"Exquisiteness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that, if you saw the more likely peril for poor human nature, you would say, 'He will be jealous of all the help coming from me,—none from him to me!'—And that would be a consequence of the help, all-too-great for hope of return, with any one less possessed than I with the exquisiteness of being transcended ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... Providence," remarked the duke, enraptured. With a touch here and there, the touch of a master, he had gathered the whole little story of Miss Alicia, and had found it of a whimsical exquisiteness and humor. ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in comparison with the natural beauty of those few simple sprays. You will also observe how much the white or pale blue screen behind the flowers enhances the effect by lamp or lantern light. For the screen has been arranged with the special purpose of showing the exquisiteness of plant shadows; and the sharp silhouettes of sprays and blossoms cast thereon are beautiful beyond the imagining of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... score of yards away from the main road and from the bank of a tumbling stream, which they had approached. She was trying to discover if she could see them. It was pretense. There was no interest in her glance. She was thinking of him and the smartness of his habit, and the exquisiteness of this moment. He had such a charming calico pony. The leaves were just enough developed to make a diaphanous lacework of green. It was like looking through a green-spangled arras to peer into the woods beyond ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... powers: they indicate a certain "donnish" timidity (if I may use the epithet), a certain distrust of his own genius. Such a timidity and such a distrust often accompany very exquisite faculties: indeed, they may be said to imply a certain exquisiteness of feeling. But they explain why, of the two contemporaries, the robust Ben Jonson is to-day a living figure in most men's conception of those times, while Samuel Daniel is rather a fleeting ghost. And his self-distrust was even then recognized ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... quite lost to him—the amazing invention that shall have put form and colour into such perfect harmony, that exquisiteness is the result, he is without understanding—the nobility of thought, that shall have given the artist's dignity to the whole, ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... church with Adeline Mohun, and Gillian, who had heard so much of the great Marchioness, was surprised to see a small slight woman, not handsome, and worn-looking about the eyes. At the first glance, she was plainly dressed; but the eye of a connoisseur like Aunt Ada could detect the exquisiteness of the material and the taste, and the slow soft tone of her voice; and every gesture and phrase showed that she had all her life been in the habit of condescending—-in fact, thought Gillian, revolving her recent experience, though Lady ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which on my first return after so many years got to mean for my mind Rome. The Aventine, where it slopes down to the Tiber white with fruit blossom, the trees growing freely in masonry and weeds, against the moist sky; this ephemeral exquisiteness seeming to mean more here among the centuries ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... whereof I believe there is none of you gentlemen drinkers that putteth any question—so in this Pantagruelion have I found so much efficacy and energy, so much completeness and excellency, so much exquisiteness and rarity, and so many admirable effects and operations of a transcendent nature, that if the worth and virtue thereof had been known when those trees, by the relation of the prophet, made election of a wooden king to rule ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... in his manner of composition. That derives its immense power from other sources; from passion, intensity, imagination, size, truth, cogency of logical reason. Those who insist on charm, on winningness in style, on subtle harmonies and fine exquisiteness of suggestion, are disappointed in Burke: they even find him stiff and over-coloured. And there are blemishes of this kind. His banter is nearly always ungainly, his wit blunt, as Johnson said, and often unseasonable. As is usual with a man who has not true ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... 'The exquisiteness of the spring. The strong-limbed sycamores with their broad expanding leaves. The leaping streams, and the small waterfalls, white and foaming—the cherry blossom, the white farms, the dark yews which are the northern cypresses—and the tall upstanding firs and hollies, vigorously black against ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... living. But such fulness requires a sphere of life that will call forth and exercise the highest human capacities. Aristotle frankly pronounces "external goods" to be indispensable, and happiness to be therefore "a gift of the gods." The rational man will acquire a certain exquisiteness or finesse of action, a "mean" of conduct; and this virtue will be diversified through the various relations into which he must enter, and the different situations which he must meet. He will be not merely brave, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... their bodies, newly revealed. To Thyrsis especially this was life's last miracle, a discovery so fraught with bliss as to be a continual torment. The incitements that were hidden in the softness and the odor of unbound and tumbled hair; the exquisiteness of maiden breasts, moulded of marble, rosy-tipped; the soft contour of snowy limbs, the rhythmic play of moving muscles—to dwell amid these things, to possess them, was suddenly to discover in reality what before had only existed in the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... mysterious gem which he might wear for an hour, but which must presently, with its hundred-fold shadow and shine, pass from his keeping. He knew that love was his, but he did not know that he was Love's. He knew he loved Barbara, but he did not know that her exquisiteness was permeating his whole being with an endless possession. In truth no man good and free could have kept her soul out of his. She was so delicate, yet so strong; so steady, yet so ready; so original, yet so infinitely responsive—what could he ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... a combination of the old Italian palace with English comforts. Mr. White, in his joy at possessing his graceful lady wife, had spared no expense in making it a meet bower for her, and Geraldine was as much amused as fascinated by the exquisiteness of all around her; as she sat, in a most luxurious chair, looking out through the open window at the blue sea, yet with a lively wood fire burning under a beauteous mantelpiece; statues, pictures, all that was recherche around, while they drank their English tea out of almost transparently delicate ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reverently at a distance. He knew how much he could not do, nor was he ever confident even of the things that he could do; and these things, therefore, he did superlatively well, having to grope for the means in the recesses of his soul. The particular quality of exquisiteness and freshness that gives to all his work, whether on canvas or on stone or on copper, a distinction from and above any contemporary work, and makes it dearer to our eyes and hearts, is a quality that came to him because he was an amateur, and that ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... years ago I gathered the idea that the Taj's place in the achievements of man was exactly the place of the ice-storm in the achievements of Nature; that the Taj represented man's supremest possibility in the creation of grace and beauty and exquisiteness and splendor, just as the ice-storm represents Nature's supremest possibility in the combination of those same qualities. I do not know how long ago that idea was bred in me, but I know that I cannot remember back to a time when the thought ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... countenance now is severe. He must have done it well, but I can hardly imagine him impersonating gentleness and complete submission to abuse. But Anton Lang, with his blonde complexion, his light hair, blue eyes and delicate mouth, his exquisiteness of form and quietness of manner, is just like what Raphael and many of the old masters present. When we talked with Anton Lang in private he looked exactly as he looked in the Passion Play. This is his first year ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... gate of the five orders, a building beautiful, as it were, in its own despite. They added a smaller curiosity of the same sort, at Merton; they added Wadham, perhaps their most successful achievement. Their taste was a medley of new and old: they made a not uninteresting effort to combine the exquisiteness of Gothic decoration with the proportions of Greek architecture. The tower of the five orders reminds the spectator, in a manner, of the style of Milton. It is rich and overloaded, yet its natural beauty is not abated by the relics ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... the office, or when he was entering another person's house, he had a purely mechanical habit of moistening his fingers at his lips, and rubbing the lapels of his coat. This was the sole relic of "the exquisite Soeren's" exquisiteness—like one of the rudimentary organs, dwindled through lack of use, which zoologists ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... commonplace sometimes leads Mr. James to become artificial and even obscure,[21] but at its best his style is as perspicuous as it is distinguished, dainty, and subtle; there is, perhaps, no other living artist in words who can give his admirers so rare a literary pleasure in mere exquisiteness ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... poetic development was rapid, and continuous. Shelley enthralled him most. The fire and spirit of the great poet's verse, wild and strange often, but ever with an exquisiteness of music which seemed to his admirer, then and later, supreme, thrilled him to a very passion of delight. Something of the more richly coloured, the more human rhythm of Keats affected him also. Indeed, a line from the ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... folds of its dragon-like neck and head from off the Scottish capital, dim in the distance, and unveiling fortalice, and tower, and spire, and the noble curtain of blue hills behind. And there was Chalmers, evidently enjoying the exquisiteness of the scene, as only by the true poet scenery can be enjoyed. Those striking metaphors which so abound in his writings, and which so often, without apparent effort, lay the material world before the reader, show how thoroughly he must have ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... shape of pictures "done" by Jane or Eliza, or embroidery upon lambrequin, portiere, or tidy. It occurs to Jane and Eliza as seldom as to their fore-mothers, that cooking is an art in itself, that may be "fine" to exquisiteness. In their eyes, it is an ugly necessity, to be got over as expeditiously as "the men-folks" will allow, their coarser natures demanding more and richer filling than women's. It follows that dishes which require premeditation ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... man!" flamed in anger across his world of beauty, and the violence of the contrast broke something in his mind like a globe of colored glass that had focused the exquisiteness of the vision.... The sound continued as before, but its power of evocation lessened. The thought of Stahl—Stahl in his ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... of coral or amethyst. Their minute flowers have rarely any general part or power in the colors of mountain ground; but, examined closely, they are one of the chief joys of the traveller's rest among the Alps; and full of exquisiteness unspeakable, in their several bearings and miens of blossom, so to speak. Plate VIII. represents, however feebly, the proud bending back of her head by Myrtilla Regina:[60] an action as beautiful in her as it is terrible in the ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... that, after all, there might be some day too much of her? Was her amber hair a little too—FLUFFY? Was something the matter with her dress? Everything she wore had always seemed so beautiful. Where had the exquisiteness of it gone? For there was surely no exquisiteness about it now! It was incredible that any one could so greatly alter in the few days elapsed since ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... the dying woman might have misunderstood it. A busy statesman, always thinking of the interests of France, the Duke had a thousand odd ways on the surface, such as often lead to a man of genius being mistaken for a madman, and of which the explanation lies in the exquisiteness and exacting needs of their intellect. He came to seat himself in an armchair by his wife's side, and looked fixedly at her. The dying woman put her hand out a little way, took her husband's and clasped it feebly; ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... character. Most readers who are likely to be really influenced by writing above the common order will find that special aspect an added reason for interest and study; and I dare say you have long seen, as I am beginning to see with new clearness, that if a book which has any sort of exquisiteness happens also to be a popular, widely circulated book, the power over the social mind for any good is, after all, due to its reception by a few appreciative natures, and is the slow result of radiation from that narrow circle. I mean that you can affect a few souls, and ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... athletic loins! The divine, severe Minerva, musing under the shadow of her awful helmet; the athlete with the strigil, resting so lightly on his tireless feet; the royal Apollo, disdaining his own victory; the Venus, half shrinking from the exquisiteness of her own beauty; the swaying poise of the Discobulus, caught forever as he drew his breath for the throw; the smooth-limbed, brooding Antinous; the terrible Laocoon, which fascinated me, though it always repelled me, too; the austere simplicity of the Dying Gladiator's ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... Foster, all this while, had been busy at the supper-table, pouring out his own tea and gulping it down with no more sense of its exquisiteness than if it were a decoction of catnip; helping himself to pieces of dipt toast on the flat of his knife blade, and dropping half of it on the table-cloth; using the same serviceable implement to cut slice after slice of ham; perpetrating terrible enormities with the butter-plate; and in ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... effort of the will. All our being, for the moment, has a new and strange colouring. We have another kind of life. I think myself, our life would be much poorer without our dreams; a thousand rainbow tints and combinations would be gone; music and poetry would lose many an indescribable exquisiteness and tenderness. You see I like to take our dreams seriously, as I would even our fun. For I believe that those new mysterious feelings that come to us in sleep, if they be only from dreams of a richer grass and a softer wind than we have known awake, are indications of wells of feeling and delight ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... There was little exquisiteness left in the young man now. It was but a few moments since he had stepped smiling into the arena, kicking aside the rose-leaves which enthusiastic hands had thrown in his path. It was but some minutes since he had begun to run, and now the perspiration was pouring from his body, his ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... floor, the delicate work basket with its coquettish bows of riband, contrasted oddly with the other simple things which had evidently been made in the wilderness by unskilled hands. Yet even those were tasteful and all painted white, so that the whole was purity, beauty, and exquisiteness. ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... have a try," said Leslie. So Peter took it and was glad. It was his one link with the world of exquisiteness and new-burnished joys out of which he was being thrust; he would ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... had her russet jumper, but round her neck hung a grey wool scarf, of the kind known as a "Comforter." Amazingly pretty she looked in Dickson's eyes, but with a different kind of prettiness. The sense of fragility had fled, and he saw how nobly built she was for all her exquisiteness. She looked like a queen, he thought, but a queen to go gipsying ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... impulse and passion—passion, clinging and self-devoted, not fierce and possessive—through all the more superficial suggestions of reticence and self-control. 'This little creature is only at the beginning of her life'—he thought, with a kind of pity for her very softness and exquisiteness. 'What the deuce will she have made of it, by the end? Why ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... different poets with each other, we should inquire which have brought into the fullest play our imagination and our reason, or have created the greatest excitement and produced the completest harmony. If we consider great exquisiteness of language and sweetness of metre alone, it is impossible to deny to Pope the character of a delightful writer; but whether he be a poet, must depend upon our definition of the word; and, doubtless, if everything that pleases be poetry, Pope's satires and epistles must ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... it seemed, young Frost made no reply to this pleasantry; for already he was impatient to be gone. Although the room was intensely cold and uncomfortable, still his guest lingered, standing before the massive cabinet, exclaiming upon the exquisiteness of the workmanship, and every now and then running his dainty fingers along the carving of its front. As Dan stood waiting for the Marquis to leave, he chanced to glance through the window to the court without, and saw Jesse ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... it is in the highest degree consonant with reason and criticism, to infer that Mr Arnold's poetic vein was not very full-blooded, that it was patient of refusal to indulge it, that his poetry, in nearly the happiest of his master's phrases, was not exactly "inevitable," despite the exquisiteness of ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... refinement is unfortunately accompanied by sterility, perhaps even results from it. But for his essential uncreativeness, he might well have become the composer uniquely representative of the artistic movement in which the late nineteenth-century refinement and exquisiteness manifested itself. No musician, not Debussy even, was better prepared for bringing the symbolist movement into music. Loeffler is affiliated in temper, if not exactly in achievement, with the brilliant band of belated romanticists ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... home-coming when Nigel had sat huddled unbecomingly in the corner of the railway carriage. Her power of expression had been limited to little joyful gasps and obvious laudatory adjectives, smothered in their birth by her first glance at her bridegroom. Betty, in seeing it, knew all the exquisiteness of her own pleasure, and all the meanings ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... persons rarely do or should marry; nor two extra homely. The fact is a little singular that very handsome women, who of course can have their pick, rarely marry good-looking men, but generally give preference to those who are homely; because that {173} exquisiteness in which beauty originates naturally blends with that power which accompanies ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis |
