"Abstract" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vertical bands of red (hoist side), blue, and red; centered on the hoist-side red band in yellow is the national emblem ("soyombo" - a columnar arrangement of abstract and geometric representation for fire, sun, moon, earth, water, and ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... is fitting," said he, "that it should be seen by the right person." Louis XV, astonished at the strange scene, inquired what it meant. "A most shameful piece of scandal, sire," replied I. "An infamous epistle," added the chancellor, "which one of my friends managed to abstract from the post-office, and forwarded to me: I brought it to madame la comtesse, that she might admire the determined malice of our enemies." "You excite my curiosity," cried Louis XV. "Madame, have the kindness to allow me to see ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... more was he seen of men. Shut up in his study, he worked feverishly day and night, writing his autobiography. Exemplar Humanae Vitae—an Ensample of Human Life, he called it, with tragic pregnancy. Scarcely a word of what the world calls a man's life—only the dry account of his abstract thought, of his progress to broader standpoints, to that great discovery—"All evils come from not following Right Reason and the Law of Nature." And therewith a virulent denunciation of Judaism and its Rabbis: "They would crucify ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... great question of abstract sovereignty, it was certainly impolitic for an absolute monarch to recognize the right of a nation to repudiate its natural allegiance. But Elizabeth had already countenanced that step by assisting the rebellion against Philip. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... This abstract doctrine required to be elucidated and fixed. From a hypothesis to concentrate and reduce it to a reality was the great work ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... soil a small percentage of water will cause better germination than in a clay soil. While different seeds vary in their power to abstract water from soils, yet it seems that for the majority of plants, the best percentage of soil-water for germination purposes is that which is in the neighborhood of the maximum field capacity of soils for water, as explained in Chapter ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... also. He wrote much, and he wrote effectively, because he taught that which was in accordance with the feelings and interests of his readers; but he was of the old school, dead now, with its professors. He disliked abstract ideas or principles, and did not trouble himself much with their investigation. The consequence was, that he made no addition to politico-economical knowledge, and left nothing by which he should be remembered ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... word, covered with fine clothes, and goes about in pomp and glitter. It builds in the abstract: telescopes for the blind, lutes for the deaf, flowers for the starved. Bah! charity has had little bearing ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... seem that contemplation or meditation is not the cause of devotion. No cause hinders its effect. But subtle considerations about abstract matters are often a hindrance to devotion. Therefore contemplation or meditation is not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... when "I," the practical, intelligent, abstract-making, idealising, generalising, clever, separated "I," the "I" which has a past, a present and a future, renounces its usurpation of the steering apparatus, that play can be. "I," to play or to pray or to love, must be born again. "I" must relinquish all. "I" ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... of men and manners, printed weekly. Had it not been supported by the government, not a fourth part of the expenses of the proprietor would have been refunded to him by the sale of his newspaper. It was a short abstract of the newspapers of New York and Albany, "accommodated" to the anti-American principles of the Governor, with an epitome of the Quebec Gazette. It was the medium through which the Acts of the Legislature, ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... minutes' walk of the City Hall." Why the City Hall should be considered as an eligible terminus of anybody's walk, under any circumstances, I have not been able to determine. Never having walked from my residence to that place, I am unable to verify the assertion, though I may state as a purely abstract and separate proposition, that it takes me the better part of an ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... anything that Tom would have liked to make, it was a trip North. It was something he had long contemplated in the abstract, but had never been able to muster up sufficient courage to attempt in the concrete. He was prudent enough, however, ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... present. All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His constant direction of affairs, all my habit of continual prayer and of realisation of His Presence—all were against me now. The very height of my trust was the measure of the shock when the trust gave way. To me He was no abstract idea, but a living reality, and all my heart rose up against this Person in whom I believed, and whose individual finger I saw in my baby's agony, my own misery, the breaking of my mother's proud heart ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... able to lay before you some better biography of him than the traditions of Vasari, of which I gave a short abstract some time back in Fors Clavigera (Letter XXII.); but as yet I have only added internal evidence to the popular story, the more important points of which I must review briefly. It will not waste your time if I read,—instead ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... who had taken the chief part in the first publication, made an able abstract and a comparison with the Grebo and Mandenga tongues ("Western Africa," part iv. chap. iv.). M. du Chaillu further abridged this abridgement in his Appendix without owning his authority, and in changing the examples he did all possible damage. In the Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... had already given an account of its introduction by Mahindo, and of the establishments founded by successive sovereigns for its preservation and diffusion. To render the narrative complete, it was felt desirable to insert an abstract of the peculiar tenets of the Buddhists; and this want it has been my object to supply. The sketch, it will be borne in mind, is confined to the principal features of what has been denominated "Southern Buddhism" amongst the Singhalese; ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... the natives fully satisfied me that there was no possibility of getting inland, and my own experience told me that I could never hope to take a loaded dray through the dreadful country I had already traversed on horseback. What then was I to do? or how proceed for the future? The following brief abstract of the labours of the party, and the work performed by the horses in the three attempts made to get round the head of the Great Bight, may perhaps seem incredible to those who know nothing of the difficulty ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... an effort which left him staring at the girl in awkward silence. When he had thought of Lang's daughter at all, it had been only in the most abstract way. He had regarded her only a possible and very probable source of trouble, scarcely as a flesh and blood woman at all. Never a ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... about it, on the other. Speculative theory has taken its own way, however, as a part of philosophy, in relating the Beautiful to the other great concepts of the True and the Good; building up an architectonic of abstract ideas, far from the immediate facts and problems of the enjoyment of beauty. There has grown up, on the other hand, in the last years, a great literature of special studies in the facts of aesthetic production and enjoyment. Experiments ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... curriculum, almost as ignorant as a ploughboy. She despised a man whose only delight was in horse and hound, gun and fishing-tackle. Molly would have cared very little for the guns or the fishing-tackle perhaps in the abstract; but she cared for everything that interested Maulevrier, even to the bagful of rats which were let loose in the stable-yard sometimes, for the education of a particularly ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... new thoughts, new studies, and new habits. Colored women must be led along the new lines of thinking. Although many have seemed stupid about some of the abstract studies, they have native powers that ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... Mr. Snyder abstract of report on nut contest and paper on beechnuts. Regret I cannot be at convention. Crop of nuts here is better than ever before. Best wishes for success of convention. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... taken to her lodging that the sheriff wanted her, had something to say to her. It was too late; the poor washerwoman was dead. The letter that had brought the sheriff news of his brother's death also gave an abstract of his will; among other bequests he had left six hundred rix-dollars to the glove-maker's widow, who had formerly served his parents. "There was some love-nonsense between my brother and her," quoth the ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... rush and roar of the coming storm, the agony, the death that might have occurred there, were now uppermost in her mind. She had found an opportunity to ask Webb questions similar to those of Miss Hargrove, and he had given Burt full credit for taking a fearful risk. A woman loves courage in the abstract, and when it is shown in behalf of herself or those whom she loves, he who has manifested it became heroic. But her homage troubled Burt, who was all at sea, uncertain of himself, of the future, of almost everything, but not quite ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... her head was even carried a little higher than usual as she left the room. But outside the door her steps flagged; and she went slowly up the stairs, asking herself if she was bound to mind what her aunt said. She was not clear about it. In the abstract, Matilda was well enough disposed to obey all lawful authority; just now a spirit of opposition had risen. Was this lawful authority? Mrs. Englefield was sick, to be sure; but did that give Mrs. Candy any right to interfere with ...
— What She Could • Susan Warner
... remarked Elisabeth thoughtfully, "I shall always like you, because we have been friends so long, and you are overgrown with the lichen of old memories and associations. But you are not very interesting in the abstract, you see; you are nice and good, but you have not heart enough ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... high reputation of the original author as a geographer, affords a satisfactory guaranty for the character of the work, which is adapted to the use of seminaries without forfeiting its claims on the attention of the more abstract student ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... eighth, the ninth, the tenth centuries, when only the brief age of Charlemagne offered any chance of an independent and progressive Catholic Empire in the west, the Arabs became recognised along with the Byzantines as the main successors of Greek culture. The science, the metaphysic, the abstract ideas of these centuries came into Germany, France, and Italy from Cordova and from Bagdad, as much as from Byzantium. And on questions like the South Atlantic or Indian Ocean, or the shape of Africa,—where Islam had all the field to itself, and there was no positive and earlier discovery ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... popular historiographers, we receive with great satisfaction the addition to our present list of translations of such chronicles, which Mr. Lower has given us in The Chronicle of Battel Abbey from 1066 to 1176, now first translated, with Notes, and an Abstract of the subsequent History of the Establishment. The original Chronicle, which is preserved among the Cottonian MSS., though known to antiquaries and historians, was never committed to the press until the year 1846, when it was printed by the Anglia Christiana Society ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... himself and human nature, although all had been educated together in perfect equality. His sense and penetration shone through everything. His replies, even in anger, astonished everybody. He amused himself with the most abstract knowledge. The extent and vivacity of his intellect were prodigious, and rendered him incapable of applying himself to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... deity in silence, impercussively, without any vociferous or obstreperous sound. My design is not to enter into a privation of gratitude towards you, but by a vivacious formality, though matter were to abstract itself from me, excentricate to you ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... love had been the creed of her life and the mainspring of her actions, and, save her father and her one friend Radna, she stood aloof from mankind and its loves and friendships, rather the beautiful incarnation of an abstract principle than a woman, to whom love and motherhood were the highest aims ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... how this Ideal may be concentrated in a certain abstract line, not only of sensuous, but of intellectual Beauty,—a line which, while it is as wise and subtle as the serpent, is as harmless and loving as the sacred dove of Venus. I have endeavored to prove how this line, the gesture of Attic eloquence, expresses the civilization of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... spoken he knew that he was asking a great deal. It was torture to his mother to express an opinion on an abstract question. She did not lack decision of conduct. She could resolve in an instant to send a drunkard to an institution or take a trip round the world; but on a matter of philosophy of life it was as difficult to get her to commit herself as if she had been upon the witness-stand. Yet it was ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... too great consequence to be trusted at the end of a rash German's sword! however, the General wrote again, and hinted at coming himself for an answer. So it happened that when he arrived, the Count was gone to the baths of Lucca-those waters were reckoned better for his health, than steel in the abstract-How oddly it happened! He Just returned to Florence as the General was dead! Now was not this heroic lover worth running after? I wonder, as the Count must have known my lady's courage and genius for adventures, that he ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... (a fierce sort of fairy) had produced a command out of a drawer almost as unexpectedly as in a fairy tale. But a command is an abstract idea, and it seemed a sort of "lesser marvel" till it flashed upon me that it involved the concrete ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... virtue, and Madison be applauded for his courage in avowing a change of opinion, if he saw in the practical application of Hamilton's principles dangers that had not occurred to him when looking at them only as abstract theories. But the Federalists believed that Madison, governed by these purely selfish motives, sacrificed his convictions of what was best for the country that he might secure for himself a position on what he foresaw was the winning side. It is quite likely that the more ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... No. 55, kindly translated for this book by Mr. W. H. D. Rouse, of Christ's College, Cambridge. There is a brief abstract of the Jataka in Prof. Estlin Carpenter's sermon, Three Ways of Salvation, 1884, p. 27, where my attention was first called to ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... against him. One half of her letter was a mere guide-book to the Roman antiquities, and was broken off short for some carnival gaiety. Lord Erymanth clearly liked his letters as little as we did. In the abstract, in spite of the first cousinship, I am afraid he would rather have given Viola to Pigou St. Glear than to Harold Alison, but he had thought better of his niece than to think she could forget such ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... derive most of what distinguishes them from the English. The Scot is more excitable, more easily brought to a glow of passion, more apt to be eagerly absorbed in one thing at a time. He is also more fond of abstract intellectual effort. It is not merely that the taste for metaphysical theology is commoner in Scotland than in England, but that the Scotch have a stronger relish for general principles. They like to set out by ascertaining and defining such principles, and then to pursue a series ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... not at liberty to materially change the rules of international law during the war, because every change suggested is discussed, not upon its merits as an abstract proposition, but according to the effect it will have upon the contest. Those who wanted to lay an embargo upon the shipments of arms defended their position on the ground that it would hasten peace, but it is strange that ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... shipping, and the rest was leisure. He could now have gone away somewhere as far as time went. So can a fish live in trees—as far as time goes. And in the daily riding, riding, riding over the range he found the opportunity for abstract thought which the frontier life had ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... convenient, or which strikes his fancy, provided it does not outrage decency or is unallied to profligacy; is not ashamed to speak to a beggar in rags, and will associate with anybody, provided he can gratify a laudable curiosity. He has no abstract love for what is low, or what the world calls low. He sees that many things which the world looks down upon are valuable, so he prizes much which the world contemns; he sees that many things which the world admires are contemptible, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... their ideas, as to test the details and intensify their musical sensibility by the excitant sounds, the actual sensual impression of which is, of course, an essential element in all music. The composer can always hear such things in his mind, but obviously the music in such an abstract form can never have quite as much effect upon him as when the sounds really strike upon his ear. [See Studies of Great Composers, by C. Hubert H. Parry, ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... Moses," and three appended tractates on the virtues "Courage," "Humanity," and "Repentance." Scholars[83] are of opinion that there are gaps in the extant "Life of Moses," but the general plan of the work is clear. It is at once an abstract and an interpretation of Jewish law for the Greek world, and also an ideal biography ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... the only notions of morality she ever possessed; otherwise, it would have been love's labor lost to talk to her of virtue or of duty. These words would have conveyed no meaning to her imagination; she knew no more about them than about the abstract ideas which ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... received their expansion over the world was not completely drawn up, although the most of it remained with me. If you wish to give me a real proof of friendship, have the kindness to write out for me such an abstract, and I shall have a hemispherical map colored for myself accordingly and add it to Lesage's Atlas, since, in view of my residence abroad for so much of the year, I am compelled to think more and more of my general need of a compendious and tabulated traveling ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... own sphere, were coming closer and closer to a perception of that secret which was first to reveal itself clearly to the patient and humble genius of Darwin. In the year before, in 1856, Darwin, under pressure from Lyell, had begun that modest statement of the new revelation, that 'abstract of an essay', which developed so mightily into 'The Origin of Species'. Wollaston's 'Variation of Species' had just appeared, and had been a nine ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... distinguished botanic physician of Ohio, with several other physicians, both of the old and the new school, whom I have not named, do not hesitate to regard a pure vegetable diet, in the abstract, as by far the best for all mankind, both in health ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... that human progress depends on the success with which the laws of phenomena are investigated and the extent to which a knowledge of them is diffused, overlooks the essential element of movement, which is not abstract knowledge, but vital force. Men and nations move in virtue of their passionate, moral, and spiritual forces, and these determine the character of their intellectual development and expression. A nation which knew all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... the life of the group, and as he grows so he comes more and more under the influence of social forces. The consequence is that the key to a very large part of the phenomena of human nature is to be found in a study of group life. We may abstract the individual for purposes of examination, much as a physiologist may study the heart or the liver apart from the body from which it has been taken. But ultimately it is in relation to the whole that the true significance and value ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... and, besides, have ransacked the law-books and cited an enormous number of cases, more or less in point, as illustration of their respective contentions. The courts find nothing more difficult than to apply an abstract principle to all classes of cases that may arise. The facts in each case so frequently create an exception to the general rule that such rule must be honored rather in its breach than in its observance. Therefore, after a careful examination of these cases, it is no criticism of the courts ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... attitude, but had hoped that she would not adopt it. She possessed in a high degree the feminine art of provoking a quarrel. But he found much consolation in the fact that she had thus shifted the discussion from the abstract to the personal. He smiled slightly, and Phil Abingdon's expression relaxed in response and she lowered her eyes quickly. "Why do you persistently treat me like a ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... actually existing beings to us. We follow the travellers through their allegorical progress with interest not inferior to that with which we follow Elizabeth from Siberia to Moscow, or Jeanie Deans from Edinburgh to London. Bunyan is almost the only writer who ever gave to the abstract the interest of the concrete. In the works of many celebrated authors, men are mere personifications. We have not a jealous man, but jealousy; not a traitor, but perfidy; not a patriot, but patriotism. The mind of Bunyan, on the contrary, was so imaginative that personifications, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... submarines first began their attacks upon British war-ships and merchant vessels the admiralty was faced by a state of affairs which had been dealt with more or less in the abstract, the only practical lessons at hand being those of the Russo-Japanese War, which conflict, as a matter of fact, left rather an unbalanced showing so far as the undersea boat and the surface craft were concerned; in ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... to present any labored analysis of the writings of Emerson,—too late to set down any eulogy. Whoever loves to deal with first principles, and is not deterred from grappling with abstract truths, will find in these essays a rare pleasure in the exercise of his powers. These volumes are universally admitted to be among the most valuable contributions to the world's stock of ideas which our age has furnished. Every page bears ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... they understood a word of them, and when they reached the age of four[FN121] they had read a variety of hymns and spiritual songs. Then they were set to learn by heart precepts that inculcate sacred duties, and arguments relating to theology, abstract ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... may or may not have seemed irrelevant: that a quantity of whisky much larger than Manderson habitually drank at night had disappeared from his private decanter since the last time he was seen alive. On the following day, the day of the inquest, I wired little more than an abstract of the proceedings in the coroner's court, of which a verbatim report was made at my request by other representatives of the Record; and it will be remembered that the police evidence showed that two revolvers, with either of which the crime might have been committed, had been found—one ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... Leibnitz (1646-1716). Bacon, as the earliest path-breaker, showed the way, theoretically at least, in which the sciences should be studied; Descartes, pursuing the methods pointed out by Bacon, carried the same line of abstract reason into practice as well; while Leibnitz, coming some years later, and having the advantage of the wisdom of his two great predecessors, was naturally influenced by both in his views of abstract ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... "Alhamdolillah—Laud to the Lord who adorned the virginal bosom with breasts and who made the thighs of women anvils for the spear handles of men!" To the same amiable theologian are also ascribed the "Kitab Nawazir al-Ayk fi al-Nayk" Green Splendours of the Copse in Copulation, an abstract of the "Kitab al-Wishah fi fawaid al-Nikah" Book of the Zone on Coition-boon. Of the abundance of pornographic literature we may judge from a list of the following seven works given in the second page of the "Kitab Ruju'a al-Shaykh ila Sabah fi ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... mental picture of some new and unknown piece of machinery would mean nothing to an unmechanical mind, or even to a mechanical mind which was not endowed also with the inventive faculty. In other cases only thoughts in the abstract could be sent, and these were more likely to remain unassimilated than the mental pictures, as a very high order of intellect was required to receive ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... Death is grateful. It is not a punishment; it is peace. But Durga Ram, called Umballa, will spend the remainder of his days in the treadmill, which is a concrete hell, not abstract." ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... too large for assurance on this idea. I felt an impatience to see it opened. About eleven, as nothing seemed happening, I walked back, full of such thought, to my home in Maybury. But I found it difficult to get to work upon my abstract investigations. ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... healthiest and strongest men, who live years without a morsel of animal food; and the fact can only be accounted for, by supposing that the system has the power to make the most economical use of the little nitrogen offered to it in the food; or else that it has by some means the power to abstract it from the atmosphere, and transform it to ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... is not enough,' he replied, laughing at my ignorance. 'God is love, but love in the abstract, which receives its incarnation in the mutual affection of two hearts which idolize each other. You, then, must not only love God in His abstract existance, but must also love Him in His incarnation, that is, in the exclusive love of a man who adores you. Quod Deus ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... Bretonne,[5307] "of the power of the king to compel any man to bestow his wife or daughter on me, and my village (Sacy, in Burgundy) thought as I did."[5308] There is no room in minds of this description for abstract conceptions, for any idea of social order; they are submissive to it and that is all. "The mass of the people," writes Governor in 1789, "have no religion but that of their priests, no law but that of those above them, no morality but that of self-interest; ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... not broach the abstract question of equality: I am willing to admit that in the eye of our Maker we are, and before the law ought to be, all equal—that is to say, ought all to have an equal chance; but to abolish the idea of subordination in the employed to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... also this time that question so puzzling to metaphysical inquirers, "What is a boy?" I know not: I rather suspect he had not leisure for so abstract a question; for the whole household burst on him, and my mother, in that storm peculiar to the elements of the Mind Feminine—a sort of sunshiny storm between laughter and crying—whirled him off to ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "Livingstone followed the dictates of duty. Never was such a willing slave to that abstract virtue. His inclinations impel him home, the fascinations of which it requires the sternest resolution to resist. With every foot of new ground he travelled over he forged a chain of sympathy which should hereafter bind the ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... Binet tests depend greatly on the use of language, they are not fair to the deaf child, nor to the child with a speech defect, nor to the foreign child. Also, some persons who are clumsy in managing the rather abstract ideas dealt with in the Binet tests show up better in managing concrete objects. For all such cases, performance tests are useful. Language plays little part in a performance test, and concrete objects are used. ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... and in 1876, feeling unable for Oxford duty, I obtained a year's leave of rest, and, by the kind and wise counsel of Prince Leopold, went to Venice, to reconsider the form into which I had cast her history in the abstract of it given in the ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... none of THEIR fault either. In they came to the drawing-room, in white frocks and blue sashes. They handed the cigarettes. Rhoda had inherited her father's cold grey eyes. Cold grey eyes George Plumer had, but in them was an abstract light. He could talk about Persia and the Trade winds, the Reform Bill and the cycle of the harvests. Books were on his shelves by Wells and Shaw; on the table serious six-penny weeklies written by pale men in muddy boots—the weekly creak and screech ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... is all does so because he is an utilitarian. He acts on the definite and refuses to believe in the abstract. Anything that is outside the sphere of his vision and action is of ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... the views attributed to him. Be this as it may, I cannot help having my doubts. All Dr. Goodnow is alleged to have said bearing on the merits of the monarchical and republican system of government as an abstract subject of discussion, such as the necessity of the form of state (Kuo-ti) being suited to the general conditions of the country and the lessons we should learn from the Central and South American republics, are really points of a very simple nature and easily deduced. How strange that among ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... with no excitement, as if she were discussing an abstract case. Sometimes, when she spoke like this, Felipe for the moment felt as if she were entirely right, as if it were really a disgraceful thing in Ramona to have thus loved Alessandro. It could not be gainsaid that there was this gulf, of which she spoke. Alessandro was undeniably Ramona's ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... has no tales of love. Her poetry is about gods and abstract religions. Wherefore, if I may choose, I will a tale from Persia next. In that country there was a verse-maker called Firdousi, and he wrote a great poem, The Shah Nameh, with a warrior for hero. This is how Rustem, in single combat, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... complicated, and you cannot understand. No woman can understand. That is why you run to sentiment. That is what is the matter with this Knox—sentiment. You can't run a government of ninety millions of people on sentiment, nor on abstract ideas of justice ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... with the real interest of ignorance; I could listen for her words and watch for her smile with hope and fear: she had for me the fascination of an unravelled destiny. I say it was this fact that chiefly determined the strong effect she produced on me: for, in the abstract, no womanly character could seem to have less affinity for that of a shrinking, romantic, passionate youth than Bertha's. She was keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical, remaining critical and unmoved in the most impressive scenes, inclined ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... irritated by the sentimentalism and dress-parade revolutionism of the socialist sects. He looked upon their projects as childish and theatrical, that gave as little promise of changing the world's history as battles between tin soldiers on some nursery floor. He seemed no longer concerned with ideals, abstract rights, or "eternal verities." Those who misunderstood him or were little associated with him were horrified at what they thought was his cynical indifference to such glorious visions as liberty, fraternity, and equality. Like Darwin, Marx was ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... chance," he continued. "Pickpockets usually abstract the money, instantly, and throw the book and papers away. They want no tell-tale evidence. It may be the case here—they, likely, didn't examine the letter, just saw it was a letter and ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... (5) For instance, fishes are naturally conditioned for swimming, and the greater for devouring the less; therefore fishes enjoy the water, and the greater devour the less by sovereign natural right. [16:1] (6) For it is certain that nature, taken in the abstract, has sovereign right to do anything, she can; in other words, her right is co- extensive with her power. (7) The power of nature is the power of God, which has sovereign right over all things; and, inasmuch as the ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza
... well as weak by the introducing sentence, "Volvitur Euryalus leto," after which the simile of the drooping flower is absurd. Of criticism, the chief use of which is to warn all sensible men from such business, the following abstract of Diderot's notes on the passage, given in the 'Saturday Review' for April 29th, 1871, is worth preserving. (Was the French critic really not aware that Homer had written the lines ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... alive. It throbbed with consciousness, with mysterious fibres of communication. There was no sense of a presence in the room, nor even the possibility of a presence. It was vague, abstract, yet curiously definite. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... and abstract statement is the theme dealt with in Pauline. The young poet, who, through a fading autumn evening, lies upon his death-bed, has been faithless to his high calling, and yet never wholly faithless. As ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... softened the blow to a certain extent that Mike should be going to Wain's. He had the same feeling for Mike that most boys of eighteen have for their fifteen-year-old brothers. He was fond of him in the abstract, but preferred ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... primary purpose is to convey an abstract truth, a something bigger and broader than the mere interesting events described, the illustrations add much to the meaning and purpose of the text. Here the artist shows not only the physical attributes of the real animal, but in a subtle way ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... philosophy; and, in short, bewildering himself as much as ever his great namesake has done with theories and schools. But, Clemency, who was his good Genius - though he had the meanest possible opinion of her understanding, by reason of her seldom troubling herself with abstract speculations, and being always at hand to do the right thing at the right time - having produced the ink in a twinkling, tendered him the further service of recalling him to himself by the application of her elbows; with which gentle flappers she so jogged his memory, in a more literal construction ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... unknown seas and traces for him in the heavens an unerring path to his appointed haven. And had not mathematicians toiled for so long, and, to uninstructed observers, apparently so fruitlessly, over the abstract relations of lines and surfaces, it is probable that but few of our mechanical inventions would have ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... settle with their property in the Territory, without their rights, either of person or property, being destroyed or impaired by Congressional or Territorial legislation. The two last words contained the gist of the resolution, which was aimed at Senator Douglas. However right as an abstract principle, Mr. Stephens declared that this was a departure ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... our luncheon before Mrs. Macallan arrived at Benjamin's cottage. The ensuing conversation between the old lady and myself (of which I have only presented a brief abstract) lasted until quite late in the afternoon. The sun was setting in heavy clouds when we got into the carriage, and the autumn twilight began to fall around us while we were still ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... Congress could with advantage cut down very materially on all the printing which it has now become customary to provide. The excessive cost of Government printing is a strong argument against the position of those who are inclined on abstract grounds to advocate the Government's doing any work which can with propriety be left in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... I have no experience of women. In the abstract, it seems to me that every man has a right to some explanation from the woman who ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... need of sound guidance. Though Scharnhorst had pointed out the way of salvation, a strategic tempter was soon at hand in the person of General von Phull, an uncompromising theorist who planned campaigns with an unquestioning devotion to abstract principles. Untaught by the catastrophes of the past, Alexander once more let his enthusiasm for theories and principles lead him to the brink of the abyss. Phull captivated him by setting forth the true plan of a defensive campaign which he ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... a century and a half since Ant. Wood printed a notice of the reverend Thomas Powell, and more than a century since the inquisitive Oldys devoted eighteen pages to an abstract of his Human industry;—yet we search in vain for the name of Powell in the dictionaries of Aikin, Watkins, Chalmers, Gorton, &c.—It is even omitted in the Cambrian biography of his countryman William ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... antipathy happens to be convenient, flattering it all they can; saying that though they have no intention of laying hands on an Establishment which is efficient and popular, like the Anglican Establishment here in England, yet it is in the abstract a fine and good thing that religion should [xviii] be left to the voluntary support of its promoters, and should thus gain in energy and independence; and Mr. Gladstone has no words strong enough to express his admiration of the refusal of State-aid by the Irish Roman Catholics, who have never ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... could not follow such abstract thought. He looked blankly at the judge. His mind had done its best when it had rejected without hesitation the gift of Adelle's fortune because he happened to be a grandson ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... all contributions whose style suggests that melodious rhythm which De Quincey and Ruskin made fashionable for their generations, and Stevenson revived in the 'nineties. He complained that the writer is no longer allowed to write as well as he can; that he must abstract all unnecessary color of phrase, all warmth of connotation and grace of rhythm from his style, lest he should seem to be striving for "atmosphere," instead of going about his proper business, which is to fill the greedy stomach of the public ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... imbibes of these things is from outside influence, after due lapse of time. A prosperous, luxurious city of merchants and statesmen, she was too much bound up in the transactions and sensations of actual life to develop any abstract and thoughtful ideals. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... was, a resident, who for the more love of the common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all about the valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son: more, perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract countryman is ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by the material aspect of my position to spare thoughts for its abstract quality. But, looking back from the cool greyness of later life, one sees a wistful pathos, and, too, a certain stirring fineness in the situation. And if that is so, how infinitely the pathos and ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... the same time and taken possession of it; their vague home intimacy had ripened into an interested friendship as they strolled back to college from the weekly meetings, once more refighting the frigidly abstract battles in which they had lately engaged from the depths of arm-chairs with their feet on the table and piled dessert-plates in their laps. Without effort or desire Waring had set a fashion and founded a school of icy fastidiousness. ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... authors who have partially treated this theme, is the first who can be considered either impartial or comprehensive; and upon his authority, not seldom using his words, we shall now present to our readers the first continuous abstract of this most interesting ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Mr. Greeley had evidently lost sight of his economic theories as applied to slavery in the abstract, and now, as a practical philosopher, caught hold of the question by the handle. Mr. Lincoln replied within a few days, but was still joined to his abstract theories of constitutional law. He loved the Union, and all he should do for the slave should be ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... weakly otherwhiles; yet I ever believed both that Thou wert, and hadst a care of us; though I was ignorant, both what was to be thought of Thy substance, and what way led or led back to Thee. Since then we were too weak by abstract reasonings to find out truth: and for this very cause needed the authority of Holy Writ; I had now begun to believe that Thou wouldest never have given such excellency of authority to that Writ in all lands, hadst Thou not willed thereby to be ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... group is fused with emotion and moves almost as an undivided unit toward some end, then the claim of a right, on the ground of conscience, for the individual to deviate from the group and to pursue another or an opposite course appears serious if not positively insufferable. The abstract principle of individual liberty all modern persons grant; the strain comes when some one proposes to insist upon a concrete instance of it which involves implications that may endanger the ends which the intensified group is pursuing. A situation of this type confronts the Quakers ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... over from boots to bandless hat with the same evidence of curiosity as a person displays when turning some washed-up object with the foot on the sands. It was as if he had but an abstract interest in the youth, a feeling which the incident had obtruded upon him without penetrating the ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... observers of human nature, owed their renown more to an acute observation of the phenomena of feeling, an intuitive knowledge of what people like and dislike, a retentive memory, and a happy knack of making all these available at the right moment, than to any profound reasoning on abstract principles. Like some untaught arithmeticians, their calculations came out correct, but they could not have gone through the steps of ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... begin getting his wine direct from the merchant instead of from the Common Room cellar, which would be a reductio ad absurdum of the tariff. Yet I have heard this course advocated, repeatedly, as an abstract principle. "You ought to consider the original value only," I have been told. "You ought to regard the Port-drinker as a private individual, who has laid the wine in for himself, and who ought to have all the ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... to be possessed of abstract volition. I could not take them off. They were held by some terrible fascination; and I felt, or fancied, that the moment this should be broken, the animal ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... interpreters who are entitled to the name of thinkers, supplies us only with the general principles of moral judgments; it is a branch of our reason, not of our sensitive faculty; and must be looked to for the abstract doctrines of morality, not for perception of it in the concrete. The intuitive, no less than what may be termed the inductive, school of ethics, insists on the necessity of general laws. They both agree that the morality of an individual action is not a question of direct perception, but ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... related all bodies. It was probably from this that Mesmer got his idea of what he called the universal fluid. It would seem, however, that Maxwell was aware of the great influence of imagination and suggestion. He said: "If you wish to work prodigies, abstract from the materiality of beings—increase the sum of spirituality in bodies—rouse the spirit from its slumbers. Unless you do one or other of these things—unless you can bind the idea, you can never perform anything good or great." ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... simple robe of India muslin, Henry led the blushing Henriette to the altar of Hymen. They were acquainted with each other's characters, in the abstract. ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... have read him right through in the course of the year, which is much the best way to read a poet, as you can follow the development of his thoughts. His mind, to my thinking, was profound but not of very wide range, and strangely abstract. His only pressing intellectual problems are those of immortality and evil, and he reached his point of view on those before he was forty. He never advances or recedes from the position summarised in the preface to "In Memoriam," ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... ourselves to abstract right for five minutes. Then I leaned back in my chair, and looked at Halicarnassus. He rested his right elbow on the table, and looked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... with indifference, even by the press, which has satisfied itself in discussing the abstract right as a question of law, rather than by disclosing the sufferings of those who endure the wrong and injustice. When we are called upon to support, and are made to suffer the penalty of laws founded in domestic fear, and made subservient to various grades of ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... himself remembered—that such a one should be merely the butt and laughing-stock of his readers! It is an unendurable position. Not that Keats attaches undue importance to popular applause. "Praise or blame," he says, "has but a momentary effect upon the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.... In Endymion I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore and took tea and comfortable ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... the fault lay in themselves. Their minds were twin whirlpools of chaotic opinions. Revolutionaries in arts and letters as they claimed to be, they detested novelties in religion, politics, medicine, science, abstract speculation. It never struck them that it was incongruous, not to say absurd, to claim complete liberty for themselves and to denounce ministers for attempting to extend the far more restricted liberty of others. And as with the ordering ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... "thread of the all-sustaining beauty, which runs through all and doth all unite" gently leads us from the things which are tangible and temporal to the truths which are spiritual and eternal; from the beauty of the concrete to the beauty of the abstract, onward along the road of beauty and farther up the heights of truth until our admiration for the beauty of the sunrise, the snow crystal, the graceful spray of the trees in winter, the exquisite order ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... up of many elements. Certain of them are essentially abstract. They must be thought out by a sort of mental vision without words. This is the most subtle and intimate part of the picture. These are the means by which the ideal is ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... prevailed, it became necessary for Mr Sparkler to repair to England, and take his appointed part in the expression and direction of its genius, learning, commerce, spirit, and sense. The land of Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Newton, Watt, the land of a host of past and present abstract philosophers, natural philosophers, and subduers of Nature and Art in their myriad forms, called to Mr Sparkler to come and take care of it, lest it should perish. Mr Sparkler, unable to resist the agonised cry from the depths of his ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... and viewed from the standpoint of abstract morality, their attitude was that of the freebooter. The backwoodsmen lusted for the possessions of the Indian, as the buccaneers of the Spanish main had once lusted for the possessions of the Spaniard. There was but little ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... garrulity. Both your systems can be packed in a phrase, and reduced to a single idea. The mere routine of living brings a stupid kind of wisdom with it, by blunting our intelligence with work; and on the other hand, a life passed in the limbo of the abstract or in the abysses of the moral world, produces a sort of wisdom run mad. The conditions may be summed up in brief; we may extinguish emotion, and so live to old age, or we may choose to die young as martyrs to contending passions. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Friday and Saturday followed the explicit demand made by the Council regarding the patronage of the Crown, that demand being based on the construction put by some of the gentlemen on the meaning of responsible government, different opinions were elicited on the abstract theory of that still undefined question as applicable to a colony."[10] There can be no doubt that the casus belli was an absolute assertion of the right of the council to control patronage, but it is, at the same time, {170} perfectly clear that in the opinion of ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... persecutors salvation was a process, like that struggle for life which is the modern form of the struggle for salvation to the superstitious. And because salvation was a process human beings were sacrificed to it. It did not matter how they were tortured, provided this abstract process was maintained. So it does not matter now how they are slaughtered, provided the abstract process of the struggle for life is maintained. To the German this war was part of a process, the historical process of the triumph of Germany, and it did not matter how many Germans were killed in ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... and partly the other. The first volume is made up of essays in which the idea of evolution, general or special, is dominant. In the second volume essays dealing with philosophical questions, with abstract and concrete science, and with aesthetics, are brought together; but though all of them are tacitly evolutionary, their evolutionism is an incidental rather than a necessary trait. The ethical, political, and social essays ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... said, "I know we talked about it; but I'm hanged if I'll try unless I'm sure you are absolutely keen. I thought it all out after—after I'd seen her, and it seemed to me all very well in the abstract giving her up to another man and all that, but when it came to the point, would you be really sure to want me to carry through? I've seen her now, you know, and I'm glad I've seen her. I'll be glad always for that, but it needn't go ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... participated in the same intellectual faculties, suffered from the same wants, and were alive to the same pleasures; they perceived that there were no conventional fashions, nor national distinctions, in abstract truths and fundamental knowledge. A new spirit seems to bring them nearer to each other: and, as if literary Europe were intent to form but one people out of the populace of mankind, they offer their reciprocal labours; they pledge to each other the same opinions; ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... conventional or political arrangement that may be abrogated at will and taken from any; that it is simply a privilege yielded to you and me and others by society or the Government which represents society; that it is only a gracious boon from some abstract place and abstract body for which we should be proud and thankful; in other words, that it is not a right in any sense, but only a concession. Mr. President, I do not hold my liberties by any such tenure. On the contrary, I believe that whenever you establish ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... ability to think abstractly and to form words with an abstract significance that human language owes much of its high development. But this ability is largely confined to civilized mankind, savages being greatly or wholly lacking in it. This deficiency is indicated in their modes of speech. ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... position so markedly at variance with the idealism of his later years? In all probability it was his rooted suspicion of reasoning as a deliberate and conscious process. Other writers of the century—Addison, for instance—had spoken as if men reasoned from certain abstract ideas (proportion, fitness, and the like) to individual instances of beauty, deciding a thing to have beauty or no, according as it squared or failed to square with the general notion This, as Burke points out, is more than questionable ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... in war in the abstract; he considered it one of the necessary evils, essential to the very existence of nations. This was nothing more than the logical sequence of his course in embracing those theories of evolution which in those days exercised such a potent influence on our young men of intelligence and ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... be rather abstract than practical, whether slavery ever can or would exist in any portion of the acquired territory even if it were left to the option of the slaveholding States themselves. From the nature of the climate and productions in much the larger portion of it it is certain ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... vice. It is rarely wise or feasible to attempt to suppress instincts; they should be directed so as to provide desirable conduct. Loyalty to family, to group, to neighborhood and to nation can not be lightly cast away for an abstract cosmopolitanism. But it can be expressed otherwise than by seizing everything in sight ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... nature, is absurd and impossible, to have it at once accepted by those who know, by painful experience, how doubtful all things are till they are proven, and how difficult it is to get satisfactory evidence of the most simple event in physiology or pathology. No one doubts the abstract possibility of a human being living without food, for, bearing in mind the discoveries that are constantly being made, nothing can be regarded as absolutely impossible outside the domain of mathematics. Two and two cannot make six, neither ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... our limits allow it, an abstract of Bougainville's voyage will be given as an appendix, in which mention will be made of the Indian ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... now the mode, the rage. Every one asks for them, every one tries to play them. We have, however, but few remarks upon the peculiarities of his style, or the proper manner of producing his works. His compositions, generally perfect in form, are never abstract conceptions, but had their birth in his soul, sprang from the events of his life, and are full of individual and national idiosyncrasies, of psychological interest. Liszt knew Chopin both as man and artist; Chopin loved to hear him interpret his music, and himself taught the ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... that celestial Colloquie sublime, As with an object that excels the sense, Dazl'd and spent, sunk down, and sought repair Of sleep, which instantly fell on me, call'd By Nature as in aide, and clos'd mine eyes. Mine eyes he clos'd, but op'n left the Cell 460 Of Fancie my internal sight, by which Abstract as in a transe methought I saw, Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape Still glorious before whom awake I stood; Who stooping op'nd my left side, and took From thence a Rib, with cordial spirits warme, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... effort than young girls at high-schools give to the first problems of Geometry—for which they will never have any practical use, while attention to this problem of home affairs will cultivate the intellect quite as much as the abstract ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... his old father to destruction. He never repined at the sacrifice he had made—I will not say for his King, for King at present he had none; the throne had been laid low, and the precious blood of him who should have filled it had been shed. No; his sacrifices had been to an abstract feeling of loyalty, which made fealty to the Crown, whether worn or in abeyance, only second in his bosom ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... "Black Thief and the Knight of the Glen," the Black Thief being Conall, and the knight corresponding to the King of Lochlan (it is given in Mr. Lang's Red Fairy Book). Here it attracted the notice of Thackeray, who gives a good abstract of it in his Irish Sketch-Book, ch. xvi. He thinks it "worthy of the Arabian Nights, as wild and odd as an Eastern tale." "That fantastical way of bearing testimony to the previous tale by producing an old woman who says the tale is not only true, ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... not make very much difference to the machines whether there is poetry in them or not. It is a mere abstract ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... generally concrete. The artist may wish to give expression to a general truth, or philosophical principle, or ethereal fancy. These appear very abstract, but the artist embodies in material forms the idea he wishes to convey. The poet expresses his thought by the suggestion of material imagery, and emotion is most ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... healthy, normal man living who has not his dream. I have no hesitation whatever in admitting that I have mine. This house must be two things. It has got to be a concrete workshop for me, and it has got to be an abstract abiding place for a dream. It's rather difficult to build a dream house for a dream lady, so I don't know what kind of a fist I am going to ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... like this to Philip, as she sometimes did, she seemed quite unconscious that he was a listener, it was rather as if he were part of her and thinking the same thoughts. To Philip she seemed wonderful. He had never bothered his head in that way about abstract things when he was her age, and he could not understand it in her. What was more, he could not have thought as she did if he had tried. She had that sort of mind which accepts no stereotyped reflection or idea; she worked things out for herself. Her words were her own, and not another's. She ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "half an hour ago we had never seen each other, we regarded each other as enemies; there is a matter unsettled between us; we've thrown it aside, and away we've gone into the abstract! Wasn't I right in saying that we ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... tendency towards centralisation on the part of the Jerusalem priesthood beyond the presumption that the Priestiy Code must chronologically precede, not Deuteronomy merely, but also the prophets. For the sake of this presumption there is constructed a purely abstract (and as such perfectly irrefragable) possibility that furnishes a door of escape from the historical probability, which nevertheless it ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... imagine it from the part of it within the cognisance of man, offers a spectacle of moral or immoral or of non-moral significance. In the old times of Greece and in the modern world many have been devoid of the taste for argument on such subjects. Those who are uninterested in these abstract discussions are rarely in opposition to the mode of faith surrounding them, as to reject the doctrines held by the majority of one's friends and associates implies either a disagreeable disposition or an unusual interest in ultimate problems; they are usually orthodox according ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... book from the reader's hand and tossed it into a corner. "Sears-Roebuck are very tactless," she declared. "Everything they have to offer reminds one of home. What do you think of home, Ban? Home, as an abstract proposition. Home as the what-d'you-call-'em of the nation; the palladium—no, the bulwark? Home as viewed by the homing pigeon? Home, Sweet Home, as sung by—Would you answer, Ban, if I stopped gibbering ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... tree, and it should not have been recklessly hewed down and cast into the fire. The frequent assertion then made was that all discrimination was unjust, and that the popular will should be left untrammeled in the formation of new States. This theory was good enough in itself, and as an abstract proposition could not be gainsaid; but its practical operation has but poorly sustained the expectations of its advocates, as will be seen when we come to consider the events that occurred a few years later in Kansas and elsewhere. Retrospectively viewed under the mellowing light of ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... to me, Hilary, that this is hardly a matter of abstract right or wrong, or a good deal might be argued on my side of the subject. It is more a case of personal conscience. The two are not always identical, though they look so at first; but they both come to ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... hounds. All the mistiness and speculation in his mind was gone now. Good stamp of man, would give a capital account of themselves! Their faces, flushed by a day in the open, were masked with passivity, or, with a half-aggressive, half-jocular self-consciousness; they were clearly not troubled by abstract doubts, or any visions ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the expense of their decrease in representation, outside the basis of enumeration." It was the belief of the North that as the passions of the civil contest should die out, the Southern States, if not inspired by a sense of abstract justice, would be induced by the highest considerations of self-interest to enfranchise the negro, and thus increase their power in Congress by thirty-five to forty members of the House. It was the belief that when they should come to realize that the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... anything surprising in this pronouncement; it was accepted as seriously as any similar statement of the Prophet Samuel to the Children of Israel, and was evidently meant to imply that abstract ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross |
