"Abstract" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in Grosvenor Gardens two ladies were at that same moment speaking of the FitzHenrys. It was quite easy to see that the smaller lady of the two was the mistress of the house, as also of that vague abstract called the situation. She sat in the most comfortable chair, which was, by the way, considerably too spacious for her, and there was a certain aggressive sense of possession ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... sake. Each nation produces a spiritual type of it, which becomes one of the deepest national characteristics, and the Celtic type is easily distinguished. No Celt ever cared for landscape. "It is loveliness I ask, not lovely things," says Fiona; and it is but a step from this to that abstract mystical and spiritual love of beauty, which is the very soul of the Celtic genius. It expresses itself most directly in colours, and the meaning of them is far more than bright-hued surfaces. The pale green of running water, the purple and pearl-grey of doves, still more the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... the Rue du Saint-Esprit or in the Square one of these bewildering phenomena, careful and exhaustive researches had invariably reduced the fabulous monster to the proportions of a person whom one 'did know,' either personally or in the abstract, in his or her civil status as being more or less closely related to some family in Combray. It would turn out to be Mme. Sauton's son discharged from the army, or the Abbe Perdreau's niece come home ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... listened to the bells chiming all about the vale, say whether 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' would be promoted by the destruction of all the feudality which belongs inseparably to this scene, and by the substitution of some abstract political rights for all the beef and ale and music and dancing with which they are made merry and glad even for so brief a space. The Duke of Rutland is as selfish a man as any of his class—that is, he never does what he does ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... curiosity, and his ways were "past finding out." He was bold and fearless physically, but there his courage ended. He avowed himself to be a Republican, yet he was an innate aristocrat. He was always declaiming against despotism and tyranny in the abstract, yet he was domineering and arbitrary in his household, in his family, and in his business. He affected primitive simplicity, yet was one of the vainest of men. In fact, his whole nature was a ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... colours in a solid or insoluble state, prepared for the artists' use. Hitherto, we have treated of colours in the abstract sense, as appealing to the eye only: we have now to consider ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... afterwards. But while things were remembered, persons, I found by-and-by, were completely forgotten. Or rather, while I remembered after a while generalities, such as houses and men, recognising them in the abstract as a house, or a man, or a horse, or a baby, I forgot entirely particulars, such as the names of people and the places I had lived in. Words soon came back to me: names and facts were lost: I knew the world as a whole, not my own old ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... Mongolian—or rather Turanian—worshippers of Budh. The latter process would have made more headway but for the influence of the reigning dynasty, which discourages it on system. The change implied in this proselytism is greater in respect of some social practices than in the abstract principles of religious belief. The polyandry of the Tibetans is in direct contrast with the polygamy of the Moslems, and is far more strictly maintained. It is favored by the circumstance that, contrary to what usually obtains in old countries, the males in this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... last several thousand years. Nor has his mind changed. There is no faculty of the mind of man to-day that did not exist in the minds of the men of long ago. Man has to-day no concept that is too wide and deep and abstract for the mind of Plato or Aristotle to grasp. Give to Plato or Aristotle the same fund of knowledge that man to-day has access to, and Plato and Aristotle would reason as profoundly as the man of to-day and ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... them was joined Burnet, whose well known hatred of Popery was likely to give weight to what he might say on such an occasion. Somers was the chief orator on the other side; and to his pen we owe a singularly lucid and interesting abstract of the debate. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... They did him good,—in the same way that the making of many shoes would have done him good had he been a shoemaker. In catching fishes and riding after foxes he could not give his mind to the occupation, so as to abstract his thoughts. But Cicero's de Natura Deorum was more effectual. Gradually he returned to a gentle cheerfulness of life, but he never burst out again into the violent exercise of shooting a pheasant. After that his mother died, and again he was called upon to endure ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... the money game. He was always making it, piling it up ruthlessly but honestly. Then that craving petered out, and he took a hand in the collecting game. What will come next I don't know. As a boy I was always afraid of him. He was kind to me, but in the abstract. I was like an extra on the grocer's bill. He put me into the hands of a tutor—a lovable old dreamer—and paid no more attention to me. He never put his arms round me and told ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... reasoned, yet at 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 ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... recited this discourse unto us on the glory of Narayana, that glory which is the highest and which is immutable. I heard it from him and have recited it to thee exactly as I heard it, O sinless one. This cult, with its mysteries and its abstract of details, was obtained by Narada, O king, from that Lord of the universe, viz., Narayana himself. Even such are the particulars of this great cult. I have, before this, O foremost of kings, explained ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... but energetic. At intervals the combatants would cling affectionately to one another, and on these occasions the red-jerseyed man, still chewing gum and still wearing the same air of being lost in abstract thought, would split up the mass by the simple method of ploughing his way between the pair. Toward the end of the first round Thomas, eluding a left swing, put Patrick neatly to the floor, where the latter remained for the necessary ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... the history and considering religious writings, the second large group of medieval productions, one finds the most significant translator's comment associated with the saint's legend, though occasionally the short pious tale or the more abstract theological treatise makes some contribution. These religious works differ from the romances in that they are more frequently based on Latin than on French originals, and in that they contain more deliberate and more repeated references ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... rendered also false as well as weak by the introducing sentence, "Volvitur Euryalus leto," after which the simile of the drooping flower is absurd. Of criticism, the chief use of which is to warn all sensible men from such business, the following abstract of Diderot's notes on the passage, given in the 'Saturday Review' for April 29th, 1871, is worth preserving. (Was the French critic really not aware that Homer had written the lines ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... speaking of her in the abstract, merely. But is it not true that the marked characteristic of all Englishmen is tyranny? Don't they rule wherever they go? Aren't they always and everywhere the dominant class—the oppressors? Watch the British tourist in any far country. Does he ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... him, or his powers of concentration were more than ordinarily great, that he could turn from the contemplation of a subject like the one left at the cross-roads corner, a subject which Burns was pretty sure vitally concerned him, to a mere abstract discussion of a modern sociological problem, bare of practical illustration, and dealing purely with one man's notions not yet worked out to ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... bring out a shade of meaning) not because we object to it, but because by doing so we would run the risk of identifying The Absolute with some idea of a personal god with certain theological attributes. Nor does the word "Principle" appeal to us, for it seems to imply a cold, unfeeling, abstract thing, while we conceive the Absolute Spirit or Being to be a warm, vital, living, acting, feeling Reality. We do not use the word Nature, which many prefer, because of its materialistic meaning to the minds of many, although ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... to the elucidation of your statement," observed the old gentleman, in the tone of one discussing a point of abstract science, "it may be remarked that the state of mind which ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... Accustomed to her parents' extravagant denunciations, and her uncle's more repressed but practical contempt of them, the unfortunate girl early developed a cynical disbelief in the virtues of kinship in the abstract, and a philosophical resignation to its effects upon her personally. Believing that her father and uncle fairly represented the fraternal principle, she was quite prepared for the early defection and distrust of her vagabond and dissipated brother Stephen, and accepted ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... being capable of adopting savage methods when it comes to punishing such a fellow as this M'Bongwele," exclaimed Lethbridge, when von Schalckenberg had come to an end. "Mere hanging seems absolutely inadequate; yet what can we do? Our sense of abstract justice may be so keen that, for the moment, we are in full sympathy with the old Mosaic law of 'an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,' but which of us could deliberately set to work to serve the savage as he has served others? We simply could not do it; and I suppose it ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... men in his day—and a good many in our own—Matthew had a low opinion of woman. It had been instilled into him, as it was at that time into every man who wrote himself "esquire," that the utmost chivalrous reverence was due to the ladies as an abstract idea; but this abstract idea was quite compatible with the rudest behaviour and the supremest contempt for any given woman in the concrete. Woman was an article of which there were two qualities: the first-class thing was a toy, the second was a machine. Both were for the use of ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... the moods of this old school-friend had begun to stir me. Meeting her on my daily walks to town by the back way through the new avenue, I found her seemingly anxious to avoid me, and difficult to warm to any interest but in the most remote and abstract affairs. Herself she would never speak of, her plans, cares, ambitions, preferences, or aversions; she seemed dour set on aloofness. And though she appeared to listen to my modestly phrased exploits with attention and respect, and some trepidation at the dangerous portions, ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... even so," said Leicester, looking at an abstract of astrological calculations which he had in his hand; "the stronger influence will prevail, and, as I think, the evil hour pass away. Lend me your hand, Sir Richard, to doff my gown; and remain an instant, if it is not too burdensome to ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... remarking that soda-water, though a good thing in the abstract, was apt to lie cold upon the stomach unless qualified with ginger, or a small infusion of brandy, which latter article he held to be preferable in all cases, saving for the one consideration of expense. Nobody venturing to dispute these positions, he ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... course make some money before we can marry. It 's rather droll, certainly, to engage one's self to a girl whom one is going to leave the next day, for years. We shall be condemned, for some time to come, to do a terrible deal of abstract thinking about each other. But I wanted her blessing on my career and I could not help asking for it. Unless a man is unnaturally selfish he needs to work for some one else than himself, and I am sure I shall run a smoother and swifter course for knowing that that ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... generally applicable." Yet, understood in the sense in which it was originally promulgated and afterwards explained, this early Socialist program still affords the most valuable key we have as to what Socialism is, if we view it on the side of its practical efforts rather than on that of abstract theories. Marx and Engels recognize that the measures I have mentioned must be acknowledged as "insufficient and untenable," because, though they involve "inroads on the rights of property," they do not go far enough to destroy capitalism and establish a Socialistic ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... language. In the Proposal he had declared with a pretense of knowledge, that Anglo-Saxon was "excepting some few variations in the orthography... the same in most original words with our present English, as well as with German and other northern dialects." But in An Abstract of the History of England (probably revised in 1719) he says that the English which came in with the Saxons was "extremely different from what it is now." The two statements are not incompatible, but the emphasis is remarkably changed. It is possible ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... play, is at least personal and vital. These qualities compensate, in some measure, for the narrowness of available opportunities. Formal instruction, on the contrary, easily becomes remote and dead—abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary words of depreciation. What accumulated knowledge exists in low grade societies is at least put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it exists with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... had been debating on an abstract topic without any immediate application to themselves. But now Dick leaned across the table with a smile upon his face which ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... to explain the ideal pantheism which Brahmanical philosophers substituted for the Nature-worship taught in the earlier Vedas. This proved too abstract for the people; and the Brahmans, in the true spirit of modern Jesuitism, wishing to accommodate their religion to the people,—who were in bondage to their tyranny, and who have ever been inclined to sensuous worship,—multiplied ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... in the abstract. But it is not a quality that tends to the making or the keeping ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... was something here of which she could take hold. Not that Father Bruno had suggested a new course of action so much as that he had supplied a new motive power. To do good, to give alms, to be kind to poor and sick people, Doucebelle had been taught already: but the reason for it was either the abstract notion that it was the right thing to do, or that it would help to increase her little heap of ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... depend greatly on the use of language, they are not fair to the deaf child, nor to the child with a speech defect, nor to the foreign child. Also, some persons who are clumsy in managing the rather abstract ideas dealt with in the Binet tests show up better in managing concrete objects. For all such cases, performance tests are useful. Language plays little part in a performance test, and concrete objects are used. The "form board" ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... which was manifested and certainly enjoyed by Duse, when she demanded that the stage be cleared of actors in order to save the creative life of the stage, is the same disgust that makes us yearn for wooden dolls to make abstract movements in order that we may release art from its infliction of the big "A", to take away from art its pricelessness and make of it a new and engaging diversion, pastime, even dissipation if you will; for all real expression is a phase of dissipation in itself: To release ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... illustration is one of the most marked features of his teaching. In one sense this simply proves him to be a genuine Oriental, for to contemplate and present abstract truths in concrete form is characteristic of the Semitic mind. In the case of Jesus, however, it proves more: the variety and homeliness of his illustrations show how completely conversant he was alike with common life and with spiritual truth. There is ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... the people; and if that welfare demands other measures, we must take them." This was not difficult, because the imperial power had gradually shaped two instruments wherewith to act: one was the laws sanctioned by the legislature and pertaining ordinarily to abstract questions of jurisprudence; the other was the Emperor's personal decrees, which, though discussed by the council of state, were the expression of the Emperor's will, and covered in their scope the whole ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... of State politics from personal belief. But we are not concerned at present with the personal philosophy of the two kings, but with the way it affected their people. This people, as far as the Netherlands were concerned, were the last in Europe to tolerate such hard and abstract methods of government, and nothing perhaps is more enlightening, if we try to form an adequate opinion of Belgian temperament, than the upheaval caused by the reforms proclaimed by the "benighted" and by the "enlightened" monarch. It was ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... business. People say to authors, just as they do to tailors: 'I want such and such an article. Make it and I'll pay you for it.' Now, your tailor may consider the Imperial Roman costume more artistic than that of today, and so may you in the abstract, but if he sent home a toga in place of a pair of trousers, you would discontinue dealing with him. So if it amuses you to make togas, well and good; I don't quarrel with it; but, personally, I mean to go into the gents' furnishing line and to do my ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... the notion that heat is matter. He thus laid the corner-stone of the modern theory that heat light, electricity, magnetism, chemical action, and all other forms of energy are in essence motion, are convertible into one another, and as motion are indestructible. The following abstract of Count Rumford's paper is taken from "Heat as a Mode of Motion," by Professor John Tyndall, published by D. Appleton & Co., New York. This work and "The Correlation and Conservation of Forces," edited by Dr. E. L. Youmans, published by the ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... keen insight into abstract truth; but he was an Englishman to the backbone in his severe adherence to the real and the concrete. He had a most classical taste, and a genius for philosophy and art; and he was fond of historical inquiry, and the politics of religion. He had no turn ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... best apology may be found in the cheerful resolution, with which, about eight years afterwards, he suffered death in the cause of religion. The authentic history of his martyrdom has been recorded with unusual candor and impartiality. A short abstract, therefore, of its most important circumstances, will convey the clearest information of the spirit, and of the forms, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... 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 in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... weekly publication of the same size as the Scientific American and contains articles too long or too technical for the parent paper. Lectures and Papers read by famous scientists before learned societies are published in full or in abstract; articles from foreign papers, otherwise inaccessible to those who read English only, are translated; and original articles on technical subjects are a few of the valuable features of the paper; ...
— Wholesale Price List of Newspapers and Periodicals • D. D. Cottrell's Subscription Agency
... wisdom.' They wanted demonstration, abstract principles, systematised philosophies, and the like. Paul comes again with his 'We preach Christ and Him crucified.' The wisdom is there, as I shall have to say in a moment, but the form that it takes is directly antagonistic to the wishes of these wisdom-seeking ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... represent his best work in both arts. These are arranged, not in chronological order, but in a way which will lead the student from the subjects most familiar and easily understood to those which are more abstract and difficult. ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... a distinguished botanic physician of Ohio, with several other physicians, both of the old and the new school, whom I have not named, do not hesitate to regard a pure vegetable diet, in the abstract, as by far the best for all mankind, both in ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... lecture at the Working Men's Club; and the subject of my lecture is the inherent nobility of man, and the necessity of man worship. Women have turned from men and are occupied now with their own aspirations, losing sight thereby of the ideal that God gave them. My poem is a sort of abstract, an epitome, a compendium ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... he had carefully developed it; and it was possible that when the world had completely palled upon him, he would shut himself up at Crumford Hall and give the public the benefit of his accumulated opinions, abstract and biographical. But he was not ready for that yet; he needed several years more of experience, observation, and assiduous cultivation of the habit of analysis; and in the meantime he was in a condition of cold disgust with himself and ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... of the Atlantic Pact builds on such precedents. The novel feature is its enlarged conception of defensible American interests abroad. In the words of the published abstract of the Report of the Committee on Foreign Relations on the Pact, "Article 5 records what is a fact, namely, that an armed attack within the meaning of the treaty would in the present-day world constitute an attack ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... by the late Sir George Gipps of the state of society in the distant interior of New South Wales is perfectly correct, nor can there be any doubt but that it entails evils on the stock-holders themselves which, on an abstract view of the question, I cannot help thinking they have it in their power to lessen, or entirely to remove, when an influx of population shall take place; but, however regular their establishments may be, they cannot, as single men, have the same influence over those whom they ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... capacity high, if not quite first rate, which enables them, granted fair chances, to rise quickly into positions where they can effectively serve the community. These men, whatever occupation they follow, be it that of abstract thinking, or literary production, or scientific research, or the conduct of affairs, whether commercial or political or administrative, are the dynamic strength of the country when they enter manhood, and ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... otherwise irksome, since social morality, the responsibility of man towards the life of man, will, in the new order of things, take the place of theological morality, or the responsibility of man to some abstract idea. Next, the day's work will be short. This need not be insisted on. It is clear that with work unwasted it CAN be short. It is clear also that much work which is now a torment, would be easily endurable if it ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... as has been before observed, that facts too stubborn to be resisted have produced a species of general assent to the abstract proposition that there exist material defects in our national system; but the usefulness of the concession, on the part of the old adversaries of federal measures, is destroyed by a strenuous opposition to a remedy, upon the only principles that can give it a chance of success. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... to adjust the doctrine of religion to the prevailing doctrinal opinions. (5) Political and social circumstances. (6) The changing moral ideals of life. (7) The so-called logical consistency, that is the abstract analogical treatment of one dogma according to the form of another. (8) The effort to adjust different tendencies and contradictions in the church. (9) The endeavour to reject once for all a doctrine regarded as erroneous. (10) The ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... escaped slave, caused a riot in which the court-house was attacked by a mob, one of the assailants was killed, and the militia were called out. Other like seizures elsewhere aroused the indignation of people who, whatever were their abstract theories as to the law, revolted at the actual spectacle of a man dragged back from freedom into slavery. May 22, 1856, Preston S. Brooks strode suddenly upon Charles Sumner, seated and unarmed at his desk in the senate-chamber, and beat him savagely over the head with ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... went on to demand his daughter from Lady Belamour, taking with him Betty, whom he allowed to be a much better match for my Lady than he could be. Very little faith in his cousin Urania remained to him in the abstract, yet even now he could not be sure that she would not talk him over and hoodwink him in any actual encounter. Sir Amyas likewise accompanied him, both to gratify his own anxiety and to secure admission. The young man still looked pale and worn with ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... subservience of lawyers, the servility of judges, gave scarce a hope that justice would not be wrested to serve the purposes of the crown; that considerations of state policy would not prove stronger than any abstract belief of the prisoner's innocence or guilt. That we have not misrepresented the degraded condition of the English tribunals during the period we have mentioned, a reference to the state trials passim, will abundantly prove. Nor is it at all strange that such should ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... Dickens that in this period of youthful strain we do not feel the strain but feel only the youth. His own amazing wish to write equalled or outstripped even his readers' amazing wish to read. Working too hard did not cure him of his abstract love of work. Unreasonable publishers asked him to write ten novels at once; but he wanted to write twenty novels at once. All this period is strangely full of his own sense at once of fertility and of futility; he did work which no one else could have ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... dropped from him in his conversations with my brother and others. But, on the whole, the simple fact was that he never ventured to go deeply into the fundamental questions. His official duties left him little time for abstract thought; and his surpassingly ingenious and versatile mind employed itself rather in framing excuses for not answering than in finding thorough answers to possible doubts. He adopted a version of the ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... perished by spontaneous combustion, and the serenade had been in honour of their ashes, it would have been impossible to surpass the unutterable despair expressed in that one chorus: 'Go where glory waits thee.' It was a requiem, a dirge, a moan, a howl, a wail, a lament, an abstract of everything that is sorrowful and hideous ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... know, and do not think essential to decide. As far as these triangles are individual, they are made so by the will of God, and not by the substance you call triangle. The universal—the abstract right angle, or any other abstract form—is only an idea, a concept, to which reality, individuality, or what we might call energy is wanting. The only true energy, except man's free ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... to the words of love which I addressed to him,— I forgot every painful thought, every fear, and every regret, in the happiness of the moment; but as soon as my attention was forced away from ourselves, and directed to abstract subjects, it wandered to the thousand objects of alarm and disquietude which ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... was drawn and quartered in MacFlecnoe, while the two were yoked for castigation in Part II. of Absalom and Achitophel, which appeared in 1682. Dryden possessed preminently the faculty for satire. He did not devote himself exclusively to an abstract treatment, nor, like Pope, to bitter personalities; he blends and combines the two methods most effectively. Every one of his brisk, nervous couplets carries a sting; every distich is a sound box ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... It is not a punishment; it is peace. But Durga Ram, called Umballa, will spend the remainder of his days in the treadmill, which is a concrete hell, not abstract." ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... clump of aged trees the young man came in view of a light and elegant country-house in the half-timbered Gothic style of the late revival, apparently only a few years old. Surprised at finding himself so near, Christopher's heart fluttered unmanageably till he had taken an abstract view of his position, and, in impatience at his want of nerve, adopted a sombre train of reasoning to convince himself that, far from indulgence in the passion of love bringing bliss, it was a folly, leading to grief and disquiet—certainly ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... of actuality in Italy that it is in England," his Eminence replied; "but in the abstract, and other things equal, my attitude would of course be one ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... two plans, the convention then went, on May 30, into a committee of the whole to consider the fifteen propositions in the Virginia plan seriatim. They wisely concluded to determine abstract ideas first and concrete forms later. Apparently for the time being little attention was paid to Pinckney's plan, and this may have been due to the hostile attitude of the older members of the convention to ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... abstract reflections for a fresh and active resentment. This is the fifth or sixth dog that has passed my Spion, harnessed to a small barrow-like cart, and tugging painfully at a burden so ludicrously disproportionate to his size, that it would seem a burlesque, but ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... cheese' had vanished! A sturdy "rat" of a beggar, whom we had relieved on the road, with his olfactories all alive, no doubt, "smelt" our cheese, and while we were gazing at the magnificent clouds, contrived to abstract our treasure! Cruel tramp! An ill return for our pence! We both wished the rind might not choke him! The mournful fact was ascertained a little before we drove into the courtyard of the house. Mr. Coleridge bore the loss with great fortitude, observing, that we should never starve with a loaf ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... persons not to be tolerated upon the face of God's earth. We do not tolerate them now. We punish them by law. We even destroy them wholesale in war, without inquiring into their individual guilt or innocence. David was taught, not by abstract meditation in his study, but by bitter need and agony, not to tolerate them then. If he could have destroyed them as we do now, it is not for us to say that he would have been wrong. And what if he were indignant, ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... mice. I have also finished Tennyson. I have read him right through in the course of the year, which is much the best way to read a poet, as you can follow the development of his thoughts. His mind, to my thinking, was profound but not of very wide range, and strangely abstract. His only pressing intellectual problems are those of immortality and evil, and he reached his point of view on those before he was forty. He never advances or recedes from the position summarised in the preface to "In Memoriam," d. 1849. The result is that his later ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... material qualities; Vedana, sensation; Sanna, abstract ideas; Samkhara, tendencies of mind; Vinnana, mental powers, or consciousness. Of these we are formed; by them we are conscious of existence; and through them communicate with the world ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... OF THE RED RACE. PAGE Natural religions the unaided attempts of man to find out God, modified by peculiarities of race and nation.—The peculiarities of the red race: 1. Its languages unfriendly to abstract ideas. Native modes of writing by means of pictures, symbols, objects, and phonetic signs. These various methods compared in their influence on the intellectual faculties. 2. Its isolation, unique in the history of the world. 3. Beyond all others, a hunting ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... 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 ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... even to your sympathy, but to you. Their very spirits are composed of a sort of sunflower dust that settles everywhere. And if they have what we term the higher life at all, it is expressed by a woodland call to some tree-top spirit in you. Thus, here am I, really desirous of an abstract, artistic training of the mind, already taking liberties with the sacred corners of your editorial dignity by impressing ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... problem which no one but himself could solve. He was only half conscious of his surroundings; he was moving in a kind of detached world of his own, where the warders and the Sheriff and those who followed were almost abstract and unreal figures. He was living with a past which had been everlasting distant, and had now become a vivid and buffeting present. He returned no answers to the questions addressed to him, and would not talk, save when for a little while they dismounted ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to-night despatch'd sixteen businesses, a month's length apiece; by an abstract of success: I have conge'd with the duke, done my adieu with his nearest; buried a wife, mourned for her; writ to my lady mother I am returning; entertained my convoy; and between these main parcels of despatch effected ...
— All's Well That Ends Well • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Englishmen with a few strangers among them into a body of strangers among whom two or three Englishmen still kept their places. The result of their "deep speech" with William was not likely to be other than an assent to William's will. The ordinary freeman did not lose his abstract right to come and shout "Yea, yea," to any addition that King William made to the law of King Edward. But there would be nothing to tempt him to come, unless King William thought fit to bid him. But once at least William did gather together, if not every freeman, at least all freeholders of ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... imitating in the round naves of a few churches the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre. Other instances of devout imitation might be found, if we looked for them. But the imitation of a concrete model is a different thing from translating abstract mysteries into the plan and elevation of a building. And, although the ground plan with nave, transepts, and chancel, certainly forms a cross; and, although, as time went on, the resemblance to the chief symbol of the Christian faith was no doubt recognised and valued, the plan itself, as we have ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... this eternal Crabbe is relished in America (I am not looking to my Edition, which would be a hopeless loss anywhere): he certainly is little read in his own Country. And I fancy America likes more abstract matter than ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... Mist.Ford. He will seeke there on my word: Neyther Presse, Coffer, Chest, Trunke, Well, Vault, but he hath an abstract for the remembrance of such places, and goes to them by his Note: There is no hiding you ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... abstract doctrine of latent heat, the ingenuity of man has discovered a certain measure for the quantity of those commutable effects which are perceived; and though this be a progress of science far above the apprehension of the vulgar, yet still, that solid ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... this table. What! Because bread is good and wholesome and necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust a crumb into my windpipe while I am talking? Do not these muscles of mine represent a hundred loaves of bread? and is not my thought the abstract of ten thousand of these crumbs of truth with which you would choke off ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... voice cheered Florimel a little, as she lay forsaken in her misery. Her whole effort now was to keep herself from fainting, and for this end, to abstract her mind from the terrors of her situation: in this she was aided by a new shock, which, had her position been a less critical one, would itself have caused her a deadly dismay. A curious little sound came to her, apparently from somewhere ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... could get respectable lodgings in the neighbourhood of Red Lion Square for a week?" said Mrs. Furnival, once more bringing the conversation back from the abstract to the concrete. ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... [298] Abstract of Randolph's instructions, from his own pen (Strype, Annals iii. i. 442): 'Nothing shall be done prejudicial to the King's title, but the same to pass by private assurance from Her ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... be turned against the throne. The sovereign people of America may give political equality to their old slaves, and invite them to share in the legislation of great interests: it is in accordance with that theory of abstract rights which Rousseau, the creator of the French Revolution, propounded,—which gospel of rights was accepted by Jefferson and Franklin, The monarchs of the world have their own opinions about the political rights of those whom they deem ignorant or inexperienced. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... neglected it. An experimenter in this direction, he now and then forgot that the proper subject-matter of the novel is man—man either individual or collective—and spent himself in fruitless endeavours to endow the abstract with reality. ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... the existence of Deity and must therefore have an abstract idea of spirit, you must have some notions on the subject, and should be able to tell me how it ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... mountainous counties of Virginia, fifteen miles from an east and west railway line. Armitage opened a duly recorded deed which conveyed to himself the title to two thousand acres of land; also a curiously complicated abstract of title showing the successive transfers of ownership from colonial days down through the years of Virginia's splendor to the dread time when battle shook the world. The title had passed from the receiver of a defunct shooting-club to Armitage, who had been charmed by the description of the ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... take in hand any volume of Divinity, or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... returned. Mr. Hobhouse is a greater man at the hustings, Lord Rolle at Plymouth Dock; but Mr. Bentham would carry it hollow, on the score of popularity, at Paris or Pegu. The reason is, that our author's influence is purely intellectual. He has devoted his life to the pursuit of abstract and general truths, and to ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... indeed be cited, but it is in the brilliant literature of German Social Democracy that the most scientific expression of the new spirit is to be sought. Truly Marx has been indeed translated. His abstract and etiolated internationalism has been replaced by the warm humanity of writers like, say, David or Pernerstorfer. The principle of nationality is Vindicated by the latter in a noble passage. I quote it from Sombart's "Socialism ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... three equal, vertical 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 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... with the uneasiness that every boy feels at any abstract approach to the great topic. The girl went straight on, with all the serenity of the least experienced of her sex. Her big blue eyes were gravely fixed on his reddened face. Her own was quite calm, and very serious indeed. Her soft lips were set as firmly as one rose leaf may be folded against ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... Ages is an expression of the spirit of feudalism and of the genius of the Church. From the union of feudalism and Christianity arose the chivalric ideals, the new courtesy, the homage to woman. Abstract ideas, ethical, theological, and those of amorous metaphysics, were rendered through allegory into art. Against these high conceptions, and the overstrained sentiment connected with them, the positive intellect and the mocking ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... seems to me, philosophy moves toward this reading of existence. The revolt from the last century's materialism is almost complete. In religious language, abstract thought is again finding and feeling God within the world; and finding too in this discovery and realization the meaning, and perhaps—if we may dare to use such a word—the purpose of life. It suggests—and ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... a country, the characteristics of a people, their intellectual, moral and spiritual condition, etc. Whereas, the temperance cause, in its strictest sense, is everywhere identical, and its laws universal; the essence of which in the abstract is simply 'to abstain' and 'to obey.' But suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are right in your opinion, I ask then, is there sufficient reason in the act of having withdrawn myself ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... for religion. But what to me is always most seductive in the book is, that to this edition (not copy, of course) of 1651 Master Izaak Walton, when he came, in his Compleat Angler of 1653, to discuss such abstract questions as the transmission of sound under water, and the ages of carp and pike, must probably have referred. He often mentions "Sir Francis Bacon's" History of Life and Death, which is included in the volume. No ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... I therefore at once abandoned. But knowing that the jurisprudence of Masonry is founded, like all legal science, on abstract principles, which govern and control its entire system, I deemed it to be a better course to present these principles to my readers in an elementary and methodical treatise, and to develop from them those necessary deductions which reason ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... case, Forkel was of opinion that the hard modulation was a faithful record of what the composer wished to express.[69] The natural order of history seems inverted here. One would have expected Forkel to look upon the music from an abstract, but Buelow from a poetical point of view. C.H. Bitter—also on purely musical grounds—condemns Buelow's alterations. He says:—"Even weaknesses of great masters, among which the passages in question are not to be counted, ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... Mrs. Owen, Dan's business was quickly transacted. She produced an abstract of title and bade him read aloud the description of the property conveyed while she held the deed. At one point she took a pen and crossed a t; otherwise the work of Wright and Fitch was approved. When she ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... courteous reader take offence at the opinions broached in the conclusion of the last Chapter. The Editor himself, on first glancing over that singular passage, was inclined to exclaim: What, have we got not only a Sansculottist, but an enemy to Clothes in the abstract? A new Adamite, in this century, which flatters itself that it is the Nineteenth, and destructive ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... rampant provincial and separatist spirit. On the other hand, they were united by a common language, by a common political and legal tradition, and by the fact that none of them had ever been really independent sovereign states. Nobody dared or cared to object to union in the abstract; nobody advocated the alternative of complete separation; it was only a strong efficient union which aroused the opposition of the Clintons and the Patrick Henrys. Nevertheless, the conditions making for ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... collection of experiments, described with just the right amount of abstract information and no more, and placed in progressive order. The recent inventions of the phonograph and microphone lend an extraordinary interest to this whole field of experiment, which makes Professor Mayer's manual ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... of PARLAK is mentioned in the Shijarat Malayu or Malay Chronicle, and also in a Malay History of the Kings of Pasei, of which an abstract is given by Dulaurier, in connection with the other states of which we shall speak presently. It is also mentioned (Barlak), as a city of the Archipelago, by Rashiduddin. Of its extent we have no knowledge, but the position (probably of its northern extremity) is preserved ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... women that we are not able to analyse those whom we love, but only worship them in the abstract. But he had a friend, his best friend; he could analyse him; the poet. He was present at Karl Mander's last meeting, and he came to me from it when your father was dead. We talked together of everything as much as I then could. He wrote about him the most beautiful things that have ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... their administration. And the means of seduction allowed by law, such as the covert bribery of shows and festivals, were used openly and boldly." What, then, could be hoped from the laws when they were made the channel of extortion and oppression? Law, the glory of Rome in the abstract, became the most dismal mockery of the rights of man. Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its savor it is good for nothing, not even for the dunghill. When the laws practically add to the evils they were ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... into account the number of people who were gathered together here in a small area I didn't see among the temperate and able-bodied any worse examples of hard luck than I saw among my former associates. In fact of sheer abstract hard luck I didn't see as much. In seventy-five per cent of the cases the conditions were of their own making—either the man was a drunkard or the women slovenly or the whole family was just naturally vicious. Ignorance may excuse some ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... my humble opinion, which is, that no man can be in his proper senses at the moment he commits so rash an act as self-murder. ...The Bible declares that a man clings to nothing so strongly as his own life, I therefore view it as an axiom, and an abstract principle, that a man must necessarily be out of his mind at the moment of destroying himself." Byron, probably, read the report of the inquest in Cobbett's Weekly Register (August 17, 1822, vol. 43, pp. 389-425). The "eulogy" was in perfectly good taste, but there ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... wouldn't. Impersonally, he was entertaining about South Africa, about the Caucasus, about Alaska, Mexico, anywhere you care to think; but concretely he might have been an illustrated lecture for all he mentioned himself. He was passionately fond of abstract argument. "Y' see," he would explain, "I don't get half as much of this sort of thing as I want. Of course, one does run across remarkable people—now, I met a cow-puncher once who knew Keats by heart—but as a rule I deal only with material things, mines and prospects and assays and that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Homestead Acts and by the distribution of credit through the Farm Loan Banks. Indeed, this desire for home ownership has, without question, stimulated more people to purposeful saving than any other factor. Saving, in the abstract, is, of course, a perfunctory process as compared with purposeful saving for a home, the possession of which may change the very physical, mental, and moral fibre of one's ...
— Better Homes in America • Mrs W.B. Meloney
... man's averdupoise was his abstract of title. There was nothing said about records and patentees as long as you worked your ground; but, likewise, when you didn't work it, somebody else usually did. We had a thousand feet of as good dirt as ever laid out in the rain; ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... from his pudding. He was very spiritual, but he had had poor pickings in his previous boarding place, and he could not help a certain abstract enjoyment over Miss ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... the subjects under discussion—because the main ideas apply to humanity in general and not to any particular country. The paper on Divorce is of course written from an English point of view, but its suggestions may be of some use to those who are interested in the question of divorce in the abstract, and are on the alert as to the results of its facilities in America. I do not presume to offer an opinion as to its action there; and in this paper am not making the slightest criticism of the American divorce ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... however, rather than positive. He does not inspire with ideals of goodness; but he holds back from evil. He is not a being who is ever likely to enter, like the God of the Jews, into intimate and affectionate relations with men; he is too abstract and has too little history to be capable of such unbending; his religion, when it comes to be fully formed, will be one of puritans and fanatics rather than of the meek and lowly. He is the one great instance of a god without any natural basis who has come ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... from his pipe) lay amongst the books of the old English writers. His soul delighted in communion with ancient generations, more especially with men who had been unjustly forgotten. Hazlitt's mind attached itself to abstract subjects; Lamb's was more practical, and embraced men. Hunt was somewhat indifferent to persons as well as to things, except in the cases of Shelley and Keats, and his own family; yet he liked poetry and poetical subjects. Hazlitt (who was ordinarily very shy) was the best talker of the three. ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... be added, also, that Purchas printed an abstract of the Oxford tract in his "Pilgrimage," in 1613, from material furnished him by Smith. The Oxford tract was also republished by Purchas in his "Pilgrimes," extended by new matter in manuscript supplied by Smith. The "Pilgrimes" did not appear till 1625, a year after the "General Historie," ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... man than in any photograph that I have seen. His forehead is not remarkably large, but comes forward at the eyebrows; it is not the brow nor countenance of a prominently intellectual man, (not a natural student, I mean, or abstract thinker,) but of one whose office it is to handle things practically and to bring about tangible results. His face looked capable of being very stern, but wore, in its repose, when I saw it, an aspect pleasant and dignified; it is not, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... instructions to the letter. He wrote a beautiful hand. He was, as the reader knows, an admirable accountant. For several days Mr. Burns seemed disposed to ascertain his capabilities by putting a variety of matters into his hands. He gave him a contract to copy, and then asked for an abstract of it. He submitted several long accounts to him for arrangement. He sent him to the mill or factory, sometimes to deliver a message simply, sometimes to look after a matter of consequence. Mr. Burns found Hiram ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the rights even of brute matter and arbitrary symbols. If he writes the same word twice in succession, by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not the first-comer the prior right? This act of abstract justice, which I trust many of my readers, like myself, have often performed, is a curious anti-illustration, by the way, of the absolute wickedness of human dispositions. Why doesn't a man always strike out the first of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... to his advantage or enjoyment."[10] To him a jest is as unmeaning as the babbling of a brook; his wife is a beast of burden; and even his courting is carried on by gifts of good things to eat, sent to the parents.[11] Heaven is merely a hunting-ground; his language has no words to express abstract qualities, virtues, vices, or sentiments.[12] His idea of the Great Spirit, and the word which expresses it, may be applied with equal propriety to a formidable (though not beneficent) animal; indeed, the Indian words which we translate "spirit," ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... progress I could in the language, and in addition I pushed my explorations here and there. Either I missed some subtle point or their language was excessively simple—almost exclusively composed of concrete substantives and verbs. There seemed to be few, if any, abstract terms, or little use of figurative language. Their sentences were usually simple and of two words, and I failed to convey or understand any but the simplest propositions. I determined to put the thought of my Time Machine and ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells |
