as the ignorant eye sees a fine drawing or a piece of Greek sculpture and without understanding enjoys, learns, and unconsciously grows in ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... A monotonous sameness is the characteristic of most of the small Filipino towns. In seeing one you have seen all; you wonder what good can come out of such a Nazareth, and there are very few of the provincial capitals, indeed, that merit a description. Rambling ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... relations, on the occasion I speak of, up and down West Fourteenth Street and over to Seventh Avenue, running most of them to earth with difficulty, but finding them at half a dozen points quite confess to a queer stale sameness. The gage of experience, as I say, had in these cases been strangely spared—the sameness had in two or three of them held out as with conscious craft. But these are impressions I shall presently find it impossible not to take ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... then he reads from paper and book, In a low and husky asthmatic tone, With the stolid sameness of posture and look Of one who reads to himself alone; And hour after hour on my senses come That husky wheeze ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... attempt, which ends in little else than in his own execution. Orsini's attempt on Louis Napoleon, and John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry, were, in their philosophy, precisely the same. The eagerness to cast blame on old England in the one case, and on New England in the other, does not disprove the sameness of ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... animals? Because they too have an instinct of immortality. Even in the same individual there is a perpetual succession as well of the parts of the material body as of the thoughts and desires of the mind; nay, even knowledge comes and goes. There is no sameness of existence, but the new mortality is always taking the place of the old. This is the reason why parents love their children—for the sake of immortality; and this is why men love the immortality of fame. For the creative soul creates not children, but conceptions ...
— Symposium • Plato
... the approach of your knuckle. At this key the phial may be charged; and all the other electric experiments be performed, which are usually done by the help of a rubbed glass globe or tube, and thereby the sameness of the electric matter with that of lightning be ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the groups is an adornment; but as soon as the original beat has been forgotten, they cease implicitly to be eccentric. Variety is what is sought; but if we destroy the original mould, one of the terms of this variety is lost, and we fall back on sameness. Thus, both as to the arithmetical measure of the verse, and the degree of regularity in scansion, we see the laws of prosody to have one common purpose: to keep alive the opposition of two schemes simultaneously followed; to keep them notably apart, though ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and we Britishers possessed the summer house; so we were all happy. The whole glory of the place was in the forest; for it was not flat sandy forest that has no undergrowth, and wearies you very soon with its sameness and its still, oppressive air. It was up hill and down dale forest, full of lovely glades, broken by massive dolomite rocks; the trees not set in serried rows, but growing for the most part as the birds and the wind planted them; a varied ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... not exist; they knew it merely as a place where settlers came from. What the Czar intended, what the Kaiser designed, never disturbed their rest. A sick ox, a rattling tile on the roof, meant more to their lives than war in Europe. The one break in the sameness of their daily routine was family prayers; the one weekly event, going to church at Salisbury. Still, they had a single enthusiasm. Like everybody else for fifty miles around, they believed profoundly in the "future of Rhodesia." When I gazed about me at the raw new land—the weary flat of ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... characters are to be found in this short poem. To say nothing of the four and twenty "fellers" who are admirably characterized by the epithet "brisk;" we have the mirthful Taylor and the rugged sea-captain, the lady fair and free, and the lady gay. It may be objected that there is too great a sameness in the female characters: but no; the lady fair and free is brave and revengeful; the lady gay is simply gay, a mere insipid character, and introduced by the poet, no doubt, as a contrast to the turbulent and busy character of the other lady. The boisterous captain is a well-drawn ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... that about seven men got shot in Marysville on account o' this one, or from some oneasiness that happened at her shop. But then," he went on slowly and deferentially as the faces of the two others were lowered and became fixed, "SHE says she tired o' drunken rowdies,—there's a sameness about 'em, and it don't sell her pipes and cigars, and that's WHY she's coming here. Thompson over at Dry Creek sez that THAT'S where our reputation is playin' us! 'We've got her as a reward o' virtoo, and be d——d to us.' But," cautiously, ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... squire's—and a young French child, Jane's pupil, Mr. Rochester's ward and reputed daughter. There is a pleasing monotony in the summer solitude of the old country house, with its comfort, respectability, and dulness, which Jane paints to the life; but there is one circumstance which varies the sameness and casts a mysterious feeling over the scene. A strange laugh is heard from time to time in a distant part of the house—a laugh which grates discordantly upon Jane's ear. She listens, watches, and inquires, but can discover nothing but a plain ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... months, twelve sisters, all of different hue, Though there appears in all a likeness too; Not such a likeness as, through Hayman's[153] works, Dull mannerist! in Christians, Jews, and Turks, 370 Cloys with a sameness in each female face, But a strange something, born of Art and Grace, Which speaks them all, to vary and adorn, At different times of the same parents born; All, one and all, shall in this chorus join, And, dumb to others' praise, be loud in mine. Rejoice, ye happy Gothamites! rejoice; Lift up your ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... were you I think I'd change my medium; I weary of your meter and your style. The sameness of it sickens me to tedium; I'll quit unless you switch it ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... find the heart as a distinct and separate part in all animals; some, indeed, such as the zoophytes, have no heart; this is because these animals are coldest, of one great bulk, of soft texture, or of a certain uniform sameness or simplicity of structure; among the number I may instance grubs and earth-worms, and those that are engendered of putrefaction and do not preserve their species. These have no heart, as not requiring any impeller of nourishment into the extreme parts; for they have bodies which are ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... column-of-route made its slow and wearisome way over the apparently limitless expanse of the swelling veld. And how monotonous that veld can be none can appreciate save those who have experienced its deadly sameness. Ahead, behind, all round, nothing but veld, veld, veld. No trees, no hills, no rivers, no lakes, no houses, no inhabitants! Here and there, perhaps, a miserable shanty of the sealed-pattern South African ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... of sameness, he found variety; instead of uniformity of distance, limitless and utterly limitless fields and boundless distances; instead of rest and quiescence, motion and activity; instead of ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... permitted to rest after the toils of life—to be doomed to be imprisoned for ever in the clay-formed dungeon—to be for ever clogged with this worthless body, its lead of diseases and infirmities—to be condemned to [be]hold for millenniums that yawning monster Sameness, and Time, that hungry hyaena, ever bearing children, and ever devouring again her offspring!—Ha! not to be permitted to die! Awful Avenger in Heaven, hast Thou in Thine armoury of wrath a punishment more dreadful? then let it thunder upon me, command a hurricane to sweep me down ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... come down to us, that the buildings of Veii were stately and magnificent. To me there is something peculiarly impressive in the presence of a stream in a scene of vanished human greatness. Its eternal sameness contrasts with the momentous changes that have taken place; its motion with the death around; its sunny sparkle with the gloom; while its murmur seems the very requiem of the past. In this giant sepulchre, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... to earth, and what comes from heaven, the divinity, returns to him who gave it. But I find nothing clear in Antoninus as to the notion of the man existing after death so as to be conscious of his sameness with that soul which occupied his vessel of clay. He seems to be perplexed on this matter, and finally to have rested in this, that God or the gods will do whatever is best, and consistent with the ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... alkali dust of the desert. The weary traveller gazed upon nothing but seemingly interminable prairies and naked elevations, destitute of verdure, or as he entered the rock-ribbed Continental Divide, only rugged mountains relieved the eternal sameness of his surroundings. Salt Lake City, nestling in its wealth of trees and flowers, was a second "Diamond of the Desert." In its welcome shade, the dusty traveller, like the solitary Sir Kenneth, reposed his jaded limbs and ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... begun by the sack of Leon and Realejo [v.04 p.0656] by the English under Davis have, even in their variety and daring, a sameness which deprives them of interest, and the wonderful confederacy is now seen to be falling gradually to pieces. The skill of Davis at sea was on one occasion displayed in a seven days' engagement with two large Spanish vessels, and the interest ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... than that of Europe; that class distinctions are less marked; and that the energies of the nation are still so much confined to strictly utilitarian objects, that life moves along with unpicturesque sameness and evenness. But mankind remains equally complicated and equally interesting under whatever circumstances it may be placed. The vast extent of American territory and the infinite variety of its inhabitants afford material ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... visiting at fashionable resorts. While he was very fond of all the boys he visited, their fathers struck him as being much of a piece, and in his boyish way he often wondered at their exceeding sameness. When he told them where his home was they would ask jovially, "Pretty hot down there?" and John would muster a faint smile and answer, "It certainly is." His response would have been heartier had they not all made this joke—at best varying it with, "Is it hot ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... gullies, ridges! where the ever-madd'ning flies — Fiercer than the plagues of Egypt — swarm about your blighted eyes! Bush! where there is no horizon! where the buried bushman sees Nothing — Nothing! but the sameness of the ragged, stunted trees! Lonely hut where drought's eternal, suffocating atmosphere Where the God-forgotten hatter dreams of ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... privation they will pass through, fire and water and storm will not appall them, nor wrath of heaven and earth, but waiting—the long, tedious, sickly, friendless days, that drop one by one in their eternal sameness into the weary past, these kill slowly but surely, as the slow dropping of water ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... my account of the inhabitants, I shall endeavour to give the reader some idea of the appearance of the village and the surrounding country. Of course, from the existence of a boundless forest, only partially cleared, there is a great sameness ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... his own way, but night after night in Hans's society began to pall on me at last, while even his conversation about my "reverend father," who seemed positively to haunt him, acquired a certain sameness. Of course, we had other subjects in common, especially those connected with Retief's massacre, whereof we were the only two survivors, but of these I seldom cared to speak. They were and still ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... remain, the burden falls down, and is often greater than we can bear. Personally, I have a certain morbid fear of those endless summer twilights. A space of light stretching from half-past 2 A.M. to 11 P.M. affects me with a sense of infinity, of horrid sameness, just as the sea or the desert would do. I feel that for too long a period I am under the eye of the taskmaster. Twilight is always in itself, or at least in its suggestions, melancholy; and these midsummer twilights are so long, they pass through such series of lovely change, they are ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... asked the same question about his wife, always in the same tone, always with the same inflection. The meeting with her had become one of the frightfully unvarying things of his day. As he walked on now, he saw stretching before him an interminable vista of days, weeks, years—one deadly sameness of hard work, long hours, scanty pay, poor living, growing debts—and inextricably mixed up with it all, this dreary, gaunt black figure, waiting always for him at the top of the hill.... He had not realized what ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... of the sea and sand became unbearable. It was too-right, somehow. Cully felt anger, and kicked up eddies of dust. It changed the sameness a little. He kicked more up, until it swirled around him in a thick gold haze, blotting out the ...
— Cully • Jack Egan
... man thinks his own experience peculiar; but life has a wonderful sameness, after all. Besides, you would flatter the portraits. Not to begin too early, and without being particular about names, there was, first, Amanda, aged fourteen; face circular, cheeks cranberry, eyes hazel, hair brown and wavy, awkward when spoken to, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... to enter into details of the reception accorded to the navigators. Hospitality and kindness are ever valuable to the recipients, but there is a sameness in an account of them which is wearisome to the reader. We need only dwell upon the sore need of rest for the suffering crew: ten of those who landed were in the worst stage of scurvy, and many others had the swollen and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... good in prolonging the story of this wrestle; there was a certain sameness in every phase, though the dangers seemed to change with such protean swiftness. For three days it lasted, and on the third day Tom Lennard, Ferrier, the patients, and the crew, were far more interested in the steward's efforts to boil coffee than they were in the arrowy flight of ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... why through inordinately pshaw therefore circumspect puss grand inasmuch stop touch sameness back cage disconsolate candle. ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... that obedience, the primary condition is the identity—not the union, but the sameness—of what we now call "church" and "state."... No division of power is then endurable without danger, probably without destruction: the priest must not teach one thing and the king another; king must be priest and prophet king,—the two must say the same because they are the same. The idea of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... One of the most usual subjects in Greek relief is a battle between male warriors and Amazons. Such battles adorn many temples. And in every case they are distinctive in style. One could not mistake a group from the temple at Phigaleia for a group from the Mausoleum. And there is no sameness: almost every group has some point or touch of its own, which makes it a variety on the usual theme. One Amazon is falling from her horse, one is asking for quarter, one is following up a retreating foe. But no group is insistent that the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... unlike qualities regardless of sameness in the environment. This is the converse of the preceding proposition, but even more convincing. In the last paragraph but one, we mentioned Galton's study (cited at some length in our Chapter I) of "identical" twins, who are so much alike at birth for the very good reason that they have identical ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... of unchanging succession and visible uniformity, which cannot shake off the yoke of custom or allow anything different to seem to it real. The sensitiveness and impressibility of the imagination are affected, and unhealthily affected, not merely by strangeness, but by sameness; to one as to the other it may "passively submit and surrender itself, give way to the mere form of attraction, and, instead of grasping something else, be itself grasped and mastered by some dominant idea." And ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... of the Durance at some point that I have forgotten. At Avignon, an hour later, I found the water in some of the streets. The sky cleared in the evening, the moon lighted up the submerged suburbs, and the population again collected in the high places to enjoy the spectacle. It exhibited a certain sameness, however, and by nine o'clock there was considerable animation in the Place Crillon, where there is nothing to be seen but the front of the theatre and of several cafes - in addition, indeed, to a statue of this celebrated brave, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... of the other; why then my soul was prophetic, and my idea must be, and by common consent would be, called cognizant of reality. That percept was what I MEANT, for into it my idea has passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness and fulfilled intention. Nowhere is there jar, but every later moment continues ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... Christmas of which we have been present at the celebration, painted according to nature—what a Gallery of Pictures! True that a sameness would pervade them all—but only that kind of sameness that pervades the nocturnal heavens. One clear night always is, to common eyes, just like another; for what hath any night to show but one moon and some stars—a blue vault, with ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... I, "because you do not know the hardness of the life and its weary sameness. It is better to be free to wander where you will, in this old land of enchantments, where each morning brings a new joy and every ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... was shown round the house. The sameness of the rooms surprised her. There was nothing to distinguish them except the different woods used in their ceilings and walls, a distinction which betrayed its costliness and its taste only to the practised eye. Each room was spotless and absolutely bare, with golden tatami, rice-straw mats ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... transition from mathematics to metaphysics. He can form a general conception of square and oblong numbers, but he is unable to attain a similar expression of knowledge in the abstract. Yet at length he begins to recognize that there are universal conceptions of being, likeness, sameness, number, which the mind contemplates in herself, and with the help of Socrates is conducted from a theory of sense to a theory ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... of course, intervening periods in harbour, when fierce gales howl overhead, and guard duty on rain-swept quaysides, or sentry-go in blinding snowstorms, comes almost as a relief from the sameness of winter ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... that hundreds of agreeable and useful little histories have been composed for children, with no other machinery than a mamma and her child, and the occasional introduction of a doll or a dog, a cat or a canary bird. To the child, there is in these numerous groupings no appearance of sameness, nor want of variety; and although so much circumscribed in their original elements, they never fail to amuse ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... with Peter—I'll tell you. You may think I'm silly; but as we're made, we're made, and this is how it is with me: of course I love Peter, my children, my home, and I love my work; but I've had this job without 'jot or tittle' of change for fifteen years, and I'm about stalled with the sameness of it. I know you'll think ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... write, I cannot bring myself to look at it again,—not from a motive which is disparaging to you, as I am sure you understand; the general impression is enough for me, also, if you care in the least how I feel toward you. The boy has certainly the likeness to which you refer, and an absolute sameness, almost, in feature as well as in look, with certain old portraits of hers,—here, older and younger; there is not a trace of me in him, thank God! I know that dear, teasing Isa, and how she won't answer your ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... ceremony on the following day, when, by appointment, Christopher Newman went to dine with him. Mr. and Mrs. Tristram lived behind one of those chalk-colored facades which decorate with their pompous sameness the broad avenues manufactured by Baron Haussmann in the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe. Their apartment was rich in the modern conveniences, and Tristram lost no time in calling his visitor's ...
— The American • Henry James
... luckily for Dol, had little undergrowth and mostly a soft carpet of moss or dry pine needles. Still they had plenty of climbing over windfalls, with many rough pokes and jibes from forward boughs and rotten limbs, to rob the way of sameness. Through this labyrinth they were safely piloted by Uncle Eb and Joe, the latter with his compass in his hand, and the former simply studying the "Indian's compass," which is observing how the moss grows upon the tree-trunks, there being always a greater quantity ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... remained the same Henry, and the sameness of his simple self was never more apparent to him than when he got out of a cab one foggy Wednesday night in November, and rang at the Grecian portico of Mrs. Ashton Portway's house in Lowndes Square. A crimson cloth covered the footpath. This was his first entry into the truly great world, and ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... romantic hues, or mystery. Calmly affectionate, or perhaps listless, towards all within the domestic circle, they look outside for inspiring intercourse and thrilling attachments, and for calls to lofty sacrifice and delight. This is too often the case. Identity of inheritance and situation, sameness of idiosyncrasy, and habitude of union, squeeze poppies into the household cup, and clothe in dull gray the familiar landscape around; and yet, happily, in numerous instances it is not so. The confidential ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... 'Niobe' is fine, but I can't bear her children, except one. Then to the Casine on horseback to see the town and the world: it seems a very enjoyable place. This morning again dropped into some of the churches, after which I have always a hankering, though there is great sameness in them, but I have a childish liking for Catholic pomp. The fine things are lost amidst a heap of rubbish, but there is no lack of marble, and painting, and gilding in most of them. They are going on with the Medici Chapel, on which millions have been ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... regret. Vanity is one source of happiness, but it does not suffice to recompense us for the absence of all others. In leaving England, I leave the scene of everlasting weariness. I am the victim of a feeling of sameness, and I look with hope to the prospect ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said of the date-day's sameness; But the tree that neighbours the track, And stoops like a pedlar afflicted with lameness, Knew of no sogged wound or windcrack. And the joints of that wall were not enshrouded With mosses of many tones, And the garth up afar was not overcrowded With a multitude ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... this slight help distributed over the years from his eighth to his fifteenth birthday he taught himself to read, write, and do sums. The stories of the effort and painful shifts, by which great men accomplish this initial labour almost unhelped, have in all cases the same pathos, and have a certain sameness in detail. Having learnt to read he had the following books within his reach: the Bible, "Aesop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," the "Pilgrim's Progress," a "History of the United States," and Weems' "Life of Washington." Later on the fancy took him to learn the laws of his State, ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... instinct to imitation, and the Doctor was right in maintaining reason and instinct to be but different degrees of perfection of the same mental processes. Had he substituted "memory" for "imitation," and asked the lady to define "sameness" or "personal identity," he would ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... goodness, my wants are few, and at any rate I had peace and quietness and wasn't always being asked to come along and DO something. And I've got such an active mind—always occupied, I assure you! But time went on, and there was a certain sameness about the life, and at last I began to think it would be fun to work my way upstairs and see what you other fellows were doing. So I scratched and burrowed, and worked this way and that way and at last I came out ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... John Ross and Lieutenant Ross, Captain Back in the Terror and in boats, the Hudson Bay Company's employes in 1836-39, and Doctor John Rae, 1846-47, all added their "notable voyages" to the record of Arctic expeditions, and were we to detail them there would be a sameness in the narratives, though the adventurous spirit breathed through them all. But later on we ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... very hard a day or night, so far as physical labour goes, is it? But, oh! the sameness, the deadly monotony, of repeating the same words to the same person at the same moment every night, sick or well, sad or happy—the ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... and gentlemen who had charge of the convicts and attended to their backs and stomachs, we must grant again that as between the convict and his masters, and between both and the nation at home, there was a quite noticeable monotony of sameness. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Around all swept the pine and the scrub oak, just varied by other trees and blossoming shrubs. The ground was level, or only slightly rolling. Look where one might there was tree and bush, tree and bush, a sense of illimitable woodland, of far horizons, of a not unhappy sameness, of stillness, of beauty far removed from picturesqueness, of vague, diffused charm, of silence, of sadness not too sad, of mystery not too baffling, of sunshine very still and golden. A man knew he was in ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... to themselves two ideas of unity: the first is a sameness of form—of expression; the second an identity of spirit. Some of the best of mankind have fondly hoped to realize an unity for the Church of Christ which should be manifested by uniform expressions in everything: their imaginations have loved to paint, as the ideal of a Christian ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... experience. I must go out into the ranks of living men, and mingle among them. I must fly about like a bird. I must see and feel, and become human altogether. I must enjoy the one half-day, instead of vegetating for years in every-day sameness and weariness, in which I become ill, and at last sink and disappear like the dew on the meadows. I will gleam like the cloud, gleam in the sunshine of life, look out over the whole like the cloud, and pass away like it, no one ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... instinctively recognize as fallen beings. What their previous estate in life may have been you cannot tell, but you know that there has been a fall, and that you are looking on a moral wreck. The types are superficially varied, but an essential sameness, not always visible at first sight, connects them and enables you to class them as you would class the specimens in a gallery of the British Museum. As you walk along on a lonely highway, you meet a man who carries himself with a kind of jaunty ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... does elsewhere on a grand scale. The effect on a stranger is at first alluring, captivating, like the caprices of a beautiful woman; then it becomes disconcerting, maddening, fatiguing; and a great longing seizes him for vast level spaces, for sameness, for the infinity where he may lose himself and rest. Then one day he climbs to the top of Harcombe or Muttersmoor and finds the immensity he longed for. As far as his sight can reach, the shoulders of the hills and the prone backs of the long ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... attic of their large warehouse, pipes, puncheons, and barrels of the slow poison were deposited, with innumerable bottles of wine, reputed to be old as a century, if not older. A box or two of Flemish pipes relieved the sameness ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... believe that, though biologically her function is different from that of man, psychologically she is identical with him; if the human world in its mentality becomes exclusively male, then before long it will be reduced to utter inanity. For life finds its truth and beauty, not in any exaggeration of sameness, but ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... oxygen, and the simplest, were unknown within five years before the date of these chapters.]—a subject that it is easy to make too much of—there was a chemical ingredient or proportion in steel that we now know nothing of. The old lands of sameness and slumber ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... pride in this mournful sameness of attire,—delight in wearing a hat like every other man's hat, are content that it should be a perfected miracle of ugliness, that it should be hot, that it should be heavy, that it should be disfiguring, ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... and if ever I write down the story of the Eurotas, and in particular of what was suffered on board her boat No. 2, I have no doubt that nine readers out of ten will forget the details just as soon and just as completely. There is a horrible sameness about these narratives, Roddy; and the truer they are (as I've proved) the nearer they resemble one another. Monotonous they are—these drawn-out agonies—as the sea itself upon which they are enacted. From time to time you sit up half-awake out ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... constant reader of romances would find that it needed months to go through even the best pieces of the inexhaustible painter of eight full centuries and every type of man, and he might repeat the process of reading him ten times in a lifetime without a sense of fatigue or sameness. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... ventured to inquire how they employed their leisure hours, and whether many did not experience here a wearisome sameness, and a ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... quality is true, but so far from being a discouraging one, it gives actual reasons for the continuance of domestic weavings. The very fact that homespun textiles are not exact—in the sense of absolute sameness—and not cheap, in the sense of first cost, is apt to be a reason for buying them. Hand-weaving, like handwriting, is individual, and this is a virtue instead of a defect, since it gives the variety which satisfies some ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... is something impressive about the grim solitudes of Estremadura; and if the plains of Leon and Old Castile are bald and dreary, they are studded with old cities renowned in history and rich in relics of the past. But there is no redeeming feature in the Manchegan landscape; it has all the sameness of the desert without its dignity; the few towns and villages that break its monotony are mean and commonplace, there is nothing venerable about them, they have not even the picturesqueness of poverty; indeed, Don Quixote's own village, Argamasilla, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... kicking steps that are now so popular. Soft-shoe steps break into it here and there in unexpected ways and places, adding a pleasing variety to the menu. The tempo enhances and harmonizes the scene and the action. There is no monotony, no tiresome sameness; yet the varying forms of action blend into a perfect continuity. The dance is full of happy surprise steps, perhaps, or unexpected climaxes and variations that arouse the interest as they ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... cuddle together, from the size of crowquills to the thickness of the little finger. During June and July, the monotonous Cicadae spring their rattles in the trees around, and one comes at last even to like their note, in spite of its sameness. A little later, flies and wasps send their buzzing progeny into our dining-rooms, to tease us over our dessert, like troublesome children: at the same period, some of the larger families of Longicorns abound, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... differentiating the mother totems within the group from the totems of the fathers without the group, and this differentiation would produce a special relationship between the sexes based upon the difference of totems instead of upon the sameness of them; and finally there would be produced first a two-class division founded on sex—all the mothers and all the fathers—and, only in a developed form, a two-class division founded on ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... about? Diary becoming monotonous; too great a sameness. Hospitals; visits; sick; ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... "habit" was not far to seek. But can a person be said to do a thing by force of habit or routine when it is his ancestors, and not he, that has done it hitherto? Not unless he and his ancestors are one and the same person. Perhaps, then, they ARE the same person after all. What is sameness? I remembered Bishop Butler's sermon on "Personal Identity," read it again, and saw very plainly that if a man of eighty may consider himself identical with the baby from whom he has developed, so that he may say, "I am the person who at six months old did this ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... discussion on the subject of Irish policy, which was protracted for nine evenings. The motion which he made on this occasion nominally aimed at the appointment of a committee of the whole house to consider the state of Ireland. The debate which ensued presented much sameness and repetition. On a division, Lord John Russell's motion was negatived by a majority of three hundred and thirty-four ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... impeded their advance, and prevented them from making any great progress. However, they crossed to the eastern side of the Peninsula, where they found a rich and beautiful country, in some parts reminding them of the rich South American forest, rather than the dreary sameness of an Australian wood. Numerous tracks of the buffalo seemed to testify to the excellence of the pasture. Several evidences, also, of the presence of natives were from time to time discovered, and at length a ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... any greater sign of the utter want of vitality and hopefulness in the schools of the present day than that unhappy prettiness and sameness under which they mask, or rather for which they barter, in their lentile thirst, all the birthright and power of nature, which prettiness, wrought out and spun fine in the study, out of empty heads, till it hardly betters the blocks on which dresses and hair are tried in barbers' windows and milliners' ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... daisy, which he afterwards identifies with the good Alceste, the type of faithful wifehood, is of course a mere poetical figure. But there is in his use of these favourite literary devices, so to speak, a variety in sameness significant of their accordance with his own taste, and of the frank and fresh love of nature which animated him, and which seems to us as much a part of him as his love of books. It is unlikely that his personality will over become more fully ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... exercises here given the tone will be, for the best and most immediate effect, kept running on somewhat in a straight line, so to speak; will have a certain sameness of sound; will be perhaps somewhat monotonous, because kept pretty much in one key, or in one average degree of pitch. It will perhaps be necessary to make the utterance for the time somewhat artificial. The voice is in the artificial stage, as is the work of an oarsman, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... except what the children called forth, was reserved for Arthur's room; but he thought Percy as gay and light-hearted as ever, and his sister not much less so. Percy would not bring their anxieties to depress the fluctuating spirits, which, wearied with the sameness of a sick-room, varied with every change of weather, ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ice and fire, of joekul and skerry, the massive timber homesteads, the horse-fights and the Viking voyages, the spinning-wheel and the salting-tub, are with us everywhere; and yet there is an almost startling individuality, for all the sameness of massacre and chicanery, of wedding and divorce, which characterises the circumstances. Gunnar is not distinguished from Grettir merely by their adventures; there is no need of labels on the lovers of Gudrun; Steingerd in Kormak's Saga and Hallgerd in Njal's, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... singing, and the flowers for their hackneyed scents and colors. They complained of the weather that it lacked originality—(true, they had not lived out an English spring)—and found fault with the Sun because of the sameness ...
— Dreams - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... in using it, and wrote him several letters containing accounts of our experiments. He got them read in the Royal Society, where they were not at first thought worth so much notice as to be printed in their Transactions. One paper, which I wrote for Mr. Kinnersley, on the sameness of lightning with electricity,[107] I sent to Dr. Mitchel, an acquaintance of mine, and one of the members also of that society, who wrote me word that it had been read, but was laughed at by the connoisseurs. ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... land, as the beings of their element on which their avocation lay, are of living in the air, their language was technical to a degree that rendered it to all, except themselves, almost unintelligible. With such persons for companions, and to use Terence's expression, quotidian and tedious sameness of a life at sea, we need look no further for Erskine's desire to change his profession. When we consider the great capacity which he possessed for observation, and his extraordinary power of combining the knowledge that he so acquired, the period which he gave to ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... atmospheric changes occur only at two opposite periods of the year, and so gradual is their approach that the climate is monotonous, and one longs to see again "the falling of the leaf" to diversify the sameness of perennial verdure. The line is faint which divides the seasons. No period of the year is divested of its seed-time and its harvest in some part of the island; and fruit hangs ripe on the same branches that are garlanded ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... little waves rippled up over the sand, the birds were singing, and the dew-drops hung on the yellow gorse; but that joy in her own being which lent a charm to these was wanting, and the songs seemed tuneless, the scent oppressive, the sea all sameness, the land a waste, and the sun itself a glaring garish baldness of light, that accentuated her own disconsolation, the length of a life that is not worth living, and the size of a world which contains no corner of comfort in ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand |
