"Incompleteness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Human Life,"[2] are essentially and profoundly poetical. They have indeed a tragic inspiration. He is deeply imbued by the sense that human existence, at its best, is inadequate and disappointing. He feels, and submits to, its incompleteness and its limitations. With stately resignation he accepts the common fate, and turns a glance of calm disdain on all endeavours after a spurious consolation. All ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... the childhood of the race, and the greatest of the sages have always returned to it and taken refuge in it. Socrates and Plato, Cicero and Plutarch, Montesquieu and Franklin, Kant and Emerson, Tennyson and Browning,—how do they all bear witness to the incompleteness of life and reach out to ...
— What Peace Means • Henry van Dyke
... curtseyed, and tilted, as I knelt first on one side and then on the other fitting her, till I was almost in despair; however, I got a sort of pattern at last, and by dint of some pertinacious efforts—which, in their incompleteness, did not escape some sarcastic remarks from Mr. —— on the capabilities of 'women of genius' applied to common-place objects—the matter was accomplished, and the little Dolphin rejoiced in very tidy back and seat cushions, covered with brown holland, and bound with green serge. My ambition ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... sea. Then—then I knew that I had only half my dream, and I was ungrateful, Maurice. I almost wished that I had never had this half, because it made me realize what it would be to have the whole. It made me realize the mutilation, the incompleteness of being in perfect beauty without love. And now—now I've actually got all I ever wanted, and much more, because I didn't know then at all what it would really mean to me to have it. And, besides, I never thought that God would select me for perfect happiness. ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... hastily completed a toilet, which, despite the Abbe's caution, had the appearance of incompleteness, and taking the great key from behind the door, led the way out into the glare of the setting sun. She unlocked the great gate and threw her weight against it with quick, firm movements like the movements of a man. Indeed, ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... Australia, out of a shapeless mass. The conception found in various parts of the world, that the present race of men was preceded by another, appears to be due sometimes to a real, though often confused, tradition of an earlier population, sometimes to a vague conception of the conflict and incompleteness in the world. Traditions of predecessors are found in various parts of the world. In North America—as, for example, among the Navahos—a part of the early history is the conflict with certain mighty and evil beings who made good life impossible—a semidualistic scheme.[1427] This view comes ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... often sketches, as it were, a living portrait, which she leaves in its rudimentary condition, perhaps for the reason that earth has no colors which can worthily fill in an outline too perfect for humanity. The sketch is left in its consummate incompleteness because this mortal life is not rich enough to carry out the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... him, and pointed out to him the enemy's rear-guard between him and the town; and on the heights behind, the fires of an army of 50,000 men. This sight was a proof of the incompleteness of his victory, and how little the enemy were discouraged; but he seemed quite insensible of it; he listened to the reports with a dejected and listless air, and returned to sleep at a village some little distance off, which was within reach of ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... of this incompleteness of aim. Infantry firing is already too rapid to be effective; so that what is claimed for the new breech-loading weapons as an advantage, that they increase the rapidity of fire, furnishes, on the contrary, a strong objection to them. The effectiveness of the fire ...
— A Treatise on the Tactical Use of the Three Arms: Infantry, Artillery, and Cavalry • Francis J. Lippitt
... length of works on the River Soar up to what is known as the old grass weir, including the Braunstone Gate Bridge, added to one of the then running contracts, at a total cost, excluding land and compensation, of L77,000. At this point a halt was made in consequence of the incompleteness of the negotiations with the land owners on the upper reach of the river, and this, together with various other circumstances, has contributed to greater delay in again resuming the works. In the interval, a question of whether there should be only one channel for both river and canal ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... of foam, and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe in outline, plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as Botticelli's flowers always are. Botticelli meant all this imagery to be altogether pleasurable, and it was partly an incompleteness of resources, inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued and chilled it. But his predilection for minor tones counts also; and what is unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the goddess of pleasure, as the depository of a great power ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... that all that had been obscure in her view of him rolled away like the mist in the garden, leaving the structure of his being bare and stark to her critical gaze. Nothing confused her now; nothing perplexed her in her knowledge of him. The old sense of incompleteness, of inadequacy, returned; but she understood the cause of it now; she saw with perfect clearness the defect from which it had arisen. He had missed the best because, with every virtue of the mind, he lacked the ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... philosophical system, so far as I have been able to work it out under most distracting, discouraging, and unpropitious circumstances of many years; and for this reason I must beg some indulgence for the unavoidable incompleteness of my work." ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... She had warm, quick sympathies and intuitional appreciations of genius. In regard to so wide and so complicated a character as George Sand's, we cannot be astonished at finding very different judgments and impressions; indeed we are prepared to feel in all of them some note of inadequacy and of incompleteness. But in our relation to her as a Great Writer, of this, as readers, we are assured, we know that it is no common matter to have come into contact with so gifted and great a nature, with a genius that possessed "a current ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... of doing, and we should not interfere again. Still I cannot truly say that we gave Providence our entire confidence as long as there remained the chance of further evil through the sort of romance we had dreaded for the girl. Till she was married there was an incompleteness, a potentiality of trouble, in the incident apparently closed that haunted us with a distrustful anxiety. We had to wait several years for the end, but it came eventually, and she was married to a young Englishman whom ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... This anaemic incompleteness of Emerson's character can be traced to the philosophy of his race; at least it can be followed in that philosophy. There is an implication of a fundamental falsehood in every bit of Transcendentalism, including Emerson. That falsehood ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... she had been quite content in the company of almost any one, and especially with those of the sterner sex. But with the advent of this dashing young officer she began to experience a set of new sensations. The incompleteness of her life was brought ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... States new applications of electricity literally every day. Before the written page is printed some startling application is likely to be made that gives to that page at once an incompleteness it is impossible to guard against or avoid. There is a strong inclination to prophesy; to tell of that which is to come; to picture the warmed and illuminated future, smokeless and odorless, and the homes in which the children ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... is obviously illogical, but a writer on English literature within brief limits is forced to bow to it if he wishes his book to avoid the dreariness of a summary, and he can plead in extenuation the increased literary output of the later age, and the incompleteness with which time so far has done its work in sifting the memorable from the forgettable, the ephemeral from what is going to last. The main body of imaginative prose literature—the novel—is treated of in the next chapter and here no attempt will be made to deal with ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... one of our University preachers once said: "We do not know anything about God unless we first know that we cannot know Him perfectly." [1] How superb, as against all this impatience of spirit, are the reserve and patience of Christ. Accept doubts, he says. Bear with incompleteness. Give faith its chance to grow. First the blade, then the ear, and then the harvest. There are some things which youth can prove, and some which only the experience of maturity can teach, and then there are some mysteries which are perhaps to be made plain to us only in the clearer ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... pressed by the opposition concerning the lingering negociations with Spain, and the incompleteness of their preparations for war. In the house of lords, the Duke of Manchester descanted in strong terms on the defenceless condition of Gibraltar, Minorca, and Jamaica. In the midst of his harangue Lord Gower desired ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... this have the advocates of infidelity usually been: nay, (as if they would make up in the number of objections what they want in weight,) they have frequently availed themselves not only of apparent contrarieties, but of mere incompleteness in the statements of two different writers, on which to found a charge of contradiction. Thus, if one writer says that a certain person was present at a given time or place, when another says that he and two more were there; ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... had grown accustomed to the place, its singular appearance of incompleteness kept exciting my attention. I had never seen a town so ragged at the edges. If there had recently been a great conflagration and almost all the whole city were being rebuilt, it would have looked much as it did at the time of my visit. To enter the post-office one had to clamber over heaps ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... incompleteness has attended the life-labours (if the expression may be allowed) of several other authors who have never published their works. Such was the learned Bishop LLOYD, and the Rev. THOMAS BAKER, who was first ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... from a long play—whether linked or disconnected—pupils will always have a feeling of incompleteness. In a full-length play no situation is complete in itself. It is part of a longer series of events. It may finish one part of the action, but it usually merely carries forward the plot, passing on ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... day, nothing seemed stable or secure. A few months ago the turf of the prairie had been undisturbed, where to-day its broad streets are trodden by the feet of thousands. Between gigantic blocks of buildings rising everywhere, strips of the prairie turf lay undisturbed still. The air of newness, of incompleteness, of insecurity that seemed to surround all things impressed him painfully; the sadden prosperity seemed unreal and unnatural, as well it might, to one brought up in a country where the first thought awakened by change or innovation is one ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... to all whom he could help or serve, from his literary friends down to the wretched libeller Ashe. Though impelled by the temper of his genius, by the period in which he lived, and by that fatality of his mission to which I have alluded, towards a poetic individualism, the inevitable incompleteness of which I have endeavored to explain, he by no means set it up as a standard. That he presaged the future with the prevision of genius is proved by his definition of poetry in his journal—a definition hitherto ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... fall like broad enormous geysers as the wind swayed them, and daffodils bloomed in all the warmer gardens. The dark foliage of the cedars skirting the road counteracted that indefinable gloom which the landscapes of early spring, in their grayness and incompleteness, so often inspire, and mocked the ripened summer in the close shadows which they threw. It was a pleasant ride, especially after mother and son had reached the main road, and other horsemen and horsewomen issued from the gates of farms on either side, taking their way to the meeting-house. ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... British Antilles, as well as the deportment of the manumitted four million slaves of the Southern United States later on, bore glorious testimony to the humanizing effects which the religion of charity, clutched at and grasped in fragments, and understood with childlike incompleteness, had produced ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... development. The joy, which a true friendship gives, reveals the existence of the want of it, perhaps previously unfelt. It is a sin against ourselves to let our affections wither. This sense of incompleteness is an argument in favor of its possible satisfaction; our need is an argument for its fulfilment. Our hearts demand love, as truly as our bodies demand food. We cannot live among men, suspicious, and careful of our ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... to him just at the period of his escape. By the aid of the faithful Guapo he had hastily collected a few things, and with his wife and family fled in the night. Hence the incompleteness of his travelling equipage. He had taken one of the most unfrequented paths—a mere bridle-road—that led from Cuzco eastward over the Cordillera. His intent was to gain the eastern slope of the Andes mountains, where he might conceal himself for a time in the uninhabited ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... in which sexual conventions and laws must necessarily be an important factor. It is alleged that probably in the case of men, and certainly in the case of women, some sexual intercourse is a necessary phase in existence; that without it there is an incompleteness, a failure in the life cycle, a real wilting and failure of energy and vitality and the development of morbid states. And for most of us half the friendships and intimacies from which we derive the daily interest ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... length is very unequal. The two longest, the fragmentary Quatre Facardins and the finished Le Belier, run each of them to 142 pages; the shortest, L'Enchanteur Faustus, has just five-and-twenty; while Fleur d'Epine, in its completeness, has 114, and Zeneyde, in its incompleteness, runs to 78, and might have run, for aught one can tell—in the mixed tangle of Roman and Merovingian history in which the author (possibly in ridicule of Madeleine de Scudery's classical chronicling) has chosen ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... trained experts. So far as the muscular operations of tone-production are concerned, and the laws of acoustics bearing on the vocal action, no new discovery can well be expected. But in this very fact, the exhaustive attention paid to the mechanical operations of the voice, is seen the incompleteness of Vocal Science. Attention has been turned exclusively to the mechanical features of tone-production, and in consequence many important facts bearing on the voice ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... him in the waves, he would have presented the world with a complete theory of mind; a theory to which Berkeley, Coleridge, and Kant would have contributed; but more simple, and unimpugnable, and entire than the systems of these writers." Their incompleteness rather tends to confirm what she proceeds to state, that the strain of philosophical composition was too great for his susceptible nerves; while her further observation that "thought kindled imagination and awoke sensation, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... The completeness or incompleteness of the occiput and the location and extent of its attachment to the ...
— The Adductor Muscles of the Jaw In Some Primitive Reptiles • Richard C. Fox
... a tantalizing incompleteness about his personal reminiscences. Elizabeth was one of those persons who like to begin a friendship with a full statement of their position, their previous life, and the causes which led up to their being in this particular spot at ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... among high-tariff men then and which remain so still;" while, on the other hand, "his superficial research, his habit of satisfying himself with half-knowledge, and his disinclination to reason out propositions logically in all their consequences" gave incompleteness to his otherwise brilliant effort. It made a great impression in spite of its weak points, and called out in opposition the extraordinary abilities of Daniel Webster, through whose massive sentences appeared his "superiority ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... larger draughts of the fulness of His life. We have only been like goldseekers, who have contented themselves as yet with washing the precious grains out of the gravel of the river. There are great reefs filled with the ore that we have not touched. Thank God for the necessary incompleteness of our 'apprehending.' It is the very salt of life. To have realised our aims, to have fulfilled our ideals, to have sucked dry the cluster of the grapes is the death of aspiration, of hope, of blessedness; and to have the distance beckoning, and all experience 'an arch, wherethro' gleams the untravelled ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to the House of the Golden Pillars. Everything moved as smoothly, as delicately, as prosperously, as before. But inwardly there was a subtle, inexplicable transformation. A vague discontent—a final and inevitable sense of incompleteness, overshadowed existence from that night when Hermas realized that his joy could never go ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... regrets its inability definitely to dispose of the important subject committed to its charge, and presents this report for its own justification, and for the additional purpose of notifying the succeeding Congress of the incompleteness of its labors, and that they ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... white-walled room with French windows opening on a terrace where olea fragans blossoms expanded round the base of a statue by Canova. At last a feeling of incompleteness penetrated her languor. She rose to pace the mosaic floor on which appeared a design ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... proof, yet a very strong presumption, if you believe in God, that a man who thus 'feels he was not made to die' because he has grasped the Eternal, is right in so feeling. If, too, we look at the experiences themselves, they all have the stamp of incompleteness, and suggest completeness by their own incompleteness. The new moon with its ragged edge not more surely prophesies its completed silver round, than do the experiences of the Christian life here, in their greatness and in their smallness, declare ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... will agree to strive not to give offence to you, and also to bear silently whatever conceit and insults may escape you. Perhaps we may become friends. But we cannot remain as we are. The blow you struck the other day must be answered for. I ask satisfaction, and the incompleteness and vulgarity of a pugilistic encounter will not suit me. I propose, therefore, as we cannot resort to the regular duel of pistols, (for reasons so good and evident that I need not name them), that after the example of the ancients, whose history we are now daily reading, we have our combat. ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... and final and most precious reward All beggars, each in his own way Always an incompleteness somewhere, and the shadow Assent to what must be Ax on his shoulder proceeding toward a grindstone Beating the dirge of yesterday or the tattoo of to-morrow Begum, of Bengal, days out from Canton—homeward ...
— Widger's Quotations from Albert Bigelow Paine on Mark Twain • David Widger
... the darkness of the shadows deepened, and the light of water and sky took on a deeper lucence before being extinguished, for the first time the sense of pain and the incompleteness of beautiful things entered his heart. The thing was wonderful; but it hurt. The sight of it filled him to the lips with a passion of uplift; and yet something lacked. And the lack of that something was ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... painfully accented the boarded spaces for the other three that "Unknown Friends" in Tasajara had promised but not yet supplied. In the clearing some trees that had been felled but not taken away added to the general incompleteness. ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... satisfaction is the growing feeling of fraternal regard and unification of all sections of our country, the incompleteness of which has too long delayed realization of the highest blessings of the Union. The spirit of patriotism is universal and is ever increasing in fervor. The public questions which now most engross us are lifted far above either partisanship, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of the higher education of the Negro would be the last to deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the present system: too many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality has sometimes been sought. But all this can be said of higher education ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... records there are obscurities, incongruities, and chasms, as might naturally be anticipated, admitting them to be strictly what they would pass for. These faults may be accounted for in several ways. First, in a rude stage of philosophical culture, incompleteness of theory, inconsistent conceptions in different parts of a system, are not unusual, but are rather to be expected, and are slow to become troublesome to its adherents. Secondly, distinct contemporary thinkers or sects ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... be so, what if the soul's petition be heard; what if it rise from the ruins around it; what if the ruins be left to the witchcraft that seeks to rebuild them? There, if demons might enter, that which they sought as their prize has escaped them; that which they find would mock them by its own incompleteness even in evil. In vain might animal life the most perfect be given to the machine of the flesh; in vain might the mind, freed from the check of the soul, be left to roam at will through a brain stored with memories of knowledge ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... felt it was in vain to attempt anything but submission. Tom had his terrible clutch on her conscience and her deepest dread; she writhed under the demonstrable truth of the character he had given to her conduct, and yet her whole soul rebelled against it as unfair from its incompleteness. He, meanwhile, felt the impetus of his indignation diverted toward Philip. He did not know how much of an old boyish repulsion and of mere personal pride and animosity was concerned in the bitter severity of the words ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... accumulation of facts that threatens my client with ruin, gentlemen of the jury," he began, "what is really damning for my client is one fact—the dead body of his father. Had it been an ordinary case of murder you would have rejected the charge in view of the triviality, the incompleteness, and the fantastic character of the evidence, if you examine each part of it separately; or, at least, you would have hesitated to ruin a man's life simply from the prejudice against him which he has, alas! only too well deserved. But it's not an ordinary case of murder, it's a case of parricide. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... language—to the voices of sorrow, joy, compassion, or religious emotion—to the animated odes of the chorus. Why interrupt so divine a display of poetical genius by inquiries degrading it to the level of every-day events, and implying incompleteness in the action till a catastrophe arrives? The very spirit of beauty breathes through every part of the composition. We may liken the Greek drama to the music of the Italian school; in which the wonder is, how so much richness of invention in detail can be accommodated to a style so simple and uniform. ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... him with all but resistless power was the deeper meaning between the lines. He knew that each day the incompleteness of her life had been borne in upon her with crushing force. He knew that the mad impulses which had expressed themselves in luxury, dress, extravagance, balls and bizarre entertainments were but the strangled cries of a sorrowing heart. And he knew ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... of his own ideas practically discounted; clearly there was nothing left for him to do but to thank his hostess and take his leave. But he felt far more uneasy than when he had arrived; and there was a singular sense of incompleteness in his visit that he could not entirely account for. His conversation with Champney had complicated—he knew not why—his previous theories of Miss Dows, and although he was half conscious that this had nothing to do with the business that brought him there, he tried ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... belonging to an animal never beheld by human eyes, even to the mingling contrasts of scales and wings, of feathers and hair. Through the combined lenses of science and imagination, we look back into ancient times, so dreadful in their incompleteness, that it may well have been the task of seraphic faith, as well as of cherubic imagination, to behold in the wallowing monstrosities of the terror-teeming earth, the prospective, quiet, age-long labour of God preparing the world with ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... twice and out of its scrappiness and incompleteness he gathered this much! that somebody who was about to be dismissed from an aeroplane factory for the very usual reason that he could not stand the terrific noise, had succeeded in either making or procuring ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... which M. Blanc has seen fit to combat the objections which some journals have raised, we see more clearly the incompleteness of his conception, daughter of at least three fathers,— Saint-Simonism, Fourierism, and communism,—with the aid of politics and a little, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... some sense the cause, of Israel's deliverance. Nor was Matthew less right in seeing in that earlier deliverance but a germinant accomplishment of the prophecy, which, by its very transiency, outwardness, and incompleteness, pointed onwards to a better spring of the Light, and a fuller deliverance from a murkier darkness and a more mortal death. 'The life was the light of men,' the teacher of all knowledge of God, the source of all light of true joy, the giver of all light ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the last of the series of historical festivals which mark the springtime of our Christian year. And without this one the rest would leave us with a sense of incompleteness; for we should be without its gift of the abiding and indwelling Spirit, and the ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... which are not finished. With this work such persons could have no concern. Yet, by what appears a great error of judgement, this worse than unfinished picture was made the subject of a public exhibition, though in a state of incompleteness which the artist during life would not permit his nearest friend to behold. And as if this violation of his wishes were not enough, a stolen and travestied copy soon appeared, and was heralded by placards, on which the words "Great Picture by Washington Allston" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... more brilliant and more masterful than the studied duplicity and elegant effeminacy of the Italians of the fifteenth century, and, after the battle of Fornovo, they returned to France justly proud and foolishly confident, notwithstanding the incompleteness of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... for a time the discussion of its biological and moral aspects altogether. He left it an incomplete doctrine of merely economic reconstruction supplemented by mystical democracy, and both its mysticism and incompleteness, while they offered no difficulties to a labouring man ignorant of affairs, rendered it unsubstantial and unattractive to people who had any real knowledge ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... regions, 'Not as though'; the higher up, the more clearly we see the summit. The ideal grows loftier, as partially realised. The mountain seems comparatively low and easy till we begin to climb. We should be continually driven by a sense of our incompleteness, and drawn by the fair vision of unattained possibilities. In all regions, to be satisfied with the attained is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and ears had cognizance; and the impression is the more strong, because the writer has told only that, and left the rest to our imagination. This illustrates one feature of the author's skill. He knows the effect producible by leaving circumstances in the incompleteness and obscurity in which they often present themselves to the senses of a single person; he tells just what that person could have perceived, and leaves the sketch to be finished by his reader. Thus, when ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... listener:—ill, when they fear interruption and are annoyed by the impossibility of exhausting the topic during that particular talk. The partial genius is flashy—scrappy. The true genius shudders at incompleteness—imperfection—and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not every thing that should be said. He is so filled with his theme that he is dumb, first from not knowing how to begin, where there seems eternally beginning behind beginning, and secondly from perceiving his true ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... The incompleteness of each skeleton was especially ascertained in regard to the human subjects, Dr. Schmerling being careful, whenever a fragment of such presented itself, to explore the cavern himself, and see whether any other bones of the same skeleton could be found. In the Engis cavern, distant about eight ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... suited to her fiance—far too good for him." Others "had always thought how it would be; it would take a good deal more yet to tame Livingstone." Sir Henry Fallowfield observed, "Nothing could be more natural and correct. The lady was a saint, and there is always a sort of incompleteness about saints if they are not made martyrs. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... its nature necessarily pure, communicates of its quality to whoever becomes aware of it, and thus in some measure counterweighs the lowering tendency. Moreover, the morally bad, deriving its character of evil from incompleteness, from the arresting or the perversion of good, like fruit plucked unripe, and being therefore outside the pale of the beautiful (the nature of which is completeness, fullness, perfection of life) cannot by ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... outlines. Every apparently separate piece of reality has, as it were, hooks which grapple it to the next piece; the next piece, in turn, has fresh hooks, and so on, until the whole universe is reconstructed. This essential incompleteness appears, according to Hegel, equally in the world of thought and in the world of things. In the world of thought, if we take any idea which is abstract or incomplete, we find, on examination, that if we forget its incompleteness, we become involved in contradictions; these contradictions ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... can say 'Thou art my God,' and who has said it, should ever by anything be brought to cease to say it. Death cannot kill love to God; and the only end of the religious life of earth is its perfecting in heaven. The experiences that we have here, in their loftiness and in their incompleteness, equally witness for us, of the rest and the perfectness that remain for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... a shrug, wondering just where and how he had blundered. A sense of artistic incompleteness mingled with a keen personal sense of chagrin. Did the girl care less for him than he had thought? Or was it merely the instinct of self-preservation that ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... presumptive certainty and legal incompleteness existed concerning Mr. Bowe's short-horns (as he averred) and ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... kitchen-gardens, and picking up loathsome provender of snails and slugs. Roger Ormiston, calm, able, kindly, yet just a trifle insolent, cigar in mouth, sauntered up and looked at the bird, and it crawled away among the cabbages ignominiously, covered with the shame of its incompleteness and its fallen estate. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... has not yet been accomplished, and seems every day fleeing farther off from those who are daring enough to pursue it. In 1545, when the world of literature was rather smaller than it now is, Conrade Gesner, in his Bibliotheca, made the first attempt at a universal bibliography. The incompleteness of the result is confessed in the Epitome of the Bibliotheca, printed five years afterwards, which professes only to record nearly all the books written since the world began, and yet boasts of adding more than ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... around them. New terraces, new streets, new squares led away into hopeless masses of stone and plaster on every side. The roads were sticky with damp clay, which clogged the wheels of the cab and buried the fetlocks of the horse. The desolations—that awful aspect of incompleteness and discomfort which pervades a new and unfinished neighborhood—had set its dismal seal upon the surrounding streets which had arisen about and intrenched Crescent Villas; and Robert wasted forty minutes by his watch, and an hour and a quarter ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... of coarseness in papa; or perhaps I should say—for the impression it leaves is primarily negative, as of something manque—an incompleteness in the sensitive equipment. As yet it can hardly be said to embarrass me; though I foresee a time when I shall have to apologise for it to strangers. There is nothing absurd in this. If a man may take pride in his ancestry, why may he not ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Southern cause led to a visit of remonstrance with which a committee of leading citizens honored her in her little milliner's shop; while her refusal to submit to the dictates of fashion when the huge hoop-skirts came into vogue caused her to be gazed upon as a marvel of incompleteness in dress. ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... facts are unknown. Such knowledge bears the same relation to accurate science as the maps of America drawn by the early explorers do to a modern atlas. Like these early efforts of geography the present science of food chemistry is all right if we realize its incompleteness. In practice, the poultryman, after a general glance at the "map," will find a more reliable guide in ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... Simonsen's explanation of the results obtained with extracts from pine wood. The incompleteness of fermentation of the products is certainly due in part to the presence of furfural-yielding carbohydrates, which are resistant to yeast. The pine woods contain 8-10 p.ct. of these constituents in their anhydride form ('pentosanes'). They yield readily to acid ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... essentially strong and beneficial to the governed. The time therefore, we may expect, will come, when a second interference will be demanded, both by the recollection of our present conquest and the incompleteness of its consequences; and we shall be doomed to find, that we have won two hard-fought battles merely to enforce the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... down suddenly in a perfect uproar of applause, and drank water. In spite of the applause he was haunted by a sense of incompleteness. There was something he had left out of his speech, something he had particularly wanted to say. It seemed to him more vital, more important, ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... of his triumph, that Racine loses. He is so absolute, so special a product of French genius, that it is well-nigh impossible for any one not born a Frenchman to appreciate him to the full; it is by his incompleteness, and to some extent even by his imperfections, that Moliere gains. Of all the great French classics, he is the least classical. His fluid mind overflowed the mould he worked in. His art, sweeping over the whole range of comic emotions, from the wildest ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... self, my life and being, my desires and endeavours, were not discerned by my parents, so is it with me now with regard to certain German Governments.[11] And just as my outward life then was imperfect and incomplete, through which incompleteness my inner life was misunderstood, so also now the imperfection and incompleteness of my establishment prevent people from discerning the true nature, the basis, the source, the aim and purpose, of my desires and endeavours, and from promoting them, after recognising ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... together in a higher synthesis. The first signs of this longing became apparent in the period of the French revolution; (we find traces of it in the works of Rousseau and in Goethe's Werther); it was developed by the romanticists and represents the typical form of modern love with all its incompleteness and inexhausted possibilities. The achievement of this eagerly desired unity, which would be synonymous with the victory of personality over the limitations of body and soul, is the great problem of modern ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... and noble cast of literature under Louis XIV. and Bossuet, and the grandiose metaphysics and broad critical sympathy under Hegel and Goethe. It is this secret contrariety of creative forces which produced the literary incompleteness, the licentious plays, the abortive drama of Dryden and Wycherly, the poor Greek importations, the gropings, the minute beauties and fragments of Ronsard and the Pleiad. We may confidently affirm that ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... least things in him, the moral nature being of the very noblest, as all who ever knew him admit? Then he has had that wide experience of men which ends by throwing the mind back on itself and God; there is nothing incomplete in him, except as all humanity is incompleteness. The only wonder is how such a man, whom any woman could have loved, should have loved me; but men of genius, you know, are apt to love with their imagination. Then there is something in the sympathy, the strange, straight ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... wound's there, all the same. She's never got over it, though she isn't conscious of it now. The fact remains that Maisie's marriage is incomplete because Jerry doesn't care for her. Part of Maisie, the adorable part we know, isn't aware of any incompleteness; it lives in a perpetual illusion. But the part we don't know, the hidden, secret part of her, is aware of nothing else.... Well, her illness is simply camouflage for that. Maisie's mind couldn't bear the reality, so it escaped ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... great Law that, as Spirit is the Alpha of the Creative Process, so solid material Form is its Omega; in other words the Creative Series is incomplete until solid material form is reached. Anything short of this is a condition of incompleteness, and therefore the enlightened souls who have passed over in possession of both sides of their mentality will realize that their condition, however beatific, is still one of incompleteness; and that what is wanted for completion is expression through ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... its fruits,—and the fruits of chance are incoherence, incompleteness, unsteadiness, the stammering utterance of blind, unreasoning force. A coherence that binds all the geological ages in one chain, a stability of purpose that completes in the beings born to-day an intention expressed in the first ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... by all the providences and events of our changeful lives. Our sorrows by their poignancy, our joys by their incompleteness and their transiency, alike call us to Him in whom alone the sorrows can be soothed and the joys made full and remain. Our duties, by their heaviness, call us to turn ourselves to Him, in whom alone we can find the strength to fill the role that is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... robes of the altar servants, broidered vestments of the priests and pallid torches of a hundred candles belonged to the Rome of Caesar Borgia and not to the Rome of Caesar Nero. Into that singular building, impressive in its incompleteness, crept no echo of the catacombs, and the sighing of the reed notes was voluptuous as a lover's whisper, and as far removed from the murmurs of the Christian martyrs. Here were pomp and majesty with all their emotional ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... access to the statuettes or engravings of these various deities of antiquity, whether they be of Egypt, of India or of China, cannot fail to see that they were intended to represent generative attributes. On account of the incompleteness of many books which describe primitive races, a number of references are given throughout these pages, and ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... murder she could have had. The jury in their verdict acquit her of the intent to rob, or participation in the stealing of valuables, from which it follows that they intended also to acquit her of the intent to murder, and only through a misunderstanding, which arose from the incompleteness of the president's summing up, omitted to express it in due form in their answer. Therefore an answer of this kind by the jury absolutely demanded the application of statutes 816 and 808 of the criminal code of procedure, i.e., an ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... feet parted. She put one hand over his heart and the other on his forehead under the lock of bloodstained hair. He was dead: stiff dead and cold. His tunic and shirt had been unbuttoned to ease his last breathing. She had a queer baffled feeling of surprise and incompleteness, as if some awful sense in her would have been satisfied if she had seen that he had been living when John had said that he was dead. To-day would then have been linked on firmly ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... since the earliest days. Emerson himself, though a man of unusual discernment and a diligent drinker from German spigots, nevertheless remained a dilettante in both aesthetics and metaphysics to the end of his days, and the incompleteness of his equipment never showed more plainly than in his criticism of books. Lowell, if anything, was even worse; his aesthetic theory, first and last, was nebulous and superficial, and all that remains of his pleasant essays today is ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... aware of its incompleteness, and very much regret much of its lack of more definite information regarding the distribution of certain species, and with regard to that portion of the Province in north and northeastern interior, which, I have no doubt, is a valuable field ...
— Catalogue of British Columbia Birds • Francis Kermode
... towards the incompleteness of Eucken's philosophy. He does not introduce his philosophy with a systematic discussion of the great epistemological and ontological problems. Philosophers have often introduced their work in this way, and it has been customary to expect ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... straight; the hedgerow on the other had a dozen curves, and came up to a point. With such irregular enclosures it was impossible that the farmer could plan out his course with the necessary accuracy. The same incompleteness ran through everything—one field was well tilled, the next indifferently, the third full of weeds. Here was a good modern cattle-shed, well-designed for the purpose; yonder was a tumble-down building, with holes in the ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... In view of the incompleteness of the data it is difficult to state more than broad conclusions. It seems fairly safe, however, to say that after the winter of 1812-13 American commerce dwindled very rapidly, till in 1814 it was practically annihilated; ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... succession of short sentences may be used with good results to describe rapid action. In conversation, also, sentences are generally short, and often grammatically incomplete, though they may be understood by the hearer. Sometimes this incompleteness is justified by the idiom of the language, but more often it is the result of carelessness on the part of the speaker. The hearer understands what is said either because he knows about what to expect, or because the expression is a familiar ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... for a while. Perhaps it was only to see whether there were any letters for him at the Tesmans. I don't know. No one knows. But this reappearance shows that his detachment from the world was not complete. And incompleteness of any sort leads to trouble. Axel Heyst ought not to have cared for his letters—or whatever it was that brought him out after something more than a year and a half in Samburan. But it was of no use. He had not the hermit's vocation! That was ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad |
