"Recondite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thinking" wrote the Spectator at the time "something of rare interest in the spectacle presented of a Bengalee of the purest descent possible, lecturing in London to an audience of appreciative European savants upon one of the most recondite branches of the modern physical science." He was then invited to address the Scientific Societies in Paris. "Prof. J. C. Bose" wrote the Review Encyclopedique, Paris "exhibited on the 9th of March before the Sorbonne, an apparatus of his invention for demonstrating the laws of reflection, ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... not only incompetent to discuss with you the more recondite beauties of "Beowulf" but providentially forbidden the attempt by the conditions laid down for this Chair. I gather—and my own perusal of the poem and of much writing about it confirms the belief—that it has been largely over-praised by some critics, who have thus naturally provoked ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... into a sunlit world. There is no denying that his words, and still more his manner, had awakened in me a sense of insecurity that had no precise object, for it was manifestly absurd and impossible to suspect my friend Carlos. Moreover, hanging was a danger so recondite, and an eventuality so extravagant, as to make the whole thing ridiculous. And yet I remembered how unhappy I felt, how inexplicably unhappy. Presently the reason was made clear. I was homesick. I gave no further thought to the second ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... are said to have numbered seven thousand five hundred, and it has not been easy to keep out fraud and deception. The subjects treated are most varied, sometimes even trivial, but dealing usually with recondite questions of law and morals. Three great collections of the 'Hadith' have been made: by al-Buchari (869), Muslim (874), and al-Tirmidhi (892). The first two only are considered canonical. From these are derived the three great systems of jurisprudence which to this day hold ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... contact—of course no forces of friction are supposed. It is exceedingly interesting to see how thus, with no other postulates than inertia, rigidity, and mutual impenetrability, we can thoroughly model not only an elastic solid, and any combination of elastic solids, but so complex and recondite a phenomenon as the passage of polarized light through a magnetic field. But now, with the view of ultimately discarding the postulate of rigidity from all our materials, let us suppose some to be absolutely destitute of rigidity, and to possess merely inertia and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... gifts from men of genius as they offer them; circumstance and the hour often rule their form. Those influences, no less than the idiosyncrasy of the man, determined De Quincey to the illumination of such matter for speculation as seemed to lie before him; he was not careful to search out recondite or occult themes, though these he did not neglect,—a student, a scholar and a recluse, he was yet at the same time a man of the world, keenly interested in the movements of men and in the page of history that unrolled itself before him day by day. To the discussion of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... an unchosen ruler. The poorer and more ignorant classes—those who would most feel excitement, who would most be misled by excitement—really believe that the Queen governs. You could not explain to them the recondite difference between "reigning" and "governing"; the words necessary to express it do not exist in their dialect; the ideas necessary to comprehend it do not exist in their minds. The separation of principal ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... catches the eye, redeeming whatever is unseemly and worthless in the rude ore; still the ore is not the metal. Nay sometimes, and not unfrequently in Shakespeare, the introduction of unpoetical matter may be necessary for the sake of relief, or as a vivid expression of recondite conceptions, and (as it were) to make friends with the reader's imagination. This necessity, however, cannot make the additions in themselves beautiful and pleasing. Sometimes, on the other hand, while we do not ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... verses in Homer, which have been strangely misconstrued. The passage is in the Odyssey; where the poet is speaking of Calypso, who is said to be the daughter of Atlas, [Greek: oloophronos], a person of deep and recondite knowledge: ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... which itself is but a speck in the immensity of the universe. And when a man of mere ordinary culture sees Sir William Thomson surveying that field with a mastery of its details and familiarity with all the recondite methods of its investigation, he feels as nothing in his presence. Yet this great man, whom we cannot help regarding with wonder, is so carried away by the spirit of his class as to say, "Science is bound, by the everlasting ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... readers with apologetic explanations as though his art were recondite and the tendency of his work immoral would be a ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Oracle, and the anonymous but admirable Culina, all concur in their testimony to the enormous amount of animal food which went to make an ordinary meal, and the amazing variety of irreconcilable ingredients which were combined in a single dish. Lord Beaconsfield, whose knowledge of this recondite branch of English literature was curiously minute, thus describes—no doubt from authentic sources—a family dinner at the end of the ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... schoolroom or at church on Sundays. Shakespeare quotes or adapts biblical phrases with far greater frequency than he makes allusion to episodes in biblical history. But many such phrases enjoyed proverbial currency, and others, which were more recondite, were borrowed from Holinshed's 'Chronicles' and secular works whence he drew his plots. As a rule his use of scriptural phraseology, as of scriptural history, suggests youthful reminiscence and the assimilative tendency of the mind in a stage of early development rather ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... human beings clinging. On the field itself, at one end of it, were a scattered handful of doll-like figures, motionless; some had white bodies, others red; and three were in black; all were so small and so far off that they seemed to be mere unimportant casual incidents in whatever recondite affair it was that was proceeding. Then a whistle shrieked, and all these figures began simultaneously to move, and then I saw a ball in the air. An obscure, uneasy murmuring rose from the immense multitude like an invisible but audible ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... and romantic adventure, insinuates a lesson in morals or in humanity, of which we often in our days must fail to perceive the drift. The book of Apuleius, before quoted, is subject to as many discoveries of recondite meaning as is Rabelais. As regards the licentiousness of the Milesian fables, this sign of semi-civilization is still inherent in most Eastern books of the description which we call "light literature," and the ancestral ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... saw Benham in conversation with liberal-minded mandarins, grave-faced, bald-browed persons with disciplined movements, who sat with their hands thrust into their sleeves talking excellent English; while Prothero pursued enquiries of an intenser, more recondite sort with gentlemen of a more confidential type. And, presently, Prothero began to discover and ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... classify, interpret and estimate them is the main work of the historian. It is no doubt true that there are some fields of history where the primary facts are so little known, so much contested or so largely derived from recondite manuscript sources, that a faithful historian will be obliged in justice to his readers to sacrifice both proportion and artistic charm to the supreme importance of analysing evidence, reproducing documents and accumulating proofs; but in ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... peeping acutely into recondite motives and half-accomplished purposes in such matters, could detect the circumstance which had determined that so noticeable peculiarity of ground-plan. Its kernel was not, as in most similar buildings of that date, [3] ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... grounded upon a little affection, will soone conjecture that it shall be dissolved upon a light occasion.' Others of Lyly's affectations are rhetorical questions, hosts of allusions to classical history, and literature, and an unfailing succession of similes from all the recondite knowledge that he can command, especially from the fantastic collection of fables which, coming down through the Middle Ages from the Roman writer Pliny, went at that time by the name of natural history and which we have already encountered ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... contrived that we see them in a cold, clear light, the light of scientific relentlessness. There is a suggestion of torture, not brutal but exquisitely refined, of perfected pain, achieved by the stimulation of recondite nerves of very delicate sensibility. Lawyers wear archaic robes and use a strange language in their mysteries, conveying to us a belief that Justice is an ancient witch whose evil eye can be averted ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... give an outline of the conclusions at which I have arrived. He must be a dull man who can examine the exquisite structure of a comb, so beautifully adapted to its end, without enthusiastic admiration. We hear from mathematicians that bees have practically solved a recondite problem, and have made their cells of the proper shape to hold the greatest possible amount of honey, with the least possible consumption of precious wax in their construction. It has been remarked that a skilful workman, with fitting tools and measures, would find it very difficult to ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... Merdle is of a cool temperament, and not a sensitive man: is about as invulnerable, I should say, as Achilles. How such a man should suppose himself unwell without reason, you may think strange. But I have found nothing the matter with him. He may have some deep-seated recondite complaint. I can't say. I only say, that at present I ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... this typical thought or sentiment was what fixed their attention and seemed to them the ultimate thing. Not so M. Bergson: he is a microscopic psychologist, and even in man what he studies by preference is not some integrated passion or idea, but something far more recondite; the minute texture of sensation, memory, or impulse. Sharp analysis is required to distinguish or arrest these elements, yet these are the predestined elements of his fable; and so his anthropomorphism is far less obvious ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... and analysis. It seems to let out with the fulness, simplicity, and unconsciousness of a child—"Fancy's Child"—the secret mechanism or procession of the greatest creative mind our race has produced. In itself, it has no recondite meaning, it answers fully its own sweet purpose. We are not believers, like some folks, in the omniscience of even Shakspeare. But, like many things that he and other wise men and many simple children ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... place in the education of the majority of mankind, leave one important thing out of their account: the constitution of human nature. But I put this forward on the strength of some facts not at all recondite, very far from it; facts capable of being stated in the simplest possible fashion, and to which, if I so state them, the man of science will, I am sure, be willing ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... get rid of this report, Nero trumped up an accusation against a sect, detested for their atrocities, whom the common people called Christians, and inflicted on them the most recondite punishments. Christ, the founder of this sect, had been capitally punished by the Procurator Pontius Pilate, in the reign of Tiberius; and this damnable superstition, repressed for the present, was again breaking out, not only through Judaea, where the evil originated, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... not think that Browning ever wrote a poem the writing of which he more enjoyed. The creation of Karshish suited his humour and his quaint play with recondite knowledge. He describes the physician till we see him alive and thinking, in body and soul. The creation of Lazarus is even a higher example of the imaginative power of Browning; and that it is shaped for us through the mind of Karshish, and in tune with it, makes the imaginative ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... try the feelings and motives of his fellow-man? Is that most difficult of all analysis, the estimating of the feelings, purposes, and motives, which every man, who examines his own secret thoughts, finds to be so complex, so recondite, so intricate; is this to be the basis, not only of individual opinion, but of public reward and censure? Is every man to constitute himself a judge of the amount of time and interest given to the proper investigation of truth by his fellow-man? ...
— An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism - With reference to the duty of American females • Catharine E. Beecher
... impressed the waiters, acquiescing in strawberry jam for breakfast, for example, in a manner which said that, although this might be to him a new and complex custom, he was acquainted with Chicago ones much more recondite. His air was superior, but modestly so, and if he said nothing you would never suppose it was because he had nothing to say. He meant to give Great Britain a chance before he pronounced anything distinctly ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... all these tales so new to time, and many another that the last two centuries tell, the tale that the milkmen tell ripples wisely on, so full of quotation from the profoundest writers, so full of recondite allusion, so deeply tinged with all the wisdom of man and instructive with the experience of all times that they that hear it in the Milkmen's Hall as they interpret allusion after allusion and trace obscure quotation lose idle curiosity and forget to question why the milkman ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... It was as much as I could do to answer the numerous keen and incisive questions which he put to me. They were all so distinct and cogent. Their object was, of course, to draw from me the necessary explanations on this rather recondite subject. I believe, however, that notwithstanding the presence of Royalty, I was enabled to place all the most striking and important features of the Moon's surface in a clear and satisfactory manner before ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... time, however, the future Astronomer Royal was steadily advancing in astronomical inquiries of a recondite nature. He had investigated the obliquity of the ecliptic with extreme care, so far as the circumstances of astronomical observation would at that time permit. He had also sought to discover the sun's distance from ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... horoscope of man, have been brought down to modern applications by learned philosophers and mathematicians. These have labored with a godlike energy and skill to trace the interior relationships existing between the recondite revelations of their Geometry, their wonderful laws of mathematical harmonies and unities, and those lines which by common consent are understood to be exponential of certain phases of our own existence. No well-organized intellect can fail to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... personages of the tale, both law-abiding and lawless, came from various sources which, perhaps, here and there, some reader may have recognized. They are not very recondite. But I am not concerned here to legitimize any of those people, and even as to my general view of the moral reactions as between the criminal and the police all I will venture to say is that it seems to me to be ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... at the manuscript between them. "I don't pretend to be up in such recondite forms of humour," he said, still stiffly. "Of course you address yourself to a very ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... and drinking-cups taken from our English long barrows are adorned with really pretty and effective patterns, produced by pressing the tip of the finger and the nail into the plastic material. It is wonderful what capital and varied results you can get with no more recondite graver than the human finger-nail, sometimes turned front downward, sometimes back downward, and sometimes used to egg up the moist clay into small jagged and relieved designs. Most of these patterns are more or less plaitlike in arrangement, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... the beginning of the second volume. Mr. Linden's acquirements are to receive peculiar lustre from a triumph over no ordinary competitor,—over the intelligent and well-read Doctor Harrison. Naturally, we expect something recondite, and are by no ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... naked female statue guarding a live lion was supposed to represent Constantinople and its future savior, the Duke of Burgundy. The rest, with the exception of a Pantomime— Jason in Colchis—seems either too recondite to be understood or to have no sense at all. Oliver de la Marche, to whom we owe the description of the scene (Memoires, ch. 29), appeared costumed as 'The Church,' in a tower on the back of an elephant, and sang a long elegy on ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... I am not being severe upon the verger, for he is a very necessary evil, if evil at all, in a place of such manifold and recondite interest; and in my next-to-last visit I found him most intelligibly accessible to my curiosity concerning those waxen effigies of royalty which used to be carried in the funeral processions of the English kings and queens. He bade us wait till ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... his Acquaintance was rather That of a Traveller, than a Native. Nothing in Philosophy was unknown to him; but every Thing in it had the Grace and Force of Novelty. And as Novelty is one main Source of Admiration, we are not to wonder that He has perpetual Allusions to the most recondite Parts of the Sciences: and This was done not so much out of Affectation, as the Effect of Admiration begot by Novelty. Then, as to his Style and Diction, we may much more justly apply to SHAKESPEARE what a celebrated Writer has ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... bare arms and across her bosom. At intervals, with her ringed fingers she would lift the short skirt—a nothing, an imperceptibility, half an inch, with glance downcast; and the effect was profound, recondite, inexplicable. Her style was not that of a male dog-dancer, but it was indubitably clog-dancing, full of marvels to the connoisseur, and to the profane naught but a highly complicated series of wooden noises. Florence's face began to perspire. Then the concertina ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... or so of preface—or perhaps overture would be the better word, since in it a group of literary men, while contributing recondite recipes, flourish trumpets in every key—to his huge volume he says, "I wish to be read by people of the world, and practiced by people of the art" (gens de l'art); and although I wish, like every one who writes, to be read by all ...
— Culture and Cooking - Art in the Kitchen • Catherine Owen
... after all, he never quite cared for music unless he had, in all literalness, his "hand" in it. He never liked to hear any one else play the piano, still less the violin; concerts of all sorts were likely to bore him; and he never really rose to an understanding of the more recondite and elaborate musical forms: to have his fingers on the keyboard—especially when improvising in a secure inarticulateness—was ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... in the physical life; a term frequently employed by Carlyle to denote a much more recondite, but a no less real, corresponding phenomenon in the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... first appearance. The mass of the public read, and enjoyed, or thought they enjoyed, when they were really only puzzled and perplexed. The wild digressions, the audacious impertinences, the burlesque philosophizing, the broad jests, the air of recondite learning, all combined to make the book a nine days' wonder; and a majority of its readers would probably have been prepared to pronounce Tristram Shandy a work as original in scheme and conception as it was eccentric. ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... they loved, we doff our caps, whether they jingle or not, as you please; and if thou thinkest, good reader, that 'twere folly to lose a life for such a cause, the bells will match the rest of thy garb. The learning, too, of the censors and critics was often indeed remarkable. They condemned a recondite treatise on Trigonometry, because they imagined it contained heretical opinions concerning the doctrine of the Trinity; and another work which was devoted to the study of Insects was prohibited, because they concluded that it was a secret attack upon the Jesuits. Well might poor ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... eclogues of the renaissance are distinguished from all other forms of allegory by the obscure and recondite allusions that they affected. There were few among their authors for whom the narration of simple loves and sorrows or the graces of untutored nature possessed any attraction; we find them either making their shepherds openly discuss contemporary affairs, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... famous coffee. The coffee turned out to be the greatest kind of joke; one of the men asked Hewson if he could say on his honor that it was really any better than St. John's coffee there before them, and another professed to be in a secret more recondite than had yet been divined: it was that long grim girl, who served it; she had lured Hewson from his rest at five o'clock in the morning; and this humorist proposed a Welsh rarebit some night at the inn, where they could all see for themselves why Hewson broke out ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... to find means of loosing you from the bargain.... But how should I have promised to perform the impossible?" Under the pressure of all their angers, he finally airily delivers himself: "Having at heart to help you, I travelled the world over, visiting its most recondite corners, in search of such a substitute for Freia as might be found acceptable to the giants. Vainly I sought, and now at last I plainly see that nothing upon this earth is so precious that it can take the place in man's affection of the loveliness ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... officer: in 1866, "Les Travailleurs de la Mer" (Toilers of the Sea), its scene among the Channel Islands; and, in 1868, "L'Homme Qui Rit" (The Man who Grins), unfortunately laid in a fanciful England evolved from recondite reading through foreign spectacles. Whilst writing the final chapters, Hugo's wife died; and, as he had refused the Amnesty, he could only escort her remains to the Belgian frontier, August, 1868. All this while, in his Paris daily ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... apathetic worldling cannot imagine the enthusiasm—nor can the tongue that attempts only to speak of things visible to the bodily eye, express the mighty emotion that inwardly agitated him, when he approached, for the first time, a volume which he believed to be replete with the recondite and mystic philosophy of antiquity: his cheeks glowed, his eyes became bright, his whole frame trembled, and his entire attention was immediately swallowed up in the depths of contemplation. The rapid and vigorous conversion of his soul to intellect ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... delicate position of having his hominy prepared for him and served at anomalous hours, at the hotels he successively visited. Newman had once spent a morning, in the course of business, at Mr. Babcock's birthplace, and, for reasons too recondite to unfold, his visit there always assumed in his mind a jocular cast. To carry out his joke, which certainly seems poor so long as it is not explained, he used often to address his companion as "Dorchester." Fellow-travelers very soon grow intimate but it is highly improbable that ...
— The American • Henry James
... the most recondite sciences, the most remarkable productions of earth, in respect of animals, vegetables, and minerals, the classified arrangement of the stars of ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... book is written with admirable good taste and judgment, and with notable self-restraint. It does not weary the reader with critical discursiveness, nor with attempts to search out high-flown meanings and recondite oracles in the plain 'yea' and 'nay' of life. It is a graceful and unpretentious little biography, and tells all that need be told concerning one of the greatest writers of the time. It is a deeply interesting if not fascinating woman whom ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Goritz. He was a clever man and a dangerous one, who, to gain his ends, whatever they were, would not hesitate to stoop to means beneath the dignity of honorable manhood—an intriguer, a master craftsman in the secret and recondite, a perverted gentleman, trained in a school which eliminated compassion, sentiment and all other human attributes in the attainment of its object and the consummation of its plans. And yet Marishka did not fear Captain Goritz. There is a kind of feminine courage which no man can understand, that ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... until the proverb [Greek] loses all application—or perturbed if my judgement should often agree with that of good critics. The best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so; nor had it been any feat to search out and insert the second-rate merely because it happened to be recondite. To be sure, a man must come to such a task as mine haunted by his youth and the favourites he loved in days when he had much enthusiasm but ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... calm determination, the unvarying earnestness of his character, may aid in explaining it. From a boy, he never swerved from great purposes, pursued the most useful though difficult knowledge, and cultivated with equal zeal the ornaments of taste and those recondite historical and statistical studies which are the roots of political science. He was as far from being flighty as Immanuel Kant. Everything that he did was marked both by temperance and sagacity. Philosophically speaking, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... are few. Two little educational books are worth mentioning: a book of Latin prose exercises, called Nuces, the sentences of which are full of recondite allusions, curious humour, and epigrammatic expression; and a slender volume for teaching Latin lyrics, called Lucretilis, the exercises being literally translated from the Latin originals which he first composed. Lucretilis ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... forming a just Stile; where it is said, "It must be a great fault of Judgment if where the Thoughts are proper, the Expressions are not so too: A Disagreement between these seldom happens, but among Men of more recondite Studies, and what they call deep Learning, especially among your Antiquaries and Schoolmen." This is a good careless way of talking, it may pass well enough for the genteel Negligence, in short, such Nonsense, as Our Antiquaries are seldom guilty of; for Propriety ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... pursued for some years the avocation of village schoolmaster. It was the suggestion of Judge Wheeler that induced him to read law. In six months' time he had mastered Story's Equity, and gained an important suit, based upon one of its most recondite principles. But his heart was not in the legal profession, and he made almost constant sallies into the fields of science, literature and art. He was a natural mathematician and was the most profound and original arithmetician in the Southwest. He frequently computed ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... perceive the nice distinctions and relations, in the exact perception and observance of which the highest manners consist. Such an one may offend against the last device in costume—and the last refinement in the recondite art of a bow—but he will eternally excel in all that we mean by breeding. Your bishop I know nothing of, but your account of him strikes me not very agreeably. These Christian bishops, methinks, are taking upon themselves too much. And besides, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... quotation, which is one of the happiest gifts of the popular orator. It is worthy of note that this manufacturer, this man of the people, this Manchester man, shows a familiarity with the more dainty, outlying, recondite literature of the world than is shown by any other member of a house composed chiefly of ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... Falerii. A third writer, M. Langevin, author of the Recherches Historiques sur Falaise, assures his readers that Falaise was, from time immemorial, a station consecrated to religion; and, in a dissertation full of the most recondite information relative to the worship of Belenus and Abrasax, Isis and Fele, he so connects and intermingles the rites of those deities with the place and its vicinity, that he can scarcely be said to do it less honor ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... my suitcase upstairs, and lingered a minute in my room. I'll swear it wasn't merely to get the tip for which he thanked me, but with the idea of showing me in some recondite, Oriental fashion that he was glad I'd come. This interested me. The people who were glad to have me in Santa Ysobel at this time belonged on the clean side of my ledger. Then I went downstairs to find Vandeman still in the living room, sprawled at ease beside ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... et sa gloire; Or, if I were over-desirous of earning A repute among noodles for classical learning, I could pick you a score of allusions, i-wis, As new as the jests of Didaskalos tis; 340 Better still, I could make out a good solid list From authors recondite who do not exist,— But that would be naughty: at least, I could twist Something out of Absyrtus, or turn your inquiries After Milton's prose metaphor, drawn from Osiris; But, as Cicero says he won't say this or that (A fetch, I must say, most transparent ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... know that in popular magazines, and so forth, all such occasions as this are depicted in terms of hysteria. Captains save their ships engineers complete their bridges, generals conduct their battles, in a state of dancing excitement, foaming recondite technicalities at the lips. I suppose that sort of thing works up the reader, but so far as it professes to represent reality, I am convinced it is all childish nonsense, schoolboys of fifteen, girls of eighteen, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... sombre diarist when he came over to study his Roman roads with Major Flint that evening, and indeed he was a sombre antiquarian himself. They had pondered a good deal during the day over their strange reception in the High Street that morning and the recondite allusions to bags, sand-dunes and early trains, and the more they pondered the more probable it became that not only was something up, but, as regards the duel, everything was up. For weeks now they had been regarded by the ladies of Tilling with something approaching veneration, but there ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... he does not always see that, however representative to himself, his emblems and his allegories may not be altogether representative to the world. His imagination is at once quaint and far- reaching—at once peculiar and ambitious; and it is often guilty of what is recondite and remote. In his best work—in Old Souls, for instance, and Old Morality—the quaintness is merely decorative: the essentials are sound and human enough to be of lasting interest and to have a capacity ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... Not so many people, perhaps, believe that a whale is a fish, instead of a mammal, but few indeed are the individuals who do not still think that a cetacean possesses a sort of natural fountain on the top of its head, whence, for some recondite reason, it ejects at regular intervals streams of water ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... current-hand ever seen; and the way in which he mastered arithmetic (going away into recondite and wonderful rules in the Tutor's Assistant, which some masters even dare not approach,) is described by the Doctor in terms of admiration. He is Mr. Prince's best algebra pupil; and a very fair classic, too; doing everything well for which ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... elder and the younger Dionysius at Syracuse has been already related His absence from Athens lasted about twelve years; on his return, being then upwards of forty, he began to teach in the gymnasium of the Academy. His doctrines were too recondite for the popular ear, and his lectures were not very numerously attended. But he had a narrower circle of devoted admirers and disciples, consisting of about twenty-eight persons, who met in his private house; over ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... drug in the market, there might nevertheless be room, amid the ramifications and interstices of so great a department, for a man or two who could help to count up or pack munitions, or, if that proposal were hopelessly wide of the mark, for the services of something even more recondite and exotic—an intelligent corpse-washer, for instance, or half a dozen astrologers. I felt I could distinguish myself, at a national crisis like this, in either capacity. Anyhow, it was only one more afternoon wasted—one ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... that, in the present case at all events, neither fulfilment of prophecy nor answer to prayer had been disregarded.—And the hard-bitten, irascible, old trainer, Tom Chifney, was happier—probably really the happiest of the lot—since he demanded nothing more recondite and far-reaching than restoration to favour, and due recognition of the importance of his calling and of the merits of his horses.—And nice, funny, voluble, little Dick Ormiston was happier too. Richard's heart went out strangely to the dear little lad! He wondered if it would be ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... prince might envy. You provide a banquet of—hem!—delicacies which must have cost you infinite trouble and unlimited expense—this, after I had expressly stipulated for a quiet family dinner! Not content with that, you procure for our diversion Arab music and dancing of a—of a highly recondite character. I should be unworthy of the name of father, sir, if I were to entrust my only daughter's happiness to a young man with so little common sense, so little self-restraint. And she will understand my ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... Chiltern was wrong. He had allowed it to be understood that he would not draw Trumpeton Wood, and he had therefore no right to expect that the earths should be stopped. But there were and had been various opinions on this difficult point, as the laws of hunting are complex, recondite, numerous, traditional, and not always perfectly understood. Perhaps the day may arrive in which they shall be codified under the care of some great ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... those heroic efforts of which the prodigious achievements seem to us impossible, though true, and which my friend the doctor" (and he turned to Bianchon) "would perhaps ascribe to some unknown forces too recondite for his physiological analysis to detect, some mysteries of the human will of which the obscurity ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... human, the results to him of these contacts were sensations. Just like a human, these sensations on occasion culminated in emotions. Still further, like a human, he could and did perceive, and such perceptions did flower in his brain as concepts, certainly not so wide and deep and recondite as those ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... his learning, and indeed at the high standard that had already been attained in England. 'It is incredible,' he said, 'what a thick crop of old books spreads out on every side: there is so much erudition, not of any ordinary kind, but recondite and accurate and antique, both in Greek and Latin, that you need not go to Italy except for the pleasure of travelling.' Hallam remarked that Erasmus was always ready with a compliment; but he admitted that before the year ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... call forth not unfrequent mirth among those who most revered him. He would meet you and look you in the face without speaking a word. He was not without humour; but his jokes, carried off by a little laugh of his own, were apt to be recondite in their meaning and allusions. With his great power of sympathy, he yet did not easily divine other men's lighter or subtler moods, and odd and sometimes even distressing mistakes were the consequence. His health was weak, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... sought his good. In Strafford as in Paracelsus, and even in Sordello, the subject had made some appeal to the interest in great epochs and famous men. Henceforth his attitude, as a dramatist, to history is a curious blend of the historical specialist who explores the recondite byways of history, and the romantic poet who abandons actuality altogether. He seeks his heroes in remote sequestered corners of the world,—Sardinia, Juliers, Lebanon; but actual historic research gradually ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... said to have said) in addressing his students:— "Never forget, gentlemen, that you have to deal with an ignorant public." The dictum may fairly be extended from medical knowledge to general information amongst the many headed of England; and the Publisher, when rejecting a too recondite book, will repeat parrot-fashion, The English public is not a learned body. Equally valid is the statement in the case of the Anglo-American community which is still half-educated and very far from being ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... and number." Erasmus has pointed out some of these sources, in the responses of oracles; the allegorical symbols of Pythagoras; the verses of the poets; allusions to historical incidents; mythology and apologue; and other recondite origins. Such dissimilar matters, coming from all quarters, were melted down into this vast body of aphoristic knowledge. Those "WORDS OF THE WISE and their DARK SAYINGS," as they are distinguished in that large collection ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... season of the year, except the theatres, and for those places of entertainment Mrs. Pallinson cherished a shuddering aversion. But there were occasional morning and evening "recitals," or concerts, where the music for the most part was of a classical and recondite character—feasts of melody, at which long-buried and forgotten sonatas of Gluck, or Bach, or Chembini were introduced to a discriminating public for the first time; and to these Mrs. Pallinson and Theobald conducted poor Adela Branston, ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... secured in the laboratory of an English scientist in Sierra Leone, and long association with that learned man had endowed him with a vocabulary at once impressive and recondite. ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... the derivation, descent, and etymology of the animal under consideration. Suffice it to say, that for my own part, diligence hath not been wanting in the research. Johnson's Dictionary and old Bailey, have been ransacked; but neither the learned Johnson, nor the recondite Bailey, throw much light upon this matter. The Slang Dictionary, to which I should in the first place have directed my attention, was unfortunately not within my reach. The result of all my inquiries amounts to this—that bore, boor, and boar, are all three spelt indifferently, and consequently ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... Hilaire are really far lighter than he supposes. It is true that he has picked most of the little information he possesses in regard to Spanish history out of the professor's work, and has strewed his pages with copious extracts from this recondite source. But, in making his acknowledgments, he might have gone still farther back. M. St. Hilaire is a laborious and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... But for some recondite reason—perhaps because this art cannot be taught at all—it has always been an accepted American conviction that poetry is a thing which may be thrown off at any time as a side issue by highly organized persons, most of whose time and strength and faculties are engaged in a vigorous and engrossing ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... have assured this existence by fostering applause and pecuniary compensation. Nature, thus prodigal of gifts to America, has, in a crowning act of munificence, conferred also a painter, capable of interpreting her own most recondite mysteries, and of faithfully transcribing the beauties revealed to all ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... absorbed that they can produce little or nothing. His output, though not prolific, was substantial. In middle life he wrote a volume on "The Hebrew Accents of the Twenty-one Books of the Bible," which has become a classical authority on that somewhat recondite subject. It was he who originated and planned the new edition of the Festival Prayer Book in six volumes, and he wrote most of the prose translations. When he died, though only two volumes out of the six had been published, he left ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... and publish it to the world. I could not tell the managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this; that they might have explained and demonstrated the properties and functions of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination afterwards found me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of Heine or Tennyson or Longfellow in my head. So I had to suffer in several places from their unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness of their ingenious ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... person in whose character caution and curiosity were oddly mingled; in his sober moments he thought of the unusual and eccentric with undisguised aversion, and yet, deep in his heart, there was a wide-eyed inquisitiveness with respect to all the more recondite and esoteric elements in the nature of men. The latter tendency had prevailed when he accepted Raymond's invitation, for though his considered judgment had always repudiated the doctor's theories as the ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... hidden, concealed, and this game is called 'Recondite Forms' because— But you will understand it better after you have played it. I want pencils and some rather ...
— Harper's Young People, November 18, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... new polish, and the statues retained the brilliant colors with which they were originally painted, and the shrines their rich gilding, of which the sunlight still shows a glimmer or a streak, though the sunbeam itself looks tarnished with antique dust. Yet this recondite portion of the Abbey presents few memorials of personages whom we care to remember. The shrine of Edward the Confessor has a certain interest, because it was so long held in religious reverence, and because the very dust that settled upon it was formerly worth gold. The helmet and war-saddle ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... author here uses adversus in some unusual and recondite sense, is intimated by the clause: ut sic dixerim. It is understood by some, of a sea unfriendly to navigation. But its connexion by que with immensus ultra, shows that it refers to position, and ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... doubt, very much in the Talmud that possesses a recondite, spiritual meaning; but it would likely puzzle the most ingenious and learned modern Rabbis to construe into mystical allegories such absurd legends regarding Biblical personages as ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... recondite allusion," said the grey-flannelled host; and Jimmy, understanding him to say, "What do you mean?" replied with the whole tale of that wonderful night when the statues came alive, and a banquet of unearthly splendour and deliciousness was plucked by marble hands from ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... it would be presumptuous in me to pretend to instruct Mr. Gladstone in matters which lie as much within the province of Literature and History as in that of Science; but if any one desirous of further knowledge will be so good as to turn to that most excellent and by no means recondite source of information, the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," he will find, under the letter E, the word "Evolution," and a long article on that subject. Now, I do not recommend him to read the first half of the article; but the second half, by ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... (b. 1551—d. 1623), and Sir Henry Spelman (b. 1562—d. 1641). The name of Camden's "Britannia" is still alive, and is familiar as a household word with all who explore even a little beyond the beaten track. But it is otherwise with Sir Henry Spelman, whose studies were more recondite, and to whom Abraham Wheloc looked back as to "the hero of Anglo-Saxon literature." His "Glossary" was a work of vast compass, and for it he corresponded much with learned men abroad; among others with the famous Northern ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... use only of what is spontaneously presented to our senses, and of which we cannot remain ignorant, provided we bestow on it any reflection, however slight, than to concern ourselves about more uncommon and recondite phenomena: the reason of which is, that the more uncommon often only mislead us so long as the causes of the more ordinary are still unknown; and the circumstances upon which they depend are almost always so special and minute as to be ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... and originality, that there is frequently much good sense, as well as much enjoyment, in the humbler conditions of life; and that, in spite of great vices and abuses, there is a reasonable allowance both of happiness and goodness in society at large. If there be any deeper or more recondite doctrines in Mr. Wordsworth's book, we must confess that they have escaped us;—and, convinced as we are of the truth and soundness of those to which we have alluded, we cannot help thinking that they ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... too recondite to be popular, and too unsatisfactory to be dangerous, do not appear likely to affect largely the English inquirer; but the case is different with the work which next meets us by another author, "the ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... asserting our personal liberty, must tend to prevent the erection of any very strict standard of [112] excellence, the belief in any very paramount authority of right reason, the recognition of our best self as anything very recondite and hard to come at. It may be, as I have said, a proof of our honesty that we do not attempt to give to our ordinary self, as we have it in action, predominant authority, and to impose its rule upon other people; but it is evident, also, that it is not easy, with our style of proceeding, ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... and many races, as singularly limited; and that a very short list indeed might be made to embrace the root-stories—the uhrsagen, as a German might call them. And really when we reflect that many of the most threadbare jests which figure in the recondite tomes of Mr Joseph Miller are to be found, crystallized in attic salt, in the pages of Hierocles, and represented as forming part of the "Hundred merye Talis and Jeastis" which delectated the citizens of ancient Greece; when we reflect, we repeat, that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... agreements appear not only in articles of public history, but sometimes in minute, recondite, and very peculiar circumstances, in which, of all others, a forger is most likely ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... perhaps at most. But out of the movement. In his prime the people of his set—the cultivated upper middle class, with a few recruits from the peerage—cared only about Art in some shape or form—recondite music, the themes of which were never obvious enough to be hummed, the androgyne poetry of the 'nineties, morbidities from the Yellow Book, and Scarlet Sins that you disclaimed for yourself, to avoid unpleasantness with the Criminal Investigation Department, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... lingered often in the neighbourhood with I knew not what sense of envy or design of mischief; his white, handsome face (which I beheld with loathing) looked in upon us at all hours across the fence; and once, from a safe distance, he avenged himself by shouting a recondite island insult, to us quite inoffensive, on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the bottle, la Dive Bouteille, is a recondite oracle, which makes an Eleusinian temple of the circle in which it moves. He who reveals its mysteries must die. Therefore, let the dose be administered. ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... the Tendai doctrines nor the Shingon conceptions were sufficiently simple to supply a remedy. Something more tangible and less recondite was needed, and it came (1196), in the sequel of twenty-five years' meditation and study, to Genku—posthumously called Honen Shonin—a priest of the Tendai sect. The leading characteristics of the Jodo (pure land) system introduced by him are ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... some congenial visitor, or chatting with his daughter. One could almost see a small throng of serious men and women wending their way up the still plainly marked path to the chapel, and catch the measured tones of the lecturer as he expounded theories too recondite for this practical age ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... convenient air-pump; and the beaver, at once a carpenter and a mason, had his month full of chisels and his tail a trowel. The bipes implumis, on the contrary, was hatched nude, without even the embryo of a pin-feather. There was nothing for him but the recondite capabilities of his two talented, but talonless hands, and a large brain almost without instinct. Nothing was ready-made, only the means of making. He was brought into the infinite world a finite deity, an infinitesimal creator,—the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... however, this Concordat between the Right Reverend Prelate and the Turks, something more is still wanting to give validity to so serious an accusation. Until the production of the alleged proofs (which Mr. Adair has confidently demanded) shall have put the public in possession of more recondite materials for judging, they must regard as satisfactory and conclusive the refutation of the whole charge, both as regards himself and his illustrious friend, which Mr. Adair has laid before the world; and for the truth of which not only his own high character, but the character of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... people. Their variety is quite destructive of any theory which might be built on the well-known general principles of human nature; and their insignificance often derides every process of formal enquiry, which attempts by any thing more recondite than the supposition of whim or caprice, to account for them. The peculiarities of all nations are, perhaps, on a par in this respect, and only escape scrutiny and wonder, because unnoticed by those to whom they are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... analogy. To these and all other subjects he recurs occasionally, and in season, but with reminiscences of the law his memory, as is abundantly clear, was simply saturated. In season and out of season now in manifest, now in recondite application, he presses it into the service of expression and illustration. At least a third of his myriad metaphors are derived from it. It would indeed be difficult to find a single act in any of his dramas, nay, in some of them, a single scene, the diction and imagery of which are not colored ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Stewart, Monge, and Chasles, all of whom possessed this power in an eminent degree. Indeed, without it, all attempts to study the geometry of space (even the very elements of descriptive geometry, to say nothing of the more recondite investigations of the science) would be entirely unproductive. It is, moreover, a power capable of being acquired by men of average intellect without extreme difficulty; and that even to the extent of "mentally seeing" the constituent parts of figures which have never been exhibited to the eye ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... Oxoniensis embodies nearly all of our accepted notions of this great English mathematician and philosopher. Anthony was indefatigable in his researches into the biography of Hariot who was both an Oxford man and an Oxford scholar. He happily succeeded in mousing out a goodly number of recondite and particular occurrences of Hariot's life. He managed, however, to state very many of them erroneously ; and he drew hence some important inferences, the reverse, as it now appears, of historical truth. This naturally leads one to inquire into his authorities. Wood's account of Hariot appeared ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... Perhaps the word 'apperception' flourished in their eyes and ears as it nowadays often is, embodies as much of this mystification as any other single thing. The conscientious young teacher is led to believe that it contains a recondite and portentous secret, by losing the true inwardness of which her whole career may be shattered. And yet, when she turns to the books and reads about it, it seems so trivial and commonplace a matter,—meaning nothing more than the manner in which we receive a thing into our ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates. This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... readily forget the wanderings of Aeneas and all the rest, rather than how to read and write. But over the entrance of the Grammar School is a vail drawn! true; yet is this not so much an emblem of aught recondite, as a cloak of error. Let not those, whom I no longer fear, cry out against me, while I confess to Thee, my God, whatever my soul will, and acquiesce in the condemnation of my evil ways, that I may love Thy good ways. Let not either buyers or sellers of grammar-learning cry out against ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... many years, producing in the end a great book: his one life-work. This famous work, "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium," embodied all his painstaking calculations, applied his new system to each of the bodies in the solar system in succession, and treated besides of much other recondite matter. Towards the close of his life it was put into type. He can scarcely be said to have lived to see it appear, for he was stricken with paralysis before its completion; but a printed copy was brought to his bedside and put into his hands, so ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... may have to refer to them again in matters of comprehension or comparison. The whole thing is so vastly strange and abnormal that the least thing may afterwards give some guiding light or clue to something otherwise not understandable. I have always found that in recondite matters first impressions are of more real value than later conclusions. We humans place far too little reliance on instinct as against reason; and yet instinct is the great gift of Nature to all animals for their protection ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... peculiarities of instinct or of habit, no relations between species or between groups of species—can exist, but which must now be or once have been useful to the individuals or races which possess them. This great principle gives us a clue which we can follow out in the study of many recondite phenomena, and leads us to seek a meaning and a purpose of some definite character in minutiae which we should be otherwise almost sure to pass over ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... lectures, and even while reading the final proofs, I have ransacked my library to find as many references, notes, illustrations and authorities as possible, for the benefit of the general student. I have purposely avoided recondite and inaccessible books and have named those easily obtainable from American or European publishers, or from Messrs. Kelly & Walsh, of Yokohama, Japan. In using oriental words I have followed, in the main, the spelling of the Century Dictionary. The ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... sensations. Had they been invented, by some inexplicable parthenogenesis in thought, it would indeed have been a marvel had they found application. Philosophy has enough notions of this inapplicable sort—usually, however, not very recondite in their origin—to show that dialectic, when it seems to control existence, must have taken more than one hint from the subject world, and that in the realm of logic, too, nothing submits to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the addition to the party. Others came in, and soon a dozen men who knew and liked each other well were gathered about the stove, talking in the old friendly Southern way and exchanging opinions with calm certainty on all recondite subjects. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Shen hsien chuan (Biographies of the Gods). The picturesque person of P'an Ku is said to have been a concession to the popular dislike of, or inability to comprehend, the abstract. He was conceived, some Chinese writers say, because the philosophical explanations of the Cosmos were too recondite for the ordinary mind to grasp. That he did fulfil the purpose of furnishing the ordinary mind with a fairly easily comprehensible picture of the creation may be admitted; but, as will presently be seen, it is over-stating the case to say that he was conceived with the set ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... She not only lit my fire, but treated me the while to her original tone of almost fervent civility and respect and determination. Her vagaries soon ceased to puzzle me: the psychology of Jane Braithwaite was not recondite. In the night it had dawned upon her that Rattray had found me harmless and was done with me, therefore there was no need for her to put herself out any further on my account. In the morning, finding me really ill, she had gone to the hall ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... cause of perplexity and discontent to the literary connoisseurs was Borrow's lack of style. By style, in the generation of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Dickens and George Eliot, was implied something recondite—a wealth of metaphor, imagery, allusion, colour and perfume—a palette, a pounce-box, an optical instrument, a sounding-board, a musical box, anything rather than a living tongue. To a later race of stylists, who have gone as far as Samoa and beyond in the quest of exotic perfumery, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... facility of understanding the poetry. For the choral songs are, and ever must have been, the most difficult part of the tragedy; there occur in them the most involved verbal compounds, the newest expressions, the boldest images, the most recondite allusions. Is it credible that the poets would, one and all, have been thus prodigal of the stores of art and genius, if they had known that in the representation the whole must have been lost to the audience,—at a time too, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... onward from the title-page, and haunts these impassioned pages. Phrases of a recondite and elaborate description, such as "Oui, monsieur," "Tres-bien," and "Entrez," adorn the sportive conversation of this cultivated circle. Sometimes, with higher flight, some one essays to gambol in the Latin tongue: "It seemed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... inquiry why they took such great pains to preserve the bodies of their dead. It has been supposed that no common motive could have animated them to such lavish expenditure of money, time, and labor as the process of embalming required. It has been taken for granted that only some recondite theological consideration could explain this phenomenon. Accordingly, it is now the popular belief that the Egyptians were so scrupulous in embalming their dead and storing them in repositories of eternal stone, because ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... world."[14448] But the balance of advantage and disadvantage does not even now always reconcile traders to a definite and tangible loss; and in the ruder times of which we are writing it was not to be expected that arguments of so refined and recondite a character should be very sensibly felt. Tyre and Sidon recognised in Alexandria a rival from the first, and grew more and more jealous of her as time went on. She monopolised the trade in Egyptian commodities from her foundation. In a short time she drew to herself, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... (Vol. ii., p. 153.) has propounded a dozen of most recondite and puzzling archaisms, upon which I have to offer ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... sorry for our haste, but one has not so much time for enjoying such churches in their presence as for regretting them in their absence. One should live near them, and visit them daily, if one would feel their beauty in its recondite details; to have come three thousand miles for three minutes of them is no way of making that beauty part of one's being, and I will not pretend that I did in this case. What I shall always maintain is ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... is the means used of discerning a recondite truth in a particular sign lying close at hand, in order to attach to this particular sign the law of action directed upon the whole truth. Of this kind are all the rules of games of play, all ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... regard the lady as an example of the beauties they were talking about, in nature, love, etc., Miss Sallianna did not complain, and even seemed somewhat pleased thereof. Of course there would have been no profit or entertainment in discussing these recondite subjects with a savage such as Verty had appeared to be upon their former interview, when, with his long, tangled hair, hunter's garb, and old slouched hat, he resembled an inhabitant of the backwoods—what could such a personage know of divine ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... is no need to apply any recondite or novel machinery. Only bait your hook in the way best known to yourself, and you will capture him; whereupon he will ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... outside of the scope of the present inquiry. Of course no question is here entertained as to the truth or beauty of the creeds on which the cults proceed. And even their remoter economic bearing can not be taken up here; the subject is too recondite and of too grave import to find a place in so slight ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... sure that what we do not yet understand is good and loving too. The web is of one texture throughout. The least educated ear can catch the music of the simpler melodies which run through the Great Composer's work. We shall one day be able to appreciate the yet fuller music of the more recondite parts, which to us at present seem only jangling and discord. It is not His melody but our ears that are at fault. But we may well accept the obscurity of the mighty deep of God's judgment, when we can see plainly that, after all, the earth ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren |
