"Incisiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reviewed the origin of the war re-arguing the case for the administration. If the arguments employed were now well-worn, they were repeated with an incisiveness that took away much of their staleness. This speech must be understood as complementary to that which he had made in the House at the opening of hostilities. But he had not changed his point of view, nor moderated his contentions. Time seemed ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... Professor Brierly slowly, "was murdered; there is no question about that." Something clicked in Jimmy's mind. He had missed something from Professor Brierly's speech. There was not his wonted incisiveness and crispness. The reporter looked sharply at the old man. Jimmy's mind cleared; he became convinced that Professor Brierly was hiding something, was withholding something he had learned in New York. He did not, as he was accustomed to do, explain in elaborate ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... sweet in those ways. In that grey, low-cut frock, her white, still prettiness and pale-gold hair, so little touched by Time, only just fell short of real beauty for lack of a spice of depth and of incisiveness, just as her spirit lacked he knew not what of poignancy. He would not for the world have let her know that he ever felt that lack. If a man could not hide little rifts in the lute from one so good and humble and affectionate, he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "Oh!" murmured Manetho, the incisiveness of his manner melting away as suddenly as it came; "now have you proved your love. You shall be made one,—one!—to-day. Four-and-twenty years ago this day, I married your parents on this very spot. The anniversary shall become a ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Hawtrey. "Gregory," she said with harsh incisiveness, "there's only one way you could get that money—and it ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... attractive to men in spite of her smallness and leanness and incisiveness of manner. She was called mighty smart and dry, which was the shop synonym for witty, and her favors, possibly because she never granted them, were accounted valuable. Abby Atkins had more admirers than many a girl who ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... see a tell-tale predilection in favour of intercourse with commonplace and well-ordered men: and this betrays how constantly he requires healing, that he needs a sort of flight and forgetfulness, away from what his insight and incisiveness—from what his "business"—has laid upon his conscience. A horror of his memory is typical of him. He is easily silenced by the judgment of others, he hears with unmoved countenance how people honour, admire, love, and glorify, where he has opened his eyes and seen—or he even conceals ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... ranging in stateliness down toward the blaze of the throne; and the pillars were pillars of porphyry and of jasper and precious marble, carven over all of them with sentences of the cunningest wisdom, distichs of excellence, odes of the poet, stanzas sharp with the incisiveness of wit, and that solve knotty points with but one stroke; and these pillars were each the gift of a mighty potentate of earth or of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... said Mrs. Ennis, "they're not sure whether they want to fall in love again with their own husbands or not." Then she stopped abruptly. She was surprised that she had told Burnaby these things; even more surprised at the growing incisiveness of her voice. She was not accustomed to taking the amatory excursions of her friends too much to heart; she had a theory that it was none of her business, that perhaps some day she might want charity herself. But now she found herself perceptibly indignant. She wondered ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... given at the Belfast meeting of the British Association, 1874, and published in the 'Fortnightly Review,' 1874, and in 'Science and Culture.'), I wish that you could review yourself in the old, and of course forgotten, trenchant style, and then you would here answer yourself with equal incisiveness; and thus, by Jove, you might go on ad infinitum, to the joy and instruction ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... Kerkel was wholly, pathetically innocent. In a few days this gradually became clear to the majority, but at first it was resisted as an attempt to balk justice; and to the last there were some obstinate doubters, who shook their heads mysteriously, and said, with a certain incisiveness, "Somebody must have done it; I should very ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... flashed ominously, indeed, all the rest of the morning, while she was about her work; and at noon, when she gave the call to dinner, there was a curious metallic incisiveness in her voice, which made the call ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... Waynefleet with querulous incisiveness, "it is quite out of the question. Do I look like a man who could reasonably be expected to undertake anything of that kind ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... were not over-used to journeying on foot. Just as the party drew level with us, a musical voice hummed out softly the line "Alone will I set forth upon the road," with the word "alone" plaintively stressed. Next, a resonant bass voice said with a sort of indolent incisiveness: ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... paying insincere compliments. It isn't your sketch which interests me so much as your method of sketching. The directness of it. The way you get to the heart of the subject without worrying over detail. The incisiveness. I'm mentally applying your method to the problems of my own work.... To stand here and watch you sketching is ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... of our greatest mathematicians of to-day; and that we are entitled to believe that the higher intellectual and moral nature of man has been approximately stationary during the whole period of human history. This great and intrepid thinker states his view with characteristic incisiveness thus: "Many writers thoughtlessly speak of the hereditary effects of strength or skill due to any mechanical work or special art being continued generation after generation in the same family, as amongst the castes of India. But of any progressive improvement there is no evidence whatever. ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen |
