"Actuality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by the inconceivable power of those explosive copper projectiles—the heaviest projectiles that could be used without endangering the planet itself—being directed under the exposed edge of that unbreakable apron, which was in actuality anchored to the solid core of the planet itself; lava flowing into and filling up the vast craters caused by the explosions. The attack seemed fiercest at certain points, perhaps a quarter of a mile apart around the circle, and after a time the watchers perceived that at those points, under ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... poor falterings of allegory and tradition in the marble walls and floors of this vast residence of the dead (as it gives you the cheerful impression of being), but the characteristic note of the place is a realism braving it out in every extreme of actuality. Possibly the fact is most striking in that death-bed scene where the family, life-size and unsparingly portraitured, and, as it were, photographed in marble, are gathered in the room of the dying mother. She lies on a bedstead which bears every mark of being one of a standard chamber-set in the ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... alone, she had so much time for dreaming, and intoxicating herself with fantastic imaginations! She was surrounded by a fabulous world, and she was the fairy of that world! But out of that fabulous world she sometimes longed to be, out of the ideal into the real; she yearned for truth and actuality. Then she would call Joseph Ribas to her side and bid him relate to her of that ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... battles unscathed while wreaking havoc and destruction among the massed ships of the Misfits. They had no Guessers. (Or no trained Guessers, he amended. The potential might be there, but certainly the actuality was not.) ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... night—there was yellow fire, there were black phantoms unceasingly hurrying hither and thither, and a dull and constant roar more continuous than that of any sea. Tottenham Court Road after Strathaivron! But here at least was actuality; the time for sentimental sorrows, for dumb and hopeless regrets, was over ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... conceived himself as a phenomenon to be explained. That he called his memoir Poetry and Truth was perhaps an error of judgment, since the title has been widely misunderstood. For Goethe poetry was not the antithesis of truth, but a higher species of truth—the actuality as seen by the selecting, combining, and harmonizing imagination. In themselves, he would have said, the facts of a man's life are meaningless, chaotic, discordant: it is the poet's office to put them into the crucible of his spirit and give them forth as a significant and harmonious whole. The ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... wish to point out, and to emphasise the fact, that I am not prepared to positively affirm what portion of my adventures in that extraordinary, and horrible place, was actuality, and what the product of a feverish imagination. Had I been persuaded that all I thought I saw, I really did see, I should have opened my lips long ago, let the consequences to myself have been what they might. But there is the crux. The happenings were of such an ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... two kinds of conscious existence, the terrestrial and the spiritual, point only to the latter as an undoubted actuality. As to the terrestrial life, owing to its changeability and shortness, it is nothing but an illusion of our senses. Our life in the spiritual spheres must be thought an actuality because it is there that lives our endless, never-changing immortal I, the Sutratma. Whereas in every ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... Troplong! you do not understand the words of the law; for I prefer to call in question your intelligence rather than the justice of the legislator. You are mistaken in your application of the principle, In pari causa possessor potior habetur: the actuality of possession here refers to him who possessed at the time when the difficulty arose, not to him who possesses at the time of the complaint. And when the code prohibits the reception of actions possessoires, in cases where the possession is not of a year's duration, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... spiritual appeal Soames turned for relief to actuality. He snapped the brooch back into its case and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... In this science it would seem as if thought must be subordinate to what is given, to the realities of fact—that this is its basis and guide; while philosophy dwells in the region of self-produced ideas, without reference to actuality. Approaching history thus prepossessed, speculation might be supposed to treat it as a mere passive material, and, so far from leaving it in its native truth, to force it into conformity with a tyrannous idea, and to construe it, as the phrase is, a priori. But as it is the business of history ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... supported by reason. For in those first days God made the creature either in its cause, or in its origin, or in its actuality, by the work from which He afterward rested; He nevertheless works even till now in the administration of things created by the work of propagation. To this latter process belongs the actual production ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Russian has to do with human nature inside of its conventional shells, and his scene is often as large as Europe. Even when it is as remote as Norway, it is still related to the great capitals by the history if not the actuality of the characters. Most of Turgenev's books I have read many times over, all of them I have read more than twice. For a number of years I read them again and again without much caring for other fiction. It was only the other day that I read "Smoke" through once more, with ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... bag of alligator skin bearing her initials in gold. One blissful month ago she and George had been married, and now, on the reluctant return from a camp in the Adirondacks, they were confronting the disillusioning actuality of the New York streets at eight o'clock in the morning. While Gabriella waited, shivering a a little, for the air was sharp and her broadcloth dress was not warm, she amused herself planning a future which appeared to consist of inexhaustible happiness. And mingling with her dreams there ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... has divided the estate, so an idea may practically be credited with truth before the verification process has been exhaustively carried out—the existence of the mass of verifying circumstance is enough. Where potentiality counts for actuality in so many other cases, one does not see why it may not so count here. We call a man benevolent not only for his kind acts paid in, but for his readiness to perform others; we treat an idea as 'luminous' not only for the light it has shed, but for that ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... of taking refuge in its past. The Scripture, or, to use the Jewish term, the Torah, was the only remnant of its former national independence, and the Torah was the magic means of making a sordid actuality recede before a glorious memory. To the Scripture was assigned the task of supplying nourishment to the mind as well as the soul, to the intellect as well as the imagination, and the result is the Halakah ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... There was no cheering—the cheering days came later—no ebullient emotion, but the tightening of lip and jaw in their stern, set faces was a sufficient index of the tensity of feeling. Canadians were thinking things out, thinking keenly and swiftly, for in the atmosphere and actuality of war mental processes are carried on at ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... at the old stone bridge to-morrow at three, and I will convince you of the actuality of this wonderful inheritance—this inheritance which you so long have been deprived of—which you have been fleeced out of by my scheming ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... during the course of World War I; in 1920, it was declared a League of Nations mandate under UK administration. In stages over the next dozen years, Iraq attained its independence as a kingdom in 1932. A "republic" was proclaimed in 1958, but in actuality a series of military strongmen have ruled the country since then, the latest being SADDAM Husayn. Territorial disputes with Iran led to an inconclusive and costly eight-year war (1980-88). In August 1990, Iraq seized Kuwait, but was expelled by US-led, UN coalition forces during ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... could assimilate them immediately, without any knowledge of their purpose and technique. They fail to recognize that a work of art has a language, with a vocabulary and grammar, which has to be mastered through study. A work of art is a possibility of a certain complex of values, not a given actuality that can be grasped by merely stretching out the hand. Very little of any work of art is given—just a few sense stimuli; the rest is an emotional and meaningful reaction, which has to be completed in a determinate fashion. A work of art is a question to which the right answer ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... was smiling upon him. As in a dream he heard her name, "The Comtesse Sylvie Hermenstein" and his own, "Mr. Aubrey Leigh"; he was dimly aware of bowing, and of saying something vague and formal, but all the actuality of his being was for the moment shaken and transfigured, and only one strong and overwhelming conviction remained,—the conviction that, in the slight creature who stood before him gracefully acknowledging his salutation, he had met his fate. Now he understood as he had never done before ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... I opened the newspaper I receive from London, and glancing down the correspondence from Russia—not the telegrams but the correspondence—the first thing that caught my eye was the name of Haldin. Mr. de P—-'s death was no longer an actuality, but the enterprising correspondent was proud of having ferreted out some unofficial information about that fact of modern history. He had got hold of Haldin's name, and had picked up the story of the midnight arrest in the street. But the sensation from a journalistic ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... 'an historical drama being the incarnation—through the most compact and brilliant literary form—of the spirit of a national epoch, the dramatic author, in adopting historic personages and events, is bound to subordinate himself with conscientious faithfulness to the actuality he attempts to reproduce. His task is, by help of imaginative power, to give to important conjunctures, and to the individuals that rule them, a more vivid embodiment than can be given on the literal page of history—not to transform, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... a tribute at once to the art of her treatment and the actuality of her theme that, after reading the delicate little study of modern romance that ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL calls The Lovers (HEINEMANN), I cannot determine whether the clever writer was reproducing or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... where you find an instinctive and therefore an honest passion for the ideals of democracy, you should find a great literature expressing and interpreting the democracy. I have given already some reasons why in practice this has not yet become an actuality in America. Let me add, in discussing the bearing of this argument upon the third category of American literature, the democratic, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... preliminary part of the subject has been dwelt upon thus at length in an effort to win assent to the general proposition that unconscious education is not only possible, but an actuality. This assent being once given, the mind feels out at once for applications of the principle and, inevitably, brings the parent and the teacher into the field of view. But the parent is too near to us in time, in space, and in relation to afford the illustration that we seek, and we ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... Turgenieff, Tchaikowsky, Tolstoy, Moussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Mendeleyeff and Metchnikoff. The world has looked at Russia as a land of uncultivated steppes, of frozen ground, hungry bears and desperate Cossacks, and forgets that in actuality this is the Russia of the past very extreme surface and next to it is a Russia of great civilization and the highest art, unknown yet to the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... sense of abasement passed, Truedale discovered that life in his little apartment was not only possible, but also his salvation. All the spiritual essence left in him survived best in those rooms. As time went by and Nella-Rose as an actuality receded, her memory remained unembittered. Truedale never cast blame upon her, though sometimes he tried to view her from the outsider's position. No; always ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... the gates of dream, which swung wide to a key of sound, he wandered on, fancy led, until some actuality broke the spell, bringing him back with a shock and an ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... freshness and buoyancy of the morning. Would her sparkling gaiety endure, I wondered, through the monotonous days ahead, when poverty became, not a child's play, not a game tricked out by the imagination, but the sordid actuality of hard work and ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... proportion to the many-sidedness of the reader's human interests and the catholicity of his tastes. Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a boy to the power of the great human book, warm with the actuality of experience and the life-blood of the heart. By humorous inversion, he points the sound moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real psychological discovery of life. With hearty laughter at the stupid irritations of ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... to prove the inadvisability of partaking of Welsh rabbits and lobster salads immediately before retiring. More than once Mr. Leary had bedreamed thus, but at this moment he realised how much more dread and distressing may be a dire actuality than a vision conjured up out of ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... hat and the boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the general elections—I am sometimes tempted to suppose is no story-teller at all, but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears in actuality; so that, by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Musgrave could not quite believe in the actuality of what had just happened. In common with most of us, he got his general notions concerning the laws of life from reading fiction; and here was the material for a Renaissance tragedy wasted so far as any denouement went. Destiny, once more, was hardly rising to the possibilities of the ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... also signifies that he takes care to preserve his self-determination, and his power of idealizing, in opposition to the pleasant filling of his consciousness with material. Herein the delight of the child for fairy tales finds its reason. The fairy tale constantly destroys the limits of common actuality. The abstract understanding cannot endure this arbitrariness and want of fixed conditions, and thus would prefer that children should read, instead, home-made stories of the "Charitable Ann," of the "Heedless ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... Her stupid husband and her fascinating lovers will enter the scene in order that she may become whatever she has it in her to be. Flaubert elects to place her in a certain provincial town, full of odd characters; he gives the town and its folk an extraordinary actuality; it is not a town quelconque, not a generalized town, but as individual and recognizable as he can make it. None the less—always supposing that Emma by herself is the whole of his subject—he must have lit on this particular town simply because it seemed to explain and expound ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... souls of which Plato speaks. It is true marriage as I have sometimes visualised it in my dreams, but which, unfortunately, I shall hardly be able to realise in actuality." ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... plan proposed by present-day critics be put into effect, that on the promise of a constitution we should agree to the adoption of a monarchy, then the promise must be definitely made to the country at the time of transition that a constitutional government will become an actuality. But if, after the promise is made, existing conditions are alleged to justify the continuance of autocratic methods, I am afraid the whole country will not be so tolerant towards the Chief Executive. To assume outwardly ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... old Apache relics, living now so quietly on the bounty of a none-too-generous government? What dreams of settlement massacres, of stage robberies, of desperate fights, they may conjure up until the wheezy arrival of the Arizona Eastern locomotive disperses their visions with the blast of sordid actuality! ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... the dark background, turning in a gruesome fashion, as if wind-blown, first one way and then another. It was a human body. The feet were tied by a bridle-rein, the hands bound behind by the suspenders the corpse had worn. Bradley had seen the thing in fancy many times before, but never in such grim actuality as now. He strained his sight to make sure. There was no doubt. The thing was actually there—there, ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... faith than a demonstration, but none the less, all honest thinking has hitherto been brave enough to recognize the reality of evil and to test the power of God and His love and goodness not by the actuality of present pain, or the confusion of present sin, but rather by the power which He offers us of growing through pain to health or else so bearing pain as to make it a real contribution to character ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... outside where Madeira lived in the world of realities and met the various demands of each day's relations capably and coolly. Inside his private office behind the bank, at his desk, he lived in another world, a world where shadow became substance, possibility became actuality and fear made facts out ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... follows from the nature of a triangle, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles. The omnipotence of God has therefore been actual from eternity, and in the same actuality will remain to eternity. In this way the omnipotence of God, in my opinion, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... victories which the Russians think to win in Silicia. Rumor has it that the Germans have even encircled Paris and are at Fontainebleau to the south-southeast. This is highly improbable, but we have already seen that the wildest improbability of one day becomes an actuality the next. Everyone at the Embassy, and indeed all Paris, is desperately anxious for news. Even unfavorable news would be better than this prolonged suspense. Everyone inquires and wonders and queries, but no one knows what the real situation is—where the German army is stationed, what its next ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... back toward Nashville. But, then, on how few fields had Southern chivalry ever yet ventured to attack; how seldom, but when fairly cornered, had its champions deemed discretion not the better part of valor! What other possibility was there which was not more likely to become an actuality than that the enemy would here dare to assume the aggressive? Who that had the least regard for the dramatic proprieties, could ever assign to him any other part in the tragedy than one whose featliest display of skill and dexterity should be exhibited in executing the movements of guard ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... things, and indulged himself in a satirical comment of greeting, far from what he had intended. Poor Dick! he was always making sage resolutions on the chance of finding Raven and Nan together, but the actuality as inevitably overthrew him. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... opportunities and no more. We may, in and through it, become wise, good, pure, happy, noble, Christ-like, or we may not. The opportunity is there, swinging, as it were, in vacuo. Lay hold of it, says he, and turn it into more than an opportunity—even an actuality and a fact. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... for the most part of a replaceable nature, need be only trivially referred to, the incident, indeed, being generally regarded as a most cordial and pressing variety of foreign politeness), but also—in the lack of highly-spiced actuality—with subtly-imagined and truly objectionable instances. These calumnies they have not hesitated to commit to the form of printed books, which, falling into the hands of the ignorant and undiscriminating, may even suggest to ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... the theory of Pleasure. Aristotle now goes back to his starting point—the nature of the Good, and Happiness. He re-states his positions: That Happiness is an exercise or actuality [Greek: energeia], and not an acquirement or state (hexis), That it belongs to such exercises as are worthy of choice for their own sake, and not to such as are worthy of choice for the sake of something else; That it is perfect and self-sufficing, seeking nothing beyond itself, and leaving ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... by Moses and Aaron, of the overwhelming of the Pharaoh, whether Thotmes or Rameses, is skilfully managed, and imparts to the portions of the Biblical narrative used by him a verisimilitude and a sensation of actuality highly artistic. The purely erudite part of the work would probably not have interested the general public, indifferent to the discoveries of archaeology, but the introduction of the human element ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... general. The idea had seized me of writing a line to Hohenfels at Marly, actually dated from the grand duchy of Baden. Undoubtedly I should reach Marly before my letter, but the postal mark would be a good proof of the actuality of my wanderings. Clinging, then, to my childishness, as we do to most of our follies, with a fidelity which it would be well to imitate in our grave affairs, and feeling pressed for time, I looked eagerly around for a resting-place where I could procure ink and paper, and entered at the sign ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... when it comes to words,—that medium of understanding and sympathy, in which the identity of the common nature is perpetually declared, even in the most private conferences,—there is usually an attempt to clothe the forlorn and shrinking actuality with the common human dignity, or to make it, at least, passably respectable, if the claim to the heroic is dispensed with,—even in oral speech. But in writing, in letters, destined to never so brief and limited an existence, who puts on paper for the eye of another, for the review of that ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... prepared to take any risk rather than allow the Princess Petrovska to escape him again. There was nothing against her but suspicion. It was for him to find evidence that might link her with the crime. It is in such things that the detective of actuality differs from the detective of fiction. The detective of fiction acts on moral certainties which would get the detective of real life into bad trouble. To arrest the Princess was out of the question; even to detain her might make ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... both Kabr and Ruysbroeck expressly acknowledge it—a universe of three orders: Becoming, Being, and that which is "More than Being," i.e., God. [Footnote: Nos. VII and XLIX.] God is here felt to be not the final abstraction, but the one actuality. He inspires, supports, indeed inhabits, both the durational, conditioned, finite world of Becoming and the unconditioned, non-successional, infinite world of Being; yet utterly transcends them both. He is the omnipresent Reality, the "All-pervading" within Whom "the worlds ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... professors himself, but it would really be something to study under this one. Not that the old boy didn't have some points, of course. Almost all nonconformists base their particular peeves on some actuality, but in this case, what was the percentage? How could you buck the system? Particularly when, ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... the actuality of the performance puts it beyond all contradiction. With his tongue he'd so vowel you out as smooth Italian as any man breathing; with his eye he would sparkle forth the proud Spanish; with his nose blow out most robustious ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... and Phebe Braley, Calvin was conscious of the persistence of the depression that had invaded him at the announcement of her visit. He resented, too, the new element thrust into the Braley household, disrupting the familiar course of his love. Hannah had been unreasonably distracted by the actuality of Phebe's return—the Phebe who had gone away from the mountains and ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... a train of the elevated railroad rushed by with a clattering roar and a trailing plume of white steam. Then a cable-car clanged past with incessant bangs upon its gong. Thus it was that I came back to the world of actuality. ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... ago, may serve to mark the distinction I draw between my conception and a Utopia. His is the ingenious invention of a modern mind thoroughly schooled in the principles of political economy, it is as remote from actuality as the Equatorial mountain on which his dream State lies. "Freiland" is a complicated piece of mechanism with numerous cogged wheels fitting into each other; but there is nothing to prove that they can be set in motion. Even supposing "Freiland societies" were to come into existence, ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... of Lenau during the afternoon." "Another echo of your dream. And now I shall demonstrate to you another subordinate wish-fulfillment in your dream. You walk in front of your house with the lady on your arm. So you take her home, instead of spending the night at her house, as you do in actuality. The fact that the wish-fulfillment, which is the essence of the dream, disguises itself in such an unpleasant form, has perhaps more than one reason. From my essay on the etiology of anxiety neuroses, ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... desire. When an empirical philosophy, therefore, calls us back from the irresponsible flights of imagination to the shock of sense and tries to remind us that in this alone we touch existence and come upon fact, we feel dispossessed of our nature and cramped in our life. The actuality possessed by external experience cannot make up for its instability, nor the applicability of scientific principles for their hypothetical character. The dependence upon sense, which we are reduced to when we consider the world of existences, becomes ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the pleasant afternoon, the glimpse of the great Louvre on the other side of the Seine, in the interstices of the sallow estampes suspended in window and doorway—all these elements of a rich actuality availed only to mitigate, without transmuting, that general vision of a high, cruel pillory which pieced itself together as I drew specimen after specimen from musty portfolios. I had been passing the shop when I noticed in a small ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... had been vacantly gray for over three thousand hours, was now a vertiginous swirl of color, the indescribable color of a collapsing hyperspatial field. No two observers ever saw it alike, and no imagination could vision the actuality. Trask found that he was holding his breath. So, he noticed, was Otto Harkaman, beside him. It was something, evidently, that nobody got used to. Even Guatt Kirbey, the astrogator, was sitting with his pipe clenched in his mouth, staring at ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... was not to be wondered at that a speech so delivered—a mere soliloquy—should fail to be impressive. It was too far and away unreal—had too little actuality to reach the poor humble breasts that were panting for excitement and exhortation. But once throughout it all was there a touch of that somewhat sardonic humour that sometimes delights even Lord Salisbury's political foes. Replying to the very ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... large as exquisitely to stagger imagination, others charming by their number and crispness—the dignified, orange paper of a man of assured position and wealth-crackling greenbacks the design of which tinged the whole with actuality. He was specially partial to engravings of President Lincoln, the particular savior and patron of his race. This five hundred dollars he was adding to an unreckoned sum of about two thousand, merely as extra fortification against a growing sense of gloom. He wished to brace his flagging spirits ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... a child. Children whom I see daily seem to do so. But thought is life. Mere enjoyment is dreaming. It may seem to cover hours or days or years of experience, but when we awake it has been only a point of time. But this pleasure-dream is worse than a sleep-dream. Over its costly actuality of time, cut out and dropped down out of life, the hither and thither ends of the shortened thread of existence must be knotted together into a cord of diminished ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... revelation, (4) the creation of the world out of nothing, (5) the unity of the human race, (6) the origin of evil from freedom, and the inalienable nature of freedom, (7) the two Testaments, (8) Christ as God and Man, the unity of his personality, the truth of his divinity, the actuality of his humanity, the reality of his fate, (9) the redemption and conclusion of a covenant through Christ as the new and crowning manifestation of God's grace to all men, (10) the resurrection of man in soul and body. But the transmission and interpretation of these propositions, by means of which ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... everything looked—even the wind, which could certainly be felt, and the rain, and the heat of the fire. From the descriptions he had amassed through his unwearied questioning, he had pieced out for himself a quaint little world of color and light,—how like or unlike the actuality ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... I remember now that I told you, did I not, that you were not likely to be a soldier because you could pretend it too well ever to be the thing in actuality." ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... Man is born into the world a child of divinity—born for the purpose of development and perfection. Life is the great laboratory in which he works out his experiment of eternity. In potentiality, a God—in actuality, a creature of heredity, environment, and teaching. "Why do I teach?" To help someone else realize his divinity—to assist him to become all that he might become—to make of him what he might not ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... feel the actuality of it all, that if this book should fall into the hands of the people to whom the vision refers, I will ask them to communicate with me. I have no idea what their past has been, but I know their characters well. The fact that they have no children is a sorrow to them, but has served to centre ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... have the greater opportunity for attaining the actuality of what is simple and true," ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... of the contest was the manner in which the "sporting editor'' gave actuality to the contests by pictorial representations. One competition took the form of a shooting match. The house organ contained an enormous target with two rings and a bull's eye. When a salesman qualified with orders for ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... during the late sixties was nothing short of a scandal. Alliances between political rings and railroad officials for the purpose of caring for their mutual interests were so common that reformers questioned whether the American people could be said to possess self-government in actuality. Immediately after the Civil War, Charles Francis Adams, an acute student of transportation, declared that it was scarcely an exaggeration to say that the state legislatures were becoming a species of irregular boards of railroad direction. The evils of the alliance ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... something of this cannot fail to be present in any relation, be it ever so intimate, because that which is common to the two is perhaps never common only to them but belongs to a general conception, which includes much else, many possibilities of similarities. As little actuality as they may have, often as we may forget them, yet here and there they crowd in like shadows between men, like a mist gliding before every word's meaning, which must actually congeal into solid corporeality in order to be called rivalry. Perhaps ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... disappointment: he had rushed home and thrown himself into her arms and told her that he was accepted. He was to sing in the choir. The hope had become an actuality. ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... distance for a moment. Then, with sudden actuality, "Apropos of interim sports," she demanded, "what are you going to do about that cat of yours?" A movement of her ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... of. Actuality: in argument. Adams. Adjectives. Advantages: of expressing ideas gained from experience; of imaginative theme writing. Adverbs. Agreement. Allen, Elizabeth A. Allen, James Lane. Ambiguity. Analogy: argument from. Antithesis. Apostrophe: rule for; as figure of ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the outward and visible sign that a nation recognizes its own needs and aspirations. Democracy wells up from the very pit of things. Its value is its foundation in actuality, its concordance with the slow unending process of man's evolution from the animal he was. Democracy, for one with any comic and cosmic animal sense, is the only natural form of government, because alone ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... horror or grief, or of both. Failing in this, it fails altogether. To this end Seneca introduced his Ghost, and his disciples filled their speeches with passionate outcry and lurid pictures of horrible events unfit to be presented in actuality. Gorboduc rained death upon a whole nation, Tancred and Gismunda invoked every awful epithet and gruesome description of dungeon and murder, for the same purpose. But the purpose remained unfulfilled—at least, ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... was plain that the new policy was suffering from a certain flatness on the further side. As a ballon d'essai it lacked buoyancy; and no doubt Mr Farquharson was right in declaring that above all things it lacked actuality, business—the proposition, in good set terms, for men to turn over, to accept or reject. Nothing could be done with it, Mr Farquharson averred, as a mere prospect; it was useful only to its enemies. We of the young countries must be invited ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... than of sanitation; but over all, and in the end overpowering all, were the sweet, pervading odour of the new-sawn boards and the exquisite aroma of the different fragrant gums—of pine, cedar, or fir—which memory will acknowledge as the incense to conjure up again in vivid actuality these early ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the conditions which brought this modern attitude of the Papacy into potent actuality. He was surrounded by intellectual and moral forces of recent growth but of incalculable potency. One of the first acts of his reign was to advance six members of the moderate reforming party—Sadoleto, Pole, Giberto, Federigo, Fregoso, Gasparo Contarini, and G.M. Caraffa—to ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... virtues and other faculties possessed by man potentially were not bound by anything inherent in him to develop into actuality, he might have remained to all eternity in his admirable and most fitting primitive condition, but for the fortuitous concurrence of a variety of external changes. What are these different changes, which may perhaps have perfected human ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... force it was soon felt that a new power had arisen. The Commissioner was not only a name but an actuality. Nothing was so trivial as to escape his attention; nothing too wide for him to grasp. He knew his men—it is said that he knows every man in the force, an exaggeration with a great deal of truth in it—and they soon ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... incident, so incredible that next day she still had great difficulty in deciding whether it was an actuality or a dream. She heard a little very familiar sound. It was the last sound she would have expected to hear and she turned sharply when she heard it. The paper-covered door in the wall of her husband's ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... if you allow female suffrage to go hand in hand with it. I believe that if there is any one influence in the country which will break down this tribal antipathy, which will make the two races one in political harmony and political action, not in actuality as races by amalgamation, but which will induce that harmony and that co-operation which may bring about the highest state, perhaps, of social civilization and development, it is the fact that woman and not ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... to what purpose can we pray for a consummation which, it will be urged, is ex hypothesi an accomplished fact at the time that we ask for it? We reply that the Divine indwelling in man is of the nature of a capacity for striving rather than of an attainment, a potentiality rather than an actuality, a prophecy rather than a fulfilment. Man's longing for communion with God, as for an unrealised good, is the longing of like for Like, but it is only through struggle and effort that the goal can be reached. The Eternal is indeed the Life of all life, and to that extent it ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... In this quest no scruples should deter them, no sentimentality hamper, no universal ideals distract. Yet this, after all, was but German romanticism assuming another form. The objects, it is true, were different. "Actuality" had taken the place of ideals, Germany of Humanity. But by the German vision the new objects were no less distorted than the old. In dealing with "Real-politik" (which is the German translation of Machiavellianism), with "expansion," with ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... him in detail; in fact told him the scene in greater detail and with a greater length than had been the actuality. Also she censored the scene by omitting her own opposition to Larry's determination. She enjoyed playing with Barney, the exercise of the power ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... highest perfection, or God, is not itself coextensive with being, but the final cause of being—that on account of which the whole progression of events takes place. Reality is the development with all of its ascending stages from the maximum of potentiality, or matter, to the maximum of actuality, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... WILLIAM HEWLETT'S new story, The Plot-Maker (DUCKWORTH), we are introduced to a popular and highly successful novelist, named Coulthard Henderson, in the emotional crisis produced by a sudden doubt as to whether his output of best-sellers represented anything in the least approaching actuality. You will admit a tragic situation. He meets it by the determination that his next book shall be a veritable slice of life, and to this end he selects and finances an eligible young man for the purpose of vicariously experiencing those emotions, from which age and other ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... hospitals, busy newspaper offices, etc., etc. These are almost entirely detached from my will, and the chief interest of the spectacle is the unexpectedness of its episodes. The scenes and the people have all the concreteness and detail of actuality, although I never forget that I am observing my own hallucinations. Just fancy what ghosts I could see in the dark if I lost my central control and let my Sub-Consciousness get the upper hand! Sociologists say, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... once suggested!" I reply. The actor made a significant grimace. The conqueror of Asia seemed to him to be wanting in actuality. And leaning toward his wife, ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... 'worm' was a monster of vast size and power—a veritable dragon or serpent, such as legend attributes to vast fens or quags where there was illimitable room for expansion. A glance at a geological map will show that whatever truth there may have been of the actuality of such monsters in the early geologic periods, at least there was plenty of possibility. In England there were originally vast plains where the plentiful supply of water could gather. The streams were deep and slow, and there were holes of abysmal depth, where any kind ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions thus cramped and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness, with which we turn to those plays of Shakspeare which have escaped being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the same writer which have happily been left ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... avert the dreaded calamity. An eminent solicitor assures me that during the last four-and-twenty hours a striking change of opinion has taken place. Red-hot Home Rulers when confronted with the looming actuality are on all sides abandoning their loudly proclaimed political opinions. My friend's business—he is, or has been, an ardent Home Ruler—is chiefly connected with land conveyancing, and he declares that his office is besieged by people anxious to "withdraw their charges" on land and ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... formal natures with one another, and are individual only in their material aspect. Since God is one and only, his essentia and his esse must be given at one stroke. This excludes from his being all those distinctions, so familiar in the world of finite things, between potentiality and actuality, substance and accidents, being and activity, existence and attributes. We can talk, it is true, of God's powers, acts, and attributes, but these discriminations are only "virtual," and made from the human point of view. In God all these points of view fall into an absolute identity ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... sinlessness became more and more absolute sinlessness by his own moral act, or the right use of his freedom in the perfect active and passive obedience to God. In other words, Christ's original possibility of not sinning, which includes the opposite possibility of sinning, but excludes the actuality of sin, was unfolded into the impossibility of sinning, which can not sin because it will not. This is the highest stage of freedom, where it becomes identical with moral necessity, or absolute and unchangeable self-determination for goodness and holiness. This is the freedom of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sunshine, and together with these, gifts of humour and pathos to which Crabbe could make no pretension. From Chaucer, Crabbe passes to the great but very different master, on whom he had first built his style. Was Pope, then, not a poet? seeing that he too has "no small portion of this actuality of relation, this nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere"? Here again, of course, Crabbe overlooks one essential difference between himself and his model. Both were keen-sighted students of character, and both described sordid and worldly ambitions. ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... bringing down her vague ideas of money that came from somewhere, through her father's pocket, as water comes from Lake Kinsittewink by the turning of a faucet, to the narrow point of actuality. ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... said often that love constitutes man's life. This does not mean, however, love separate from wisdom or good from truth in the cause, for love separate or good separate is not an actuality. The love which makes man's inmost life—the life he has from the Lord—is therefore love and wisdom together; neither is the love which makes his life as a recipient being separate in the cause, but only in the effect. For love cannot ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... of other countries, fired by the realization of what could be done, staged revolutions, happily largely bloodless, and soon, working through the United Nations Council, a United World government became an actuality, and Burkett one of ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... who had been an unconscious barrier between them lies dead under their roof. It is a somewhat painful episode, and precludes anything like high esteem for Rutherford, but it has the quality of intense actuality. ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... the possibility of being devoid of dramatic interest, by the succession of movements being too rapid for us to realise each completely, and too fatiguing, even if realisable. Now if a way could be found of conveying to us the realisation of movement without the confusion and the fatigue of the actuality, we should be getting out of the wrestlers more than they themselves can give us—the heightening of vitality which comes to us whenever we keenly realise life, such as the actuality itself would give us, plus the greater effectiveness of the heightening brought about by the clearer, intenser, ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... enchantress appears to be now prowling in poverty and degradation, concludes the curious story. The narrative bears marks of having passed through a French translation and then a British version. To disentangle the thread of actuality that probably runs through it would be too troublesome and futile; but the truths that the wily Melek cannot help telling—the facts of the harem and of Eastern life that involuntarily sprinkle it all like a flavoring of strange spices—these are what ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... Audrey made that marriage. For any one who had enjoyed the friendship of such men as Langley Wyndham and Flaxman Reed, there was bathos in the step; it seemed an ugly concession to actuality. It may have been; for Audrey was nothing if not modern, the daughter of an age that has flirted with half-a-dozen ideals, all equally fascinating, and finally decided in favour of a mature realism. She may have learned that hardest lesson of the schools, the translation of life's drama from fancy ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... the earlier historical plays are indeed marked by his prevailing sanity of perception; always they show the play of the seeing eye, the ruling sense of reality which shaped his life; it is this visible actuality that best marks them off from the non-Shaksperean figures around them. And in the wonderful figures of Falstaff and his group we have a roundness of comic reality to which nothing else in modern literature thus far could ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... scene was at once intimate and remote. Its distinguishable features had the sense of nearness and actuality of some piece of splendid stagecraft, yet he seemed to be peering not at the rigid outlines of time but rather into the vague, almost terrifying, depths of eternity. And it was a bewildering fact that this glimpse ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... identical in meaning,—a species is the perennial succession of similar individuals in continued generations. The species is the chain of which the individuals are the links. The sum of the genealogically connected similar individuals constitutes the species, which thus has an actuality and ground of distinction not shared by genera and other groups which were not supposed to be genealogically connected. How a derivative hypothesis would modify this view, in assigning to species only a temporary fixity, is obvious. Yet, if naturalists adopt this hypothesis, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... analogy and fancy. This hazardous game is half the delight, the frolic, of daily life. I glow as I read of splendours which the eye alone can survey. Allusions to moonbeams and clouds do not emphasize the sense of my affliction: they carry my soul beyond affliction's narrow actuality. ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... us truly, of that typical American who, in Dr. Talmage's mind's eye, was coming, but who, in Abraham Lincoln's actuality, had already come. In some recent studies into the career of that man, I have encountered many startling confirmations of this judgment; and from that rugged trunk, drawing its sustenance from gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier sprays and Puritan ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... their vital manifestation may be kept in abeyance for five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty years. Though not living any more than the wheat, they also retain the potentiality of manifestation of life; and for each alike, in order that this potentiality may pass into actuality, the first requisition is water with which to restore them to that possibility of molecular rearrangement under the influence of incident forces, of which the absence of water had deprived them, and without which, life in any real ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... of sense, or (2) by intuitions, are invalid as representations of real truth. Yet the conception of God referred to is justified by our primary intuitions, and we can assure ourselves that it does stand for an actuality by comparing it with (1) our intuitions of free-will and causation, and (2) our intuitions of morality and responsibility. That we have these intuitions is a point on which the Author joins issue with Mr. Spencer, and confidently affirms that they cannot logically be denied ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart |
