"Abstraction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... neck. His eyes were blue; his eye-brows highly arched; his nose large; beard covered the upper lip and chin; and so far as an opinion could be formed, from his sitting posture, he was tall and well-made. The expression of his countenance was gentle, and there was an air of introspection and abstraction about it as if he were much in the habit of communing with his own thoughts. The upper part of his person, which only was visible, the rest being hid by the table and depending cloth, was clothed in a black coat or doublet, without ornament or even the appearance of a button, ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... lying almost at full length in the chair, his eyes fixed in dreamy abstraction upon the ceiling. As I came towards him, he drew at the cigarette between his fingers, glanced at me, looked away again, and expelled another mouthful of smoke. He was not interested ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... no children. Physically inferior all his life. Repressed desire for pure science which produced more than a smattering of a great many sciences and made him a hell of an engineer. High idealistic quotient; self sacrifice. Look at him playing chess, making of this very real situation a theoretical abstraction ... like leaving a ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... mythology and ritual; its theology, which was thoroughly saturated with Chaldean erudition, probably did not differ noticeably from the Syrian. At the head of the divine hierarchy it placed as first cause an abstraction, deified Time, the Zervan Akarana of the Avesta. This divinity regulated the revolutions of the stars and in consequence was the absolute master of {151} all things. Ahura Mazda, whose throne was in the heavens, had become the ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... slowly, and so deeply engaged in their own conversation that they did not raise their eyes to observe that there stood a stranger in the path before them. The soldier took advantage of their state of abstraction, and, desirous at once to watch their motions and avoid their observation, he glided beneath one of the huge trees which skirted the path, and whose boughs, sweeping the ground on every side, ensured him against discovery, unless in ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Annette, returning from her abstraction. "What do you mean, 'my sort'?" Her head went ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... Jim. Abstraction had settled upon him. "Say, Mis' Marshall, what if I should drop in an' 'tend ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... Mrs. Stowe endeavored to translate into concrete form certain phases of the institution of slavery, which had been merely an abstraction to the North. Of Senator John Bird, who believed in stringent laws for the apprehension of fugitive ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... uttered these reflections with the utmost vehemence and agitation, his face was again obscured by gloom and despair; his posture was again fixed; and he was falling back into his former state of silent abstraction, when he was suddenly roused by the appearance of the Genius, the sincerity of whose friendship he ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... over-active owing to their thermic environment, and the thermotaxic balance being habitually anomalous, the emergency was not successfully encountered; and this was more particularly the case because the nerve-centres of vital resistance to sudden and extreme thermal abstraction were atrophied." ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... abstracted and thoughtful all that day, and performed no miracles except certain provisions for Winch, and the miracle of completing his day's work with punctual perfection in spite of all the bee-swarm of thoughts that hummed through his mind. And the extraordinary abstraction and meekness of his manner was remarked by several people, and made a matter for jesting. For the most part he was ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... said he, with marked emotion, "is a stay-lace, with golden tags, which belonged to Miss FLORA'S mother. It was handed to me, in the abstraction of his grief, by Miss FLORA'S father, on the day of the funeral; be saying that he could never bear to look upon it again. To you, as Miss FLORA'S future husband, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... back and gazed with a curious abstraction at his antagonist. This was a fat, bearded Frenchman. The Frenchman considered the position, then broke suddenly into jovial expletives, and with an impatient gesture, gathering up the pieces, flung them into their box. He cursed Strickland freely, then, calling for the waiter, ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... The orator's abstraction should change the face, but not the gesture. If the double change takes place simultaneously, there will be no unity. The gesture should be retained and the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... distinguish these several playmates of the child by special characteristics, and enable him to make his first clear analyses or abstractions, since the color is the only point wherein the objects differ. This contrast in color results in the abstraction of color ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... eyebrows, straight, well-shaped nose, short mouth, rather full; round chin—what the deuce are you grinning at, Jervis?" For my friend had suddenly unmasked his batteries and now threatened, like the Cheshire Cat, to dissolve into a mere abstraction of amusement. ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... far out in one of her suppositions. Will Flandin came a good deal about the house, it is true; but Diana hardly knew he was there. If she thought about it at all, she was half glad, because his presence might serve to mask her silence and abstraction. She was conscious of both, and the effort to cover the one and hide the other ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... of speculative abstraction I must have taken the wrong turning, for I presently found myself in a long, narrow passage. I did not remember. I was retracing my steps when there came the sound of rapid footfalls upon stone flags; a little door flew open in the wall close to me, and a small, thick-set man, huddled ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... one of the many who learn to curb the impulse of a charitable intention. She looked out of the window, and pretended not to notice that the culprit had addressed his remark to her. To complete this convenient deafness she gave a simulated little cough of abstraction, which entirely gave ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... ever-present jealousy and apprehension rising, was carried from her moorings. She recalled the evidences of "duty" in Northrup's attitude toward her since his return from King's Forest; his abstraction and periods of ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... impression of sense, unconnected by some rational and speculative principle, can only end in a practical acquaintance with individual objects; the operations of the rational faculties, on the other hand, if allowed to go on without a constant reference of external things, can lead only to empty abstraction and barren ingenuity. Real speculative knowledge demands the combination of the two ingredients—right reason and facts to reason upon. It has been well said, that true knowledge is the interpretation of nature; and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... to claim from the reader, occasionally, a higher consideration. At times, the narrative rises into a far higher key. Most of all it does so at a period of the writer's life where, of necessity, a severe abstraction takes place from all that could invest him with any alien interest; no display that might dazzle the reader, nor ambition that could carry his eye forward with curiosity to the future, nor successes, fixing his ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... perform some professional duty, he spent his time at home, although his family observed that he secluded himself in his office, among his books and gallipots, more than had been his wont, and that he sometimes indulged in moods of silent abstraction, which had never been noticed in his manner until of late. But these changes of demeanor seemed to betoken an enduring sorrow for the loss of his wife, rather than to indicate a desire or an intention to choose a successor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... himself, and gazing open-mouthed at the Professor, when there suddenly occurred an avalanche so peculiar and destructive that it threw the whole party into the utmost consternation. While removing a pile of plates, Gillie, in his abstraction, tripped on a stone, tumbled over the artist, crushed that gentleman's head into Nita's lap, and, descending head foremost, plates and all, into the midst of the feast, scattered very moraine of crockery and bottles all round. It was an appalling ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... truly," said Leo, looking after him, "to dwell through aeons in monotonous misery in order that consciousness may be swallowed up at last in some void and formless abstraction called the 'Utter Peace.' I would rather take my share of a bad world and keep my hope of a better. Also I do not think that he knows anything of Ayesha and ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... allow themselves to be despoiled. The declaration of rights has become their new Gospel: liberty is henceforth the religion of the people. In this shock of opposing interests, all sentiments have become extreme—opinions have assumed the accent of enthusiasm. The country is no longer an abstraction, but a real being, to which we are attached by the happiness it promises to us, and the sacrifices we have made for it. To what point will this patriotism be exalted at the moment now imminent, when the enemies' forces without ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... not some abstraction that haunts the marble halls at Washington. Nor is it our vast dominion on which, like England's, the sun never sets. You will find it rather in workshop and store and factory; it is no more nor less than our men. If the capital at Washington ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... Mahometans; [38] and in every state he defended with equal zeal the divine light of Mount Thabor, a memorable question which consummates the religious follies of the Greeks. The fakirs of India, [39] and the monks of the Oriental church, were alike persuaded, that in the total abstraction of the faculties of the mind and body, the purer spirit may ascend to the enjoyment and vision of the Deity. The opinion and practice of the monasteries of Mount Athos [40] will be best represented in the words of an abbot, who flourished in the eleventh century. "When thou art alone in thy cell," ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... difficult to explain how the same glow which ennobled them to him is conveyed to his readers, the process somehow takes place. We catch the enthusiasm. A word, which strikes us as a bare abstraction in the report of the Censor General, say, or in a collection of poor law returns, gains an entirely new significance when he touches it in the most casual manner. A kind of mellowing atmosphere surrounds all objects in his pages, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... unnecessary archaism, and so is such a phrase as With this Borrow could not away, in the sense of 'this Borrow could not endure.' 'Borrow's abstraction from general society' may, I suppose, pass muster. Pope talks somewhere of a hermit's 'abstraction,' but what is the meaning of saying that the author of Lavengro quartered Castile and Leon 'in the most interesting manner, riding everywhere with his servant'? And what defence can be made for such an expression as 'Scott, and other black beasts of Borrow's'? Black beast for ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... prohibition in her constitution, nor by any act of her legislature. Fortunately, her constitution, like that of most other States, contained a general declaration of human rights, somewhat similar to the "rhetorical abstraction" in the Declaration of Independence. Two or three years before the Federal Convention assembled, a young lawyer, perceiving that the declaration in the constitution had inadvertently made no exclusion of the rights of men with dark complexions, ...
— A Letter to the Hon. Samuel Eliot, Representative in Congress From the City of Boston, In Reply to His Apology For Voting For the Fugitive Slave Bill. • Hancock
... play a role in scholarly communication, and facilitate classroom teaching. SPERBERG-McQUEEN reminded listeners that a written or printed item (e.g., a particular edition of a book) is merely a representation of the abstraction we call a text. To concern ourselves with faithfully reproducing a printed instance of the text, SPERBERG-McQUEEN argued, is to concern ourselves with the representation of a representation ("images as simulacra for the text"). The TEI proponents' interest in images ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... confusion were all the accounts, both personal and official. Mr. Johnson was hardly restrained by his compassion for the orphan from throwing up the executorship in disgust. Mr. Ness roused himself from his scholarlike abstraction to labour at the examination of books, parchments, and papers, for Ellinor's sake. Sir Frank Holster professed himself only a trustee for ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... inquirer may not be that which is considered most fundamental by the experienced man of science; for the success of any physical investigation depends on the judicious selection of what is to be observed as of primary importance, combined with a voluntary abstraction of the mind from those features which, however attractive they appear, we are not yet sufficiently advanced in science to ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... sit by me, Miss Ross?' asked her hostess in a winning voice; and Audrey woke up from her abstraction, colouring and smiling. ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... a moment of abstraction. Again, her eyeglass up, she glanced round the walls—hung, in this octagonal room, with dim-coloured portraits of women, all in wonderful toilets, with wonderful hair and head-gear, all wonderfully young and pleased with things, and all four centuries dead. They caused her ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... A mode that allows a program to transfer bits directly to or from an I/O device (or, under {bogus} systems that make a distinction, a disk file) without any processing, abstraction, or interpretation by the operating system. Compare {rare mode}, {cooked mode}. This is techspeak ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... had opened the telegram he stood with it for a moment in his hand, looking the boy full in the face. His look had in it that peculiar far-away quality that the newspapers were calling "Napoleonic abstraction." In reality he was wondering whether to give the ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... prepared under the direction of the Secretary of the Treasury, and also legislation upon some special questions affecting the business of that Department, more especially the enactment of a law to punish the abstraction of official books or papers from the files of the Government and requiring all such books and papers and all other public property to be turned over by the outgoing officer to his successor; of a law requiring disbursing officers to deposit all public money in the vaults of the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... that he might, in Pagan times, have represented the statue of a water-god bending over his urn, and attentive only to the supplies which it was pouring forth. At length, however, he seemed to recall himself from this state of deep abstraction, drew himself up, and took some coarse food from his pilgrim's scrip, as if suddenly reminded that life is not supported without means. But he had probably something at his heart which affected his ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... a disciple of Korzybski, you came pretty close to confusing orders of abstraction, a couple of times, back there. You showed that Stephen was at home while Rivers was taking that phone call, a little after ten. But when you talk about clearing him completely, aren't you overlooking the possibility that he came back to Rivers's ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... answer but continued my examination while Potts took his seat on the prayer-stool and seemed to go off into one of his fits of abstraction. ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... thing in itself—hence I always hear the expressions of hospitality with pleasure. But, as for the wine, my regard for that beverage is so extreme, and I am so fearful of letting it sate me, that I keep my love for it in the lasting condition of an untried abstraction. Briefly, I quaff immense draughts of wine from the page of Hafiz, but wine from a cup I seldom as ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... that were so, for she remembered his abstraction; his mention of Honor had been a ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... spying within a closed and secret room—the murder on the ninth floor, a murder without trace of wound or weapon. Weapon! He stared again at the tangible evidence he held; then shook his head in perplexed abstraction. No—the man was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... itself venerable to the most enlightened minds; and the night was devoted to the consideration of the causes which contribute to the developement of genius, or of the events which tend to stifle and overwhelm its powers. Every recreation of the stranger in Rome was an effort of the memory, of abstraction, and of fancy.—Society, in this elevated state of enjoyment, surrounded by the greatest works of human creation, and placed amidst the monuments of the most illustrious of mankind,—and that of the Quakers of Pennsylvania, employed in the mechanical industry of felling timber, and amid the ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... anachronism; that is to say, that nineteenth-century men have been asking the Early Ages questions which they could not answer and reading back into early history distinctions which are themselves historical products. Ownership is itself a late abstraction developed out of use. We may say with some certainty that family "ownership" preceded individual ownership, but in what sense there was communal ownership by a whole village it is not ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... disagreeable, which is unlike him, nervous, looking at his watch every few minutes, and he ate almost nothing. He asked twice during the meal on what train Mr. Jamieson and the other detective were coming, and had long periods of abstraction during which he dug his fork into my damask cloth and did not hear when he was spoken to. He refused dessert, and left the table early, excusing himself on the ground that he ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... death, simply considered. But, allegorically taken, its subject is man, according as by his good or ill deserts he renders himself liable to the reward or punishment of Justice." It is the allegory of human life; and not of human life as an abstraction, but of the individual life; and herein, as Mr. Lowell, whose phrase I borrow, has said, "lie its profound meaning and its permanent force." [1] And herein too lie its perennial freshness of interest, and the actuality which makes ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... had fallen from Philip's hands. The people hitherto had acquiesced in their action, and certainly there had not yet been any call for a popular convention, or any other device to ascertain the popular will. It was also difficult to imagine what was the exact entity of this abstraction called the "people" by men who expressed such extreme contempt for "merchants, advocates, town-orators, churls, tinkers, and base mechanic men, born not to command but to obey." Who were the people when ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... be observed, and fall into a gloomy, abstracted mood; from which, when suddenly roused by some loud peal of laughter, or by the touch and voice of some person near, he would sometimes start and look around as one just awakened from a frightful vision. This gloomy abstraction, too, appeared to grow upon him more and more, as the day settled into night and the night wore on, as though he felt some dreaded calamity had been hanging over, and was now about to fall upon him. So apparent was this toward the last, that even the most careless began to observe, ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... a bright idea. Any one familiar with the Peggy disposition would have guessed as much from a number of infallible signs. There were periods of abstraction, characterized by long silences or random replies. There were thoughtful little frowns, and sudden dimpling smiles, all for no reason apparent. And when Peggy reached the point of saying to herself in a ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... proceeds to show that man depicts himself in his God, and that "God is the racial expression"; a pedagogue on the Nile, an abstraction in India, and an astrologer in Chaldaea; where Abraham, says Berosus (Josephus, Ant. I. 7, Sec. 2, and II. 9, Sec. 2) was "skilful in the celestial science." He notices the Akarana-Zaman (endless Time) of the Guebres, and the working dual, Hormuzd and Ahriman. He ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... the smile and the sparkle she was astonishingly like her brother,—both had oval faces, well-marked eyebrows, flexible scarlet lips, and hazel eyes, but the girl's chin was made in a firmer mould, and the expression of dreamy abstraction which characterised the boy's face was on hers ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... wept with pious delight, while Neville, leaning on his children in a posture of penitent adoration, besought Heaven to pardon his own sins, and the sins of his brother De Vallance. So entire was his abstraction, that he was not interrupted by the entrance of Barton, whose countenance expressed a degree of depression ill suited to the joyous character of the times. Dr. Beaumont accosted him by the title ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... goes around with him considerable, there's different ways of lookin' at that; you understand what I mean? You follow me?" For all that, the conversation seemed to languish this evening, partly through some abstraction on the part of Wayne and partly some hesitation in McGee, who appeared to have a greater fear than usual of not expressing himself plainly. It was quite dark in the cabin when at last, detaching himself from his usual lounging place, the door-post, he walked ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... kindness has to touch the mind in the moment of distress; nor did I ever, till now, feel how deeply the eloquence of true piety sinks into the heart. This excellent friend will, I hope, in time restore me to my better self. From the abstraction, the selfishness of passion, I think I am already somewhat recovered. After being wholly absorbed by one sentiment, I begin to feel again the influence of other motives, and to waken to the returning sense of social duty. Among the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... is, for instance, "Pictor Ignotus," one of the earlier poems! The painter is no longer unknown, for his mood betrays and describes him. It is not merely his speaking in the first person which saves him from melting into an abstraction, but it is that the "I" takes flesh and lives; the poet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... willing wings the flight of Hope up and on to an ideal heaven. The voice of Mrs. Fairfax, speaking to a servant in the hall, wakened you: and how curiously you smiled to and at yourself, Janet! There was much sense in your smile: it was very shrewd, and seemed to make light of your own abstraction. It seemed to say—'My fine visions are all very well, but I must not forget they are absolutely unreal. I have a rosy sky and a green flowery Eden in my brain; but without, I am perfectly aware, lies at my feet a rough ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... a twist of the wheel, had made the arbiter of his life. Even to one so young and inexperienced, it was impossible to know Andrew Henderson and not to feel that some strange peculiarity set him apart from other men. In his ascetic face, in his large, light-blue eyes, in his extraordinary air of abstraction and aloofness from mundane things, there was something that fascinated and repelled; and with a wondering interest the boy studied these things, trying in his unformed way to reconcile them with his narrow experience ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... Pao-ch'ai played for a time with a twig of olea she held in her hand, then resting on the window-sill, she plucked the petals, and threw them into the water, attracting the fish, which went by, to rise to the surface and nibble at them. Hsiang-yn, after a few moments of abstraction, urged Hsi Jen and the other girls to help themselves to anything they wanted, and beckoned to the servants, seated at the foot of the hill, to eat to their heart's content. Tan Ch'un, in company with Li Wan and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... had, indeed, acquired in all the circles which I frequented, an extraordinary reputation. Numerous instances of his sagacity were quoted and some of them exhibited on the spot. Much surprise was excited by the readiness with which he appeared to comprehend sentences of considerable abstraction and complexity, though, he in reality, attended to nothing but the movements of hand or fingers with which I accompanied my words. I enhanced the astonishment of some and excited the ridicule of others, by observing that my dog not only understood English when spoken by others, but actually ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... proposed lease of range that took him out of their small circle for a time, Hopalong rode farther and farther into the northwest, frequently lost in abstraction which, judging by its effect upon him, must have been caused by something serious. He had not heard from Dave Wilkes about that individual's good horse which had been loaned to Ben Ferris, of Winchester. Did Dave think ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... The abstraction of the specie completed, the sentries set by the dining-room door, as also those sent to guard the entrance-gate, are called off; and the band becomes reunited by the treasure, ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... some measure of the skill which in Paradise Lost has made impossible beings possible to the imagination, we may find it in contrasting them with the incarnated abstraction and spirit voices, which we encounter at every turn in Shelley, creatures who leave behind them no more distinct impression than that we have been in a dream ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... regle du sujet singulier est observee huit cent trente-cinq fois, et violee sept fois seulement; encore dois-je dire que cinq de ces violations se rencontrent dans une meme charte, celle du mois de mai 1278, qui n'est connue que par une copie faite au siecle dernier. Si l'on fait abstraction de ce texte, il reste deux violations contre huit cent trente-cinq observations de la regle. La regle du sujet pluriel est observee cinq cent quartre-vingt-huit fois, et violee six fois: ce qui donne au total ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... than the biography of great men. Through a succession of individuals we trace the character and destiny of nations. THE PEOPLE glide away from us, a sublime but intangible abstraction, and the voice of the mighty Agora reaches us only through the medium of its representatives to posterity. The more democratic the state, the more prevalent this delegation of its history to the few; since it ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the stand and a new witness, from the mayor's office, was called, with no happier results. He, too, was about to be excused when Dr Johnson, who represented Science on the committee, descended from Himalayan abstraction to demand what effect the oil had had ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... business to read men. Quickly he put together the bits he had gathered from Harmony on the staircase, added to them Peter's despondent attitude, his strained face, the abstraction which required a touch on the arm from his companion when they reached their destination, recalled Peter outside the door of Harmony's room in the Pension Schwarz—and built him a little story that was not far ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... recently that physicists are now divided into two opposing schools according to the way in which they view the subject of energy, some regarding it as a mere mathematical abstraction and others looking upon it as a physical entity, filling space and continuously migrating by definite paths from one place to another. It may be added that there are numerous factions within these two parties; ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... of that period were so cumbrous and slowly worked, and so inaccurate in their aim, that the advantage of occupying a position that would prevent an enemy from firing down into a town was considered to be more than counterbalanced by the weakening of the garrison by the abstraction of the force required to man the detached work, and by the risk of their being surrounded and cut off without the garrison of the town being ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... soldiers, men of family, who rose and saluted as he passed, and not an officer in the regiment was more exact or scrupulous in his recognition of such soldier courtesy as Blakely had ever been. They wondered, therefore, at his strange abstraction. They wondered more, looking after him, when, just as his stumbling pony reached the crest, the rider reined him in and halted short in evident embarrassment. They could not see what he saw—two young girls in gossamer ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... emancipation from intellectual narrowness and the bondage of injurious convention. But Browning in his verse, setting aside the early Strafford, nowhere celebrates a popular political movement; he nowhere chaunts a paean, in the manner of Byron or Shelley, in honour of the abstraction "Liberty." Nor does he anywhere study political phenomena or events except as they throw light upon an individual character. Things and persons that gave him offence he could summarily dismiss from his mind—"Thiers is a rascal; ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... afterward, the captain taking a seat at his desk and Foster standing like a sentinel at the closed door. The captain, after examining a number of papers, glancing round from time to time as if to note whether or not the Judge had come out of his abstraction, ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... Greek, was making eager and indecorous love to one of the women at the other table. Another of the latter had just ventured on some light badinage with the chief guest, in whose face smiles had chased away all the abstraction of the earlier hours. He answered her as lightly, but with indifference, and turned ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... had approached close to the subject of their conversation; and Ellen had a moment's space for observation before he started from the abstraction in which he was plunged. The result of her scrutiny was ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sickness, and sight to her blindness. Through the mist of the unknown by which she felt herself encompassed, she distinguished clearly his devotion, his abnegation, his courage. Heroism in immaterial regions has an outline; she distinguished this sublime outline. In the inexpressible abstraction in which thought lives unlighted by the sun, Dea perceived this mysterious lineament of virtue. In the surrounding of dark things put in motion, which was the only impression made on her by reality; in the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... there are so many kings. But there is one real advantage (among many real disadvantages) in the method of abstract democracy, and that is this: that under impersonal government politics are so much more personal. In France and America, where the State is an abstraction, political argument is quite full of human details—some might even say of inhuman details. But in England, precisely because we are ruled by personages, these personages do not permit personalities. In England names are honoured, and therefore names are suppressed. ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... Through his abstraction Balder felt on his hand a touch soft as the flowing of a breath, yet pregnant of indefinite apprehension. When two clouds meet, there is a hush and calm; but the first seeming-trifling lightning-flash brings on the storm whereby earth's face is altered. So Balder, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... owing to his lameness; to a wholesome consciousness of his own social defects; or an inordinate passion for reading cheap scientific textbooks, which did not, however, add fluency nor conviction to his speech. Neither had he the abstraction of a student, for his accounts were kept with an accuracy which struck us, who dealt at the store, as ignobly practical, and even malignant. Possibly we might have expressed this opinion more strongly but for a certain rude vigor ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... by the jeweller's wife, who, disquieted by those alarms which ever attend guilt, sent one of her female slaves to watch her husband. This slave, on seeing her master speak to the astrologer, drew near; and when she heard Ahmed, after some moments of abstraction, compare a woman to a poisonous dragon, she was satisfied that he must know everything. She ran to her mistress, and, breathless with fear, cried, "You are discovered by a vile astrologer! Before six hours ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... we have to do what the cinematograph does with the film—that is, introduce or rather, re-introduce movement.[Footnote: Creative Evolution, pp. 320- 324 (Fr. pp. 328-332).] The stiff photograph is an abstraction bereft of movement, so, too, our intellectual views of the world and of our own nature are static instead of being dynamic. Human life is not made up of childhood, adolescence, manhood, and old age as "states," although we tend to speak of it in this ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... would she allow the life of any other people to be endurable. Sleep is her great gift; her body has been wonderfully constituted to take a great deal of ease. Deprive her of that, and you starve her as effectually as you famish a human being by abstraction of food. Her personal appearance confirms her philosophy; for you can detect not one particle of restlessness about her. All is soft, rounded, and woolly, as if she carried an atmosphere ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... faced about again after the interval of abstraction there were fine lines of harassment between his eyes, and his words came as if speech were costing ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... from an earlier age; that she is a house-keeper cumbered and encompassed by minute cares largely of her own making. It is an easy guess that, for Eliza Marshall, London is in another world, that Tangier is but a remote and impracticable abstraction, and that all her strength and fortitude might be necessary merely to make the ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... clue. My passengers observed my preoccupation, and endeavoured—for some time unavailingly—to withdraw me from it; at length, however, the consciousness dawned upon me that my peculiar behaviour must appear to them decidedly discourteous. I therefore aroused myself, threw off my abstraction, and apologised; explaining that I had been endeavouring to recall the details of a dream in which I seemed to have discovered the long-sought key to the secret of my ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... of the boat and a sudden dash of ice-cold spray roused the captain from the fit of abstraction into which the sinking of his ship ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... one long accustomed to authority. He seemed a man born after his time, and worthy to have lived and acted in the high and palmy days of Venice. After attending the archduke to the steps of the dais at the upper end of the hall, he made his bow, and began to pace the floor in seeming abstraction from the gay scene around him. Arrested in his progress by the numerous groups which, after saluting the archduke, had again collected around the counsellor's lady, he paused in returning conciousness; and, looking for the cause of such unwonted attraction, was enabled, by his lofty stature, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... when I was a girl, partook of a similar obscurity, created by tarnish and dust. I inquired whether I might call the maid, and be conducted to a bedroom! Mr. Earnshaw vouchsafed no answer. He walked up and down, with his hands in his pockets, apparently quite forgetting my presence; and his abstraction was evidently so deep, and his whole aspect so misanthropical, that I ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... although they thus distinguish the principal qualities of character and conduct with appropriate adjectival terms, they have no substantival terms for the virtues and vices, and that they have not fully accomplished the processes of abstraction implied by the appropriate use ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... fleeting splendors of thought pass like stars. Well, the man of the south cares naught for that sort of paradise. The vein of real sensation is freely, perpetually open, open to life. The side that pertains to abstraction, to logic, is ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... halcyon blue of the calmest, loveliest sky that ever made perfect weather, till late afternoon when it began to glide almost insensibly downward towards earth. Then she roused herself from her long abstraction and looked through the window of her cabin, watching what seemed to be the gradual rising of the land towards the air-ship, showing in little green and brown patches like the squares of a chess-board,—then the houses and towns, tiny as children's toys—then the azure gleam of the sea ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... circumstances in my life. Though then but two-and-twenty, I had for several years read his works with delight and instruction, and had the highest reverence for their author, which had grown up in my fancy into a kind of mysterious veneration, by figuring to myself a state of solemn abstraction, in which I supposed him to live in the immense metropolis of London. Mr Gentleman, a native of Ireland, who passed some years in Scotland as a player, and as an instructor in the English language, ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... definite explanation to be given of one effect produced by the Lyrical Ballads. God is nowhere formally deposed, and Wordsworth would have been the last man to say that he had lost his faith in the God of his fathers. But his real God is not the God of the Church, but the God of the hills, the abstraction Nature, and to this my reverence was transferred. Instead of an object of worship which was altogether artificial, remote, never coming into genuine contact with me, I had now one which I thought to be real, one in which literally I could live and move and have my being, an actual fact ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... and mountains, trees and rivers, are worshipped; so too are both useful and noxious animals.[87] Childish as it seems to us the worship of spirits is at least an advance upon this. It presupposes a certain power of reflection and abstraction by which men were led to conclude that intelligence and will are not necessarily bound up with a body that can be seen and touched. Life has been mobilized, if we may use such a phrase, and thus we arrive at polydemonism; by which we ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... always equal to ourselves, and that we shall not allow our power of acting to be paralyzed through any mutations of fortune. Passive habit is not to be confounded with obtuseness in receiving impressions, a blank abstraction from the affair in hand which at bottom is found to be nothing more than a selfishness which desires to be left undisturbed: it is simply composure of mind in view of changes over which we have no control. While we ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... pursued their art studies that afternoon with a certain abstraction. Peachy worked with her left wrist poised, so that she could obtain a perpetual view of the new gold watch that had arrived by post that morning; Delia frittered her time shamelessly; Esther was guilty of ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... certainly if every one had not known Edward to be the most heedless of men, the confusion would have justified them in thinking him a dishonest one. Things had been done in his name by Maddox that might have made a stranger think him guilty of the rest, but to those who had ever known his abstraction, and far more his real honour and uprightness, nothing could ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that govern psychical phenomena are as occult as the abstraction of the "fourth division of space"; and they defy the realism of common-place probability, mock all analysis, and annihilate distance. When Beryl had first met the keen scrutiny of Mr. Dunbar's glittering ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... which I perceived a coach with four horses and a service of plate. It was, however, driven away before I could decipher it, by positive bodily pain, occasioned by my elder brother Tom, who, having been directed by my father to snuff the candles, took the opportunity of my abstraction to insert a piece of the still ignited cotton into my left ear. But as my story is not a very short one, I must not dwell too long on its commencement. I shall therefore inform the reader, that my father, ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... he did! Why shouldn't he?" challenged Betty, coming out of her abstraction and smiling gayly. ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... observing its general drift and scope in Mr. Mayhew's manner; and his eyes glowed with admiration for her winning tact and kindness. The glance he bent upon her was perhaps more ardent and approving than he was aware, for she, looking up from the abstraction which the recent conversation had occasioned, seemed strangely affected by it, for she trembled and her face blanched with a sudden pallor, while her eyes were riveted ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... member of parliament in Yorkshire; and burned a whole batch of baked hair to ashes, while singing Moore's 'When he who adores thee,' in attitude, before a block, dressed up for the occasion with a fashionable wig upon it—to say nothing of my having, in a fit of abstraction, given a beautiful young lady, who was going that same evening to a Lord Mayor's ball, the complete charity-workhouse cut, leaving her scalp as bare as the back of my hand. But cheer up!—to my happy astonishment, sir, matters worked like a charm. What a parley-vooing and billet-dooing passed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... who knew few of his letters at four; and was superannuated—such was his impenetrability to learning—at the age of five from the school of which his father had been master. He was moreover till the age of six and a half so frequently subject to long fits of abstraction and of apparently causeless crying that his mother and grandmother feared for his reason and thought him 'an absolute fool.' We are told also by his sister—and there is no incongruity in the two accounts—that he early displayed a taste for 'preheminence and would preside over his playmates ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... word's strictly intellectual concomitants, poetry, even while rousing emotion, brings into play what is most different to emotion, emotion's sifter and chastener, the great force which reduces all things to abstraction, to the eternal and typical: reason. You cannot express in words, even the most purely instinctive, half-conscious feeling, without placing that dumb and blind emotion in the lucid, balanced relations which thought has given to words; indeed, words rarely, if ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... in all the examples, all the features given under analysis and fail at the same time to abstract and generalize. The fact is that in such lessons, if the selection, or analysis, is completed in only one example, abstraction and generalization implicitly unfold themselves at the same time and constitute a relating, or synthetic, act of the mind. The fourfold arrangement of the matter, however, may let the teacher see more fully the children's mental ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... de Rudolstadt, Albert, loves Consuelo, which seems, in the conduct of the relation, a type of a religious democracy in love with the spirit of art. We do not mean that any such cold abstraction is consciously intended, but all that is said means this. It shadows forth one of the greatest desires ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... part of Barker's speech completely, in her fit of abstraction, had some vague idea that he was asking her advice ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... me and very seldom to charm. Herbin, who was another of those who about the year 1910 were modifying natural forms in obedience to Cubist theory, has since gone all lengths in the direction of pure abstraction: his art is none the better for it. Valloton, so far as I can remember, was much where Herbin was. Now apparently he aims at the grand tragic; an aim which rarely fails to lead its votaries by way of the grand academic. Perhaps such aspirations can express themselves ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... to set out with a bare affirmation of it is merely to beg the question and to abandon the discussion. Doubtless, by the mere act of consulting their own consciousness, the fact now in dispute appears to some persons self-evident. But in matters of such high abstraction as this, even the evidence of self-evidence must not be relied upon too implicitly. To the country boor it appears self-evident that wood is annihilated by combustion; and even to the mind of the ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... throw out still more clearly the angelic purity of Desdemona, Shakspeare has in Emilia associated with her a companion of doubtful virtue. From the sinful levity of this woman it is also conceivable that she should not confess the abstraction of the handkerchief when Othello violently demands it back: this would otherwise be the circumstance in the whole piece the most difficult to justify. Cassio is portrayed exactly as he ought to be to excite suspicion ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... candles in the drawing-room, Margery, and then, child, go to your bed,' said the young lady, awakening from an abstraction. 'I don't mind dreams, Tamar, nor fortune-tellers—I've dreamed so many good dreams, and no good ever came of them. But talking of Stanley reminds me of trouble and follies that I can't help, or prevent. He has left the army, Tamar, and I don't ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... pleasant life ran on in the most agreeable absorption and abstraction from the world outside. "Don't ask any one else; why should we have any one else?" they all said, except Janey, who had condescended to appear in the evening in her best frock, though she was not admitted at dinner, and ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... courtesans, generals, prelates, priests, bourgeois and servants. A hunchback made a fortune by lending his back as a desk; lacqueys became masters in a day, and a parvenu foot-man, by force of habit, jumped up behind his own carriage in a fit of abstraction. The inevitable catastrophe came at the end of 1719. The Prince of Conti was observed taking away three cartloads of silver in exchange for his paper; a panic ensued, every holder sought to realise, and ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... standard or typical arrangement as just mentioned. The intrinsic value of this type is shown by the facility with which all varieties of form or arrangement may be explained by reference to certain modifications of it. It must, however, be considered as an abstraction, and should be looked on in the light rather of a scaffolding, which enables us to see the building and its several parts, than of the edifice itself, but which latter, from our imperfect knowledge and limited powers, we could not see ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... Have you imagined that when I sent for Diego Martinez to come to me at Turruegano and instructed him touching the surrender of those two chests of documents, that I did not also instruct him carefully touching the abstraction in the first instance of a few serviceable papers and the renewal of the seals that should conceal the fact that he had tampered with the chests? If you have thought that, you have done me less than justice. There had been so much correspondence between Philip and ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini |
