"Underrating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... underrating the value of the theory which accompanies translations of this sort. The translators have left comparatively little comment on their methods, and it may be that now and then more satisfactory principles were implicit. Yet even when the translator ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... were reminded frequently both by relic and place name. To Palmer, viewing them in the light of the past, the Cedars of Lebanon were a poem, but to Burton—a curious mixture of the romantic and the prosaic—with his invariable habit of underrating famous objects, they were "a wretched collection of scraggy Christmas trees." "I thought," said Burton, "when I came here that Syria and Palestine would be so worn out that my occupation as an explorer ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... any particular animal are studied by a naturalist, the more he attributes to reason and the less to unlearnt instincts. (22. Mr. L.H. Morgan's work on 'The American Beaver,' 1868, offers a good illustration of this remark. I cannot help thinking, however, that he goes too far in underrating the power of instinct.) In future chapters we shall see that some animals extremely low in the scale apparently display a certain amount of reason. No doubt it is often difficult to distinguish between the power of reason and that of instinct. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... guns than they rated; the disparity was less in the French than in either the British or American navies. Our 38-gun frigates carried 48 guns, the exact number the British 38's possessed. The worst case of underrating in our navy was the Essex, which rated 32, and carried 46 guns, so that her real was 44 per cent, in excess of her nominal force; but this was not as bad as the British sloop Cyane, which was rated a 20 or 22, and carried 34 guns, so that ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... committee; to stop the begging system entirely (that is, going to the United States and thereby representing that the fugitives are starving and suffering, raising large sums of money, of which the fugitives never receive the benefit,—misrepresenting the character of the fugitives for industry and underrating the advance of the country, which supplies abundant work for all at fair wages); to raise such funds among themselves as may be necessary for the poor, the sick, and the destitute fugitive newly arrived; and prepare themselves ultimately to bear their due weight ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... or to be dispatched by them on heroic errands, as it were, for the sake of winning the prize of love held out to them. Such women as Emilia in Cinna and Rodogune, must surely be unsusceptible of love. But if in his principal characters, Corneille, by exaggerating the energetic and underrating the passive part of our nature, has departed from truth; if his heroes display too much volition and too little feeling, he is still much more unnatural in his situations. He has, in defiance of all probability, pointed them ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Hebe-like contour caught his eye in a moment, of which Cecil felt an instinctive conviction; but though, with a woman's keenness, underrating no point of attraction in her friend, she considered her wanting in style, which deficiency she dwelt on now with secret satisfaction. For though not in the least anxious to monopolize general admiration, that of ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... this conversation appeared. Mr Wardlaw thought that we were underrating the capacity of the native. This opinion was natural enough in a schoolmaster, but not in the precise form Wardlaw put it. It was not his intelligence which he thought we underrated, but his dangerousness. His reasons, shortly, were these: There were five or six of them to every ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... another topic, it may be well to answer a question which may have occurred to the reader; how it happens that we remained so long ignorant of the vegetation and insects of the Upper Miocene period in Europe? The answer may be instructive to those who are in the habit of underrating the former richness of the organic world wherever they happen to have no evidence of its condition. A large part of the Upper Miocene insects and plants alluded to have been met with at Oeningen, near the Lake of Constance, ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell |
