"Profundity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... example shows the profundity of these moral truths. She perceived that she had senses. A second was enough to bring about this discovery, to change her soul, to alter her whole life. To have learned to know herself was at first a delight. The {greek here} of the ancient philosophy is not a precept ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... is and must be, shall be!" Bakahenzie grunted his acknowledgment of the profundity of the statement. "He who would trap the leopard must needs dig the pit!" Another uncompromising silence urged Birnier to force the pace a little: "O son of Maliko, what say the omens and the signs of the ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... inspiration which comes from the Gods, and the heroes a grand, and venerable, and lofty fixedness of mind, and the whole divine race together a perfect preparation for sharing in Plato's most mystical and far-seeing speculations, which he declares to us himself in the Parmenides, with the profundity befitting such topics, but which he (i.e. his master Syrianus) completed by his most pure and luminous apprehensions, who did most truly share the Platonic feast, and was the medium for transmitting the divine truth, the guide in our speculations, and the hierophant of these divine words; who, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... of solitude. The position to which he was so unexpectedly called was an exceedingly difficult one for a mind filled, as his was, with ideal visions of liberty and progress, and totally inexperienced in the ways of a selfish world and in the profundity of Jesuitical intrigues; and the unavoidable embarrassments of the time had been increased by the course of his immediate predecessors. Ludwig I., through a sentimental love of the picturesque, had encouraged the multiplication of monasteries and convents and brotherhoods of wandering friars, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... legerdemain art of turning a penny. Still, however, a tinge of the old leaven is discernible, even unto this day, in their characters; witches occasionally start up among them in different disguises, as physicians, civilians and divines. The people at large show a keenness, a cleverness and a profundity of wisdom, that savors strongly of witchcraft; and it has been remarked, that whenever any stones fall from the moon, the greater part of them is sure to ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... natural wall, rising steep on every side to a height which produced the idea of insurmountable confinement. The interception of all lateral light caused a dismal gloom. Round us was a perpendicular rock, above us the distant sky, and below an unknown profundity of water. If I had any malice against a walking spirit, instead of laying him in the Red-sea, I would condemn him to reside ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... same after the war." This is one of the consoling platitudes with which people cover over voids of thought. They utter it with an air of round-eyed profundity. But to ask in reply, "Then how will things be different?" is in many cases to rouse great resentment. It is almost as rude as saying, "Was that thought of ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... this service of his at the city's gates that he learned his lovely sense of blacks and greys and silvers, of which Paris offers so much always, and which predominate in his canvases. Even his tropical scenes strive in no way toward artificiality of effect, but give rather the sense of their profundity than of oddity, of their depth and mystery than of peculiarity. He gives us the sense of having been at home in them in his imagination, being so well at home in those scenes of Paris which were daily life to him. We find in Rousseau true naivete, ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... no sandy plain, nor any circumscribed and scant oasis I seem to realize. A forest valley, with rocky sides and brown profundity of shade, formed by tree crowding on tree, descends deep before me. Here, indeed, dwell human beings, but so few, and in alleys so thick branched and overarched, they are neither heard nor seen. Are they savage? Doubtless. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... instinct for recognizing its own, and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life. From qualities for instance of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise in literature, nor at all less in literature, than it ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... at Wendell Phillips's home in Boston, and the music of his voice, the liquid charm of his words, the purity, the transparency of his diction, the profundity of his knowledge, the fascination of his personality, and his marvelous art of putting things, I shall never forget. He sat down on the sofa beside me and talked as he would to an old schoolmate, and it seemed to me that I had never heard such exquisite and polished English. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... writing there. Having lifted a corner of the Veil of Isis, having glanced once into that Death-Kingdom where grope the roots of the Ash-Tree whose name is Fear, we return to the surface, from Nadir to Zenith, and become "superficial"—"out of profundity." ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... school was, that a work should be judged by itself alone or by the author's ideal. The great master of this school was Sainte-Beuve (1804- 1869), who possessed a rare combination of great and accurate learning, compass and profundity of thought, and above all sympathy in judgment. Hippolyte Taine (b. 1828), the most brilliant of living French critics, Theophile Gautier, Arsene Houssaye, Jules Janin (d. 1874), Sarcey, and others, are distinguished ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... you, I was caught up,—snatched out of that black profundity with inconceivable swiftness,—and when the ascending movement ceased, I found myself floating lightly like a wind-blown leaf through twining arches of amber mist, colored here and there with rays of living flame ... I heard whispers, and fragments of song and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Peter Bell, the Idiot Boy, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, Simon Lee, and the Wagoner. But there are multitudes of Wordsworth's ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly, and which, in their homeliness and clear {229} profundity, in their production of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes, are among the choicest modern examples of pure, as distinguished from decorated, art. Such are (out of many) Ruth, Lucy, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... we take the Buddha as the type of them; and expect not only a life and character that we can recognise as flawless, but also a profundity of revelation in the philosophy and ethics. But if no two blades of grass are alike, much less are two human Souls; and in these Great Ones, it is the picture of Souls we are given. When we think that if all men were perfect, all would be alike, we err with a wide mistake. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... in her bosom things she could not express; a vague comprehension of the pure spirituality of the man who had died to save her child, a response to the love that had stirred in the bosom now cold beneath the sea. All the primitive deep profundity of the devotion of that wild-hearted man who had brought a wealth of food to her from over the mountains, who had faced death for her on the frozen seas, who had tended her in her time of trial with the gentleness of a woman, his indomitable heroism, the splendor, the ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... Signor Rodicaso and friends, Fidelia rose, turned toward them, and made a profound courtesy, as if to signify her abject submission. Signor Rodicaso bowed with equal profundity, and straightway proceeded to make a speech to the lady, in which he spoke of the wild idolatry that he had long felt for her, and alluded most disparagingly to his own merits. If the Signor's statements could be relied on, he was totally unworthy of an alliance with the beautiful ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... behold Creation, and the Wonders, of his Might. Then staid the fervid Wheels, and in his Hand He took the Golden Compasses, prepar'd In Gods eternal Store, to circumscribe This Universe, and all created Things: One Foot he center'd, and the other turn'd Round, through the vast Profundity obscure; And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, This be thy just ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the present age, we see that Christian logic (yes, and Christian veracity) has undergone little if any alteration. It is as infantile and as impudent as ever. Arguments that would look fallacious in the nursery are used in the pulpit, generation after generation, with an air of solemn profundity, as though they were as wise as the oracles of omniscience. To select from such a plethora is almost impossible; the difficulty is where to begin. But happily we are under no necessity of selection. A case is before us, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... of the City of London; but as the vehicle approximated nearer towards him, he became lost in a labyrinth of conjecture, on perceiving, that the pericranium of its principal inmate was enveloped in a wig of appalling dimensions; he now inquired whether the profundity of wisdom was denoted by the magnitude of a wig; and if so, why it was not worn by the Civic Sovereign rather on the seat of justice, where it might operate in terrorem on delinquency, than on the happy ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... ignorance respecting pictures to be found among persons of the first standing in society. Often where a liberal spirit exists, and a wish to patronise the fine arts is expressed, it is joined to a profundity of ignorance on the subject almost inconceivable. A doubt as to the excellence of their artists is very nervously received, and one gentleman, with much civility, told me, that at the present era, all the world were aware ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... this potential ceremony, Ruth remained leaning against the doorway, looking upon the night, the bulk of whose profundity and blackness seemed to be gathered below him. The vault above was serene and tranquil, with a few large far-spaced stars; the abyss beneath, untroubled by sight or sound. Stepping out upon the ledge, he leaned far over the shelf that sustained ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... himself; in brief, from no other than eternal Bardianna. It seems that that worthy essayist had discussed the whole matter in a chapter thus headed: "On Seeing into Mysteries through Mill-Stones;" and throughout his disquisitions he evinced such a profundity of research, though delivered in a style somewhat equivocal, that the company were much struck by the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... though I am not unmindful of the inevitable conclusion, that my own parabola will some day take its downward course, and I shall sit, quiescent, while the younger men around will demand stormily why I cannot see the grandeur, the profundity, of their newer gods. There lies the tragedy. Those gods, quite possibly, will be greater than mine—must be, if my belief in man be worth anything. Yes, that is the tragedy. I shall be at rest, and the youths ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... is, and with all its profundity, it lacks breadth. It rests wholly on the national, not on a universal basis. It would be vain to seek in it for the comprehensive universalism of the Prophets. Every lofty ideal is claimed as exclusively Jewish. So far from bridging over the chasm between Israel and the other ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... trying to probe into the causes of your ailment, and that they had signally failed. Physicians, mademoiselle, are very clever and estimable men, and there are a few things which come within the limit of their treatment; but there are also other things which baffle their utmost profundity of knowledge. One of these is that wondrous piece of human machinery, the nervous system; that intricate and delicate network of fine threads—electric wires on which run the messages of thought, impulse, affection, emotion. If these threads or wires become, ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... plan of the campaign of the Austrians is incomprehensible to all our military men—not on account of its profundity, but on account of its absurdity or incoherency. In the present circumstances, half-measures must always be destructive, and it is better to strike strongly and firmly than justly. To invade Bavaria without disarming the Bavarian army, and to enter Suabia and yet acknowledge the neutrality ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... and goes over it again, and you realize that he is deep. Once more he traverses the same ground, but he is so far down now that you cannot follow him, and then you are aware that he is profound." That sort of profundity is still not rare in the field of general education. The person who has all possible knowledge pigeonholed and classified is still in our midst. The pedant still does the cause of ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... appeared, rendered it all the more charming. In the bold yet beautiful contour of those features, in the full red lips, in the high pale forehead and, above all, in those dark and haunting eyes lay a depth of feeling and profundity and nobleness of thought, which to a reflective mind have a charm infinitely more irresistible than that which belongs to mere youthful perfection. There was a bland beauty in the smile which slept upon her lips, a delicacy of sentiment in the faint flush that tinged her soft cheek, and a ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... the back of his brain there lurked a dim mistrust. Cecil praised one too much for being athletic. Was that it? Cecil made one talk in one's own way. This tired one. Was that it? And Cecil was the kind of fellow who would never wear another fellow's cap. Unaware of his own profundity, Freddy checked himself. He must be jealous, or he would not dislike a man for ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... be considerable risk, no doubt," continued Mr Tippet meditatively, "of foolish young men and boys getting over the rails in sport or bravado, and falling off into the depths of illimitable profundity, but—" ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... — N. depth; deepness &c. adj.; profundity, depression &c. (concavity) 252. hollow, pit, shaft, well, crater; gulf &c. 198; bowels of the earth, botttomless pit[obs3], hell. soundings, depth of water, water, draught, submersion; plummet, sound, probe; sounding rod, sounding line; lead. bathymetry. [instrument to measure ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... want to know your opinion of it." Folter gave a toss of her head that seemed to say, "Have not I spoken?" but what it really did mean, how should other mortal know? for the main obstructions to understanding are profundity and shallowness, and the latter is far the more perplexing ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... did the mighty sage, Yavakri, son of the ascetic Bharadwaja, acquire profundity in the Vedas? And how also did he perish? I am anxious to hear all this, just as it happened. I take delight in listening to the narration of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... accompanies this characteristic is the sense of profundity, of mighty significance. And this feeling is not necessarily an illusion. The nature of our materials — be they words, colours, or plastic matter — imposes a limit and bias upon our expression. The reality of experience can never be quite rendered through ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... them by the camp-fire till twilight faded and moon and stars shone with desert brilliancy. Shaking the dust from our beds as a testimony against the spiteful spirits of Rawhide Peak, we slept with our usual profundity. Always, however, before bedtime we had to go through the little ceremony of removing the burs from our clothing, for every plant in this country seems to have a bur or a tick-seed, and we found a new one in every camp. Sometimes they were arrows or needles an inch long, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... the profundity of an observation made by Mr. Bagehot —a man who carried away into the next world more originality of thought than is now to be found in the Three Estates of the Realm. Whilst remarking upon the extraordinary reputation ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... doctor, laying his hand kindly upon her shoulder,—"you'll want something fresh again presently. What mine of profundity are you digging ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... craft, he was literally, to employ the slang phrase in that quarter, the "cock of the walk." He was, however, not so much regarded by the villagers a worthy as a clever man. It required not erudition to win the credit of profundity, and the lawyer knew how to make the most of his learning among those who had none. Like many other gentlemen of erudition, he was grave to a proverb when the occasion required it, and would not be seen to laugh out of the prescribed ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... of the world." Shelley, who knew what he was talking about when poetry was the subject, has said it, and with a profundity of truth Whitman seems in a peculiar degree marked out for "legislation" of the kind referred to. His voice will one day be potential or magisterial wherever the English language is spoken—that is to say, in the four corners of the earth; ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... indeed, is not entirely new. The Restoration had heralded its coming, and the tone of Halifax has more in common with Bolingbroke and Hume than with Hobbes and Filmer. Nor has the eighteenth century an historical profundity to compare with that of the zealous pamphleteers in the seventeenth. Heroic archivists like Prynne find very different substitutes in brilliant journalists like Defoe, and if Dalrymple and Blackstone are respectable, ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... man with great dignity. "Dey'll take me fo' jest what I am—a mostest profundity educationalized specimen ob de human fambly. But I'se ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... is loathe to believe of any laborious provider for a great intellectual interest that he can deliberately have meant to deceive: the first point, and, separately by itself, an all-sufficient demur, is this—that, not in proportion to the learning and profundity brought to bear upon Herodotus, did the doubts and scruples upon his fidelity strengthen or multiply. Precisely in the opposite current was the movement of human opinion, as it applied itself to this patriarch of history. Exactly as critics and investigators arose ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... myself, a consciousness forced on me by these things—I feel that thought must yet grow larger and correspond in magnitude of conception to these. But these cannot content me, these Titanic things of sea, and sun, and profundity; I feel that my thought is stronger than they are. I burn life like a torch. The hot light shot back from the sea scorches my cheek— my life is burning in me. The soul throbs like the sea for a larger life. No thought which I have ever had has ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... said had some distinction and unusualness: perceptive observation, ripe wisdom, and, with it all, the petulant attractiveness of the spoiled and engaging child. And yet even so, one is baffled, because it is not the profundity or the gravity of what he said that impresses; it is rather the delicate and fantastic turn he gave to a thought or a phrase that makes his simplest deductions from life, his most sensible bits of counsel, appear to have something fresh and interesting about them, though prudent men have ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "over-soul" from whose universal being the ideas of beauty and truth and goodness may be supposed to proceed. It is a clumsy and crude speculation, easy to be grasped by the superficial mind, and with an air of profundity which is ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... eagerness in Fontenoy's voice. Ease was no longer welcome to him, whether in himself or as a spectacle in other men. George, startled from a momentary profundity of sleep, staggered to his feet, and clutched at various ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... were Lowrie and Vigne; it would be difficult, every one agreed, to find better or handsomer children. But they seemed no more than shadows or colored mist. This terrified her—what a hopelessly deficient woman she must be! But even in the profundity of her depression the old vibration of ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... election to pandering to demagogic sentiments or class hatreds and prejudices, and the judge who owes either his election or his appointment to the money or the favor of a great corporation, are alike unworthy to sit on the bench, are alike traitors to the people; and no profundity of legal learning, or correctness of abstract conviction on questions of public policy, can serve as an offset to such shortcomings. But it is also true that judges, like executives and legislators, should hold sound views on the questions of public ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... flowers pressed between the leaves of a book,—and now offer the bouquet, such as it is, to any whom it may please. These fitful sketches, with so little of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose,—so reserved, even while they sometimes seem so frank,—often but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image,—such trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sat in several parliaments, and given bushels of votes. He is a man of that profundity in the matter of vote-giving, that you never know what he means. When he seems to be voting pure white, he may be in reality voting jet black. When he says Yes, it is just as likely as not - or rather more so - that ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... that had won me, though not alone. The same gem in a less brilliant setting might have failed to draw my admiration. I was the captive both of the spirit and the form. Soul and body had co-operated in producing my passion, and this may account for its suddenness and profundity. Why I loved her person, I knew—I was not ignorant of the laws of beauty—but why the spirit, I knew not. Certainly not from any idea I had formed of her high moral qualities; I had no evidence of these. Of her courage, even to daring, I had proof; of energy and determined will; of the ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... "English music" is purely German. That we shall ever throw off that yoke I do not care to prophesy; but if ever we do, it will be by imitating Purcell in one respect only, that is, by writing with absolute simplicity and directness, leaving complexity, muddy profundity and elaborately worked-out multiplication sums to the Germans, to whom these things come naturally. The Germans are now spent: they produce no more great musicians: they produce only music which is as ugly to the ear as it is involved to the eye. ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... find that would explain the situation. His fingers went from habit, as a man might play with his watch chain, to the symbol of his faith; her eyes followed them, and rested mutely on the cross. There was a profundity of feeling in them, wistful, acknowledging, deeply speculative. "You could not forget that?" she said, and shook her head as if she answered herself. He looked into her upturned face and saw ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... himself of a historical profundity. "The man who first had the notion of teaching the mass of people to read will ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... seek comfort in the reflection that "the essence of scholarship lay in profundity and acumen rather than in the ability to rattle off pages like so many psalms." Yet those "five hundred leaves" of his gave ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... young man, as in most of the men who live in that way, of amazing profundity,—passions too vast to be drawn into petty incidents. His want of means compelled him to lead an ascetic life, and he conquered his fancies by hard work. After paling all day over figures, he found his recreation ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... they had been weeping, and were so joyously consoled that they forgot to wipe away their tears. They were bright but not clear—large and shimmering, as if reflected from some invisible sea, not immediately present to his eyes. The gulfs in which they floated were black blue with profundity. There was no moon, but the night was yet so far from dark, that it seemed conscious throughout of some distant light that illumined it without shine. And his heart felt like the night, as if it held a deeper life than he could ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... stand apart a little and look at her—watch her—with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... have been the obstinate injustice of destiny in this case, Thenardier was one of those men who understand best, with the most profundity and in the most modern fashion, that thing which is a virtue among barbarous peoples and an object of merchandise among civilized peoples,—hospitality. Besides, he was an admirable poacher, and quoted for his skill in shooting. He had a certain cold ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... "O PROFUNDITY! O mysteries of that other life that separates us! I who was always so anxious about him, who wanted so much to know everything, wherever he may be now there is an end to that. I follow him into the three abodes; I stop at that of bliss; I pass on to the place ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... prove to that ingenious lady that she was hopelessly mistaken. Any hasty movement on his part would but confirm her in her absurd suspicions, while his actual flight would be the most flattering testimony to the profundity of her insight. He was not going to behave like the victim to a desperate infatuation for Miss Tancred. He would stay on, and Mrs. Fazakerly would see that nothing ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... absence in the remaining 22 per cent. might be explained by internal commotions producing irregularities of structure. The absolute depth of spot-cavities—at least of their sloping sides—was determined by Father Secchi through measurement of the "parallax of profundity"[451]—that is, of apparent displacements attendant on the sun's rotation, due to depression below the sun's surface. He found that in every case it fell short of 4,000 miles, and averaged not more than 1,321, corresponding, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... deal with it, in the opening of the Purgatorio, in a wonderfully touching and penetrative way. Hellenism, which is the principle pre-eminently of intellectual light (our modern culture may have more colour, the medieval spirit greater heat and profundity, but Hellenism is pre-eminent for light), has always been most effectively conceived by those who have crept into it out of an intellectual world in which the sombre elements predominate. So it had been in the ages of the Renaissance. This repression, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... only is all sense of the historical or moral basis of dogma wanting, but the dogma itself is hardly conceived explicitly; all is despatched with a stock phrase, or a quotation from some theological compendium. Ecclesiastical authority acts as if it felt that more profundity would be confusing and that more play of mind might be dangerous. This is that "Scholasticism" and "Mediaevalism" against which the modernists inveigh or under which they groan; and to this intellectual barrenness may be added the offences against taste, verisimilitude, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... not know a writer, Wordsworth not excepted, who reveals more delight in the visions of Nature than Henry Vaughan. He is a true forerunner of Wordsworth, inasmuch as the latter sets forth with only greater profundity and more art than he, the relations between Nature and Human Nature; while, on the other hand, he is the forerunner as well of some one that must yet do what Wordsworth has left almost unattempted, namely—set forth ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... a soul, sir, nobler than his fate. I followed him not without love from boyhood—a youth almost too fine of spirit; shrinking from all violence, over-nicely; eloquent, yet chary of speech, and of a dark profundity of thought. The questions he would patter!—unanswerable, searching earth and heaven through.... And who now was it told me the traitor Judas's hair was red?—yet not red his, but of a reddish chestnut, fine and bushy. ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... to a low guttural grating. No cub had a cavernous profundity of sound such as that. Still there was not the stir of a muscle, so far as his senses ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... aesthetic sentiments makes it rigorously impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in making many converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter offers a so much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy, has so many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its multiform ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... issue of Japan's experience will be like that of Rome I do not believe. For her environment is totally different. But the same struggle of the two conflicting principles is already on. Few, even among the educated classes, realize its nature or profundity. The thinkers who adhere to the principle of apotheosis do so admittedly because they see no other way in which to secure authority for law, whether political or moral. Here we see the importance of those conceptions of God, of law, of ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... that I agree with you, Mr. Bainton,"—said a stout, oily-looking personage, named Netlips, the grocer and 'general store' dealer of the village, a man who was renowned in the district for the profundity and point of his observations at electoral meetings, and for the entirely original manner in which he 'used' the English language; "Public worship is a necessary evil. It is a factor in vulgar civilisations. Without it, the system of religious politics would fall into cohesion,—absolute cohesion!" ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... unattainable began to stir within him and take hold of him in a manner entirely new. Hazy, fragmentary glimpses of hitherto undreamed possibilities began to shape themselves in his mind. The immensity and profundity of the universe and the mysterious growth of its hidden life held ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... to a state which he picturesquely describes as resembling that of "a dog in a coal-box," he picks him up and philosophically informs him that "all the different styles of fence were invented and established for man's protection, not for his destruction. Besides," he adds, with much profundity, "the laws thereto appertaining are based on certain strict principles of honor, which you have unquestionably violated in this case. Now, take my advice, never again engage in fight without having some just cause of quarrel. Thus, at least, you will ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... has "lived into" the experience of the past. This is what the profound investigator of history does; he lives again the life of the hero, he feels with him as he felt upon special occasions, and in this way there is revealed to him a profundity and greatness of human experience, of which he would have been largely unaware if he had trusted to his own experience alone, and to the superficial examination he is able to make of the experiences of those living men with ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... middle teeth in his lower jaw, broke out while he was at dinner." He sat (for the last time) for "a second picture to Mr. Ryley," p. 379. Ashmole's intimacy with Lilly was the foundation of the former's (supposed) profundity in alchemical and astrological studies. In this Diary we are carefully told that "Mr. Jonas Moore brought and acquainted him with Mr. William Lilly, on a Friday night, on the 20th of November," p. 302. Ashmole was ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... had to deal with a single issue demanding no great width of knowledge, it must be evident that the passions aroused by it and the confused and shifting state of public sentiment made his problem very subtle, and it was a rare profundity and sincerity of thought which solved it in his own mind. In expressing the result of thought so far deeper than that of most men, he achieved a clearness of expression which very few writers, and those among the greatest, have excelled. He once during the Presidential election of 1856 wrote ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... suppressed Dedication to Marino Faliero. "In the Appendix to an English Work, lately translated into German, and published at Leipzig, a judgment of yours upon English poetry is quoted as follows: 'That in English poetry great genius, universal power, a feeling of profundity, with sufficient tenderness and force are to be found, but that altogether these do not constitute poets,'" etc., etc. (see Poetical Works, 1901, v. 340, 341, and Letters, 1900, v. 100-103). The originals ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... present rector of the college of the Society of Jesus, and qualifier of the Holy Office, sealed the glory of that day. He mounted the pulpit, where he preached a sermon so well suited to the subject in its eloquence, the depth of its arguments, the gravity and maturity of its discourse, the profundity and erudition of its fundamental proofs, and the solidity and thoroughness of its learning, that he arrested the attention and even the admiration of those present. Not less learnedly did he instruct them than he melted them to affection ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... worth a glance with the five-inch glass. It is dense, but its stars are very small, so that to enjoy its beauty we should have to employ a large telescope. Yet there is a certain attraction in these far-away glimpses of starry swarms, for they give us some perception of the awful profundity of space. When the mind is rightly attuned for these revelations of the telescope, there are no words that can express its impressions of the ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... Mr. Pike's profundity of passion, that he paused like a somnambulist, actually rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... of fortune had brought it here—here of all spots? what chance of chances? I looked at the bleak, inaccessible wall at my back and know the profundity of despair. Escape was hopeless, out of the question. I thought of Maud, asleep there in the hut we had reared; I remembered her "Good-night, Humphrey"; "my woman, my mate," went ringing through my brain, but now, alas, it was a knell that sounded. ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... declared the young gentleman with a scowling profundity. "No go. Got to come out your corner 'n' fight. 'N' I'm goin' ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... expression of his and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bruyere, to Machiavelli, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... James Hall, President of the Royal Society; Francis Jeffrey, Editor of the Edinburgh Review; Walter Scott, still the Great Unknown; and many other distinguished notabilities. The cheerful old man delighted them with his kindly talk, as well as astonished them with the extent and profundity of ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... of secretive dignity, and yet had he taken up his position there on the corner of the uneven boardwalk and cried aloud his sensation, like a bally-hoo advertising the excellence of his own particular side-show, he could not have equaled the results which the very profundity of his ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... against the night where they followed the ridge of a hill. That was on the one hand, but on the other they rolled, vague and blurred, down into a vast hollow from which the mist was drifting. The sound of the river rose reverberating from its profundity of shadow, for it had cost the party most of a day to climb to the height they had pitched the camp upon. There was but little light overhead, though here and there a star blinked fitfully, and Alton shivered again, for it was very cold and but little past the ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... disordered; the luxury of ornament never overloads the chaste eloquence of the principal lines. His best works abound in combinations which may be said to be an epoch in the handling of musical style. Daring, brilliant, and attractive, they disguise their profundity under so much grace, their science under so many charms, that it is with difficulty we free ourselves sufficiently from their magical inthrallment, to judge ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... hand in hand with self-assurance and consists in a tacit assumption that one's companion is the only man besides oneself capable of understanding the folly of the rest of mankind and the reasonableness and profundity of one's own ideas. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... anything. It has served an extemporary apprenticeship; it wants no drilling; it never ranks in the awkward squad; it has no left hand, no deaf ear, no blind side. It puts on no look of wondrous wisdom, it has no air of profundity, but plays with the details of place as dexterously as a well-taught hand flourishes over the keys of the pianoforte. It has all the air of commonplace, and all the force and power ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... and that, without the pomp of notes or boasts of criticism, many passages are happily restored. He prefixed a life of the author, such as tradition, then almost expiring, could supply, and a preface, which cannot be said to discover much profundity or penetration. He at least contributed to the popularity of his author. He was willing enough to improve his fortune by other arts than poetry. He was under-secretary for three years when the Duke of Queensberry was Secretary of State, and afterwards applied to the Earl of Oxford for some public ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... often heard that the borderline between profundity and insanity was thin and inexact and it was now clear on which side she stood. I looked at Gootes to see how he was taking her hysterical outburst, but he had found a batch of empty testtubes which he was building into a perilously ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... this strange remark with a simplicity and wistfulness which were in striking contrast to the awful profundity of the suggestion, and all her auditors, including the half-tipsy ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... precipitate a conflict between the Cubans and the Spaniards! I have pinned upon the bed-curtains, next to the precautions for preserving health and the washing-list, the words, "Never talk politics, nor be led into listening to them," I can always, if pushed into a corner, assume an air of profundity and say, "Is the crisis—" and then stop and look for a word. The politician, if he is anything of a politician, will finish the phrase for me, with the conviction that I know all about it ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... are pained to perceive how slight is the justice we have been able to render to the rare combination of powers exhibited in the works we have enumerated. We have left unnoticed the wonderful extent and accuracy of the learning, the compass and profundity of the thought, the inexhaustible spirit, ever preserving the happy mean between mental languor and nervous excitement. In these twenty-seven volumes of criticism, scarcely an error has been detected, scarcely a single repetition ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of European policy, and the important movements of foreign governments, or our own, in matters tending to affect the general welfare and progress of humanity, had a profound interest for me; but I talked so little on such subjects, as became the profundity of my ignorance, that Mrs. Grote supposed them altogether above my sympathy, and probably above ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... either the brilliance or the profundity of your own active intellect! What you say is of interest. We already have followed with profound interest your efforts. Your words here justify our concern in meeting you. This is perhaps the first ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... remember that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof—an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... of Religion[11] I have known for more than a quarter of a century, and have heard much of its profundity, spiritualism, and symbolism. But no critic will assign to the picture the first rank among works of creative reason and imagination; the comparison has inevitably been instituted with Raphael's Disputa, in the Vatican, to which it is confessedly inferior. Historically, it finds a place ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... as well as one of the most successful essays in psychological analysis ever attempted by an author; and in his wonderful portrait, which must be closely studied, and not epitomized or reproduced in extracts, we see glowing enthusiasm united to cabalistic profundity, and the most morbid tension of the intellectual powers united to clear and well-defined hopes. How has the author succeeded in making Mordecai so human and so true to nature? By mixing the gold with an alloy of commoner metal, and by giving ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... spent many years and a large part of his fortune in the collection of materials for his history of the wars between France and England, it is not as an historian that he is now remembered; it is as a writer of magnificent prose. His Chroniques, devoid of any profundity of insight, any true grasp of the movements of the age, have rarely been paralleled in the brilliance and animation of their descriptions, the vigour of their character-drawing, the flowing picturesqueness of their style. They unroll themselves like ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Parisian soul has depths in it. It is so lucid that its luminous profundity escapes one—so with Villon. Religion hangs there. Humility—fatally divorced from simplicity—pervades it. It laughs at itself. There are ardent passions of sincerity, repressed and reacting upon themselves. The virtues, little practised, are commonly comprehended, always ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... resting-place, there to repose "till the sea gives up her dead,"—this, with the wailing moan of the wind aloft, the sobbing of the water alongside, and the solemn glory of the dying day all uniting to imbue the scene and the occasion with a profundity of sadness and a sublimity that would have been impossible under other circumstances. And so deeply was Leslie moved by it that, for the first time since the words of his cruel and unjust sentence had fallen upon his ears, he once more ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Everybody reads Shakespeare, but few know what the word means. The theatre is crowded to hear Macready's "Hamlet," but it is to see Macready, not to study the drama. When he is gone the play remains; and though it is spoken by stupid men, their dulness cannot affect its profundity and strength. That is the test of art, that it transcends its instruments; and the artist at his piano realizes the soul, though not the effect of the symphony which has spoken to him so loudly ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... Second, on account of the spontaneity and direct appeal of its themes, is undoubtedly the most popular. It contains a first movement of a quasi-Mendelssohnian suavity and lyric charm; a slow movement which is a meditation of the profundity of Bach himself; a third movement, allegretto, based on a delightful waltz of the Viennese Laendler type and a Finale of a Mozartian freshness and vigor—the second theme being specially notable for its broad sweep. The whole work is a convincing example of Brahms's vitality and "joie de vivre." ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... produced. This is the sole method which we possess for the investigation of the masses of the planets; and though it may be difficult in its application—not only from the observations which are required, but also from the intricacy and the profundity of the calculations to which those observations must be submitted—yet, in the case of Jupiter at least, there is no uncertainty about ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Julia's Street toward Julia's Party, there was something in his mien and look more dramatic than mere sprightliness; and when he came within sight of the ineffable house and saw its many lights shining before him, he breathed with profundity, ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... and the Works of Alexander the Great; the manners, habits, customs, usages, and the meditations of the Grecians; the Greek Digamma resolved, Prosody, Composition, both in prose and verse, and Oratory, in English, Latin and Greek; together with various other branches of learning and scholastic profundity—quoi enumerare longum est—along with Irish Radically, and a small taste of Hebrew upon the ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... long afternoon Percival slept; and if the faithless Hortense essayed to haunt his dreams, she was drowned in the profundity of his slumber. It was not until his valet touched his arm and respectfully submitted the information that the first gong had sounded for dinner that he woke to the fact that the Saluria was still swinging from the trough ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... English very cleverly—Winterbourne afterward learned that he had practiced the idiom upon a great many American heiresses—addressed her a great deal of very polite nonsense; he was extremely urbane, and the young American, who said nothing, reflected upon that profundity of Italian cleverness which enables people to appear more gracious in proportion as they are more acutely disappointed. Giovanelli, of course, had counted upon something more intimate; he had not bargained for a party of three. But he kept his temper in a manner which suggested far-stretching ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... burning lake of brimstone and fire. Those whose sins cause them to sink so low that they no longer can rise to the surface are for ever forgotten by God, i.e., they fade out from the omniscient memory, says the poem—an expression, by the way, of an extraordinary profundity of thought, when closely analysed. The Virgin is terribly shocked, and falling down upon her knees in tears before the throne of God, begs that all she has seen in hell—all, all without exception, should have their sentences remitted to them. Her dialogue with ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... You've that to remember," the older lady murmured, as if struck by the profundity of ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... dream process now gains either sufficient intensity to attract consciousness to itself and arouse the foreconscious, which is quite independent of the time or profundity of sleep, or, its intensity being insufficient it must wait until it meets the attention which is set in motion immediately before awakening. Most dreams seem to operate with relatively slight psychic intensities, for they wait for the awakening. ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... Our muleteer, Delorier, brought up the rear with his cart, waddling ankle-deep in the mud, alternately puffing at his pipe, and ejaculating in his prairie patois: "Sacre enfant de garce!" as one of the mules would seem to recoil before some abyss of unusual profundity. The cart was of the kind that one may see by scores around the market-place in Montreal, and had a white covering to protect the articles within. These were our provisions and a tent, with ammunition, blankets, and presents for ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... its ontological profundity, is of a subtlety and vastness that would rack the brain of a Fichte or a Schelling; but, popularly stated, so far as our present purpose demands, it is this. Existence is the one all inclusive evil; cessation of existence, or Nirwana, is the infinite ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... island as a match for Popish bigotry. There will be no love lost between them—be assured of that—and justice will be done to both, though neither should do it to her rival; for philosophy, which has so long sought only amusement in either, is in these latter days of growing profundity applying herself steadily to the profound truths which dimly are descried lurking in both. It is these which Mr. Newman is likely to illuminate, and not the faded forms of an obsolete ceremonial that cannot now be restored effectually, were it even important that ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... profundity of contempt in Veltman's voice; and a deeper bitterness when he snapped his teeth upon a word which sounded to Hal suspiciously like the Biblical characterization of an undesirable citizeness ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... give rein to his imagination with more imposing effect than in 'The Tempest.' As in 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' magical or supernatural agencies are the mainsprings of the plot. But the tone is marked at all points by a solemnity and profundity of thought and sentiment which are lacking in the early comedy. The serious atmosphere has led critics, without much reason, to detect in the scheme of 'The Tempest' something more than the irresponsible play of poetic fancy. Many of the characters have been represented as the outcome of ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... full by then and buzzing with voices. I had been looked at with curiosity by every one, but how am I to describe the sensation produced by the appearance of Falk himself blocking the doorway? The tension of expectation could be measured by the profundity of the silence that fell upon the very click of the billiard balls. As to Schomberg, he looked extremely frightened; he hated mortally any sort of row (fracas he called it) in his establishment. Fracas was bad for business, he affirmed; but, in truth, ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... our eyes, a moral phenomenon of amazing profundity takes place which is, nevertheless, so simple as never to be noticed. If two men meet in a salon, one of whom has the right to hate or despise the other, whether from a knowledge of some private and latent ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac
... it all? Ah, he has looked too deeply into the profundity of the past not to see the future in appalling accuracy. He thinks of the regiment, decimated at each shift; of the big knocks and hard he has had and will have, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... the reported lectures on Aristotle is, though cloudy, intelligible. The remainder is a fair specimen of that skimmy-dashy style of thought which glances over the surfaces of things and never reaches their substance or reality, yet boasts of its unlimited profundity because it does not know the meaning of profound. Such thinking must necessarily end in falsity and folly, of which the lecture gives many specimens, which it is worth while to quote, to show what the devotees ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... sophistry. The question is:—Does a thief (and a fraudulent debtor is no better) acquire a claim to impunity by not possessing the power of restoring the goods? Every moral act derives its character (says a Schoolman with an unusual combination of profundity with quaintness) 'aut voluntate originis aut origine voluntatis'. Now the very essence of guilt, its dire and incommunicable character, consists in its tendency to destroy the free will;—but when thus destroyed, are the habits of vice thenceforward innocent? Does the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... their present starvation bear abundant witness on every page to the splendid preaching and the skilful pastorate that this parish must at one time have enjoyed. There must have been men of no common ability, as well as of no common profundity of spiritual life in Kilmacolm during those trying years, for the letters they wrote to Rutherford would have done credit to any of Rutherford's ablest and best correspondents—to William Guthrie, or David Dickson, or Robert ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... perceptible French accent in a fine clear voice. But she spoke little and said practically nothing: which was a shock to Marian Prohack, who had imagined that in the circles graced by Lady Massulam conversation varied from badinage to profundity and never halted. It was not that Lady Massulam was tongue-tied, nor that she was impolite; it was merely that with excellent calmness she did not talk. If anybody handed her a subject, she just dropped it; the floor around her was strewn ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... eloquent simplicity, became that of metaphor, "When JOSEPH," he said, "shall reveal himself to his brethren, the whole house of Pharaoh shall hear the weeping." On another occasion I heard him dwell on that vast profundity, characteristic of the scriptural revelation of God, which ever deepens and broadens the longer and more thoroughly it is explored, until at length the student—struck at first by its expansiveness, but conceiving of it as ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... bold swimmer, you may venture out alone a long way—once! Not twice!—even in company. As the water deepens beneath you, and you feel those ascending wave-currents of coldness arising which bespeak profundity, you will also begin to feel innumerable touches, as of groping fingers—touches of the bodies of fish, innumerable fish, fleeing towards shore. The farther you advance, the more thickly you will feel them come; and above you and around you, to right and left, others will leap and fall so ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... agonized carriage, after several groans that would have moved the heart of a highway commissioner, gave a rush downward, and committed suicide in the most determined manner, by dashing its axle on the ground—the wheels endeavouring in vain to fathom the profundity of the ruts, and the horses totally unable to move the stranded equipage. The sudden jerk knocked Reginald's hat over his eyes against the roof of the carriage, and Jane screamed when she felt the top of her bonnet squeezed as flat as a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... with a self-reliant, bold, and impetuous nature, a spirit of reflection and profundity which moderates the counsels of his passions, which leads him by inpenetrable motives, and makes him advance to his ends by many paths. He is one of those long-sighted men, who consider the succession of events from afar off, who always finish a design begun; who are ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... of disaster to the fire department by means of black balls and white boards, in fixed combinations; by night, with colored lanterns. Each section of the city has a signal-tower of this sort, and the engine-house is close at hand. Gradskaya Duma means, literally, city thought, and the profundity of the meditations sometimes indulged in in this building, otherwise not remarkable, may be inferred from the fact discovered a few years ago, that many honored members of the Duma (which also signifies the Council ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... is headed, "What the Bar-tender Sees." And the exordium is worthy so profound a speculation. "Did you ever stop to think," murmurs the Yellow philosopher, "of all the strange beings that pass before him?" There's profundity for you! There's invention! Is it wonderful that five million men and women read these golden words, or others of a like currency, ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... scrupulous patience and the willingness to submerge his own personality which are characteristic of the scientific scholar. His gift was for generalization, and his writings were marked by clarity of thought and wealth of phrase, rather than by profundity. But such qualities brought him remarkable success as a lecturer and essayist, and constant practice gave him a fluency, a vocal control, and a power of verbal expression which assured distinction at the frequent ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... said Clarissa. She turned to Helen with an air of profundity. "I'm convinced people are wrong when they say it's work that wears one; it's responsibility. That's why one pays one's cook more than one's ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... himself in a wig and blue spectacles, becomes tutor to her brother, and wins her affections while playing pedagogue. On her acknowledging her attachment, he flings his disguises into the sea, and, in the wildness of his joy at being adored for his profundity in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, Mathematics, Natural Science, and Civil Engineering, folds his loved one in his arms, and springs into the surf, where both ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... this effect of originality and profundity was produced by a quite limited talent for turning striking phrases, exploiting certain curious and rather catching rhythms and modulations, and devising suggestive or eccentric instrumentation. On its ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... haze of abstruse phrases in which Cavor expressed himself. Comic relief in a play indeed! It was some time before I would believe that I had interpreted him aright, and I was very careful not to ask questions that would have enabled him to gauge the profundity of misunderstanding into which he dropped his daily exposition. But no one reading the story of it here will sympathise fully, because from my barren narrative it will be impossible to gather the strength of my conviction that this astonishing ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... held a reception. The Bulletin of Lyons thus described it: "The assembly was most brilliant. As our sovereign has exhibited in his audiences profundity, affability, exact and varied learning, and true greatness, so his august wife has shone with grace, courtesy, and gentleness. Thus we witness a revival of that old French urbanity and politeness of manners which have always distinguished our court, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... sucklings, and when he grew to be a hobedy-hoy, there was a seriousness in his visage, and a much-ado-about-nothing-ness in his eye, which were proclaimed by good natured people to be indications of deep thought and profundity; while others less "flattering sweet," declared they indicated naught but want of comprehension, and the dulness ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 389, September 12, 1829 • Various
... philosophers and men of science, who are quite aware of its advantage in all departments of BELLES LETTRES; and if you allude in their presence to the deplorably defective presentation of the ideas in some work distinguished for its learning, its profundity or its novelty, it is probable that you will be despised as a frivolous setter up of manner over matter, a light-minded DILLETANTE, unfitted for the simple austerities of science. But this is itself a ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... narrates its doings, and, lastly, sets about describing what it thinks. It is, let us say in passing, because of this last, that the drama, combining the most opposed qualities, may be at the same time full of profundity and full ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... may be spoken in little words. Profundity is often supposed to be obscurity, but the deepest depth is clear. John, in his gospel and epistles, deals with the deepest realities, and with all things in their eternal aspects, but his vocabulary is the simplest in the New Testament. God ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... gesture of the head, looked meaningly into Chichikov's face, while displaying in his every feature, including his closely-compressed lips, such an expression of profundity as never before was seen on any human countenance—unless on that of some particularly sapient Minister of State who is ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol |
