"Speculate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strength of this passion, of which Noel was disturbing the ashes. Perhaps, he felt it all the more keenly on account of those expressions which recalled his own youth. He understood how irresistible must have been the strength of such a love and he trembled to speculate as to the result. ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... their bodies, so it was not attack I was to fear, but some mysterious, underhanded treachery which would rob me of consciousness and make the precipitation of my body into the water both safe and easy. Perhaps it was in the bottle of brandy that the peril lay; perhaps—but why speculate further! I would watch till midnight and then, if nothing happened, signal my companions to raid ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... right, eh? Look here, Towsley. I'm not a 'supposing' sort of a man. I've no time to speculate over things. I have to take them as they come and keep hustling. That's pretty much the way it is in the newspaper business, ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... the van. The provisions of 1665 afterwards disappear. In 1740, and even as late as 1781, they are traceable only in certain colorless articles, suggestive of the atrophied organs of a body concerning whose past use physiologists may speculate. ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... surrender, smiles give token of mature criticism. It may be that in the early ages of this world there was far more laughter than is to be heard now, and that aeons hence laughter will be obsolete, and smiles universal—every one, always, mildly, slightly, smiling. But it is less useful to speculate as to mankind's past and future than to observe men. And you will have observed with me in the club-room that young men at most times look solemn, whereas old men or men of middle age mostly smile; and also that those young men do often laugh loud ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... in No. 401; but then it was too late. Had he been delayed ten seconds, or had he gotten off at the fourth floor, he would have—. However, I anticipate; or rather I speculate on what would have happened under hypothetical conditions—which is fatuous in the extreme; hypothetical conditions never ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... set out to tell you about Sonny's diristenin' an' us turnin' 'Piscopal. Ez I said, he never seemed to want baptism, though he had heard us discuss all his life both it an' vaccination ez the two ordeels to be gone thoo with some time, an' we'd speculate ez to whether vaccination would take or not, an' all sech ez that, an' then, ez I said, after he see what the vaccination was, why he was even mo' prejudyced agin' baptism 'n ever, an' we 'lowed to let it run on tell sech a time ez he'd ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... did not perhaps speculate on the reason why this double outflow took place from the wounded side, others have ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... character; and no playwright has created a more probable gallery of characters with whom we can become so easily and so completely familiar. They live before us, and with apparently so unconscious a self-revelation that we speculate about them as we would about real people, and sometimes take sides with them against their creator. Nora would, would not, have left her children! We know all their tricks of mind, their little differences from other people, their habits, the things that a novelist spends ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... as his father had gone to pay the morning visit to the printing shops, he ran out to post the letter himself. He could not be contented until it was in the post. Now, when he saw men of about his own class and age in the street, he would speculate upon their experiences in the romance of women. And it did genuinely seem to him impossible that anybody else in a town like Bursley could have passed through an episode so exquisitely strange and beautiful as that through which he was passing. Yet his reason told ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... tobacconist who had supplied him with Gold Flake and the margin transferred to another pocket for the purpose of one final engagement with the habit of high living. After that—well time would show. It was futile to speculate upon the future. He had the clothes he stood up in, the brain and tissue heaven had provided him with and a spirit unawed by adversity. Many men have started life ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... profit, may, perhaps, lie here. You feel and we feel that, among the so-called learned folks, we alone are brought into contact with tangible facts in the way that you are. You know well enough that it is one thing to write a history of chairs in general, or to address a poem to a throne, or to speculate about the occult powers of the chair of St. Peter; and quite another thing to make with your own hands a veritable chair, that will stand fair and square, and afford a safe and satisfactory resting-place to a frame of sensitiveness ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... seems rather as though the great gales of the Westerlies must begin in these latitudes with such mild disturbances as we have just experienced. I think it is the first time I have known rain beyond the Antarctic circle—it is interesting to speculate on its effect in melting ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... have hob-and-nobbed with Mrs. Catherine; that here, perhaps, the noble Sheppard might have cracked his joke, or quaffed his pint of rum. Who knows but that Macheath and Paul Clifford may have crossed legs under Hayes's dinner-table? But why pause to speculate on things that might have been? why desert reality for fond imagination, or call up from their honoured graves the sacred dead? I know not: and yet, in sooth, I can never pass Cumberland Gate without a sigh, as I think of the gallant cavaliers ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines; doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins. Yet we never speculate as to whether the conversational pessimist will strengthen or disorganize society; for we are convinced ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... that goads us with fiercer despair (Those who buy, you perpend, stock, debenture or share, Such as speculate mainly; investors are rare—) Than this growl ill-conditioned ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various
... ostensible motive of my journey, and it is singular enough that one which offers considerable prospect of advantage has just presented itself on the confines of Persia. Think not, however, that motives of lucre would have been sufficiently powerful to tempt me to the East at the present moment. I may speculate, it is true; but I should scarcely have undertaken the journey but for your pungent words inciting me to attack the Persians. Doubt not that I will attack them on the first opportunity. I thank you heartily for putting me in mind of my duty. I have hitherto, to use your own words, been too fond ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... not less lucrative than our old practices. This is a business that may bring you hundreds, thousands; that may take you from this hovel to speculate at the West End; that may change your gin into Lafitte, and your herring into venison; that may lift the broken attorney again upon the wheel,—again to roll down, it may be; but that is ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Henry Rogers lent, and even gave, Mark Twain large sums, and pointed out opportunities whereby he could make heavily by speculation. No one of these statements is true. Mr. Rogers neither lent nor gave Mark Twain money for investment, and he never allowed him to speculate when he could prevent it. He invested for him wisely, but he never bought for him a share of stock that he did not have the money in hand to pay for in full-money belonging to and earned by Clemens himself. What he did give to Mark Twain was his priceless counsel and time—gifts more precious ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... friend, why should Roguin speculate? He gets his commissions, and his fortune is made. I see him pass sometimes more full of care than a minister of state, with an underhand look which I don't like; he hides some secret anxiety. His face ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... Best. You have told us that all those three persons, Mr. Cochrane Johnstone, Lord Cochrane, and Mr. Butt, were very large speculators; did they always speculate the same way, or on the contrary, when one bought did not ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... look at or listen to anybody else when she was about. Such things are, sometimes, among the goddesses, I believe. Of course, Marianne and I know nothing of these troubles; we, being a model pair, sit among the clouds and speculate on all these matters as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... to be; what mutations lie hid in the womb of the distant future; to what convulsions our societies may be exposed—whether the master, finding it impossible to live with his slaves, may not be compelled to abandon the country to them—of all this it were presumptuous and vain to speculate. ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... intellectual form of the living being has been gradually modeled on the reciprocal actions and reactions of certain bodies and their material environment, how should it not reveal to us something of the very essence of which these bodies are made? Action cannot move in the unreal. A mind born to speculate or to dream, I admit, might remain outside reality, might deform or transform the real, perhaps even create it—as we create the figures of men and animals that our imagination cuts out of the passing cloud. But an intellect bent upon the act to be performed ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... have endeavored to engage merchants to speculate in a direct commerce to America, to find out the sentiments of the people in general respecting us, to know whether, in case of necessity, the United States would be able to negotiate a loan, whether England would be able to obtain ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... trust that some one will take it upon himself to take the initiative. Our correspondent intimates that this might be the first step towards a national federation of architectural clubs. It is rather unsafe to speculate upon what might take ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 10, October 1895. - French Farmhouses. • Various
... mine aunt, or speculate upon the impossible. I couldn't care for Lionel in that way any more than he would care for me. I am only eighteen, and I am sure I need not think about marriage as a ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... monero. Species speco. Specimen modelo. Specious versxajna. Speck makuleto. Spectacle (a sight) vidajxo. Spectacles okulvitroj. Spectator rigardanto. Spectre fantomo. Spectrum spektro. Speculate spekulacii. Speculation spekulacio. Speculative spekulativa. Speculate (theorise) teoriigi. Speculative (theoretic) teoria. Speculum spegulo. Speech parolado. Speechless muta. Speed rapido. Speed rapidigi. Speedy rapida. Spell silabi. Spell cxarmo. Spend ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... in February Corrie first noticed that Gerard and Rupert simultaneously disappeared for an hour and a half every morning. No one knew why, or had interested enough to speculate, it seemed. Gerard always sent Corrie off on some duty, at that time each day, and only accidental circumstances awoke the young driver's attention to a custom without ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... center like London, where writers can rub elbows half-a-dozen times a year. Boston was such a capital once; only, however, for New England. New York is a clearing-house of literature now; but the writing is, most of it, done elsewhere. It is curious to speculate what might have happened if the capital of the United States had been fixed at New York instead ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... is not instantaneous and equal for all things. Sharp men, brokers, and men of business, will not suffer by it; for it is their trade to watch the fluctuations of prices, to observe the cause, and even to speculate upon it. But little tradesmen, countrymen, and workmen, will bear the whole weight of it. The rich man is not any the richer for it, but the poor man becomes poorer by it. Therefore, expedients of this kind have ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... Angel's Camp, the evening promenade seems the most important event of the day. Young men and maidens pass and repass in an apparently endless chain. The same faces recur so frequently that one begins to take an interest in the little comedy and speculate on the rival attractions of blonde and brunette, and wonder which of the young bloods is the local Beau Brummel. The audience—so to speak—sit on, chairs backed against the walls of the hotels and stores, ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... were headed up the flat. I saw many ten-pound fish, but I did not know enough about bonefish then to appreciate what I saw. However, I did appreciate their keen sight and wariness and wonderful speed and incredible power. Some of the big surges made me speculate what a heavy bonefish might do to light tackle. Sam and I were disappointed at our luck, somewhat uncertain whether it was caused by destructive work of crabs or the wrong kind of bait or both. It scarcely occurred to us ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... Parkinson to speculate as she pleased concerning her eccentricity, she went out into the broad street again; and, unaccustomed as she was to such expenditure, hailed a hansom; for there was no ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... her there in the winter, and the news of her father's illness did not reach her for some weeks. But, as it happened, when Charlotte's letter detailing the sad event arrived, Julius was particularly in need of something to wonder over and to speculate about; and of all subjects, Seat-Sandal interested him most. To be master of the fine old place was his supreme ambition. He felt that he possessed all the qualities necessary to make him a leader among the ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... the baker's; there is a butcher's stall in each campo with fresh meat. These shops are therefore resorted to for family supplies day by day; and the poor lay in provisions there in portions graduated to a soldo of their ready means. A great Bostonian whom I remember to have heard speculate on the superiority of a state of civilization in which you could buy two cents' worth of beef to that in which so small a quantity was unpurchasable, would find the system perfected here, where you can buy half a cent's worth. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... ascribes the success of his defence. While the greater part remained attached to France, some leaned to the English, who bought their produce and paid them in ready coin. Money was rare with the Acadians, who loved it, and were so addicted to hoarding it that the French authorities were led to speculate as to what might be the object of these careful savings. [Footnote: Beauharnois et Hocquart au Ministre, ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... useless to speculate about that, because you grow worse instead of better. You are like one of those people who, apparently unharmed themselves, carry about with them the germs of typhoid and scatter destruction wherever they go. The sooner the world is rid ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... agreed that it was extremely adverse to the growth of greatness among our public men; and he said the mass of public business increased so fast that he could not tell what it was to end in, and did not venture to speculate even for a few years upon the mode of administering public affairs. He thought the consequence was already manifest in its being not ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... been settled. Yet she had demanded a lover-like devotion, and allowed him to speculate on what might have been if she were rich or he older. And though Jim's sturdy common-sense had kept him from going very deep, he felt wretched and jealous that any other man should have the supreme right; and yet he had a ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... not in our line to speculate upon what would have been the result of the war had the South kept up this policy, enlisted the freemen, and emancipated the enlisting slaves and their families. The immense addition to their fighting force, the quick recognition of them by Great Britain, to which ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... hands upon; and that meanwhile they will sit together like good housewives, making nets from our purses to cover the coop for us. If you would be plump and in feather, pick up your millet and be quiet in your darkness. Speculate on nothing here below, and I promise you ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... into her lovely eyes that seemed to spread up and around her white forehead and beautiful hair like a supernatural lustre. There was a fire that animated her which nobody who saw its glow or felt its warmth could question. Without that altar of music—But why speculate on what she might have been if she had not been what she was? That would be to consider not Benigna, but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... said to Paul. There was no doubt in Paul's mind as to the quality of his patron. He had at once recognized the Greatest Pitcher. He ceased to speculate as to whether this assured young man owned the high office-building. That was now of ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... nearly half done before the drift of the action is clearly apparent. In "Almayer's Folly" we are thrown into the middle of a story, and do not discover its beginning until we come to "An Outcast of the Islands," a later book. As in structure, so in detail. Conrad pauses to explain, to speculate, to look about. Whole chapters concern themselves with detailed discussions of motives, with exchanges of views, with generalizations abandoned as soon as they are made. Even the author's own story, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... companions passed through Chawton about 9 this morning; later than it used to be. Uncle Henry and I had a glimpse of his handsome face, looking all health and good humour. I wonder when you will come and see us. I know what I rather speculate upon, but shall say nothing. We think uncle Henry in excellent looks. Look at him this moment, and think so too, if you have not done it before; and we have the great comfort of seeing decided improvement ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... of a separate Czecho-Slovak master. Certainly the work of Jan Neruda, Svatopluk AeOEech, and Caroline SvAestlAi, to name no others, ranks with the best of the Russian masters, and the reader is compelled to speculate as to how many more equally fine writers remain unknown to him. For such stories as these can only come out of a long and conscious tradition of art, and the greater part of these stories are drawn from volumes published during the last half century. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... conventionally? You are not really conventional in mind. You have thoughts and emotions infinitely above those of average girls. Do recognize your own superiority. I spoke in a speculative way. One may speculate about anything and everything—if one has the brains. You certainly are not made to go through life with veiled eyes and a tongue tuned to the common phrases. Do yourself justice, dear girl. However other ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... us all;—are, doubtless, intended to be dear. Only in acknowledging so much, let us remember that there are prices at which these good things may be too costly. Therefore, being desirous, too, of telling the truth in this matter, I must confess that Lucy did speculate with some regret on what it would have been to be Lady Lufton. To have been the wife of such a man, the owner of such a heart, the mistress of such a destiny—what more or what better could the world have done for her? And now she had thrown all that aside ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... stood out in amazing clearness. If one man on that ship, hundreds of yards away, had opened his mouth I could have counted his teeth. Suddenly I gasped with astonishment as I awoke to the fact that every man on board the destroyer was wearing motor-goggles! I had no time to speculate about this new surprise, for then the Fiona, left to her own devices, suddenly crashed ashore. The ship shook and shivered, and Fuller was thrown on his face beside the searchlight, and as I looked again the destroyer had resumed its ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... a million conifer seeds for each one she chooses for growth, so we can only speculate as to the selection of the seed from which sprung this storied pine. It may be that the cone in which it matured was crushed into the earth by the hoof of a passing deer. It may have been hidden by a jay; or, as is more ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... cause, they now, taking up their trail, do not pause to speculate upon it, nor make any delay. On the contrary, as hounds that have several times lost the scent, hitherto faint, but once more recovered, and now fresher and stronger than ever, they press on with ardour not ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... with wan but triumphant grins. Then they began to speculate on what the beamlike bolt was, who was in the plane, and if their enemy knew who ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton
... to speculate in wheat or building-lots, and Bob will certainly lose it all; but that's not what makes me mad. After all, it's his money; he's been saving it since he steadied down. I can manage Bob if he's left alone, and thought I'd cut out the friends he shouldn't have. Wilkinson was ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... mind, was an object of special interest. He would purposely sneak up-stairs and sit on one of the soft sofas in the foyer simply to see the well-dressed diners go in and come out. Edward would speculate on whether the time would ever come when he could dine in that wonderful ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... a shock to Ethne. She did not guess the correct answer; she was not, indeed, sufficiently mistress of herself to speculate upon any answer, but she dreaded ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... their slaves taught trades on this account. But before our time expired, my old master wanted money; so he sold my brother, and then mortgaged my sister, a dear girl about fourteen years of age, and myself, then about sixteen, to one of the banks, to get money to speculate in cotton. This we knew nothing of at the moment; but time rolled on, the money became due, my master was unable to meet his payments; so the bank had us placed upon the auction stand and sold to the ...
— Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom • William and Ellen Craft
... their eyes and ears, and paint scenes that amuse or strike their fancy with tolerable accuracy; but it requires the strong-thinking heart of man to anticipate events, and trace certain results from particular causes. Women are out of their element when they attempt to speculate upon these abstruse matters—are apt to incline too strongly to their own opinions—and jump at conclusions which ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Aunt Hildy was copied, and improved also by Mr. Benton, who considered it a masterpiece, and the respect we bore our friend was not lessened, even though there were those among us who might speculate as to the motive that ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... and her unaffected graces seemed for the moment to have made a complete conquest of him. He came in his dressing-gown to her apartments for breakfast, and spent a great portion of the day there. The courtiers again began to speculate on her breaking down the ascendency of the favorite, remarking that, though Louis was careful to pay his new relative the honors which, were her due as a stranger and a bride, he returned as speedily as he could with decency to the dauphiness ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... could I ask for more? I was satisfied and filled. But, by and by, my dream of life was disturbed—my sleep broken. Natural questions began to propose themselves for my solution, such, I suppose, as, sooner or later, spring up in every bosom. I began to speculate about myself—about the very self that had been so long, so busy, about everything else beside itself. I wished to know something of myself—of my origin, my nature, my present condition, my ultimate fate. It seemed to me I was too rare ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... pretty, mocking courtesy, and he could not help looking with some interest at the woman who might have been his wife. The best of men, and the best of husbands, are liable to speculate a little under such circumstances, and in fancy to put themselves into a position they have probably no wish in reality to fill. She noticed his air of consideration; and, with a toss of her handsome head, she spread out all her finery. "You see," ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... time to meditate on the camellias, and then to turn and speculate on the age of the cedar, whether it could have been planted by the monks of Stoneborough Abbey, to whom the Grange had belonged, brought from Lebanon by a pilgrim, perhaps; and then he tried to guess at the longevity of cedars, and thought of asking ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... met my cavalry friends at dinner that evening it was amusing to hear them speculate upon the remarkable occurrence which had, in fact, upset the wits of the whole town. Priests and vergers and sacristans had visited the campanile, and one of them had brought away a flattened piece of lead, which looked as if it might have been a bullet; but the suggestion that ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... association. His nephew seemed to me an ordinary specimen of a very trite human nature,—a young man of limited ideas, fair moral tendencies, going mechanically right where not tempted to wrong. The same desire of gain which had urged him to gamble and speculate when thrown in societies rife with such example, led him, now in the Bush, to healthful, industrious, persevering labour. "Spes fovet agricolas," says the poet; the same Hope which entices the fish to the hook impels the plough of the husband-man. The young farmer's young wife was somewhat superior ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and a disappointment which she would not own. She looked about the room, as she often had of late, and began to enumerate its possibilities in case she should desire to have it changed. Amelia never went so far as to say that change should be; she only felt that she had still a right to speculate upon it, as she had done for many years, as a form of harmless enjoyment. While every other house in the neighborhood had gone from the consistently good to the prosperously bad in the matter of refurnishing, John Porter had kept his precisely as his ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... what was going to happen downtown. I used to say to myself that if I had capital it would be easy to make money breed money. Well, one day I borrowed from the bank, without the bank's leave, $3,000 in order to speculate. I won on that deal and the next and the next. Then I was able to return what I'd borrowed and to set up in a small way for myself in the furniture business. That was my start, ladies—the nest-egg of ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... the land, and of the people who dreamed them. And I looked at that land, covered with the sweet pinkish-green of the clover, and considered how much of it, through the medium of sheep, would find its way into me, to enable me to come out here and be eaten by midges, and speculate about things, and conceive the sentiment of how good the sheep were. And it all seemed queer. I thought, too, of a world entirely composed of people who could see the sheen rippling on that clover, and feel ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hall in which Frau Lureley sits on a sevenfold throne with seven crowns upon her head and her seven daughters around her. This makes interesting reading for children, but Brentano did not lose sight of adults, including those who like to speculate as to the origin of the legend. He says: "Sie [Lorelei] ist eine Tochter der Phantasie, welches eine berUehmte Eigenschaft ist, die bei Erschaffung der Welt mitarbeitete und das Allerbeste dabei that; als sie unter der Arbeit ein schOenes Lied ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... this intense excitement, is the uncertainty which attends such operations. No man can tell one week whether he will be a beggar or a millionaire the next, the chances being decidedly in favor of the former. Nine out of ten who speculate in stocks or gold, lose. Like all gamblers, they are undismayed by their first reverse, and venture a second time. They lose again, and to make their loss good venture a third time, risking in the end their last dollar. The fascination of ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... revolutionary outbreak provoked by Socialists, perhaps—but at any rate by the political immaturity of the enlightened classes and by the political barbarism of the Russian people. The throes of Russian resurrection will be long and painful. This is not the place to speculate upon the nature of these convulsions, but there must be some violent break-up of the lamentable tradition, a shattering of the social, of the administrative—certainly ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Australian savages, who performed an artificial hypospadias on themselves for a specific purpose, requiring a knowledge of the anatomical relation of the parts as well as of their physiological functions, it is hard to speculate how the operation was first suggested or how it came at first to be performed. As a Malthusian agent it is certainly an operation of the highest merit, and it should be introduced, by all means, in the United States, where the wealth and luxury in which the people ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... in this text than we at first see. Of "these three," two concern ourselves; the third concerns others. When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action. We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it. When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... the world's history move not by chance; and how, moreover, could Italy have fulfilled her destiny without the divers forms of political existence that made her what she was? Yet, standing before some of the great Lombard churches, we are inclined to speculate, perhaps with better reason, what the result would have been if that style of architecture could have assumed the complete ascendency over the Italians which the Romanesque and Gothic of the North exerted over France and England?[12] ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Methodism, a system said to have been founded by Asclepiades of Prusa (who lived in Rome in the first century before Christ), and by his pupil Themison (B.C. 50). The third school of medical thought, that of Empiricism, taught that experience was the only teacher, and that it was idle to speculate upon remote causes. The Empirics based these views upon the teaching of philosophers known as Sceptics or Zetetics, followers of Parmenides and Pyrrho, who taught that it was useless to fatigue the mind in endeavouring to comprehend what is beyond its range. They were the precursors ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... can be dimly seen."[339] "The results of the unknown, or but dimly understood, laws of variation are infinitely complex and diversified."[340] "We are profoundly ignorant of the cause of each slight variation or individual difference."[341] "We are far too ignorant to speculate on the relative importance of the several known and unknown causes of variation."[342] He admits, indeed, the effects of use and disuse to have been important, but how important we have no means of knowing; he also attributes ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... returns with interest. Every one must have noticed how miserable horses, dogs, sheep, etc., are when separated from their companions, and what strong mutual affection the two former kinds, at least, shew on their reunion. It is curious to speculate on the feelings of a dog, who will rest peacefully for hours in a room with his master or any of the family, without the least notice being taken of him; but if left for a short time by himself, barks or howls dismally. We will confine ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... issues of the present campaign, and upon them it may be bootless to speculate. No one may foretell the fortunes of war—I mean where victory will ultimately perch in this frightful struggle. We are environed and invaded by not less than 600,000 men in arms, and we have not in the field more than 250,000 to oppose them. ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... circumstance, to understand, and that it is to be understood as literal as it can be and make good sense; and that in every case where the language is figurative, we must let the Bible explain its own figures. We are in no case allowed to speculate on the Scriptures, and suppose things which are not clearly expressed, nor reject things which are plainly taught. I believe all of the prophecies are revealed to try our faith, and to give us hope, without which we could have no reasonable hope. I believe that the Scriptures do reveal unto us, in ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... know approximately the constitution of matter and a good deal concerning life and mind. How has this progress been possible? Only in one way. Improvement in the mechanical instruments by means of which we study Nature. We might "speculate" as to the constitution of matter for a thousand years, but we should never have arrived at our present positive knowledge had it not been for the delicate and sensitive instruments which are today in the hands of the physicist and the chemist, and employed ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... humour for sport of any kind; he did not care to look out at the ships, and speculate upon what port they were bound for; he picked up no stones to send spinning at the grey gulls; did not see that the gorse was wonderfully full of flower; and did not even smell the wild thyme as he crushed it beneath his feet. There were hundreds of tiny blue and copper butterflies flitting about, ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... earth's surface. To the ancient physics they stood much in the same relation which geology does to modern science. But the Greek was not, like the enquirer of the last generation, confined to a period of six thousand years; he was able to speculate freely on the effects of infinite ages in the production of physical phenomena. He could imagine cities which had existed time out of mind (States.; Laws), laws or forms of art and music which had lasted, 'not in word only, but in very truth, ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... think it is Keats, in a letter—that the poet lives not in one, but in a thousand worlds, and the actor has not one, but a hundred natures. What was the real Henry Irving? I used to speculate! ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... of words it shows a marked preference for certain suffixes and prefixes. It would furnish an interesting excursion into folk psychology to speculate on the reasons for this preference in one case and another. Sometimes it is possible to make out the influence at work. In reading a piece of popular Latin one is very likely to be impressed with the large number of diminutives ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... painful and exhausting. To shift his position even in the smallest way would be to invite the bullet. As the moments flew the strain upon particular sets of muscles increased his pain with alarming rapidity, and unconsciously he began to speculate upon the length of time that remained before his suffering would lead him into recklessness and death. While he was thus approaching a very agony of pain, with the end of all human endurance not far away, another was suffering in a different ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... she was gone, and I began to wonder and speculate. Why should my cousin Monica make all this fuss about, after all, a very natural arrangement? My uncle, whatever he might have been, was now a good man—a religious man—perhaps a little severe; and with this thought a dark streak fell ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... so much inclined to speculate, to philosophize, and to reason on everything, it is not surprising that a fundamental law, as vaguely expressed as the charter, should leave ample room for discussion. We find that our own long experience in these written ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... or not it afterwards proved to be on a tract previously granted to some land company or rich private individual who had never been a hundred miles from the sea-coast. Public officials went into these speculations. Thus Major Joseph Martin, while an Indian agent, tried to speculate in Cherokee lands. [Footnote: See Va. State Papers, III., 560.] Of course the officer's public influence was speedily destroyed when he once undertook such operations; he could no longer do justice to outsiders. Occasionally the falseness of his position ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... longer, evacuated the premises. As no other tenants could be found, the house was eventually pulled down, and a row of fine modern buildings now occupy the site. As the history of the place could never be traced with any degree of authenticity, one can do no more than speculate as to the cause of the disturbances, which, I am inclined to think, were due to the phantoms of people and animals that had once actually ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... apparatus inherited from hard-drinking Southern ancestors. Altogether, he gave himself little time for thought, and if he felt at times an inclination to dream he thrust it from him with an almost superstitious fear. He would speculate no longer, but neither would he run the risk of invoking the laughter of cynical gods. If unimaginable disaster awaited him, at least he would not weaken his defences by a sojourn in the paradise ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... understand, then, that without disloyalty to my many friends in Europe, I could not discuss with freedom the causes or the progress of the war, or speculate in detail about the future of the European problem. My friends in Germany, France, and England all write to me with the utmost freedom and not for the public eye; so you see that my great difficulty, when you ask me to talk about the meaning of the struggle, arises ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... distant. The congregation seemed to suspect the priest of having an ulterior motive in his eulogies, and the priest seemed to suspect the congregation of a frivolous desire to waste his time. He had begun to speculate openly as to why they were there at all. Once, when a particularly repellent statuette of a nude female with an unwholesome green skin had been offered at two dollars and had found no bidders—the congregation appearing ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... success in literature stimulated the strong mind of his son to seek occupation of more certain profit; and those who feel interest in the whereabouts of celebrated men, may think upon the days when William Hogarth wrought in silver, as the apprentice of Ellis Gamble, in Cranbourne Street, and speculate upon the change of circumstances, wrought by his own exertions, when, as a great painter, in after time, he occupied the house, now known as the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... had seen Frank over the mat which lay outside his study door, and that there was a six foot servitor to open any other door through which he might have to pass, he returned to his seat, and, drawing his chair close to the fire, began to speculate on Fanny and her ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... life is not dependent on the theories of philosophers: we know what our duties are for the most part before we speculate about them. And the use of speculation is not to teach us what we already know, but to inspire in our minds an interest about morals in general, to strengthen our conception of the virtues by showing that they confirm one another, to prove to us, as Socrates would have ...
— Philebus • Plato
... and was vexed, for he prided himself on the digging of the carrot-bed. "Anything that had had any sense might have gone down into it, he was sure," he said. And he was not far wrong; but you see the Carrot had had no sense when he began to speculate, and tried to be something he was not intended ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... likes to speculate as to what might have been, had things been different, King's Bridge affords large opportunity for thought. It seems always to have been a favorite haunt of the human race, its encircling hills and accessibility by water no doubt being responsible for this popularity. ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine
... we have already settled the matter. Why speculate in vain? Let us seek repose. Chaplain. Victory to ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... to watch the women drawing water, or even to help tug at the chain that turned the axle. And on the bridge that led from the Old Ghetto to the New, where the canal, though the view was brief, disappeared round two corners, how absorbing to stand and speculate on what might be coming round either corner, and which would yield a vision first! Perhaps there would come along a sandolo rowed by a man standing at the back, his two oars crossed gracefully; perhaps a floating raft with barefooted boys bestriding it; perhaps a barca punted by ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... splendour of bronze but looking as if they were modelled in dough, and possessing in consequence none of the vital qualities of the lion. It is interesting to compare them with the little lion Alfred Stevens modelled for the railing of the British Museum, and to speculate on what a thrill we might have received every time we passed Trafalgar Square, had he been entrusted with the work, as ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... of a particular case, is true. The emphasis is laid not on absolute principles, but on consequences. We must not consider things as they are in themselves, but in their reference to the good of mankind. It is useless, for example, to speculate about the existence of God. If the hypothesis of a deity works satisfactorily, if the best results follow for the moral well-being of humanity by believing in a God, {115} then the hypothesis may be taken as true. It is true at least for us. Truth, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... will ever know of its real nature, even though hundreds of eclipses furnish them with the indisputable evidence of its presence. The sun is so thickly surrounded by a shell of this "red matter," that it is useless for them to speculate with only the help of their physical instruments, upon the nature of that which they can never see or detect with mortal eye behind that ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... we finally drive down the hill, their figures silhouetted against the sky. They have been on the whole pleased and awakened by their adventure; they will discuss and compare their emotions, finger their silver, wonder and speculate, and go their separate ways, convinced anew that the ways of the world and its worldlings are ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... essentially the characteristic of the chivalrous that they never speculate upon the fears of any man, and I trust that no such speculations will be made upon the idea that may be entertained in any quarter that the South, from fear of her slaves, is necessarily opposed to a ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... thief and forger. In fact, had Balder delayed his return another year, he would have found the enchanted castle in possession of the auctioneer; and as to the fate of its inhabitants, one does not like to speculate! ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... deserted; its lamps shuddered flaring and streaming and darkening in the fierce gusts of the wind. A vague army of evil things seemed to start up and come crowding between him and Alice. He turned homeward, with a sense of loss and a great sadness at his heart, unable even to speculate as to the cause of Alice's behaviour. All he knew was, that his mother had something to do with it. For the first time since childhood, he ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald |
