"Discursive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... incur, concur, occurrence, cursory, excursion, course, discourse, intercourse, recourse; (2) curriculum, precursor, discursive, recurrent, concourse, courier, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Bonaventura, and, what is more to the point, the address of a Priest and theologian, Salmeron, had a critical effect on some of the definitions of dogma. In some of those cases the influence might be partly moral, but in others it was that of a discursive knowledge of ecclesiastical writers, a scientific acquaintance with theology, and a force of thought ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... brilliant blue of the Arizona sky—is the memory of that talk of Mr. Muir's during the long drive, a talk which for range and raciness I have never heard equaled. He often uses the broad dialect of the Scot, translating as he goes along. His forte is in monologue. He is a most engaging talker,—discursive, grave and gay,—mingling thrilling adventures, side-splitting anecdotes, choice quotations, apt characterizations, scientific data, enthusiastic descriptions, sarcastic comments, scornful denunciations, ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... style has its proper place, like another, if it is used by the right man, and the concentrated and structural style has also its higher province. It would not do to employ either style in the wrong place. In a rambling discursive essay, for example, a mere straying after the bird in the branches, or the thorn in the way, he might not take the safest road who imitated Mr. Pater's style ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... merely in the lines of composition as a whole, but in the choice of a single word, while it by no means interferes with, but may even prescribe, much variety, in the building of the sentence for instance, or in the manner, argumentative, descriptive, discursive, of this or that [23] part or member of the entire design. The blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a child's expression of its needs, may alternate with the long-contending, victoriously intricate sentence; the sentence, born with the integrity of a single word, relieving the sort of sentence ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... nor was it discursive. There was nothing eulogistic of my various acquirements, occupations, talents; no remark about the optimistic trend of my literature, the affection in which my characters were held; nothing of this ...
— Forty Minutes Late - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... purpose of keeping her company she continued to cling to the dress-maker's side, letting Mr. Ramy lead the way with Evelina. Miss Mellins, stimulated by the excitement of the occasion, grew more and more discursive, and her ceaseless talk, and the kaleidoscopic whirl of the crowd, were unspeakably bewildering to Ann Eliza. Her feet, accustomed to the slippered ease of the shop, ached with the unfamiliar effort of walking, and her ears ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... for your sins, you are to suffer the infliction of a long gossiping letter. I tell you distinctly that I am going to punish you for all your impertinences by being as tedious, as discursive, as incoherent and as unsatisfactory as possible. Besides, here I am, cooped up in a dirty balloon, with some one or two hundred of the canaille, all bound on a pleasure excursion, (what a funny idea some people have of pleasure!) and I have no prospect of touching terra ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the mind proceeding further, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the MATERIALS about which to exercise its discursive faculty. And the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these materials that give it employment increase. But though the having of general ideas and the use of general words and reason usually grow together, yet I see not how this any way proves them innate. ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... nature is perfectly sound; everything ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development. His ethics, when thoroughly digested and weighed, especially when the meagre outlines are filled in with Plato's more discursive expositions, will seem therefore entirely final. The Life of Reason finds ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... declared Brick, "and them as has heard it once can take it or leave it." He was discursive, circumstantial, and it was a long time before he led them in fancy to the door of the boat-house and showed them Red Feather and Gledware disappearing forever beneath the surface of ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... the leading topic of their discussion, and enough has been said to reveal the lines along which it developed. There was much of a discursive nature, naturally, introduced by Bessie, who sought thereby to fog the issue and effect a compromise. She had found that was a good way to deal with a husband. But to-night Falkner ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... and discursive subaltern, relieved on account of rheumatic troubles from more strenuous duties with an Infantry regiment, joined our mess and proved a valuable addition. He was a talented mathematician whose researches had carried him to where ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... suddenly upon some pleasant view, or unexpectedly entering an apparently previously unexplored nook, more than atoned for such trifling annoyances. Without digression in some degree, neither spoken nor written language can be made entertaining to the person addressed. Who is more discursive than the Autocrat, the Czar of table-talkers; and whose productions are more charming or wiser? We do not do our everyday thinking in strictly logical or consistent forms. It is sufficient to introduce hypotheses, premises, or ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... size and shape and strength and nimbleness, cognizable by intellectual perception, even the Hottentot would get to know something of it in the forest, along with the grosser qualities of trees and valleys. Were it liable to be seized by the discursive and ratiocinative intellect, the most eminent statesman or lawyer or general would excel too in the capacity to appreciate beauty; the Roman would have shone in arts as in arms; the Spartan would not ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... how such a huge mass ever manages to melt," said Elspie—for the human mind, even in pretty girls, is discursive. ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... little heed to the consideration of balance until a complication of many units forces the necessity upon it. The painter who esteems lightly the subject of composition is usually found to be the painter of simple subjects—portraits and non-discursive themes, but though these may survive in antagonism to such principles their authors are demanding more from the technical quality of their work than ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... least attractive of the papers in the London University Magazine, we ought also to run over the lighter portions of its pages. These are "A young head, and, what is still better, a young heart,"—discursive enough—"A Tale of the Irish Rebellion—the Guerilla Bride, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... July and August last, under the title, The Revised American Prayer Book. Here we come upon a writer who, if not always edifying, has the undoubted merit of being never dull. In fact, so deliciously are logical inconsequence and accidental humor mingled throughout his fifteen columns of discursive criticism that a suspicion arises as to the writer's nationality. It is doubtful whether anyone born on the English side of the Irish Sea could possibly have suggested the establishment of a Saint's Day in honor of the late respected Warden ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... all manner of waters, with all manner of nets, it seems probable enough, this abstruse Inquiry might, in spite of the results it leads to, have continued dormant for indefinite periods. The Editor of these sheets, though otherwise boasting himself a man of confirmed speculative habits, and perhaps discursive enough, is free to confess, that never, till these last months, did the above very plain considerations, on our total want of a Philosophy of Clothes, occur to him; and then, by quite foreign suggestion. By the arrival, namely, of ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... lightly, "I suppose Sidney told you a little of our news. Men's letters are not discursive as a rule I know, but no doubt he ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... perfectly well. The disproportion between the shiftiness of these men and the rigorous Acts that they passed or authorized was too scandalous. It was as though there were in them two contradictory things: an inconsistent character, believing in nothing, and discursive Reason, intent on truncating, mowing down, and crushing life, without regard for anything. Christophe wondered why the peaceful middle-class, the Catholics, the officials who were harassed in every conceivable way, did not throw them all out by the window. He dared not ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... be silent; and when he spoke unsuspected gifts of biting sarcasm, clever characterization, convincing scorn of the uneducated minister type came to his aid. His tongue played round his victims, unequipped as they were with his vast experience of reality, vaguely discursive, on the surface as are most lawyers, at a loss for similes and tropes as are most men of business, or dull of wits as are most of the fine flowers of the public schools, stultified with the classics and scripture history. He knew that unless there ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... discursive mind of James wandered from the position which it occupied at the epoch of Maximilian de Bethune's memorable embassy ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... spending his vacation at the Holt, and Miss Charlecote looked so bright as she walked to church leaning on his arm, that Phoebe had no regrets in leaving her. Indeed, the damsel greatly preferred the Holt in his absence. She did not understand his discursive comments on all things in art or nature, and he was in a mood of flighty fitful spirits, which perplexed her alike by their wild, satirical mirth, and their mournful sentiment. She thought Miss Charlecote was worried and perplexed at times by his tone; but ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Whatever could be done by adjusting points, is, therefore, silently performed, in some plays with much diligence, in others with less; it is hard to keep a busy eye steadily fixed upon evanescent atoms, or a discursive mind upon evanescent truth. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... necessity, in its turn, receive, in some degree, the impress of that temper which nature has bestowed upon him. Thus we see that Roman Catholicism is more zealous, more enthusiastic, more turbulent, in Ireland, more artistic in Italy, more philosophic in Germany, more literary and discursive in France, more idolatrous in the States of South America, more reserved and modest, more decent and tolerant, less ambitious in its aspirations, and less audacious in its polemics, in England than in any other part of ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... want the Divine sanction; and they are tempted to ward off a just verdict of unsuitableness and of incompetency by bringing many and grievous charges against their flocks. "A mania for church-extending"; "a hankering for architectural splendor"; "or for discursive and satirical preaching"; "or for something florid or profound": these and the like imputations have been put forward, as a screen, by many an unsuccessful preacher, who failed,—simply failed,—not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the slightest signs of recovery in Ovid's face, Carmina detected a faint return of colour. She was so relieved that she was able to listen to the doctor's oddly discursive talk, and even to join in it. "Some of our friends used to think I was like my ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... the monologue was an incoherent discursive medley, now plaintive, now passionate, at times prayerful, then exultant. As he proceeded, he seemed to lose sight of his present aim at doing good in the hope of release from termless life, and become the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... preferred the manner of musing expatiation, where scene melts into scene, impressions are foreshortened by distance, and the backward-ranging thought can linger and brood as it will. Every novel of his takes the general form of a discursive soliloquy, in which he gradually gathers up the long train of experience that he has in mind. The early chapters of Esmond or Pendennis, the whole fragment of Denis Duval, are perfect examples of Thackeray's way when he is most himself, and when ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... videlicet—love, wine, and friendship. I am afraid I am growing poetical, which is a bad thing for a lawyer, for the flower of poetry cannot flourish in the arid wastes of the law. On reading what I have written, I find I have been as discursive as Praed's Vicar, and as this letter is supposed to be a business one, I must deny myself the luxury of following out a train of idle ideas, and write sense. I suppose you still hold the secret which Rosanna Moore ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... for lobster is entirely destroyed by this sinister prediction; but whether the Driver has been unjustly maligned, or whether he has sobered himself in the interval—he reappears in a more sedentary, and less discursive mood, and the journey home proves agreeably ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892 • Various
... equal), but the cause of Miss Stackpole's need of demonstrative affection. Each of these groping celibates supplied at any rate a want of which the other was impatiently conscious. Mr. Bantling, who was of rather a slow and a discursive habit, relished a prompt, keen, positive woman, who charmed him by the influence of a shining, challenging eye and a kind of bandbox freshness, and who kindled a perception of raciness in a mind to which the usual fare of life seemed unsalted. Henrietta, on the other hand, enjoyed the society ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... discursive intellect,—not gifted with that power, Homeric in kind and more than Homeric in degree, which might meet the old mythic imaginations on, or rather above, their own level, and out of them, together with the material which modern time supplies, build in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... listening to."—-London Daily Mail, "The publishers of 'The Corner of Harley Street' are really justified in comparing these critical papers with Dr. Holmes' 'The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table'.... They are charmingly discursive, often witty, and always full of a genial sympathy with humanity and the significant facts ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... distinction, and having gained two steps without purchase, removed, too, by his present rank, and the pension for his wound, from being likely to become chargeable to him; so he had written such brotherly congratulations, that good honest Fred was quite affected. He was even discursive enough to mention some connexions of the young man who had been with Fred in the Crimea, a Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy, a very good sort of fellow, who gave excellent dinners, and was a pleasant yachting companion. His ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... all was unpremeditated, incoherent, and discursive, and yet strangely effective. She described the contortions of her kaleidoscope as they came to mind haphazard, with an indifference, a precise objectivity that made the picture all the more real and universal, not the special story of the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... writings, however, Johnson manages, almost entirely, to throw off these impediments. In his deep capacity for sympathy and reverence, we recognise some of the elements that go to the making of a poet. He is always a man of intuitions rather than of discursive intellect; often keen of vision, though wanting in analytical power. For poetry, indeed, as it is often understood now, or even as it was understood by Pope, he had little enough qualification. He had not the intellectual vivacity implied in the marvellously neat workmanship ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... sprightly and discursive comments upon the current events of her day, we have to transport ourselves back into a society which, though not very remote in point of time, has now so completely passed away that it is difficult fully ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... takes up a number of subjects, some of which are merely touched in most books on Missions, and others not at all. Reminiscences, especially when they spread over many years, and embrace great events, admit of very discursive treatment. They leave the writer unfettered to take up any subject within his wide scope which he may deem fitted to interest his readers. I have allowed myself the freedom thus afforded me. My aim has been to take my readers with me to our Indian home, to see us at our ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... to Chester and put him again to school, this time to an old gentleman named Neif, who had served in the guards of Napoleon. The method of instruction practiced by him seems to have been unsystematic and discursive; but Farragut, who was ever attentive to make the most of such opportunities as offered for self-improvement, derived profit here also, and said afterward that the time thus passed had been of service ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... that they had really chosen the Best Swell Place by the fact of a vacant table at a window looking out over a box hedge. Jack told the waiter that the assemblage was not an autocracy, but a parliament which, with a full quorum present, would enjoy in discursive appreciation selections from the broad range of a ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... his speech so well that the final solution became inevitable, and the final solution, of course, was the addition of a penny to the income-tax. The debate which followed the Budget speech was quiet, discursive, friendly to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Picton is a formidable man to Chancellors of the Exchequer—for he has very strong ideas of reform—especially on the breakfast-table; but Mr. Picton is rational as well as Radical; ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... be found in that city, and some of the leading laymen revered him as their spiritual father. Sometimes he was betrayed into eccentricities, and his vivid imagination often carried him away into discursive flights; yet he never soared out of sight of Calvary's cross, and never betrayed the precious Gospel ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... the plain below, to the dense mass of buildings surmounted by the domes of the Invalids, and the Pantheon and the towers of Notre Dame. To the eye of contemplation it is one of the most memorable of landscapes; a stand-point for historical reverie, which attunes the mind for subsequent and less discursive retrospection. Enter the apartment where Bonaparte dispersed the assembly of five hundred—the initatory act of his rule; it is now a conservatory, whence rising terrace walks, statues and fountains only are visible; in the fresh silence of morning, they offered a ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... right to discuss these great topics on the first night of the session; awaiting the discussion in the commons. The Duke of Richmond endeavoured to bring on a debate; but ministers were taciturn; and after a long and discursive speech delivered by Lord Brougham, which touched upon the subjects of the Oregon dispute, the corn-laws, and Irish affairs, the address was carried. In the course of the evening, the Duke of Richmond wished ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... sentence on the works of others, his own would have been received more favourably, and treated more leniently. The current of his feelings is deep, but narrow; the range of his understanding is lofty and aspiring rather than discursive. The force, the originality, the absolute truth and identity with which he feels some things, makes him indifferent to so many others. The simplicity and enthusiasm of his feelings, with respect to nature, renders him bigotted and intolerant ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... green and the village street. There, or thereabouts, unless her plot lamentably miscarried, she expected to meet her niece and that niece's ex-governess-companion, herded in amicable converse by the pinioned Angel of Peace. Her devious and discursive mind fluttered to and fro, meanwhile, over a number of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... wherever you open the pages there is always a witty, well-informed Irishman discoursing to you, who tells his story admirably, when he has one to tell, and, failing that, never fails to be pleasant. Irish talk is apt to be discursive; to rely upon a general charm diffused through the whole, rather than upon any quotable brilliancy; its very essence is spontaneity, high spirits, fertility of resource. That is a fair description of Lever. He is ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... four English stories, "The Mill on the Floss" seems to me to have most dramatic continuity, in distinction from that descriptive, discursive method of narration which I have attempted to indicate. After Hetty Sorrel, I think Maggie Tulliver the most successful of the author's young women, and after Tito Melema, Tom Tulliver the best of her young men. English novels abound in pictures of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... people who express admiration for it know nothing of the essay except a delicious passage at the end, like a draught of fragrant wine, about the gowned figures evaporating into the twilight, and the nightingale heard among the flowering chestnuts of Jesus. But the talk itself is discursive and somewhat pompous. However, it is not of that that I wish to speak, it is rather of the passage from Digby's Godefridus which is read aloud by the narrator, which sets out to analyse the joyful and generous temperament of Youth. "They [the young] ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the Utilitarians explained unselfishness, is only admissible as accounting for modifications, such as are due to education and example, but 'presupposes the existence of certain principles which are common to all mankind.' The evidence of such principles is established by a long and discursive psychological discussion. It is enough to say that he admits two rational principles, 'self-love' and the 'moral faculty,' the coincidence of which is learned only by experience. The moral faculty reveals simple 'ideas' ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... to watch the soldiers; she loved all manner of shows, and also to tell of them. She asked Bessie if she would like to hear about the emperor's fete last month; and when Bessie acquiesced, she began in a discursive narrative style by which a story can be stretched ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... meeting of the Club Charlie Leland was chosen President. He was the intellectual leader among the boys, now that the old Class had gone; he was a lad of good principles, bright, generous, and popular. As may be judged from the somewhat discursive dialogue on the piazza, he had a subject well matured in his mind for the literary exercises ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... The discursive story began to narrow and concentrate itself when at last it reached Mexico. The sister changed her position in her chair, and crossed her knees when Tehuantepec was mentioned. It was from that place that Joel had sent her the amazing remittance ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... kept in view throughout my somewhat discursive address, which will begin with an imaginary clinical lesson from the lips of an historical personage, and close with the portrait from real life of one who, both as teacher and practitioner, was long loved and honored among us. If I somewhat overrun my hour, you must ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... school and other schools was a difference so fundamental that there was hardly any common ground on which a controversial battle could be fought; and, secondly, because his mind, eminently observant, preeminently discursive and capacious, was, we conceive, neither formed by nature nor disciplined ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 1843, when Ruskin was only twenty-four; and at intervals during the next seventeen years he issued four additional volumes, the result of prolonged study both of Nature and of almost all the great paintings in Europe. The completed book is a discursive treatise, the various volumes necessarily written from more or less different view-points, on many of the main aspects, general and technical, of all art, literary as well as pictorial. For Ruskin held, and brilliantly demonstrated, that the underlying principles ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... back, and lifting her face upward in the discursive fulness of her fancy, 'I feel I am not robbed. 'Il y a des miracles, et j'en ai vu'. One's life seems more perfect when one has seen what nature can do. The fellow was stupendous! I conceive him present. Who'll fire a house for me? Is it my deficiency of attraction, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... at Guildford, his native place, where he had endowed a hospital with lands to the value of L. 300 a year. Abbot was a conscientious prelate, though narrow in view and often harsh towards both separatists and Romanists. He wrote a large number of works, the most interesting being his discursive Exposition on the Prophet Jonah (1600), which was reprinted in 1845. His Geography, or a Brief Description of the Whole World (1599), ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of religious faith is not the constant environment of his life. He may or may not feel sure of God from his pew, but God is not among the things that count in his daily life. God does not enter into his calculations or determine his scale of values. Again, discursive thinking is regarded as an interruption of religion. When I am at pains to justify my religion, I am already doubting; and for common opinion doubt is identical with irreligion. In so far as I am religious, my religion stands in no need of justification, even though I regard it as justifiable. ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... incursions of the sea like that which broke in over Holland and formed the Zuyder Zee, may have often occurred, can be made to look like evidence that something that, by courtesy, might be called a general Deluge has really taken place. Their discursive energy drags misunderstood truth into their service; and "the glacial epoch" is as sure to crop up among them as King Charles's head in a famous memorial—with about as much appropriateness. The old story of the raised beach on Moel Tryfaen is trotted out; though, even if the ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... or be celibate. But however that may be, there was an uncanonical alliance between them which evidently did not in the least scandalise her brothers and which resulted in the birth of Ferdinand Columbus in the following year. Christopher, so communicative and discursive upon some of his affairs, is as reticent about Beatriz as he was about Philippa. Beatriz shares with his legitimate wife the curious distinction of being spoken of by Columbus to posterity only in his ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... have n't forgotten the dinner?" Leigh asked, perceiving that the other was preparing to settle back in his chair for one of those discursive talks ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... in insight as against discursive analytic knowledge: the belief in a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating, coercive, which is contrasted with the slow and fallible study of outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... to be discursive in a little book which seeks to hit the nail on the head in every paragraph, drive it home in every page, and clinch it in every chapter, and there would be no excuse, therefore, for sketching, even in brief outline, the history ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... work of which I am thinking will deal not so much with our likeness to tree and herb as with the likeness of tree and herb to us; and furthermore, it will go into the whole subject, systematically and at length. Meanwhile, it is open even to an amateur to offer something, in a general and discursive way, upon so inviting a theme, and especially to call attention to its scope ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... Sunday Bible classes of the period Phelps was a perpetual anxiety to the others, who followed closely the printed lessons, and beheld with alarm his discursive efforts to get into freer air and light. His remarks were the most refreshing part of the exercises, but were outside of the safe path into which the others thought it necessary to win him from his "speckerlations." The class were one ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... happened, that, after this discursive life had lasted for some ten months, a serious difficulty arose between the clergyman and the parish of the neighboring town of Ashfield. The person who served as the spiritual director of the people was suspected of leaning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude,—shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty, sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. In all the Shakespearian women there is essentially the same foundation and principle; the ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... from first to last, an unquestioning believer in the doctrines of the Christian religion, and he viewed with great disfavour any one who ventured to question any part of its creed. As a lecturer he was eloquent and though discursive, always interesting. None of his lectures were written, so that to-day they are only a fading memory to those who heard them delivered. Though found acceptable at the time, it is hardly likely that, ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... of stars above the moving sea, an almost unbearable loneliness would fall upon soul and body; she needed Warren, she said to herself, often with bitter tears. Warren, splashing in his bath, scattering wet towels and discarded garments so royally about the place; Warren, in a discursive mood, regarding some operation as he stropped his razor; Warren's old, half-unthinking "you look sweet, dear," when, fresh and dainty, his wife was ready to go downstairs—for these and a thousand other memories of him she yearned with ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... of things, and consequently it has been deemed advisable to omit it. By this curtailment, together with that of some meteorological tables and discussions of very limited interest, the work has been divested of its somewhat lengthy and discursive character, and condensed within dimensions better adapted to the taste and requirements ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... reader be puzzled by the title of this discursive volume, the following verses may provide him with an explanation. They were written some time ago for a lady who had requested, required, requisitioned (I forget the precise shade of the imperative) ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a time that was more obscure, and now the tension of the mind relieves the tension of the heart. On the one side we have all passages of life-weariness, whether as the issue of long meditation, or as the outcome of familiar talk; and on the other we have the brilliant and discursive criticism of man and Nature continued throughout the play. All this is so closely connected with the treason of his mother, that we see the very attachment of the ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... judgments known as aesthetic—so called because they determine the aesthetic qualities of objects. And it is agreed, with practical unanimity, that they rest much more upon feeling and intuition than upon discursive reason. To this extent they rank as genuine "mystical" modes of experience, and from this point of view have bulked largely in the systems of mystics like Plato and Plotinus. But while claiming them as mystical, it is necessary to note that they possess ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... over were finishing their contracts. Collins, his coat off, his sleeve protectors strapped closely about his thin arms, worked at an intense white heat. He wasted no second of time, nor did he permit discursive interruption. His manner to those who entered the office was civil but curt. Time was now the essence of the contract these ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... contemporary nerves. Our bonne foi is still sophisticated in comparison with that of the great Gascon. Of all essayists who have yet written, he is the most transparent, the most sincere even in his stratagems, the most discursive, the most free-tongued, and therefore the most alive. A classic commonplace becomes in his hands a new intimacy of feeling: where verbal commonplaces have, as it were, glazed over the surface of our sense, he goes behind ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... continue to follow the adventures of the pioneers of British North America, I think—even if it seems wearisome and discursive—my readers would better understand this story if I placed before them a general description of what is now the Dominion of Canada, more particularly as it was seen and discovered by ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... Meric Casaubon in his treatise "Of Credulity and Incredulity in Things Divine and Spiritual," 1670, 12mo; and if his reply be altogether inconclusive, it cannot be denied to be, as indeed every thing of Meric Casaubon's writing was, learned, discursive and entertaining. He ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... than breaking stones. Thus you would make every one self-dependent—also no fear of being out of work altogether. Then let there be a Government fund for all the savings of the working man. I am afraid you will think this a wild, discursive sort of ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... and therefore, only so far as a pure practical use is made of them. As to all the rest that belongs to these conceptions psychologically, that is, so far as we observe these faculties of ours empirically in their exercise (e.g., that the understanding of man is discursive, and its notions therefore not intuitions but thoughts, that these follow one another in time, that his will has its satisfaction always dependent on the existence of its object, etc., which cannot be the case in the Supreme Being), from all this ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... me: as having clasped a rose Within my palm, the rose being ta'en away, My hand retains a little breath of sweet, So may man's trunk, his spirit slipped away, Hold still a faint perfume of his sweet guest. 'Tis so: for when discursive powers fly out, And roam in progress through the bounds of heaven, The soul itself gallops along with them As chieftain of this winged troop of thought, Whilst the dull lodge of spirit standeth waste Until ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... fact concerning Mr. Philip Spruce, that his method of telling a story ("Which reminds me," always meant a story with him) is very discursive. He may be said to resemble Jeremy Bentham, who, according to Hazlitt's criticism, fills his sentence with a row of pegs, and hangs a garment upon each of them. Let us omit some portion of his tediousness, and allow him to go on ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... various, and divided, and it is to quite other links and forces, it seems to me, than fiscal or military unification that we who desire its continuance must look to hold it together. There never was anything like it before. Essentially it is an adventure of the British spirit, sanguine, discursive, and beyond comparison insubordinate, adaptable, and originating. It has been made by odd and irregular means by trading companies, pioneers, explorers, unauthorised seamen, adventurers like Clive, eccentrics like Gordon, invalids like Rhodes. It has been made, in spite of authority and officialdom, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... his legs and crossed them the other way. The old lady began to seem to him a thought too discursive, ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd To vital Spirits aspire, to animal, To intellectual, give both life and sense, Fansie and understanding, whence the soule Reason receives, and reason is her being, Discursive, or Intuitive; discourse Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours, Differing but in degree, of kind the same. 490 Wonder not then, what God for you saw good If I refuse not, but convert, as you, To ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... faint memory. There are obvious reasons why De Quincey's historical and philosophical writings, in an age which devotes itself so largely to similar pursuits, no longer recommend themselves to the popular taste. His method is too discursive and leisurely; his subjects as a rule too remote from current interest; his line of thought too intricate. These failings, from our point of view, are the more to be regretted because there has never been an English essayist more entertaining or suggestive than De Quincey. His works ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... expecting their return until the evening, but she had travelled by an earlier train. She plunged into a discursive explanation, without in the least making her reasons clear. The doctor listened with a smiling face. "At all events, here you are," he said. "That's ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... Much discursive reading is not only injurious to the faculty of memory, but may be positively destructive of it. The vast extent of our modern world of reviews, magazines and newspapers, with their immense variety of subjects, dissipates ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the most genuine, biography of Burns is furnished by his own writings. His letters will, if carefully studied, disprove many of the positions taken up so confidently by would-be interpreters of his history. It is not the purpose of this discursive paper to take up the details of the Clarinda episode; but philandering is scarcely the word by which to describe the mutual relations of the lovers. As for Mrs. M'Lehose, the severest thing that can with justice be said against her is that, if she maintained her virtue, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... order had been obeyed, he commenced the narrative of his love adventure, and for a time spoke with his accustomed calmness: but toward the close he became so exceeding discursive and excited, and it was with so much difficulty we drew from him many little particulars it was essential to hear, that I have been compelled, from regard to brevity as well as strict decorum, to soften down and render in my own words some ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... exceptions, not a development of Hooker, but either a development of Sidney or a fresh style, resulting from the blending in different proportions of the academic and classical manner with the romantic and discursive. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... to myself or to my readers that this or that would be out-of-place here, and must be deferred to such and such a chapter, or to some portion of the book giving an account of later years, devoted to miscellaneous anecdotes! In a word, I am discursive not ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoon of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive talk with him. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the Frenchman was in great feather: he was discursive and pompous to every one. In Moscow too, I remembered, he had blown a great many bubbles. Interminably he discoursed on finance and Russian politics, and though, at times, the General made feints to contradict him, he did so humbly, ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Earl that he killed Matt Hall," said Joan, taking up another thread of thought in her discursive, unfixed humor of ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... conversation to his pupil's father; with the additional observation that he feared, he very humbly and respectfully feared, that the developing mind of the prince appeared undesirably disposed towards discursive philosophies, which were wholly unnecessary for the position he was destined to occupy. Whereupon the King took his son to task on the subject with a mingling ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... to Zola; let us notice, too, how amusingly he sets off Cezanne. Both were greatly gifted men: neither was the man of intelligence and talent, the brilliant man with the discursive intellect, who carries his gift about with him, takes it out when and where he pleases, and applies it where and how he likes. Zola, when he was not using his gift, posed as an artist, a saint, or simply "a great man"; but he never contrived to be anything but a ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... Leighton, and Burne-Jones. He read poetry widely, and strongly advocated the teaching of poetry in English schools. As to poetry, his own preferences are interesting. Wordsworth he considered too discursive; Shelley was too diffuse; Keats, he liked for pure beauty, Browning for strength, and Tennyson for his understanding of modern science; but most frequently of all he ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and others who take that discursive light-tripping philosopher for their guide, have represented the Scotch as a sort of half Germans, and have both praised them, and praised them coldly, on this very account, that they have travelled half-way, and only half-way, towards the region of "high a priori" speculation. With ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... business better; no furrowed face of adult exile, longing for Europe at Europe's antipodes, ever bore more legibly the signs of home sickness than did her infant visage. She seemed growing old and unearthly. I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination; but whenever, opening a room-door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head in her pigmy hand, that room seemed to me not inhabited, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... my sitters. In the case of this third story, it is impossible for me to proceed upon the same plan. The circumstances of "Sister Rose's" eventful history were narrated to me at different times, and in the most fragmentary and discursive manner. Mademoiselle Clairfait characteristically mixed up with the direct interest of her story, not only references to places and people which had no recognizable connection with it, but outbursts of passionate ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... therefore, even that we are sensible of this power that hath oftentimes laid hold of our adversaries, and made them yield to us, and join with us, and confess to the Truth, before they had any distinct and discursive knowledge of our doctrines."—The Quakers, then, according to this eminent Apologist for them, had, from the first, definite doctrines, which might be distinctly and discursively known. What were they? They hardly amounted ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... might have spared myself the trouble, for in five minutes, Nora May, there was I sobbing again; over Gilbert's letter. By the most curious coincidence he had opened his heart to me too. Being a man, he wasn't so discursive as Anne; he said his say in four pages, but I could read the heartache between the lines. He wrote that he was going to Klondike and would start in a month's time. He was sick of living now that he'd lost Anne. He said he loved her better than his ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... your old parish church, like a faithful old churchwoman," said Magdalen. "Well, you see, I am faithful enough to go to my parish in the morning, but I think we may be discursive afterwards. There is a Sunday school in which I was waiting to offer help till our party ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the Kadi lived with much honour, famed as the most learned and widely-read personage in Damascus, filling his house with scholars and discursive amateurs of verse, and engaging in conversations that are described by a friend as "most instructive, being entirely devoted to learned investigations and ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... here; is glad, at any rate, that he does the costs of conversation, better or worse. In the rest is no hope. Stille, Borck are accomplished military gentlemen; but of tacit nature, reflective, practical, rather than discursive, and do not waste themselves by incontinence of tongue. Stille, by his military Commentaries, which are still known to soldiers that read, maintains some lasting remembrance of himself: Borck we shall see engaged in a small bit of business before long. As to Munchow, the JEUNE MORVEUX ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... sight makes its appearance in animals quite low in the scale, therefore the reader will pardon me if, while discussing this sense, I prove to be a bit discursive. The subject is, withal, so very interesting that it calls for a ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... himself. He scarcely glanced at the small daughter, now presented to him for the first time; and he bade Madame Lavaux, the mistress of the hotel, "make haste and finish with all that," when, with tearful voice, and discursive minuteness, she related to him the history of his wife's last days. He made all necessary arrangements; took possession of Madame Linders' watch and few trinkets; himself superintended the packing of her clothes and other trifling properties into a large trunk, which ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... journalism. For these groups of students, many of whom continue the study of the subject for several years, often going on into the advanced courses in graduate departments, it is recognized that beginning work which is too general and discursive may be less useful than a specialized course which may be rounded out by a series of correlated courses. Consequently, there is a question whether the professional student, interested in the study of government, should begin his work under the same conditions and with the same ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... wretchedness of her life seems to have culminated, the little doubts she has thrust out or tried to overlive. Somehow she appears to have worked a great and unwitting change in the Grandon family. Once, when Denise was in a discursive mood, she told Violet of Mr. Wilmarth's proposal of marriage. What if she had married him? Violet thinks now. Marcia talks about her "Vulcan" with a curious pride, and he certainly is indulgent. In that case Violet would have ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... lectures is twofold. They were delivered in the first place for the purpose of directing the attention of readers to books whose literary charm and spiritual value have made them conspicuous in the vast literature of England. Such a task, however, tends to be so discursive as to lose all unity, depending absolutely upon the taste of the individual, and the chances of ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... 'Monseigneur, the most, at present, depends on yourself.—'How so?' asked he. I answered, 'It is only by showing good conduct, and proofs of real wisdom and worth, that the King's entire favor can be gained First of all, to fear God'"—And, in fact, I launched now into a moral preachment, or discursive Dialogue, of great length; much needing to have the skirts of it tucked up, in a way of faithful abridgment, for behoof of poor English ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... intervals, within a confined periphery, abounding in individuals who are led to observation of his person through interest in the kindred nature of his occupation with their own. But the walks of Marie may, in general, be supposed discursive. In this particular instance, it will be understood as most probable, that she proceeded upon a route of more than average diversity from her accustomed ones. The parallel which we imagine to have existed in the mind of Le Commerciel would only be sustained ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... way of comparison. For Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii, 14): "We do not uphold counsel or choice in Christ." Now these things are withheld from Christ only inasmuch as they imply comparison and discursion. Therefore it seems that there was no collative or discursive knowledge in Christ. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... discourse with rising and kindling eloquence upon everything connected with his Phillis? Will not the ribbons on her bodice, and the lace around her neck, become the most important and delightful objects of discursive commentary?—the very fluttering rosettes which burn upon her little instep, and the pearls which glitter in her powdered hair, be of more interest than the fall of thrones? So Corydon, the lover, dreams, and dreams—and ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... many things, which, having no corporeal evidence, can be perceived and comprehended only by the discursive energies of reason. Hence the ambiguous nature of matter can be comprehended only by adulterated opinion. Matter is the principle of all bodies, and is stamped with the impression of forms. Fire, air, and water derive ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... remarked, after a discursive, fitful, but very spicy preface of ten minutes' duration, "why they couldn't find somethin' I hed done, instead of tuckin' some other feller's job on me? I hev had difficulties, but this here ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... at the outset, the writer acknowledges a thousand imperfections in this discursive story. In all truth, it is a most garrulous and incoherent narrative. Like the automobile, part of the time the narrative moves, part of the time it does not; now it is in the road pursuing a straight course; then again it is in the ditch, or far afield, ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy |
