"Clarity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fatigue disappeared. I realized a clarity of mind, an interesting exhilaration and sense of irresponsibility, of freedom from care, that were oddly enjoyable. Larry became ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... what it was that Karslake had promised, but found her memory of a sudden singularly sluggish. In fact, her mind seemed to have lost its marvellous clarity of those first moments after tasting the wine of China. Small wonder, when one remembered the emotional strain she had experienced ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... 'The light that did burn, will burn!' Clouds obscure— But for which obscuration all were bright? Too hastily concluded! Sun—suffused, A cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze,— Better the very clarity of heaven: The soft streaks are the beautiful and dear. What but the weakness in a faith supplies The incentive to humanity, no strength Absolute, irresistible, comports? How can man love but what he yearns to help? And that which men think weakness within strength, But angels ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... diffuse, and always exceedingly melodious. It is noticeable for its metaphorical felicity. But it was not in the sympathetic nature of the author, to which I just referred, to come sharply to the point. It is much to have merited the eulogy of Campbell that he had "added clarity to the English tongue." This elegance and finish of style (which seems to have been as natural to the man as his amiable manner) is sometimes made his reproach, as if it were his sole merit, and as if he had concealed under this charming form a want of substance. In ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... life. And, as in this life we move in ignorance and safety only by accepting the hair-balance of stupendous forces, so now I felt that my safety depended on my observation of the conditions that governed that region of light and clarity and Law. ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... the passion which invests these events in the memory of the present generation, that it is almost hopeless to sift and adjudicate the sober facts. Time has softened much; even the Civil War begins to stand forth in some firmness of outline and clarity of atmosphere. But when we come to reconstruction—grave historians grow almost hysterical, romancers pass the bounds of possibilities, and even official figures contradict one another ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... her and we enjoyed two blissful hours. She was no longer the stern capricious mistress, she was entirely a fine lady, a tender sweetheart. She showed me photographs and books which had just appeared, and talked about them with so much intelligence, clarity, and good taste, that I more than once carried her hand to my lips, enraptured. She then had me recite several of Lermontov's poems, and when I was all afire with enthusiasm, she placed her small ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... were on a lower wave length than any receiver then in existence could receive with any degree of clarity, and the additional fact that they appeared to come from an immense distance lent a certain air of plausibility to these ebullitions in the Sunday magazine sections. For some weeks the feature writers harped on the subject, but the hurried construction of new receivers which ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... relieve mild depression, increase energy and activity, and include cocaine (coke, snow, crack), amphetamines (Desoxyn, Dexedrine), ephedrine, ecstasy (clarity, essence, doctor, Adam), phenmetrazine (Preludin), methylphenidate (Ritalin), and ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... that fastened with peculiar emphasis and eagerness upon all the limits, the dissonances, the angularities that Shelley's harmonising fancy dissolved away. The ultimate psychological result was that the brilliant clarity and precision of his imagined forms gathered richness and intensity of suggestion from the vaguer impulses of temperament, and that an association was set up between them which makes it literally true ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Marshall handed down his most famous opinion. He condensed Pinkney's three-day argument into a pamphlet which may be easily read by the instructed layman in half an hour, for, as is invariably the case with Marshall, his condensation made for greater clarity. In this opinion he also gives evidence, in their highest form, of his other notable qualities as a judicial stylist: his "tiger instinct for the jugular vein"; his rigorous pursuit of logical consequences; his power of stating a case, wherein he is rivaled only by Mansfield; his ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... taught you to think, and given you a heart. God knows I envy the man who wins it! You have been in the college of the Limberlost all your life, and I never met a graduate from any other institution who could begin to compare with you in sanity, clarity, and interesting knowledge. I wouldn't even advise you to read too many books on your lines. You acquire your material first hand, and you know that you are right. What you should do is to begin early to practise self-expression. Don't wait ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... explain them I always made it a point to get him to do it. I had a fair knowledge of his subject—layman's knowledge—to begin with, but it was his teachings which crystalized it into scientific form and clarity—in a word, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... did not confront me with the torture of my darling, he did not bring tangible evidence of her suffering—he just sat and talked, describing with a remarkable clarity of language which seemed incredible in a foreigner, the 'amusements' which ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... the occupation of Charles Critchlow chemist under an agreement for a yearly tenancy." The catalogue ran to fourteen lots. The posters, lest any one should foolishly imagine that a non-legal intellect could have achieved such explicit and comprehensive clarity of statement, were signed by a powerful firm of solicitors in Hanbridge. Happily in the Five Towns there were no metaphysicians; otherwise the firm might have been expected to explain, in the 'further particulars and conditions' ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... sleep, until the great day of awakening. 'Tis a dreary mood—like clouded moonlight on troubled, turbid waters! And we could roast Love with his own torch—and we see every thing through crape spectacles, and have no clarity for the softer, more refined emotions and contemplations; so we plunge our head and ears into a chaos of most musty, dusty metaphysics; and by the time we are nearly choked with them, and have reasoned ourselves, first, out of all intercourse with an external world, secondly, out of its existence, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... Hamlet considers his madness the same that he so deliberately assumed. But his idea of himself goes for nothing where the experts conclude him mad! His absolute clarity where he has no occasion to act madness, goes for as little, for 'all madmen have their ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... The life is Christ. The light too is Christ, but only the body of Christ. The life is Christ himself. The light is what we see and shall see in him; the life is what we may be in him. The life 'is a light by abundant clarity invisible;' it is the unspeakable unknown; it must become light such as men can see before men can know it. Therefore the obedient human God appeared as the obedient divine man, doing the works of his father—the things, that is, which his father did—doing them humbly before unfriendly ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... John Morley's series, English Men of Letters, and in essays on Berkeley and on Descartes, all of which are republished in the Collected Essays. He contrived to preserve, in the most abstrusely philosophical of these writings, a simplicity and clarity which, although they have not commended him to professional metaphysicians, make his attitude to the problems of metaphysics extremely intelligible. The greatest barrier and cause of confusion to the novice in metaphysics is that the writings ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... and glowing with excitement, and her arms and shoulders, whose mobile, expressive gestures made her always the outstanding figure in any group. He was fascinated and his fascination exercised a sobering effect on him. With a growing clarity the events of the day came back—rage rose within him, and with a half-formed intention of taking her away from the crowd he started toward her—or rather he elongated slightly, for he had neglected to issue the preparatory ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... unconsciously increasing my pace as is my way when I am lost in abstraction; and, perhaps stimulated to greater mental clarity by the exercise, some of my doubts were dispersed and I became convinced at last that the shadowy figure which had dogged my footsteps on the night of the crime—the owner of those blazing eyes which had watched me from my garden—the woman who had stolen the amulet ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... fangs, with which this love Is grappled to thy soul." I did not miss, To what intent the eagle of our Lord Had pointed his demand; yea noted well Th' avowal, which he led to; and resum'd: "All grappling bonds, that knit the heart to God, Confederate to make fast our clarity. The being of the world, and mine own being, The death which he endur'd that I should live, And that, which all the faithful hope, as I do, To the foremention'd lively knowledge join'd, Have from the sea of ill love sav'd my bark, And on the coast secur'd it of the right. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... had been gaining a sort of dreadful clarity. I had avoided looking at the sword of kara-kiri, but my thoughts had been leading me mercilessly up to the point at which we were now arrived. No vestige of anger, of condemnation of the inhuman being seated ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... smoke for a long time—the increasing brightness seemed to diminish the clarity of the air. Before noon the pain in his side had become almost insupportable, and his head was swimming; he felt worn out, scarcely able to keep on his feet, but again a gray streak on the horizon put heart into him. It did not appear to move ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... the early clarity of thought had left him and his mind moved disjointedly in and out of seemingly brilliant, emotional solutions to his problem, he knew he must have a showdown. Lying back on the couch he drifted into sleep determined to have it out with Gordon ...
— Security • Ernest M. Kenyon
... count he knew himself to be ineligible; and in the same flash of insight he saw Bruce Cheniston, young, good-looking, distinguished in his profession, in the receipt of a large salary; and owned to himself, with that clarity of vision which rarely failed him, that Cheniston, rather than he, was a fit suitor for ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... nowhere. This plan had no beginning, that one had no ending, and the other neither beginning nor ending. Outside he lighted a cigar, not because at that moment he possessed a craving for nicotine, but because like all inveterate smokers he believed that tobacco conduced to clarity of thought. And mayhap it did. At least, there presently followed a mental calm that expelled all this confusion. The goal waxed and waned as he gazed down the great avenue with its precise rows of lamps. Far away he could discern the outline of ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... far otherwise with the English-speaking races—loosely called Anglo-Saxon, They are powerfully sexed; their feelings and sentiments go deeper than is possible to those of more ebullient temperament but fatal clarity of vision; refinement of mind and habit and manner is perhaps the most precious of their achievements, and they have established a code which not only demands rectitude of act but suppression of thought and desire where ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... to put before her the proposition he did have in his mind. In the dusk, even, those violet eyes seemed to look to the very bottom of his soul. Fortunate for him that its clarity was visible to the girl ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... bird called silverly, startling the dusk. It was a woodlark, and its song seemed even more vacillating than usual in the vast hush. At the first note all Hazel's thoughts of Reddin fled. It seemed that clarity, freshness, and music were bound up in her mind with Edward. She thought only of him as she ran up the hill over the minute starry carpet of ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... the Congress you can demonstrate effective legislative leadership by discharging the public business with clarity and dispatch, voting each important proposal up, or voting it down, but at least bringing it to a fair ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... fell, and all the little camp-fires under the trees twinkled bravely forth. Some of the men sang. One had an accordion. Figures, indistinct and formless, wandered here and there in the shadows, suddenly emerging from mystery into the clarity of firelight, there to disclose themselves as visitors. Out on the plain the cattle lowed, the horses nickered. The red firelight flashed from the metal of suspended equipment, crimsoned the bronze of men's faces, touched with pink ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... with a clarity of detail that left nothing to be desired, and he was corroborated in most respects by the Italian woman, who identified Mock Hen as the Chinaman with the iron bar. Their evidence was supplemented by that of ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... clearly conscious, my first thought that morning was to call her as soon as the sphere of clear perception should open before me. And with great suspense I awaited such a night, and morning after morning was disappointed and vexed that this clarity had not come. For as I said before, sometimes this perception eludes me for months and the dreams are on the ordinary confused, insignificant order. Then all at once some inexplainable cause summons forth the good, happy and clear moments ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... betokened complete seclusion from the sun, we clambered up the opposing steep emerging from an entanglement of jungle on a high and open ridge which commanded an unimpeded view to the west—a scene of theatrical clarity with a single theatrical smear. From a hollow far below slothful smoke filtered through the matted, sombre, dew-bespangled foliage, rose a few feet, and drifted abruptly, dissolving from diaphanous blue to nothingness. The resonant whooping of a swamp pheasant, antiphonal to a bell-voiced, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... obeyed—anger at his own impotence and frustration. It wasn't a clean anger. It was a dark, red-splashed thing that struggled and writhed inside him, a fierce unreasoning rage that seethed and bubbled yet could not break free. For an instant, with blinding clarity, Kennon understood the feelings of the caged male Lani on ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... the other hand, a superlative clearness is not necessarily admirable. To see truly, according to the fine saying of Renan, is to see dimly. If art is expression, mere clarity is nothing. The extreme clarity of an artist may be due not to his marvellous power of illuminating the abysses of his soul, but merely to the fact that there are no abysses to illuminate. It is at ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... and Jed seemed to retain their orientation to the past, the clarity of awareness. These two spent much time together, seemed always available when Cal needed them, yet did not intrude upon his thought. Frank now seemed one with the colonists. Louie lived on the outskirts ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... drama. It requires the grand manner to read it adequately, and the doppio movemento is exciting to a dramatic degree. I fully agree with Kullak that too strict adherence to the marking of this section produces the effect of an "inartistic precipitation" which robs the movement of clarity. Kleczynski calls the work The Contrition of a Sinner and devotes several pages to its elucidation. De Lenz chats most entertainingly with Tausig about it. Indeed, an imposing march of splendor is the second subject in C. A fitting pendant is this work to the C sharp minor Nocturne. Both ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... speak his mind was Olva's last plunge into the open. He saw now, with a clarity that was like the sudden lifting of some blind before a lighted window, that he had been beguiled, betrayed. He had thought that his confession to Bunning would stay the pursuit. He saw now that it was the Pursuer Himself who had instigated it. With that confession the grey shadow had drawn nearer, ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... opportunity was come. He was to serve her indeed, and sacrificially. He saw with a horrible clarity where his duty lay, and wondered that he had not seen it before. She needed him for Jacqueline as she would never need him for herself. Young Benoix was of the stuff of which martyrs are made; but as he stood there, gripping the little cross of his calling, ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... positive whether she was vexed or not because their conversation was of common-place things: The work he was doing, upon which he was aggravatingly reticent, or the severity of the last storm, or the amazing clarity of the night. Certainty, however, was hers that he was no longer sure of himself—that he was fighting silently against a growing conviction that she ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... soon homing, A patriarch that strolls Through the tents of his children, The Sun, as he journeys His round on the lower Ascents of the blue, Washes the roofs And the hillsides with clarity; Charms the dark pools Till they break into pictures; Scatters magnificent Alms to the beggar trees; Touches the mist-folk That crowd to his escort Into translucencies Radiant and ravishing, As with the visible Spirit of Summer ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... prologue may be in its restraint and picturesque vividness, and, not least, in its clarity. Confused business dealings may be described so that important sums, figures, and dates will be remembered and recognized when they appear again in the evidence. Counsel, for the time, occupies the center ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... apart from the scientific, side (developed in his own volumes) of his epoch-making discoveries is marked with a simplicity, clarity, and good sense beyond praise. I would specially refer such as doubt the sustaining influence of ancestral faith upon character and will to the eleventh and nineteenth chapters, in which are contained the opening and ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... Greek letter individually, such as {alpha beta gamma delta...}. The reader can distinguish these words by the enclosing braces {}. Where multiple words occur together, they are separated by the "/" symbol for clarity. Readers who do not speak or read the Greek language will usually neither gain nor lose understanding by skipping over these passages. Those who understand Greek, however, may gain a deeper insight to the original meaning and ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... many rare minds, had for years been jotting down his reflections in a private journal. It constitutes the story of his inner life, never told in his published writings. When a volume of the 'Journal Intime' appeared the year after his taking off, the world recognized in it not only an intellect of clarity and keenness, and a heart sensitive to the widest spiritual problems, but the revelation of a typical modern mood. The result was that Amiel, being dead, yet spoke to his generation, and his fame was quick and genuine. The apparent disadvantage ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... determined (in the strict scientific sense) are similarly impotent because they are, in the life of man, subordinate to ends. Consequently, Spinoza was able to write upon Human Freedom with a truth and clarity and force excelling by far all theological, teleological, "free-will," idealistic philosophers from Plato to Josiah Royce. Spinoza was able to write thus because, not in spite of the fact that he placed at the heart of his philosophy the ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... combination, the facts just stated are so extremely important that they deserve to be stated with the utmost emphasis and clarity. To this end I beg the reader to consider very carefully and side by side the two following series of numbers. The first one is a simple geometrical progression—denoted by (GP); the second one is a ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... pure gold like unto clear glass!—he had often puzzled over that as a child; gold always seemed so opaque a thing, a surface without depth; but, after all, it was true of the air about him to-day—clear and transparent indeed, with a perfect clarity and purity, and yet undoubtedly all tinged with lucent liquid gold. He sate long on a bench in the college garden, a little paradise for the eye and mind; it had been skilfully laid out, and Hugh used to think that he had never seen a place so enlarged by art, where so much ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... not scientific, for they have no clarity of argument. Their wanderings of thought are as intertangled as the sheep-walks on league after league of high grasslands. When one has a fancy to follow them, the pursuit is entertaining; but unless one has the fancy, there are livelier employments. Their chief interest ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... on. He burned to wipe out his own trickeries, his cowardice, his failures, to wreak a vile satisfaction on this girl who sat so disdainfully, with her chin lifted, her lips firm, oblivious of him. She baffled him. A mind like Plimsoll's never had the clarity of prevision to see the strength of character that had been in the prospector's child, even as he had never suspected her unfolding to beauty. It roused the vandal in him—he longed ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... to the people. And out that said temple our Lord drove out the buyers and the sellers. And upon that rock our Lord set him when the Jews would have stoned him; and the rock clave in two, and in that cleaving was our Lord hid, and there came down a star and gave light and served him with clarity. And upon that rock sat our Lady, and learned her psalter. And there our Lord forgave the woman her sins, that was found in avowtry. And there was our Lord circumcised. And there the angels shewed tidings to Zacharias of the birth of Saint Baptist ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... For clarity, in this e-text the "fractions" have been converted to a one-line citation, e.g., Rom. III, v, 25 (signifying Act III, scene v, line 25). Where the original does not use the fraction format, the citation style ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... at him stupidly. "Do? When I don't know whether I'm on my feet or my head?" he said. His drugged passiveness showed Oliver with desolating clarity that anything that could be done would have to be done by himself. He crept over toward the window with a wild wish that black magic were included in a Yale curriculum—the only really sensible thing he could think of doing would be for both of them ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... whispering embraces of sense, in the terror of seizure of the spirit, in the tranquil euthanasia of the end by the touch of speechless beauty, it seems to me a true symbol of life whole and entire. It is beautiful in language and feeling, with an extraordinary clarity and rise of power; and, above all, though rare in experience, it is real. A young poet's poem; but it has a quality never captured by perfect art. A poem for poets, no doubt; but that is the best kind. So, too, the poem, entitled ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... tavern, and at once people came forward who had heard from others, who again had heard from third or fourth parties, that the girl had seen the old man laid upon the table and her mother receiving money. Of course it was ascertained by Counselor Pinaud, the only man who retained clarity and judgment in the wild confusion, that Madeleine had taken presents from the managers of the tavern, as well as from other people; but it was too late by that time to discover and extirpate the root ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... final outcome of his proposition: where others saw mist and failure ahead, he saw clear weather and the port of success. Never did he waver: never did he deflect from his course. He knew no path save the direct one that led straight to success, and, through his eyes, he made Bok see it with equal clarity until Bok wondered why others could not see it. But they could not. Cyrus Curtis would never be able, they said, to come out from under the load he had piled up. Where they differed from Mr. Curtis was in their lack of vision: they could not ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... and believed me—I saw that from her sudden pallor, and from the way she laid her arms upon her bosom in terror and entreaty. In one instant all that had happened of late flashed through her mind; she reflected, and with pitiless clarity she saw the whole truth. But at the same time she remembered that I was a flunkey, a being of a lower order. . . . A casual stranger, with hair ruffled, with face flushed with fever, perhaps drunk, in a common overcoat, was ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... communication is desirable; it suggests that figures are tools for achieving this ornateness; it supplies examples of ornateness to be imitated in writing and speaking; it supports knowing the figures in order to understand both secular and religious writings; it proposes that clarity is found in the figures. In short, the work assisted Englishmen to understand eloquence as ...
— A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes • Richard Sherry
... were impounded by the commission, which also took charge of all correspondence with the colony. The records of the company demonstrated all too clearly the bankrupt state of its finances. The hearings before the commissioners demonstrated with equal clarity the hopeless division of the adventurers by bitter factional strife. Correspondence from the colony brought evidence of a desperate situation. Even Sandys had to admit that no more than 2,500 colonists were still alive in the colony, which was to confess an attrition, mainly by death, of something ...
— The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624 • Wesley Frank Craven
... more, determined to understand, shrank back with a sharp indrawing of breath, as there whirled past, it appeared only a few yards away, a flare of brilliant blue lines, in the midst of which passed a phantom-like body in a mist and accompanied by a musical sound (it seemed) of extraordinary clarity and beauty, that rose from a deep organ-note to the shrill of a flute, and down again Into a bass and a ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... the shifting attitudes toward taste held by most mid-century poets and critics. Cooper, who accepts the Shaftesbury-Hutchesonian thesis of the internal sense, emphasizes the personal, ecstatic effect of taste. Armstrong, while accepting the rationalist notions of clarity and simplicity, attacks methodized rules and urges ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... beer-gardens, the houses on the dunes (with a hint of the Rembrandt magic), or the bathing boys. His skill in black and white is best seen when he holds a pencil, charcoal, or pen in his hand. The lightness, swiftness, elasticity of his line, the precise effect attained and the clarity of the design prove the master at his best and unhampered by the slower technical processes of ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... free the soul of man. Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a Prussian pastor's son, and hence two-thirds a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war. Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals. And that other English novelist who springs from the servants' hall—let us not be surprised or blame him if he ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... spontaneous eloquence. But Hamilton had a pen which served him well, when he was forced to substitute it for the charm of his personality. It was so pointed, simple, and powerful, it classified with such clarity, it expressed his convictions so unmistakably, and conveyed his subtle appeals to human passions so obediently, that it rarely failed to quiver like an arrow in the brain to which it was directed. And this particular report was vitalized by the author's overwhelming sense of the great ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... with brilliant audacity when in his Birth of Tragedy (1872) he contrasted scornfully with the laboured and ineffectual constructions of the theoretic man, even of Socrates the founder of philosophy, the radiant vision of the artist, the lucid clarity of Apollo. 'His book gave the lie to a thousand years of orderly development', wrote the great Hellenist Wilamowitz, Nietzsche's old schoolfellow, indignant at his rejection of the labours of scholastic reason. But it affirmed energetically the passion of his own ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... of the most beautiful things in Holland. It is, however, in no sense Dutch: the girl is not Dutch, the painting is Dutch only because it is the work of a Dutchman. No other Dutch painter could compass such liquid clarity, such cool surfaces. Indeed, none of the others seem to have tried: a different ideal was theirs. Apart, however, from the question of technique, upon which I am not entitled to speak, the picture has to me human interest beyond description. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... overtones and rich harmonies of an organ. There was no formalism nor coldness, no hesitancy to plumb the stark reality of the occasion, but only the vibrant convictions of his own great faith in the goodness of God. Few can fail to recall the clarity and feeling with which he read St. Paul's immortal passage in 1st Corinthians, nor ever forget the prayer he invariably used in this service, "We seem to give him back ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... the logical progression of thought; it was to tell me how the difficulties are broken up into sections which, elucidated consecutively, together form a lever capable of moving the block that resists any direct efforts; lastly, it showed me how order is engendered, order, the base of clarity. If it has ever fallen to my lot to write a page or two which the reader has run over without excessive fatigue, I owe it, in great part, to geometry, that wonderful teacher of the art of directing one's thought. True, it does not bestow imagination, a delicate flower blossoming none ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... of a thousand times. His every action and word in the days of their first acquaintanceship came back to her with the wonderful inner clarity of sight and hearing that belongs to those who ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... the Southerners were fighting for independence and for nothing else; that no compromise over slavery; nothing but the recognition of the Confederacy as a separate nation would induce them to put up their bright swords. As Lincoln subsequently, in his perfect clarity of speech, represented Davis: "He would accept nothing short of severance of the Union—precisely what we will not and can not give.... He does not attempt to deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He can not voluntarily reaccept the Union; ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... great individual fortunes from railroads, it is advisable to present a preliminary survey of the concatenating circumstances leading up to the time when these vast fortunes were rolled together. Without this explanation, this work would be deficient in clarity, and would leave unelucidated many important points, the absence of which might ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... claws. Lydia was a born nurse. She knew little of thermometers, of charts, of technical terms, but her ability and instincts in the sick-room were unerring; and, when her husband succumbed to a raging fever, love lent her hands an inspiration and her brain a clarity that would have shamed ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... has been spelled out for clarity. "Employe", used throughout with no accent, has been replaced by "employee". "Buechner" appeared with the umlaut ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... identified by sensation, which latter by itself, we repeat, carries no suggestion of externality. This view revolutionises the whole psychology of Perception, and therefore, though it at once gives to that science a much-needed unity, clarity, and simplicity, it will naturally be accepted with reluctance by the laborious authors of the cumbrous theories ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... and left upon them the imperishable imprint of his own unique individuality. Although the traditions regarding him have been transmitted for centuries from mouth to mouth, they portray the character and work of Moses with remarkable clarity and impressiveness. Moses was primarily a patriot. He was also a prophet-statesman, able to grasp and interpret the significance of the great crises in the life of his people and to suggest practical solutions. Moreover, he was able to inspire ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... manner of working. He was less impatient, less romantic and emotional than Michelangelo; he was graver, quieter, more serene; and if he had little of the Greek sensuousness and the Greek love of physical beauty, he had much of the antique clarity and simplicity. To express his idea clearly, logically, and forcibly; to make a work of art that should be "all of a piece" and in which "things should be where they are for a purpose"; to admit nothing for display, for ornament, even for beauty, that did not necessarily and ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... issues McCloy thought the board did "not speak with the complete clarity necessary," but he considered the ambiguity unintentional. Experience showed, he reminded the secretary, "that we cannot get enforcement of policies that permit of any possibility of misconstruction." Directness, ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... in France should Hawkesworthify him. He did not object to being carefully edited, but he did not want to be decorated. He wrote excellent French narrative prose, and his work may be read with delight. Its qualities of clarity, picturesqueness and smoothness, are quite in accord with the fine traditions of the language. But, as it was likely that part of the history of his voyage might be published before his return, he did not want it to be handed ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... already lifting into upper air, a mingled tissue of shadows lay along the valley. In the magical clarity of the evening light he suddenly felt (as one often does, by unaccountable planetary instinct) that there was a new moon. Turning, he saw it, a silver snipping daintily afloat; and not far away, an early star. He had found no creed in the prayer-book that accounted for the ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... were bold, independent, and sound, his insight was very penetrating, and his knowledge of matters of criminal procedure and of prison conditions was accurate and ample. Facts which I afterward learned for myself were never out of accord with information he had given me; and the sanity and clarity of his judgments were refreshing and remarkable. His courage was undemonstrative but indomitable; he never complained of his own condition and experiences, but was instant in his sympathy with the misfortunes of others. No ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... presence of the record of these deep experiences, silence is better than words: is, indeed, for most of us the only possible attitude. The letters that follow must speak for themselves. The clarity of mind which Catherine always preserved, even in moments of highest exaltation, and her loving eagerness to share her most sacred experiences with those dear to her, have given her a power of ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... told us so much about himself as Tolstoi. Not only do we now possess his letters and journals, in which he revealed his inner life with the utmost clarity of detail, but all his novels, even those that seem the most objective, are really part of his autobiography. Through the persons of different characters he is always talking about himself, always introspective. That is one reason why his novels ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... have so strange an issue, made up his mind to give a great entertainment to all his friends and lovers in the city. Because it might be said of him that every man that knew him was his friend, and that many that knew him not loved him for his good deeds and the clarity of his good name, it came about that the most part of Florence that were of Messer Folco's station were bidden to come and make merry at the Palace of the Portinari. Among the number, to his great satisfaction, was your poor servant ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... complex issue involving the medium, the hardware, the software, and the technical capacity for reproductive fidelity and clarity. ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... for a man to take a job," Morgan told her, looking for a daring moment into the cool clarity of her honest brown eyes. "But I might make it worse instead of better. Trouble came to this town with me; it seems to stick to ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... arbiters of taste and form, but their canons of art were far from nature and the free impulses of mankind. The particular development of this spirit of clarity in Berlin, the centre of German influence, lay in the tendency to challenge all historic continuity, and to seek uniformity ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... significance of words. To disparage his memory by citing them is a preposterous use of scholarship. Jonson's prose, both in his dramas, in the descriptive comments of his masques, and in the "Discoveries," is characterised by clarity and vigorous directness, nor is it wanting in a fine sense of form or in the ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... this man. His listlessness, his easy acquiescence, were but consequent upon the self-knowledge of self-control. But mastery of the master-vice required something different; he was sick of a sickness; and because, in this sickness, will, mind, and body are tainted too, reason and logic lack clarity; and, to the signals of danger his reply had always been either overconfident or weak—and it had been always the same reply: "Not yet. There is time." And now, this last week, it had come upon him that the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... He wrote standing up. And, almost you may say, he wrote walking up and down. Some people, accustomed to the delicious ease and clarity of his style, imagine that he wrote very easily. He did and he didn't. Letters, easy, clear, to the point, and gorgeously human, flowed from him without let or hindrance. That masterpiece of corresponding, "The German March Through Brussels," ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... of a theatre, and although the two eldest daughters of the Dean, aged ten and eleven, had been once to London and to Drury Lane Theatre, their sense of glory and distinction so clouded their powers of accuracy and clarity that we were no nearer, by their help and authority, to the understanding of what a ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... stranger, she felt glad that she had obeyed her impulse and had been, for once, a victim to altruism. When she looked at his eyes she knew that she would not mind saying to him all she wanted to say about Dion Leith. They were eyes which shone with clarity; and they were something else—they were totally incurious eyes. Perhaps from perversity Lady Ingleton had always rebelled against giving to curious people the exact food they ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" and the "Rape of Europa," by Paolo Veronese, reproduced on pages 166 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XV, Plate XXXVII] and 168 [Transcribers Note: Diagram XVI, Plate XXXVIII]. The Venetian picture does not depend so much on the clarity of its line basis as the Florentine. And it is interesting to note how much nearer to the curves of the circle the lines of Europa approach than do those of the Venus picture. Were the same primitive treatment applied to the later work painted in the oil medium as has been used by Botticelli ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... legato touch. The old instruction books tell us that legato must be learned first, and is the most difficult touch to acquire. But legato does not bring the best results in rapid passages, for it does not impart sufficient clarity. In the modern idea something more crisp, scintillating and brilliant is needed. So we use a half staccato touch. The tones, when separated a hair's breadth from each other, take on a lighter, more vibrant, radiant quality; they are really like strings of pearls. Then I also use pressure touch, pressing ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... of modern culture, sat in wonder at the common old fellow's clarity of vision. Tears rolled down his cheek. "I know, dear old Bill, what you're trying to say. Only one man has ever been able to say it. A mad ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... sky, in which that indefinable lifting of the darkness which precedes the dawn was taking place, and to the far distances of sea, where a sort of livid clarity was beginning to absorb and vanquish that stormy play of alternate dark and moonlight which had prevailed when they left the ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is weak, and the U.S. training mission has been hindered by a lack of clarity and capacity. It has not always been clear who is in charge of the police training mission, and the U.S. military lacks expertise in certain areas pertaining to police and the rule of law. The United States has been more ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... commentary upon human limitations, upon man's failure to understand his own life, that not a single person on either side has arisen with sufficient intelligence and breadth of vision to state the relations of the two classes with clarity and force enough to accomplish that end, to make them understand ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... direct speech of New York has it, I want to pay tribute to the sagacity, the clarity of vision, the sure divination of the truth amidst a fog of deceit, which has characterized almost the whole Press of the United States since those feverish days at the end of July, 1914, when the nightmare of ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... old, when writers bold Betrayed the least disparity Between their genius and an age When frankness was a rarity, An odious word was often heard From critics void of charity, Simplicity or clarity, Or vision or hilarity, Who used to slate or deprecate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... eyes only for Jerry, staring at him in wondering amaze until he pieced the situation together in his growing clarity of brain and realized that such a small chunky animal had ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... Harvey formulated with equal clarity what the voters of 1920 had in their minds. That is a rash thing to do, and, if you simply assume that all who voted your ticket voted as you did, then it is a disingenuous thing to do. The count shows that sixteen millions voted Republican, and nine millions Democratic. They voted, says Mr. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... and that all her devotion to him, to it, his terrible work, was to make up to him for not seeing, for seeing as she saw. It was consecration, if you like; but it was expiation too, the sacrifice for the sin of an unfilial clarity. ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... days of his existence, but now the deed came naturally enough. He poured his glass and even echoed the other remarks of 'Here's how.' When the fiery liquor arrived in his stomachical regions he realized with perfect clarity that it was without doubt some newly invented substitute for whisky; perhaps that jackass-brandy which he had heard of. His emotion was twofold: he was glad that Helen was at the hotel and he was determined not to ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... He rapidly outlined the complexities of the affair in old Bond Street, and Mary Kerry surveyed the problem with a curious and almost fey detachment of mind, which enabled her to see light where all was darkness to the man on the spot. With the clarity of a trained observer Kerry described the apartments of Kazmah, the exact place where the murdered man had been found, and the construction of the rooms. He gave the essential points from the evidence of the several witnesses, ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... fear, will never compass this clarity of vision, this perfect de-spiritualization and contempt of illusions. He will never remain curious, to his dying day, in things terrestrial and in nothing else. From a Jewish-American father he has inherited that all ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... are separated from them by the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. When we think of Athens we think of the Parthenon and its frieze, of Sophocles and Euripides, of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, of urbanity and clarity and moderation in all things. When we think of the Middle Ages we find ourselves in a world of monks, martyrs, and miracles, of popes and emperors, of knights and ladies; we remember Gregory the Great, Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas —and very little do these reminiscences ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... no attack of a serious nature—yet. And Kars unfolded the plans he had so carefully thought out long months ago. He set them before his three companions late in the afternoon, and detailed them with a meticulous care and exactness which revealed the clarity of vision he had ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... such devotion as this is one who knows in whom he has believed; the man who makes such a thought-form as this is one who has taught himself how to think. The determination of the upward rush points to courage as well as conviction, while the sharpness of its outline shows the clarity of its creator's conception, and the peerless purity of its colour bears ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... within her: "All this is wrong. This is base and shameful. This is something to blush for, really!" She did blush. But her blushes were a part of the delight. And the voice was not persistent. She could silence it with scarcely an effort, despite its clarity. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... pleasures and dangers, and the pleasures of its dangers, in such fashion that Clementina listened with delight. He dwelt especially on the feeling almost of disembodiment, and existence as pure thought, arising from the all-pervading clarity and fluidity, the suspension and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... not know what sentiment really abided in her heart. She was wise enough to realize that something was wrong; and there were but three months between her and the inevitable decision. Never before had she known other than momentary indecision; and it irked her to find that her clarity of vision was fallible and human like the rest of her. The truth was, she didn't know her mind. She shrugged, and the movement stirred the dust that ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... the sharp peaks touched the clouds, there came a widening rift showing a cold, turquoise clarity. The sun was just setting and, as the cloud-banks lifted, strong shadows, intensely blue, pointed across the plain of snow. A small, black, energetic figure came out from among the firs and ran forward where the longest shadow pointed. ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... no end of good luck in you, Will-o'-the-wisp, with a flicker of Puck in you, Wild as a bull-pup, and all of his pluck in you— Let a man tread on your coat and he'll see! Eyes like the lakes of Killarney for clarity, Nose that turns up without any vulgarity, Smile like a cherub, and hair that is carroty— Whoop, you're a rarity, Barney McGee! Mellow as Tarragon, Prouder than Aragon— Hardly a paragon, You will agree— Here's all that's fine to ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... ambassadors departed, promising faithfully to be back before we slept. We spent the day writing and in gazing at the vivid view of the hillside, the forest, and the distant miniature prospect before us. Finally we discovered what made it in essence so strangely familiar. In vividness and clarity—even in the crudity of its tones—it was exactly ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... wiser folk, and perhaps that is merely a little device of nature's, for if one could look into the future with too great a clarity of vision there would be fewer matings. In the main her declaration still held true. She loved her husband with the same intensity; possibly even more, for she had found in him none of the flaws which every woman dreads that time and association may ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... recalled as they were impressed, so the value of your ideas in reasoning will depend upon the manner in which you make original impressions. A further characteristic of serviceable ideas is clarity. Ideas are sometimes described as "clear" in opposition to "muddy." You know what is meant by these distinctions, and you may be assured that one cause for your failures in reasoning is that your ideas ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... is finely wrought out,' he thought to himself. 'Even damnation may be finely imagined for me in the night. I have come so far. Now I must get clarity and courage to follow out the theme. I don't want to ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... she and Lutie met in the library and had it out,—briefly, as I said before, but with astounding clarity. Mrs. Tresslyn swept into the library at four in the afternoon, coming direct from her home, where, as she afterwards felt called upon to explain in self-defence, the telephone was aggravatingly out of order,—and that was why she hadn't called ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... recourse to another explanation, and to hold that men have no such foreknowledge of the future, but that they can acquire it by means of experience, wherein they are helped by their natural disposition, which depends on the perfection of a man's imaginative power, and the clarity of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... accomplice. If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... jolt, just as the sun was going down, and he knew then with perfect clarity what he had to do. He checked quickly to see that he had been undisturbed, and then manipulated the controls of the 'copter. Easing the ship into the sky toward Washington, he searched out a news ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... the past one hundred years give to thought the very freedom it seeks. But if science is dispassionate, mathematics is even more austere and impersonal. It cares not for teeming worlds and hearts insurgent, so long as in the pure clarity of space, relationships exist. Indeed, it requires neither time nor space, number nor quantity. As the mathematician approaches the limits already achieved by study, the colder and thinner becomes the air and the fewer the contacts with the affairs of every ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... the face of her familiar sun. Death! There was an unbearable unpleasantness about death. She had always felt ill at ease in its presence, in the very mention of its name; she had avoided every sign and symbol of it as she would a plague. And now, she foresaw for an instant of blinding clarity, perhaps it could not be avoided any longer. Was this young aviator's accident just a symbol of the way death was going to invade all the happy sheltered places? The thought turned the girl sick for a minute. How ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... was ringing, as Eric entered his flat. He unhooked the receiver and tossed it on to his bed; but after a moment's silence there broke out a persistent metallic buzzing, while the bells in the other rooms rang with all their accustomed clarity. He began to undress; but the merciless noise racked his nerves. There was nothing for it but to tie a handkerchief round the clapper of the ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... may grow mephitic When Papist struggles with Dissenter, Impregnating its pristine clarity, —One, by his daily fare's vulgarity, Its gust of broken meat and garlic; —One, by his soul's too-much presuming To turn the frankincense's fuming An vapors of the candle starlike Into the cloud ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... was not too much to see. What the attacking creature had used to blur the restructure wasn't clear, except that it wasn't a standard scrambler. Amplified to the limits of clarity and stepped down in time to the limit of immobility, all that emerged was a shifting haze of energy, which very faintly hinted at a dwarfish human shape in outline. A rather unusually small and heavy ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... The sight of this last vessel seemed to produce the beginning of a slight gnawing resistance in Frederick's brain. He knew he was looking upon an all-embracing symbol, which he had never before seen. With a new sense organ, with centralised clarity of thought, he realised that here, in this little model, was comprehended all the wandering and adventuring ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... overestimate the extent of that influence. It is true that in one sense Treitschke's political philosophy only expresses the Prussian policy, and that he did not create it. But when a political ideal is expounded with such clarity and such force, when it is propagated with such enthusiasm, when it takes such exclusive hold of the mind, it becomes a hundred times more efficient and more dangerous; it acquires the compelling force and inspires the fanaticism of religion. Those readers who will follow Treitschke's close ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... contributing to its general success. | In science, as Bacon conceives it, | truly effective results (not the | illusory achievements of magicians | and alchemists) can be attained only | through collaboration among | researchers, circulation of results, | and clarity of language. Scientific | understanding is not an individual | undertaking. The extension of man's | power over nature is never the work | of a single investigator who keeps | his results secret, but is the fruit | of an organized community financed ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... nature and the philosopher return again and again. Deep calls unto deep. The exaggerated and dehumanising claims of purely physical and mechanical concepts may for a time obscure the intuition by their specious clarity, but the feelings and the wider consciousness in man reassert themselves. The stars of heaven no longer swing as masses of mere physical atoms in a dead universe, they shine in their own right as members in a living whole. Wordsworth ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer |
