"Lucidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... man, and speaking seldom, exerted a systematic opposition in the Senate, and Madison, in the House, argued, with lucidity and persistence, that the Constitution had no power to grant a charter to any such institution as the Secretary proposed. Others argued that the success of this new scheme would infringe upon the rights of the States, and still others thundered the everlasting ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... was announced by the furious barking of the faithful dogs, the apology that "the camstary breutes of dougs would not steek their clatterin' gabs," was accepted as an ample explanation, more from the dogs being quieted than from the lucidity of the remark ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... supposed that I had expressed myself with perfect lucidity. But if any point appeared to you to need explanation, I am disengaged at the present time—I am quite willing to explain." "Thank you," Iglesias answered, "no explanation is necessary on your part, I believe, though perhaps ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... a man who would talk three hours without pause, and undoubtedly there were many people sadly bored by him in his day; but to those who could appreciate the remarkable stores of information he possessed, and the lucidity with which he could deal them forth,—to say nothing of his rhetorical splendors,—those discourses of his were never tedious, but full of supreme interest. To be sure, Sydney Smith sneered at his "wonderful stores of very accurate—misinformation," but he was one who did not like a ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... clearly put by Hume, and was handled by him with singular lucidity; but his answer, though very near the truth, was not so expressed as to set the ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... heart. She has also judged other women, her friends and confidants. The moment of "the crisis" arrives, and, taking refuge in "a savage solitude," in which even the sight of a male servant is hateful to her, she sets down with disconcerting lucidity all she has observed in other women, and in herself. These other women are also of the North: Lillie Rothe, Agatha Ussing, Astrid Bagge, Margarethe Ernst, Magna Wellmann.... Her memory invokes them all, and they reappear. We seem to take part in a strange, painful revel; a witches' revel ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... molasses, and had been rewarded with a premium. I am indebted for all knowledge of this anomalous tractate to the "Agricultural Biography" of Mr. Donaldson, who seems disposed to give a sheltering wing to the curious theory broached, and discourses upon it with a lucidity and coherence worthy of a state-paper. I must be permitted to quote Mr. Donaldson's language:—"The author's ideas are no romance or chimera, but a very feasible entertainment of the undertaking, when a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... latter date, while engaged in a conference of the first magnitude, I was seized with an overwhelming desire to dance a quadrille at a public ball. I found it impossible to concentrate my attention on the case concerning which I was consulted; I could no longer express myself with lucidity. Outwardly sedate, reliable, I sat at my desk dizzied by such visions as pursued St. Anthony to his cell. No sooner was I free than I fled from Vernon, dined in Paris, bought a false beard, and plunged wildly into the vortex of a dancing-hall. Scoundrel! This is past pardon! ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... executed the brilliant stroke that disconcerted Dearborn's campaign in 1813; and who on the present occasion drew up the instructions to Riall, and to Lieutenant-Colonel Tucker, the officer in charge of the forts, with a delightful lucidity which characterizes all papers signed by him.[316] The brigs "Star" and "Charwell" left York July 23, with a re-enforcement of four hundred men for Fort Niagara, in which post the officer commanding was directed ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... version of the Arabian Nights, executed with peculiar literary vigor, exact scholarship, and rare insight into Oriental modes of thought and feeling, can under any shadow of presence be classed with 'the garbage of the brothels.' In the lack of lucidity, which is supposed to distinguish English folk, our middle-class censores morum strain at the gnat of a privately circulated translation of an Arabic classic, while they daily swallow the camel of higher education based upon minute ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... very good," said Christophe, whose terrible sufferings had developed an extraordinary lucidity in his mind, and who, after enduring such unspeakable sufferings, was determined not to compromise the results of his devotion. "But she might have spared me much agony be telling my persecutors herself the secrets that I know nothing about, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... I do not know whether these experiences of mine are unique. So far, I have not yet met with any one in whom the dreaming faculty appears to be either so strongly or so strangely developed as in myself. Most dreams, even when of unusual vividness and lucidity, betray a want of coherence in their action, and an incongruity of detail ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... to the demand for an ideal of beauty. That remarkable saying preserved by S. Clement, of a kingdom in which "the two shall be one, and the male with the female neither male nor female,"[2] might form the text for a chapter of no small importance in human history. The Greek lucidity, which made all mysticism impossible in their art as it was alien from their life, did not do away with this imperious demand; and their cult of beauty was the issue of their attempt, imperfect indeed at best and at worst disastrous, to reunite the ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... the author of "ducation sentimentale" seems to have inherited in the paternal line the shrewd realism of Champagne, so de Maupassant appears to have inherited from his Lorraine ancestors their indestructible discipline and cold lucidity. ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... patients, for instance, or those who die of gangrene like Louis XIV., of fever like Pons, of a stomach complaint like Mme. de Mortsauf, or of wounds received in the full tide of life like soldiers on the battlefield—all these may possess this supreme lucidity to the full; their deaths fill us with surprise and wonder. But many, on the other hand, die of intelligential diseases, as they may be called; of maladies seated in the brain or in that nervous system which acts as a kind of purveyor of thought fuel—and these die wholly, ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... all its shades of feeling. "Economy of attention," Spencer's familiar phrase for the philosophy of style, his explanation of even the most ornate and extravagant forms, is but another name for this desired lucidity of the medium. Pater, himself, an artist in the overlaying of phrases, has the same teaching. "All the laws of good writing aim at a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which the word is associated to its import. The term is right, ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... "when;" Swede is quite astray!—And indeed we will here leave off, and shut down this magazine of rubbish; right glad to wash ourselves wholly from it (in three waters) forevermore. Possibly enough the Prussian Dryasdust will, one day, print it IN EXTENSO, and with that lucidity of comment and arrangement which is peculiar to him; exasperated readers will then see whether I have used them ILL or not, according to the opportunity there was!—Here, at any rate, my reader shall he ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... of Hoyle's games, Complete Gamesters, Magazines and trifling publications, down to A.B.C. for a Lady and whatever we may think of the connexion of events and lucidity of his arguments, it may be pronounced an extraordinary monument and memorial ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... force should be dispatched at once across the desert from Suakin to Barber, the point on the Nile nearest to the Red Sea, and thence up the river to Gordon; but, after considerable hesitation, the military authorities decided that this was riot a practicable plan. Upon that, he foresaw, with perfect lucidity, the inevitable development of events. Sooner or later, it would be absolutely necessary to send a relief expedition to Khartoum; and, from that premise, it followed, without a possibility of doubt, that it was the duty of the Government to do so at once. This he saw quite ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... and comparing the readings of his many manuscripts, the thought occurred to Michelangelo that, between leaving the poems unpublished and printing them in all their rugged boldness, lay the middle course of reducing them to smoothness of diction, lucidity of meaning, and propriety of sentiment.[7] In other words, he began, as Signer Guasti pithily describes his method, 'to change halves of lines, whole verses, ideas: if he found a fragment, he completed it: ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... weary; he felt it, though he continued to play. But that divining sense which leads a gambler, and which comes in flashes, was already failing him. Intermittent perceptions, so fatal to all gamblers, set in. Lucidity of mind, like the rays of the sun, can have no effect except by the continuity of a direct line; it can divine only on condition of not breaking that line; the curvettings of chance bemuddle it. Philippe lost all. After such a strain, ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... author. Darrell is unjust to the more exquisite female characters of a Novelist, admirable for strength of sense, correctness of delineation, terseness of narrative, and lucidity of style-nor less admirable for the unexaggerated nobleness of sentiment by which some of her ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... truly," I said; "but remember your head has not grown a particle larger since the Spring of 1844, nor your body less; but had the same idea of Ethics been then presented to you, you would certainly not have seen its lucidity." ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... over the face of the rescued patient, his eyes opened wide, and his consciousness returned in almost supernatural lucidity. Euthymia had sat down upon a bank, and was still supporting him. His head was resting on her bosom. Through his awakening senses stole the murmurs of the living cradle which rocked him with the wavelike movements of respiration, ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... plan had one great merit to the mind of a foreigner denied the lucidity of our Italian intelligence—it was adorably simple. I can give it to you now in a nutshell as I learned it later, not as I knew it then, for I did not know it then. Nobody knew it then except Messer Simone of the one part, and Messer Griffo of the other part, and one other ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... piling up of reasons, the cumulation of argument—setting off epigram against epigram—that mark Johnson's literary style are its distinguishing features. He is profound, but always lucid. And lucidity is just what modern Johnsonese lacks. The word was coined by a man who had neither the patience to read Johnson nor the ability to comprehend him. Only sophomores, and private secretaries who write speeches ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... him, the publisher eagerly turned over the pages of her new manuscript. At a glance he saw that there was no "falling-off"—he recognised the same lucidity of expression, the same point and delicacy of phraseology which had distinguished her first effort, and the wonderful charm with which a thought was pressed firmly yet tenderly ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... he owed, as a writer, to geometry, whose severe discipline forms and exercises the mind, gives it the salutary habit of precision and lucidity, and puts it on its guard against terms which are incorrect or unduly vague, giving it qualities far superior to all the "tropes ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... elegant shop, where conversation flowed, a salon rather than a shop, changed and ennobled its customs. The reign of coffee is that of temperance. Coffee, the beverage of sobriety, a powerful mental stimulant, which, unlike spirituous liquors, increases clearness and lucidity; coffee, which suppresses the vague, heavy fantasies of the imagination, which from the perception of reality brings forth the sparkle and ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the case before him with a cold lucidity. "I should, in your place, I believe," she ended ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore her note open and took in the few lines—she seldom exceeded the first page—with the lucidity of apprehension that is the forerunner ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... still for some time; not hurt but apparently lacking the initiative to get up again. He had at that period the alternating lucidity and mental torpor of the half drunken man. But struggling up through layers of blackness at last there came again the instinct for flight, and he got on the horse ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... corseted figure, was most friendly, approaching the limit of half-familiarity. I had the feeling that I was beholding in her a captured ideal. No common experience! But I didn't care. It was very lucky perhaps for me that in a way I was like a very sick man who has yet preserved all his lucidity. I was not even wondering to myself at what on earth I was doing there. She breathed out: "Comme c'est romantique," at large to the dusty studio as it were; then pointing to a chair at her right hand, and bending slightly ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... especially to a young fresh mind, full of faith—the spectacle of a man meant for better things sunk at my age in such dishonour." St. George, in the same contemplative attitude, spoke softly but deliberately, and without perceptible emotion. His tone indeed suggested an impersonal lucidity that was practically cruel—cruel to himself—and made his young friend lay an argumentative hand on his arm. But he went on while his eyes seemed to follow the graces of the eighteenth-century ceiling: "Look at me well, take my lesson to heart—for ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... learning the opinion of an English critic, who candidly confessed that he respected German philosophy because of its complete incomprehensibility, as instanced by Hegel's doctrines, until the study of Schopenhauer had made it clear to him that Hegel's lack of lucidity was due not so much to his own incapacity as to the intentionally bombastic style in which this philosopher had clothed his problems. Like every man who is passionately thrilled with life, I too sought first for the conclusions of Schopenhauer's system. With its ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... replied Tibby, who had at times a pedantic lucidity. "The facts are that she has been in England for three days and will not see us. She has forbidden the bankers to give us her address. She refuses to answer questions. Margaret finds her letters colourless. There are other facts, but ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... the house were dressing for dinner, Rnine handed the deed to Hortense. She seemed dazed by all that she had heard; and the thing that bewildered her even more than the relentless light shed upon her uncle's past was the miraculous insight and amazing lucidity displayed by this man: the man who for some hours had controlled events and conjured up before her eyes the actual scenes of a tragedy which no ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... his reason with a quickness that surprised Madame Rameau. He was, indeed, one of those men in whom excess of drink, when slept off, is succeeded by extreme mildness, the effect of nervous exhaustion, and by a dejected repentance, which, to his mother, seemed a propitious lucidity of the moral sense. ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... habit to which he has adhered all his life. But, notwithstanding these two things—which are both, to my mind, capital defects in Parliamentary speaking—Sir William put his case with such extraordinary lucidity, that everybody listened in profound attention to every word he uttered; and when he sate down, he was almost overwhelmed with the chorus of praise which descended on his head from ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... most subtile one of the whole lecture, and at the same time the point on which all the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention to it. What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be in itself to call it 'chance.' It may be a bad thing, it may be a good thing. It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an unimaginably perfect way. All you mean by calling it 'chance' is that this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise. For the system of other things has no positive ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the day was spent in seeing more visitors and in philosophical and moral talks, in which Sand developed his social and religious theories with a lucidity of expression and an elevation of thought such as he had, perhaps, never before shown. The governor of the prison from whom I heard these details, told me that he should all his life regret that ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of a man I am!" replied Ardan, not without some degree of complacency. Then he added simply: "Barbican, my friend, if I understand your explanations so readily, attribute it all to their astonishing lucidity. If I have any faculity, it is that of being able to scent common sense at the first glimmer. Your sentences are so steeped in it that I catch their full meaning long before you end them—hence my apparent ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... first lecture to show our feeling not only for M. Taine, but for a France wounded and trampled on by her own children. The few dignified and touching words with which he opened his course, his fine, dark head, the attractiveness of his subject, the lucidity of his handling of it, made the lecture a great success; and a few nights afterward at dinner at Balliol I found myself sitting next the great man. In his published Correspondence there is a letter ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... place," answered Policeman Rat-it-all with painful lucidity, "where they shut people up. Sometimes there's an execution. But not often; not very often; once in a while, as you might say. There's a monument, too,—upon a hill they call the Beacon. I'm very fond of Bodmin. It's the County Town, you know; and with ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... Apart from his well-known mathematical attainments, he possesses by inheritance the political and historical mind, and an intrepid determination to pierce convention and look to ultimate things. He has written abundantly and, where the subject permits, with a singular lucidity, candour, and charm. Especially his Philosophical Essays and his little book on The Problems of Philosophy can be read with pleasure by any intelligent person, and give a tolerably rounded picture of the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... thoughts flashed through his brain he lost no time, not even in lighting a lamp, though the room was dark. What there was to be done must be done promptly, and with the same extraordinary lucidity of mind he remembered every simple remedy there was at his disposal. He ran upstairs, three steps at a time, for the blankets off his own bed. He had made up the kitchen fire, as was his wont, that evening, for the Boy to cook if it pleased him, and ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Tempelhof).—The "HISTORY," or Series of Lectures on the Battles &c. of this War, "BY THE ROYAL STAFF-OFFICERS"—which, for the last thirty or forty years, is used as Text-Book, or Military EUCLID, in the Prussian Cadet-Schools,—appears to possess the fit professorial lucidity and amplitude; and, in regard to all Official details, enumerations and the like, is received as of CANONICAL authority: it is not accessible to the general Public,—though liberally enough conceded in special cases; whereby, in effect, the main results of it are now become current in modern ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... not in the least mollified but instead swinging to a certain degree of lucidity that was nevertheless governed largely by the hoot he ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... enough what had happened: his hostess had forgotten that he was coming. Young as Faxon was, this sad lucidity of soul had been acquired as the result of long experience, and he knew that the visitors who can least afford to hire a carriage are almost always those whom their hosts forget to send for. Yet to say that Mrs. Culme had forgotten him was too crude a way of putting it Similar incidents ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... within him, like a crazy structure, leaving behind emptiness, desolation, regret. His resentment was not against the girl, but against life itself—that commonest of snares, in which he felt himself caught, seeing clearly the plot of plots and unconsoled by the lucidity of ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... him; it was the face of one who had found satiety in pleasure, and sorrow in the very heart of joy. There was no taint of grossness or of luxury in the face, but rather a strength, an intellectual force, a firm lucidity of thought. I confess that the sight moved me very strangely. I felt a thrill of the deepest compassion, a desire to do something that might help or comfort, a yearning wish to aid, to explain, to cheer. The silence, the stillness, the hopelessness of the pathetic figure ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... may be lost and an irretrievable error committed by a brief break in the lucidity of the intellect or in the train of thought. "He who would be Caesar anywhere," says Kipling, "must know everything everywhere." Nearly everything comes to the man who is ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... about it. Successful action, as in arts, crafts, games, sports, and the like, must needs have subtle and accurate knowledge behind it; but the possessor of such knowledge is seldom able to impart it with any approach to lucidity. On the other hand, it frequently happens that one who has a retentive memory is able to impart information glibly and correctly, without possessing any real knowledge ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... hypothesis as an unnecessary and embarrassing complication in a subject already overburdened with difficulties. Spirit messages are to them examples of the activity of the subliminal self, and a medium is a person gifted—or cursed—with extraordinary subconscious force and lucidity. Materializations, they argue, are produced through the effluvia of the living and controlled by the subliminal forces of the participators in the seance. Spirits are nothing but thought-forms. The painstaking investigation recorded in the Proceedings and Journal of the Society ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... contemporaries were surrounded by sunsets of precisely the same kind, and yet only Turner was capable of producing such masterpieces as his own. The case of the writer and the artist, indeed, illustrates with singular lucidity the fact which the philosophy of the evolutionary sociologists ignores that the great man does great things, not in virtue of conditions which he shares with the dullest and the feeblest of the men around him, but in virtue of the manner in which his exceptional ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... flood of bitterness against our poor upper class, so well intentioned for all its occasional lack of lucidity, should have arisen in so young a breast it is a little difficult for the most conscientious biographer to explain. She had partners to her heart's desire; young Lord Waynflete used his utmost arts upon her to persuade ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gold was beside him, yet he seemingly dared not touch it; perhaps he feared that the instant his hand went forth toward it, it would melt like the dream-gold which vanishes during that period of progressive lucidity which separates profound slumber from ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... remarks, I may treat him as public property. With his diminutive stature and his per- pendicular spirit, his flushed face, expressive protuber- ant eyes, high peremptory voice, extreme volubility, lucidity, and neatness of utterance, he reminded me of the gentry who figure in the revolutions of his native land. If he was not a fierce little Jacobin, he ought to have been, for I am sure there were many men of his ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... Monday, March 2.—In speech of flawless lucidity displaying perfect command of columnar figures upon which strength of British Navy is based, the WINSOME WINSTON moved Supplementary Estimates amounting to two and a-half millions. These raise total expenditure of year on the Navy to forty-eight ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... incidents of her later life may possibly be convenient for the reader. In 1849-1850 she published her "History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace," a thoroughly good bit of historical work, not less admirable for the general fairness of its tone than for the lucidity of its narrative. This was followed by her "Introduction to the History of the Peace, from 1800 to 1815." A careful English condensation of Comte's "Positive Philosophy" appeared in 1853. Meanwhile she was a constant contributor to Mr. Charles Dickens's ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... those moments then came to me that are said to come sometimes under the stress of great emotion, when in an instant the mind grows dazzlingly clear. An abnormal lucidity took the place of my confusion of thought, and I suddenly understood that the two dreams which I had taken for nightmares must really have been sent me, and that I had been allowed for one moment to look over the edge of what was to come; the Good was helping, even when the Evil was most ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... which are at once truly great and thoroughly entertaining. The learning displayed in it would do credit to a German specialist, both for extent and for minuteness, while the orderly arrangement of the arguments and the elegant lucidity of the style are such as we are accustomed to expect from French essay-writers. And what is still more admirable is the way in which the enthusiasm characteristic of a genial and original speculator is tempered by ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... at the bar whom I have ever heard reasoned with such perfect lucidity. He would explain a case which his client the solicitor would have wrapped up in fifty or sixty brief sheets, and involved in as much obscurity as it were well possible, to a committee in a few minutes; and I have often thought his clients ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... persistency than William Law, but it can hardly be doubted that he narrowed the range of his influence by the views he expressed with regard to culture and to all human learning. He forgot that, without the logic, the wit, the irony, the singular force and lucidity of style displayed in his own writings, he would have lost the power as a religious teacher which he was ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... lucidity, the following chapters will aim even more scrupulously at telling the truth. There are doubtless a number of matters—though generally of relatively small moment—about which we are, and probably always shall be, uncertain. The best way ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... their own points and to know their own mind," he returned with hopeless lucidity. "Don't ask me to climb our family tree now," he added; "I fear I haven't the head for it. I'll try some day—if it will bear my weight; or yours added to mine. There's no doubt, however, that we, as ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... the fever his treatment produced in them. But he was only a pioneer; the method would improve later. Was it not already a miracle to make the ataxic walk, to bring consumptives back to life, as it were; even to give hours of lucidity to the insane? And at the thought of this discovery of the alchemy of the twentieth century, an immense hope opened up before him; he believed he had discovered the universal panacea, the elixir of life, which was to combat human debility, the one ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... would assist greatly in maturing and perfecting the author's style. "Religion and Superstition" is the current article in F. E. M. Hercules' interesting series on Trinidad; and exhibits all the polish, lucidity and conciseness of its predecessors. "His Photo," by Master Randolph Trafford, is a very promising poem by a youthful bard. Every rhyme is correct, which is more than can be claimed for a great deal of the poesy perpetrated by ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Guerre de l'Independence Americaine, 1877, Histoire, etc., sous la premiere Republique, 1886, most valuable works; a third vol., Hist., etc., sous le Consulat. M. le Capitaine DESBRIERE, Projets de Debarquement, 2 vols., 1901, a phase of the great war told with all the care and lucidity which distinguish the best French ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... not from life. Nor did the satire gain in lucidity from any editorial care. There are hardly two consecutive lines that do not suffer from a truly perverse theory of punctuation. A copy of the rare original is in the writer's possession, at the head of which the poet has inscribed his own maturer judgment ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... another art: the art of breaking the cables, the roots, the stolons, the slender rhizomes which check the body's descent into the grave. To the work of the shovel and the pick must be added that of the shears. All this is perfectly logical and may be foreseen with complete lucidity. Nevertheless, let us invoke experiment, the best ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... admitted without hesitation that his lonely greatness rather forces admiration on us than attracts us. That unrelenting intensity; that lucidity, as clear as air and as hard as agate; that passion which burns with a consuming heat or with a blinding light in all his writings, have endeared him to none. It is impossible to take one's ease with Milton, to induce him to forget ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... ceased her heart was beating so violently that there was a rush in her ears like the noise of the river after rain, and she did not immediately make out what he was answering. But as she recovered her lucidity she said to herself that, whatever he was saying, she must not hear it; and she began to speak again, half playfully, half appealingly, with an eloquence of entreaty, an ingenuity in argument, of which she had never dreamed herself capable. And then, ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... consciousness of the race, and to the disclosure of these secrets we may look with confidence for the inspiration of a new literature. But in politics Ireland has no secrets. All her cards are on the table, decipherable at the first glance. Her political demand combines the lucidity of an invoice with the axiomatic rectitude of the Ten Commandments. There is no doubt about what she wants, and none about why she ought to have it. In that sense the case for Home Rule is made, and this book, having ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... Leon has his weak points. He does not attain to the angelic melody of St. John of the Cross. He is apt to be indifferent to sheer beauty of form; though he often reaches it, this success seems with him to be a happy accident. Lucidity is not his main object; though he uses simple terms, his immense range of knowledge tempts him at whiles to indulge in allusions which it might tax all the ingenuity of commentators to explain. Commentators of Luis de Leon have a sufficiently heavy task before ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... could not forget Father Beron with his monotonous phrase, "Will you confess now?" reaching him in an awful iteration and lucidity of meaning through the delirious incoherence of unbearable pain. He could not forget. But that was not the worst. Had he met Father Beron in the street after all these years Dr. Monygham was sure he would have quailed before him. This contingency ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... in my absence. To my enormous relief, he had improved greatly in the interval. His appearance was as ghastly as ever, but all trace of delirium had left him and he spoke in a feeble voice, it is true, but with even more than his usual crispness and lucidity. ...
— The Adventure of the Dying Detective • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mingled so largely the possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the fourth man necessary to compound a salad, is a madman to mix it: Jack is that madman. I know not what is more remarkable; the insane lucidity of his conclusions, the humorous eloquence of his language, or his power of method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject treated, mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... contemporary one we possess. He traces her malady from its incipiency, through the successive disquieting manifestations of hysteria, melancholia, and fury, broken by periods of partial and even complete mental lucidity. Such intervals became rarer and ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... the reviewers seemed not to understand where G.K. stood or what was his philosophy. "Bernard Shaw," says one, "whom as a disciple* he naturally exalts." This, after a series of books in which G.K. had exposed, with perfect lucidity and a wealth of examples, a view of life differing from Shaw's in almost every particular. One reviewer clearly discerned the influence of Shaw in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, "but without a trace of Shaw's wonderful humour ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... produced two considerable works, "Principes de la Guerre" and "De la Conduite de La Guerre," which give a high idea of their author's character and talent. There is nothing in them that ought to scare away the average reader. Their style has the geometrical lucidity which is the polytechnician's birthright, but in spite of the deliberate impersonality generally attached to that style of writing, there emanates from it a curious quality which gradually shows us the author ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... hurtled over us and shrieked away into the distance; and again the man beside me flinched, but I did not. I was thinking, with odd lucidity, of many things, among them Dunny and his old house in Washington, into which I should never again let myself with my latch-key, sure of a welcome at any hour of the day or night. My guardian's gray head rose before me. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... regards the Jew, John Castell. I think that the matter may possibly be managed, provided that the money is all right, for, as you know, I do not work for nothing. Thus——'" And Inez dictated with admirable lucidity those suggestions as to the rescue of Castell, with which the reader is already acquainted, ending the letter ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... to inform you," said Syme with restraint, "that your remarks convey no impression to my mind. Perhaps if you were to remove the remains of your original forehead and some portion of what was once your chin, your meaning would become clearer. Mental lucidity fulfils itself in many ways. What do you mean by saying that the train has caught you? It may be my literary fancy, but somehow I feel that it ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... rules by which they had mutually agreed to be bound. They had of late determined that the old man must not be disturbed in his profound rest by any question tending to cause a state of mental activity. The test of a very fine instrument had proved that the shortest interval of positive lucidity was followed by a slight but distinctly perceptible rise of temperature in the body, and this could mean only a waste of the precious tissues they were so carefully preserving. They hoped and believed that the grand crisis was at hand, and that, if the body ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... large sovereignty; and then work patiently on with ever-present enjoyment, learning his art, gaining skill and mastery over his vast and complex instrument, till he gained certainty of touch and the power of saying, with perfect lucidity, with pure transparency of phrase, exactly what he meant; and then, behind his art, to live resolutely in his simple creed, whatever article of it he could master, sure of this, that if his inspiration came, he would be able to ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "that was just the reason." She was speaking frankly, as a child can speak; but children have their own code of honour, and it forbids them to give away a friend. "Jan was telling us, only the other day," she explained with careful lucidity, "how his father had once caught a mermaid in a pool there. We wanted very much to see one, and so we planned to go. But afterwards, when father rowed us home, we did not like to tell him about it. We were ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... struck his forehead with his fist as if to pound it into a state of lucidity. "Where is he? It is a stone wall; I ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... a certain crystalline lucidity, clear and pure as the ring of glass upon glass, and with a mellifluous after-tone or echo of vibration, which dies away upon the ear in a lingering fall—melancholy and voluptuous, or light and tender as the hour and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Session and season has at length closed, Lyndhurst having wound up by a resume of the acts of the Government, in one of those 'exercitations,' as Melbourne calls them, which are equally pungent for their severity, and admirable for their lucidity. Melbourne made a bitter reply, full of personalities, against Lyndhurst, but offering a meagre defence for himself and his colleagues. Those who watch the course of events, and who occasionally peep behind the curtain, have but a sorry spectacle to contemplate:—a Government miserably weak, dragging ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... passionate enthusiasts for Natural Law. The Law of Nature overleapt all provincial and municipal boundaries; it disregarded all distinctions between noble and burgess, between burgess and peasant; it gave the most exalted place to lucidity, simplicity and system; but it committed its devotees to no specific improvement, and did not directly threaten any venerable or lucrative technicality. Natural law may be said to have become the common law of France, or, at all events, the admission of its dignity and claims was the one tenet ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... take my things as they stand, and I'm not going to write 'Tales of my First Feeding Bottle' to please them. So I'm going over to Paris. I shall turn my MSS. into French and publish them there. The language lends itself to perfect lucidity, and the Paris press allows men to write as men. Besides, the French admire word-painting, which is my particular vein. The English don't. They like composition. Here an author's pen must remain always a stick dipped in ink. ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... command, that it carried conviction to the minds of all those who were seated listening to him. He spoke of what would happen as if he was dealing with an absolute certainty, and went on with such wonderful lucidity and force of reasoning that they ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... her hair and put it up in a big, gleaming knot. Here she had been engaged for a whole hour and a half, and was getting calmer every minute, instead of the reverse. She astonished herself by the lucidity of her brain, although it only worked by snatches—there being lacunae when she could not have told what she was doing. And yet, as she had approached the house, sitting again beside the Colonel, ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... nineteenth-century "stylists" has outgone, perhaps none has touched, Eustathius in euphuism. It is needless to say that while the simplicity of the best Greek style usually prefers the most direct and natural order, its suppleness lends itself to almost any gymnastic, and its lucidity prevents total confusion from arising. Eustathius has availed himself of these opportunities for "raising his mother tongue to a higher power" to the very utmost. No translation can do justice to the elaborate foppery of ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... inspiration, no mannered archaism:—above all, no sickly sweetness, no subtle, unhealthy affectation. Throughout his work, whether when it is strong, or in the less worthy portions, sanity, sincerity, simplicity, lucidity, are everywhere the characteristics of Herrick: in these, not in his pretty Pagan masquerade, he shows the note,—the only genuine note,—of Hellenic descent. Hence, through whatever changes and fashions poetry may pass, her true lovers he is likely to 'please now, and please for long.' ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... his milk and biscuits. The light had come back to his eyes and the colour to his cheeks, as he set himself with great vigour and lucidity to explain the situation. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... This state of lucidity enabled her to take note of all that was being said. The talk ran more on general questions, and less on people, than she was used to; but though the allusions to pictures and books escaped her, she caught and stored up every personal ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... For lucidity and sincerity, the important thing is to say what you have to say in whatever words most accurately express your own thoughts. That done, it is pointless to worry about ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... silent. He could think of nothing to say. But his mind began to work with extraordinary rapidity and lucidity. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... answered Charley, with engaging lucidity, "if she were less so. It's her infernal virtue I can't stand, Gabriella. No man could stand ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... so finely modelled, closer than when he accompanied his friend in their wild rush through the streets, he was struck by the surprising phenomenon of the moral second-sight which a man exalted by love invariably finds within him. With what lucidity had Michel Chrestien read into that soul, that heart, illumined by the fires of love! Thus the princess acquired, in d'Arthez's eyes, another charm; a ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... Belgium; and suggesting that, treaty or no treaty, frontier or no frontier, Russia would be out to slay Teutons or England to steal colonies. Here, as elsewhere, I think the professors dotted all over the Baltic plain fail in lucidity, and in the power of distinguishing ideas. Of course it is quite true that England has material interests to defend, and will probably use the opportunity to defend them: or, in other words, of course England, like everybody else, would be more comfortable if Prussia were less predominant. The ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... do not recollect to have found precisely these sins in the long catalogue of those hitherto laid to his charge. It is worth while, therefore, to examine into these discoveries effected solely by the aid of the "lucidity and solidity" of ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Irish Opinion. He had since published mature and valuable histories of rationalism, and of morals. His History of England in the Eighteenth Century is likely to remain a standard book, being written with fairness, lucidity, and candour. It is true that in his Irish chapters, with which alone I am concerned, Lecky, like Froude, wrote with a purpose. He was an Irish patriot, and bent on making out the best possible case for ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... be one of the most strenuous advocates of Utility as the Standard, and is distinguished for the lucidity of his exposition, and the force of his replies to the ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... to the lucidity of these loose pages, Smith shall flutter among them again. In the nick of time he shall come to tell us why he strewed so many anxious cigar stumps around the cocoanut palm that night. This he must do; for, when he sailed away before the dawn in his yacht Rambler, he carried with him the ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... of his sentences, aping the style of Chalmers or of Robert Hall, and occasionally inserting some fine-sounding quotation; for apparent richness of composition was his principal aim, not truth of meaning, or lucidity of utterance. ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... incomprehensible even to ourselves." The clear insight into the conditions of the question conveyed by the last sentence is very characteristic of Shelley. It makes us regret the non-completion of his essay on a "Future Life", which would certainly have stated the problem with rare lucidity and candour, and would have illuminated the abyss of doubt with a sense of spiritual realities not often found in combination with wise suspension of judgment. What he clung to amid all perplexities was the absolute and indestructible ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... gift which is mainly the result of certain elementary virtues which we practise without thinking about them, justice, tolerance, and moderation. These qualities have, we think and think truly, been often wanting in the Latin nations, which pride themselves on lucidity of intellect and logical consistency in obedience to general principles. Recent philosophy has encouraged these advocates of common sense, who have long been "pragmatists" without knowing it, to profess their faith without ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... Mr. Holden, when the mise-en-scene was quite to his liking, "that a good map, and a few realistic models of the principal buildings dealt with in my discourse, give a lucidity and a coherence otherwise foreign ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... criticisms are, how delicate in expression. The remarks on Sir Joshua Reynolds alone exemplify the truth of Sententia No. 19, 'From a picture we gain but little more than we bring.' On the general principles of art Mr. Quilter writes with equal lucidity. That there is a difference between colour and colours, that an artist, be he portrait-painter or dramatist, always reveals himself in his manner, are ideas that can hardly be said to occur to him; but Mr. Quilter really does his best ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... and potent life, and it was shown how the yearly balancing of the national accounts might be directed by and made to promote the profoundest and most fruitful principles of statesmanship. With such lucidity and picturesqueness was this financial oratory rolled forth that the dullest intellect could follow with pleasure the complicated scheme; and for five hours the House of commons sat as if it were under the sway of a magician's wand. When Mr. Gladstone resumed his seat, it was felt that ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... explained Monty Merriweather, with succinct lucidity, grinning at his comrades. "Say, fellows, you know how Hicks dreads a cold shower-bath; well, some of you rage at him from the other side of the rock, while I climb up the rope-ladder and close with him! Then some of you prehistoric pachyderms ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... to compose a letter in reply, and for dignity combined with lucidity it may stand as a model ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... but still wading in deeper and deeper, inch by inch, the cautious minister was fast finding himself too far advanced to retreat. He was rarely decided, however, and never lucid; and least of all in emergencies, when decision and lucidity would have been more valuable ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... try to attain to the unattainable: never regret the thing past and gone: and never believe the word that passeth belief. Keep these three precepts, and may it be well with thee.' The man, admiring the lucidity and sense of her words, freed the bird from her captivity, and sent her forth aloft. She, therefore, desirous to know whether the man had understood the force of her words, and whether he had gleaned any profit therefrom, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... irrational desire to be maltreated, bruised, made to suffer in her flesh, to experience a violent shock, a sharp pain that would put a stop to what was going on in her brain. She could think of nothing but blows to bring matters to a crisis. After the blows, she saw, with the lucidity of an hallucination, all sorts of things come to pass,—the guard arriving, the gendarmes from the post, the commissioner! the commissioner to whom she could tell everything, her story, her misfortunes, how the man before her had abused her and what he had cost her! Her heart collapsed in anticipation ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... shared his fate. Kuhlmann also wrote a volume of verses, entitled The Berlin and Amsterdam "Kuhl- festival" at the Gathering of Lutherans and Calvinists, which sufficiently attests his insanity. The following is a specimen of the lucidity of his works: "The more I continued my doctrines, the more opposition I received, so that also the higher world of light with which I am illuminated, in their light I was enlightened, or shadowed, when I proceeded, and in their light lit I ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... Wassermann may have served as a model for his younger fellow-townsman Bernhard Kellermann (born at Fuerth in 1879). He too is a seeker after new forms of expression for psychical reactions; but he presents himself to us from the very first as a purer nature of greater delicacy and lucidity. He introduces himself as a troubadour of narrative art in his first two novels Yester and Li, a Story of Longing (1904) and Ingeborg (1905). With unutterable tenderness and richness of tone ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... was, but there he fell his full length on the floor. He was cupped, and fully recovered his speech during the course of the day, but Mr. Lockhart thinks that never, after this attack, did his style recover its full lucidity and terseness. A cloudiness in words and a cloudiness of arrangement began to be visible. In the course of the year he retired from his duties of clerk of session, and his publishers hoped that, by engaging him on the new and complete edition of his works, they might detach ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... Mill, and all becomes clear. Principles of the most abstract kind are translated into concrete language, and brought to explain familiar facts; and this result is achieved, not simply or chiefly by virtue of mere lucidity of exposition, but through the discovery and exhibition of modifying conditions and links in the chain of causes overlooked by Ricardo. It was in his "Essays on Unsettled Questions in Political Economy" ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... ago the President wrote a letter to McClellan, with ability and lucidity, exposing to view the military urgency of a movement on the enemy with an army of one hundred and forty thousand men, as has now McClellan at Harper's Ferry. But the letter ends by saying that all that it contains is not to ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... reply to my question leaves nothing to be desired in the way of lucidity. Now, supposing I should happen to feel some repugnance to those delicate attentions on Morillo's part that you have just alluded to, what inducement would be sufficient to persuade you to 'bout ship, and land me on the wharf at Kingston, instead of ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... of the English Novel by the admirable Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitisme Litteraire of the late Joseph Texte—an investigation unquestionably of the ripest scholarship, and the most extended research. And now once more there are signs that French lucidity and French precision are about to enter upon other conquests; and we have M. Barbeau's study of a famous old English watering-place[53]—appropriately dedicated, as is another of the books already mentioned, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... trigonometry and spherical geometry gratis, and all who appreciated the help that was being offered to them streamed to his lessons. This young student, later Pastor Joergen Lund, had a remarkable gift for mathematics, and gave his instruction with a lucidity, a fire, and a swing that carried his hearers with him. I, who had never before been able to understand a word of the subject, became keenly interested in it, and before many lessons were over was very well up in it. As Joergen Lund taught ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... about capital, however, is lucidity itself compared with the exposition of the remarkable thesis, "Wages not drawn from capital, but produced by labour," which occupies the third chapter of "Progress ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley |
