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Iteration   Listen
noun
Iteration  n.  
1.
Recital or performance a second time; repetition. "What needs this iteration, woman?"
2.
(Computers) The execution of a statement or series of statements in a loop which is repeated in a computer program; as, at each iteration, the counter is incremented by 2.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Iteration" Quotes from Famous Books



... peaceful scene beyond. It was a perfect night, the harvest moon riding through fleecy cloud aloft, whilst the breaking of the sea between the rocky points to right and left was soothing in its gentle iteration. Dick had been on parade extremely early that morning, and, tell it not in Gath! his eyes involuntarily closed. Starting awake again, he saw with surprise that, though Alix had not yet come forward, he was no longer alone. No! the sacred beach had been invaded, and a female figure clad in ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... of experienced readers. They will doubtless imagine that it is portentous of long rhapsodies on those wonders of antiquity, the description of which has long become absolutely nauseous to them by incessant iteration. They will foresee wailings over the Palace of the Caesars, and meditations among the arches of the Colosseum, loading a long series of weary paragraphs to the very chapter's end; and, considerately anxious to spare their attention ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... of suffering before it has obtained the strength, or general recognition, which are pre-supposed when the newspaper becomes its mouthpiece. The miseries of the marriage-market had been told by Thackeray, with almost wearisome iteration, many years before they found utterance in the columns ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green

... neither, and thus stand in the presence of two Incomprehensibles, instead of one Incomprehensible.' Here I secede from the automaton theory, though maintained by friends who have all my esteem, and fall back upon the avowal which occurs with such wearisome iteration throughout the foregoing pages; namely, my own utter incapacity to grasp ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... recommend him to your notice, and to expatiate on his misfortunes. Though he himself can scarcely move, his friend, who is often a little ragged boy or girl, light of weight and made for a chase, pursues the carriage and prolongs the whine, repeating, with a mechanical iteration, "Signore! Signore! datemi qualche cosa, Signore!" until his legs, breath, and resolution give out at last; or, what is still commoner, your patience is wearied out or your sympathy touched, and you are glad to purchase the blessing of silence for the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... foreshadowed by Beethoven, is a vestibuled train: one indivisible whole from beginning to end.[158] But before the Fifth Symphony there had been no such systematic unification; for it is not too much to say that the whole work is based upon the persistent iteration of a single note in varied rhythmic groups. Thus in the first movement we find continually the rhythm [Music]; in the second, in several places [Music]; in the Scherzo [Music]; and in the Finale ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... the warbling and the solitary are the most pleasing, while the red-eye and the yellow-throat are very much alike, and both of them rather too monotonous and persistent. It is hard, sometimes, not to get out of patience with the red-eye's ceaseless and noisy iteration of his trite theme; especially if you are doing your utmost to catch the notes of some rarer and more refined songster. In my note-book I find an entry describing my vain attempts to enjoy the music of a rose-breasted grosbeak,—who at that time ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey

... of the couple, and the continual iteration of that name by which he loved to be called—"Uncle Ith"—finally overcame his objections. He reconciled himself to the prospect of the blue coat, short trousers, and gaudy vest, and solemnly promised to ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... amid his exaltation, Loud the convent-bell appalling, From its belfry calling, calling, Rang through court and corridor, With persistent iteration He had never heard before. It was now the appointed hour When alike, in shine or shower, Winter's cold or summer's heat, To the convent portals came All the blind and halt and lame, All the beggars of the street, For ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... that "once more" means only once more, and start to enumerate the beams in the roof, the panes in the windows, and the gray hairs in the old gentleman's head before us. About the time that we feel sleepy an anecdote arouses us: then the iteration of expletives from the membership succeeds; we see that the owner of the tuning-fork has fallen to sleep in so ingenious an attitude that he would never have been detected but for his snore, and are amused by the fashion ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... from apprehension of that fateful hour as even from the delight of being in his mistress's company that he acceded with alacrity when Sir John desired him to stay. But an end must come at last to all hesitations, and a familiar verse repeated itself in his brain with the persistent iteration of cathedral chimes— ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... right to call upon Parliament for assistance would be one calculated to promote the interests of the whole British Empire, by establishing a line of communication between the three provinces in North America.' Howe's {113} attempt to have the verdict rescinded led only to its iteration. ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant

... cast off Faith; he could not pledge the Present for the Future; he shuddered at the sword of Justice, and would not touch the ivory sceptre of Forgiveness. No: he meditated horrid iteration—and again the fiend possessed him! What! not only lose the crock of gold, but all his own bright store? and give up every thing of this world's good for some imaginary other, and meekly confess, and meanly repent—and—and all this to resuscitate that hated old aunt of his, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... to him twice or thrice with great patience, while he told how well he had deserved of his country; but, when he persisted in repeating the same tale, not only to me, but to every creature he encountered, the iteration became simply "damnable." He spoke of his dead sons in the same pompous tones of self-exultation with which he reckoned all other items standing to the credit side of his patriotism. Fortunately for my equanimity, I was not present ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... that there were brilliant colors in the streets of Montreuil, and at every doorway a sentry slapped his hand to his rifle, with smart and untiring iteration, as the "brains" of the army, under "brass hats" and red bands, went hither and thither in the town, looking stern, as soldiers of grave responsibility, answering salutes absent—mindedly, staring haughtily at young battalion officers who passed through Montreuil and ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... wearies of the endless repetition, the "damnable iteration" contained in the great mass of books. You will finally come to care greatly for the Bible, Shakespeare, and Burns. Compared with these most others are "twice-told tales" indeed. Of course one must read the great scientific productions. ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... soul. He moved in solitary majesty, and if from his smooth speech a lightning flash of satire or of scorn struck a cherished lie, or an honored character, or a dogma of the party creed, and the crowd burst into a furious tempest of dissent, he beat it into silence with uncompromising iteration. If it tried to drown his voice, he turned to the reporters, and over the raging tumult calmly said, "Howl on, I speak ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson

... words fell upon flat ears. Presently the Ashanti war of 1873-74 brought the subject before the public. The Protectorate was overrun by British officers, and their reports and itineraries never failed to contain, with a marvellous unanimity of iteration, the magic word—Gold. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... drank up the clouds: an hour of silence in the ship, an hour of agony beyond narration for the sufferers. Brown's gabbling prayers, the cries of the sailors in the rigging, strains of the dead Hemstead's minstrelsy, ran together in Carthew's mind, with sickening iteration. He neither acquitted nor condemned himself: he did not think, he suffered. In the bright water into which he stared, the pictures changed and were repeated: the baresark rage of Goddedaal; the blood-red light of ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... best put the child to bed, Belle, and I will show this young carpenter the way out," Mr. Mencke remarked, contemptuously, as if he really regarded Violet's assertion as simply the iteration of a willful child. ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... sort of coldness and paleness rose to the very roots of my hair, and was then replaced by a hot flush. I caught myself laughing, syllabically, and shrugging my shoulders, fitfully. Once, the rhyme that came to my lips—for I am sure there was no mind in the iteration—was the simple ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... discoveries are only re-discoveries; as Bacon wrote: "Medicine is a science which hath been, as we have said, more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced; the labour having been, in my judgment, rather in circle than in progression. For I find much iteration, and small progression." Of late years, however, the History of Medicine has been coming into its kingdom. Universities are establishing courses of lectures on the subject, and the Royal Society of Medicine recently ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... time we sat silent. I thought, with stupid iteration, of how like a jest this had sounded when the woman said it to me in the forest: a matter for coquetry, a furnishing of foils for the game. If I had realized then—— But no, what could ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith

... without, whereas all our activity ought to be from within. But sickness not only overwhelms the mind, but, vitiating all the channels of the senses, causes them to represent things as they are not, of which misrepresentations the presence, persistency, and iteration seduce the man to act from false suggestions instead of from what he ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... part. Meanwhile the celestial subjects of this choral adoration look down upon the scene with a tranquillity and patience which can only result from the security with which their immeasurable remoteness invests them. I would remark that the stars are not the only topics subject to this "damnable iteration." A certain popular song, which contains the statement, "I will not forget you, mother," apparently reposes all its popularity on the constant and dreary repetition of this unimportant information, which at least produces the desired result ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte

... woman question should not be forced at such a time, and the only answer from congress this "woman-intruding" petition received was found in the fourteenth amendment itself, in which the word "male," with unnecessary iteration, was repeated, so that there might be no mistake in future concerning woman's rights, under the Constitution of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... more exalted swindlers of the age—the crafty bankrupts who anticipated the era of the Merdles described by Dickens, but who can hardly have done much immediate injury to a capitalist of the rank of Dekker. Here too there are glimpses of inventive spirit and humorous ingenuity; but the insufferable iteration of jocose demonology and infernal burlesque might tempt the most patient and the most curious of readers to devote the author, with imprecations or invocations as elaborate as his own, to the spiritual potentate ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... are ridiculous. Take them figuratively, as a type of unknown spiritual anguish, and they are awful. Besides, had Christ intended to teach the doctrine of a local burning hell, he surely would have enunciated it in plain words, with solemn iteration and explanatory amplifications, instead of merely ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... In this speech—it was to be his last before the Convention—the melancholy note prevailed. {218} There was no effort to conciliate, no attempt at being politic, only a slightly disheartened tone backed by the iteration which France already knew so well:—the remedy for the evil must be sought in purification; the Convention, the Committee of ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston

... a philosopher and see that equality is an idea; and not merely one of these soft-headed sceptics who, having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad champagne in tawdry hotel lounges, and tell each other twenty times over, with unwearied iteration, that equality is ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... with the mournful iteration of some dolorous refrain; and yielding to the spell she leaned her forehead against the chimney-piece, and repeated ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... came to the Park, whose sombre woodland seemed to fascinate him. He leaned wearily up against the railings, cooling his brow against the wet metal, and listening to the tremulous silence of the trees. 'Murder! murder!' he kept repeating, as though iteration could dim the horror of the word. The sound of his own voice made him shudder, yet he almost hoped that Echo might hear him, and wake the slumbering city from its dreams. He felt a mad desire to stop the casual passer-by, and tell ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde

... watched her with unspeakable sympathy, but Cornelia's grief was dumb; it made no audible moan, and preserved an attitude which repelled all discussion. As yet she would not acknowledge a doubt of her lover's faith; his conduct was certainly a mystery, but she told her heart with a passionate iteration that it would positively be ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr

... Israel; that they were to obey their priests, and that there was a good time coming. I fancy that they had heard all this before so many times it produced no impression whatever, even as the sublimest mysteries of another faith lose salt through constant iteration. They breathed heavily through their noses, and stared straight in front of ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling

... hold of the right end of the controversy; his instinct was correct, but he was a wretched controversialist. As a poet in the minor key, he was tolerable, but as a prose writer, he was a very dull person and a bore. He was rude and clumsy; he tried to be sarcastic and couldn't, he had damnable iteration. Lowell speaks of his "peculiarly helpless way," and says: "Bowles, in losing his temper, lost also what little logic he had, and though, in a vague way, aesthetically right, contrived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... showed in well-defined masses against a clear sky. Two or three farmhouses were visible through the haze, but in none of them, naturally, was a light. Nowhere, indeed, was any sign or suggestion of life except the barking of a distant dog, which, repeated with mechanical iteration, served rather to accentuate than dispel the ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce

... of work was a reversal of the natural alternation of regular periods of activity and repose. He not only, as he told all his correspondents with wearisome iteration, burned the midnight oil, but would keep up these eighteen or twenty hours' daily labour for weeks altogether, until some novel that he was engaged on was finished. During these spells of composing he would see no one, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... avocations of daily business; by the conditions, they are sequestered for days together in the wilderness for the exclusive contemplation of momentous truths pressed upon the mind with incessant and impassioned iteration; and they remain together, an agitated throng, not of men only, but of women and children. The student of psychology recognizes at once that here are present in an unusual combination the conditions not merely of the ready propagation of influence by example and persuasion, but ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... creatures of Ahriman. To kill any of these was a merit. The dog was held sacred; as was also the cock, who announces the break of day. In the system of worship, sacrifices were less prominent than in India. Prayers, and the iteration of prayers, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... disparaging Aubrey (and I do not think him a scientific authority, moult s'en faut), but Mr. Greenwood here says not a word as to the steps in the descent of the tradition. He frequently repeats himself, thereby forcing me to more iteration than I like. He had already disparaged Aubrey in note I to p. 105, but there he approached so closely to historical method as to say that "Aubrey quotes Beeston, a seventeenth-century actor, as his authority." On p. 209 he dismisses the anecdote (which does not ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang

... deceived as he wished to be Official wrath at sound of footfall or a fancied one Optional marriages, broken or renewed every seven years Pessimy is invulnerable Repeatedly, in contempt of the disgust of iteration Satirist is an executioner by profession Semblance of a tombstone lady beside her lord The banquet to be fervently remembered, should smoke The homage we pay him flatters us We must have some excuse, if we would ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger

... neither greater nor less than might have been expected from a person who, if the most scholarly of eccentrics, was also the most eccentric even of English scholars. It is difficult not to think that Mr Arnold makes too much of them and refers too frequently to them. Such "iteration" is literally "damnable": it must be condemned as unfair, out of place, out of taste, and even not distantly approaching that lack of urbanity with which Mr Arnold was never tired of reproaching his countrymen. Another translator, Mr Wright, was indeed ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... Barral was not being exposed alone. For himself his only cry was: Time! Time! Time would have set everything right. In time some of these speculations of his were certain to have succeeded. He repeated this defence, this excuse, this confession of faith, with wearisome iteration. Everything he had done or left undone had been to gain time. He had hypnotized himself with the word. Sometimes, I am told, his appearance was ecstatic, his motionless pale eyes seemed to be gazing down the vista of future ages. Time—and of course, ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad

... have somewhat abridged the confession of the Princess, who carefully repeats every word known to the reader. This iteration is no objection in the case of a coffee-house audience to whom the tale is told bit by bit, but it is ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... moved on heedless of the heaven that lies about us here, placing their hopes and aims in material and perishable elements, athirst neither for truth, nor beauty, nor aught that is divinely good! They sleep, they wake, they eat, they drink; they tread the beaten path with ceaseless iteration, and so they die. If one come appealing for culture of intellect, not because they who know, are stronger than the ignorant and make them their servants, but because an open, free, and flexible mind is ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding

... exaltation, Loud the convent bell appalling, From its belfry calling, calling, Rang through court and corridor With persistent iteration He had never heard before. It was now the appointed hour When alike in shine or shower, Winter's cold or summer's heat, To the convent portals came All the blind and halt and lame, All the beggars of the street, For their daily dole of food Dealt ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... influence, which complicates the problem, but increases its interest. No scientific observer, so far as we know, has ever been able to watch the development of the primitive man, played upon and fashioned by the hebdomadal iteration of "Greeley's Weekly Tri-bune." Old Phelps educated by the woods is a fascinating study; educated by the woods and the Tri-bune, he is a phenomenon. No one at this day can reasonably conceive exactly what this newspaper was to such a mountain valley as Keene. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... fill in this outline will, perhaps, conduce to an appreciation of what is sought and of what the conditioning circumstances will enforce in the course of its realisation. As touches the fear of aggression, it has already been indicated, perhaps with unnecessary iteration, that these two Imperial Powers are unable to relinquish the quest of dominion through warlike enterprise, because as dynastic States they have no other ulterior aim; as has abundantly appeared in the great ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... Carnot is to him merely "that sanguinary tyrant," and the heroic Hoche becomes "that old practised assassin," while the Prince of Wales, by the way, and the Duke of York are the hope and pride of nations. To heap up that incessant iteration about thieves, murderers, housebreakers, assassins, bandits, bravoes with their hands dripping with blood and their maw gorged with property, desperate paramours, bombastical players, the refuse ...
— Burke • John Morley

... sounded the same note—sounded it indeed with a "damnable iteration" that only proved how deeply it ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... hour of agony beyond narration for the sufferers. Brown's gabbling prayers, the cries of the sailors in the rigging, strains of the dead Hemstead's minstrelsy, ran together in Carthew's mind with sickening iteration. He neither acquitted nor condemned himself: he did not think he suffered. In the bright water into which he stared, the pictures changed and were repeated: the baresark rage of Goddedaal; the blood-red light of the sunset into which they had run forth; the face of the babbling Chinaman as they cast ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... unnecessary to dwell on a point which is now at last, one may hope, becoming clear to most intelligent persons. But I may perhaps be allowed to refer in passing to an argument that has been brought forward with the wearisome iteration which always marks the progress of those who are feeble in argument. The good stocks of upper social class are decreasing in fertility, it is said; the bad stocks of lower social class are not decreasing; therefore the bad stocks are tending ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... a task of skill. You must bring to your aid in speaking every available resource. An effective weapon at times is a "remorseless iteration." Have the courage to repeat yourself as often as may be necessary to impress your leading ideas upon the minds of your hearers. Note the forensic maxim, "tell a judge twice whatever you want him to hear; tell a special jury thrice, and a common jury half a dozen times, the view of a case ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser

... plainly said, in its metallic reverberations, that I was somebody. As I left my friends, I felt the knocker looking at me, and when I came out into the great square, framing the heavens like an astronomical chart, the big stars repeated the lesson with thousand-fold iteration. How they seemed to nudge each other and twinkle among themselves at the poor ass down there, who actually took himself and his doings so seriously as to flourish, even on a little ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne

... would perhaps be necessary to enable her to pass as a Pinzochera, and that her whole air and expression were as little as possible like those of a sister whose eyelids were used to be bent, and whose lips were used to move in silent iteration. Her inexperience prevented her from picturing distant details, and it helped her proud courage in shutting out any foreboding of danger and insult. She did not know that any Florentine woman had ever done exactly what she was ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... other sends them to the bottom as dregs. The former is the more offensive, and that seems to be our way; but neither is useful if the impurities are merely separated but not removed. We are told with tiresome iteration that our social and political systems are clarifying; but when is the skimmer to appear? If the purpose of free institutions is good government where is the good government?—when may it be expected to begin?—how is it to come about? Systems of government have no sanctity; they are practical ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... has also important psychological effects. A farmer, with his varied outdoor occupations, feels little craving for relief and relaxation. The factory hand, with his attention riveted for hours at a stretch on the wearisome iteration of machinery, requires recreation and distraction: naturally he is a prey to unwholesome stimulants, such as drink, betting, or the yellow press. The more educated and morally restrained, however, seek intellectual ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... reminded that I had outlived some friends, and wondering if I had not outlived some friendships; and had just, while boasting of better health, been struck down again by my haunting enemy, an enemy who was exciting at first, but has now, by the iteration of his strokes, become merely annoying and inexpressibly irksome. Can you fancy that to a person drawing towards the elderly this sort of conjunction of circumstances brings a rather aching sense of the past and the future? Well, it was ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... The princess' fiance; bridegroom-to-be; future husband, lord and master," she explained, with indubious and positive iteration. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... desperately to hold natural and easy. He had already received this information, but speech seemed a refuge from his trepidation. If Sutphen had noticed how his king's voice quavered he was too loyal a subject to comment. With the patience of iteration he answered ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton

... it was ever before me, haunting me with the direst forebodings. Nor, though I retired early, could I succeed in getting either sleep or rest. All night I tossed on my pillow, saying over to myself with dreary iteration: "Something must happen, something will happen, to prevent Mr. Gryce doing this dreadful thing." Then I would start up and ask what could happen; and my mind would run over various contingencies, such as,—Mr. ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green

... laboured, monotonous, without relief and without light. There is now and then an energetic phrase, but as a whole the vocabulary is jejune; the sentences are overloaded; the pitch is flat. A scrupulous insistence on making his meaning clear led to an iteration of certain adjectives and adverbs, which at length deaden the effect beyond the endurance of all but the most resolute students. Only the profound and stimulating interest of much of the matter prevents one from thinking of Rivarol's ill-natured remark upon Condorcet, that he wrote with ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley

... out comprehension and hands that can execute finely! The more obvious beauty, also adorable sometimes—one may say it without blasphemy—begins by being an apology for folly, and ends like other apologies in becoming tiresome by iteration; and that Klesmer, though very susceptible to it, should have a passionate attachment to Miss Arrowpoint, was no more a paradox than any other triumph of a manifold sympathy over a monotonous attraction. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... artists, and in certain forms of alienation. Yet it is only in the intonation of a few sentences or some old fragment of melody that I catch the real spirit of the island, for in general the men sit together and talk with endless iteration of the tides and fish, and of the ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge

... that agriculture is a profession in which a man may, above all others, be excused if he manifests a certain amount of irritability at the prospect of change. The slow round of uneventful years, the long continuance of manual labour, the perpetual iteration of a few ideas, in time produce in the mind of the most powerfully intellectual men a species of unconscious creed; and this creed is religiously handed down from generation to generation. Setting ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies

... is known as the wrestling or struggle for truth. The story, as he tells it in the Pitakas, gives no dates, but is impressive in its intensity and insistent iteration[318]. Fire, he thought to himself, cannot be produced from damp wood by friction, but it can from dry wood. Even so must the body be purged of its humours to make it a fit receptacle for illumination and knowledge. So he began a series of terrible fasts and sat "with set teeth ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... venture to deny or even to question. The mode in which this is managed so as to keep up some show of impartiality is very dexterous. The reproach, well or ill founded, which he thinks most likely to damage the character of any one he dislikes, is repeated over and over again in hope that the iteration will at last be taken for proof, such as the perfidy of Charles I, the profligacy and selfishness of Charles II, the cold and cruel stupidity of James, the baseness of Churchill, the indecent violence of Rochester, the contemptible subserviency of his brother, Clarendon, and so on ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... which was a condition of primitive thought, foreign to our modern consciousness. Some will perhaps think that they detect in the first quatrain an indication of a lost line, which later rhapsodists, failing in imaginative vigour, have supplied by the feeble device of iteration. Others, however, may rather maintain that this very iteration is an original felicity, to which none but the most prosaic minds ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... existence of a Church in which, week by week, services should be devoted, not to the iteration of abstract propositions in theology, but to the setting before men's minds of an ideal of true, just and pure living: a place in which those who are weary of the burden of daily cares should find a moment's rest in the contemplation ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... paces off, was perfectly given up to the care of his team, in the intense anxiety to show his skill and gallantry in saving her harmless from every ugly place in the road that threatened a jar or a plunge. Why his oxen didn't go distracted was a question; but the very vehemence and iteration of his cries at last drowned itself in Fleda's ear, and she could hear it like the wind's roaring, without thinking of it. She presently subsided to that. With a weary frame, and with that peculiar quietness of spirits that comes upon the ending of a day's ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell

... these ideals was cast up to him by many in Ireland, first in private grumblings, afterwards with public iteration. He saw and admitted, what these critics urged, that the one aspiration made the other impossible of fulfilment, for the moment. Would it be so, he asked, after an interval in which Ulstermen and other Irishmen, Nationalist and Unionist, would be found fighting and dying side by side on the ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... were forced to fall back discomforted from their rash onslaught, swirling away in circling eddies aft, where, anon, the cruel propeller tossed and tore them anew with its pitiless blades—ever whirling round with painful iteration to the music of their monotonous refrain, "Thump-thump, Thump-thump," and ever churning up the already seething sea into a mass of boiling, brawling, bubbling foam that spread out astern of us in a broad shimmering wake in the shape ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson

... Lord Randolph in the future is a matter which, I believe, depends entirely upon the state of his physical health. I have written elsewhere, with perhaps tiresome iteration through the six years he has been wilfully trying to lose himself in the wilderness, that he might win or regain any prize in public life to the attainment of which he chose seriously to devote himself. His indispensability ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... yell, this time from our enemies. Harvard has lost the ball and Yale has it. And now before my bewildered eyes scrimmage follows scrimmage with fierce iteration, and one pile of bodies, arms, and legs succeeds another. The player, fortunate enough to carry or force the ball a yard or more toward the rival goal by a frantic rush before he is overwhelmed and squashed, reaps a whirlwind ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant

... agen, that if the sacrilege Thou'st made gainst vertue be but yet sufficient To yeild thee dead, the iteration of it May damne thee past the reach of mearcye. Speake it, While thou hast utterance left; but I conceit A lie soe monstrous cannot chuse but choake The vocall powers, or like a canker rott ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various

... Prophets, had come to this Tribe and to that, warning men of their sin; and been received by them even as he Mahomet was,—which is a great solace to him. These things he repeats ten, perhaps twenty times; again and ever again with wearisome iteration; has never done repeating them. A brave Samuel Johnson, in his forlorn garret, might con-over the Biographies of Authors in that way! This is the great staple of the Koran. But curiously, through all this, comes ever and anon some glance as of the real thinker ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... such evenings, was privileged to strike false notes with painful iteration, even to the actual distress of auditors, without a word of criticism from the leader or the manager. Excruciating discord from the flute, on three or four nights of a season, was accepted as part payment ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey

... have been aghast if he could have felt the slightest reflection from the heat of her detestation of his favorite, Emersonian motto, which, now that he had reached five and forty, he was apt to repeat with the iteration natural to his age, rousing in Sylvia the rebellious exasperation felt by her age ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... son recognized instinctively the intimate connexion between ideas of religious and of civil freedom. "The authority of God and the supremacy of his Majesty" was the formula used with perpetual iteration to sanction the constant recourse to scaffold and funeral pile. Philip, bigoted in religion, and fanatical in his creed of the absolute power of kings, identified himself willingly with the Deity, that ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... tearful face, it must be confessed that grief does not, in his person, appear under a very lovely form. The first impression that I made on him who was to hold almost everything that could constitute my happiness in his power, was the very reverse of, favourable. My continued iteration of "I want to go home," was anything but pleasing to the pedagogue. The sentence itself is not music to a man keeping a boarding-school. With the intuitive perception of childhood, through my tears, my heart acknowledged an enemy. ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... city, the cities of a country, the countries of a vast continent, and encounter everywhere certain forms, identical, inevitable, exasperating by their repetition! How esthetics would gain by more simplicity! Instead of this luxury in job lots, all these decorations, pretentious but vapid from iteration, we should have an infinite variety; happy improvisations would strike our eyes, the unexpected in a thousand forms would rejoice our hearts, and we should rediscover the secret of impressing on a drapery or a piece of furniture that ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner

... to the "Scripture of the Lotus of Good Law," and he taught that salvation could be attained merely by chaunting the formula, "namu myo ho renge kyo" ("hail to the Scripture of the Lotus of Good Law") with sufficient fervour and iteration. In fact, Nichiren's methods partook of those of the modern Salvation Army. He was distinguished, also, by the fanatical character of his propagandism. Up to his time, Japanese Buddhism had been nothing if not tolerant. The friars were quick to take up arms ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... pay them much respect. One was called Lord Charles, and the other the Hon. Mr. Henry. I learned these names with facility, and contrived to repeat them, as they had been taught me, by the frequent iteration of one of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various

... Moreover, whether he should ever have any trouble with "spooks" or not, one thing was true of him, as of many others in all stations of life, he was haunted by the ghost of a conscience. This uneasy spirit suggested to him with annoying iteration that his proceedings the night before had been of very unusual and doubtful character. When at last fully awake, he sought to appease the accusing voice by unwonted diligence in all his tasks, until the fat cook, a devout Baptist, ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe

... failed to dispel the gloom that settled upon Mr. Archibald Bennett as he crept through the shed where the laborers were housed and found his cot. It was a hot humid night, with the chirr of queer insects outside mocking with weary iteration the lusty snores of the weary farm hands. He might bolt, now that he had Isabel's address, and suffer the Governor to manage in his own fashion the foolhardy enterprises, of which he had spoken so lightly; but to do this would be only to ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson

... something as dexterous and impersonal as a wind he would have been content to listen to it for ever—but, could he give her pipe for pipe? Would the rich gurgle or the soft coo sound at last as a horrid iteration, a mere clamour to which he must not only give an obedient heed, but must even answer from a head wherein silence ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... he said, with a gesture of authority. He leaned over the table, holding the other's eyes, the letter in one clinched hand. "Kill him—," he said, and pointed to the other room, from which came the maddening iteration of the jingling song—"you would kill him for his hellish insolence, for this infamous attempt to lead your wife astray, but what good will it do to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Liszt was now united, in a close personal and poetic league, with the new ideas of Wagner's later drama. Both men adopted the symbolic motif as their main melodic means; with both mere iteration took the place of development; a brilliant and lurid color-scheme (of orchestration) served to hide the weakness of intrinsic content; a vehement and hysteric manner cast into temporary shade the classic mood of tranquil depth in which alone man's ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... True enough, there do appear cases where it seems to work pretty well; but when they are inquired into, it is generally found either that the husband is a simpleton, submitting by mere inanity, or a man who has resisted to the uttermost, and is at last crumpled up by pure "Caudlish" iteration and perseverance. How Tammas ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various

... their iteration of the one word 'moyeh,' that water was the matter in dispute, even before ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall

... sense of wasted power, The tiresome round of little things, Are hard to bear, as hour by hour Its tedious iteration brings; Who shall evade or who delay The small demands of ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... gravamen of the charge against a Napoleon of the Press is not that he gives the public what it wants, but that he can make the public want what he wants, think what he thinks, believe what he wants them to believe, and do what he wants them to do. By dint of assertion, innuendo, and iteration in a hundred papers, he can create an apparent public opinion, or public emotion, which may be directed towards the most dangerous ends. This point Mr. Bennett entirely missed. What he gave us was ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... of a particularly monotonous character. It is distinguishable immediately, and if the bird happens to nest near a house, is often disliked on account of the loud iteration. Perhaps those who first gave it the name of the mocking-bird were not well acquainted with the notes of the birds which they fancied it to mock. To mistake it for the nightingale, some of whose tones it is said to imitate, would be like confounding the ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies

... to the sky; black does not belong to Day and Martin, but to the abyss. Even the finest posters are only very little things on a very large scale. There is something specially irritant in this way about the iteration of advertisements of mustard: a condiment, a small luxury; a thing in its nature not to be taken in quantity. There is a special irony in these starving streets to see such a great deal of mustard to such very little meat. Yellow ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... compound, and found that the old man had been cruelly beaten, by order of one of the premier's half-brothers, for refusing to bow down before him. Exhausted as he was, he found voice to express his sense of the outrage in indignant iteration. "Am I a beast? Am I an unbelieving dog? O son of Jaffur Khan, how ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... popular as he was, Robespierre felt every instant the necessity of walking cautiously. He was as far removed as possible from that position of Dictator which some historians with a wearisome iteration persist in ascribing to him, even at the moment when they are enumerating the defeats which the party of Hebert was able to inflict upon him in the very bosom of the Mother Club itself. They make him ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

... suggested to her with persistent iteration that she should even now look strictly into the evidence which had so quickly sufficed to convince her that the young and ardent lover who had wooed her so passionately, and promised her such loyalty and faith and devotion, ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder

... stimulating. He was in a small, square room with a low ceiling, dense and green with pine-boughs, fastened to the walls. The odor was as strange an accompaniment to dancing as was that furiously whirling primitive iteration of the fiddle. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... be left undisturbed for a little while, but the moment her eyes opened again the merciless professors flocked about her once more, and resumed the tedious iteration of ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss

... amusing to them, when the fact is that their pride is very sore in that particular spot. A woman who has passed her hour of bloom, and feels with sensitive pain the creeping on of ancient maidenhood, will talk charmingly, and with superfluous iteration, about the usefulness of old maids, and the independence of their lot—determined to cover up the galled spot that burns upon the surface of her personal pride. The trick of keeping up the appearances of wealth, after wealth is departed, is a familiar ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... held in forms in which this uncanny doctrine of absolute identity was avoided; but at the best it meant an endless monotonous iteration, which was singularly unlikely to stimulate speculative interest in the future. It must be remembered that no thinker had any means of knowing how near to the end of his cycle the present hour might be. The most influential ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... be all right." He staggered to his feet and clung to the rail of the bridge, trying to collect his wits. One phrase ran over and over in his mind with damnable iteration—"Mild, but they satisfy!" ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley

... the first woman he had met who embodied the heroine of his youthful dreams. He proposed and was refused, and went away despairing. It would have been a good match, undoubtedly—a truth which Lord and Lady Lodway urged with some iteration upon their daughter—but it would have been a terrible descent from the ideal marriage which Lady Jane had set up in her own mind, as the proper prize for so fair a runner in life's race. She had imagined herself a marchioness, with a vast territory of mountain, vale, and lake, ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon

... hast damnable iteration, and art indeed able to corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm unto me, Hal; God forgive thee for it. Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing, and now I am, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked. I must give ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... be an l, as in jingle, tingle, tinkle, mingle, sprinkle, twinkle, there is implied a frequency, or iteration of small acts. And the same frequency of acts, but less subtile by reason of the clearer vowel a, is indicated in jangle, tangle, spangle, mangle, wrangle, brangle, dangle; as also in mumble, grumble, jumble. But at the same time the close u implies ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson

... Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated and repeated, as it were an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of his own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding quiet. And still, as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him, with a sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his design. He should have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... candles, and went to bed, and the demons of a sleepless night came to him and tormented him. The opening line of Tennyson's 'Love and Duty' got into his brain and ticked there: 'Of love that never found its earthly close, what sequel?' It recurred with a damnable iteration. He tried all the devices for wooing slumber he had ever heard of. He assembled an innumerable flock of sheep, for he had the knack of making pictures in his mind, and he set them one by one to leap through a gap in a hedge, counting them as they went by. He had not counted ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... and ecclesiastical punishments so cruel and recurrent as during the period of the Renaissance. It is a common error to suppose that judicial cruelty reached its culmination in the Middle Ages.[110] Punishments are described with appalling iteration in the pages we are following. The Place de Greve was the scene of mutilations, tortures, hangings, and quarterings of criminals and traitors, the king and his court sometimes looking on. Coiners of false money were boiled alive at the pig-market; robbers ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... again, it is apt to suggest the heretical idea that the whole Trinity was incarnate in Christ, and not merely the Word. Orthodox Theology does not teach that God the Father became incarnate in Christ, and suffered upon the Cross. And lastly, the constant iteration of the phrase 'Divinity of Christ' tends to the concealment of the other half of the Catholic doctrine—the real humanity of Christ. To speak of the God-manhood of Christ or the indwelling of God in Christ would ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... find much iteration in my ideas but had little expected that out of every hundred words twenty-three would give rise to exactly the same association in every one of the four trials; twenty-one to the same association in three ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... to feed, their cravings, if they cannot with substance then with dreams, perpetually pretend a satisfaction in such acquirements which the years as they proceed tell them with increasing iteration that they do not feel. The young, the adventurous, the admired, may at first be deceived by such a glamour, and it is in the providential scheme of human affairs, and it is for the good of us all that the pleasing cheat should last while the good ...
— On Something • H. Belloc

... with the senseless iteration of the word popular, applied to new works in poetry, as if there were no test of excellence in this first of the fine arts but that all men should run after its productions, as if urged by an appetite, or constrained by a spell!—The qualities of writing best fitted for eager reception ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... modesty, Mr. Landor, in quoting Virgil only to improve him; but your alteration is not an improvement. Dido, having just complained of her lover for putting out to sea under a wintry star, would have uttered but a graceless iteration had she in the same breath added—if Troy yet stood, must even Troy be sought through a wintry sea? Undosum is the right epithet; it paints to the eye the danger of the voyage, and adds ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various

... of worship must constitute one dose. They are in the same circuit, are looked after by the same ministers, and if we gave a separate description of each we should only be guilty of that unpleasant "iteration" which Shakspere names so forcibly in one of his plays. Wesley Chapel is the older of the two, and, therefore, must be first mentioned. It is situated in North-road, at the corner of Upper Walker-street, and ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... dry iteration, however varied by diversity of verbal arrangement, sounded flat when mingled with the rich and recommendatory oratory of the bold-faced, deep-mouthed, and ready- witted Jenkin Vincent.—"What d'ye ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... sometimes to take my part when some hazy recollection of his dead brother came before his mind, declaring that as long as he had a crust to spare I should not want; still, as the incessant dropping of water will in the end wear away stone, so my aunt's persistent nagging and iteration of my shortcomings in resisting my cousins' bullying had their ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson

... the one who rightfully claimed her from me. This was impossible. Only by guilt or vulgar disgrace could she become his. Then the question took possession of me, 'How shall I win her love?—how shall I win her love?' This repeated itself again and again, with a distinct and fearful iteration, as if a demon were whispering it in my ear. A thousand mad thoughts took possession of me, and suicide thrust itself on me. For a few moments,—though it seemed an age of experience,—I was insane. The blow had dispossessed my reason. Dimly, as in a drunken ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... doubling &c v.; gemination, ingemination^; reduplication; iteration &c (repetition) 104; renewal. V. double, redouble, duplicate, reduplicate; geminate; repeat &c 104; renew &c 660. Adj. double; doubled &c v.; bicipital^, bicephalous^, bidental^, bilabiate, bivalve, bivalvular^, bifold^, biform^, bilateral; bifarious^, bifacial^; twofold, two-sided; disomatous^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... so noteworthy. I am conscious that the reader may desire even more assurance of the trustworthiness of the accounts I have given than the space now at my disposal admits, or than I could otherwise afford without wearisome iteration of the same tale, by multiplying extracts from my large store of material. I feel, too, that it may seem ungracious to many obliging correspondents not to have made more evident use of what they have sent than my few ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... humor in the last line finds its counterpart in many other passages. Thus, when the dreamer sits down to rest by the wayside, his iteration of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... most human and civilised of men—it had come upon me as a shock to find in Kimberley the same bloodthirstiness that had distinguished the more thoughtless section of the public at home. Cruel shouting for blood by people who never see it; the iteration of that most illogical demand, a life for a life—and, if possible, two lives for a life; the loud, hectoring, frothy argument that lashes itself into a fury with strong and abusive language—they all came like a clap of thunder after what I am bound ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young

... the risk of needless iteration, from quoting a further example. It is taken from the poet Burns. The original dialect being written in inverted hiccoughs, is rather difficult to reproduce. It describes the scene attendant upon the return of a cottage labourer to his home ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock

... it alternately, while the other attended to the windows. By this time Alexander had ceased to wonder if he should see another morning, or much to care: the storm was so magnificent in its almighty power, its lungs of iron bellowed its purpose with such furious iteration, as if out of all patience with the mortals who defied it, that Alexander was almost inclined to apologize. More than once it took the house by the shoulders and shook it, and then a yell would come from below, a simultaneous note pitched in a key of common agony. Suddenly the ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... each and all of these the details are identical; the length of the ears, the proportions of the arms, fingers, and toes; the colour of the eyes, and the curls of the hair[2] being repeated with wearisome iteration. To such an extent were these multiplied, and with an adherence so rigid to the same recognised models, that the Rajavali ventures to ascribe to one king the erection of "seventy-two thousand statues of Buddha," an obvious error[3], but indicative, nevertheless, that the real ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... to take—no excuses for seeming harshness—no pledge of future yielding to any will but his own. The simple words he spoke were wholly impersonal; firm declaration that he would bend the future to his purpose; calm and solemn iteration of abiding faith that a united South, led by him, must ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... characteristic of the communal animals is that they become mentally specialized. They round up their powers, build barriers of habit over which they cannot pass, perform the same acts with such interminable iteration that what began as intellect sinks back into instinct. Each individual has fixed duties and is confined within a limited circle of acts, whose scope it cannot pass, or only ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... this was not always the case, for I was once, perhaps unperceived by him, writing at a table, so near the place of his retreat, that I heard him repeating some lines in an ode of Horace, over and over again, as if by iteration, to exercise the organs of speech, and fix the ode ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... submission, or, if his mind remains unaltered, silently leaves his book to take its chance, and to influence men according to its merits. But such passivity, however right and seemly in the author of a book, is inapplicable to the case of a Review. The periodical iteration of rejected propositions would amount to insult and defiance, and would probably provoke more definite measures; and thus the result would be to commit authority yet more irrevocably to an opinion which otherwise might take no deep root, and might yield ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... to Guest's strong arm, and suffered him to lead her back, half insensible, to the carriage, into a corner of which she sank with a low moan, while all the way home the beat of the horses feet and the rattle of the wheels upon the pavement seemed to form themselves with terrible iteration into the words she had heard fall from Stratton's lips, and she shuddered as now, for the first time, she gave them ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn

... typical "timer" might be chiefly conscious of the steady sequence of the waves, the measured intervals between their summits; while the typical stresser, although subconsciously aware of the steady iteration of the giant rollers, might watch primarily their foaming crests, and listen chiefly to their crashing thunder. The point to be remembered is this: that neither the "timing" instinct nor the "stressing" instinct excludes the ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... objections, for instance, of that truly pedantic philosophy which once argued that ethical and religious truth are not given in the Scripture in a system such as a schoolman might have digested it into; as if the brief iteration and varied illustration of pregnant truth, intermingled with narrative, parable, and example, were not infinitely better adapted to the condition of the human intellect in general! For similar reasons, the old objection, that statements ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... more: we are tempted to the outward activity of destruction; reviewing becomes almost inevitable. As for the spiritual life—O weary, weary act of refusal! O waste but necessary hours, vigil and wakefulness of fear! 'We live by admiration' only a shortened life who live so much in the iteration of rejection and repulse. And in the very touch of joy there hides I know not what ultimate denial; if not on one side, on the other. If joy is given to us without reserve, not so do we give ourselves to joy. We withhold, we close. Having denied many things that have approached us, ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell

... the jessamine twining round its columns. The picture was very beautiful—but something was wanting to perfect its beauty; and the name of the something that was wanting sang itself in poignant iteration to the beating of his pulses. And he longed and longed to tell her; and he dared not; ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... he did so," said the good auctioneer, trying to throw something soothing into his iteration. "I was about to fulfil his order, if possible, this afternoon. He ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... repeated and repeated, as it were an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of his own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding quiet. And still as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him, with a sickening iteration[7], of the thousand faults of his design. He should have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... wanting to round off his knowledge before he could take his professional line with confidence, he was led to remember that his own native Gothic was the one form of design that he had totally neglected from the beginning, through its having greeted him with wearisome iteration at the opening of his career. Now it had again returned to silence; indeed—such is the surprising instability of art 'principles' as they are facetiously called—it was just as likely as not to sink into the neglect and oblivion which had been ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... Doing it headlong, wastefully and by the rule-of-thumb, the Country was a desert, all its inhabitants fled, all its edibles consumed, before six weeks were over. Friedrich is not now himself at all; in great things or in little; what a changed Friedrich!" exclaims Schmettau, with wearisome iteration. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... The iteration of that refrain, "Within three weeks," made him forget everything, even the trouble ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant

... that fiery light His life, no more triumphant, passed once more In underthought before him, while on spread The swift, contagious madness of that fire, And muttered thus, not knowing it, the man, "The mighty flame into itself takes all," Mechanic iteration. Not alone Stood he that hour. The Demon of his House By him once more and closer than of old, Stood, whispering thus, "Thy game is now played out; Henceforth a byword art thou—rich in youth - Self-beggared ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere

... emblems, and, if need be, of idols. Therefore he set about the establishment of the cult of Apis, and "made two calves of gold, and set the one in Bethel and the other put he in Dan." This was the sin for which he was condemned again and again with almost wearisome iteration. He was by no means a fanatical idolater, and this act of his was simply the dictate of his worldly policy. He was engaged in the establishment of the separate kingdom of Israel, which for many a long year was to exist side by side with the kingdom of Judah. But this policy ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... damnable iteration, and art, indeed, able to corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm upon me, Hal,—God forgive thee for it. Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing; and now am I, if a man should speak truly, little ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... another explosion by my compliance; and I thought, too, it might create a favourable crisis in Catherine's mental illness: and then I remembered Mr. Edgar's stern rebuke of my carrying tales; and I tried to smooth away all disquietude on the subject, by affirming, with frequent iteration, that that betrayal of trust, if it merited so harsh an appellation, should be the last. Notwithstanding, my journey homeward was sadder than my journey thither; and many misgivings I had, ere I could prevail on myself to put the missive ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte

... Name" will lead most of us to sacrifice the passages, where the blessed name may have an impressive force, to the reverential uniformity of our Authorised Version, and to the latent fear that frequent iteration might derogate from the solemnity with which we instinctively clothe the ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott

... Graydon again knelt near, to have it in readiness, while the doctor kept up his monotonous effort, pressing the arms against the lungs, then lifting them above the head and back to the ground, with regular and mechanical iteration. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe

... against the floating ship. He too afloat,—afloat. Whither bound? Yearning still for a belief on which he may repose. And he bethinks himself,—does it lie somewhere under the harsh and dogmatic utterances of the Ashfield pulpit? At the thought, he recalls the weary iteration of cumbersome formulas, that passed through his brain like leaden plummets, and the swift lashings of rebuke, if he but reached over for a single worldly floweret, blooming beside the narrow path; and yet,—and yet, from the leaden atmosphere of that past, saintly faces ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... at Natchez, where she was supplied with wood and water, and during the delay a huge, hard-fisted boatman, somewhat the worse for a poor article of strychnine whiskey, made himself very conspicuous and exceedingly obnoxious by the continual iteration of his intense desire to fight some one. He was fearful that he would "ruin," if his pugilistic wants were not immediately attended to, and in manner more earnest than agreeable invited one and all to "come ashore and have the conceit taken ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... moveless on his back, and ignoring even the tea, made no reply to this speech. He was still repeating to himself the following words, which, by constant iteration, had assumed in his mind the force and emphasis of italics: 'So grateful for your sympathetic help. When next I see you, if there is opportunity, I will try to thank you. Meantime, all is well with me. Please trouble no more. And forget.' Such were the exact terms ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett

... man a sense of homeliness and racial solidarity. The French, more fluid and sensitive to the incongruous, have introduced local colour into some of their Colonial buildings, not without success. As to this particular Roman tradition, it pursues one with meaningless iteration from the burning sands of Africa to Ultima Thule. Always those ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... delight to dwell, and on which in especial learned old maids, like Miss Martineau, linger with such an insatiable relish. They expose it in the slave States with the most minute observance and endless iteration. Miss Martineau, with peculiar gusto, relates a series of scandalous stories, which would have made Boccacio jealous of her pen, but which are so ridiculously false as to leave no doubt, that some wicked wag, knowing she would write a book, has furnished her materials—a game too often ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... shot Mrs Fred made her way up-stairs and retired from the field. Nettie woke with a startled consciousness out of her dreams, to perceive that here was the process of iteration begun which drives the wisest to do the will of fools. She woke up to it for a moment, and, raising her drooping head, watched her sister make her way, with her handkerchief in her hand, and the broad ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... to screw their verses into the fetters of musical time. Notwithstanding the obstacles stated by Dryden himself, every line seems to flow in its natural and most simple order; and where the music required repetition of a line, or a word, the iteration seems to improve the sense and poetical effect. Neither is the piece deficient in the higher requisites of lyric poetry. When music is to be "married to immortal verse," the poet too commonly cares little with how indifferent a yoke-mate he provides her. But Dryden, probably ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden



Words linked to "Iteration" :   repetition, computing, physical process, looping, loop



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