"Impersonal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from having personally verified it, lived it and obeyed it, this truth without which a people is incapable of governing itself? Liberty?—it is respect; liberty?—it is obedience to the inner law; and this law is neither the good pleasure of the mighty, nor the caprice of the crowd, but the high and impersonal rule before which those who govern are the first to bow the head. Shall liberty, then, be proscribed? No; but men must be made capable and worthy of it, otherwise public life becomes impossible, and the nation, undisciplined and unrestrained, goes on through license into the inextricable ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... to define wit (which, as Mr. Coleridge says, is "impersonal"), and humor also; but it is not easy to distinguish the humor of one man from that of all other humorists, so as to bring his special quality clearly before the apprehension of the reader. Perhaps the best (if not the most ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... the note filled me with suspicion. Its tone was too impersonal. When I asked for it, I was impelled by the sole desire to study it the more carefully at my own leisure. That night I found certain markings over some of the letters. These I jotted down and rearranged until I had ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... M. Blanc who interrogates—that all capitalists are not idlers? M. Blanc, generous to capitalists who work, asks why so large a share should be given to those who do not work? A flow of eloquence as to the IMPERSONAL services of the capitalist and the PERSONAL services of the laborer, terminated by ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... intimate nature of the data reported. Belonging as dreams do to the most personal and private life of the individual it is nevertheless true that continued and careful study of this form of mentation insensibly alters one's attitude so that at length the dream appears as a fact of nature, impersonal ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... choose for my Judge? the earnest, impersonal reader, Who, in the work, forgets me and the world and himself! You who have eyes to detect, and Gall to Chastise the imperfect, Have you the heart, too, that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... for me and I was confronted with a human situation which I must in this narrative of Secret Service operations treat as impersonal though it is full of pathetic implications. I found her with her ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... to him and now it flattered his mild proud sovereignty. Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy. So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped City. Now, at the name of the ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... in a man) had more stability. A good deal of his sympathy survived. Indeed I heard him murmur "Ghastly nuisance," but I knew it was of the integrity of his domestic accord that he was thinking. With my eyes on the dog lying curled up in sleep in the middle of the porch I suggested in a subdued impersonal tone: "Yes. Why not let ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... individual quality a longing.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} And this is what the dissatisfied of all kinds, and all those who yearn, divine in him. He is much too little of a personality, too little of a central figure.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} The "impersonal," those who are not self-centred, love him for this. He is especially the musician of a species of dissatisfied women. Fifty steps further on, and we find the female Wagnerite—just as we find Wagner himself fifty paces ahead of Brahms.—The female Wagnerite is a more definite, a more ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... came across Lizzie's mind that this glowing language had a taste of the Bible about it, and that, therefore, it was in some degree impersonal, and intended to be pious. She did not relish piety at such a crisis as this, and was, therefore, for a moment inclined to be cold. But she liked being called a flower, and was not quite sure whether she remembered her Bible rightly. The words which struck her ear as familiar ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... days that Hugh and Rachel saw much of each other, during these days that Rachel passed in spite of herself beyond the anxious impersonal interest which Hugh had awakened in her, on to that slippery much-trodden ground of uncomfortable possibilities ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... emphasis on the awkward impersonal, 'one may have scruples about committing an act of schism by encouraging an intruding bishop performing episcopal functions in another man's diocese. Has not your spiritual father taught you that ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of no book which has come down to us with grander pretensions than this, and it is so impersonal and sincere that it is never offensive nor ridiculous. Compare the modes in which modern literature is advertised with the prospectus of this book, and think what a reading public it addresses, what criticism it expects. It seems to have been uttered from some eastern summit, with a sober ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... interests of the two classes were identical. But as capital was consolidated and great corporations were formed for extensive operations in transportation and manufacturing, the relation between the two became very impersonal and difficult to control. In order to protect their interests the wage-earners organized into unions, brotherhoods, etc., almost every trade and ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... get away from the practical in this life," he said. "Even in—" He seemed to bite off the beginning of confidence with an effort. "You may dream half the night," he began again, with a thin assumption of making an impersonal statement, "but before the night's over you'll come up against the practical, or the practicable, or the proper right thing, or something, that makes you see what a fool you are. The way this world's run, ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... tenderness, no awareness of each other, in these men and women. There is only the fierce, impersonal longing for utter consumption, the extinction of the flaming torch, complete merging in the Absolute, the weaving All. In each of them, desire for the void mounts into a gigantic, monstrous flower, into the shimmering thing that enchants King Mark's garden ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... the region of credit altogether. He believed indeed that women valued the pleasure of making an impression, of exercising influence, too highly, and that in this point their perception seemed to fail; they did not understand that a man acts very often from impersonal motives, and is interested in the doing of the thing itself, whatever it may happen to be, rather than in the effect that his action may have upon other people. It was part of the high-mindedness of women that they could not ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... materialist; physicist; somatism[obs3], somatist[obs3]. Adj. material, bodily; corporeal, corporal; physical; somatic, somatoscopic[obs3]; sensible, tangible, ponderable, palpable, substantial. objective, impersonal, nonsubjective[obs3], neuter, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... as a perpetual obstacle, so far as your eyes are concerned, between you and me. Make the best instead of the worst of your strange position here. It offers you a new sensation to amuse you while you are ill. You have a nurse who is an impersonal creature—a shadow among shadows; a voice to speak to you, and a hand to help you, and nothing more. Enough of myself!" she exclaimed, rising and changing her tone. "What can I do to amuse you?" She considered a little. "I have some odd tastes," ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... the fatal mistake of Catholic and Protestant philosophy by assuming an impersonal deity in three modes of manifestation, while Christian thinkers have played around the logical contradiction of one personality in three equal persons for fifteen hundred years. We must utterly break ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... so far as Aesthetics deals with the emotions rather than the reason it comes into contact with Ethics in the psychological field. In its narrower sense Aesthetics deals with beauty merely in an impersonal way; and its immediate object is not what is morally beautiful, but rather that which is beautiful in itself irrespective of moral considerations. Ethics, on the other hand, is concerned with personal worth as expressed ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... to her constant principles in the interpretation of character, she insists on putting the best possible construction on his actions, ascribing his impatient vehemence and bad temper to a noble and partially impersonal cause. One suspects that Urban had lost his temper with poor Fra Bartolomeo because the friar had used too great freedom of speech rather than too little, as Catherine suggests. Despite her generosity, however, she can rebuke pungently enough, as this letter shows. ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... Thus we have no guarantee that the other cities referred to by name in the text, Nippur, Erech, and Eridu, are mentioned in any significant connexion with each other.(1) Of the actual cause of Creation the text appears to give two versions also, one in its present form impersonal, and the other carried out by a god. But these two accounts are quite unlike the authorized version of Babylon, and we may confidently regard them as representing genuine Sumerian myths. The text resembles other early accounts of Creation by introducing ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... twenty-five years there'll hardly be a big railroad man in the country who wasn't born in sight of the Rockies." Unlike Mr. Fowler, whose mind ran in a groove leading directly to business, the judge had a natural bent toward generalization, and when dining, preferred to discuss impersonal topics. He was a tall, florid man with an immense paunch flattened by artificial devices, and a vitality so excessive that it overflowed in numberless directions—in his hearty animal appetites, in his love of sports, in his delight in the theatre and literature, particularly ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... away from Pearce still more amazed. Some strange, deep undercurrent was working here. There had been unmistakable hate for Kells in his dark look and a fierce implication in his portent of fatality. What had caused this sudden impersonal interest in her situation? What was the meaning of the subtle animosity toward the bandit leader? Was there no honor among evil men banded together for evil deeds? Were jealousy, ferocity, hate and faithlessness fostered by ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... energy of the greater part of mankind. It seems curious to measure the force wasted in sensitiveness to public opinion as you would measure the waste of power in an engine, and yet it is a wholesome and impersonal way to think of it,—until we find a better way. It relieves us of the morbid element in the sensitiveness to say, "I cannot mind what so-and-so thinks of me, for I have not the nervous energy to spare." It relieves us still ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... ability to sleep quickly and soundly made them endurable. The first night that she spent in her completed house behind barred windows and barricaded door was one of almost undiluted peace and happiness. The night noises seemed far removed and impersonal and the soughing of the wind in the trees was gently soothing. Before, it had carried a mournful note and was sinister in that it might hide the approach of some real danger. That night she ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the third vowel as its centre, it does not soon betray it. The highest thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not obviously ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... notes; they soon make one harmonious sound and acquire a most touching significance, until by daily practice he learns how to abstract himself altogether from the most wretched surroundings. A quite impersonal ego seems then to detach itself from the particular ego that suffers and is in peril; it looks impartially upon all things, and sees its other self as a passing wave in the tide that a mysterious Intelligence controls. Strange faculty of double existence ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... highly finished marionnettes. There was a fascination in watching the movement of these brilliant, clear-cut silent little things upon that amazingly verdant carpet of grass. But it was a fascination which, for Poppy, had by now worn somewhat thin. The interest proved too far away, too impersonal. Indeed it may be questioned whether any who have not within themselves large store of resignation, or of hope, can look on at gaiety, in which they have no share, without first sadness and then pretty lively irritation. And of those two most precious ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... or four successive Sundays Lemuel's face dawned upon the minister from the congregation, and tasked his powers of impersonal appeal and mental concentration to the utmost. It never appeared twice in the same place, and when at last Sewell had tutored the sexton carefully in Lemuel's dress, he was driven to despair one morning when he ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... generosity and consideration shown in his arrangement for her, had touched her deeply, and she had been only too willing to express her concurrence. It was the first time she had known the sensation of a genuine and impersonal interest in an intellectual man's conversation; and she was happier than she had been for many a day. She lay down again, but sleep would not come to her eyes, and her thoughts were busy with the subject of Honor's letter. She reasoned with herself to no purpose, for the stillness ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist; he is not CHARACTERISED by becoming this or that. In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to WHO HE IS,—that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses of his nature ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... how strangely it foreshadowed something in Japanese character to be fully learned only after years of familiarity. You will recognize in the memory of that first impression one glimpse of the race-soul, with its impersonal lovableness and its impersonal weaknesses—one glimpse of the nature of a life in which the Occidental, dwelling alone, feels a psychic comfort comparable only to the nervous relief of suddenly emerging ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... exposed to all the danger of the Twenty Parts method of publication. He began his stories without seeing the end; in one of them he is humorously plaintive over the trouble of making this manner of fiction. While "Vanity Fair" is, of course, written in the impersonal third person, at least one passage is put into the mouth of a character in the book: an extraordinary ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... conditions that make it impossible for it to resemble anything so personal and intimate as the great unwritten epistle to which you refer. But I will note down here very hurriedly and in a more impersonal way, some of the matters that have affected me in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... that such vast and powerful phenomena as a bolt of lightning or the flood of a river were mere impersonal things. Some one—somewhere—must be their master and must direct them as the engineer directs his engine or a ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... impersonal about a book, I suppose. At any rate I find myself able to write down here just the confession I've never been able to make to any one face to face, the frightful trouble it was to me to bring myself to do what I suppose every other coloured ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... and that nothing now remained save the business of living. So, when he told her to rest, and that he would get dinner and show her how a bachelor kept house, she let him go with no reply save that vague, impersonal smile which Kent ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... I had felt unwell for several weeks, and now I woke up to a bad feverish cold, my body one vast ache, and at the same time impersonal, away from me, floating over above me, sinking under me, tied to me only ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... Carlyle it may be said, as it has been said of M. Sainte-Beuve, that "what chiefly interests him in a book is the author, and in the author the very mystery of his personality." In other words, each looks upon a literary work, not as the production of certain impersonal intellectual faculties, but as a manifestation of the author in the totality of his nature. But while the point of view is thus identical, there is little similarity in the treatment. In the one case a powerful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... entire lack of self-consciousness, as though the episode of the night before had never occurred. Code was very thankful for her tact and much relieved. It was evident that their relations for the remainder of the four days' journey north were to be impersonal unless he chose to make them otherwise. This he had no intention of doing—after his morning's ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... having on these conditions. He felt the hot sun on his back, and listened dreamily to the cannon. Hope was gone, and he wondered at himself for feeling a remote rather than an active interest in his fate. He thought of himself as somebody else, and felt a vague impersonal pity. He criticised the random firing, and suspected the hit was merely a fluke. When his back was dry he rolled lazily over and lay gazing up at the cloudless sky. For greater comfort he placed his hands beneath his head. The sky faded, and ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... that is; nor do you, Mr. Craven. Even you, Seymour, you don't know. For you are a man of action, and at Court there is always movement. But I, my friends—" She gave Craven a deliciously kind yet impersonal smile. "I am a contemplative. There is nothing oriental about me, but I am just a quiet British contemplative, untouched by the unrest ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... Sun had stepped out of her shrine; . . no longer a creature removed, impersonal, and sacred, she had become most absolutely human. Moreover, she might now have been taken for a bacchante, a dancer, or any other unsexed example of womanhood inasmuch as with her golden mantle she had thrown off all disguise of modesty. Her ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... perceives the searchlights of the world's assembled navies in act to converge on one minute fragment of wreckage—one only in all the black and agony-strewn sea. Then those beams focussed themselves. Earth as we knew it—the full circuit of our orb—laid the weight of its impersonal and searing curiosity on this Huckley which had voted that it was flat. It asked for news about Huckley—where and what it might be, and how it talked—it knew how it danced—and how it thought in its wonderful soul. And then, in all the zealous, merciless ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... truth—and of its rigidly accurate truth I think there can be no question—the assertion that the Self-existing Substance is a Personal and Intelligent Being, and the assertion that this Substance is an Impersonal and Non-Intelligent Being, are alike assertions wholly destitute of any assignable degree of logical probability, I say assignable degree of logical probability, because that some degree of such probability may exist I do not undertake to deny. All I assert is, that if we are here able ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... one young person in the village toward whom Albert found himself making exceptions in his attitude of serenely impersonal tolerance. That person was Helen Kendall, the girl who had come into his grandfather's office the first morning of his stay in South Harniss. He was forced to make these exceptions by the young lady herself. ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... seemed entirely withdrawn; she existed like an atmosphere about the babe, an impersonal emanation of love. She lay absorbed in this life of her life, this flesh of her flesh, unconscious of herself as a sponge in warm sea-water. She touched this pulp of life, and was thrilled, and once more her ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... a distinction can be made, chronicles and annals (q.v.) have points of great similarity. Chronicles are accounts generally of an impersonal character, and often anonymous, composed in varying proportions of passages reproduced textually from sources which the chronicler is seldom at pains to indicate, and of personal recollections the veracity of which remains to be determined. Some of them are ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... and as he took it their eyes met for an instant, and she flushed ever so slightly. He, with many unspoken thoughts, knelt down, made a little hole in the turf with his knife, and planted the rose. When he stood up again Phadrig went on in the same quiet impersonal voice: ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... last little bottle, and sitting on the edge of the bath let her eyebrows rise. How pleasant was that impersonal humor which made her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... out of his difficulty. The post was an impersonal and incorruptible go-between, so he wrote frequently. Sometimes he had news to send, for, to avoid the espionage of Caesar, intelligence of Pete came through him; occasionally he had love-letters to enclose; now and then he had presents to pass on. When such necessity did not arise, ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... step toward an amelioration of our crude and unjust industrial code is to awaken the public conscience to protest against the evils we have enumerated. Publicity, pitiless publicity, alone can lead to redress. These large- scale, impersonal sins must not be so nonchalantly tolerated; instead of applauding and envying the shrewd financier who rakes in unearned profits by clever manipulation, by unscrupulous use of inside information, and disregard of the welfare of workers, competitors, and public, we ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... its own answer. It will be obvious to every one who considers that the drafting of statutes and the formulating of legal decisions is almost as impersonal a procedure as that of drawing up the rules to govern a game; and it offers hardly more opportunity for discriminating ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... It was useless to whip him, for whippings seemed only to make Baboo grow. He would lisp serenely as Aboo Din took down the rattan withe from above the door, "Baboo baniak jahat!" (Baboo very bad!) and there was something so charmingly impersonal in all his mischief, that we came between his own brown body and the rod, time and again. There was nothing distinctive in Baboo's features or form. To the casual observer he might have been any one of a half-dozen of his playmates. Like them, he went about perfectly naked, ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... Governments that they are short-sighted, detached, impersonal, aloof, and haughty. We gathered in the road, a gayly bandanaed, dusty, and ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... single, attendant gantry tower, waiting on the launching pad. The rockets were as gaunt as sharks. They might almost have been natural spires on the Moon, or ruined towers left by the extinct beings of Mars. At first they were impersonal and expected parts of the scene, until the numbers, ceramic-enamelled on their striped flanks, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... as if afraid she might say too much. Florian, who had rallied in his literary enthusiasm, collapsed into his chronic state of terror. Even in so impersonal a thing as Browning, the man who does not know what his habits are takes every ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... on account of them. Neither can I recall any quarrel or murder directly attributable to this kind of gambling. It must be remembered that these public games were chiefly rouge et noir, monte, faro, or roulette, in which the antagonist was Fate, Chance, Method, or the impersonal "bank," which was supposed to represent them all; there was no individual opposition or rivalry; nobody challenged the decision ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... services are Mary's own tastes; the church is Mary; and the chapels are her private rooms. She was not pleased with the arrangements made for her in her palace at Paris; they were too architectural; too regular and mathematical; too popular; too impersonal; and she rather abruptly ordered her architect at Chartres to go back to the old arrangement. The apse at Paris was hardly covered with its leading before the architect of Chartres adopted a totally new plan, which, according ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... with an equal care, but by means of the bold, broad touches necessary for their effective presentation on a canvas so large and so crowded. Such figures are, indeed, but the component features of one great form, and their actions only so many modes of one collective impersonal character,—that of the Parisian Society of Imperial and Democratic France; a character everywhere present and busy throughout the story, of which it is the real hero or heroine. This society was doubtless selected for characteristic illustration as being ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Farwell, the architect. The table capriciously swung that way. She did not feel prepared to talk to Mr. Chiltern. And before entering upon her explorations she was in need of a guide. She could have found none more charming, none more impersonal, none more subtly aware of her wants (which had once been his) than Mr. Farwell. With his hair parted with geometrical precision from the back of his collar to his forehead, with his silky mustache and eyes of soft hazel lights, he ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... know, therefore, that no more than appreciation can it choose its material and stand alone. But scientific criticism professes, at least, the true faith M. Brunetiere holds that his own method is the only one by which an impersonal and stable judgment can ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... comrade. Jeff has looked out for her, but she needs a woman friend." With a sweep of the hand he went back to the impersonal. "Her trouble was economic, just as ours is. Look at it. We've got a perfect self-regulating system that adjusts itself automatically to bring hard times when we're most prosperous. Give us big crops and boom times, and we head straight for a depression. ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... by any of his advisers. He is unwilling to have the public think that any other than himself is President. A man as handsome as Harding, as vain of his literary style as he is, has an ego that is not capable of total self-effacement. He will bow to impersonal authority like that of the party, or invoke the anonymous governance of "best minds," calling rather often on God as a well established authority, but he will not let authority be personal and be called Daugherty, or Lodge or Knox or whomever ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... large and far-reaching story. The value of the thought, indeed, is not to be measured by poetic tests; but still the thought has poetic value, too, for it is this which has stirred in the writer that keen yet impersonal interest in the actors of his story and in its situations which is one of the most certain notes of true dramatic feeling, and which therefore gives the most unfailing stimulus to the interest ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... befall him in the course of his discreetly regulated career. He had played with fire once too often, and he had discovered, not without a slight accession of self-respect, that he was perceptibly scorched. He had supposed his interest in May Beverly to be purely impersonal; he had been mistaken. He had admired her in his character of connoisseur, as a man of the world he had found amusement and relaxation in her society. For May had the unique advantage of combining that degree of conventionality which is admissibly essential, ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... in, contritely. "Please don't be so dreadful about it. After all, you asked me, didn't you? Perhaps I've hurt your vanity. There, I didn't mean that, either. Oh, dear, let's talk about something impersonal. We get along wretchedly ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... commonplace. Unlike the heroes of Homer, they repress their fears—they repress everything, save their irrepressible flatulence of mind. They are expansive in unimportant matters and at wrong moments—blown about in a whirl of fatuous extremes. The impersonal note has vanished. Why has it gone, Mr. Denis?" he suddenly asked. "And when ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... destroying the strength of his shelter. By so much as one man preys upon or debases another man, he weakens the strength of the man-herd. And for man it is the herd, not the individual, that must meet that stern law of "the survival of the fittest" on the vast impersonal arena of the universe. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... aspect it is pure intelligence undifferentiated into individuality. As pure intelligence it is infinite responsiveness and susceptibility. As devoid of relation to time and space it is devoid of individual personality. It is, therefore, in this aspect a purely impersonal element upon which, by reason of its inherent intelligence and susceptibility, we can impress any recognition of personality that we will. These are the great facts that the mental scientist works with, and the student will do well to ponder deeply ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... was in Cuba," said Shere, and the conversation dragged on impersonal and dull. Esteban talked continually with a forced heartiness, Christina barely spoke at all, and then absently. Shere noticed that she had but lately come in, for she still wore her hat, and her gloves lay crossed on the table in the light of the lamp; she moved restlessly ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... not been opened in vain. Rennes could talk well, sometimes brilliantly, often with originality, and, with the tact of all highly sensitive beings, he led the conversation into impersonal themes. He said Miss Carillon's portrait was not yet finished, but he changed that subject immediately, and the evening, which had been to Orange a trial of patience, ended rather better than it began. Lord Reckage invited Rennes to accompany them home. The ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... sort of an answer from each of them; but if it is only three lines, that answer will breathe something of the spirit of the institution. Of course the great universities will answer you very formally, or perhaps not at all. Their attitude is the impersonal one. They say to the world, and to the youth thereof: "Here we are. We are perfectly prepared. We have on hand a complete stock of education. Take it, or leave it. It is not of ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... participate in the result of the old Judge's or young hero's happy championship of the cause of her sex, she conceived her separateness high aloof, and actually supposed she was a contemplative, simply speculative political spirit, impersonal albeit a woman. This, as Emma, smiling at the lines, had not to learn, was always her secret pride of fancy—the belief in her possession ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... stage-directions as brief as is consistent with clearness. Few readers will burden their memory with long and detailed descriptions. When a new character of importance appears, a short description of his or her personal appearance and dress may be helpful to the reader; but even this should be kept impersonal. Moreover, as a play has always to be read before it can be rehearsed or acted, it is no bad plan to make the stage-directions, from the first, such as tend to bring the play home clearly to the reader's mental ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... a smile of apprehension which plainly amused him. Beatrice was frankly impersonal in her attitude; he represented a new species of the genus man, and she, too, evidently regarded him in the light of a strange animal, ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... was reading had a dinner pail in his hand. The clothes of the other told that he, too, was of the world's workers. It was clear to the girl that the man at the file was reading the paper from home; and the man who was ready to take his place looked as if waiting for something less impersonal than ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... to light a filthy clay pipe. He had his eyes on Jones, and evidently considered him, for some occult reason, of the same way of political thinking as himself, and he addressed him in that impersonal way in which one addresses ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... desk sighed and looked at the obsessed youth with a smile too impersonal to be called pitying. "Vaults! That's a matter for the police. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... life's desolation. The Indians soon grew accustomed to the lonely figure wandering about the sand plains, or kneeling for hours together before the altar in the church. And whom their padre trusted was to them as sacred and impersonal as the wooden saints of ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... There was just a touch of contempt in her demeanor; but her air was coldly business-like; sitting there at her desk she held him, physically and mentally, at arm's-length. Her poise was sure. It seemed perfectly natural for her to be discussing a young man in an impersonal manner. ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... at him, at his chest and shoulders, not at his face, but her eyes still kept their unself-conscious and almost oddly impersonal look. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... stood silent, handsome head high, looking down at her; then slowly the latent humor flickered along the edges of lip and lid, curbed instantly as he bowed, faultless, handsome—only the persistently upturned mustache impairing the perfectly detached and impersonal decorum with a warning of the ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... that admirable portrait we should have scant warrant for our conception of Emily Bronte's character. Her work is singularly impersonal. You gather from it that she loved the moors, that from her youth up the burden of a tragic fancy had lain hard upon her; that she had seen the face of sorrow close, meeting that Medusa-glance with rigid and defiant fortitude. So much ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... and quite impersonal trend of thought is offered for consideration by Shakespeare's majestic eloquence. The dramatist bids us bear in mind that his lines do no more than suggest the things he would have the audience see and understand; the actors aid the ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... Grant returned, in the same impersonal tone which she had seen fit to employ—but his eyes turned for a sidelong glance at her, although he appeared to be watching the trout rise lazily to the insects skimming over the surface of ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... conscience with platitudes. You will take hold of pleasure with both hands, but your shoulders are not broad enough for the pack of responsibility. Don't look at me as though I were a mile off, Lawrence, as though this were simply an impersonal discussion. I am speaking to you—of you. You avoid me whenever you can. I don't often get a chance of speaking to you. You shall listen now. You live the life of a poet and a scholar, they tell me. You live ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... means of political training. Patrols and Troops conduct their own meetings and the Scouts learn the elements of parliamentary law. Working together in groups they realize the necessity for democratic decisions. They also come to have community interests of an impersonal sort. This is perhaps the greatest single contribution of the Scouts toward the training of girls for citizenship. Little boys play together and not only play together, but with men and boys of all ages. The interest of baseball is not confined to any one age. The rules of the game are the ...
— Girl Scouts - Their Works, Ways and Plays • Unknown
... in men as in women," said the Young Man in an impersonal tone. "I may be right or wrong, you see, but I imagine he would feel something like this: From boyhood he has understood that away out in Canada there is a little girl growing up who is some day to be his wife. She becomes his boyish ideal of all that is good ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... so now? Did he brood over his adverse fate? Did he rebel against it, or did he accept it? Did angels of despair and anguish wrestle with him through the hot nights until the dawn? Did his famishing youth rise up against him? Or did that most blessed of all temperaments, the impersonal one, minister to him in his ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... contents. The net "was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind: which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away." There is no ambiguity here; the drawers are also the dividers. I suppose none will take advantage of the impersonal form in which the casting of the net is expressed, and assume that while one class, representing a human ministry, cast the net into the water, another class, representing ministering angels, drew it ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... limb, twisted the railways until they stood end upon end in sheer horror, disembowelled the bears and golliwogs so that they screamed again, he might have some personal feeling for them. At present there they lay in shining impersonal newness, and there for Ernest Henry ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... Percy deals in salt and hides, the Douglas sells red herring"? And why does the picturesque tourist, in general, object to the substitution of naphtha launches for gondolas on the Venetian canals? Perhaps because the more machinery is interposed between man and the thing he works on, the more impersonal ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... interview, during which Bruce was cross-examined by a cold-eyed gentleman with a cool, impersonal voice, was sufficient to make him realize with tolerable clearness his total unpreparedness. What engineer of recognized standing had reported upon the ground? None! To what extent, then, had the ground been sampled? How many ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... dwelling on the thought of shadowed brightness and Marjory, fresh, young, deeply rooted in respectability, seemed suddenly more significant than she had ever been before. In no way Augustine's equal, of course, except in that impersonal, yet so important matter of roots; Amabel had known a little irritation over Mrs. Grey's open manoeuvreings; but on this morning of rudderless tossing, Marjory appeared in a new aspect. How sound; how safe. It was of Augustine's insecurity rather than of Augustine himself that ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... after many direct impressions. With reference to social life, he has been deprived of all these direct impressions and the precious depot has never been formed in him.—e He has scarcely ever conversed with his professors; their talk with him has been about impersonal and abstract matters, languages, literature and mathematics. He has spoken but little with his teachers, except to contest an injunction or grumble aloud against reproof. Of real conversation, the acquisition and exchange ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... down to her task. She was quiet and technical with her mother. The two loved one another, with a curious impersonal love which had not a single word to exchange: an almost after-death love. In these days Mrs. Houghton never talked—unless to fret a little. So Alvina sat for many hours in the lofty, sombre bedroom, looking out silently on the street, or hurriedly rising to attend the sick woman. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... I are being polite, but cool, toward the doctor. The annoying thing is that he is rather cool, too. And he seems to be under the impression that the drop in temperature is all on his side. He goes about his business in a scientific, impersonal way, ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... working through her, and her devoutness was not without its human mixture of girlish pride and exaltation. She worshiped him in her natural moments, and in her moments of religious fervor she prayed for him with impersonal anguish as for a lost soul. She did not consider him a criminal, but she thought him Godless ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... free sentiment of the people should operate the strictly Anti-Slavery men were to some extent responsible. It is difficult to convince an ardent reformer that the principle for which he contends, being impersonal, should be purified from the passions and whims of his own personality. The more fervid he is, the more he is identified in the public mind with his cause; and, in a large view, he is bound not merely to defend his cause, but to see that the cause, through him, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... is the ultimate principle of cosmic energy. We may call it principle, but it is not, like Brahman, absolutely impersonal. Often it assumes personality, when it receives the name of Tathagata. It has neither passions nor prejudices, but works for the salvation of all sentient beings universally. Love (karunâ) and intelligence (bodhi) are equally its characteristics. It is only the veil of illusion ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... very high," she said to the steward. "When did you take his temperature?" She drew a little morocco case from her pocket and from that took a clinical thermometer, which she shook up and down, eying the patient meanwhile with a calm, impersonal scrutiny. The Lieutenant raised his head and stared up at the white figure beside his cot. His eyes opened and then shut quickly, with a startled look, in which doubt struggled with wonderful happiness. His hand stole out fearfully and warily until it touched her ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... "but you might, perhaps, be about that." Her voice was as impersonal as an oracle's. "You would be better off without her in your house; she might easily ruin it. No common infidelity could be half as dangerous. How blind women are—your wife would keep that about and yet divorce you for kissing a servant. ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him. He had support of course mostly in the rooms at the wide front and the prolonged side; it failed him considerably in the central shades ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... French Revolution is an abstract subject of impersonal interest compared with the Irish question at the present time; and the commotion which was caused by the misrepresentation of Evadne's remarks about the Reign of Terror was insignificant compared with what followed when her feeling for Ireland had been misinterpreted. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the girl, striving so hard to speak with impersonal unconcern that she did not notice the ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... delivered, and its virtue was its extreme impassiveness; it seemed quite impersonal, the mere automatic action of justice, not revengeful, not seeking for death, but merely stating the case as it might be stated by some planet or remote fixed star. Then there was a short pause, while the prosecutor for the Crown laid ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... matter of surprise to many to find the work in sheds and quarries proceeding with its accustomed regularity; to find that to the new comers in Flamsted the affair was an impersonal one, that Champney Googe held no place among the workmen; that his absconding meant to them simply another one of the "high rollers" fleeing from his deserts. Little by little, during that first week, the truth found its way home to each ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... thoroughfare in a new, impersonal way. She felt as if now she were only passing through the slushy streets on her way to new lands. From the tracks of the Elevated Road dripped great drops of turbid water. The sky was leaden and an easterly wind, in spite of the thaw, brought the chill humidity ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... "Modern Painters" that, like Ruskin, I accepted art as something in the peculiar vision of the artist, not yet recognizing that it is the brain that sees and not the eye. But there is this which makes the nature-worshiper's creed a more exalting one than that of the art-lover, that it is impersonal and compels the forgetting of one's self, which for an ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... taste in this life. But all creation was remodelled on a grander scale by the utterances of my teachers; and my problems, though they deepened with the expansion of all nameable phenomena, were carried up to the heights of the impersonal, and ceased to torment me. Seeing how life and death, beginning and end, were all parts of the process of being, it mattered less in what particular ripple of the flux of existence I found myself. If past time was a trooping of similar yesterdays, back over the ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... the school girl, but was sure he thought about her in a quite impersonal way. She was like the woman going to milk cows he had seen across hills when he was a young fellow and walked far and wide over the country to cure the restlessness in himself. In his life she was like the man who threw the stone ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... it will perish. Militarism is the modern state's instrument of oppression, just as dogma was the instrument of the church.—What is this state, before which all cringe? How absurd to speak of it as an impersonal authority, to invest it with a quasi-sacred character! The state consists of a few elderly gentlemen, for the most part of less than average ability, for they are cut off from the new life of the masses. Hitherto, the United States has been the freest of the nations. She has reached ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... know very much about himself or to be able to analyse his reasons for liking or disliking people or things. He thought he knew his reasons for his likes and dislikes, but he was frequently very far away from the clear, impersonal truth about them. Only the brilliant logic and sensitiveness of genius really approaches knowledge of itself, and as a result it is usually extremely unhappy. Walderhurst was never unhappy. He was sometimes dissatisfied or annoyed, ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... his mental life. Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own. The end of these discourses was that one night during which she had shown every sign of unusual ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... and Phaedo; and since the Laws were written in the last decade of his life, there is no time to which this change of opinions can be ascribed. It is true that the theory of Ideas takes several different forms, not merely an earlier and a later one, in the various Dialogues. They are personal and impersonal, ideals and ideas, existing by participation or by imitation, one and many, in different parts of his writings or even in the same passage. They are the universal definitions of Socrates, and at the same time 'of more than ...
— Charmides • Plato
... pleasant, impersonal kindliness, and as he turned to his satchel she slipped out of the saddle and came towards him, ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... for work's sake. He was going through the practical stage of an engineer's training, and left the house at six o'clock each morning, to return in the afternoon clad in workman's clothes, incredibly greasy and dirty. Betty suffered agonies in case "they"—that wonderful impersonal "they" who overclouded her life—should think he was really and truly an ordinary workman! On one occasion Miles had joined her on the doorstep as she was returning from an afternoon walk, and she had distinctly seen the curtains ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... sustainer of his life and health and happiness. With some the worship was purely and wholly material—the sun was viewed as a huge mass of fiery matter, uninformed by any animate life, unintelligent, impersonal; but with others, sun-worship was something higher than this: the orb of day was regarded as informed by a good, wise, bright, beneficent Spirit, which lived in it, and worked through it, and was the true benefactor of mankind and sustainer ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... of months all these impersonal influences took dominion over me and gave me a quiet happiness never known before. The nights brought the greater light; but the days too had their glories. I would climb the rugged sides of the mountain, and ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... me of my duty," she added gently. "I was wool-gathering." She turned to discover if he had in any measure divined her thoughts. Satisfied that he had not, she was content to talk of many things which would claim her time. Their conversation became gradually impersonal ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... by nothing in verity, except it may be Admiral Dupont's waltz of fire around the two forts of Hilton Head. Another, who laughs at both of these amateur statements, has a Grub-Street one; but, except to a favored few, to everybody in this country he is only an impersonal existence. In this general dearth of useful information, there are, however, one or two biographical sketches afloat,—possibly hints of those waiting their chance in the pigeon-holes of the Thunderer,—of which we are tempted to give the reader a sample, brought to us by Una ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... isn't a brute," Lindsay went on with most impersonal solicitude, "and can support her. I suppose there isn't any way one could do anything for her. I heard a story only yesterday about a girl changing her mind on the way out. By Jove, I didn't suppose it would ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... politician that, long before 1863, when its announcement opened the memorable year for freedom, not only had its demonstration been implored by his friends, but some of his subordinates had tried to launch its lightning with not so impersonal a sentiment. To a religious body, pressing him to verify his title of Abolitionist, ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... It signifies the complete sacrifice of his personality, the renunciation of every personal desire. It is the effacement of that radical egotism that caused the fall of Adam, in that he dragged down spirituality into corporeality. The narrow pusillanimous ego melts into nothing before the high impersonal self, symbolized by Hiram. The mythical sins of the eternal universal human Adam are thus expatiated. The architect of the temple is to the Grand Master Builder of All Worlds (G. B. a. W.) just what ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... run. And of late years there is a notable improvement of tone in treating of symbolism or idolatry: the Lingam and the Yoni are now described as "mystical representations, and perhaps the best possible impersonal representatives of the abstract expressions paternity and maternity" (Prof. Monier Williams in "Folk-lore Record" vol. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... fast, and Gray sensed an urgency, an impersonal haste, as though a command had been laid upon ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... in clinging to that part which is cold and inhuman instead of seizing upon that which is warm and very near by? I would not take you with me into those bleak ways where always there is fear lest our personality be swallowed up in the dark impersonal abyss. I would love you as a man loves a woman and cleaves to her. Nay, more, I perceive dimly in that love a strange reconcilement wherein the dual forces of my nature shall be made one, wherein truth and beauty shall blend together in a kiss, and there ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... the butler reappear by the door that opened to the terrace, and though the high, bleak, impersonal approach of this functionary was ever, and more and more at every step, a process to defy interpretation, long practice evidently now enabled her to suggest, as she turned again to her fellow-visitor a reading ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity—"teleological" activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude or propensity may be called ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... a steady mechanical creep which had in it an impersonal quality—the movement of the wave, or of the breeze, or of the cloud. He followed his directions literally, without an inquiring gaze at anything. It could have been seen that the boy's ideas of life were different from ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens, the oldest and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain, contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the extreme, to which his real love will allow him. All is general, impersonal, indirect, the rule of the world, the order of Providence. He does not accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather for himself the occasion which had produced them, and then passes off, as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious vision in which the ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... entertain ladies in his lodgings. Moreover, the Union seemed less intimate. It had a faint flavour of a London club; it marked the undergraduate's nearest approach to the great world. Amid its waiters and serviettes one felt impersonal, and able to conceal the private emotions. Rickie felt that if Miss Pembroke knew one thing about him, she knew everything. During this visit he took her to no place ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... no faith is our own that we have not arduously won—has missed not only a moral but an intellectual discipline. The absence of that discipline may mark a man for life and render all his work ineffective. He has missed a training in criticism, in analysis, in open-mindedness, in the resolutely impersonal treatment of personal problems, which no other training can compensate. He is, for the most part, condemned to live in a mental jungle where his arm will soon be too feeble to clear away the growths that enclose ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... day was spent thus in purely impersonal discussions of affairs, and though he himself did not realize it, Gloria saw that Philip was ever at his best when viewing the large questions of State, rather than the narrower ones within the scope ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... from her face, and the clear eyes which met his from beneath the broad helmet distended as though at some sudden shock. In the course of their earnest but impersonal conversation she had almost forgotten what was to come. This was the end of the ride, this was the to-morrow, the inevitable to-morrow of those ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... Pantheist will therefore have difficulty in living a perfect ethical life. There are many cases in which, by deviating from the strictly ethic code, you do not harm anyone, you only injure your own soul. The Non-Believer will in this case only hardly, for the sake of impersonal Truth, make up his mind to the step which the God-fearing man will take actuated by his passionate fear ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... with that simple rudeness which at times professed to be almost impersonal, and which Rosalie had usually tried to believe was the outcome of a kind of cool British humour. But this time she started a little ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is one course which the unfortunate gentleman may take. He may subscribe to pay the taxes. There were the true charity, impartial and impersonal, cumbering none with obligation, helping all. There were a destination for loveless gifts; there were the way to reach the pocket of the deserving poor, and yet save the time of secretaries! But, alas! there is no colour of romance in such a course; and people nowhere ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on its edge impressed him as belonging to some bygone stage of his history. This was the first time that she had questioned him about himself. His sympathy had won her confidence, but she had treated him hitherto in an impersonal way, as something tributary to her brother's memory, like the tombstone or the flowers on his grave. The suspicion that he was seeking her for her own sake had not, so far as Putnam could discover, ever ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... social position between employer and employed, and the increased number of the latter, make the previous close relation impossible. Quite as important is the fact that the real employer in modern industry is growing more "impersonal." What we mean is this. The nominal employer or manager is not the real employer. The real employer of labour is capital, and it is to the owners of the capital in any business that we must chiefly look for the exercise of such responsibility ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... first time I ever saw her here. And let me add," evenly, "that my interest in her is not of the order you would infer. She is good and patient and brave, and my interest in her is impersonal. It is not necessary for me to make any explanations, ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... controversy of unwonted bitterness with an innkeeper at le Muy. The scene is conjured up for us with an almost disconcerting actuality; no single detail of the author's discomfiture is omitted. The episode is post-Flaubertian in its impersonal detachment, or, as Coleridge first said, "aloofness." On crossing the Var, the sunny climate, the romantic outline of the Esterelles, the charms of the "neat village" of Cannes, and the first prospect of Nice began ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... gazing at him intently, but with that same changeless expression of impersonal interest, as if she were listening to the discussion of a third party who was not known to her save by name. "Zara," he continued, "you will receive other cards than mine to-day, and you should know that every man or woman who will call upon you in behalf of the nihilists, is marked ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... Nature given to man,"—this interfusion of human interest with the sublimity of moor and hill,—formed a typical introduction to the manner in which Wordsworth regarded mankind to the end,—depicting him as set, as it were, amid impersonal influences, which make his passion and struggle but a little thing; as when painters give but a strip of their canvas to the fields and cities of men, and overhang the narrowed landscape with the space and ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... fingers. In the far Algerian distance, a city of low square forms was set against a sky that was faint with the last sunset hues. The correspondent, plying the oars and dreaming of the slow and slower movements of the lips of the soldier, was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... coat, and looking at her. He felt the different tone that had got into their talk. It had been impersonal a ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... embryo-ideals, anything but the revelation of God in a personality—a revelation so that the narrow mind could become opened? But the tendency to over-personalize personality may also have suggested to Emerson the necessity for more universal, and impersonal paths, though they be indefinite of outline and vague of ascent. Could you journey, with equal benefit, if they were less so? Would you have the universal always supplemented by the shadow of the personal? If this view is accepted, and we doubt that it can be ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... that I informed her who I was, with eyes impersonal as the dawn she replied that she would see if Mr. Gregory could see me ... that at present he was busy with a conference in ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... which were in exact proportion to his own feeling of physical and social inferiority. Seen truly, there was a pathos in this, for it was a weak man's way of trying to be manful but his new labourer, could not be expected to see it in that light. Then, too, on all impersonal subjects of conversation which arose, it was the nature of Bates to contradict and argue; whereas Trenholme, who had little capacity for reasonable argument, usually dealt with contradiction as a pot of gunpowder deals with an intruding ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... of severity. He saw that he would have to word his offer of a bribe in as least offensive a fashion as was possible. But while he was trying to find a sentence with which to embark on the delicate negotiation, he suddenly felt his left hand grasped and turned over, with a firm and yet impersonal touch. ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... however carefully selected and trained, must still inhabit 'the ostensible world.' The Anglo-Indian civilian during some of his working hours—when he is toiling at a scheme of irrigation, or forestry, or famine-prevention—may live in an atmosphere of impersonal science which is far removed from the jealousies and superstitions of the villagers in his district. But an absolute ruler is judged not merely by his efficiency in choosing political means, but also by that outlook on life ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... complicated beauty of this prospect, as they moved toward it between the symmetrically clipped limes of the lateral terrace, touched him anew through her nearness, as with the hint of some vast impersonal power, controlling and regulating her life in ways he could not guess, putting between himself and her the whole width of the civilization into which her marriage had absorbed her. And there was such fear in the thought—he read such derision of what he had to offer in the splendour of ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... little while; and when the charm of the romance is over, then they are ready for another, perhaps more fantastic than the last. But the plot is always the same: our beloved ones—shall we meet them, and how? Isn't it pitiful? Why cannot we be more impersonal? These puny, petty minds of ours! When will ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... fatal day on to 1917 each oncoming debutante was taught by her mother to give unto the genus, married man, her most impersonal manner, lest she provoke his "undesirable attentions." If poaching was done, it was from behind a tree. Unmarried girls knew that their place was not in somebody else's home in those days. The wives could protect their preserves by the simple expedient ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... impersonal way she described the life of a teacher in a great American school system: its routine, its spying supervision, its injustices, its mechanical ideals, its one preeminent ambition to teach as many years as it was ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... is less a purely personal matter, takes on a more public aspect, has a more socialized character than isolated trade, depends more on forces outside the control of any one man, and results in a price fixed with greater definiteness. The price in a more developed market results from the play of impersonal forces, or at least from the play of personal forces which have come under the rules of the market.[2] This price men are ready to accept as fair. It has a democratic character, whereas the gains of ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... hopeless ambition, nameless as it was strange. His bronzed face paled and he breathed heavily. His eyes absorbed every detail of the girl's face and figure. There was wonder in his eyes at her girlish face, and something like awe at her powerful diction and her impersonal emotion. She stood there like an incarnation of the great dream-world that lay beyond his horizon, the world of poets and singers in the far realms ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... extremely plain and tidy. It was impersonal, neutral, like the room in a hotel. And yet he had spent in it twelve years of his life. Most people collect no end of trifles during such a period; presents, little superfluous nothings, ornaments. Not a single engraving, not a supplement to an illustrated magazine even, ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... quiet talks about their lives. Sally, however, did not share this fondness for Myra. She felt that Myra was an intruder—that Myra was interposing a wall between her and Joe—and she resented the intrusion. She could not help noticing that Joe was becoming more and more impersonal with her, but then, she thought, "people are not persons to him any more; he's swallowed up in the cause." Luckily she was too busy during the day, too tired at night, to brood much on the matter. ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... own design, and convey his own feeling. His individuality is so vast, so purified from eccentricity, and we grasp it so imperfectly, that we are apt to deny it altogether, and conceive his mind as impersonal. In view of the multiplicity of his creations, and the range of thought, emotion, and character they include, it is a common hyperbole of criticism to designate him as universal. But, in truth, his mind was restricted, in its creative action, like other minds, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... Gard with mixed emotions watched it elevated and straightened. The pictured face smiled down at him—impersonal yet human, glowing, vivid with color, alive with that suggestion of eternal life that art alone in its highest expression can give. Card's smile was enigmatical; his eyes were sad. His imagination pictured to him Mrs. Marteen as she had sat before him in ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... (a) Write in impersonal mood—that is, make your song such that it does not matter whether a man or a woman sings it. Thus you will not restrict the wide use of your song. Anyone and everyone can sing it on the stage. Furthermore, it will be apt ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page |
