"Discursive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... becoming an axiom in anthropology that what is needed is not discursive treatment of large subjects but the minute discussion of special themes, not a ranging at large over the peoples of the earth past and present, but a detailed examination of limited areas. This work I am undertaking for Australia, and in the present volume I deal briefly with some of the aspects ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... my volubility, I am glad to say; a back is not very inspiring or expressive, but Ruth can tell me when you look bored if I wax too discursive." ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... seems to have culminated, the little doubts she has thrust out or tried to overlive. Somehow she appears to have worked a great and unwitting change in the Grandon family. Once, when Denise was in a discursive mood, she told Violet of Mr. Wilmarth's proposal of marriage. What if she had married him? Violet thinks now. Marcia talks about her "Vulcan" with a curious pride, and he certainly is indulgent. In that case Violet ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... shall find the greatest interest lies in a certain discursive treatment of his subject, which enables him to run hither and thither, while he always pleases us, whatever attitude he may assume, whatever he may say, and in whatever guise he may speak to us. But here, in the last book, there does ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... Mr. Muir's during the long drive, a talk which for range and raciness I have never heard equaled. He often uses the broad dialect of the Scot, translating as he goes along. His forte is in monologue. He is a most engaging talker,—discursive, grave and gay,—mingling thrilling adventures, side-splitting anecdotes, choice quotations, apt characterizations, scientific data, enthusiastic descriptions, sarcastic comments, ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... Whom they are, habitually infused 115 Through every image and through every thought, And all affections by communion raised From earth to heaven, from human to divine; Hence endless occupation for the Soul, Whether discursive or intuitive; [C] 120 Hence cheerfulness for acts of daily life, Emotions which best foresight need not fear, Most worthy then of trust when most intense Hence, amid ills that vex and wrongs that crush Our hearts—if here the words ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... lines of composition as a whole, but in the choice of a single word, while it by no means interferes with, but may even prescribe, much variety, in the building of the sentence for instance, or in the manner, argumentative, descriptive, discursive, of this or that [23] part or member of the entire design. The blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a child's expression of its needs, may alternate with the long-contending, victoriously intricate sentence; ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... results of these imaginary phenomena, and the crimes and cruelties they have caused us to commit, is one of the most instructive studies in which we can possibly be engaged. It is here that man is most astonishing, and that we contemplate with most admiration the discursive and unbounded nature ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... first, because, as he has himself remarked, the difference between his school and other schools was a difference so fundamental that there was hardly any common ground on which a controversial battle could be fought; and, secondly, because his mind, eminently observant, preeminently discursive and capacious, was, we conceive, neither formed by nature nor disciplined by habit ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... knowing that Miss Mellins had been invited for the sole purpose of keeping her company she continued to cling to the dress-maker's side, letting Mr. Ramy lead the way with Evelina. Miss Mellins, stimulated by the excitement of the occasion, grew more and more discursive, and her ceaseless talk, and the kaleidoscopic whirl of the crowd, were unspeakably bewildering to Ann Eliza. Her feet, accustomed to the slippered ease of the shop, ached with the unfamiliar effort of walking, and her ears with the din of the ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... string of quotations, and that is a very complimentary thing to say about any novel. Written in diary form, on the whole successfully, it tells little of doing and much of being, and a great deal more of feeling than of either. It is scarcely necessary after that to add that it is discursive. As a matter of fact I found that for me that half of its charm which did not lie in being whisked off, as it were by magic, to sit in the sunshine of Switzerland lay in its author's reflections upon subjects quite unconnected with her story, and as far apart from each other as LAW'S Serious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... here announce the fact concerning Mr. Philip Spruce, that his method of telling a story ("Which reminds me," always meant a story with him) is very discursive. He may be said to resemble Jeremy Bentham, who, according to Hazlitt's criticism, fills his sentence with a row of pegs, and hangs a garment upon each of them. Let us omit some portion of his tediousness, and allow him to go on with ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... introduction—(This is my friend, N or M; if he steals anything, I will be responsible for it): a form of introduction, by the way, too sweeping in its suretyship for prudent men to use in Riverina—I shall describe the group, severally, with such succinctness as may be compatible with my somewhat discursive style. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... most timid of its dreams. And I wondered if always it would be so, if man was a doomed animal who would never to the last days of his time take hold of fate and change it to his will. Always, it may be, he will remain kindly but jealous, desirous but discursive, able and unwisely impulsive, until Saturn who begot him shall devour him ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... Thus far had the discursive mind of James wandered from the position which it occupied at the epoch of Maximilian de ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Invalids, and the Pantheon and the towers of Notre Dame. To the eye of contemplation it is one of the most memorable of landscapes; a stand-point for historical reverie, which attunes the mind for subsequent and less discursive retrospection. Enter the apartment where Bonaparte dispersed the assembly of five hundred—the initatory act of his rule; it is now a conservatory, whence rising terrace walks, statues and fountains only are ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... than ever the mind should be freed from every hindrance, and its whole energy directed to getting the meaning, the greatest care should be given to making a plan. No person who has attained distinction in prose has worked without a plan. Any piece of literature, even the most discursive, has in it something of plan; but in literature of the first rank the plan is easily discovered. How clear it is in Macaulay's essay has been seen. In Burke it is yet more logical and exact. However beautiful a piece ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... considered himself entitled to. He at once resolved to abandon his own impossible country and settle in Spain. Accompanied by his wife and his two young daughters, he set out from Calais with his carriage, his horse, his man-servant, and his monkey. A discursive, disorderly, delightful book is the record of his journey through France into Catalonia, of his visit to Montserrat, which takes up the larger part of it, of the abandonment of his proposed settlement in Spain, and of his safe return with his whole ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... things. So, He rules the world, With wrath commingling mercy. Who may hope With finite mind to understand His ways, So excellent in power, in wisdom deep, In justice terrible, respecting none Who pride themselves in fancied wisdom." Hark! On the discursive speech a whirlwind breaks, Tornadoes shake the desert, thunders roll And from the lightning's startled shrine, a voice! The voice of the Eternal. "Who is this That darkeneth knowledge by unmeaning words? Gird ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... one or two questions which Jessy desired to ask, but she did not frame them immediately. Mrs. Bendle was incautious and discursive, but there was nothing to be gained by ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... and a delightful humorist; a discursive essayist of unfailing charm; the best American critic of his time; a scholar of wide learning, deep also when his interest was most engaged; a powerful writer on great public questions; a patriot passionately pure; but first, last, and always he was a poet, never so happy ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... a text-book for students, and reached a nineteenth edition in 1851. Their faults, considered as philosophical treatises, are palpable. They have the wordiness of hasty composition, and the discursive rhetoric intended to catch the attention of an indolent audience. Brown does not see that he is insulting his hearers when he apologises for introducing logic into lectures upon metaphysics, and indemnifies them by quotations from Akenside and the Essay on Man. Brown, however, showed great acuteness ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii, 14): "We do not uphold counsel or choice in Christ." Now these things are withheld from Christ only inasmuch as they imply comparison and discursion. Therefore it seems that there was no collative or discursive knowledge ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... disjointed—discursive and eloquent in parts, and bare and meagre in others. Connections are omitted, passages of real and rare beauty jostling with long passages of the most common-place rhetoric. His platitudes, however, to myself who knew him, have a genuine ring about ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... deliberate and conscious stylist, the forerunner of Charles Lamb, of Stevenson (whose Virginibus Puerisque is modelled on his method of treatment) and of the stylistic school of our own day. His eloquence is too studied to rise to the greatest heights, and his speculation, though curious and discursive, never really results in deep thinking. He is content to embroider his pattern out of the stray fancies of an imaginative nature. His best known work, the Religio Medici, is a random confession of belief and thoughts, full of the inconsequent speculations ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... connected with trade and navigation. The cultivated and enlightened traveller, whose mind is alike open to the charm of ancient story and the interest of modern achievement—who is classical without being pedantic, graphic and yet faithful, enthusiastic and yet accurate, discursive and at the same time imaginative, is almost unknown amongst us. It will continue to be so as long as education in our universities is exclusively devoted to Greek and Latin verses or the higher mathematics; and in academies ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... in the Medical School of Paris, delivered a discursive lecture not long ago, in which he soared from the region of drugs, his well-known special province, into the thin atmosphere of aesthetics. It is the influence that surrounds his fortunate fellow-citizens, he declares, which alone preserves their intellectual supremacy. If a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... general smiled at the introduction of motives on a grand scale, or of reasons that lay very far off. This was the point of strongest difference between him and Deronda, who rarely ate at breakfast without some silent discursive flight after grounds for filling up his day according to the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... not in hesitation or fear. Anthony says, he was "an affectionate and gallant kind of boy, adventurous and generous, daring to a singular degree." Apt enough withal to be "petulant now and then;" on the whole, "very self-willed;" doubtless not a little discursive in his thoughts and ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Our discursive notice would, probably, contribute but little to this joint-stock production; but as even comparing notes is not always unprofitable, we venture to give ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... of to-day would print the disquisitions which Hamilton wrote in 1788 in support of the Constitution, or that, if it did, any one would read them, least of all the lawyers; and yet Mr. Roosevelt's audience was emotional and discursive even for a modern American audience. Hence, if he attempted to lead at all, he had little choice but to adopt, or at least discuss, every nostrum for reaching an immediate millennium which happened ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... had never encountered a more unofficial official than Clancy. Shrewd judge of character as he was, he could hardly be expected to guess, after such a momentary glimpse of a man of extraordinary genius in unraveling crime, that Clancy was never more discursive, never more prone to chaff and sneer at his special friend, Steingall, than when hot on the trail of some particularly acute and daring malefactor. The Chief of the Bureau, of course, knew by these signs that his trusted aide had obtained information of a really startling nature, ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... therefore, only so far as a pure practical use is made of them. As to all the rest that belongs to these conceptions psychologically, that is, so far as we observe these faculties of ours empirically in their exercise (e.g., that the understanding of man is discursive, and its notions therefore not intuitions but thoughts, that these follow one another in time, that his will has its satisfaction always dependent on the existence of its object, etc., which cannot be the case in the Supreme Being), ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... AND SOURCES.—The following table, which presents the plays in chronological order,[32] the times when they were written, as nearly as can be known, and the sources whence they were derived, will be of more service to the student than any discursive remarks upon the ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoon of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive talk ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the coroner's courtroom. The inquest was proceeding in its usual discursive way, and I sat down to listen for a while. The coroner was hearing reports from detectives who had interviewed the market men and shopkeepers where ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... have recorded the green memories of an old man, as told while seated by his humble "ingle nook" have endeavoured to adhere to his own words and mode of narration—hence the somewhat rambling and discursive style of these "Recollections"—a style which does not, in the opinion of many, by any means detract ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... word now and then, it was, in the main, the soft, sweet sense of ease, like the breath of violets in the air, that surrounded him. They talked of all sorts of things, or rather, as he said to himself, they babbled, for real talk could hardly be so discursive, so aimless, so merely merry. She made him think of a child playing with a lapful of flowers; that was what her talk was like. She would spread them out in formal rows, arrange them in pretty, intricate posies, or, suddenly, gather them into generous handfuls which she gave ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... professor as in duty bound, reported the conversation to his pupil's father; with the additional observation that he feared, he very humbly and respectfully feared, that the developing mind of the prince appeared undesirably disposed towards discursive philosophies, which were wholly unnecessary for the position he was destined to occupy. Whereupon the King took his son to task on the subject with a mingling of kindness ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... arch-interpreter of Holy Russia. In The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary (Macmillan) he returns with even more than his customary zeal to his good work, wishing herein specifically to interpret Russian Christianity to the West. A passionate earnestness informs his discursive eloquence. I cannot resist the conviction that he has the type of mind that sees most easily what it wishes to see. He moves cheerily along, incidentally raising difficulties which he does not solve, ignoring conclusions which seem obvious, throwing glorious generalisations ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... one of these portraits can readily be traced to its original, and taken as a group they represent as valuable a cross-section Of our hurrying civilization as we have. Strictly speaking, however, they are not short stories, but discursive causeries on friends of Mr. Dreiser. They answer to no usual concepts of literary form, but have necessitated the creation of a new form. They reflect a gallic irony compact of pity and understanding. The ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... human knowledge, and it embraces in its scope the loftiest subjects of human thought, and the richest fields of human inquiry. Nothing is too vast, nothing too subtle, nothing too distant, nothing too minute, nothing too discursive, nothing too exact, to ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... with each other, and with discursive raids right and left of the road, and parenthetical rushes in various directions for their own special delectation, would sometimes, returning to us at full gallop, tumble over poor puss and roll ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... tree and herb as with the likeness of tree and herb to us; and furthermore, it will go into the whole subject, systematically and at length. Meanwhile, it is open even to an amateur to offer something, in a general and discursive way, upon so inviting a theme, and especially to call attention ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... I am told that Caesar, having now completed his volumes of bons mots, if anything is brought to him as mine, which is not so, habitually rejects it. This he now does all the more, because his intimates are in my company almost every day. Now in the course of our discursive talk many remarks are let fall, which perhaps at the time of my making them seem to them wanting neither in literary flavour nor in piquancy. These are conveyed to him along with the other news of ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... discursive imagination proceeds from details to the vaguely-perceived unity. It starts from a fragment that serves as a matrix, and becomes completed little by little. An adventure, an anecdote, a scene, a rapid glance, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... purposes, as well as to the subsequent action, of British officials. The sea coast from Maine to Georgia, according to the season of the year, was made to feel the increasing activity and closeness of the British attacks; and these, though discursive and without apparent correlation of action, were evidently animated throughout by a common intention of bringing the war home to the experience of ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... then calmly brought this discursive lady back to the point: "Would she be so kind as go with this good youth to the friar and ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Kiesewetter and J.F. Costelli were authors of libretti and songs. The others were prominent in court circles, and their devotion to music was such as to give weight to the communication. The memorial itself is discursive to a point which taxes one's patience, but the expressions of appreciation and friendship are genuine, and must have gratified Beethoven extremely. Naturally but one outcome was probable as a result of this memorial. Shortly after ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... be pinned up opposite the writing-tables of our current authors of detestable pseudo-Meredithian and decayed Paterese. His narrative style is concise and brisk. His book may undoubtedly best be compared among English classics with Whiggism in its Relations to Literature, although it is less discursive and does not possess the personal element of that vivacious piece of polemic. In this recurrence of Mr. Strachey to a pellucid stream of prose we see an argument against his own theory of revolt. The procedure of the arts, the mechanical tricks of the trade, do they really improve ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... rolled off to meet him there. The novelty of the moment over, the children returned sedately to their play, and the women sat together under the canopy of the tree. Bella's adventures had been few and tame, Susan's was the great story. She was not discursive about her marriage. She was still shy on the subject and sensitively aware of the disappointment that Bella was too artlessly amazed to conceal. She passed over it quickly, pretending that she did ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... De Legibus Naturae, disquisitio philosophica contra Hobbium instituta, appeared in 1672. The book is important as a distinctly philosophical disquisition, but its extraordinarily discursive character renders impossible anything like analysis. His chief points will be presented in ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... which, having no corporeal evidence, can be perceived and comprehended only by the discursive energies of reason. Hence the ambiguous nature of matter can be comprehended only by adulterated opinion. Matter is the principle of all bodies, and is stamped with the impression of forms. Fire, air, and water derive their origin and principle from ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... The discursive story began to narrow and concentrate itself when at last it reached Mexico. The sister changed her position in her chair, and crossed her knees when Tehuantepec was mentioned. It was from that place that Joel had sent her the amazing remittance over two years ago. Curiously enough, though, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... high time that I should pass from these brief and discursive notes about things in Flatland to the central event of this book, my initiation into the mysteries of Space. THAT is my subject; all that has ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... overlooked the new harmonium. She sang her best, however, and more than one of the audience thought that "little Sister Appleby" had greatly improved. Indeed, it would not have seemed strange to some—remembering Brother Seabright's discursive oratory—if he had made some allusion to it. But he did not. His heavy eyes moved slowly over the ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... first stages of the first meditation (pathamam jhanam) the mind is concentrated on the object in the way of understanding it with its form and name and of comprehending it with its diverse relations. This state of concentration is called vitakka (discursive meditation). The next stage of the first meditation is that in which the mind does not move in the object in relational terms but becomes fixed and settled in it and penetrates into it without any quivering. This state is called vicara (steadily ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... complete and exhaustive without being discursive. We shall look far before finding anything of its kind so ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... instance, contains but few metrical passages, whereas the latter is composed of poetry and prose in almost equal proportions. The ethical part continually addresses the reader himself in the second person singular, while the discursive section never does. In a word, internal evidence leaves no doubt that, whether the dislocation of the chapters was the result of accident or design, this was the ground ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... any eminent characteristics. A volume of short stories, entitled "Wild and Tame," partakes very much more of the latter adjective than of the former. The first of the tales, "Inclined Planes," is a discursive family chronicle, showing the decadence of a fishing village under the influence of city boarders. The second, "Love and Despatches," inculcates a double moral, the usefulness of economy and the uselessness of mothers-in-law; and the third, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... language, and condensed within a small compass, was the final result and substance of Captain Cuttle's deliberations: which took a long time to arrive at this pass, and were, like some more public deliberations, very discursive and disorderly. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Burnell, A. C. Hobson-Jobson. A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical, and discursive; new ed. by Wm. Crooke, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Lady Shelley's sprightly and discursive comments upon the current events of her day, we have to transport ourselves back into a society which, though not very remote in point of time, has now so completely passed away that it is difficult fully to realise its feelings, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... sat down to sketch, while I walked on. This often happened. Indeed, his rambles were often discursive, so that I lost sight of him for hours together; once in Sardinia, when there was reason to fear his having been carried off to the mountains by banditti. Thus, each had his separate adventures; on the present occasion I had opened out a ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... sirloin of beef,—Ned Landon, who was nearly opposite him, actively apportioned slices of roast pork, the delicacy most favoured by the majority, and when all the knives and forks were going and voices began to be loud and tongues discursive, Innocent slipped into a chair by Farmer Jocelyn and sat between him and Priscilla. For not only the farm hands but all the servants on the place were at table, this haymaking supper being the annual ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... new boom, aloft!" cried Ludlow, interrupting the discursive discourse of the master. "He is bent on getting in with ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... of the possible is an actual infinity of ideas. Out of the consideration of an infinity of ideas, how can God arrive at a choice? Why not? His mind is not, of course, discursive; he does not successively turn over the leaves of an infinite book of sample worlds, for then he would never come to the end of it. Embracing infinite possibility in [32] the single act of his mind, he settles his will with intuitive immediacy upon the best. The inferior, the ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... to be called such) of the poem begins. This consists in the Lover's desire to possess himself of the Rosebud, the opposition offered to him by powers both good and evil, and by Reason in particular, and the support which he receives from more or less discursive friends. Clearly, the conduct of such a scheme as this admits of being varied in many ways and protracted to any length; but its first conception is easy and natural, and when it was novel to boot, was neither ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... petitions of which he himself had been the bearer. He however devoted himself with characteristic energy to the presentation of his case, and prepared a memoir wherein all the most serious grievances of the Upper Canadian people were set forth in detail. In this document the writer adopted a discursive and rhetorical style which, as the Colonial Secretary justly remarked, were "singularly ill adapted to bring questions of so much intricacy and importance to a definite issue." The facts were nevertheless pretty comprehensively embodied, and were generally speaking of such a ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... attention on the part of the listener, cannot continually present new material[17] without becoming diffuse; but instead, must make its impression by varied emphasis upon the main thought. Otherwise it would become so discursive that one could not possibly follow it. From these historical facts as to the structure of music certain inferences may be drawn; the vital importance of which to the listener can hardly be exaggerated. As polyphonic treatment (the imitation and interweaving of independent ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... and so does her brother. He is very nice, only his self-consciousness spoils him," returned Nan, in a calm, discursive tone, as though they were discussing ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... your sins, you are to suffer the infliction of a long gossiping letter. I tell you distinctly that I am going to punish you for all your impertinences by being as tedious, as discursive, as incoherent and as unsatisfactory as possible. Besides, here I am, cooped up in a dirty balloon, with some one or two hundred of the canaille, all bound on a pleasure excursion, (what a funny idea some people have of pleasure!) ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... was not long, nor was it discursive. There was nothing eulogistic of my various acquirements, occupations, talents; no remark about the optimistic trend of my literature, the affection in which my characters were held; nothing of this at all. Nor ...
— Forty Minutes Late - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... back, and lifting her face upward in the discursive fulness of her fancy, 'I feel I am not robbed. 'Il y a des miracles, et j'en ai vu'. One's life seems more perfect when one has seen what nature can do. The fellow was stupendous! I conceive him present. Who'll fire a house for me? Is it my deficiency of attraction, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... distinguished historical person emerge as it were out of the clay, like a second Eve; but he makes a mental reservation that it would be better if English and American sculptors would make a freer use of their chisels—of which more hereafter. Story was a light-hearted, discursive person, with a large amount of bric-a-brac information, who could appreciate Hawthorne either as a genius or as a celebrity. He soon became Hawthorne's chief companion and social mainstay in Rome, literally a vade mecum, and we may believe that he exercised more or less ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... has a right to indulge in the convenience of indented headings when writing a discursive article, I may claim a share in the privilege. When I retired from the editorship of a morning newspaper, a not obtrusively friendly commentator wrote that my chief claim to be remembered in that connection was that I ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... which was made in company with Mr. and Mrs. Thrale, though it no doubt contributed to his health and amusement, did not give an occasion to such a discursive exercise of his mind as our tour to the Hebrides. I do not find that he kept any journal or notes of what he saw there[838]. All that I heard him say of it was, that 'instead of bleak and barren mountains, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... when to abbreviate, or how to omit. His subject has in itself this unavoidable disadvantage, that the history of Greece lies scattered and broken up amongst many independent cities and communities: this disadvantage our author's voluminous and discursive manner does nothing to remedy, does much to aggravate. One would almost suspect that Mr Grote had entertained the idea that it belonged to the history of Greece to give us an account of all that the Greeks knew of history. It seems sufficient that a subject has been mentioned ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... kept in view throughout my somewhat discursive address, which will begin with an imaginary clinical lesson from the lips of an historical personage, and close with the portrait from real life of one who, both as teacher and practitioner, was long loved and honored among us. If I somewhat overrun ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... leave anybody of importance unmarried at the final page. Before this is turned, you have some pleasant comedy of London in war-time, and meet a number of agreeably sketched persons, whose conversation may amuse you, or, on the other hand, may cause you to wish them a little less discursive. Madame ALBANESI indeed impressed me as having occasionally turned her subordinate characters loose into a chapter, with instructions to fill it up anyhow, while she herself thought out the next move. But the law was always leisurely, so this characteristic might perhaps be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... but it only made her discursive brain think of cuckoos. She would no doubt immediately have begun to talk of cuckoos, incoherently, unrestrainably and deplorably, if she had been in the condition of nerves and shyness she was in last ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... He passes to and fro, at regular intervals, within a confined periphery, abounding in individuals who are led to observation of his person through interest in the kindred nature of his occupation with their own. But the walks of Marie may, in general, be supposed discursive. In this particular instance, it will be understood as most probable, that she proceeded upon a route of more than average diversity from her accustomed ones. The parallel which we imagine to have existed in the mind of Le Commerciel would only be sustained in the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... they were convinced that they had really chosen the Best Swell Place by the fact of a vacant table at a window looking out over a box hedge. Jack told the waiter that the assemblage was not an autocracy, but a parliament which, with a full quorum present, would enjoy in discursive appreciation selections from the broad range of ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... entirely, to throw off these impediments. In his deep capacity for sympathy and reverence, we recognise some of the elements that go to the making of a poet. He is always a man of intuitions rather than of discursive intellect; often keen of vision, though wanting in analytical power. For poetry, indeed, as it is often understood now, or even as it was understood by Pope, he had little enough qualification. He had not the intellectual vivacity implied in the marvellously neat workmanship ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... delirious idea of a Regatta; and taking their courage in their hands had sought an interview with Sir Felix, to entreat his patronage for the scheme. They had found him in his most amiable mood, and within an hour—the old gentleman is discursive—he had consented to become Patron and President and to honour the gathering with his presence. But observe; the idea cannot have originated before August the 12th, on which day the trio arrived from London; yet a whisper ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Planet had been in the nature of a discursive essay rather than an informative article, although I had enlivened it with some account of my experiences at Upper Crossleys. But at the moment that I had set pen to paper I had realized the difficulty of expressing, within the scope ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... was in great feather: he was discursive and pompous to every one. In Moscow too, I remembered, he had blown a great many bubbles. Interminably he discoursed on finance and Russian politics, and though, at times, the General made feints to contradict him, he did so humbly, and as though wishing not wholly to lose sight ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... indicated, a highly organized, even an over-organized, book, which, by emphasis, Montaigne's "Essays" is not, these two works may be said, in their contents, somewhat to resemble each other. Montesquieu is nearly as discursive as Montaigne. He wishes to be philosophical, but he is not above supplying his ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... Theologian. This truly great and good man resided for The last nineteen years of his life, In this Hamlet. He quitted 'the body of his death,' July 25th, 1834, In the sixty-second year of his age. Of his profound learning and discursive genius, His literary works are an imperishable record. To his private worth, His social and ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... place, where he had endowed a hospital with lands to the value of L. 300 a year. Abbot was a conscientious prelate, though narrow in view and often harsh towards both separatists and Romanists. He wrote a large number of works, the most interesting being his discursive Exposition on the Prophet Jonah (1600), which was reprinted in 1845. His Geography, or a Brief Description of the Whole World (1599), passed through numerous ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... France; his system being to talk only of the large towns, where he may be supposed to find a market for his goods. It was his ambition to pass for an ironmonger. But in the large towns he is usually excellent company, though as discursive as Sterne, and strangely indifferent, for a man of imagination, to those superficial aspects of things which the poor pages now before the reader are mainly an attempt to render. It is his conviction that Alfieri, at Florence, bored the Countess of Albany ter- ribly; ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... environment of his life. He may or may not feel sure of God from his pew, but God is not among the things that count in his daily life. God does not enter into his calculations or determine his scale of values. Again, discursive thinking is regarded as an interruption of religion. When I am at pains to justify my religion, I am already doubting; and for common opinion doubt is identical with irreligion. In so far as I am religious, my religion stands in no need of justification, even though ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... learning all that was to be learned from the text-book, any attempt to supply the deficiency, by drawing upon his own resources, would be sure to be followed by the plainest marks of dissatisfaction or merited rebuke on the part of Professor Long. Never indulging in the diffuse or the discursive himself, he never tolerated such a course on the part of the student. A mere glance at the man was sufficient to indicate the richest and most solid type of mind. Those who sat under his instruction, and were capable of appreciating it, will ever remember his efforts ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... of mind and more charitably disposed towards those who had come to give them a welcome. That he was now as one settled in life with something worthy to live for, we have ample proof in his letter written to Mrs. Dunlop on the first day of the New Year. It is discursive, yet philosophical and reflective, and its whole tone is that of a man who looks on the world round about him with a kindly charity, and looks to the future with faith and trust. Life passed very sweetly and peacefully with the ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... open the pages there is always a witty, well-informed Irishman discoursing to you, who tells his story admirably, when he has one to tell, and, failing that, never fails to be pleasant. Irish talk is apt to be discursive; to rely upon a general charm diffused through the whole, rather than upon any quotable brilliancy; its very essence is spontaneity, high spirits, fertility of resource. That is a fair description of Lever. He is never at a loss. If his story hangs, off he goes at score with a perfectly irrelevant ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... part of "the winter of the deep snow," Lincoln became acquainted with one Denton Offutt, an adventurous and discursive sort of merchant, with more irons in the fire than he could well manage. He wanted to take a flat-boat and cargo to New Orleans, and having heard that Hanks and Lincoln had some experience of the river, he insisted on their joining him. John Johnston was afterwards added ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... the talk and laughter go by him without any attempt to take part in it. After dinner he went to his own room; while Valentine and the ladies sat round the fire in the orthodox Christmas manner, and after a good deal of discursive conversation, subsided ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... most genuine, biography of Burns is furnished by his own writings. His letters will, if carefully studied, disprove many of the positions taken up so confidently by would-be interpreters of his history. It is not the purpose of this discursive paper to take up the details of the Clarinda episode; but philandering is scarcely the word by which to describe the mutual relations of the lovers. As for Mrs. M'Lehose, the severest thing that can with justice be said against her is that, if she maintained her virtue, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... for the slightest signs of recovery in Ovid's face, Carmina detected a faint return of colour. She was so relieved that she was able to listen to the doctor's oddly discursive talk, and even to join in it. "Some of our friends used to think I was like ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... the country over were finishing their contracts. Collins, his coat off, his sleeve protectors strapped closely about his thin arms, worked at an intense white heat. He wasted no second of time, nor did he permit discursive interruption. His manner to those who entered the office was civil but curt. Time was now the essence of the contract these ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... discursive. Lady Engleton enjoyed the pastime of lightly touching the edges of what she called "advanced" thought. She sought the society of people like the two Professors and Miss Du Prel in order to hear what dreadful and delightful things they really would say. She read all the ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... himself. He scarcely glanced at the small daughter, now presented to him for the first time; and he bade Madame Lavaux, the mistress of the hotel, "make haste and finish with all that," when, with tearful voice, and discursive minuteness, she related to him the history of his wife's last days. He made all necessary arrangements; took possession of Madame Linders' watch and few trinkets; himself superintended the packing of her clothes and other trifling properties into a large trunk, which he left ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... four English stories, "The Mill on the Floss" seems to me to have most dramatic continuity, in distinction from that descriptive, discursive method of narration which I have attempted to indicate. After Hetty Sorrel, I think Maggie Tulliver the most successful of the author's young women, and after Tito Melema, Tom Tulliver the best of her young men. English ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... say that Derek Blunt (ne Blount), second son of the Earl of Avonleigh, is no prig, but, on the contrary, a very pleasant fellow. For a protagonist he obtrudes himself only moderately in a rather discursive story which involves a number of other people who do nothing in particular over a good many chapters. We are halfway through before Derek takes the plunge, and then we find, him, not in the slums of some industrial quarter, but in Western Canada, where class distinctions are founded less on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... pays little heed to the consideration of balance until a complication of many units forces the necessity upon it. The painter who esteems lightly the subject of composition is usually found to be the painter of simple subjects—portraits and non-discursive themes, but though these may survive in antagonism to such principles their authors are demanding more from the technical quality of their work than is ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... Dr. Spencer's good. He had almost broken down in the height of the labour, and still looked older and thinner for it; and after one night at Coombe, he was going to refresh himself by one of his discursive tours. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and crossed them the other way. The old lady began to seem to him a thought too discursive, ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... procedure in using subjects and predicates as we do is fundamentally irrational, an example of the desperation of our finite intellectual estate, infected and undermined as that is by the separatist discursive forms which are our only categories, but which absolute reality must somehow absorb ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... sat in 'Bias's summerhouse, the scent of their tobacco mingling, while they discoursed, with the fragrance of late roses, nicotianas, lemon verbenas. "Discoursed," did I say? Well, let the word pass: for their talk was discursive enough. But when at intervals one or the other opened his mouth, his utterance, though it took the form of a comment upon men and affairs, was in truth but the breathing of a deep inward content. On the table between them Captain Cai's musical box tinkled ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... soul and body; she needed Warren, she said to herself, often with bitter tears. Warren, splashing in his bath, scattering wet towels and discarded garments so royally about the place; Warren, in a discursive mood, regarding some operation as he stropped his razor; Warren's old, half-unthinking "you look sweet, dear," when, fresh and dainty, his wife was ready to go downstairs—for these and a thousand other memories ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... outset, the writer acknowledges a thousand imperfections in this discursive story. In all truth, it is a most garrulous and incoherent narrative. Like the automobile, part of the time the narrative moves, part of the time it does not; now it is in the road pursuing a straight course; then again it is in the ditch, or far afield, quite ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude,—shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty, sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. In all the Shakespearian women there is essentially the same foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety are merely the ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... too, by his present rank, and the pension for his wound, from being likely to become chargeable to him; so he had written such brotherly congratulations, that good honest Fred was quite affected. He was even discursive enough to mention some connexions of the young man who had been with Fred in the Crimea, a Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy, a very good sort of fellow, who gave excellent dinners, and was a pleasant yachting companion. ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... language, we mean chiefly phonetic articulate language, we do not exclude the less perfect symbols of thought, such as gestures, signs, or pictures. They, too, are language in a certain sense, and they must be included in language before we are justified in saying that discursive thought can be realized in language only. One instance will make this clear. We hold that we cannot think without language. But can we not count without language? We certainly can. We can form the conception of three without any spoken word, by simply holding up three ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... husbands; the conscription carried away all the finest young men. Janey loved to watch the soldiers; she loved all manner of shows, and also to tell of them. She asked Bessie if she would like to hear about the emperor's fete last month; and when Bessie acquiesced, she began in a discursive narrative style by which a story can be stretched to ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... love's converse now seems So tender to my dreams As he, discursive at our mutual desk, Most fervid and most ripe, When dreaming at his pipe, He made the ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... learned and discursive subaltern, relieved on account of rheumatic troubles from more strenuous duties with an Infantry regiment, joined our mess and proved a valuable addition. He was a talented mathematician whose researches had carried him to where mathematics soar into the realms of imagination; he had ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... from ever making its own impression upon the mind. It has to speak with the language of logic, whereas its use and function in the world is to speak with a language not of logic, but of a process of mind which is at least as sovereign in its own right as the discursive reason. ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... lowest stage add change, and you have growth or plant nature; super-add to this phantasy and impulse and you rise to the soul of irrational animals; at a yet higher stage you reach the rational and discursive intellect, which is peculiar to ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... something to say, who think more than they speak. The spinster aunts had been voluble persons, full of small chatter, women of no mental reservations whatever. The young men of his group had not been much different. The reflective attitude as opposed to the discursive was new to him. New and embarrassing. He felt impelled to talk, and while he groped uncertainly for some congenial subject he grew more and more acutely self-conscious. He felt that these men were calmly taking his measure. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... are discursive and desultory enough, as a reader, to have pleased even the late Lord Iddesleigh. It was "Aucassin and Nicolette" only a month ago, and to-day you have been reading Lord Lytton's "Strange Story," I am sure, for you want information about Plotinus! He was born (about A.D. 200) in Wolf-town ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... that Shakespeare has done. However fine or profound the thought, we know what was coming, whereas the effect of reading Shakespeare is 'like the eye of vassalage encountering majesty'. Chaucer's mind was consecutive, rather than discursive. He arrived at truth through a certain process; Shakespeare saw everything by intuition, Chaucer had great variety of power, but he could do only one thing at once. He set himself to work on a particular subject. His ideas were ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... I most cordially coincide, and at the same time bring these somewhat rambling and discursive reminiscences to ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... Bill's discursive remarks upon other subjects, and put into rather more choice English than that in which the latter delivered it, the ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... his beard, and Razumov, whose tension was relaxed by that unexpected and discursive ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... is characterized by reason, this our summit is rational, and though it subsists in energy, yet it has a remitted union with things themselves. Though too it energizes from itself, and contains intelligibles in its essence, yet from its alliance to the discursive nature of soul, and its inclination to that which is divisible, it falls short of the perfection of an intellectual essence and energy profoundly indivisible and united, and the intelligibles which it contains degenerate from the transcendently ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... answered, 'It is only by showing good conduct, and proofs of real wisdom and worth, that the King's entire favor can be gained First of all, to fear God'"—And, in fact, I launched now into a moral preachment, or discursive Dialogue, of great length; much needing to have the skirts of it tucked up, in a way of faithful abridgment, for behoof of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that the knowledge of God is discursive. For the knowledge of God is not habitual knowledge, but actual knowledge. Now the Philosopher says (Topic. ii): "The habit of knowledge may regard many things at once; but actual understanding regards only one thing at a time." Therefore ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... day of a St. Mocholmoc, na hainse, "of the island," at the 30th October. Could we find what was the patron day of the saint of Inche Colm it might help to settle the matter. One of the above saints is called Colman Ailither, or the pilgrim. Chattering in my discursive way, let me add that a Saint Mocholmoc appears to have been a favourite with the Danes of Dublin in the twelfth century, for we find in the lists of the Danish Kings of Dublin that of Donald MacGilloholmoch as reigning from 1125 to 1134; and another of the name is noticed by Regan as an ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... to these discursive sentences, let me add this poetic morsel in my own vein. Mr. Butler of Philadelphia was quite right in his judgment of my indoles: I "write by impulse on occasion." Here is a very recent instance in point. I had lately visited Mr. ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... famous sanctuary save by the questionable expedient of adopting his name: she called herself S. M. "della Vita." That settled it. He came from Mazzara in Sicily, whither they still carry, to his lonely shrine, epileptics and others distraught in mind. And were I in a discursive mood, I would endeavour to trace some connection between his establishment here and the tarantella—between St. Vitus' dance and that other one which cured, they say, the bite of the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... remember, "I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly by little and little into a full and clear light." These are different, but certainly very wonderful, instances of what can be done by attention. But now suppose that your mind is in its nature discursive, erratic, subject to electric attractions and repulsions, volage; it may be impossible for you to compel your attention except by taking away all external disturbances. I think the poets have an advantage and a disadvantage as compared with the steadier-going ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... malakordo. Discount diskonto. Discourage senkuragxigi. Discouragement senkuragxeco. Discourse parolado. Discourteous malgxentila. Discover eltrovi. Discovery eltrovo. Discredit senkreditigi. Discreet diskreta. Discretion singardemo, diskreto. Discriminate distingi. Discursive tro skribema. Discuss diskuti. Discussion diskutado. Disdain malsxati. Disease malsano—ego. Disembark elsxipigxi. Disengage liberigi. Disentangle liberigi. Disfavour malfavoro. Disgrace malhonori. Disguise alivesti. Disgust nauxzi. Dish plado. Dishcloth telertuko. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... to contemplate the works of these great men without arriving at the conclusion, that it is in the varied and discursive education of the Continent, that a foundation has been laid for the extraordinary eminence which its travellers have attained. It is the vast number of subjects with which the young men are in some degree made acquainted at the German universities, which has ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... to write A Vindication of the Press is not clear. Unlike his earlier An Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704), A Vindication does not seem to have been occasioned by a specific situation, and in it Defoe is not alone concerned with freedom of the press, but writes on a more general and discursive level. His opening paragraph states that "The very great Clamour against some late Performances of Authorship, and the unprecedented Criticisms introduc'd" make such an essay as he writes "absolutely ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... prepared by her discursive reading and discussion under the Widgett influence for ideas and "movements," though temperamentally perhaps she was rather disposed to resist and criticise than embrace them. But the people among whom ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... paroled prisoner of war. Captain Porter took him at once to Chester and put him again to school, this time to an old gentleman named Neif, who had served in the guards of Napoleon. The method of instruction practiced by him seems to have been unsystematic and discursive; but Farragut, who was ever attentive to make the most of such opportunities as offered for self-improvement, derived profit here also, and said afterward that the time thus passed had been of service to him throughout his life. Until very lately there were residents ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... he remarked, after a discursive, fitful, but very spicy preface of ten minutes' duration, "why they couldn't find somethin' I hed done, instead of tuckin' some other feller's job on me? I hev had difficulties, but this here one's just one more than I knows on. Like 'nuff some ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... good deal to do with the effect produced;—for no one, I suppose, will set Johnson before Burke,—and Burke was a great and universal talker;—yet now we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in Boswell. The fact is, Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the sharp short things that Johnson almost always did, which produce a more decided effect at the moment, and which are so much more easy to carry off.[1] ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... cats are spirited and harmonious; but the animals depart to different quarters of the universe, and your hydraulic measure, so far from bringing order out of chaos, merely evokes a wailing chaos out of comparative order. These discursive observations aim at showing that a cat has a haughty spirit of independence which centuries of partial submission to the suzerainty of man have not eradicated. I do not want to censure the ancient personage who made friends with the creature which is ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... a broken heart, with the following somewhat discursive farewell to her child: 'There are two ways in which a mother can be of use to her daughter; the one is by instilling into her mind virtuous principles, and by setting her a virtuous example, the other is by being to her, in her own person, an ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie) |
