"Preciousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with this study of commercial madness runs a thread of that new sense of the preciousness of vital joy which had occupied Ibsen so much ever since the last of the summers at Gossensass. The figure of Erhart Borkman is a very interesting one to the theatrical student. In the ruin of the family, all hopes concentre ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... life, on the other hand, curiously, Aylmer's real taste in art and decoration was Pre-Raphaelite; delicate, detailed and meticulous almost to preciousness. He often had delightful things in his house, but never for long. He had no pleasure in property; valuable possessions worried him, and after any amount of trouble to get some object of art he would often give it away the next week. For he really liked money only for freedom and ease. The general ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... does not tell you that he has been rewriting his book (not for correction of fact, but for improvement of style) for ten years, and that now he doesn't care anything for critics, and endorses it NE VARIETUR (sic).[440] The style itself is a mosaic of preciousness, literary jargon, and positive argot—not quite contemptible, but, like some actual mosaic, unattractive; and the matter does not attract me, though it may attract people who like tiger-taming scenes, crimes, grimes, etc. The address ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... had no souls—if, like the aesthetic reptilia, we knew that when our dust dissolved our existence would be over—we should realize the preciousness of what we hold so lightly now. Man and the spirits and angels are the only beings with souls, and in no place except on earth are new souls being created. This gives you the greatest and grandest idea of the dignity of life and its inestimable ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... the shadows fear lest ever again they be lured by specious promises to suffer usury at the hands of Yahn, who is overskilled in Law. Only Yahn sits and smiles, watching his hoard increase in preciousness, and hath no pity for the poor shadows whom he hath lured from their quiet to toil in the ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... the methods of clouding, and strength of burnished lustre, in plumage like the peacock's, give them more universal interest; in some birds, also, as in our own kingfisher, the colour nearly reaches a floral preciousness. The lustre in most, however, is metallic rather than vitreous; and the vitreous always gives the purest hue. Entirely common and vulgar compared with these, yet to be noticed as completing the crystalline ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... shut the door, stood in front of the fire and looked round him with a delightful sense of possession, of privacy, of well-being. His new house—indeed, one might almost have said his new life—was still so recent a possession as to have lost none of its preciousness. He still felt a childish joy in all its details. The house was one of those built within the last decade which seem to have made a struggle to escape the uniformity of the older streets. The front door opened into a square ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... reflected that the simple-minded affectionate girl might prove as wax in the hands of her clever godless daughter. But it was too soon to intervene and try to undo her own work. She would watch and wait, and hope still that the infinite beauty and preciousness of a childlike faith would touch the stony heart that nothing had touched, and win back the wandering feet to the ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... the weak point in the position of the positive moralists, when they hold up such love to us as so supreme a treasure in life. They observe, and quite correctly, that it is looked upon as a treasure; but the source of its preciousness is something that their system expressly takes from it. That choice amongst the loves, so solemn and so imperious and yet so tender, which descends like a tongue of flame upon the love it delights to honour; which fixes on a despised and a weak affection, taking ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... himself so full of resource, so considerate and helpful, ever since the news of Sir Richard Calmady's desperate state had broken up the peace of the little party at Ormiston Castle, now five days ago, that she forgave him even his preciousness of speech, even his slightly irritating superiority of manner. She had ceased to be on her guard with him during these days of travel, had come to take his presence for granted and to treat him with the comfortable ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... importance you make in walking the roads is the comparative rarity and exceeding preciousness of buttermilk. We had, as I said, caught up with Summer. Summer, need one say, is a thirsty companion, and the State seemed suddenly to have gone dry. We looked in vain for magic mirrors by the roadside, overhung with fairy grasses, littered ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... scrawl on gold, and he cannot play with it; and, lastly, that it gives great delicacy and precision of touch to work upon minute forms, and to aim at producing richness and finish of design correspondent to the preciousness ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... was a murderer: he had murdered his own wife and burnt her to ashes. What are all these now, I thought, and the crowds that accompany them! Whither are they going? and what to do? Blessed sight for angels! Oh, the preciousness of a Saviour's blood! If there is joy in heaven ever one sinner that repenteth, with what delight must angels gaze on such a sight as this! I felt such a glow of gratitude to God come over me, my heart was stirred ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... found a response in the consciousness where they were once a rapture of novelty; but the response was faint and thin; he could not warm over the old mood in which he once treasured them all away as of equal preciousness. ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... synods may order forms of prayer. They may get speeches to be spoken upward by people on their knees. They may obtain a juxtaposition in space of curiously tessellated pieces of Bible and Prayer Book. But when I speak of the rareness and preciousness of prayers, I mean such prayers as contain three conditions—permanence, capability jot being really prayed, and universality. Such prayers primates and senates can no more command than they can order a new Cologne Cathedral or ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... and neglected; a little while hence they will bury here some great man, and many will come to visit his grave, and again it will be frequented and thronged with people."' When the Baha'is are more conscious of the preciousness of their own history, this prophecy may be fulfilled, and ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... color may be, though not larger than the smallest pin's head, if one part of it is not darker than the rest, it is a bad touch; for it is not merely because the natural fact is so, that your color should be gradated; the preciousness and pleasantness of the color itself depends more on this than on any other of its qualities, for gradation is to colors just what curvature is to lines, both being felt to be beautiful by the pure instinct of every human mind, and both, considered as types, ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... and really noteworthy in itself, acquires a certain preciousness by its being the only one transmitted to us of that period of Chopin's existence. But this scantiness of information need not cause us much regret. During the first years of a man's life biography is chiefly concerned with his surroundings, with the agencies ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... and Father of Jesus Christ loves every human being individually, cares for each and has a specific vocation for each one to fulfil. This doctrine of the equal preciousness in the sight of GOD of all human souls is for Christianity fundamental. But the correlative of Divine fatherhood is human brotherhood: just because GOD is love, and fellowship is life and heaven, and the lack of it is hell, GOD does not redeem men individually, but ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... the preciousness of children in adversity paved the way for the reception of one who was to come to them from under the shadow of a family cloud, a certain mysterious personage of tender years, Lewis ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... as Jesus saw it. And no one ever measured the sacred values of humanity as He measured them. And now, in the perfect mercy of God, there is no man but may dwell in the house of God alway and feel life's sacredness amidst a thousand desecrations, and know its preciousness amidst all that seeks to ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... insuperable, connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of nations: it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture; and it is not until a building has assumed this character, till it has been entrusted with the fame, and hallowed by the deeds of men, till its walls have been witnesses of suffering, and its pillars rise out of the shadows of death, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... small that, in order to negotiate the pail, I sat down and gathered it into my lap. First I sipped the foam. I was disappointed. The preciousness evaded me. Evidently it did not reside in the foam. Besides, the taste was not good. Then I remembered seeing the grown-ups blow the foam away before they drank. I buried my face in the foam and lapped the solid liquid beneath. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... ask an answer to that question of mine. All I entreat is forgiveness for—what for I know not: but I have sinned, and that is enough for me. What if I have been too confident—too hasty? Are you not the price for which I strain? And will not the preciousness of the victor's wreath excuse some impatience in the struggle for it? Hypatia has forgotten who and what the gods have made her—she has not even consulted her own mirror, when she blames one of her innumerable adorers for a forwardness which ought to ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... Buddha,(15) of the utmost magnificence and beauty, the beams, pillars, venetianed doors, and windows being all overlaid with gold-leaf. Besides this, the apartments for the monks are imposingly and elegantly decorated, beyond the power of words to express. Of whatever things of highest value and preciousness the kings in the six countries on the east of the (Ts'ung) range of mountains(16) are possessed, they contribute the greater portion (to this monastery), using but a small portion ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... over and over these precious things, with a strong sense of their preciousness in all her throbbing grief, there came to her ear through the perfect stillness of the night the faint, far-off, not-to-be-mistaken sound of quick-coming horse's feet, nearer and nearer every second. It came with a mingled ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... forth in all His untold preciousness and proclaims the glorious message, "Deliver him, that poor helpless sinner, from going down into the pit. I have found a ransom." ...
— The One Great Reality • Louisa Clayton
... consciousness of wrong in a not all-unrighteous soul. The laird was false to his own self, but to confess himself false would be to initiate a change which would render life worthless to him! What would all his fine things be without their heart of preciousness, the one jewel that now was nowhere in the world but in his house, in the secret chamber of his treasures, which would be a rifled case without it! As is natural to one who will not do right, he began to argue the moral ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... contained; yet when Pericles, as reported by Thucydides, speaks of the statue of the Athena Parthenos, it is only to reckon the gold of her drapery as part of the possible resources of the state. We know that in the eyes of Pericles and of his hearers the preciousness of the material was only an incident in the artistic character of the work; but what is felt most deeply is often the least spoken about. Later descriptions, such as that of Pausanias, lay emphasis on the details and accessories of the statue, the ornamentation of helmet and shield and sandals; ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... men's souls; we all have our secrecies and sanctuaries, rarely acknowledged even to ourselves. But no one can read Joyce Kilmer's poems without grasping his vigorous idealism, his keen sense of beauty, his devout and simple religion, his clutch on the preciousness of common things. He loved the precarious bustle on Grub Street; he was of that adventurous, buoyant stuff that rejects hum-drum security and a pelfed and padded life. He always insisted that America is the very ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... straws!" she cried, wildly. "A plague upon your preciousness which drives you to deny and die rather than admit my wisdom! You are no prisoner to the King. You are my prisoner. I took you, I hold you, and as my prisoner I command you to follow me, that I may convey you to some place of surety more pleasing to ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... come under this category; yet the difference between seventeen and thirty-seven was sufficient to warrant in him a trembling uncertainty, and eager catching at the skirts of that vanishing youth whose preciousness he never seemed to have recognized till now. It was with a mournful interest that all day I watched him follow the child about, gather her posies, help her to water her flowers, and accommodate himself to those whims and fancies, of which, as the pet and the youngest, Mistress ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... slipped from the keys and, as it were, died in her lap. Jim Dyckman understood a woman for once, and in a gush of pity for her and of resentment for her disprized preciousness caught at her to embrace her. Her hands came to life. The wifely instinct leaped to the fore. She struck and wrenched and drove him off. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... vulgarity. For vulgarity is not—what it is too often assumed to be—a matter of class, but in itself a matter of insincerity, the effort to appear or to be something that one is not. The contrary of vulgarity, by the word, is preciousness or distinction, and in conduct or act it is the perfect preciousness and distinction of truthfulness. Truthfulness in manners gives distinction and dignity in all classes of society; truthfulness gives that simplicity of manners which is one of the special graces of royalty, and also of an ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... mass; of the general enlightenment, firmness, and probity. It is no great physical secret, which a single brain, finding, may announce and so establish: it is a moral truth, which, like a gem, hides its ray and its preciousness in obscurity, nor becomes refulgent till all around it is beaming with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... others and lives in them. We wished in this history to speak of a class of lives formed on the model of Christ, and like his, obscure and unpretending, like his, seeming to end in darkness and defeat, but which yet have this preciousness and value that the dear saints who live them come nearest in their mission to the mission of Jesus. They are made, not for a career and history of their own, but to be bread of life to others. In every household or house have been ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... must continually and reciprocally submit and surrender in all kind and courteous and affectionate ways: and these submissions and ministries to each other, of which you all know (none better) the practice and the preciousness, are as good for the yielder as the receiver: they strengthen and perfect as much as they soften and refine. But the real sacrifice of all our strength, or life, or happiness to others (though it may be needed, and though all brave creatures hold their lives in their hand, to be given, when ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... without wonder and self-reproach. But the main design on which I had then set my mind of reaching Rome, and, if possible, Naples, within the limited period which circumstances allowed, rendered me far less alive than I ought to have been to the preciousness of the episode thus ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... inheritance which should descend to the children of the Christian home. This is an undefiled and imperishable treasure, which does not become worthless at the grave, but which will continue to increase in preciousness as long as the ages of eternity shall roll on. If through the parent's pious agency, the child comes into possession of this invaluable blessing, there is given to him more than earthly treasure, more than pecuniary ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... assurance the heart finds rest. O the preciousness of the promise, "I will come again"! "I am coming for you," is the cheering message. "Yes, Lord," we reply, "we will wait, and watch, and be ready, by ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... were chosen, for they wished to see as few people as possible, and to be seen by none. But Manners did not trust to this alone. He felt the preciousness of his charge, and had brought horses and men with him, whom he sent off in couples by different roads, to lead their pursuers on a false ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... vanities—living for pleasure was but another name for living for future woe: living for wealth was losing all; living for honour was but heaping condemnation for the last day: while living for Christ gave not only pleasure, and riches, and honour here, but hereafter. Then he spoke of the preciousness of Jesus to those who believe, as the sympathising Friend, and the loving Brother; of the honour and joy of living for Him who had died to bring life and immortality to light; and of that "peace which ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... throughout the Old Scriptures the symbol of departure from Himself, and closely associated monogamic love with monotheistic worship, teaching us by the history of all ancient idolatries that the race which is impure spawns unclean idols and Phrygian rites; if Nature attaches such preciousness to purity in man that the statistics of insurance offices value a young man's life at twenty-five, the very prime of well-regulated manhood, at exactly one-half of what it is worth at fourteen, owing, Dr. Carpenter does not hesitate to say, to the indulgence of the passions ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... becomes a possibility for each of us, and therefore a duty; a certainty for all the redeemed in fullest measure hereafter; and, alas! a rebuke to our low lives and feeble expectations. Let us look, then, at the petition, with the desire of sounding, as we may, its depths and realising its preciousness. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... said, "I didn't mean to insult you. But can't a clever fellow like you understand that all the pretty frills and preciousness of a year ago are as dead as last year's Brussels sprouts? We're up against elemental things and can only get at them with elemental ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... gondola; shelter and adornment were all about her life, and plenty within. Dolly had been, as it were, cast into the waves and was struggling with them; now lifted on a high crest, and now brought down to the bottom. Was that how she had learned to know that there were wonderful things of preciousness and beauty at the bottom of the sea? and must one perhaps be tossed by the storm to find out the value and the power of the hand that helps? It did smite Dolly with a kind of pain, the sense of Christina's sheltered position and security; the thought of the father's ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... to set off the brightness of the Gospel. All artists know the value of contrast in giving prominence. A dark background flashes up brighter colours into brilliancy. White is never so white as when it is relieved against black. And so here the special preciousness and distinctive peculiarities of what we receive in Christ are made more vivid and more distinct by contrast with what in old ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... dress, amusement, religion, and politics, is compelled to obtain the support of a class, of a herd within the herd. The most eccentric in opinion or conduct is, we may be sure, supported by the agreement of a class, the smallness of which accounts for his apparent eccentricity, and the preciousness of which accounts for his fortitude in defying general opinion. Again, anything which tends to emphasize difference from the herd is unpleasant. In the individual mind there will be an analysable dislike of the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... three years the recluse life, not in the guarded peace of a convent, but in her own room at home, in the noisy and overcrowded house where a goodly number of her twenty-four brothers and sisters were apparently still living. And these had been years of inestimable preciousness; but they came to an end at the command of God, speaking through the constraining impulse of her love for men. From the mystical retirement in which she had long lived alone with her Beloved, she emerged ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... the furnace and for the loom of England, as they have already richly earned, still more abundantly to bestow, comfort on the indigent, civilization on the rude, and to dispense, through the peaceful homes of nations, the grace and the preciousness of simple adornment, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... Andrews are much stronger than Fielding's admirers have always been willing to admit. This recalcitrance has, I think, been mainly due to the erroneous conception of Marivaux as, if not a mere fribble, yet a Dresden-Shepherdess kind of writer, good at "preciousness" and ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... of majestic aspect. Barbarous enough it would have looked beside the marble lovelinesses of Greece, but it was quite like the coarser art which sought for impressiveness through size and costliness. Other people than Babylonian sculptors think that bigness is greatness, and dearness preciousness. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... is a feeling which a husband takes as his due; the sense of the immense preciousness of such perfect love soon wears off, as a debtor, in the course of time, begins to fancy that the borrowed money is his own. This noble loyalty becomes the daily bread of the soul, and an infidelity is as tempting as a dainty. The woman who is scornful, and yet more the woman who is reputed dangerous, ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... take some of this wine," said Lapham, pouring himself a glass of Madeira from a black and dusty bottle caressed by a label bearing the date of the vintage. He tossed off the wine, unconscious of its preciousness, and waited for the result. That cloudiness in his brain disappeared before it, but a mere blank remained. He not only could not remember what he was going to say, but he could not recall what they had been talking about. They waited, looking at him, and he stared at them in return. After ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Son of man," the Mediator, clothed in sacerdotal garments, supplying oil for the light, after the example of Aaron and his sons. (Exod. xxvii. 20, 21.) The "garment" may signify his mediatorial righteousness,—the "golden girdle" the preciousness of his love,—"his head and his hairs white like wool," his purity and eternity,—"his eyes as a flame of fire," his omniscience, by which he searches the reins and hearts, and sees the end from the beginning; "his ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... their house. F.C. read the parable of the great supper (Luke xiv.), and made some remarks in explication of it; after which Pastor Chabrand spoke with much feeling on the influence of the Holy Spirit, the gradual operation of the Spirit in the secret of the soul, and the preciousness of dwelling in Christ, as the branch in the vine, in order to ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... portion of my Narrative, I would add some hints on a few passages of the word of God, both because I have so very frequently found them little regarded by Christians, and also because I have proved their preciousness, in some measure, in my own experience; and therefore wish that all my fellow-saints may share the ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... applied to a heap of miscellaneous filings will pick out every little bit of iron there, so surely will that love which He bears to the people, when it is responded to, draw to itself, and therefore draw out of the heap, the men that feel its impulse and its preciousness. And so 'saint' means, secondly, righteous and pure, but it means, first, knit to God, separated from evil, and separated by the power of His ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... arguments of her elders, these surroundings were likely to foster a passionate interest in public affairs; while other influences round her were tending to increase in her a natural sense of the delicacy and preciousness of personal relations. In the course of telling her story occasions may come for remarking again on what was one of the chief graces of her character; but in a book of this kind the sooner the reader becomes acquainted with the subject of it, ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... view the glitter of vanity fair without thought of acquiring its treasures for herself; and, when reminded that she was there to buy, she appeared to be utterly ignorant of the value of money, though a childhood without it was supposed to have taught her its rarity and preciousness. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... that he is expected to claim some of the privileges of the long-absent lover. He has some information as to their nature. His eyes ought to apprise him (as they do us, my boy!) of their preciousness. He is not without knowledge concerning past conduct of that type which, beginning in hard-won privileges, ripens into priceless duties, not to discharge which is insult all the more bitter because it is not to be mentioned. It is ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... that he would give me a piece of his stone (though it were no larger than a coriander seed), he somewhat brusquely refused, adding, in a milder tone, that he could not give it me for all the wealth I possessed, and that not on account of its great preciousness, but for some other reason which it was not lawful for him to divulge.... Then he inquired whether I could not show him into a room at the back of the house, where we should be less liable to the observation of passers-by. On my conducting him into the state parlour (which he entered ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... mine. It presented itself to his fifty-years' old eyes in the shape of a little woman in a soft dress with a long train, with a head attractively overweighted by a great mass of fair hair and the delicate preciousness of her inner worth, partaking of a gem and a flower, revealed in every attitude of her person. As the dangers thickened round the San Tome mine this illusion acquired force, permanency, and authority. It claimed him at last! This claim, exalted by a spiritual detachment from the usual sanctions ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... defend the prize. "How great a jewel this place (Flushing) is to the crown of England," wrote Sidney to his Uncle Leicester, "and to the Queen's safety, I need not now write it to your lordship, who knows it so well. Yet I must needs say, the better I know it, the more I find the preciousness of it." ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... life. Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul's vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than the useful groceries ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... hold on yet awhile, by all the good angels in heaven, by the mighty powers of the deep, by the love she bore to those within her, by the affection they bore to her, by the value of their lives, by the preciousness of the little innocent children, by the hopes she had given them of her strength and goodness; while he promised her in return every good thing on sea or in sky, fair breezes, bright sun, and ever-flowing sheet, with the devoted love and ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... Comstock; democracy means the rule of the people, or it means Tammany Hall. And so it is with the word "Religion". In its true sense Religion is the most fundamental of the soul's impulses, the impassioned love of life, the feeling of its preciousness, the desire to foster and further it. In that sense every thinking man must be religious; in that sense Religion is a perpetually self-renewing force, the very nature of our being. In that sense I have no thought ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... the familiar precept of a patriot touching the price and preciousness of liberty, femininity, scorning to be free, exults in shackles. We hesitate over our own taste, and turn rather to the crowning of some courageous male, with a liking and a talent for notoriety. The duties of this gentleman being irksome and his reward being ridicule, it is perhaps ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... restless night. His experience was similar on several succeeding nights, but during the day he seemed tolerably comfortable, enjoyed conversation, and frequently desired the Scriptures to be read, remarking on the importance of the subjects, and the preciousness of the promises. His devotional feelings were awakened and his spirits revived by the reading or singing of hymns, such as he suggested. On the 19th his mind was somewhat affected, and he fainted while preparations were ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... his private affairs and domestic life." His daily life at home was a model of simplicity and regularity, and the great secret of the vast amount of work he accomplished was owing to the fact that every odd five minutes were occupied. He had a deep sense of the preciousness of time and the responsibility which everyone incurs who uses or misuses it. "To such a length did he carry this that at a picnic to a favorite Welsh mountain he has been seen to fling himself on the heather and bury himself in ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... through which we are passing, the life blood dearer than our own which is drenching distant fields, should remind us of the preciousness of distinctive American ideas. They who would seek in their foolish pride to establish the pomp of liveried servants in America are doing that which is simply absurd. A servant can never in our country be the mere appendage to another man, to be marked like a ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... forget the inestimable preciousness of the new Promethean gifts because they have become familiar. Think first of the privilege we all possess now of preserving the lineaments and looks of those ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... divers meats and drinks, and namely [specially] such manner bake-meats and dish-meats burning of wild fire, and painted and castled with paper, and semblable [similar] waste, so that it is abuse to think. And eke in too great preciousness of vessel, [plate] and curiosity of minstrelsy, by which a man is stirred more to the delights of luxury, if so be that he set his heart the less upon our Lord Jesus Christ, certain it is a sin; and certainly the delights might be so great in this case, that a man might lightly ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... manuscript, that I doubted if I should at last marvel at it. But the wonder remains with the relic, and I paid it my homage devoutly and humbly, and was disconcerted afterward to read again in my Valery how sensibly all others had felt the preciousness of that famous page, which, filled with half a score of previous failures, contains in a little open space near the margin, the poet's final triumph in a clearly written stanza. Scarcely less touching and interesting than ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... of a painted stone,' of 'the worthless honours of a bust.' The worth of honour lies in that same worthlessness. Fair money wage for fair work done, no wise man will despise. But that is pay, not honour; the very preciousness whereof—like the old victor's parsley crown in the Greek games—is that it had no value, gave no pleasure, save that which is imperishable, spiritual, and not to be represented by gold nor ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... front and no behind Speech seemed but desecration Temperamentally unable to beg anything of anybody The boy—for what else was thirty to seventy-six? They forgot everything but happiness To a woman the preciousness of her reputation was a fiction To shut one's eyes, and be happy—was it possible! Touching evidences of man's desire to persist for ever Trouble of youth lasted on almost to old age Unbound as yet ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... texts magnify the preciousness and perfectness of redemption: "Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you." Ezek. 36:25. "Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... made familiar, were written after a visit to Rome in attendance upon the Cardinal du Bellay, and first published in 1558. The beautiful Songe sur Rome accompanied them. Two years later Du Bellay, then in his thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, died. The preciousness of these poems is enhanced rather than diminished if we imagine that the friend of Ronsard endeavoured to wed the music of Villon's Ballades to the passing of empires ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Jefferies has told us that it requires a hundred and fifty years to make a perfect maiden. "From all enchanted things of earth and air, this preciousness has been drawn. From the south wind that breathed a century and a half over the green wheat; from the perfume of the growing grasses waving over heavy-laden clover and laughing veronica, hiding the green finches, baffling the bee; from rose-lined hedge, woodbine, and cornflower, ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... said. And it made me think that if such a person could only know the high-minded way she had found to get out of her trouble! I would like somebody who is capable of valuing her to value her in all her preciousness. Wouldn't you be glad if such a man as he is could know how and why she feels ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... be too short to praise my God for what I have learned. It was there I first beheld my lost and wretched estate as a sinner; it was there that I first found the way of salvation, and there that I first experienced the preciousness of Christ in me the hope of glory. O, sir, permit me to say, Never, never neglect those precious engagements. You have yet a family and more apprentices. May your house be ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... passionate sense of the value of things: of the richness of the cosmic treasure: the world where every star is a diamond, every leaf an emerald, every drop of blood a ruby, it is this sense of preciousness that is really awakened by the death of His saints. Somehow we feel that even their death is a thing of incalculable value and mysterious sweetness: it is awful, tragic, desolating, desperately hard to bear—but still "precious." . . . Forgive ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... in a box, where I can be taken afterwards"—a declaration which led to financial negotiations between David Marshall and his sister-in-law, and which brought him to a still higher appreciation of the general preciousness of ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... immediate neighborhood of the Genoa serpentine. The accessibility of marble throughout North Italy similarly modified the aim of all design, by the admission of undecorated surfaces. A blank space of freestone wall is always uninteresting, and sometimes offensive; there is no suggestion of preciousness in its dull color, and the stains and rents of time upon it are dark, coarse, and gloomy. But a marble surface receives in its age hues of continually increasing glow and grandeur; its stains are never foul nor dim; its undecomposing surface preserves a ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... May, 1843, I entered upon a remarkable part of my life, upon which I must dwell somewhat at length, especially as it will, by God's blessing, still further show the Reader the preciousness of depending upon ...
— A Narrative of some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Third Part • George Mueller
... letters. But so poor a result does Mr. Parker show in this part of his work, that he drives us to the dilemma either of placing Mr. Choate in quite an unworthy rank as a scholar, or of concluding, that, in the case of these conversations, he bestowed upon his listener very little of any particular preciousness, or that what else was bestowed was not understood or remembered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of ruling the Palace or arranging private houses. The value of the object committed to a person's care increases the dignity of the post. It is much more honourable to be caretaker of a diadem than of a wine-cellar. Judge of our esteem for you by the preciousness of the body over which we are ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... disappear like a piece of ice hid in a hot hand, which will melt and trickle away. This obligation lies with infinitely increased weight on Christ's servants; and the consequences of failing to discharge it are more tragic in their cases, in the exact proportion of the greater preciousness of their faith. Corn hoarded is sure to be spoiled by weevils and rust. The bread of life hidden in our sacks ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... must also "number our days." We are wasteful with them, and we throw them away as though they are ours in endless procession. And yet there are only seven days in a week! A day is of immeasurable preciousness, for what high accomplishment may it not witness? A day in health or in sickness, spent unto God, and applied unto wisdom, will gather treasures more precious than ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... delicate pictures, firelike in their subtle brilliancy. They have always seemed to contain this suggestion for me: flowers that seemed to be much more the embodiment of jades, rubies, emeralds, and ambers, than just flowers from the common garden. His flamelike touches have always held this preciousness: notations rather for the courtly robe or diadem than just drawings. All this gift of goldsmithery comes as one would expect, quite naturally, from his powers as an engraver, in which art he held a first place in his time and was the master of the younger ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... tide. It may be, as Mr. Carlyle alleges, that the Constitution of the United States is no supreme effort of genius; but events now passing are teaching us that every day of fidelity to the spirit of it lends it new preciousness; and that an adherence to it, not petty and literal, but at once large and indomitable, might almost make it a charter of new sanctities both of law and liberty for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... one is only capable of receiving the fiery-red beams of the wrath, and the other is capable of receiving the golden light of the love. Let us take heed lest, by destroying the wrath, we maim the love; and let us take heed lest, by exaggerating the wrath, we empty the love of its sweetness and its preciousness; and let us accept the teaching that these are one, and that the deepest of all the things that the world can know about God lies in that double saying, which does not contradict its second half by its first, but ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... recognize them for turnips at all. She never afterwards believed them to be turnips; and as for cabbages, they were green inflorescences of majestic bloom. There is one position from which all common things can be seen with reflections of preciousness, and Ellen had insensibly taken it. The window and the shop behind were illuminated with the yellow glare of gas, but the glass was filmed here and there with frost, which tempered it as with a veil. In the background rosy-faced men in white frocks ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and quivering, and lengthening; and the light was as an arrow of beams and as a globe of radiance. Desire for the Jewel waxed in her, and she had no sight but for it alone, crying, ''Tis a Jewel exceeding in preciousness all jewels that are, and for the possessing it would I forfeit all ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and whose good opinion she coveted. But she remained splendidly wholesome and inspiring in her fiction, because she clung to her faith in spiritual self-development, tested all life by the test of duty, felt the pathos and the preciousness of inconspicuous lives, and devoted herself through a most exceptional career to loving service for others. She was therefore not only a novelist of genius, but a profoundly good woman. She had an ample practical credo for living and will always be, for those ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... first pair exhibit the RELATIONS of the kingdom to the several classes of intelligent creatures with which, as adversaries or subjects, it comes into contact: the second pair exhibit the PROGRESS of the kingdom from small beginnings to a glorious issue: the third pair exhibit the PRECIOUSNESS of the kingdom, in comparison with all other objects of desire: and the remaining one teaches that the good and evil which intermingle on earth will be completely and finally separated in ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... where community of taste restricts the calling lists—from the noisy studio, where pianos and girls make evenings lively, to the austere bare boards or the velvet elegance of studios where authority and preciousness, and occasionally attainment, reside, ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... have been more or less employed in the support of superstition. Darkness and mystery; confused recesses of building; artificial light employed in small quantity, but maintained with a constancy which seems to give it a kind of sacredness; preciousness of material easily comprehended by the vulgar eye; close air loaded with a sweet and peculiar odor associated only with religious services, solemn music, and tangible idols or images having popular legends attached to them,—these, the stage properties of superstition, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... her eyes took on in the glen from the deep fern, the mossy bank and the green boughs overhead. On the terrace at Lessings' under a wide June sky he had supposed them to be blue; but there was no blue stone of that sky colour of sufficient preciousness ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... indifference to the world? I was at my old puzzle again, while you unfastened the pinks, and, before the butler, who acquiesced at your frivolity in impertinent silence, you held them out to me. Only you know the preciousness of unsought-for favors. "Write me," ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... and the finest of the gold and silver have been lavished in its construction. The fragrant wood typifies the beauty of sanctified humanity, while the gold reminds us of the divine glory of our LORD, and the silver of the purity and preciousness of His redeemed and peerless Church. The imperial purple with which it is lined tells us of the Gentiles—the daughter of Tyre has been there with her gift; while the love-gifts of the daughters of Jerusalem accord with the ...
— Union And Communion - or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon • J. Hudson Taylor
... to the old one's conceit, as the great carved log, drawn back through two-score feet of space, was released. The next moment he was lost in ecstasy at the abrupt and thunderous liberation of sound. But such thunder! Mellow it was with preciousness of all sounding metals. Archangels spoke in it; it was magnificently beautiful before all other sounds; it was invested with the intelligence of supermen of planets of other suns; it was the voice of God, seducing and commanding to be heard. And—the everlasting miracle of that interstellar metal! ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... very glad, I was allowed to suffer so much, and learn something of the preciousness of truth. It is a diamond with a white light, children. There is no other gem so ...
— Aunt Madge's Story • Sophie May
... discern God in the excellence of things. If all were well, as they hope it may some day be, God would henceforth be present in everything. While good is mixed with evil, he is active in the good alone. The pleasantness of life, the preciousness of human possessions, the beauty and promise of the world, are proof of God's power; so is the stilling of tempests and the forgiveness of sins. But the sin itself and the tempest, which optimistic theology has to attribute just as much to God's purposes, are not attributed to him ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... arrested him? Merely the countenance of the woman before him. If all those curses had gathered into legions of devils, crowding, swarming, furious, armed with lash and brand, about the form of one who represented love, joy, beauty, all preciousness to her, the terror and the anguish looking from her face could not have been intensified. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... which they present to God's good will, greatly enhance its preciousness. "His favour is life, his loving-kindness is better than life." Where God has a will, God always has a way. At the throne of divine grace, none had ever to shed Esau's tears, or cry with him, Hast ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... when, a little while before, I saw her sobbing on the floor, Because I told her that in heaven She would be as the angels even, And would not want her doll, 'tis true A horrible fear within me grew, That, since the preciousness of love Went thus for nothing, mine might prove To be no more, and heaven's bliss Some dreadful good which is not this. But being about to die makes clear Many dark things. I have no fear, Now that my love, my grief, my joy Is but a passion ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... were like cool jade; the gardens, where red, yellow, blue and white gleamed together in a mist of heat, had the radiance of opal; the river was a band of dull gold. On every side, as if to enhance the preciousness of the city, the woods hung dark on the hills; above, the sky was violet, specked with minute feathery clouds, white as snowflakes. It reminded him of a beautiful bowl in his villa; the ground was of that same brilliant blue, and the artist had fused into the work, when it was hot, particles ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... slop-bucket of Walt Whitman. A belief in the preciousness of filth. Entirely bestial. Nastiness and animal insensibility to shame. Noxious weeds. Impious and obscene. Disgusting burlesque. Broken out of Bedlam. Libidinousness and swell of self-applause. Defilement. ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... outlet valley of a much greater group of cirques north of Two Medicine, offers a picture as similar in kind as two canvases are similar which have been painted by the same hand; but they widely differ in composition and magnificence; Two Medicine's preciousness yields to St. Mary's elemental grandeur. The steamer which brings our rheumatic traveller from the motor-stage at the foot of the lake lands him at the upper chalet group, appropriately Swiss, which finds vantage on a rocky promontory for the view of the divide. Gigantic ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... the French consul in the former city. Behold, then, our traveler, as, accompanied by the captain of the Republica, he sets foot on the quay, intent on relieving himself of his precious valise, the possession of which is doubly embarrassing because of its very preciousness. He has a hope that he may meet the charge at the Progreso Club, whither he is going, but whether he is to be met or not, he does not dare to leave behind him the valise, which to him is a veritable Old Man of the Sea. Night has fallen when they leave the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... to labour for independence until you have proved, by winning that prize, your right to look higher. But afterwards, is there nothing more for me in life—no true home—nothing to be dearer to me than myself, and by its paramount preciousness, to draw from me better things than I care to culture for myself only? Nothing, at whose feet I can willingly lay down the whole burden of human egotism, and gloriously take up the nobler charge of ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... man give in exchange for his soul?" Matt. xvi. 26; though he would give, yet what hath he to give? There are two things endear any privilege to us, and heighten the rate of it,—the necessity of it, and the preciousness of it; and these two are eminent here. Is it not necessary to be, to live, and have a being? All men think so, when they will give all they have to redeem themselves. All other things are accidental to them, they are nearest to themselves; ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... then long been maturing, as you know; but just then came the crisis. It was the one theme everywhere. Of course I took my king's part against these rebels, and at once I was outraged, wronged beyond all human bearing. Her mad brother, her's, her's what a world of preciousness, Andre, that little word once enshrined for me; and still it seems like some broken vase, fragrant with ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... rejoiced in it long before the revision appeared, I should have owed the revisers endless gratitude, if for nothing more than the genuine reading of St. Matthew's report of the story of the youth who came to our Lord. Whoever does not welcome the change must fail to see its preciousness. ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... wheel,' said the voice which had already grown dear to Curdie: its very tone was precious like a jewel, not as a jewel, for no jewel could compare with it in preciousness. ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... the ancient carvings. If this were a small room, there would be a sense of unrest in so lavish a use of broken surface, but in one large enough to have it felt as a whole, and not in detail, it simply gives a quality of preciousness. The soft browns of the wood spread a mystery of surface, from the edge of the polished floor until it meets a frieze of painted canvas filled with large reclining figures clad in draperies of red, and blue, and yellow—separating the walls from the ceiling by an illumination of ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... field to feed and barge to bear; that the fierce flames to which the Alp owes its upheaval and the volcano its terror, temper for us the metal vein and quickening spring; and that for our incitement, I say not our reward, for knowledge is its own reward, herbs have their healing, stones their preciousness, and ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... was originally sacred, perhaps, only as the representative of the sun; and this luminary was later spiritualized in the idea of Apollo. Gold was sacred as far as this worship was spread, from India to the North of Europe, and the great demand for it for sacred uses gave the metal much of its preciousness in the markets of the world. It was worn by the living and was buried with the dead; so that if humanity had not refined its conception of the divine, it would have come to be the case at length that every particle of gold in the soil would ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... of Cherbury at this moment struck, and Venetia instantly sprang from her seat. It reminded her of the preciousness of the present morning. Her mother was indeed absent, but her mother would return. Before that event a great fulfilment was to occur. Venetia, still grasping the key, as if it were the talisman of her existence, looked up to Heaven as if she required for her allotted ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... sake of beneficent power; and would wish to associate rather with sensible and well-informed persons than with fools and ignorant persons, whether they are seen in the company of the sensible ones or not. And finally, without being troubled by repetition of any common truisms about the preciousness of friends, and the influence of companions, you will admit, doubtless that according to the sincerity of our desire that our friends may be true, and our companions wise,—and in proportion to the earnestness and discretion with which we choose both, will be the general chances ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... to see preciousness in Christ; but unbelief sees no form, beauty, or comeliness in him (1 ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... a blue-and-white checked kerchief, and a smaller one in brown paper. The kerchief, having been laid on the table and unwrapped, disclosed a fantastic piece of ironwork in the shape of a crown, set with stones of which the preciousness was concealed by a plentiful layer of dust. He lifted this, set it on my head for a moment, and, replacing it on the table, took ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... Malcourt thoughtfully. "I would like to tell her that I didn't mean it—case of boy and grasshopper, you know.... Well, as you say, gun-play has no place in real novels. There wouldn't be room, anyway, with all the literature and illustrations and purpose and purple preciousness; as anachronismatically ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... corporal exercise was necessarily in partial darkness, and only idle people lived in the light. The exercise might give an advantage to the occupants of the gloom, but we should neither be justified in therefore denying the preciousness of light in general, nor the necessity to the workers of the few rays they possessed; and thus I suppose the hills around Stratford, and such glimpses as Shakespere had of sandstone and pines in Warwickshire, or of chalk cliffs in Kent, to have been ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... for a moment, hardly venturing to believe, and yet afraid she must. "I heard Miss Valery once say that no man's love after marriage is exactly as it was before it; that the thing attained soon loses its preciousness, and that the wife has to assume a new character, and win another kind of love. I wonder if this is true. I wonder"—and suddenly she changed her seriousness for the tone of raillery she always used with Harrie Dugdaie—"I wonder whether ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the all-encompassing death, fate's dark opacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed background of their imagination. The beautiful joyousness of their polytheism is only a poetic modern fiction. They knew no joys comparable in quality of preciousness to those which we shall erelong see that Ilrahmans, Buddhists, Christians, Mohammedans, twice-born people whose religion is non-naturalistic, get from their several creeds ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... of life, when measured by the usual standards of commercial value. Yet in what other kind of value can the preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered in some one, by ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... whom it is true that 'the publicans and the harlots will go into the Kingdom of God before you,' because in their degradation they may be nearer the lowly penitence and the consciousness of their own misery and need, which will open their eyes to see the beauty and the preciousness ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren |
