"Tangible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... troubles. Without any great affliction, they feel that all the flower and sweetness of their life have faded; their eye grows dim, their cheek care-worn, and their spirit loses hope and elasticity, and becomes bowed with premature age; and in the midst of tangible and physical comfort, they are restless and unhappy. The constant under-current of little cares and vexations, which is slowly wearing on the finer springs of life, is seen by no one; scarce ever do they speak of ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... had run its course, her convalescence would be rapid. He was measurably happy in the privilege of calling every day to ask for her, but speedily realized the poverty of Oriental marts in the means wherewith to convey to the fair patient some tangible token of his constant devotion. Where were the glorious roses, the fragrant, delicate violets, the heaping baskets of cool, luscious, tempting grapes, pears, and peaches with which from Saco to Seattle, from the Sault de Sainte Marie to Southwest Pass, in any city ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... and that I must certainly accompany him to a meeting-place of this same chosen few the following evening, when, by the means of sacred expedients, they hoped to invoke the presence of some departed spirits, and perchance successfully raise a tangible vision or two. To so fair-minded a proposal I held myself acquiescently, and then inquired where the meeting-place in question was destined to be—whether in a ruined and abandoned sanctuary, or upon some precipitous spot ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... sake to endure the ennui of mere vegetation until the prodigal Jack had been safely gathered within the fold once more. After the rude shock of first impressions had passed and she had found time to pause and breathe, she began to cast her eyes about her for something more real and tangible than the memories of the world she had left behind her, but had failed to find anything of interest until the occurrence of that ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... applications of that love which Paul regards as 'the bond of perfectness,' knitting all Christians together. The former of these two is love that expresses itself by tangible material aid. The persons to be helped are 'saints,' and it is their 'needs' that are to be aided. There is no trace in the Pauline Epistles of the community of goods which for a short time prevailed in the Church of Jerusalem ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... little more estimable than other common merchandise. It would be difficult to find, among the countless books about books produced by us in the old country, any in which the bent of individual tastes and propensities is so distinctly represented in tangible symbols; and the reality of the elucidation is increased by the sort of innocent surprise with which the historian approaches each "lot," evidently as a first acquaintance, about whom he inquires and obtains all available particulars, good-humouredly communicating ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." That gives very little information but it gives some tangible idea to grasp. Beyond this there is no hold ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... play itself to understand why she does as she does without this picture of her in Dublin. Her story is that of a woman who hates the much talk of patriotism in Dublin and the lack of doing anything tangible for Ireland. In Dublin she has worked her way up from servant to assistant in a bookshop, but she goes back happily to the country to give her sister a chance in town such as she has had, thinking that perhaps ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... rough-minded colleague, for the chancellor of the exchequer was well aware that he stood high in his royal master's favour. His majesty, indeed, had often expressed his high sense of his minister's services in words, and soon after this he testified it in a more tangible manner. By the death of Lord Guildford on the 5th of August, the wardenship of the cinque ports, worth about L3000 a-year, became vacant, and his majesty offered it to Pitt in such pressing terms, that even if he had been inclined to refuse the boon it would scarcely have been possible. The royal ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... there, her hand clasping Billy's sleeve as at first—something tangible to hold on to. Her gaze had gone far beyond the room; even that haunting consciousness that Bailey Girard was near her was but a far, hidden subconsciousness. She was out on a rocky slope beside a dead body—Lawson, his head thrown back, those mocking, caressing eyes, those ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... into a fact upon the floor. A leaden hue, less black than the pulsing sea of ink about it, spread and spread, lighter and lighter, until it invaded the dim recesses where I stood. My hand became once more a tangible possession, unreal and grim, yet all my own. The opposite wall loomed up, my utmost frontier of the domain of certainty. Dimmer, darker, more obscure, the door, a vast unexplored cavern gathered to itself the hobgoblins ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... have held these opinions for several years, I am more than ever convinced, since examining these few Tinguian records, that something really tangible and worth while can be deduced from the music of various primitive peoples, and I trust this branch of ethnology will ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... The shadow in the alcove at the end of the room began to display that undefinable quality of a presence, that odd suggestion of a lurking living thing that comes so easily in silence and solitude. And to reassure myself, I walked with a candle into it and satisfied myself that there was nothing tangible there. I stood that candle upon the floor of the alcove and left it in ...
— The Red Room • H. G. Wells
... dear," said Miss Dora, with unexpected wisdom. And she comforted her conscience that she did not know, for she had forgotten Lucy's name. So there was no tangible evidence to confirm Miss Leonora's doubts, and the carriage from the Blue Boar rattled down Prickett's Lane to the much amazement of that locality. When they got to the grimy canal-banks, Miss Leonora stopped the vehicle and got out. She declined the attendance ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... hold of, to embrace or to charm. He always made the melody undulate like a skiff borne on the bosom of a powerful wave; or he made it move vaguely like an aerial apparition suddenly sprung up in this tangible and palpable world. In his writings he at first indicated this manner which gave so individual an impress to his virtuosity by the term tempo rubato: stolen, broken time—a measure at once supple, abrupt, and languid, vacillating like the flame under the breath which agitates it, like the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... he was driven by some emergency of the verse; but in the absence of all sharp lines of character and anything specific, we feel for the moment a sort of surprise, as though the epithet were singularly happy and unusual, or as though we had made our escape from cloudland into something tangible and sure. The measure of Charles's indifference to all that now preoccupies and excites a poet is best given by a positive example. If, besides the coming of spring, any one external circumstance may be said to have struck his imagination, it was the despatch of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Morelli[109] that this may be a portrait of one of the Querini family, who were Palma's patrons, has nothing tangible to support it, once Palma's authorship is contested. But the unimaginative Palma was surely incapable of such things as this ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... than Peace." This would doubtless be conceded without argument, but also without prejudice. Hitherto the pacifists' quest of a basis for enduring peace, it must be admitted, has brought home nothing tangible—with the qualification, of course, that the subsidised pacifists have come in for the subsidy. So that, after searching the recesses of their imagination, able-bodied pacifists whose loquacity has never been at fault hitherto ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... She was not struck by any other hand; yet she lies dead from a mortal wound in the breast. Though there is no tangible proof of her having inflicted this wound upon herself, the jury will have no alternative, I fear, than to pronounce the case one ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... ate, my glance roved about the room, taking in its various details, and still searching, though almost unconsciously, for something tangible upon which to take hold, among the invisible mysteries that encompassed me. 'Surely,' I thought, 'there must be something—' And, in the same instant, my gaze dwelt upon the face of the clock in the opposite corner. Therewith, I stopped eating, and just stared. For, though ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... Things; that what the scytale was to the Spartan hero, a sheriff's writ often is to a Waterloo medallist: that a Bow Street runner will enter the foulest den where Murder sits with his fellows, and pick out his prey with the beck of his forefinger. That, in short, the thing called LAW, once made tangible and present, rarely fails to palsy the fierce heart of the thing called CRIME. For Law is the symbol of all mankind reared against One Foe—the Man of Crime. Not yet aware of this truth, nor, indeed, in the least suspecting ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... The most tangible thing he had to build on was the night, immersed in bridge, when he had not been unaware of the abrupt leaving of the piano after the singing of the "Gypsy Trail"; nor when, in careless smiling greeting of them when they came down the room to devil him over his losing, had he failed to receive ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... on giving me some tangible keepsake, I'll simply ask you to send me the smallest Horace you can get. It will amuse me, and prevent me from forgetting all my Latin. There's a little woman who sells cigars on the jetty at Bastia. If you give it to her, ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... comparison to the kings of Europe, but the places which are at his disposal are sufficiently numerous to interest, directly or indirectly, several thousand electors in his success. Political parties in the United States are led to rally round an individual, in order to acquire a more tangible shape in the eyes of the crowd, and the name of the candidate for the Presidency is put forward as the symbol and personification of their theories. For these reasons parties are strongly interested in gaining the election, not so much with a view to the triumph of their principles under ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... despite the passing of the tangible symbol, and that the prayer is still made in every township of that territory, where even a few children live, is evidenced by the fact that every two miles north and south, east and west of settled region there stands a schoolhouse. I ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... to Creighton's interjected and severe remarks, while looking down on the deck he weighed in his hand the iron belayingpin—that a moment ago had just missed his head—as if it had been the only tangible fact of the whole transaction. He was one of those commanders who speak little, seem to hear nothing, look at no one—and know everything, hear every whisper, see every fleeting shadow of their ship's life. His two ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... to change, growing softer and more mellow. It wasn't a tangible substance, but something ethereal, like the flicker of flame over an open hearth. Some tremendous force seemed to hold the sphere ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... little, Harry. Here is a solid body which we touch but which we cannot see. The fact is so unusual that it strikes us with terror. Is there no parallel, though, for such a phenomenon? Take a piece of pure glass. It is tangible and transparent. A certain chemical coarseness is all that prevents its being so entirely transparent as to be totally invisible. It is not theoretically impossible, mind you, to make a glass which shall not reflect a single ray of light—a glass so pure and homogeneous in its atoms ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... in the room a constraint like a tangible inhibition against any natural spontaneity fell over them. Kendric read in Barlow's look no joy at the sight of him but only a sullen brooding; Betty flashed one look at him in which was nothing of last night's friendliness ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... One tangible result of our great increase in merchant shipping— which I think will be good news to civilians at home—is that tonight we are able to terminate the rationing of coffee. We also expect that within a short time we shall get ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... at him in stupor; the sense of his words was not tangible to her; she had had no hope, no thought, that they would ever deal thus with her; all she had ever dreamed of was so to touch their hearts and their generosity that they would spare one from among their troop to do the errand of mercy she ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... judgment, glad to be on ground where she could dispute with assurance. They argued it hotly, as if sweet peas were the most vital things in the world. It was good to be venting all one's feeling on things so tangible and knowable as ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... in the room of the Hermes seemed to Dion more full of peace even than before, but the peace was like something almost tangible. It troubled him a little because he felt that the Hermes, the child and Rosamund were of it, while he was not. They were surrounded by the atmosphere necessary to them, and to which they were mysteriously ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... the study of mathematics led him easily into the quest of some practical form by which to give tangible expression to his thought. It is highly probable that this fact can explain the facility with which he planned and completed at the age of thirty a clock which stands as one of the wonders of his day.[157] "It is probable," says ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... he had just caught sight of a bat circling over the dilapidated roof of the pavilion, and he hated bats. Though he belonged to a community which denied the angels and ignored the saints, he had a firm belief in the existence of a tangible devil, and somehow he could not dissociate his ideas of hell and of evil spirits from those which related to ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... say, as he had no very decided plan of action. He had not sufficient money saved to justify him in leaving the Pactolus—still there were always possibilities, and Fortune was fond of playing wild pranks. At the same time there was nothing tangible in view likely to make him rich, so, as these thoughts rapidly passed through his ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... repeated. Then again there was silence almost absolute, Herb's oars moving with the softest swish imaginable, as the boat skimmed along the lonely, curved bay which he had chosen for a calling-place. It came to a stop amid shadows so dense and black that they seemed almost tangible, close to a bank fringed with overhanging bushes, having a background of evergreens. These last, in the fast-gathering darkness, looked like a sable array of mourners in whose ranks a pale ghost or two mingled, the spectres being ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... external signs—not on the parties' having meant the same thing but on their having said the same thing. Furthermore, as the signs may be addressed to one sense or another—to sight or to hearing—on the nature of the sign will depend the moment when the contract is made. If the sign is tangible, for instance, a letter, the contract is made when the letter of acceptance is delivered. If it is necessary that the minds of the parties meet, there will be no contract until the acceptance can be read; none, for example, if the acceptance ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... had but to open his veins, and in an hour he was a divinity. But the divinity which Caligula desired was not of that kind. He wished to be a god, not on Olympus alone, but on earth as well. He wished to be a palpable, tangible, living god; one that mortals could see, which was more, he knew, than could be said of the others. The mere wish was sufficient—Rome fell at his feet. The patent of divinity was in the genuflections of a nation. At once he had a temple, priests and flamens. Inexhaustible ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... and its Kontor, in London, there remains, perhaps, an echo in the expression, "A pound sterling"—a pound of the Easterlings; but the site of its Steel-yard is now a railway station, and its only tangible memorials remaining ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... farm boy, in haymaking, and in driving the cows to and from the pasture, I planted myself there, and whatever comes back to me now from that source is honestly my own. The second crop which I gather is not much more tangible than that which the poet gathers, but the farmer as little suspects its existence as he does that of the poet. I can use what he would gladly reject. His daisies, his buttercups, his orange hawkweed, his yarrow, his ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... with these two excellent auxiliary hypotheses, whatever is seen to be below this standard and opposed to this inner harmony is at once swept aside as un-Homeric. But even this distinguishing characteristic, in place of wishing to recognise the supernatural existence of a tangible personality, ascends likewise through all the stages that lead to that zenith, with ever-increasing energy and clearness. Individuality is ever more strongly felt and accentuated; the psychological possibility of a single ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to the seas, and Satyrs to the fields; and in this many-sided and devout sympathy with nature the imagination and reverence of all Greece found expression. But Greek religion in its temples, its oracles, its games, and its councils, provided more tangible bonds of union than those of sentiment. Each city had its tutelary deity, whose temple was usually the most beautiful building in it, and to which any Greek might have access to make his offering or prayer. The sacred precincts were not to be profaned by those who ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... lot, but SO ignorant! The devil we are!" He struck the rivet such a blow that he snapped one shank of his spur short off. This meant ten or twelve dollars for a new pair—though the cost of it troubled him little, just then. It was something tangible upon which to pour profanity, however, and the atmosphere grew sulphurous in the vicinity of the blacksmith shop and remained so for several minutes, after which a tall, irate cow-puncher with his hat pulled low over angry eyes left the shop and strode ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... in Garth's veins subsided. Here he had something tangible to work upon; and his conscious brain resumed operations; prompting him at first like a small, strange voice at an ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... I feel a vague uneasiness in my mind which causes a cold shiver to run all over me. I look round, and of course nothing is to be seen, and I wish there were something there, no matter what, as long as it were something tangible: I am frightened, merely because I cannot understand ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... terror. Warships gathered in New York harbor were impotent. State troops massed in New Jersey, across the Hudson from New York, and in Putnam and Westchester Counties, were powerless to do more than try and help the escaping people since there was no enemy of tangible substance to attack. Patrolling airplanes, armed with bombs, were helpless. The white apparitions were gathering everywhere in the neighborhood of New York City. But they remained only apparitions, imponderable wraiths, non-existent save that they could be dimly seen. And ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... through it falling back dead. It was a terrible lesson, but afterwards the others took no risks, although they were anxious to fire on hostile figures that their fancy saw for them among the trees. Willet, Robert and Colden compelled them to withhold their fire until a real and tangible enemy appeared. ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... wealth. Politics absorbed the minds of the people. Glory and splendor were followed by corruption of morals and the pursuit of material pleasures. Philosophy went out of fashion, since it brought no outward and tangible good. More scientific studies were pursued,—those which could be applied to purposes of utility and material gains; even as in our day geology, chemistry, mechanics, engineering, having reference to the practical wants of men, command talent, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... faced the enemy in his heart, bidding misery do its worst. In imagination he followed Reuben Elgar to Naples, saw him speed to Villa Sannazaro, where as likely as not he would meet Cecily. Mallard had no tangible evidence of its being Reuben's desire to see Cecily, but he was none the less convinced that for no other reason had his companion set forth. And jealousy tormented him sorely. It was his first experience ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... irrespective of religion or denomination. As a last resource government convened a Congress, comprising representatives of all classes of subject Slaves. As might have been supposed, little unanimity prevailed in their counsels, and no tangible advantages were thereby attained. And now a combination of unforeseen circumstances conspired to rescue the Porte from the pressing danger which threatened it. The neutrality preserved by Servia, or rather its Prince, Alexander Guirgievitch, infected not only the ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... soon made his purchase. He stayed for a while at the store, smoking, and watching the customers as they came and went. It was all of considerable interest to him, and he beheld in this trading-place another tangible evidence ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... child can have of sight must take the form of feeling the image on its retina, as though the object were actually inside the head, and it could have no idea that it was outside until, by touching with the hand, it would gradually learn by experience that the tangible outside object corresponded with the image located in the head; this is fully borne out by the testimony of men who, born blind, have, by an operation, received their sight late in life; in each case their first experience ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... Certain great souls seem to gather to themselves, as their work accumulates its destined momentum in its voyage down the years, a power of arousing our imagination to issues that seem larger than those which can naturally be explained as proceeding inevitably from their tangible work. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... few minutes at the end of school, if a bit of work had been satisfactorily mastered. It certainly produced a lot of cheerful effort; my story was simple enough, description as brief and vivid as I could make it, and brisk tangible incidents. But the silence, the luxurious abandonment of small minds to an older and more pictorial imagination, the dancing light in open eyes, did really give me for once a sense of power which I never ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... blood-stained altar of human sacrifice. Every year the fairest maiden of the Tengger was the chosen victim offered to Siva, who, in his attribute of a Consuming Fire, occupied the volcanic abyss. The worship of the Divine Destroyer has ever been a fruitful source of crime and cruelty, and a tangible atmosphere of evil lingers round those hoary temples of India dedicated to the Avenging Deity, whose fanatical followers are reckoned by millions. Through the inversion of creed peculiar to Hindu Pantheism, the propitiation of Divine wrath has become ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... expressed in love. The Epistle is full of this subject. No writing is so truly characterised by the love of St. Paul for his converts, or of his converts for St. Paul (see ch. iv. 14-18). Let us again remind ourselves that love in the New Testament is something definite, tangible, strong, practical, intense. It is more than sentiment, though of course it includes that; it is more than emotion, though undoubtedly it includes that; it is more than desire, though obviously it includes that. Love is the outgoing of the entire ...
— The Prayers of St. Paul • W. H. Griffith Thomas
... native tongue; and until one of these two opinions be proved, it will be well to suspend our judgment as to the isolation of the Moskitos. If, indeed, either of them be true, their ethnological position will be a difficult question. With nothing in Honduras to compare them with—with nothing tangible, or with an apparently incompatible affinity in Nicaragua—with only very general miscellaneous affinities in Guatemala—their ethnological affinities are as peculiar as their political constitution. Nevertheless, isolated as their language is, ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... glad to feel myself within the influence of the long-looked-for Himalaya; and I narrowly watched every change in the character of the vegetation. A fern, growing by the roadside, was the first and most tangible evidence of this; together with the rarity or total absence of Butea, Boswellia, Catechu, Grislea, Carissa, and all the companions ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... of emulation change. The opportunity and the incentive to emulate increase greatly in scope and urgency. The activity of the men more and more takes on the character of exploit; and an invidious comparison of one hunter or warrior with another grows continually easier and more habitual. Tangible evidences of prowess—trophies—find a place in men's habits of thought as an essential feature of the paraphernalia of life. Booty, trophies of the chase or of the raid, come to be prized as evidence of pre-eminent force. Aggression becomes ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... of Barsoom he clung, more or less inherently, to a certain exalted form of ancestor worship, though it was rather the memory or legends of the virtues and heroic deeds of his forebears that he deified rather than themselves. He never expected any tangible evidence of their existence after death; he did not believe that they had the power either for good or for evil other than the effect that their example while living might have had upon following generations; he did not believe therefore in the materialization ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a great comfort to poor helpless human beings to have a tangible personality of like nature with themselves as a mediator between them and the heavenly powers. Sympathy can do much for the sorrowing, the suffering, the dying, but to hear God himself speaking directly through human lips, to feel the touch of a hand which is the channel ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in the world, surpass in nothing so much as in their handling of those filmy textures which clothe the vague shapes of the borderland between experience and illusion. This is perhaps because our people, who seem to live only in the most tangible things of material existence, really live more in the spirit than any other. Their love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry, but is apparently an effect from psychological influences in the past, widely separated ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... Crow's Foot, having demonstrated the bigness of his heart, and received in return a tangible proof of the corresponding size of the trader's, addresses his braves, cautioning them against violence or rough behaviour. The braves, standing ready with their peltries, are in a high state of excitement to begin the trade. ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... obvious again, they say, from the consideration that, if it were even possible for one man to discern the conscience of another, it is impossible for him to bend or controul it. But conscience is placed both out of his sight and of his reach. It is neither visible nor tangible. It is inaccessible by stripes or torments. Thus, while the body is in bondage, on account of the religion of the soul, the soul itself is free, and, while it suffers under torture, it enjoys the divinity, and feels felicity in ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... and pleased. He strode forward with short steps, rapid yet noiseless, and Laurie adapted his longer stride to his companion's. He, too, was content. Now, at last, he reflected, he was through with mysteries, and was coming to a grip with something tangible. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... gleams of the early sunshine shone into that window from which Nettie had looked out last night, the wintry light came in with agitating revelations not simply upon another morning, but upon a new world. As usual, Nettie's thoughts were expressed in things tangible. She had risen from her sleepless bed while it was still almost dark, and to look at her now, a stranger might have supposed her to be proceeding with her last night's work with the constancy of a monomaniac. Little Freddy sat up in his crib ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... words might with justice be applied to Faraday's own researches at this time. They furnish us with results of permanent value; but little help can be found in the theory advanced to account for them. It would, perhaps, be more correct to say that the theory itself is hardly presentable in any tangible form to the intellect. Faraday looks, and rightly looks, into the heart of the decomposing body itself; he sees, and rightly sees, active within it the forces which produce the decomposition, and he rejects, and rightly rejects, the notion of external attraction; but beyond the hypothesis ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... an idea," the man contradicted flatly. "He was in love with just that. And it is not safe for any man to live alone with an abstract conception of anything. He's bound, sooner or later, to lose his grip on tangible things if he does. He's likely to start destroying property to further the cause of labor, or liable to turn to shooting men who were born to jobs I'm certain some of them never wanted—kings and that sort, I mean—figuring on solving the social problems of men and women who must solve that ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... maiden there stirred a something which she did not quite understand, something brought to life by the sight of her sister's daguerreotype lying at the edge of the valence, where it must have fallen from David's pocket without his knowledge as he lay asleep. It had seemed to put into tangible form the solid wall of fact that hung between her and any hope of future happiness as a wife, and for the first time she too began to realize what she had sacrificed in thus impetuously throwing her young life into the breach that it might be healed. But she was not ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... friends of the cause from joining it, and gave it a quaint, and sometimes even a comical aspect. These Utopian and impracticable notions were accepted by the abolitionists partly on the log-rolling principle, and partly from a tendency of those people to separate themselves from what is real and tangible. It seems strange that a man of Wendell Phillips' culture and mental endowments should not have been able to distinguish between a necessary and possible reform, and those vague theories of human happiness and perfection ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... of the many abuses which still exist, and which demand reform, there could not be a more tangible proof of the general efficiency of the officers of our army than the picture of Cyprus after the first year's occupation. Although the government has been severely pinched for means, and a season of cruel drought has smitten the agriculturists; ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... had preceded that grievance or had been deliberately perpetrated since, he was compelled to suffer snubs and annoyances on behalf of his Government, with no relief but such as he could find in the office of recording them. A good deal had been done by Mr. Conyngham Greene to establish visible and tangible evidence of the desire of her Majesty's Government to interest themselves in the condition of British subjects and—as far as the exigencies of a very peculiar case would for the time permit—to protect them from at least the more outrageous acts of ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... the development of the respective sciences would prove just the contrary. The observations of psychology are always rather unprecise. Psychological phenomena, notwithstanding the efforts of Fechner and his school, are not yet measured with the same strictness and ease as the tangible reality. To speak plainly, the psychologist who vaunts the superiority of his method, and only shows inferior results, places himself in a somewhat ridiculous and contradictory position; he deserves to be compared to those spiritualists who claim the power of evoking ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... except when I sit down to write." I believe this is not a very common case, for people who don't write think as well as people who do; but connected, severe, well-developed thought, in contradistinction to vague meditation, must be connected with some tangible plan or object; and therefore we must be either writing men or acting men, if we desire to test the logic, and unfold into symmetrical design the fused colours of our reasoning faculty. Maltravers did not ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that all along; and it might have been worse. It is characteristic of an untruthful nature to be impervious to the shame of mere detection. In Eastern countries the liar detected smiles in one's face. Detection is to an Oriental no punishment; something more tangible is required ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... commencement, to prevent any dangerous precedents from being established, that might afterwards be cited for the defence of customs injurious to the interests of the settlers. One of the first principles adopted, even before the regulations by which the colonists were governed assumed the tangible shape of law, was that all persons born in the colony, or residing in it, should be free, and enjoy all the rights and privileges of citizenship known to the United States of America, which was taken as the model of the Liberian ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... less exalted strain come suggestions that the translator's work is valuable enough to deserve some tangible recognition. Thomas Fortescue urges his reader to consider the case of workmen like himself, "assuring thyself that none in any sort do better deserve of their country, that none swink or sweat with ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... desire to deny it. He knew that words would weigh as nothing against this material, tangible, incontrovertible proof. Forty-seven cards had been fraudulently inserted among the others. Certainly not by him! But by whom? Still he, alone, had been the gainer through ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... grown road, on each side of which were the red and white bungalows, residences of the dozen officials of the island. They were screened by hedges of high growing bushes, bearing brilliant, exotic flowers which gave out a heavy, sweet perfume, and the perfume hung in clouds, invisible yet tangible, pervading the soft, warm air. How he had dreamed of such perfumes—long ago. Yet how sickening in reality. And how dull they were, the interiors of these sheltered bungalows, how dull and stupid the monotonous life that went on inside them—dejected, ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... full-size drawings of architectural detail, in which sculpture plays a large part. Well, we need as many modellers, who, either in architects' offices, or in stone-cutters' yards and terra-cotta works, shall be putting into tangible form the dreams and thoughts of the designer's brain. "As many," do I say? Once it is found that architectural sculpture can be got promptly and cheaply, and conveniently, it is not 200 modellers only that this big community around the big bridge will need; ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... my arms now there is just a very pretty girl who is not over-careful in her dealings with young men, thought Jurgen, as their lips met. Well, all life is a compromise; and a pretty girl is something tangible, at any rate. So he laughed, triumphantly, and prepared for ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... the greater number of cases, that is to say, the problem arises simply and solely from the questioner's failure to dissociate personality from materiality; a "person" suggests to him a tangible, visible, ponderable form, with arms and legs and organs of sense—and when he has reflected sufficiently to understand that such a description cannot apply to God, he concludes that therefore God cannot be personal. The ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... The mighty power plants on Venus and Mercury were idle. The only remaining tangible asset were the fleets of spaceships used less than a month before to ship the accumulators to the outer worlds, to bring them Sunward ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... what, Dickens seems never to have known—and he was sent home. Mrs. Dickens acted the part of the peacemaker on the next day, probably feeling that amid the shadowy expectations on which she and her husband had subsisted for so long, even six or seven shillings a week was something tangible, and not to be despised. Yet in spite of this, he did not return to the business. His father decided that he should go to school. "I do not write resentfully or angrily," said Dickens, in the confidential communication made long afterwards to Forster, and to which reference ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... be observed that for lack of any tangible evidence he very properly makes use of subjective reasoning. Now it has long been the opinion of the writer that the maximum of comic effect (and that this was the purpose of the servus currens there can surely be no doubt) could best be obtained ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... some practice in translation. To-day, after a considerable interval, there is something phantasmagoria, like a prismatic reflexion or a serial novel, in Pemberton's memory of the queerness of the Moreens. If it were not for a few tangible tokens—a lock of Morgan's hair cut by his own hand, and the half-dozen letters received from him when they were disjoined—the whole episode and the figures peopling it would seem too inconsequent for anything but dreamland. Their ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... Baronet, I only feel surprised that I could have been such a dupe as to expect that any real benefit would ever arise to the people from his exertions. All his promises, all his protestations, I now perceive to have been general; there was nothing in them specific and tangible. The great cry raised against Sir F. Burdett's principles at that time was, that he had been the associate of the traitors Despard and O'Connor. This was most infamous, and was resented by every upright and honest freeholder in the county. ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... humanitarian sympathy for the submerged tenth; the modern thing in Thackeray, however, was his fearlessness in uncovering the conventional shams of polite society. The idols that Dickens smashed (and never was a bolder iconoclast) were to be seen of all men: but Thackeray's were less tangible, more subtle, part and parcel of his own class. In this sense, and I believe because he began his major novel-writing about 1850, whereas the other began fifteen years before, Thackeray is more modern, more of our own time, than his great co-mate in fiction. When we consider the question ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... eye glanced at him in a manner that startled him, as he made reply, 'Fellow-alumnus, you speak as Oxford scholars speak; but I rede ye well that the real is not that which is grossly tangible to the corporeal sense, but the idea that is conceived within the ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that she was better, she had determined to make a complete change. When she herself arrived other changes would be made. This much Gualtier managed to communicate to them, so as to give them some tangible idea of the affairs of the family and prevent idle conjecture. He let them know, also, that Lord Chetwynde was in India, and might come home at any moment, though his engagements there were so important that it might be impossible for him ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... capital of Honorius and Theodoric the few notes of which they are composed, I let the original date stand for local colour's sake. Its mere look, as I transcribe it, emits a grateful glow in the midst of the Alpine rawness, and gives a depressed imagination something tangible to grasp while awaiting the return of fine weather. For Ravenna was glowing, less than a week since, as I edged along the narrow strip of shadow binding one side of the empty, white streets. After a long, chill spring the summer this year descended upon Italy with a sudden ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... somebody's dope, I always thought: "That's just the way I feel." But when I turned over a few pages and read some lady sufferer's testimonial, I was sure that I felt very much the same myself. All these symptoms, however, assumed a more tangible form ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... compelling force more dominant than the strong will of a man, Sledge Hume rode the one trail open to him. It was as though the deeds of his life were now grown tangible separate squares of rock cemented into sheer walls rising about him, narrowing, forcing him into ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... can't hold one's tongue when one has a feeling, a tangible feeling, that one might be a help if only.... Eh! Do you know the details of ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... gone back more often than ever they had to the younger man who had played, with such vivid, brilliant strokes, so important a part in her life. She felt, what was new to her, a growing need of him—a need based on nothing tangible and yet none the less ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... himself of that. Had he come across Lady Mabel's old Lisbon coach, beset by robbers, in her journey through the Alemtejo, he would have dashed in among them, sword in hand, like a true gentleman, and a good knight. Now, when he saw her surrounded by evils and embarrassments of a less tangible kind, the same spirit of chivalry brought him promptly to ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... fallen from that sky did not, after the first stir of curiosity had subsided, materially add to their interest in her. She had fallen, she had "gone under," and true to the ideal of their race, they were awed only by success—by the gross tangible image of material achievement. The consciousness of her different point of view merely kept them at a little distance from her, as though she were a foreigner with whom it was an effort ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... rule, roads exercise the greatest influence on the location of supports, and a support will generally be placed on or near a road. The section which it is to cover should be clearly defined by means of tangible lines on the ground and should be such that the support is ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... to resist a sense of profound emotion before the abysses of infinite Space, when we behold the innumerable multitude of worlds suspended above our heads. We feel in this solitary contemplation of the Heavens that there is more in the Universe than tangible and visible matter: that there are forces, laws, destinies. Our ants' brains may know themselves microscopic, and yet recognize that there is something greater than the Earth, the Heavens;—more absolute than the Visible, the Invisible;—beyond the more or less vulgar affairs of life, ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... was almost tangible; it was a glow so real it seemed to warm and light that dingy old passageway. Certainly it warmed and lighted the young man who stood there with her. For him, too, the whole world was transfigured, and life just an orchard to walk through ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... embodiments. Each individuality known as Lucy, Jane, Flora, Evangeline, or what-not, had been merely a transient condition of her. He did not recognize this as an excuse or as a defence, but as a fact simply. Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the lips. God only knew what she really was; Pierston did not. ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... has to be called in to guarantee the accuracy of the representation. The objective world, again, does not reveal itself to us as simply made up of 'primary qualities'; we know of it only as somehow endowed with 'secondary' or sense-given qualities: as visible, tangible, audible, and so forth. These qualities are plainly 'subjective'; they vary from man to man, and from moment to moment: they cannot be measured or fixed; and must be regarded as a product in some inexplicable way of the action ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... her religion was a fantastic medley, so entangled that poor Father Francis had given up in despair any attempt to arrange it more correctly. Indeed, being of the peasantry himself, he was not so very full sure in his own mind that demons were not bodily presences, quite as real and often much more tangible than saints. Anyway, he let her alone; and she believed in the goodness of God as she believed in the shining of ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... preacher. He realized now that he had counted on Judith's being interested even were she antagonistic. But she was indifferent. He would have preferred that she be resentful like his father. There was nothing tangible there to struggle against. One could neither fight nor urge indifference. Then he set his jaws. Judith should see! He knew whither he was going now. He had found the fine straight line of which Peter had spoken, long ago, and he would ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... sauce; chocolates, oceans of which lay in mimic lakes, each of which the bill of a humming-bird might expand; tongues of most melodious singing birds—the nightingale, the thrush, and the goldfinch; lambs en supreme, each eliminated of earthly particles, and spiritualized in scarcely tangible results. Over all hovered the memories of exquisite beverages, which became realities when you approached, and stole over the sense ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... view, so that those who came could see for themselves that the Lord's body was no longer there; it was not necessary to open the portal in order to afford an exit to the resurrected Christ. In His immortalized state He appeared in and disappeared from closed rooms. A resurrected body, though of tangible substance, and possessing all the organs of the mortal tabernacle, is not bound to earth by gravitation, nor can it be hindered in its movements by material barriers. To us who conceive of motion only in the directions ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... both at home, and in the many Englands beyond sea, to those who, (despite the inevitably more engrossing attractions of the Present, and the emphatic bias of modern culture towards the immediate and the tangible), maintain that high and soul-inspiring interest which, identifying us with our magnificent Past, and all its varied lessons of defeat and victory, offers at the same time,—under the guidance from above,—our sole secure guarantee for prosperous ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... remarking upon the high merit of his brief fiction in other years, and in recalling that he alone is represented in the first three volumes of O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories, the Committee intimated the wish to express in some tangible fashion its appreciation of this author's services to American fiction. On the motion of Doctor Wheeler, therefore, the Committee voted to ask an appropriation from the Society of Arts and Sciences as a prize to be awarded on account of general excellence in the short ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... sea to the dim mountains, the glorious golden light of the sun—these had enchanted her eyes with her beauty of the universe. They had burst the windows of her blindness. When she crawled into the green-brown covert it was to escape too great perception. She needed to be encompassed by close, tangible things. And there her body paid the tribute to the realization of life. Shock, convulsion, pain, relaxation, and then unutterable and insupportable sensing of her environment and the heart! In one way she ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... have lost nearly all its charms in losing that perplexing veil of indistinctness which affords such ample range wherein the doubting imagination may speculate. At present it is like a thing in another world. A dark gulf is betwixt us. It is not tangible by the body. We can only approach it ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... purchaser's fancy for the forest was unconquerable: it puzzled even Mr. Holt. He returned from Mapleton the proprietor of a hundred acres of bush in a newly settled western township, and felt much the better and cheerier that his excursion had ended so. The future had something tangible for his grasp now; and he only grudged every hour spent away from his sphere of labour as an opportunity ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... intervals they reached and crossed small spaces of natural clearings, where Rosa and the youths scanned all the country that could be brought under their field of vision. In no instance were these very extensive, and the view resulted in nothing tangible as regarded the movements of their enemies. Much of the ground which was passed was rough and covered with stones. Upon these they stepped so carefully that they left a trail which it would require the keenest eye of the Indian warrior to ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... purpose that would be answered," said Colonel Keith, coming to a pause at last; "you have nothing tangible to mention, even as to the former affair that you suspect. I see a great deal in your view of her to make you uneasy, but nothing that would not be capable of explanation, above all to such a man as my brother. It ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... come to the plays of Sophocles, we feel that a new era in the drama is created; we feel that the artist poet has called into full existence the artist actor. His theatrical effects [375] are tangible, actual—could be represented to-morrow in Paris—in London— everywhere. We find, therefore, that with Sophocles has passed down to posterity the name of the great actor [376] in his principal plays. And I think ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lofty air, and announced that he was under the impression that, when chilled, she would do nothing of the sort! He had his own ideas regarding the treatment of chills of small, brown women. What would really occur, what the solid, tangible fact of the occasion would be, required no effort to describe. He should merely draw a great easy-chair before the grate. Then some one would be picked up and turned about before the fire until thoroughly warmed and with full circulation ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... which women like Mrs. Lovell provoke. The truth was, that she could read a character when it was under her eyes; but its yesterday and to-morrow were a blank. She had no imaginative hold on anything. For which reason she was always requiring tangible signs ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of section 106 is to be distinguished from "display" under clause (5). For a work to be "reproduced," its fixation in tangible form must be "sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration." Thus, the showing of images on a screen or tube would not be a violation ...
— Reproduction of Copyrighted Works By Educators and Librarians • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... to him—that the jester was endeavouring to urge a very serious earnest behind, and by means of, his jest; that he was no mere railer, or caviller, or even satirist, but a convinced reformer and apostle. Yet when we try to get at his programme—at his gospel—there is no vestige of anything tangible about either. Not very many impartial persons could possibly accept Mr Arnold's favourite doctrine, that the salvation of the people lies in state-provided middle-class schools; and this was specially difficult in 1871, if they remembered ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... fruitless: nothing definite, nothing tangible, rewarded it. Worse still, a new doubt grew out of it—a doubt whether the motive which Sir Patrick had avowed (through Blanche) was the motive for helping her which was really in ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... identified with the various Turkish court officials from the Grand Vizier down to an officer in the Ganitsharies. This preliminary work is always exhausting, but it is so necessary on a mission of this kind. One blunder, one step in the dark, and you are gone. One spends months without any tangible results, often going on the wrong track. One has to be excruciatingly circumspect in one's inquiries. To use a hunter's expression, there is no quarry so wary, sharp-sighted and keen at smelling the wind as a ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... reality, as near to him as his right hand. Marriage was a formless, far distant abstraction. Hilma a tangible, imminent fact. Before he could think of the two as one; before he could consider the idea of marriage, side by side with the idea of Hilma, measureless distances had to be traversed, things as disassociated in ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... loneliness, in obscurity, in the hidden life and experience of the people of God. The allegory thus far has been that of the soul, amidst its spiritual enemies, toiling towards Heaven; now there comes a scene more open, tangible, external; the allurements of the world are to be presented, with the manner in which the true pilgrim conducts himself amidst them. It was necessary that Bunyan should show his pilgrimage in its external as well as its secret spiritual ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... through the corridors of the hotels. The provincials (both clerical and lay) were enticed to the metropolis by a "Trade Carnival." The Squash met them everywhere. Here, in the midst of the city's strange and shifting life, was something simple, tangible, familiar, appealing. Jared had had the happy thought to mount one or two of his best pieces on easels fitted out with a receptacle for holding a real squash. "Which is which?" cried the dear people, delightedly. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... literary friend of these years, and an extravagant admirer of his devotion to the Stuarts, was Aphra Behn. She dedicated her Fair Jilt to Payne in 1688 in terms which suggest that he had favored her in tangible ways. ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne
... And two years of memories, two years of bitterness, two years of ugly recollections had made its mark. In all his dealings with Thayer, conducted though they might have been at a distance, Barry Houston could not place his finger upon one tangible thing that would reveal his crookedness. But he had suspected; had come to investigate, and to learn, even before he was ready to receive the information, that his suspicions had been, in some wise at least, correct. To follow those suspicions to their stopping ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... then was like a tangible thing, measureless and infinite. But into it faltered almost at once that voice like ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... A tangible clue lay upon the table before him—the silken cord. But it was a clue of such a nature that, whatever deductions an expert detective might have based upon it, Robert Cairn could base none. Dusk was not far off, and ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... who urge that the war should be discontinued, ask us, who are for carrying it on, what tangible reason we have for our hope. But what tangible reason for hope was there at the beginning of the war? Are our affairs darker now? Quite the contrary—miracles have been worked in our favour during the last twenty-two months. General ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... flashed into rage; I leapt erect, and cried: "Could I but grasp my life as sculptors grasp the clay And knead and thrust it into shape again!— If all the scorn of Heaven were but thrown Into the focus of some creature I could clutch!— If something tangible were but vouchsafed me By the cold, far gods!— If they but sent a Reason for the failure of my life I'd answer it; If they but sent a ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... now; she shrank from the next step. It wasn't illogical. She had set out with a purpose in view, and she had not been blind to the danger that she ran, but the prospective and mental encounter with danger did not hold the terror that the tangible, concrete and actual presence of that peril did—and that was ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... has been said to be the English conception of Paradise—namely, "getting on." I look upon it, that "getting on" is a very important matter indeed. I do not mean merely for the sake of the coarse and tangible results of success, but because humanity is so constituted that a vast number of us would never be impelled to those stretches of exertion which make, us wiser and more capable men, if it were not for the absolute necessity of putting on our faculties all the strain they will bear, for the purpose ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... grandfather was run to earth by him as easily as was ever any other criminal in Holmes's grip, a little naked god called Cupid stepped in, saved Raffles from jail, and wrote the word failure across Holmes's docket of the case. I, sir, am the only tangible result of Lord Dorrington's ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... And in this brief and burning play, more than in much of his later writing, I find the reflection of that unique temperament, to which real things are so abstract, and abstract things so coloured and tangible; a temperament in which there is almost too much poetry for a poet—as pure gold, to be worked in, needs ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Human mind labored and struggled and tortured itself for ages, to explain to itself what it felt, without confessing it, to be explicable. A vast crowd of indistinct abstractions, hovering in the imagination, a train of words embodying no tangible meaning, an inextricable labyrinth of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... hidden in the darkness to trap desperate foes, had watched, with bated breath and pounding hearts, for shadowy forms to appear. They were not unaccustomed to danger and the suspense of an ambush. But in the forest they had solid ground beneath their feet. Trees and other tangible objects were all about them. But here everything seemed unreal, almost ghostly. The darkness of the forest was no blacker than the night here in the open. And yet there was no shady covering of leaves to shut out the light—only ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... tasteless lawyers, not many years past, with legal metaphysics, wrangled like the schoolmen, inquiring of each other, "whether the style and ideas of an author were tangible things; or if these were a property, how is possession to be taken, or any act of occupancy made on mere intellectual ideas." Nothing, said they, can be an object of property but which has a corporeal substance; the air and the light, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... parts of the intelligence were broken to her through the medium of Francis, but without any marked result, if exacerbations were not more frequent, ending in deeper depression; as if a wild hope had risen and died away in the absence of anything visible or tangible to justify it to the erring but suspicious judgment of the victim of despair. Other preparations were made; the old servants recalled; and Francis was glorying in the prospect of a restoration of the old ways, if not ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... out of nothing, something visible, tangible, and audible. There is no motion and no sound. I move my arm by the power of will, and I produce both sound and motion. The motion of a body in space is a material phenomenon; for whatever is perceived by the senses is material. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke |
