"Abstract" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to an examination of her desertion of Arnaud, but she could find no trace of conventional regret; of what, she felt, her sensation ought to be. The instinctive revolt from oblivion was an infinitely stronger reality than any allegiance to abstract duty. She was consumed by the passionate need to preserve the integrity of being herself. The word selfish occurred to her but to be met unabashed by the query, why not? Selfishness was a reproach applied by those ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... lying at the open door, watching the movements of Thor (the raven), whose depredatory proclivities were well known to the dog. Thor, perfectly aware that a detective's eye was upon him, did not venture to abstract any of the wreckage, but assumed an air of careless curiosity as he hopped about among Mr. Adiesen's ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... of the conflict between the interests of an oligarchy based upon slavery and a democracy in which slavery, if it exists at all, exists as a mere accident that may be dispensed with without any radical social revolution. Slavery, as opposed to divine law or to abstract justice, never has brought, nor ever will bring, two countries into conflict with each other; but slavery made indispensable as a peculiar institution, as an organized fact, as a fundamental social necessity, must come into conflict ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... numerous Kami, more or less abstract beings without any distinguishing functions, who preceded the progenitors of the Yamato race, and there was the goddess of the Sun, pre-eminent and supreme, together with deities of the Moon, of the stars, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... perfectly capable of seeing and describing an abstract wife like that in blistering terms that would make an industrious street-walker look almost respectable by comparison. But when he looked at Rose, he saw her through the lens, as some one to be loved and desired,—and prevented, if ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... bands of red (hoist side), blue, and red; centered on the hoist-side red band in yellow is the national emblem ("soyombo" - a columnar arrangement of abstract and geometric representation for fire, sun, moon, earth, water, and the ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... only that these rights, enjoyed by one portion of the American people, may be extended to embrace the whole, not less for the abstract but all-sufficient reason, that they have been given to the whole by the Creator, than that by their application to the whole, the more general will be the benefits experienced; and the deeper, broader, more prevailing and more enduring will become those benefits. Manifestly, such must be the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... muscle quivered; no nerve thrilled; no artery throbbed. But there seemed to have sprung up in the brain that of which no words could convey to the merely human intelligence even an indistinct conception. Let me term it a mental pendulous pulsation. It was the moral embodiment of man's abstract idea of Time. By the absolute equalization of this movement—or of such as this—had the cycles of the firmamental orbs themselves been adjusted. By its aid I measured the irregularities of the clock upon the mantel, ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... live at Four Forks, in his own house; and next winter we're going to Sacramento. I suppose it's all right, father, eh?" She emphasized the question with a slight kick through the bed-clothes, as the parental McClosky had fallen into an abstract revery. ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... much interest in abstract statements. 'You remember,' she said, turning to Baruch, 'that man Chorley as has the big farm on the left-hand side just afore you come to the common? He wasn't a Surrey man: he came ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... a more or less indefinite notion abroad that the Bantu languages, as compared with those of Europe, are but poor and ineffective vehicles for the conveyance of abstract ideas, wherefore the capacity to form and entertain such ideas may be taken to be innately inferior in the Native brain. That the language of a people embodies, so to speak, in objective form the intellectual progress made by it is ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... understanding what Bergson has to say requires a very considerable effort from anyone, but the feat is perhaps most difficult of all for those who have carefully trained themselves in habits of rigorous logical criticism. In attempting to describe what we actually know in the abstract logical terms which are the only means of intercommunication that human beings possess, Bergson is driven into perpetual self-contradiction, indeed, paradoxical though it may sound, unless he contradicted himself ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... he could conceive of no words, no thoughts, no arguments adequate to that strife. Had he been a Papist he might have turned with hope, even with pious confidence, to the Holy Stoup, the Bell and Book and Candle, to the Relics, and hundred Exorcisms of his Church. But the colder and more abstract faith of Calvin, while it admitted the possibility of such possessions, supplied no weapons of ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... the "Clarion." Moreover, he was bitterly disappointed in Hal as a man. Had his superior "gone on the loose" and contracted a liaison with some woman of the outer world, Ellis would have passed over the abstract morality of the question. But to take advantage of a girl in his own employ, and then so cruelly to leave her to her fate,—there was rot at the heart of the man who could do that. The excision of the offending "Relief Pills" ad. after the culmination of the tragedy, ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... an ear for it; whim also to construe lord and master relaxed but reboant and soaring above the verbal to harmonic truths of abstract or transcendental, to be hummed subsequently by privileged female audience of one bent on a hook-or-crook plucking out ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... in the latter particular of what he wished and expected. The duty of an officer, the most imposing of all others to the inexperienced mind, because accompanied with so much outward pomp and circumstance, is in its essence a very dry and abstract task, depending chiefly upon arithmetical combinations, requiring much attention, and a cool and reasoning head to bring them into action. Our hero was liable to fits of absence, in which his blunders excited some mirth, and called down some reproof. This circumstance ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the same time, we feel inclined to agree with Mr. Farrer that the red berries of the mountain-ash probably singled it out from among trees for worship long before our ancestors had arrived at any idea of abstract divinities. The beauty of its berries, added to their brilliant red colour, would naturally excite feelings of admiration and awe, and hence it would in process of time become invested with a sacred significance. It must be remembered, too, that all over ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... compared with these in this respect. These are the most liberal in scale of all the old Teutonic poems; the largest epic works of which we know anything directly. These are the fullest in composition, the least abstract or elliptical; and they still want something of the scale of the Iliad. The poem of Maldon, for instance, corresponds not to the Iliad, but to the action of a single book, such as the twelfth, with which it has been already ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... resolute. I had caught Aunt Elizabeth's eye as she passed me, and the contempt in it had cut me to the quick. This bird despised me. I am not a violent or a quick-tempered man, but I have my self-respect. I will not be sneered at by hens. All the abstract desire for Fame which had filled my mind five minutes before was concentrated now on the task ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... Spinoza became recognized by the esoteric few as one of the world's great thinkers, although the good people with whom he lived knew him only as a model lodger, who kept regular hours and made little trouble. Occasionally visitors would come from a distance and remain for hours discussing such abstract themes as the freedom of the will or the nature of the over-soul. And these visitors caused the rustic neighbors to grow curious, and we find Spinoza moving into the city and renting a modest back room. By a curious chance, his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... virtually, one of the favoured nation, by habit and connection as well as in blood? and did not England's greatness send down a reflected light on all her sons?—only poetical justice, as it was earlier sons who had made the greatness. But of that Mrs. Dallas did not think. 'England' was an abstract idea of majesty and power, embodied in a land and a government; and Westminster Abbey was in a sort the record and visible token of the same, and testimony of it, in the face of all the world. So Mrs. Dallas enjoyed Westminster Abbey, and her heart swelled in contemplation ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... How far this condition limits the system of shaft grouping we shall see presently. The reader must remember, that we at present reason respecting shafts in the abstract only. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... me!" ejaculated my mother, again breaking into our conversation after a brief pause, during which she must have gone through an abstract mental calculation. "Why, that will be barely a month from ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... ends with two appendices: the first an abstract of Thomas Candish's circumnavigation; the second an abstract of Dutch expeditions to ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... numerous works may be seen in the Biogr. Dictionaires, or in Watts's Bibl. Britt. To his "Christian Morals," Dr. Johnson has prefixed his Life. It is so masterly written, that it is impossible to give even an abstract. Dr. Kippis has, however, in part, transcribed it. He was chosen Honorary Fellow of the College of Physicians, as a man virtute et literas ornatissimus. In 1671, he received the honour of Knighthood from Charles II., a prince, (says ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... duty. Of our men 21 have died, and many more are sore hurt or sick. Mr Burton has been sick for six weeks, and is now so very weak that, unless God strengthen him, I fear he will hardly escape. Your worship will find inclosed an abstract of all the goods we have sold, and also of what commodities we have received for them; reserving all things else till our meeting, and to the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... If one takes up a review of a book on America by Mr. Wells or Mr. Bennett, it is in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in order to find out what the author thinks, not what the reviewer thinks. If the reviewer begins with a paragraph of general remarks about America—or, worse still, about some abstract thing like liberty—he is almost invariably wasting paper. I believe it is a sound rule to destroy all preliminary paragraphs of this kind. They are detestable in almost all writing, but most detestable of all in book-reviews, where it is important to plunge ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... the most interesting place on the face of the earth; and perhaps he was right. Let us hear what he has to say about this halo of old association: "To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible if it were endeavoured; and would be foolish if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... Man has these faculties developed, the animals have them undeveloped. In the "Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," published by his son, is a letter from Mr. Darwin to W. Graham, written in 1881, from which I quote the following: "I have no practice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray. Nevertheless, you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done. But then, with me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... pleasure, nor was it pain, but a chilliness of soul which proceeded from the gloomy and severe task that I had undertaken—a task which, when I considered the danger and the advantages annexed to its performance, was sufficient to abstract me from every other object. It was really the first exercise of that jealous spirit of mistaken devotion which keeps the soul in perpetual sickness, and invests the innocent enjoyments of life with a character of sin and severity. It was this gloomy feeling that could alone have strangled in ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... extension. He asserted, that man thinks eternally, and that the soul, at its coming into the body, is informed with the whole series of metaphysical notions: knowing God, infinite space, possessing all abstract ideas—in a word, completely endued with the most sublime lights, which it unhappily forgets at ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... kings of Sicily, fills books of the Istoria Civile of Giannone, (tom. ii. l. xi.-xiv. p. 136-340,) and is spread over the ixth and xth volumes of the Italian Annals of Muratori. In the Bibliotheque Italique (tom. i. p. 175-122,) I find a useful abstract of Capacelatro, a modern Neapolitan, who has composed, in two volumes, the history of his country from Roger Frederic ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... grew older, his poetry, dominated too much by his acute intellect, became more and more abstract. In Under the Old Elm, for example, he speaks ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... inevitable product of cause and effect. We know that. We must admit that he is just as much a fact of the universe as a shower of rain or a storm at sea that swallows a ship. We freely grant in the abstract that there must be, at the present stage of evolution, a certain number of persons with unfair minds. We are quite ready to contemplate such an individual with philosophy—until it happens that, in the course of the progress of the solar system, ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... cannot be absolutely maintained. It may be also that the number of intervals following that concerning which judgment is to be given, and with which that interval may be compared, has an influence on the accuracy of the judgment made. If we abstract from this last set of results, the tendency which appears is toward an increase in accuracy of perception of comparative durations from the beginning to the end of the series, a tendency which appears more markedly ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... This abstract has been given to show the singular manner of legislating in those times.* Not, but that it was necessary thus to legislate, as it was certainly better to have some kind of civil government than none. The raising of two regiments of cavalry was suggested ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... NOTE B, p. 80. The abstract of the report of the Brook House committee (so that committee was called) was first published by Mr. Ralph (vol. i. p. 177), from Lord Halifax's collections, to which I refer. If we peruse their apology, which we find in the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... flat in the abstract, and he had not expected this concrete result. But he said, "We will look at ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... small valise in his hand, and a light summer overcoat flung over his shoulder. Many half-thoughts grazed his mind, and ere the first had taken shape, the second and the third came and chased it away. And still they all in some fashion had reference to Bertha; for in a misty, abstract way, she filled his whole mind; but for some indefinable reason, he was afraid to give free rein to the sentiment which lurked in the remoter ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... loaded with grain for Rouen; and on the eastern horizon the armada, in crescent at present, moving with fires banked at two knots, a glare hiding them from the naked eye, but the glass revealing them like toys in the abstract, ethereally hazy. ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... and with which our legal jargon is saturated. We find in Anglo-French many words which are unrecorded in continental Old French, among them one which we like to think of as essentially English, viz., duete, duty, an abstract formed from the past participle of Fr. devoir. This verb has also given us endeavour, due to the phrase se ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... said Jean thoughtfully. "I like Jack—he's clever. He has all the moral qualities which one admires so much in the abstract. I could ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... the interpretation given to many of these myths that one is compelled to question. Bachofen's way of applying mythical tales has no scientific method; for one thing, abstract ideas are added to primitive legends which could only arise from the thought of civilised peoples. For instance, he accepts, without any doubt, the existence of the Amazons; and believes that the myths which refer to them record "a revolt for the elevation of the feminine sex, ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... position as the starting-point for a greater prize. Lady Eynesford was, here again, with him—up to a point. She thought (and thoughts are apt to put themselves with a bluntness which would be inexcusable in speech) that it was high time that Eleanor Scaife was married, and, from an abstract point of view, this could hardly be denied. Lady Eynesford took the next step. Eleanor and Coxon would suit one another to perfection. Hence the invitations to tea, and Lady Eynesford's considerate withdrawals into the house, or out of sight in the ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... It softened the blow to a certain extent that Mike should be going to Wain's. He had the same feeling for Mike that most boys of eighteen have for their fifteen-year-old brothers. He was fond of him in the abstract, but preferred ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... association with Krafft. Through him the young lawyer came into intimate personal touch with a large class of people who would otherwise have been remote from him. He heard of their difficulties and problems at first hand, saw the actual effect of abuses that, looked at from above, were abstract or academic. Police brutality as a phrase carried little significance; police brutality as a clubbing of Malachi Hogan, who was brought in with his skull crushed, and whose blood stained Keith's new coat, meant something. Waste of public funds, translated before his eyes into eviction for ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... leaves us as far from the origin as ever. What does it all mean? What is behind it all? The "voice of God," says the artist, "the voice of the devil," says the man in the front row. Are we, because we are, human beings, born with the power of innate perception of the beautiful in the abstract so that an inspiration can arise through no external stimuli of sensation or experience,—no association with the outward? Or was there present in the above instance, some kind of subconscious, instantaneous, composite ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... ancient city's walls. There are many such imperfect syncretisms or eclecticisms in the history of philosophy. A modern philosopher, though emancipated from scholastic notions of essence or substance, might still be seriously affected by the abstract idea of necessity; or though accustomed, like Bacon, to criticize abstract notions, might not extend his ...
— Sophist • Plato
... amusement, to the disturbance of an invalid who is lying in a critical state in the next room. Do the mere consequences make this otherwise innocent amusement evil? Yes, if you consider the amusement in the abstract: but if you take it as this human act, the act is inordinate and evil in itself, or as it is elicited in the mind of the agent. The volition amounts to this: "I prefer my amusement to my neighbour's recovery," which is an act unseemly and unreasonable in the mind of a social being. Utilitarians ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... him and liked him, and because he had shown himself no partisan of either side in the civil war, though he was known to be inclined, in the way of abstract opinion, toward a form of government that was not monarchy, the commissioners appointed in 1646 to bring Charles from Newcastle named Harrington as one of the King's attendants. The King was pleased, and Harrington was ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... not yet united: and Edith the Christian maid dwelt in the home of Hilda the heathen prophetess. The girl's blue eyes, rendered dark by the shade of their long lashes, were fixed intently upon the stern and troubled countenance which was bent upon her own, but bent with that abstract gaze which shows that the soul is absent from the sight. So sate Hilda, and so reclined ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Translation by Goerres, with Von Hammer's Review, Vienna Jahrbuch von Lit. 17, 75, 77. Malcolm's Persia, 8vo. ed. i. 503. Macan's Preface to his Critical Edition of the Shah Nameh. On the early Persian History, a very sensible abstract of various opinions ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... cried Roy savagely. Not that the abstract fact of the bells ringing was of any moment to him, but he was in a mood to be angry with everything. "Here, you!" continued he, seizing hold of a boy who was running by, "what be them ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... that manner celebrated his 80th birthday; and it was opened October 1, 1880. The College, which is estimated to have cost L100,000, was built entirely by the founder who also endowed it with an income of about L3,700 per annum, with the intention of providing instruction in mathematics, abstract and applied; physics, mathematical and experimental; chemistry, theoretical, practical, and applied; the natural sciences, geology, metallurgy and mineralogy; botany, zoology and physiology; English, French and German, to which have since been added Greek, Latin, English literature, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... there between that strong description and the sentence quoted from the Freethinker in our Indictment, which declared the same being as "cruel as a Bashi-Bazouk and bloodthirsty as a Bengal tiger"? The one is an abstract and the other a concrete expression of the same view; the one is philosophical and the other popular; the one is a cold statement and the other a burning metaphor. To allow the one to circulate with impunity, and to punish the other with twelve months' imprisonment, is to turn ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... sufficient for a crop yielding 31 bushels of wheat; the phosphorus is sufficient for a crop of 44 bushels, and the potassium for a crop of 35 bushels per acre. Dr. Hopkins, in his recent valuable work on "Soil Fertility and Permanent Agriculture" gives, on page 154, a table from which we abstract ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... the exercise of its own reasoning powers or from its senses. How does it learn the meaning of words? Certain nouns like "papa" or "cat" it may easily be made to understand by pointing at the object referred to and uttering the word, but how does it learn the meaning of abstract nouns, or of verbs and other parts of speech which cannot be illustrated by pantomime? It is almost inevitable that the child should use many words the meaning of which it does not understand, and when young children ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... "Livingstone followed the dictates of duty. Never was such a willing slave to that abstract virtue. His inclinations impel him home, the fascinations of which it requires the sternest resolution to resist. With every foot of new ground he travelled over he forged a chain of sympathy which should hereafter bind the Christian nations ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... hand. When he tried to do so his conclusions seemed grotesquely fanciful and farfetched. This delay was all the more annoying because on the morrow the girl was to be buried, and, therefore, the precious hours were slipping away. He tried repeatedly to attain that abstract, subconscious mood in which alone shines the pure light ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... to be danced, the theatrical action must go forward with the utmost rapidity: there must not be one unmeaning entry, figure, or step in them. Such a piece ought to be a close crouded abstract of ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... temple where the beautiful is always worshipped; it makes a continuous appeal to the higher senses and natural passions. In this temple vice is punished, and virtue rewarded; the great social problems are presented. In this temple instruction is less abstract, and, therefore, more profitable for the crowd. The apostles of this temple are full of faith and courage; they have the souls of missionaries marching always toward ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... he was looked upon as the hope of the Barnburners and the most dangerous foe of the Hunkers. Even Horatio Seymour was afraid of him. He did not advocate abolition; he did not treat slavery in the abstract; he did not transcend the Free-soil doctrine. But he spoke with such power and brilliancy that Henry Wilson, afterward Vice President, declared him "the bright particular star of the revolt."[372] He was not an impassioned ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Articles can be verified in standard periodical indexes and abstracting services such as Reader's Guide, Education Index, Psychological Abstracts, Engineering Index, etc. Give full citation including volume, series, year/date, page, abstract number of verification. If request could not be ...
— The Long Island Library Resources Council (LILRC) Interlibrary Loan Manual: January, 1976 • Anonymous
... is believed to be rather abstract than practical, whether slavery ever can or would exist in any portion of the acquired territory even if it were left to the option of the slaveholding States themselves. From the nature of the climate and productions in much the larger portion of it it is certain it could never ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... opposites: but in strictness he should rather have spoken of a harmony which succeeds opposites, for an agreement of disagreements there cannot be. Music too is concerned with the principles of love in their application to harmony and rhythm. In the abstract, all is simple, and we are not troubled with the twofold love; but when they are applied in education with their accompaniments of song and metre, then the discord begins. Then the old tale has to be repeated of fair Urania and the coarse Polyhymnia, ...
— Symposium • Plato
... mathematical science not merely as a vast body of abstract and immutable truths, ... but as possessing a yet deeper interest for the human race, when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world ... those who thus think on mathematical ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Secretary of the Interior herewith attached gives much interesting statistical information, which I abstain from giving an abstract of, but refer you to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... 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 they could not have gone through the steps of ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... is generally concrete. The artist may wish to give expression to a general truth, or philosophical principle, or ethereal fancy. These appear very abstract, but the artist embodies in material forms the idea he wishes to convey. The poet expresses his thought by the suggestion of material imagery, and emotion is most readily aroused by ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... token I can give) that the moth and rust of time have not eaten away the affection which I had for you all, and that those two thieves, Change and Death, which were so early busy with us, have not been able to undermine the house of our Love, nor abstract the treasure of ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... The reader who is not satisfied with the picture now given of these wretched and disgusting beings, may turn to the abstract of Bougainville's Voyage, quoted in the preceding volume of this collection, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... but the thin shadow And blank foreboding, never a wainscot rat Rasping a crust? Or at the window pane No fly, no bluebottle, no starveling spider? The windows frame a prospect of cold skies Half-merged with sea, as at the first creation, Abstract, confusing welter. Face about, Peer rather in the glass once more, take note Of self, the grey lips and long hair dishevelled, Sleep-staring eyes. Ah, mirror, for Christ's love Give me one token ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... pass to Jupiter or Mercury, and instantly he becomes aware of a revolting individuality. He sees before him the opposite pole of deity. The river-god had too little of a concrete character. Jupiter has nothing else. In Jupiter you read no incarnation of any abstract quality whatever: he represents nothing whatever in the metaphysics of the universe. Except for the accident of his power, he is merely a man. He has a character, that is, a tendency or determination to this quality ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... remains, in fact, a mere abstraction, inasmuch as the former is not comprehended and exhibited as a development of it—an organization produced by and from Reason. I wish, at the very outset, to call your attention to the important difference between a conception, a principle, a truth limited to an abstract form, and its determinate application and concrete development. This distinction affects the whole fabric of philosophy; and among other bearings of it there is one to which we shall have to revert at the close of our view of universal history, in investigating the aspect of political affairs ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... perjury, that were ever witnessed in this or any other country on a similar occasion. The whole number of votes polled was forty-one thousand three hundred. It is a notorious fact, that there are not forty thousand legal voters residing in the city. In the abstract this election is but of little importance. Its moral influence on other sections of the country remains to be seen. Generally, the effect of such a triumph is unfavourable to the defeated party in other places; and it would be so in the present instance, if the contest had been an ordinary ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... (prayer) "to stand" (i.e., to begin). Hereupon the worshippers recite the Farz or Koran commanded noon-prayer of Friday; and the unco' guid add a host of superogatories Those who would study the subject may consult Lane (M. E. chaps. iii. and its abstract in his "Arabian Nights," I, p. 430, or note 69 to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... beneficent vital-spark every body, but a lawyer, is in search; and it is what every body, but a lawyer, is delighted to find. No wonder therefore that a lawyer should meet discomfiture, and confusion, when he pretends to discuss the abstract nature of justice, in any place except in these aforesaid ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... came. If he loved abstract truth, he saved himself by propounding the most popular of all principles, the absolute good, which rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by drawing all his illustrations from sources disdained by orators, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... She agreed. She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male. She was glad that he had suggested coming with her. ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... the first part of this tale should be of peculiar interest to the student of Shakspeare as well as to those engaged in tracing the genealogy of popular fiction. Jonathan Scott has given—for reasons of his own—a meagre abstract of a similar tale which occurs in the "Bahar-i- Danish" (vol. iii. App., p. 291), ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... only integral parts of the person, but its most distinctive attributes. When Earl Grey said he would stand or fall by his order, it was as if he had said, he would stand or fall by himself. Take a noble lord, and, if the process be possible, abstract him mentally from his titles and privileges, and offer the two lots separately for sale in the market, who would not buy the latter if they could? who would, in most cases, even bid for the first? It is the title that is asked everywhere to dinner; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... moral and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present, and the future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic nations with the exhausted population of the south, impressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... her neighbours, and to the conduct of people with whom she lives, almost invariably right. She has a quick insight, and an affectionate heart, which together keep her from going astray. She knows how to do good, and when to do it. But to abstract argument, and to political truth, she is wilfully blind. I felt it to be necessary that I should select this opportunity for making Jack understand that I would not fear his opposition; but I own that I could have wished that Mrs ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... My judgment was stronger than were my powers of realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language, though indeed partly owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire of giving a poetic colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths, in which a new world then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part likewise, originate in unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative talent.—During several years of my youth and early manhood, I reverenced those who had re- introduced the manly simplicity ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the application of the law again showing how interest may be developed in a specific college subject. Let us choose one that is generally regarded as so "difficult" and "abstract" that not many people are interested in it—philology, the study of language as a science. Let us imagine that we are trying to interest a student of law in this. As a first step we shall select some legal term and show what philology can tell about it. A term frequently encountered ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... probably lost quite half of the communications he made, and much we have is damaged, broken, and partly effaced. In the abstract that follows the reader must be prepared therefore for a considerable amount of break, hiatus, and change of topic. Mr. Wendigee and I are collaborating in a complete and annotated edition of the Cavor record, ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... suggested the necessity of preparing for war, Lord Grey said the preparation should be by gaining the hearts of our own people—and he advocated, but very temperately, Reform. He did not, however, allow that there was any abstract right to a particular mode of constituting a Legislature. The right of the people was to a good Government, and to whatever form of Legislative Assembly might seem best to ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... majority of those who have undertaken to interpret "Don Quixote." It has been completely overlooked, for example, by the illustrators. To be sure, the great majority of the artists who illustrated "Don Quixote" knew nothing whatever of Spain. To them a venta conveyed no idea but the abstract one of a roadside inn, and they could not therefore do full justice to the humour of Don Quixote's misconception in taking it for a castle, or perceive the remoteness of all its realities from his ideal. But even when better informed ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... course which is the specific characterisation of Michelangelo. As years advanced, his pulses beat less quickly and his body shrank. But the man did not alter. With the same lapse of years, his style grew drier and more abstract, but it did not alter in quality or depart from its ideal. He seems to me in these respects to be like Milton: wholly unlike the plastic and ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Aristotle placed it in riches and outward prosperity. Plato believed in prayer; but Aristotle thought that God would not hear or answer it, and therefore that it was useless. Plato believed in happiness after death; while Aristotle supposed that death ended all pleasure. Plato lived in the world of abstract ideas; Aristotle in the realm of sense and observation. The one was religious; the other secular and worldly. With both the passion for knowledge was boundless, but they differed in their conceptions of knowledge; the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... expect a person of your (as I imagine) limited intellect to know anything about the scientific subjects which interest me, but I feel sure that you are perfectly aware that the calculus is abstract and not concrete. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various
... from such attempts on our peace and safety. The United States are becoming too important in population and resources not to attract the observation of other nations. It therefore may in the progress of time occur that opinions entirely abstract in the States which they may prevail and in no degree affecting their domestic institutions may be artfully but secretly encouraged with a view to undermine the Union. Such opinions may become the foundation of political ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Tyler • John Tyler
... question of abstract sovereignty, it was certainly impolitic for an absolute monarch to recognize the right of a nation to repudiate its natural allegiance. But Elizabeth had already countenanced that step by assisting the rebellion against Philip. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... from the council of Chalcedon to the death of Anastasius, may be found in the Breviary of Liberatus, (c. 14—19,) the iid and iiid books of Evagrius, the abstract of the two books of Theodore the Reader, the Acts of the Synods, and the Epistles of the Pope, (Concil. tom. v.) The series is continued with some disorder in the xvth and xvith tomes of the Memoires Ecclesiastiques of Tillemont. And here I must ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... be an old subject between them, and they discussed it languidly, like some abstract ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... beauty, and they misunderstood the language of admiration. The latter I suspect to be at the root of the whole matter. Poets were, as we shall presently see, everlastingly praising small waists, and women fell into the error of supposing that a small waist was, in the abstract, a beauty and an attraction. When or where the mistake originated I cannot tell, but here are the words of praise of probably a fourteenth-century lover: "Middel heo hath menskful smal," or, "She hath a graceful small waist." At a later day Master Wither included ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... The following abstract of the history of Virginia Maria de Leyva is based on Dandolo's Signora di Monza (Milano, 1855). Readers of Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi, and of Rosini's tiresome novel, La Signora di Monza, will be already familiar with her in romance under the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the opposite tendency: he had to translate his internal thoughts into the external shapes of the Mythus before he could grasp fully his own mind. His conception of the world was mythical; this form he understood and not that of abstract reflection. We may well exclaim: Happy Homeric man, to whom the world was ever present, not himself. Yet both sides belong to the full-grown soul, the mythical and the reflective; from Homer the one-sided modern mind can recover a part of its spiritual inheritance, which ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... not to be a public character. For instance, no judicious artist would have attempted to murder Abraham Newland. For the case was this; everybody read so much about Abraham Newland, and so few people ever saw him, that there was a fixed belief that he was an abstract idea. And I remember that once, when I happened to mention that I had dined at a coffee-house in company with Abraham Newland, everybody looked scornfully at me, as though I had pretended to have played at billiards with Prester John, or to have had an affair of honor with the Pope. And, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... universal, because human speech does not differ with the difference of human tongues. These three parts are: first, nouns—the names of things; second, verbs—the names of events; and, third, the partitives—or the words which express the relations of things to events. Thus the most abstract of verbs, "to be," refers to an event; for when a man says, "I am," he is mentioning an event in the history of the universe which did not occur till ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... uttermost to keep Englishmen for Oxford or to win them back from Paris. Oxford clerks fought the battle of England against the legate Otto, and we shall see them siding with Montfort. The eminently practical temper of the academic class could not neglect the world of action for the abstract pursuit of science. Eager as men were to know, to prove, and to inquire, the age had little of the mystical temperament about it. The studies which made for worldly success, such as civil and canon ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... Vaert, van Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, van by Noorden, om langes Noorwegen de Noortcaep, Laplant, Vinlant, Ruslandt ... tot voorby de revier Oby, Franeker, 1601. Another edition at Amsterdam in 1624, and in abstract in Saeghman's collection of travels in 1665. The voyage is also described in Blavii Atlas Major, 1665. Linschoten was "commis" on board, a post which included both the employment of supercargo and that of ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... the same time almost passionate, impatience which was to devote us for some time to variety, almost to incoherency, of interest. We had fared across the sea under the glamour of the Swiss school in the abstract, but the Swiss school in the concrete soon turned stale on our hands; a fact over which I remember myself as no further critical than to feel, not without zest, that, since one was all eyes and the world decidedly, at such a pace, all images, it ministered to the panoramic. ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... This question, from an abstract, speculative phase of the Monroe Doctrine, took on the concrete and somewhat urgent form of security for our trans-Isthmian routes against foreign interference towards the middle of this century, when the attempt to settle it was made by the oft-mentioned Clayton-Bulwer ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... legislates for universal humanity on philanthropic principles; it legislates for itself. There is no country where there are not high duties on some things, not even England. No nation can be governed on abstract principles and in disregard of its necessities. When it was for the interest of England to remove duties on corn, in order that manufactures might be stimulated, they took off duties on corn, because the laboring-classes ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... be endured! And yet, with what utmost stretch of courage,—even though he were willing to devote himself certainly and instantly to the worst fate that he had pictured to himself,—could he immediately rush away from these abstract speculations, encumbered as they were with personal flattery, into his own most unpleasant, most tragic matter! It was the unfitness that deterred him and not the possible tragedy. Nevertheless, through it all, he was sure,—nearly sure,—that ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope |
