"Intangible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said Corey, willing to laugh away the topic. "And from what I read occasionally of some people who go about repeating their happiness, I shouldn't say that the intangible evidences were ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... summons in the whistles of passing craft. Almost everywhere, sharp above many smells of oils and spices, the whiff of coffee tingled his busy nose. Above one huge precipice stood a gilded statue—a boy with wings, burning in the noon. Brilliance flamed between the vanes of his pinions: the intangible thrust of that pouring light seemed about to hover ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... the domain of quite simple material things the dislike of having fixed habits of thought disturbed, leads gentlemen to resent innovations in that way, it is not astonishing that innovations of a more intangible and elusive kind should be subject to a like unconscious misrepresentation, especially by newspapers and public men pushed by commercial or political necessity to say the popular thing rather than the true thing: that contained in the speech of Mr. Churchill, ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... on their young shoulders the burdens of the world. Evidence is hard to collect, for the witnesses disagree among themselves. Then there are other complications. Abundance stole things which you can see and touch, while Lotus's theft was only one of intangible thoughts. Furthermore, Abundance comes from a no-account family, quite "down and out," while Lotus is a pastor's daughter and as such entitled to due respect and deference. And still further, nobody likes Abundance, while Lotus is very popular and counts one ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... nature, animate and inanimate. The Rev. S. R. Riggs who, for forty years, has been a student of Dakota customs, superstitions etc., says, "Tahkoo Wahkan," p. 55 et seq. "The religious faith of the Dakota is not in his gods as such. It is in an intangible, mysterious something of which they are only the embodiment, and that in such measure and degree as may accord with the individual fancy of the worshipper. Each one will worship some of these divinities, and neglect or despise others, but the great object ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... fabled monster of the wave, breathing fire, and making the shores resound with its deep respirations. Then there is something mysterious, even awful, in the power of steam. See it curling up against a blue sky, some rosy morning—graceful, floating, intangible, and to all appearance the softest and gentlest of all spiritual things; and then think that it is this fairy spirit that keeps all the world alive and hot with motion; think how excellent a servant it is, doing all sorts of gigantic works, like the genii of old; ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... guesswork; exactly the same figure of sixty thousand is commonly brought forward as the probable number of prostitutes not only in Berlin, but also in London and in New York. It is absolutely impossible to say whether it is under or over the real number, for secret prostitution is quite intangible. Even if the facts were miraculously revealed there would still remain the difficulty of deciding what is and what is not prostitution. The avowed and public prostitute is linked by various gradations on the one side to the respectable girl ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... should, in an almost savage isolation, she dreaded his absorption in anything apart from her. There were other reliefs, consolations, and hopes than those she held. He was slipping away into a silent region—man's peculiar world—of thought and dream and speculation, an intangible, ideal, remote, unloving world. Some day she would knock at his ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... stone of our political liberty. The Constitution is a piece of parchment—sacred and to be revered—but it is, in its outward presentment, material and inactive. The spirit of the Constitution is intangible and ideal, its interpretation alone is its vitality. We the people—through equally material morsels of paper entitled votes—raise the spirit of the Constitution by placing in the halls of Congress the interpreters of that Constitution, over whom and above all sits the Chief ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... jellies and good bread. Nothing made her so happy as to have the doctor come home, saying: "I've got a patient to-day that we must feed to cure him." Then only, Hetty felt that she was of real help to her husband: of any other help that she might give him Hetty was still incredulous; intangible things were a little out of Hetty's range. Even her great and passionate love had not fully opened her eyes to all love's needs and expressions. All that it meant to her was a perpetual doing, ministration, a compelling of the happiness of the loved object. And here, ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... state; the first kind of teacher is always a little uncertain of her ground and a little fearful that she is not quite "up-to-date," while the second class of teacher is sometimes a little timid, and not quite sure that she is prepared to account for the rather subtle and intangible outcome ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... centre, differing from the cells that surround it by no material elements, but by the principle of life in which its individuality consists, which is to make it a new being, instead of a fellow-cell with those that build up the body of the parent animal and remain component parts of it. This intangible something is the subtile element that eludes our closest analysis; it is the germ of the immaterial principle according to which the new being is to develop. The physical germ we see; the spiritual germ we cannot see, though we may trace its action on the material elements through ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... In a few words, I can give a resume of mine: not to place oneself behind an opaque glass through which one can see only the reflection of one's own nose. To see as far as possible the good, the bad, about, around, yonder, everywhere; to perceive the continual gravitation of all tangible and intangible things towards the necessity of the decent, the ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... tremendous mental excitement, though one does not know what the stir is all about; and that the impression produced by this nervous, impassioned style is usually spoiled by digressions, by hairsplitting, and by something elusive, intangible, to which we can give no name, but which blurs the author's vision as a drifting fog obscures a ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... of his time, has remained puzzling to the present day.... As no other man bore his name, so the artist, too, is something unique, mocks every historical analysis, and remains what he was, a puzzling, intangible, Hamlet nature—Rembrandt." The author's theory of the psychological document is hardly a solution of the admitted puzzle, though it is interesting to follow him in tracing it out in Rembrandt's religious pictures, from the Samson already mentioned to his last dated work, in 1668, ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... disputatious that it was almost impossible for anyone to make a statement that he would not either deny outright or strive to prove fallacious. He had a permanent quarrel with Fate, which he considered had not treated him in accordance with his high deserts; but as Fate was rather too intangible for him to satisfactorily vent his spleen upon it, he made his fellow creatures Fate's substitute, and never missed an opportunity to vent his spleen upon them instead. And, as he was a vulgar, surly, ill-bred fellow, he was able to make himself excessively disagreeable ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... nothing to Miss Gore, but passed a very profitable morning in her society after which she invited me to stay for lunch. I can assure you that after Jerry's glum looks, Miss Gore's amiable conversation and warm hospitality were balm to my wounded spirit. I had no desire to discuss her intangible relative or she, I presume, the unfortunate Jerry, both of us having washed our hands of the entire affair. She was a prudent person, Miss Gore, and though full of the milk of human kindness, not disposed to waste it where it would do no good. ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... yet it takes many to complete me, though I am intangible. Motion is necessary to make me. I have no motion of my own, being incapable of voluntary action; still, were there not voluntary action on my part, commerce would be at a stand-still. I am necessary to vessels. I am a vessel. I am what vessels ...
— Harper's Young People, May 18, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... nation which was America's first ally. The king was the state, the king was the country, the king was all. There was one king, with power not derived from his people, and too high to be questioned; and the rest were all subjects, with no political right but obedience. All above was intangible power, all below quiet subjection. A recent occurrence in the French Chambers shows us how public opinion on these subjects is changed. A minister had spoken of the "king's subjects." "There are no subjects," exclaimed hundreds of voices at once, "in a country where the people ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... her about the room or studied her face while she studied her lesson—she felt if she did not see them,—even the increased unwillingness to have her out of his sight,—what did they all mean? So constant, yet so intangible,—so going hand in hand with all the clear, bright activity that had ever been part of Mr. Linden's doings; while the pleasure of nothing seemed to be checked, and yet a little pain mingled with all,—Faith ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... creations of our imagination, without objective value, may it not equally be said of the latter that they are only the creations of our senses? Who can assert that there is not an invisible and intangible world, perceived by the inward sense that lives in the service of the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... only a few weeks to undo a single day. Let him get the tang of the salt air, let him go to bed every night dog-tired physically, let him get out of sight of her eyes and lips, and that something—intangible as a perfume—that emanated from her, and doubtless he would be laughing at himself as heartily as he ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... to absorb the fresh advance of waves. It is indeed striking to observe how authors and men of talent have increased, so vastly out of all proportion with other classes of men. Observing it, the political economist may well shout 'Io triumphe!' for that even in so delicate and intangible a matter as intellectual gifts, the famous doctrine of supply and demand is so thoroughly carried out. We raise, however, no hue and cry after 'poor trash.' Neither have we the blood-thirsty wish to run ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... dropping away; they had not utterly departed, however, but came crowding back in moments of excitement. At other times she clothed Miss Smith's clear-cut, correct speech in softer Southern accents. She was drifting away from him in some intangible way to an upper world of dress and language and deportment, and the new thought was ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... hawk-featured, turbaned men, the Jews, the Chaldeans, the Arabs, the Armenians, the stalwart Kurds, and through it all a leaven of khaki-clad Indians, purchasing for the regimental mess. All these and an ever-present exotic, intangible something are what the bazaar means. Close by the entrance stood a booth festooned with lamps and lanterns of every sort, with above it scrawled "Aladdin-Ibn-Said." My Arabic was not at that time sufficient to enable me to discover from the owner ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... whiff of vapor in his nostrils checked his riotous impulses. It was one thing to ride out to meet the foe, it was another matter when the foe was known to be near. A half mile nearer and the acrid taste in the air turned to a defined veil of smoke, intangible and unreal, at first, which merely seemed to hang about the trunks of the mighty trees and make them seem dim and far away. Nearer yet, and the air grew hard to breathe, the smoke was billowing through the foliage of the pines, which sighed wearily and moaned in ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... and the Conseil is freely attributed in intelligent quarters to Mr. Roosevelt. French people say it is a repercussion of his visit, of his Sorbonne lecture, and that going away he left in the minds of these people some of that intangible spirit of his—in other words, they felt what he would have felt in a similar emergency, and for the first time in their lives showed a disregard of voters when they were bent upon mischief. It is rather an extraordinary ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... is full of you!—As I came in And closed the door behind me, all at once A something in the air, intangible, Yet stiff with meaning, ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... reading it now, she is looking steadfastly into the fire. It has fulfilled—nay, more than fulfilled—her wishes. The triumph of her success is pleasant to her, and has brought a little more than their usual glow into her cheeks, and yet—Heaven knows what vague and intangible dreams and fancies have not somehow sunk down chill and cold within her ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... familiar—as though you and I had ridden together through such a country once before; I even seem to know those great redwoods well. I—I think I dreamed it, but there is another intangible memory in which ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... about Mina Raff. She wouldn't attract him, Lee Randon, in the least, he was sure of that ... no wistful April moon. What, then, did engage him? He was unable to say, he didn't know. It was something intangible, a charm without definite form; and his thoughts returned to Cytherea—if he could grasp the secret of her fascination he would be able to settle a great many disturbing feelings and needs. Yes, what she mutely expressed was what, beneath his comprehension, he had come to long for. He ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... dulcimer beside the running stream sings to him of Mount Abora and of the old heroes of the elder days. If the Egyptologist or the archaeologist could revive within him one-hundredth part of the elusive romance, the delicate gaiety, the subtle humour, the intangible tenderness, the unspeakable goodness, of much that is to be found in his province, one would have to cry, ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... is that these creatures (and certain queer skeletons have been found in the "Asiatic Bowl") with a mental superdevelopment, but a vacuum in place of that intangible something we call a soul, mated forcibly with the Tibetans, thereby strengthening their physical structure to almost the human normal, adapting themselves to earthly speech and habits, and in some strange manner intensifying even further ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... of the Dead.—Religion seems to have very little place in the Athenian funeral: there are no priests present, no prayers, no religious hymns. But the dead man is now conceived as being, in a very humble and intangible way, a deity himself: his good will is worth propitiating; his memory is not to be forgotten. On the third, ninth, and thirtieth days after the funeral there are simple religious ceremonies with offerings of garlands, fruits, libations and the ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... Baghdad for long at a time, I generally had occasion to spend four or five days there every other month. The life in any city is complex and interesting, but here it was especially so. We were among a totally foreign people, but the ever-felt intangible barrier of color was not present. For many of the opportunities to mingle with the natives I was indebted to Oscar Heizer, the American consul. Mr. Heizer has been twenty-five years in the Levant, the ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... reserved. They loved each other to the point of idolatry; and yet they parted ten days after marriage with these words of wroth and madness. Something had come between them. What was it? Another man? No. Another woman? Still no. What then? A ghost, an intangible, almost an invisible but very real and divorce-making co-respondent. ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... and strong, and of a just proportion; red tresses lay like a crown over her brow; her eyes, of a very golden brown, held mine with a look; and her face, which was perfectly shaped, was yet marred by a cruel, sullen, and sensual expression. Something in both face and figure, something exquisitely intangible, like the echo of an echo, suggested the features and bearing of my guide; and I stood awhile, unpleasantly attracted and wondering at the oddity of the resemblance. The common, carnal stock of that race, which had been originally designed for such high dames as the ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which nevertheless disposes of all the supernatural powers! What was the use of struggling against the infernal machinations of that which is no more? What was the use of picking up the fallen revolver and levelling it at the intangible spirit ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... be there audibly breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her short-sighted eyes strained through them, half-discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the recoil from that intangible propinquity she threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope and gave ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... years ago Torricelli discovered that the atmosphere, the space surrounding the earth, which seemed more intangible than a dream, had weight and substance, and invented the barometer, the tiny tube and drop of mercury by which it could be seized and held and weighed as accurately as a pound of lead. As soon as this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... know—Oh, of course! You've got a sort of intangible interest in that, haven't you? Through ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of United States v. Deveaux,[524] Chief Justice Marshall declared: "That invisible, intangible, and artificial being, that mere legal entity, a corporation aggregate, is certainly not a citizen; and consequently cannot sue or be sued in the courts of the United States, unless the rights of the members, in this respect, can be exercised in their ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... both of us much nearer a solution of our troubles than we had any idea of. I say solution, although it but substituted one mystery for another. It gave tangibility to the intangible, indeed, but I can not see that our situation was any better. I, for one, found myself in the position of having a problem to solve, and no ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... farmer's house, trimly painted, with barns and hay-stacks and wood-piles drawn up in goodly array, stands in its old orchard, and offers the front of a fortress against want and misery. Idle aspect! fortress of vain front! there are intangible foes that no man may conquer! In such a stronghold was born Roger Pierce, the Man with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... volumes. Enthusiasm alone will undertake to grapple with them, but enthusiasm will be rewarded. In place of the truthful summary of the earlier editions, we have now the truth itself—the truth in all its subtle gradations, all its long-drawn-out suspensions, all its intangible and irremediable obscurities: it is the difference between a clear-cut drawing in black-and-white and a finished painting in oils. Probably Miss Berry's edition will still be preferred by the ordinary reader who wishes to become acquainted with a celebrated figure in French literature; ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... and hear and feel in the sun-steeped ways of the wonderful Japanese city. Still, even could I revive all the lost sensations of those first experiences, I doubt if I could express and fix them in words. The first charm of Japan is intangible and ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... was a being afar off, inaccessible, almost intangible,—like the millionaire employer to his humble workman, covered with sweat and grime, at the ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... to madness; not when the ceaseless scurry of hunted clouds should have piled the south-west horizon with scowling blue-black ramparts, topped by awful towers, themselves belittled by stupendous heights built of intangible vapours, and reproducing with added grandeur and terror the soaring peaks and awful vales and appalling precipices of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... quite understand," He said in a voice that was under command Of his will, "All your fears in a storm of this kind. There is something uncanny and weird in the wind; Intangible, viewless, it speeds on its course, And forests and oceans must yield to its force. What art has constructed with patience and toil, The wind in one second of time can despoil. It carries destruction and death and despair, Yet no man can follow it into its lair And bind it or stay it—this ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... name, and that farther north were other men who had a superstitious dread of undersized cow-men with spectacles. There were also stories of lonesome "run-ins," which, owing to Willie's secretiveness and the permanent silence of the other participants, never became more than intangible rumors. But he was a good ranchman, attended to his business, and the sheriff's office was remote, so Willie had ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... colorless, kindly disposed gentleman of Pike's description. But by various intangible methods, he was made to feel an outsider by the manager, Conrad, and his more confidential Mexican assistants. They were punctiliously polite, too polite for a horse-ranch outfit. Yet again and again a group of them fell ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... then we find ourselves face to face with a problem which will, perhaps, for ever remain insoluble scientifically. But as for that, so is the primeval material of which it (protoplasm) is composed. "Matter" itself is evaporating, for it is being resolved by physical research into something which is intangible. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... not to be undisturbed. Something awoke me. What! Was this night given over to ghosts and spirits intangible? Again the forms of men were gliding noiselessly about me. Above were the twinkling stars, around were busy men, and silence everywhere. With instinctive cautiousness I lay motionless, furtively noting the curious scene. A moment's careful ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... no means effusive in his expressions of good- will toward me, and although there was a certain perfunctory quality in such attentions as he showed me, there was with it all a curious subtle something, so intangible that I found it utterly impossible to define or describe it, which yet impressed me with the feeling that it was all unreal, assumed, a mockery and a pretence; though why it should be so, I could not for ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... dreams of thousands of women. The world's standard of success may appear to give the prize to those who collect things, but in reality the crown of victory, the laurel wreath, the tribute beyond all material value, is always reserved for those invisible, intangible qualities which are ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... Nearly everybody who is worth L100 has a banking account, and most people who have an account have overdrafts, which are given for the most part on purely personal security. The banks also advance freely on growing crops, wool on the sheep's back, and all kinds of intangible security. Many of the largest merchants are to all intents and purposes mere bank-agents. It is quite a common thing for ordinary working-men to keep bank accounts; and all farmers, even the smallest, are obliged to keep them; ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... otherwise. Perhaps he was not without hope still, but it was not such as could be allowed to control his action. He could not say now why it was; he could not tell what was lacking, but somehow there seemed to have been a change. She was so far away—so intangible. It was the same lithe form, the same bright face, the same pleasant voice; but the life, the soul, seemed to have gone ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... The intangible and shapeless suspicions which Ethel had caught from Leonora took a misty form and substance, only to be immediately dispelled in that inconstant mind by the sudden refreshing sound of Milly's voice: 'We've called to take Ethel home, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... him. Suffocated with the rapid pounding of his heart, sick with horror at the impending vision he knew to be inevitable, he watched the shadowy figure slowly substantiate into the semblance of a living, breathing body. Not intangible as she had always appeared before, but material as she had been in life, she stood erect in the brilliant pathway of light, facing him. He could see the outline of her slender limbs, solid against the shimmering background; he could mark the rise and fall of the bosom ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... King's pen.... He occupies a position in American literature entirely his own.... His is the literature of honest sentiment, pure and tender.... His heroes and his charming heroines are the product of the army, and it is pleasant to meet, even in this intangible way, women who can break their hearts and men who would die rather than ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... same relation to the nation. The Mohammedans relate that the road to heaven is two miles long, stretching over a fathomless abyss, the only pathway across which is narrower than a razor's edge. Delicately balanced must be the body which goes over in safety! The intangible path which the Executive must walk to meet the people's wishes on the one side, and to avoid their fears upon the other, in the national peril, is narrower than the Mahommedan's road to heaven, and cautiously bold must be the feet that safely tread it! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... bonds to lose. I knew that it would be useless to try to head off the detective now, and I wisely kept silent. My mind was by no means at rest however; for an unknown reason I did not want a detective any more than Radnor. I had the intangible feeling that there was something in the air which might better not ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... fall of the year the Caucasus resembles a gorgeous cathedral built by great craftsmen (always great craftsmen are great sinners) to conceal their past from the prying eyes of conscience. Which cathedral is a sort of intangible edifice of gold and turquoise and emerald, and has thrown over its hills rare carpets silk-embroidered by Turcoman weavers of Shemi and Samarkand, and contains, heaped everywhere, plunder brought ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... passed all up my body, and next all feeling save the consciousness of the loud beating of my heart ceased. Then it seemed that boy's eyes were inside my head and not outside, while along with them an intangible something pervaded my brain. The sensation at first was like the application of ether to the skin—a cool, numbing emotion. It was followed by a curious tingling feeling, as some dormant cells in my mind answered to ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... irrational hodgepodge of contradictory conclusions the thinking mind can conceive. This pre-cognition that enables one to arrive at the tenuous statement, 'I think, therefore I am,' is nicely thrown out by tagging it with another metaphysical intangible called illusion—as if the mind can separate illusion from reality by some ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... dwelt upon the brightest star; those of life and death, and all of the mystery of mysteries. She went to sleep struggling with the ancient problem: 'Do the dead return? Are there, flowing about us, weird, supernatural influences as potent and intangible as electric currents?' In her sleep she continued her interesting investigations, but her dreaming vision explained the evening's problem by showing her the camp-fire made, the bacon and coffee set thereon, by a very nice young ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... She was surprised to find herself so much at her ease with him, and so mildly happy. They shared a secret together, and that of itself was an intangible bond linking him with her who had no ties with any one else. She liked him; had liked him from the first; and his unconcealed delight in her company was gratifying to a girl who heretofore had found none to offer her the gentle ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... thing? What's wrong with it?" Dicky asked belligerently. "Oh, you mean figure posing! She wouldn't have to do that at all if she didn't want to. Plenty of good nudes. It's the intangible, high-bred look and ability to wear clothes ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... and recreate it, impregnated with his own soul; the secret motive powers were the mystic love of eternity and the love of woman which had outgrown this world and aspired to the next. To Goethe, thirsting to give a concrete shape to his yearning, God and eternity were too intangible, too remote and incomprehensible—but the woman he loved with religio-erotic intensity was familiar to him. The Eternal-Feminine is thus not fraught with incomprehensibility, but is rather, and this necessarily, the final conclusion. For ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... brighten into joy, yet not so vividly as to break his evening quietude. The gate of heaven had been kindly left ajar, that this forlorn old creature might catch a glimpse within. All the night afterwards, he would be semi-conscious of an intangible bliss diffused through the fitful lapses of an old man's slumber, and would awake, at early dawn, with a faint thrilling of the heart-strings, as if there had been music just now ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from the field like a light cloud, with his eyes. It seemed grey at first, but the higher it flew the lighter it became, and the friendly sunshine shone through it, transforming it. It floated upwards, ever upwards, ever more immaterial, more intangible, until it flew away entirely—a puff, ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... looked at her, she became conscious of some subtle intangible change that had shadowed, as it were, the marvellous beauty of her face and form. Her large deep eyes had lost their lustre, her clear creamy skin looked dull and opaque. Even the magnificent hair seemed to have been robbed of its sheen, and here and there amidst its masses gleamed ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... this fact flashed to his remembrance now, it made him shrink; it had a certain cold, commercial look which struck him unpleasantly. Perhaps, indeed, the singular and painful shyness—chill almost—with which Guida had received the fifty pounds now communicated itself to him by the intangible telegraphy of the mind ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... neighbors and child-friends. They had grown up together; had they been growing away from each other in some things since they had been older? Often it appeared so; but it was Marion chiefly who seemed to change; then, all at once, in some unspoken and intangible way, for a moment like this, she seemed to come suddenly back again, or he seemed to catch a glimpse of that in her, hidden, not altered, which might come back one of these days. Was it a glimpse, perhaps, like the sight the Lord has of each ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... to the painter's lodgings? what possible reason could she have for going there? Miss Granger's suspicions were shapeless and intangible as yet, but she did suspect. More than once—many times, in fact—during the painting of the portrait, she had seen, or had imagined she could see, signs and tokens of a closer intimacy between the painter and her father's wife than was ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... economy or parsimony. You should always have a considerable amount of good fact left over, for unless you know a good deal of the region on the outskirts of your argument you will feel cramped and uncertain within it. The effect of having something in reserve is a powerful, though an intangible, asset in an argument; and, on the other hand, the man who has emptied his magazine is in ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... great principles of nature are a vacuum, and a plenum. The plenum is body, or tangible nature; the vacuum is space, or intangible nature. "We know by the evidences of the senses (which are our only rule of reasoning) that bodies have a real existence, and we infer from the evidence of the senses that the vacuum has a real ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... disposition, we will now turn to those more elaborate pictures in which the dead are represented under an altogether terrific aspect. It is not as an incorporeal being that the visitor from the other world is represented in the Skazkas. He comes not as a mere phantom, intangible, impalpable, incapable of physical exertion, haunting the dwelling which once was his home, or the spot to which he is drawn by the memory of some unexpiated crime. It is as a vitalized corpse that he comes to trouble ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... a vague intangible way there was an ideal in front of and behind this work. It is really not desirable for men who do not believe that knowledge is of value for its own sake to take up this kind of life. The question constantly put to us in civilization was and still is: "What is ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... gates of Milton's other place. It was my gold that helped to make those hinges. And this I endured merely for the sake of enjoying the society, not of my dear newly-found cousins, but of two phantoms, intangible, unsatisfactory, unreal that hovered over their heads,—the phantom of wealth and the still more empty phantom of social position. But all this, understand, was before I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... teg> (touch): (1) tact, contact, intact, intangible, attain, taint, stain, tinge, contingent, integrity, entire, tint; (2) tactile, tactual, tangent, distain, attaint, attainder, integer, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... him than Jean were grateful to Geoffrey Stonor when he smiled. They felt relieved from some intangible responsibility for the order of ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... ghost be really a shadow, there must be some substance of which it is the shadow. These visible and intangible shadows, without substances to cause them, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... and genius very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of dying in a hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's vested ideas,—blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible private truth. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... those intangible but effective aids of Medicine, which exert their healthful influence through the nervous system. It is in fact a mental tonic. A writer in the London "Lancet" remarks that "a pleasing and lively melody can awake in a faded brain the strong emotion ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... loved by any one. He was not positively hated, or disliked; for there was nothing which the general mind could take firm hold of enough for such feelings. Cold, intangible, he was to play across the life of others. A momentary resentment was sometimes felt at a presence which would not mingle with theirs; his scrutiny, though not hostile, was recognized as unfeeling and impertinent, and his mirth unsettled all objects from their foundations. But he was ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... a possible solution," Philippe said to himself, "my father is not the man to be asked to provide it. My father represents a mass of intangible ideas, principles and traditions. But I, I, I ... what can I do? What is my particular duty? What is the object for which I ought to make in spite of ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... It was like opening a grave now to raise its cover. The man almost shuddered as he bent over and looked in, curious as though these things had never before met his gaze. There was a dull odor of dead flowers long boxed up. A faint rustling as of intangible things became half audible, as though spirits passed out at this contact ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... overheard, not heard, is the more beautiful. Palimpsestlike we strive to decipher and unweave the spiral harmonies of Chopin, but they elude as does the sound of falling waters in a dream. Those violet bubbles of prismatic light that the Sarmatian composer blows for us are too fragile, too intangible, too spirit-haunted to be played. [All this sounds as if I were really trying to write after the manner of the busy Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, who helped Liszt to manufacture his book on Chopin; indeed, it is suspected, altered every line he ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... flanged with rocky buttresses, dark amid the long sweeps of radiant snow, their shattered peaks reared high into the very heavens. A great silence reigned. There was no wind with us, and yet, even as we watched, a white cloud flitted past the virgin peak of Kolahoi—ghostly, intangible; and immediately, even as vultures assemble suddenly, no one knows whence, so did the clouds appear, surging over the gleaming shoulders of the mountain ridges, and up and round the grim precipices. We turned ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... regarded one another mistrustfully, like two creatures taken in a snare. They both felt as if they had been trapped by something vast and intangible. Reddin was dazed. For the first time in his life he had felt passion instead of mere lust. The same ideas that had striven within him on his way ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... observer, that the difference between frankness and duplicity, the genius for intrigue and the genius of the heart, is there inscrutable. A man gifted with the penetrating eye can read the intangible shade of difference produced by a more or less curved line, a more or less deep dimple, a more or less prominent feature. The appreciation of these indications lies entirely in the domain of intuition; this alone can lead to the discovery of what everyone is interested in concealing. The old ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... R. A. SELIGMAN, Columbia University: The general property tax as actually administered is beyond all doubt one of the worst taxes known in the civilized world. Because of its attempt to tax intangible as well as tangible things, it sins against the cardinal rules of uniformity, of equality, and of ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... stage in the journey Tom could not have accounted for himself in the ethical field. Something, a thing intangible, had gone out of him. He could not tell what it was; but he missed it. The kindly Gordon nature was intact, or he hoped it was, but the neighbor-love, which was his father's rule of life, seemed not to have come down to him in its largeness. ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... sorry. The petulance that relatives show towards each other is in truth directed against that intangible Causality which has shaped the situation no less for the offenders than the offended, but is too elusive to be discerned and cornered by poor humanity in irritated mood. Melbury followed her. She had rambled on to the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... astral post which carries a thousand miles an hour. In this sort of correspondence the communication is written like any ordinary letter designed for transmission, but instead of stamping and posting it, a lighted match is applied to the finished work. The material part is destroyed, but the intangible and only real and lasting part remains behind. This is attached, by the direction of the will, to a particular person and set in a certain direction. If all the conditions have been properly observed it will not fail to reach its destination. ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... a procession: Job Thornberry, Bob Tyke, Frank Ostland, Zekiel Homespun, and a host of departed heroes "with martial stalk went by my watch." Charming fellows all, but not for me, I felt I could not do them justice. Besides, they were too human. I was looking for a myth—something intangible and impossible. But he would not come. Time went on, ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... the rapt patience of the born angler had folded him close, she disposed herself comfortably in the thick grass, her back against a tree, and took up the shuttle of fancy to weave a wonderful daydream, as beautiful, intangible as the lacy, summer clouds over ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... bring joy to him. Firmly though his feet were planted upon the ladder, it seemed to him then in that gloomy mood that every step must take him further away from any chance of that wonderful happiness, so intangible, yet so sweet an adjunct to life. For he was following like a doomed creature in the wake of Drexley, and Rice, and those others. Too late had come his warning. The woman of whom he never dared to think was surely a sorceress. She was only a woman—scarcely even beautiful, yet the world of her ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... inanimate objects about him, so that they seemed to reflect the spirit of those who dwelt there. No room had given him this sense of companionship since he had spent his boyish holidays in the old Count Benedetto's apartments; but it was of another, intangible world that his present surroundings spoke. Vivaldi received him kindly and asked him to repeat his visit; and Odo returned as often ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... rough place. The girl, still lying on her bed of leaves and auto-robes, with the mutilated shawl drawn over her, looked up at him with an expression of trust and gratitude. For a second, only one, something quick and vital gripped at the wanderer's heart—some vague, intangible longing for a home and a woman, a longing old as our race, deep-planted in the inmost citadel of every man's soul. But, half-impatiently, he drove the thought away, dismissed it, and, smiling down at her with cheerful eyes and white, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... a steady-eyed seriousness in which, too, she recognized the intangible quality that made him seem to her different from all the other men ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... beheld such a change in mortal man as there was in Mr. Allen, my old tutor, and rector of St. Anne's. And 'twas a baffling, intangible change. 'Twas as if the mask bad been torn from his face, for he was now just a plain adventurer that need not have imposed upon a soul. The coarse wine and coarse food of the lower coffee-houses of London had replaced ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was called into existence by the motion for Independence passed by the Continental Congress on the second day of July, 1776, when the people of the rebelling British colonies in America, by action of their representatives, assumed a free and independent position. But a motion is intangible. It is an act, of which the announcement is the visible result. "A decent respect to the opinions of mankind" prompted the Congress on July 4, 1776, to "declare the causes" which impelled it to separation. This date is accepted in the popular mind, as well ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... returned. Austria, then, must be freed from her oppressive alliance with the maritime powers. She has youth and vitality enough to shake off this bondage, and strike for the new path which shall lead her to greatness and glory. There is a moral and intangible greatness, of whose existence these trading Englishmen have no conception, but which the refined and elevated people of France are fully competent to appreciate. France extends to us her hand, and offers us alliance on terms of equality. Cooperating with France, we shall defy the enmity of all ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... is too intangible, the second too narrow. The rude savage does not philosophize on phenomena; the enlightened student sees in them but interacting forces: yet both may be profoundly religious. Nor can morality be accepted as a criterion of religions. The bloody scenes in the ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... dreamed from manner or conversation that they had gone to a sacred place to worship God in humility. Indeed, scarcely a thought of Him seemed to have dwelt in their minds. Religious faith had never been of any practical help, and now in their extremity it seemed utterly intangible, and in no sense to be ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... and he only is sensible who knows there are many things beyond his senses. Practical men consider all the factors to every problem, and things are not less real to them because they may chance to be intangible. ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... was aware, in a curious, sickening way, that no such person as he had ever before seen her. He was pale, gray-eyed, intelligent, amiable. He appeared to be a man who had been a gentleman. But there was something strange, intangible, immense about him. Was that the effect of his presence or of his name? Kells! It was only a word to Joan. But it carried a nameless and terrible suggestion. During the last year many dark tales had gone from camp to camp ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... not one word of what Bone Stillman said, it is possible that the outcast's treatment of him as a grown-up friend was one of the most powerful of the intangible influences which were to push him toward the great world outside of Joralemon. The school-bound child—taught by young ladies that the worst immorality was whispering in school; the chief virtue, a dull quietude—was here first given a reasonable basis for supposing that he was ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... apprehensiveness in regard to worth becomes aware of any marked superiority in a fellow creature,—an experience which in unhappy lives very seldom occurs,—a feeling of certainty usually accompanies it, which is as mysterious as the evidence upon which it is based is intangible and elusive. A man knows that he has met his superior, he knows too how far the superiority he recognises extends, and he is conscious of experiencing something exceptional, ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... practicable means for diminishing the force of a custom which is the disgrace of civilisation, seems to be the establishment of a court of honour, which should take cognisance of all those delicate and almost intangible offences which yet wound so deeply. The court established by Louis XIV. might be taken as a model. No man now fights a duel when a fit apology has been offered; and it should be the duty of this court to weigh dispassionately the complaint ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... all these pretences of content lay a hollow sense of desolation. It was not the want of butter nor the diminished meat; it was the total removal from life of that intangible splendour of hope produced by the lottery ticket. Ah! every day was drawn blank now. This gloom, this gnawing emptiness at the heart, was worse than either had foreseen or now confessed. Malicious Fate, too, they felt, would even crown with the grand prix the number they would have chosen. But ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... her—and I had not seen her since she left the table. I feared that she was feeling ill, and, of course, lover-like, I evolved all sorts of dread possibilities from this. I had in mind, besides, another and more vague cause of anxiety, which was as yet too intangible ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... idea would be inadequate, though we realized the full measure of every groan and heartache. Earth's most priceless treasures are still more intangible things, the treasures of justice and kindliness and love. In that higher realm the cost of war is most terrible and most deadly. The spirit of war in the soldier sets aside the moral law, makes human life seem valueless, human suffering a thing to be disregarded, human slaughter ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... museum, gallery, and cathedral tangible records of the creativeness of the world's masters. Soon I think we are to possess—thanks to Edison and the cinematographers—intangible records—or at least suggestions—of the modest creativeness of our masters by proxy. Some day every son with this inspiring sort of mother will have as complete means as science and his purse affords, of perpetuating her ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... perhaps in the intangible things that go to the making of national character that the Scottish contribution to the making of America has been most notable. In 1801, the population of the whole of Scotland was but little over a million and a half, and behind that there were ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... The woman looked up at the man with a peculiar light in her eyes, a gentleness which never appeared except for him, and held him from her, dreaming intangible things.... She, too, could dream with him,—that was the wonder of it all to her! This was the force that had taken her out of her ordinary self. She slipped into nothing—never drifted—looked blind fate between the eyes. But now she dreamed! ... And as the man spoke to her, covered ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... free government, the wise and equal laws, the noble literature, of this fortunate island and its majestic empire beyond the seas, and the discretion, valour, and tenacity by which all these great material and still greater intangible possessions had been first won, and then kept, against every hostile comer whether domestic or foreign, sent through Macaulay a thrill, like that which the thought of Paris and its heroisms moves ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... that it was the last review that many of the men were ever destined to see and it seemed to be peculiarly fitting that before they left for the field of battle they should see that figure,—the head of the Empire—that stood for freedom and that intangible something that had made them come thousands of miles to fight and, perhaps, ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... adoration at its feet, and have found it the same immobile, relentless, unresponsive image. Youth is yet mine, but it is a youth hoary in desolation. Centuries of anguish have flooded through my bosom, even in the heyday of existence. The tangible and the intangible, the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, have been at deadly strife in my conjectures. The present has been to me an evasion, the future an enigma; the earth a delusion, the heavens a doubt. Even the pomp of those inexplicable stars is a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... and Harry Lee, and Stanley the explorer, who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and Henry Irving, and many another whose name remains, though the owners of those names are all dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are only a part of that intangible fabric which we call the past.'—[Clemens had first known Stanley as a newspaper man. "I first met him when he reported a lecture of mine in St. Louis," he said once in a conversation where the name of Stanley ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of this strength, when, in magnetic disturbances, there is an unusual amount of immortal food. Should we try to resist it, there would eventually be a greater pressure without than within, and we should assimilate involuntarily. We are part of the intangible universe, and can feel no hunger that is not instantly appeased, neither can we ever ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... earth. Rosie is dead and buried. I perceive also—I perceived, while Tony and the children stood round that picture—that Rosie is still here, in this house, hallowing it a little. The one statement is as much a fact as the other; but how much more delicately intangible, and perhaps how much truer, ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... long as the evidence against him was vague and intangible, it was very hard to disprove. But, in his anxiety, the criminal has drawn the net so closely that one cut ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... spirit, of a man was called KHU, and it seems to have taken form as a shining, luminous, intangible shape of the body; the KHUs formed a class of celestial beings who lived with the gods, but their functions are not clear. The KHU, like the KA, could be imprisoned in the tomb, and to obviate this catastrophe special formulae were composed and duly recited. Besides the KHU another very important ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... aesthetic impression, intentionally or accidentally conveyed in the course of wholly different interests, can become a constant accompaniment to the shifting preoccupations of existence, like the remembered songs which sing themselves silently in our mind and the remembered landscapes becoming an intangible background to our ever-varying thoughts. And, secondly, it explains how art can fulfil the behests of our changing and discursive interest in things while satisfying the imperious unchanging demands of the contemplated preference for beautiful aspects. And thus we return to ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... multitudinous associations for the amelioration of human poverty, ignorance, and crime; and nothing more depressing than the seeming immense waste of force scattered in these innumerable directions with results so intangible and undefined. From all the discussions we hear in the halls of legislation, and on the popular platform, on the relations of capital and labor, finance, free trade, land monopoly, taxation, individualism, and socialism, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... strength and weakness, but of clearness and obscurity. It is inexplicably uneven, as if the writer were perpetually playing on the boundary line that divides sanity of thought from intellectual chaos. There is method in the madness, but it is a method of intangible ideas. Nevertheless, there is genius written over a large portion of it, and to a musician the wealth of musical imagination is a living spring of thought"—Harold E. Gorst, in London Saturday Review (Dec. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... ant. Again and again I saw these little springtails skip through the very scimitar mandibles of a soldier, while the workers paid no attention to them. I wondered if they were not quite odorless, intangible to the ants, invisible guests which lived close to them, going where, doing what they willed, yet never perceived by the thousands of inhabitants. They seemed to live in a kind of fourth dimensional ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe |
