"Congruous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Angler of 1653, to discuss such abstract questions as the transmission of sound under water, and the ages of carp and pike, must probably have referred. He often mentions "Sir Francis Bacon's" History of Life and Death, which is included in the volume. No doubt it would be more reasonable and more "congruous" that Bacon's book should suggest Bacon. But there it is. That illogical "succession of ideas" which puzzled my Uncle Toby, invariably recalls to me, not the imposing folio to be purchased "next to the Mytre ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... the order of grace is more congruous than the order of nature. Now according to nature a thing is not moved in contrary directions; thus if a stone be naturally moved downwards, it cannot naturally return upwards from below. But according to the order of grace it is lawful to pass from the religious to the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... impossible conveyance] [W: impassible] I know not what to propose. Impossible seems to have no meaning here, and for impassible I have not found any authority. Spenser uses the word importable in a sense very congruous to this passage, for insupportable, or not to ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... back, by that word 'them,' to the previous verse, where we have a double description of those who are thus hidden in the inaccessible light of His countenance. They are 'such as fear Thee,' and 'such as trust in Thee.' Now, that latter expression is congruous with the metaphor of my text, in so far as the words on which we are now engaged speak about a 'hiding-place,' and the word which is translated 'trust' literally means 'to flee to a refuge.' So they that flee to God for refuge are those whom God hides in the 'secret of His face.' Let ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... is this: when, in a distant region of the world, I sought for and eagerly read anything I could find relating to country scenes and life in England—the land of my desire—I was never able to get an extended and congruous view of it, with a sense of the continuity in human and animal life in its relation to nature. It was all broken up into pieces or "bits"; it was in detached scenes, vividly reproduced to the inner eye in many cases, but unrelated and unharmonized, like framed pictures of ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... friction and chafing. Hence every sentence is braided hard, and more or less knotted, and, though of silk, makes the mind tingle. He startles by overstatement, by understatement, by paradox, by antithesis, and by synthesis. Into every sentence enters the unexpected,—the congruous leaping from the incongruous, the high coming down, the low springing up, likeness or relation suddenly coming into view where before was only difference or antagonism. How he delights to bring the reader up with a ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... 25th of December is in Hippolytus' (c. 202) commentary on Daniel iv. 23. Jesus, he says, was born at Bethlehem on the 25th of December, a Wednesday, in the forty-second year of Augustus. This passage also is almost certainly interpolated. In any case he mentions no feast, nor was such a feast congruous with the orthodox ideas of that age. As late as 245 Origen, in his eighth homily on Leviticus, repudiates as sinful the very idea of keeping the birthday of Christ "as if he were a king Pharaoh." The first certain mention of Dec. 25 is in a Latin ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... and institution. They were Christians and, at the same time, true children of the intellectual life of their own age. They esteemed it not merely their privilege, but also their duty, to endeavour to ponder anew the religious and Christian problem, and to state that which they thought in a manner congruous with the thoughts which the men of the age would naturally have concerning ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... by her and Fathom, in order to defraud the family to which they were so much indebted, that I could not have believed the human mind capable of such degeneracy, or that traitor endowed with such pernicious cunning and dissimulation, had not her tale been congruous, consistent, and distinct, and fraught with circumstances that left no room to doubt the least article of her confession; on consideration of which she was permitted ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... tradition, or invent such fables as are congruous to themselves. If as poet you have to represent the renowned Achilles; let him be indefatigable, wrathful, inexorable, courageous, let him deny that laws were made for him, let him arrogate every thing to force of arms. Let Medea be fierce and untractable, ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... certain phenomena of the order of grace. St. Ignatius almost invariably speaks, not, as we should, of thoughts that give rise to will-states of "consolation" or "desolation," but conversely, of these will-states giving rise to congruous thoughts. Indeed, nothing is more familiar to us than the way in which the mind is magnetized by even our physical states of elation or depression, to select the more cheerful or the gloomier aspects of life, according as we are under one influence or the other; and in practice, we recognize ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... sensibility, and secondly, the Plastic, or that lower which in obedience to its sympathies enables the soul to attach itself to, and to organize into a suitable body those substances of the universe to which it is most congruous. It is more difficult to determine whether Plato or his principal followers, recognized in the rational soul or nous a distinct and separable entity, that which is sometimes discriminated as "the Spirit." Dr. Henry More, no mean authority, repudiates ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... is perfectly congruous with the habits of fishermen and the character of the instruments which they employ. As fishers drop the net over a certain space, and, without making any pretence of discriminating between good and ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Ambrose, St. Augustine, and others of the fathers. They understood the words of Christ as addressed to them with the meaning, "Arise, leave the things of this world, have faith, and go forward to thy abiding home in heaven." Such an interpretation is entirely congruous with the general tone of thought and feeling exhibited in many other common paintings in the catacombs. But later Romanist writers have attempted to connect its interpretation with the doctrine of the Forgiveness of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... propositions presents terms which cannot possibly be rendered into thought at all in the relation which the proposition alleges to subsist between them; or we may mean that one of the two propositions presents terms in a relation which is more congruous with the habitual tenor of our thoughts than does the other proposition. Thus, as an example of the former usage, we may say, It is more conceivable that two and two should make four than that two and two ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... scarcely expected much companionship from Frank. She would not have said even to herself, that Frank was rusty; and she would do her faithful and good-natured best to rub her up; but there was an instinct with her of the congruous and the incongruous; and she would not do her Bath-brick polishing ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... as the Jewish-minded Christians did. The wine must have bottles. Every great spiritual renovating force must embody itself in institutions. Spiritual emotions must express themselves in acts of worship, spiritual convictions must speak in a creed. But the containing vessel must be congruous with, and still more, it must be created by, the contained force, as there are creatures who frame their shells to fit the convolutions of their bodies, and build them up from their own substance. Forms are good, as long as they can stretch if need be; when they are too stiff to expand, they restrict ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... much in London," said Meta; "he is pleasant enough to talk to, but somehow, he is not congruous here—if you understand me. And I think his coming oppresses Flora—she turned quite pale when he was announced, and her voice was lower than ever ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... importance. I take this opportunity of contradicting that statement most emphatically. Neither when I began nor yet later in my career have I ever played under a management where infinite pains were not given to every detail. I think that far from hampering the acting, a beautiful and congruous background and harmonious costumes, representing accurately the spirit of the time in which the play is supposed to move, ought to help and ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... deserve, and no doubt it is good for me to be humbled and set aside; but work I will get of some kind! I looked in at a great factory the other day, and longed to apply for a superintendent's place, only I thought it might not be congruous with an ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... colthood—though if all had their rights, he ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been picking the herbage of some Eastern plain instead of tugging here—had trodden this road almost daily for twenty years. Even his subjection was not made congruous throughout, for the harness being too short, his tail was not drawn through the crupper, so that the breeching slipped awkwardly to one side. He knew every subtle incline of the seven or eight miles of ground between Hintock and Sherton Abbas—the market-town to which ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... together on the sands made a happy and congruous party of absorbed children, till Cheriton the energetic came swinging back over the sand-hills. Peter saw him approaching, watched the resolute lunge of his stride. His mother was about to be married for the third time: one could ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... we know in the Christian religion as the Recording Angels, whose wonderful prevision enable them to view the trend of even so unstable a quantity as the human mind, and thus they are enabled to determine what steps are necessary to lead our enfoldment along the lines congruous to the ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... simply the method of comparative anatomy, the result of a habit of thinking which makes it impossible to have any set of ideas brought into the mind without an immediate, almost unconscious, overhauling of the memory for any other ideas at all congruous. In a strict scientific exposition Huxley would choose from the multitude of possible comparisons that most simple and most intelligible to his audience; when in a lighter vein, he gave play to a natural humour in his choice. Instances of his method of exposition by comparison ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... cogency other arguments, which are manifold, might be readily adduced, as of congruous force, to vindicate our claim in favour of analytical knowledge over blind experience in the methods of Herbal cure, especially if this be pursued on the broad lines of ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... says, not to be beloved and yet retained is the greatest injury to a gentle spirit. Our present doctrine of divorce, which sets the household captive free on payment of a broken vow, but on no less ignoble terms, is not founded on the congruous, and is indeed ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... encouraged the growth of a self-consciousness hitherto unknown. It was not always a panic of contrition, sweeping the joyous out of the sunlight into a monastic shade, which brought the troubled into a new way of peace, but sometimes a quiet joy in renunciation, congruous with a timid mood, leading by gradual allurement to cloisters of shadowy lanes and cells which were forest bowers. The new faith gave open sanction to evasion of the banquet, and thus fortified and increased those who loved not the ceremonial ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... account for Him, and that all of them have spiritual value. All four insist that Jesus' origin is in God, and that in Jesus we find the Divine in the human. All four—a spiritual endowment, a spiritual heredity, a spiritual birth, the incarnation of God in Man—may well seem congruous with the Jesus of our experience, even if we are not intellectually satisfied with the particular modes in which these affirmations have been made in the past. The question of Jesus' origin is not of primary importance; He Himself judged nothing by its antecedents, but by its results—"By ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... alert and retentive mind had seized, long ago, on Rowlatt's recommendation at the Little Bear Inn, and he had developed, perhaps half consciously, a half sense of humour. A whole sense, however, is not congruous with the fervid beliefs and soaring ambitions of eighteen. Your sense of humour, that delicate percipience of proportion, that subrident check on impulse, that touch of the divine fellowship with human frailty, is a thing of mellower ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... beautiful lines, cited above, called "Good Counsel of Chaucer." And when, at last, the Elizabethan era properly so-called began, the proof was speedily given that geniuses worthy of holding fellowship with Chaucer had assimilated into their own literary growth what was congruous to it in his, just as he had assimilated to himself—not always improving, but hardly ever merely borrowing or taking over—much that he had found in the French trouveres, and in Italian poetry and prose. The first work which can be included in the great period of Elizabethan literature is ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... an idea to reckon only with facts: it has also to cohere with other ideas. It must be congruous with the mass of other beliefs held for good reasons by the thinker who accepts it. For no one can afford to have a stock of beliefs which conflict too violently with those of his fellows. If his 'intuitions' contrast too seriously with those of others, and ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... for his imitation. The fact is, Sir David Wilkie's pictures show that he did carry this practice too far—for there is scarcely a picture of his that does not show patches of imitations, that are not always congruous with each other; there is too often in one piece, a bit of Rembrandt, a bit of Velasquez, a bit of Ostade, or others. The most perfect, as a whole, is his "Chelsea Pensioners." We do not quite understand the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... limited human form, and the floating essence it is to contain. On the one hand, was the teeming, still fluid world, of old beliefs, as we see it reflected in the somewhat formless theogony of Hesiod; a world, the Titanic vastness of which is congruous with a certain sublimity of speech, when he has to speak, for instance, of motion or space; as the Greek language itself has a primitive copiousness and energy of words, for wind, fire, water, cold, sound—attesting a deep susceptibility to the impressions of those things—yet ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... labours, as it were, under the weight of the great conception. Literally rendered, the words are—'to all generations of the age of the ages'—a remarkable fusing together of two expressions for unbounded duration, which are scarcely congruous. We can understand 'to all generations' as expressive of duration as long as birth and death shall last. We can understand 'the age of the ages' as pointing to that endless epoch whose moments are 'ages'; but ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... wide expression, meaning any kind of equipment, and in other places of the Old Testament the whole phrase rendered here, 'ye that bear the vessels,' is translated 'armour-bearers.' Such an image would be quite congruous with the context here, in which warlike figures abound. And if so, the picture would be that of an army on the march, each man carrying some of the weapons of the great Captain and Leader. But perhaps the other explanation is more likely, which regards ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... experts declared that this would never do, since from time immemorial Levavi oculos had been a Vesper Psalm, and it would be little less than sacrilege to insert it in a morning service, however congruous to such a use the wording of it might, to an unscientific mind, appear. Accordingly the excision was made; but upon inquiry it turned out that the monks had possessed a larger measure of good sense, as well as a better ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington |
