"Inaccurate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... myself or be defended. I should as soon think of controverting his statement about my personal appearance (of which he draws no very lovely picture) as about anything else that he says. So pray do not take up the cudgels on my behalf; especially as I perceive that your recollections are rather inaccurate. For instance, it was Park Benjamin, not Goodrich, who cut up the 'Storyteller.' As for Goodrich, I have rather a kindly feeling towards him, and he himself is a not unkindly man, in spite of his propensity to feed and fatten himself on better brains than his own. Only ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... popular sovereignty. I do not propose, in regard to this argument drawn from the history of former times, to enter into a detailed examination of the historical statements he has made. I have the impression that they are inaccurate in a great many instances,—sometimes in positive statement, but very much more inaccurate by the suppression of statements that really belong to the history. But I do not propose to affirm that this is so to any very great extent, or to enter into a very minute examination of his historical ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... always more or less inaccurate, and too many, or rather the majority, remain boys all their lives. When, for instance, I hear speakers at public meetings declaiming about "large and enlightened views," or about "freedom of conscience," ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... perform miracles. He was a man, or let us rather say a lad, of unusual projective power. Give him the faintest hint of any speculation, and the figures flowed from him by the page. A lively imagination and a ready though inaccurate memory supplied his data; he delivered himself with an inimitable heat that made him seem the picture of pugnacity; lavished contradiction; had a form of words, with or without significance, for every form of criticism; ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... perhaps, was so splendidly and solidly valuable as his great protest for the fables and superstitions of mankind. He has the supreme credit of showing that the fairy-tales contain the deepest truth of the earth, the real record of men's feeling for things. Trifling details may be inaccurate, Jack may not have climbed up so tall a beanstalk, or killed so tall a giant; but it is not such things that make a story false; it is a far different class of things that makes every modern book of history as false as the father of lies; ingenuity, ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... into the forest without the rifle and a supply of ammunition, and as they never lost a bullet by an inaccurate shot, it is not probable that our adventurer suffered from hunger. But the incidents of such a voyage must have been so wonderful, that it is greatly to be regretted that we have ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... read Utkrisha-vikramas. The correct reading seems to be Aklivhtavikramas. Then again Sahanujam seems to be inaccurate. I follow ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... extensive teaching of its just forms, according to analogy and the general custom of the most accurate writers. This teaching, however, may well embrace also, or be combined with, an exposition of the various forms of false grammar by which inaccurate writers have corrupted, if not the language itself, at least ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... reach a certain degree of perfection before further progress can be made. However this may be, there are several minor causes which tend to increase the number of plateaus and to lengthen the time spent in any one. In the first place an insecure or an inaccurate foundation must result in an increase of plateaus. If at the beginning, during the initial spurt, for instance, the learner is allowed to go so fast that what he learns is not thoroughly learned, ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... a distinction between real and nominal value was made by Adam Smith, but not altogether the distinction of Mr. Malthus. It is true that Mr. Malthus tells us ("Polit. Econ.," p. 63) that the distinction is "exactly the same." But in this he is inaccurate; for neither is it exactly the same; nor, if it had been, could Mr. Malthus have urged it in his "Political Economy" with the same consistency as its original author. This you will see hereafter. But no matter; how do you ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... creation by co-operation, not antagonism; by making constructive legislation, not destructive prosecution, the immediate object of its inquiries; by conservative investigation of law and fact, and by refusal to issue incomplete and hence necessarily inaccurate reports. Its policy being thus one of open inquiry into, and not attack upon, business, the Bureau has been able to gain not only the confidence, but, better still, the cooperation of men engaged ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... state or disposition of the mind, the disposition to render to everyone his right or, as put by Aristotle, is the disposition to distribute according to desert. It was this statement that captured the medieval jurists and which they made their text, but it is now regarded as incomplete and even inaccurate. One may have the disposition, the desire, the will, to render to every one his right, but unless he can know what is his fellow's right he may unwittingly fail to accord it to him and thus unwittingly ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... their voices (if one may except the one occasion on which Mme. Melba attempted to sing Brunnhilde in Siegfried with disastrous results). Mme. Melba (according to Grove's Dictionary, which, like all other books devoted to the subject of music, is frequently inaccurate) was born in Australia, May 19, 1859. Therefore she was 28 years old when she made her debut in Brussels as Gilda on October 12, 1887. She has used her voice carefully and well and still sings in concert and opera at the age of 59. With the advance of age, indeed, her ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... subject which gave much discussion, but few people, even in the army, thought that the aeroplane would be of great service except for scouting. At the airdrome where I learned to fly we used to practice dropping bombs—-imaginary ones, of course—-but we were so inaccurate at it that none of us imagined we would be of much use in that direction in actual warfare. I have heard it said that the Germans directed their artillery by signals dropped from aircraft at the very beginning. They did so before they had fought many weeks, anyway. Boche fliers, English gunners have ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... Republic by Dr. Spens, it is necessary to observe that a considerable part of it is very faithfully executed; but that in the more abstruse parts it is inaccurate; and that it every where abounds with Scotticisms which offend an English ear, and vulgarisms which are no less disgraceful to the translator than disgusting to the reader. Suffice it therefore to say of this version, that I have adopted ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... my view of the matter, be an inaccurate mode of expression to say, that obtaining appropriate conceptions is a condition precedent to generalization. Throughout the whole process of comparing phenomena with one another for the purpose of generalization, the mind is ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... my story of the poor French modiste and her sad and painful accident, also about my curiously vivid and yet inaccurate vision, and we discussed the latter in quite an S.P.R. spirit! We were then in a very remote part of the Dovre Feld, where foreign papers were ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... as we may talk of the daily movement of the sun. But, as I have elsewhere remarked, propositions which are to bear any deductive strain that may be put upon them must run the risk of [157] seeming pedantic, rather than that of being inaccurate. And the statement that land, in the sense of cultivable soil, is a producer, or even one of the essentials of economic production, is anything but accurate. The process of water-culture, in which a plant is not "planted" in any soil, but is merely supported ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... for human plans! The party in the auto was doomed to bitter disappointment. As they approached, and no camp was to be seen, they began to realize that their information had been inaccurate. Bill Whiting speedily clinched ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... effect of his guns on the barbed wire entanglements. A good deal of ammunition was expended but only one hit on the entanglement was registered, and that did not seem to do any harm. The fire was described to me as inaccurate. The fact is, as was agreed between the two services at Malta, the whole principle of naval gunnery is different from the principles of garrison or field artillery shooting. Before they will be much good at landmarks, the sailors will have ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... estimate of the last season's crop around Hermann. It may be rather inaccurate, but it is about as near as I could come to the result. There are now, I suppose, something like 1,000 acres planted in grapes, of which about 400 may be in bearing. Unfortunately, nearly all the old vineyards are planted with the Catawba, which was almost an entire failure this season, the average ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... surely led to an error or two in the transcription, though every effort was made to minimize this factor. The standards of printing at the time were also somewhat low, and combine all this with those instances where Indian names and words are given, and some of the material is doubtless inaccurate — though Lawson's comments on zoology should make that quite clear. Nonetheless, this account remains one of our best sources for information on the Indians of North Carolina in and about the ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... and satiric point. This is not the kind of matter one expects to find in "N. & Q." neither do I think your pages should be made a vehicle for "showing up" such of "the herd of menstrual Aristarchi" as chance to differ in opinion from some of your smart and peremptory, but not unfrequently inaccurate and illiberal correspondents. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... idea that Fisher and More were executed for refusing to take an oath prescribed in the Act of Supremacy is technically inaccurate. No oath is there prescribed, and not till 1536 was it made high treason to refuse to take the oath of supremacy; even then the oath was to be administered only to civil and ecclesiastical officers. ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... like the word 'seems,'" answered Keyork. "It is the refuge of inaccurate persons, unable to distinguish between ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... language of flowers, wherein one may occasionally find a popular or traditional symbol; but, as a rule, these expressions are generally the wild fancies of the author himself." Hence, in dealing with plant language, one is confronted with a host of handbooks, many of which are not only inaccurate, but misleading. But in enumerating the recognised and well-known plants that have acquired a figurative meaning, it will be found that in a variety of cases this may be traced to their connection with some particular ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... of the High Court, was sitting chuckling inwardly at the prospect of refuting these inaccurate statements, when the student entered ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... is sufficient to illustrate the pioneer character of his work and influence. Inaccurate he may have been in his "History of the American Theatre," but the atmosphere is there, and he never failed to recognize merit, and to give touches of character to the actors, without which our impression of the early ...
— Andre • William Dunlap
... we only did reverence England as once we reverenced her, this is what I would say:—"Upon my country do not visit my sins. Upon my country's fame let me fasten no blot. Wherever I am wrong, inelegant, inaccurate, provincial, visit all your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... against the Goths till 555, when they were conquered. This was the period when so many basilicas were built in that country, in gratitude for the securing of freedom to the province from the yoke of the Arians, and for the re-establishment of the "Holy Republic," the inaccurate term which the Istrians used for the Byzantine Government. The exarchs ruled till 752. During this period the bonds between Istria and Ravenna were close. It was a military district under a provincial magister militum, directly ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... values of the exercise is the familiarity with good English which it gives, I need not say that especial attention must be paid to the phraseology in which the story is clothed. Many persons who never write ungrammatically are inaccurate in speech, and the very familiarity and ease of manner which the story-teller must assume may lead her into colloquialisms and careless expressions. Of course, however, the language must be simple; the words, for the most part, Saxon. No ponderous, Johnsonian ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... smaller one, though it must inevitably be softer, less clear, less isolated, less gigantic. I do not wish, and I shall not try, to deface Borrow's portrait of himself; I can only hope that I shall not do it by accident. There may be a sense in which that portrait can be called inaccurate. It may even be true that "lies—damned lies" {1} helped to make it. But nobody else knows anything like as much about the truth, and a peddling biographer's mouldy fragment of plain fact may be far more dangerous than the ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... animal more familiarly—and he generally begins a fresh chapter or half chapter when he does so—he writes no more about evolution, but gives an admirable description, which no one can fail to enjoy, and which I cannot think is nearly so inaccurate as is commonly supposed. These descriptions are the parts which Buffon intended for the general reader, expecting, doubtless, and desiring that such a reader should skip the dry parts he had been addressing to the more studious. It is true the descriptions ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... effects of increased or diminished use of organs, the direct influence of the environment, and so forth. From the fact that Darwin has persuaded the world of the truth of evolution, evolution is often called Darwinism; and in this historically just though scientifically inaccurate sense of the term, Huxley was a strict Darwinian, a Darwinian of the Darwinians. From the facts that, although natural selection had been formulated by several writers before Darwin, and had been simultaneously elaborated by Wallace and Darwin, the Origin of Species was ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... using the term "carrier" instead of "horse," while misleading, is not inaccurate. However, I would like to know just what sort of picture the term conjured up in the reader's mind. In Chapter Ten, in the battle scene, ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... his Life of Coleridge asserts that the Tragedy of "Osorio" was sent to Drury Lane "without much hope that it would be accepted."[1] This, however, is inaccurate. The play was not sent; Coleridge went to London with it, for he writes to Cottle in ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... a large scale, commerce also has extensive statistics. Every week the larger centers of commerce and the ports publish reports on the supply of petroleum, coffee, cotton, sugar, grain, etc. These statistics are frequently inaccurate, seeing that the owners of the goods frequently have a personal interest in concealing the truth. On the whole, however, the statistics are pretty safe and furnish to those interested, information on the ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... from time immemorial in the manufacture of soap and glass, two chemical productions which employ and keep in circulation an immense amount of capital. The quantity of soap consumed by a nation would be no inaccurate measure whereby to estimate its wealth and civilisation. Of two countries, with an equal amount of population, the wealthiest and most highly civilised will consume the greatest weight of soap. This consumption does not subserve ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... of books; into that account of a long series of collated experiments and partly verified hypotheses we call science; into the imperfectly developed system of inductive and deductive logic which determines mathematics and philosophy; into the long, inaccurate and largely unverifiable account of human blindness and error known as history; and into the realm of idealism, symbol, and pitiful pride we find in the story of poetry, ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... or—The Candy Man got no further with his questions, for just then Margaret Elizabeth turned and gave him her hand, explaining that they were so much stiller when they sat on the floor. She added that it was very good of him to come—a purely conventional and entirely inaccurate statement. He was also instructed to sit on the sofa ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... errors of these charts are far more suggestive of deliberate distortion than, of inaccurate charting. ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... the impersonal and official viewpoint, with data checked and balanced. But the following account introduces the personal and human element with poignant effect. Some of the very minor facts are a little inaccurate, but that is inevitable when an individual soldier describes a general action from his own viewpoint. Nevertheless the editors consider that in no other Battalion source is there such a vivid record of experiences to be got ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... practiced successfully under exceptional conditions only. In view of the fact that such bomb-dropping is exceedingly inaccurate, and that the charges carried are relatively small, this form of attack ordinarily would not be very dangerous for the submersible. Surface craft have also employed large charges of high explosives, which are caused to detonate by hydrostatic pistons upon reaching a certain depth. Patrol ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for the sake of the one, manfully ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that there is some animate principle behind such clocks is that they are so like a good many people one meets. There are persons who are packed with the most curiously inaccurate information on the most abstruse subjects, and they insist on imparting it to you. I have no ground to complain if I ask Jones what is the capital of Illinois and he says Chicago. The initiative was mine, and taken at my own peril, and it is fair that I should pay the penalty. But frequently ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... charitable enough to hope that the actions of such men would be in practice as different as possible from what they anticipate in theory. But it is enough to say that experience, if it proves any thing, proves this to be an inaccurate view of human nature. All the threats of theologians with infinite stores of time and torture to draw upon, failed to wean men from sins which gave them a passing gratification, even when faith was incomparably stronger than it is now, or is likely to be again. One reason, doubtless, ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... procurement of well-known facts, in order that, by severe induction, philosophy might attain to general laws, and to a classification of the sciences. The fault of the ages before him had been hasty, careless, often neglected observation, inaccurate analysis, the want of patient successive experiment. His great motto was experiment, and again and again experiment; and the excellent maxims which he laid down for the proper conduct of experimental philosophy have outlived his own ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... secretly slaughter the nephew and appropriate the umbrella of one of the most loyal and devoted Ritualists that ever sent a substitute to battle? In the mighty metropolis, too, the Great Dailies—those ponderous engines of varied and inaccurate intelligence—published detailed and mistaken reports of the whole affair, and had subtle editorial theories as to the nature of the crime. The Sun, after giving a cut of an old-fashioned parlor-grate as a diagram ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... have always seemed to possess a real value of their own, irrespective of their exactness. For example, the reports repeated by Nelson at Leghorn of the happenings during Bonaparte's campaign of 1796 in upper Italy, though often inaccurate, represent correctly an important element of a situation. Misapprehension, when it exists, is a factor in any circumstances, sometimes of powerful influence. It is part of the data governing the men of ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... inaccurate, for I'm not one of the family circle myself. My money gets me here and any skill I've used in making it. It wouldn't keep me at a pinch. And Trebell ... [He speaks through his teeth.] ... do you think your accession to power ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... universal life. These fine theories, from which men of talent managed to extract receipts for art and thought, were in full flower in 1914. The heart of the simple Clerambault rejoiced in such visions, for nothing could have harmonised better with his warm heart and inaccurate mind. If one has but little self-possession it is easy to give oneself up to others, to the world, to that indefinable Providential Force on whose shoulders we can throw the burden of thought and will. The great current swept on and these indolent souls, instead of pursuing their way along ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... not quick work in those days, and the distance between the vessels was decreased by half before the guns were again fired. This time it was not a broadside; the guns went off one by one as they were loaded, and the aim was hasty and inaccurate, for close as they were not a shot struck the hull of the Good Venture, though two or three went through the sails. In the bright moonlight men could be seen running about and officers waving their arms and giving orders on ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... tell what he knew about the book. His synopsis was so inaccurate that Green knew that he had not read the book, but was glibly misquoting the publisher's announcement. Green's courage was fired as he reflected how much better he could have portrayed the chief incidents of the plot. But his triumph was ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... Dolly went to bed this evening without even that inaccurate enlightenment. And presently Mr. Alibone, detecting his friend's meaning when he said he was deadly sleepy somehow to-night, took his leave and went away to finish his ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... As pointed out in the introduction the Cavalier's account of the disposition of forces in this battle is inaccurate. ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... world has hitherto been strangely in error respecting the fate of the vizier's daughter, Scheherazade, as that fate is depicted in the "Arabian Nights"; and that the denouement there given, if not altogether inaccurate, as far as it goes, is at least to blame in not ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... with colors the imagination alone can supply, and all do it—alive or dead. You will find that Fiction, as distinguished from neat mendacity, has not one form upon earth, but a dozen. You will find the most habitually, willfully, and inexcusably inaccurate, with the means of accuracy under its nose, that form of fiction called "anonymous criticism," political and literary; the most equivocating, perhaps, is the "imaginavit," better known at Lincoln's Inn as the "affidavit." In the article of exaggeration, ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... amount of his authorities during the Saxon period, when stripped of the bombast and inaccurate style of the monkish historians, is, that the Scots had sometimes been defeated by the English, had received peace on disadvantageous terms, had made submissions to the English monarch, and had even perhaps fallen into some dependence on a power which was so much superior, and which they ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... uncolored by passions and hope, and to discover those laws of the universe which, in the words of Karl Pearson, "hold for all normally constituted minds." In ordinary experience, our impressions and beliefs are the results of inaccurate sense observation colored by hope and fear, aversion and revulsion, and limited by accidental circumstance. Through science we are enabled to detach ourselves from the personal and the particular and to see the world, as, undistorted, it must appear ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... "owned he was now in a scene of as wild nature as he could see; but he corrected me sometimes in my inaccurate observations. 'There,' said I, 'is a mountain like a cone.' Johnson: 'No, sir. It would be called so in a book, but when a man comes to look at it, he sees it is not so. It is indeed pointed at the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... favor addressed to the late Mr. Stanton, and in which you ask information with reference to the proposed issue of stamps to commemorate the centenary of Sir George Etienne Cartier. The information which you have received from outside sources is not only premature, but inaccurate in several details, and I can only say that although it is possible that these stamps may be issued during the course of the next few months the whole question is still under ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... perform miracles. He was a man, or let us rather say a lad, of unusual projective power. Give him the faintest hint of any speculation, and the figures flowed from him by the page. A lively imagination, and a ready, though inaccurate memory, supplied his data; he delivered himself with an inimitable heat that made him seem the picture of pugnacity; lavished contradiction had a form of words, with or without significance, for every form of criticism; and the looker-on alternately smiled at his simplicity and fervour, or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... characters remarks, "I propose to send a mental message to Eliza." This sounds (we contend) quite a harmless sentiment, but the director insisted that the person speaking, being an Englishman of studious disposition, would not say anything so inaccurate. "He would use much more correct language," said the director. "He ought to say 'I purpose to send.'" We balked mildly at this. "All right," said our mentor. "The trouble with you is you don't know any English. I'll send you a ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... includes ammunition for the following additional ordnance which I should like to get, namely, two batteries of 4.5-inch howitzers for each of the Xth and XIth Divisions (since 5-inch howitzers are found to be too inaccurate to bombard the enemy trenches even in close proximity to our own), one battery of 6-inch ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... invention justice would be to keep the executive part of it out of the hands of the multitude of empirical engineers, who from ignorance, want of experience and want of necessary convenience, would be very liable to produce bad and inaccurate workmanship; all of which deficiencies would affect the reputation of the invention." Boulton expected to build the engines in his shop "with as great a difference of accuracy as there is between the blacksmith and the mathematical instrument ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... enemy of accurate knowledge, for the first condition of knowing a thing is to know that we do not know it. And so there are a great many of us who, having picked up since childhood vague and partially inaccurate notions about Christ and His Gospel and what He has done, are so satisfied on the strength of these that we know all about it, that we listen to preaching about it with a very languid attention. The ground in our minds is preoccupied with our own vague and imperfect apprehensions. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... of Absia is so inaccurate, that I should not have recognised it, had not the Lithotrya Nicobarica, in a bottle in the British ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... little full and never quite against the upper. If Linda's effect was cool and remote, Mrs. Condon, thanks to her mouth, was reassuringly imminent. She was, too, friendly; she talked to women—in her not overfrequent opportunities—in a rapid warm inaccurate confession of almost everything they desired to hear. The women, of course, were continually hampered by the unfortunate fact that the questions nearest their hearts, or curiosity, were ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... here given are of course inaccurate; but this proves that Major Frye wrote his text in the very midst of the crisis, and that his manuscript has not been ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... therefore as one which does not concern us. If that was all, it would not be needful for me to discuss the position. But it has been held, not only that the narrative does not concern us, but also that it is certainly inaccurate. ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... Gospels are not "loose, exaggerated, inaccurate, credulous narratives." They are the story of the clearest transparency to truth that was ever known to mortals as a human being. They preserve the life-giving words of him whose mission it was to show mankind the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... is inaccurate. He ascribes to Phips acts which took place weeks after his return, such as the capture ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... correct as not to include many equivocally denoting different ideas. Hence it must happen that however accurately objects may be discriminated in themselves, and however accurately the discrimination may be considered, the definition of them may be rendered inaccurate by the inaccuracy of the terms in which it is delivered. And this unavoidable inaccuracy must be greater or less, according to the complexity and novelty of the objects defined. When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own ...
— The Federalist Papers
... familiar references to the worthy inhabitants. Natural enough: I ought to have thought of it before. At any rate, I can set it right now. Suppose I begin with myself, so as to get done with that part of the subject as soon as possible? My name is Marian Halcombe; and I am as inaccurate as women usually are, in calling Mr. Fairlie my uncle, and Miss Fairlie my sister. My mother was twice married: the first time to Mr. Halcombe, my father; the second time to Mr. Fairlie, my half-sister's father. Except that ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... paraphrase, abounding in confusions and in mistranslations from the Greek of Erasmus's New Testament, which, as the author confessed, "was rather tumbled headlong into the world than edited." And he told me how the edition of Erasmus itself was hastily prepared from careless copies of inaccurate transcriptions of yet further copies of divers manuscripts of which the oldest dates no further back than the fourth century, and is in turn, most probably, just a liberal paraphrase, as all the others ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... are deleted, as the language used is adapted, and in a strict sense is also inaccurate; thus, "The woman tempted me, and I did eat." Compare Genesis ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... scourge or second untruss [that is, satirist], of the time." (Joseph Hall being by his own boast the first, and Marston's work being entitled "The Scourge of Villainy"). Apparently we must now prefer for Carlo a notorious character named Charles Chester, of whom gossipy and inaccurate Aubrey relates that he was "a bold impertinent fellow...a perpetual talker and made a noise like a drum in a room. So one time at a tavern Sir Walter Raleigh beats him and seals up his mouth (that is ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... lectures, teaches habits of promptness. Every young man should have a watch which is a good timekeeper; one that is nearly right encourages bad habits, and is an expensive investment at any price. Wear threadbare clothes if you must, but never carry an inaccurate watch. ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... Julia, that an inaccurate use of words produces such a strange confusion in all reasoning, that in the heat of debate, the combatants, unable to distinguish their friends from their foes, fall promiscuously on both. A skilful disputant knows well how to take advantage of this confusion, and sometimes endeavours to create ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... keenest intellects of all time, did little to advance medical science. He did not practise medicine, but studied it as a branch of philosophy, and instead of observing and investigating, attempted to solve the problems of health and disease by intuition and speculation. His conceptions were inaccurate ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... longer honest or even safe to deny that this noble literature, rich in all the elements of moral or spiritual grandeur, given—so the Church had always taught, and would always teach—under the inspiration of Almighty God, was sometimes mistaken in its science, was sometimes inaccurate in its history, and sometimes only relative and accommodatory in its morality. It assumed theories of the physical world which science had abandoned and could never resume; it contained passages of narrative which devout and temperate men pronounced ...
— Humanity's Gain from Unbelief - Reprinted from the "North American Review" of March, 1889 • Charles Bradlaugh
... period of semi-seclusion gradually disintegrated by appropriate stages. But Payson, Sr., simply died right in the middle of everything—without any chance of a spiritual understanding—"reconciliation" would be inaccurate—with his son. So, Payson, Jr., protestingly acquired by part cash and balance credit a complete suit of what he scathingly described as "the barbarous panoply of death" and, turning himself into what he similarly called a "human catafalque," ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... for supervision in any workroom. It was soon discovered that the girls entering the school know arithmetic in an abstract way, but are at sea when asked to meet the ordinary trade problems. They are inaccurate in reading and copying; they cannot write a letter of application, conduct correspondence, make out checks, or keep simple accounts. They are ignorant of the laws already made which concern them and of their own ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman
... "Timaeus" (ch. xiv.). "God resolved to create a moving image of eternity, and out of that eternity which reposes in its own unchangeable unity he framed an eternal image moving according to numerical succession, which we call Time. Nothing can be more inaccurate than to apply the terms, past, present, future, to real Being, which is immovable. Past and future are expressions only suitable to generation which proceeds through time." Time reposes on the bosom of eternity, as all bodies ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the English translation of Jagor (London, 1875) with the original text reveals the fact that the translation is inaccurate in many places, and that it was done in a careless and slovenly manner. Consequently, it has been necessary to translate this matter ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... to the working class to be carried into effect by the municipality so long as they remain in undisputed control of the State and federal government and especially of the judiciary." This statement is slightly inaccurate. The capitalists will allow the enactment of measures that benefit the working class, provided those measures do not involve loss to the capitalist class. Thus sanitation and education are of real benefit to the workers, but, temporarily at least, they benefit the capitalist class ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... naturally was aggrieved. He had informed all hands on May 1 that they would not see the sun again for seventy days, and now had to endure the jeers of friends who affected to believe that his observations were inaccurate by a ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... worthless article in the sixth volume of the Retrospective Review.[279] The merits of the piece have been somewhat more fully recognized by Dr. Ward and Mr. Homer Smith, but the treatment accorded the play by the former is necessarily scanty, while that of the latter is inaccurate. Throughout a tendency is manifest to find fault with the artificiality of the piece, and to blame the author for not representing the true 'simplicity' of pastoral life. That the pastoral tradition was a wholly impossible, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... the language of the Book as we see it in the Geographic Text should be so much more rude, inaccurate, and Italianized than that of Rusticiano's other writings, is a question to which I can suggest no reply quite satisfactory to myself. Is it possible that we have in it a literal representation of Polo's own language in dictating the story,—a rough draft which it was intended afterwards ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... answer as the story proceeds, yet they show how the wording impresses a mind fresh to the subject, and perhaps here and there you may like to alter it slightly, if you wish the full idea, i.e., not an inaccurate one, to be suggested at first; and yet after all I believe it is not your exposition, but the natural jumping to a conclusion that affects or has ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... needed, to supplement the genuine constellations, and as it was impossible to recognize these additions in the sky, the predictions were made, not from observation of the heavens, but from observations on globes, often very inaccurate. ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... the fear of epileptic attacks for ever hanging over him; and further, he was unfitted for society owing to a very painful and violent stammer. I saw him twice in my life; remote impressions of people seen for a single evening are often highly inaccurate, but I will give them for what they are worth. On the first occasion I saw a small, sturdily built man, with a big, clerical sort of face with marked features, and, as far as I can recollect, rather coppery in hue. There was a certain grotesqueness communicated to the face by large, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... grossly inaccurate and highly coloured reports which have been circulated from time to time regarding the life and treatment of prisoners of war, the story has been set out in a plain unvarnished form. There are no exaggerations whatever. Much of the most revolting detail has been eliminated ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... finished his twenty-third year without having ever seriously known the passion of love. In that year he first saw Laura. Concerning this lady, at one time, when no life of Petrarch had been yet written that was not crude and inaccurate, his biographers launched into the wildest speculations. One author considered her as an allegorical being; another discovered her to be a type of the Virgin Mary; another thought her an allegory of poetry and repentance. Some denied her even allegorical existence, and deemed her ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... be accurately measured. Geography and history have each an important place in Assyrian learning; while astronomy and mythology occupy at least as great a share of attention. The astronomical observations recorded are thought to be frequently inaccurate, as might be expected when there were no instruments, or none of any great value. Mythology is a very favorite subject, and appears to be treated most fully; but hitherto cuneiform scholars have scarcely penetrated below ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... tropical. 'The full absurdity of this phrase, the essence of its nonsense, seems not to have been hitherto pointed out.' It is not 'consistent with reason'; and it is not 'conformed to the normal development of the language.' It is 'a monstrosity, the illogical, confusing, inaccurate, unidiomatic character of which I have at some length, but yet imperfectly, set forth.' Finally, 'In fact, it means nothing, and is the most incongruous combination of words and ideas that ever attained respectable usage in any civilized language.' These be 'prave 'ords'; ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... But, so far as regards this particular topic, Aristotle, it must be confessed, has not got very far beyond common knowledge. He knows a little about the structure of the heart. I do not think that his knowledge is so inaccurate as many people fancy, but it does not amount to much. A very few years after his time, however, there was a Greek philosopher, Erasistratus, who lived about three hundred years before Christ, and who must have pursued anatomy with much care, for he ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley
... time, we must not too strongly emphasize this aspect of the matter; such over-emphasis of a single aspect of highly complex phenomena constantly distorts our vision of great social processes. We have already seen that it is inaccurate to assert any connection between a high birth-rate and a high degree of national prosperity, except in so far as at special periods in the history of a country a sudden wave of prosperity may temporarily remove the restraints on natural fertility. ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... tenets. He was a highly cultivated, large-minded man, and the conversation between him and his nephew was a constant novelty to her, who had always yearned after depth and thought, and seldom met with them. Still here she was constantly feeling how shallow were her acquirements, how inaccurate her knowledge, how devoid of force and solidity her reasonings compared with what here seemed to be old, well-beaten ground. Nay, the very sparkle of fun and merriment surprised and puzzled her; and all the courtesy of the one gentleman, and the affection of the other, ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... story of a woman—one of those no man could know and not remember. I make no apologies for her; I pay her no homage. I record only a not inaccurate account of an adventure of my youth, in which she played a part; I leave to you the task of ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... no pretence that Southern people may not go into territory which shall be subject to the Ordinance of 1787. The only restraint is, that they shall not carry slaves thither, and continue that relation. They say this shuts them altogether out. Why, Sir, there can be nothing more inaccurate in point of fact than this statement. I understand that one half the people who settled Illinois are people, or descendants of people, who came from the Southern States. And I suppose that one third of the people of Ohio are ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Ana. We were to endeavor to secure this before the Turks could destroy it, and cross over to bivouac on the far side. The road was in fair shape. Many of the small bridges were of recent construction. We soon found that our map was exceedingly inaccurate. Our aeroplanes were doing a lot of damage to the fleeing Turks, and as we began to catch up with larger groups we had some sharp engagements. The desert Arabs hovered like vultures in the distance waiting for nightfall to cover them ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... connexion I must insist for a few minutes upon the relations of literature to the intellectual idol of to-day—to wit science—science in the popular, if inaccurate, sense. I have to maintain that literature—and particularly poetry—is the indispensable ally and complement of science; that it is, in the end, the means by which the essential truths of science will reach their application to life; that it supplies the force by which ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Ferrer, a Spaniard of much research, and originally incredulous as to the facts, published about seventeen years ago a selection from the leading documents, accompanied by his palinode as to their accuracy. His materials have been since used for the basis of more than one narrative, not inaccurate, in French, German and Spanish journals of high authority. It is seldom the case that French writers err by prolixity. They have done so in this case. The present narrative, which contains no sentence derived from any foreign one, has the great ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... at this; "on that point of the bells Master Pedro is very inaccurate, for bells are not in use among the Moors; only kettledrums, and a kind of small trumpet somewhat like our clarion; to ring bells this way in Sansuena is ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... The inaccurate rendering of the Authorised Version is responsible for a mistake in the meaning of these words, which has done much harm. They have been supposed to describe a quality or characteristic belonging to Christ or the Gospel; and, so construed, they have sometimes been ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... manner of the earlier antiquarians and encyclopedists. A free use of the rhetorical figures goes side by side with a general want of finish and occasional lapses into solecism. His literary gift is so small, and his knowledge of the religion he professes to defend so slight and so excessively inaccurate, that theologians and men of letters for once agree that his main value consists in the fragments of antiquarian information which he preserves. But he has a further claim to notice as the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... undeniable that in this instance, at least, there are mutual action and reaction between matter and spirit. If it be said that this connection of the soul with the organized frame is the only condition in which the material and immaterial are known to be capable of acting upon each other, it is yet wholly inaccurate and unphilosophical to say that this mutual action ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... The governing idea is that puberty marks the direct association of the individual with a spiritual world to the influence of which the functional changes are due. As more accurate conceptions are formed, the older and inaccurate one is not altogether discarded. It has become incarnate in ceremonies, it is part of the traditional psychic life of the people, and the change is one of transformation rather than of eradication. In later cultural stages the physiological nature of the changes ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... not to be startled: but if you are, then test the truth of my theory by playing to-night at the game called "Russian Scandal;" in which a story, repeated in secret by one player to the other, comes out at the end of the game, owing to the inaccurate and—forgive me if I say it—uneducated brains through which it has passed, utterly unlike its original; not only ludicrously maimed and distorted, but often with the most fantastic additions of events, details, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... disaster, had played the mischief with her for a day or two—and the news from Russia. Any bad news, indeed, seemed to haunt her; her colour faded away; and if he dictated notes to her, they would be occasionally inaccurate. But that was seldom. In general, he felt that he had made great strides during the preceding weeks; that, thanks to her, the book he was attempting was actually coming into shape. She had suggested so much—sometimes by her ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Fortress Monroe on the evening of November 15. The next day the news was known, but since it was Saturday, few papers contained more than brief and inaccurate accounts and, there being then few Sunday papers, it was not until Monday, the eighteenth, that there broke out a widespread rejoicing and glorification in the Northern press[403]. America, for a few days, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... all he had the quick memory of his mother's companionship, he could recall her rueful looks whenever the eager inaccurate ways, in which he reflected certain ineradicable tendencies of her own, had lost him a school advantage; he could remember her exhortations, with the dash in them of humorous self-reproach which made them so stirring to the child's affection; and he could realise their old far-off life ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... twelve. He has never had any sort of agriculture, nor until the English taught him the use of dogs did he ever domesticate any kind of animal or bird, nor did he teach himself to turn turtle or to use hook and line in fishing. He cannot count, and all his ideas are hazy, inaccurate, and ill-defined. He has never developed unaided any idea of drawing or making a tally or record for any purpose, but he readily understands a sketch or plan when shown him. He soon becomes mentally tired, and is apt to break down physically under ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... which they would appear; but that we could add on a popular exposition of them on a level with the discussion which had preceded. And you replied that such an exposition would be enough for you, and so the enquiry was continued in what to me seemed to be a very inaccurate manner; whether you were satisfied or not, it is for you ...
— The Republic • Plato
... know how you are. I shall shortly send a cheque for thirteen pounds, which I believe will settle the interest account up to Michaelmas. If you see anything inaccurate pray inform me. I am at present tolerably well, but of late have been very much troubled with respect to my people. Since I saw you I have been three times over to Mattishall, but with very little profit. The last time I was there I got the key of the house from that ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter |
