"Incorrectness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... character of the man is such, that any one would be much more inclined to deny him any knowledge of rhetoric, than to grant him any acquaintance with philosophy. Nor do I say this because the book on the art which he published appears to me to have been written with any particular incorrectness, (for, indeed, he appears to me to have shown very tolerable ingenuity and diligence in arranging topics which he had collected from ancient writings on the subject, and also to have advanced some new theories himself,) but it is the least part of the business of an orator to ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... to select such as, though not originally intended for publication, yet appeared to contain matter that might contribute to the gratification and instruction of the public. Our last object was to determine what degree of imperfection and incorrectness in papers of either of these classes ought or ought not to exclude them from a place in the present volume. This was, doubtless, the most nice and arduous part of our undertaking. The difficulty, however, was, in our ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... mere diction was concerned, indeed, Mr. Fox did his best to avoid those faults which the habit of public speaking is likely to generate. He was so nervously apprehensive of sliding into some colloquial incorrectness, of debasing his style by a mixture of parliamentary slang, that he ran into the opposite error, and purified his vocabulary with a scrupulosity unknown to any purist. "Ciceronem Allobroga dixit." He would not allow ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... some of them knew the life of that most foreign of all capitals, New York. They nearly all spoke French and German better than they did English, for their accent in those languages was very sweet and winning in its incorrectness, while their English was high-pitched and nasal, and a little too loud in company. They were as pretty as girls are anywhere, and they wore dresses designed by Mr. Worth, or his New York rivals, Loque ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... it difficult, nay, almost impossible, to understand at first, especially the broad Suabian of Tuebingen. Here, however, as the system of dictation prevails, the slowness of utterance compensates in a measure for its indistinctness and incorrectness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... of the correctness of the scientific or naturalistic explanation of the career of man and of the incorrectness of the traditional or supernaturalistic one is afforded by the history of morals, the soul of both religion and politics, without which neither could ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... in this State a numerous and powerful body. Any measure adopted by the Trustees with the appearance of anger, or haste, will be eagerly seized on. If the statements of the president are as incorrect as I have heard it confidently asserted, an exposure of that incorrectness will put the public opinion right. It may require time, but the result must be certain. If it can be shown that his complaints are nothing but defamatory clamor, he will be reduced to that low condition that it will be the interest of no sect or party to attempt to hold him up. I see ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... does not weary of telling his friend about them, transcribing portions of them, and complaining of Polish papers which had misrepresented the drift and mistranslated the words of them. I do not wonder at the incorrectness of the Polish reports, for some of these criticisms are written in as uncouth, confused, and vague German as I ever had the misfortune to turn into English. One cannot help thinking, in reading what Chopin says with regard to these matters, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... attention chiefly to the progressive phases of thought; but it must not be inferred from this that Greek science, with all its secure inductions, was entirely free from superstition. On the contrary, the most casual acquaintance with Greek literature would suffice to show the incorrectness of such a supposition. True, the great thinkers of Greece were probably freer from this thraldom of false inductions than any of their predecessors. Even at a very early day such men as Xenophanes, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Plato attained ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... verbiage - his translations even replete with tautology, a fault which is to refinement as midnight is to noonday; and, what is truly surprising, that the fourth book of the Dunciad, his last publication, is more full of redundancy and incorrectness than his Pastorals, which are ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... above being same size, but loftier. The central tower is 110 feet high, the turret, in which there was placed a clock made by John Inshaw, to be moved by electro-magnetic power (but which is now only noted for its incorrectness), rising some 45 feet above the cornice. Other portions of the building are let off ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... Fremont now recognized the incorrectness of the maps which had so nearly caused the destruction of the party. As he says in his notes: "No river from the interior does, or can, cross the Sierra Nevada, itself more lofty than the Rocky Mountains... There is no opening ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... a thousand times for the trouble I cause you. I cannot understand how it is that there are so many mistakes in the copying of the Sonata. This incorrectness no doubt proceeds from my no longer being able to keep a copyist of my own; circumstances have brought this about. May God send me more prosperity, till —— is in a better position! This will not be for a whole year to come. It is really dreadful the turn affairs have ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... victory or imported by commerce; and the very agreeableness of their position nourishes many expensive and deceitful gratifications of the passions. And what I have spoken of Corinth may be applied, for aught I know, without incorrectness to the whole of Greece. For the Peloponnesus itself is almost wholly on the sea-coast; nor, besides the Phliasians, are there any whose lands do not touch the sea; and beyond the Peloponnesus, the AEnianes, the Dorians, and the Dolopes are the only inland ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... been said to prove the incorrectness of Westermarck's assertion (515) that the lack of jealousy is "a rare exception in the human race." Real jealousy, as a matter of fact, is unknown to the lower races, and even the feeling of revenge that passes by that name ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... moral certainty of avoiding error. With the aid of these precautions, I have discovered the justice of M. de Reaumur's suggestions, and I have a thousand times seen, if certain experiments seemed to combat them, it was from incorrectness of execution. Yet I must except some facts where my results have constantly been different from his. Those respecting the reception of a stranger queen substituted for the natural ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... that was all she saw in the picture. Then on cross-questioning she mentioned 9 more items correctly, and gave 8 others much altered from the truth. No other item was added, but her report on these was almost illusional in its incorrectness. Of 5 suggestions offered she accepted 2 of the least important, refusing the others entirely. This was a remarkably poor result for a girl of her age, but may not be indicative of her best abilities even on this type of work. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... the Committee have determined that inasmuch as the relief prayed for by the memorial can not be granted, the Committee will ask to be discharged from its further consideration, and will not express any opinion as to the correctness or incorrectness of the course pursued on the trial of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of the misstatements of all those who have hitherto written on the subject of the poet, instancing the fallacies of Captain Medwin's book, and also, in an especial manner, though vaguely enough, the incorrectness, amounting to caricature, put forth by a later biographer, one of Shelley's oldest friends,—by which she evidently means to indicate Mr. Hogg. At the same time, the nature of her Ladyship's book is, involuntarily, an additional evidence ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... mix much with the world, without imbibing the false and puerile conceptions of the multitude; and without losing that true elevation of soul which comparatively despises every mortal concern? Plotinus, therefore, conscious of the incorrectness of his writings arising from the rapidity, exuberance and daring sublimity of his thoughts, committed their revision to his disciple Porphyry; who, though inferior in depth of thought to his master, was, on account of his extraordinary abilities, called ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... period during which a nation has been governed by its imagination and that in which it submits to reason, there is a melancholy interval. The constitution of man is such that, for a long time after he has discovered the incorrectness of the ideas prevailing around him, he shrinks from openly emancipating himself from their dominion, and, constrained by the force of circumstances, he becomes a hypocrite, publicly applauding what his private judgment condemns. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... trace of any letters on the surface of the stone where the chief part of the word CONSTAN is represented as existing—viz., after JACIT. It would be difficult, perhaps, to adduce a case of more flagrant incorrectness in copying an inscription than Mr. Wilkie's and Lord Buchan's reading of the Cat-stane legend affords. Mr. Gough, in his edition of Camden's Britannia (1784), only aggravates this misrepresentation. For whilst he incorrectly states that the inscription is "not now ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... it to you—so that all witnesses may hear it. It is then to be filed with the district attorney. You can signify its correctness or incorrectness after ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... ought not to be belated. But it is much worse to be premature or garrulous. In my own experience, I have never been sorry for keeping silence, especially if I had already said something. The only rule in the matter is comparatively self-evident. Never move toward any incorrectness and never present the appearance of knowing more than you actually do. Setting aside the dishonesty of such a procedure, the danger of a painful exposure in such matters ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... to consider the correctness or the incorrectness of her inference. It was quite enough for her to know that this spirit of inequality existed. In his presence, however, she felt at perfect ease, wholly oblivious of everything save her own happiness, as she could now bear witness to, but alone with her thoughts the horrible ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... the taking of the census for the year 1840, we, the undersigned, were called upon by Mr. Wilton to examine the papers in his possession relative to these appointments, and to ascertain therefrom the correctness or incorrectness of such charge. We accompanied Mr. Wilton to a room, and examined the matter as fully as we could with the means afforded us. The only sources of information bearing on the subject which were submitted to us were the letters, etc., recommending and opposing the various ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... always take the liberty to tell for news such things (let them have happened never so much before the time of writing) as have escaped public notice, or have been misrepresented to the world, provided that I am still within rules, and trespass not as a Tatler any further than in an incorrectness of style, and writing in an air of common speech. Thus if anything that is said, even of old Anchises or AEneas, be set by me in a different light than has hitherto been hit upon, in order to inspire ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... Gospel,' writes the author of Supernatural Religion, 'was not only called Diatessaron, but according to Victor of Capua, it was also called Diapente ([Greek: dia pente]) "by five," a complication which shows the incorrectness of the ecclesiastical ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot |
