"Arbitrary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... don't pay too much attention to the rather arbitrary rules on painting laid down by the Painters' Union. Life is too short. For instance, I don't put my brushes in turpentine when I have finished for the day; and if I do I put the green brush and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... thinking may be carried on without any overt, definite use of laws and principles, as in constructive imagination or in apperception, but, if this is so, it seems better to call the thinking by one of the other names. Of course this classification is somewhat arbitrary, but there can be no question that types of thinking do differ. As has already been noted, some psychologists have used the terms thinking and reasoning as synonyms, but such usage has resulted in confusion and has not been of practical value. It is only as the mental process ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... with the usual thick-headed official lack of imagination, with the result that the excess paid was deducted from his slender salary. With a man of less conscience this condition would easily have been offset by another wherein other rates, less arbitrary, would have been adjusted to negotiate the official deficit. With Orion Clemens such a remedy was not even considered; yielding, unstable, blown by every wind of influence though he was, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... at its pleasure with the lives and properties of citizens?—criminals though they might be, what right had Cicero to strangle citizens in dungeons without trial? If this was to be allowed, the constitution was at an end; Rome was no longer a republic, but an arbitrary oligarchy. Pompey's name was on every tongue. When would Pompey come? Pompey, the friend of the people, the terror of the aristocracy! Pompey, who had cleared the sea of pirates, and doubled the area of the Roman dominions! Let Pompey return and bring ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... narrow and fretted arch, as the minute-hand moved round and round the dial of the old clock. At length assuming to himself the command, which in those times was as willingly ceded to the Reformed minister as it had formerly been to the not more arbitrary Catholic priest, he ordered the procession "to tarry no longer the coming of him whose feet were shod with heaviness, but to depart forthwith in the name of ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... speed; in what particular points of this variable course, which varies in velocity, but can never stop till Time itself stops, does revolution begin and end; cease to be ordinary mutation, and again become such? It is a thing that will depend on definition more or less arbitrary. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... as if Maria Dolores could hear the words. But Winthorpe, calm and smiling, would not be moved. John shook his head, muttered, shrugged his shoulders, threw up his hands, muttered again. "Was ever such pig-headed obstinacy! Was ever such arbitrary, voluntary blindness! I give you up, for a perverse, a triple-pated madman!" And so, John muttering and frowning, Winthorpe serenely smiling, reiterating, they passed round the corner of the Castle buildings, and were lost to Maria ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... reception which the Chilian squadron has met with from you not only shews the generosity of your sentiments, but proves that a people capable of asserting their independence in spite of arbitrary power must always possess noble and exalted feelings. Believe me, that the state of Chili will ever be grateful for your assistance, and more especially the Supreme Director, by whose exertions the squadron was created, and to whom, in fact, South America ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... the disastrous termination of the six weeks' acquaintance. A troublesome form, and an arbitrary custom, however, prescribe that a story should have a conclusion, in addition to a commencement; we have therefore no alternative. Lieutenant Slaughter brought a message—the captain brought an action. Mr. Joseph ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... smiled to think of man's arbitrary distinction between that which has life and that which has not. Here, quite apart from such recognisable sounds as the scampering of mice, the falling of plaster behind his panelling, and the popping of purses or coffins from his fire, was a ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... held sacred by all true Americans, would be angrily dissolved, and sectional political combinations would be formed with the newly admitted foreign states, unnatural and adverse to the peace and prosperity of the country. The civil government, with all the arbitrary powers it might assume, would be unable to control the storm. The usurper would find himself in his proper element; and, after acting the patriot and the hero for a due season, as the only means ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... reverend pastor exults in this "leading in triumph," because truly Louis the Sixteenth was "an arbitrary monarch"; that is, in other words, neither more nor less than because he was Louis the Sixteenth, and because he had the misfortune to be born King of France, with the prerogatives of which a long line of ancestors, and a long acquiescence ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... concern the mechanism of intelligence. We have said that the function of intelligence is to establish relations. Let us determine more precisely the nature of these relations. On this point we are bound to be either vague or arbitrary so long as we see in the intellect a faculty intended for pure speculation. We are then reduced to taking the general frames of the understanding for something absolute, irreducible and inexplicable. The understanding must have ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... solution was found by requiring that such aids should not be levied except with the consent of the Great Council, which consisted of the lords spiritual and temporal. They tried to set limits to the arbitrary imprisonments that had been hitherto the order of the day, by definite reference to the law of the land and the verdict of sworn men. But these are just the weightiest points on which personal freedom and security of property rest; and how to ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... to whisper in the king's ear, that the principles of loyalty in the Church of England, were wholly inconsistent with the Revolution.[7] Hence began the early practice of caressing the dissenters, reviling the universities, as maintainers of arbitrary power, and reproaching the clergy with the doctrines of divine-right, passive obedience and non-resistance.[8] At the same time, in order to fasten wealthy people to the new government, they proposed those pernicious ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... changed guides at the next native village, fearing that Binhart might have grown too intimate with the old ones. He was swayed by an ever-increasing fear of intrigues. He coerced his flagging will into a feverish watchfulness. He became more arbitrary in his movements and exactions. When the chance came, he purchased a repeating Lee-Enfield rifle, which he packed across his sweating back on the trail and slept with under his arm at night. When a morning came when he was ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... Protestants of Ireland." The other was that the Imperial Legislature should by statute make it impossible for any landlord in Ireland to commit three wrongs,—"first, the wrong of abusing his rights by arbitrary eviction; secondly, by exacting an exorbitant rent; thirdly, by appropriating to his own use the improvements effected by the industry of ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... time of our residence in Brazil, was nothing less than constitutional. This is sufficiently proved by the tumultuary arrest of the above-mentioned three Ministers, by the arbitrary dispersion of the Deputies from the provinces, called together expressly to form a Constitutional Assembly, and by the expression of the Emperor, that he required unconditional submission, even if he should ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... and an act was passed directing peremptorily the allowance of an injunction on the prayer of the State grantees, and the seizure of any hostile boat at the commencement of the suit. Litigation was thus effectually arrested in New York, though by an arbitrary and unconstitutional enactment, and the waters of the State remained in the exclusive possession of Fulton and his partner during the lifetime of the former. A similar controversy with Colonel Aaron Ogden, of New Jersey, was compromised by advantageous concessions, which ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... end of my journey I reached Ganhard, which was formerly one of the most prosperous towns in Central India, but is now much decayed and governed by a wealthy, arbitrary, violent, generous, and cruel prince. His name is Rajah Maddan, a true Oriental potentate, delicate and barbarous, affable and sanguinary, combining feminine ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... to whom it is not, they who have arrived at a systematic view of the Universe, and they who behold it only in its elements or only in obscure chaos—all, notwithstanding, should be only one, for one band surrounds them all and they can be totally separated only by a violent and arbitrary force; every specific combination is nothing but an integral part of the whole; its peculiar characteristics are almost evanescent, and are gradually lost in outlines that become more and more indistinct; and at least those who feel themselves ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... the Huk home-world. It seemed insolently to remain there. In a matter of seconds it appeared at another place—a hundred fifty thousand miles out, but off to one side. It seemed arrogantly to remain there, too—in a second place at the same time. Then it appeared, with the arbitrary effect a ship does give when coming out of overdrive, at a third place a hundred seventy-five thousand miles from the planet. At a fourth place barely eighty thousand miles short of collision with the Huk world. At ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... was much more marked than its acerbity. In many places he shows Greek reflections, for he had received a liberal education, duly completed at Athens. But his philosophy did not consist of dreamy theories and arbitrary rules—it was directed to practical ends, to the harmonizing of the feelings, and the elevation of society. As a man of the world, he was not carried away by fancies, nor given to exaggerated views; and as a companion of ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... no hostility to the General Government, and she was driven to the necessity of deciding whether or not her citizens should be used for the subjugation of the Southern States, her people and their representative, the State government, repelled the arbitrary assumption of authority by military force to control ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... nature should be only a mechanism, without expression and without beauty; lest the God who made us should be like us only in this, that he too was selfish and mean and proud; lest his ideas should resemble those that inhabit the brain of a retired money-maker, or of an arbitrary monarch claiming a divine right — instead of towering as the heavens over the earth, above the loftiest moods of highest poet, most generous child, or most devoted mother. I do not mean that these thoughts took these ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... and Lord Clanricarde, his to Miss Gallatin. Here occurred a touch of character that is worthy to be mentioned, as showing of how very little account an American, male or female, is in the estimation of a European, and how very arbitrary are the laws of etiquette among our English cousins. Mr. Canning actually gave way to his son-in-law, leaving the oldest of the two ladies to come after the youngest, because, as a marquis, his son-in-law took precedence of a commoner! This was out of place in America, at least, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Though there is something arbitrary in this mode of valuation, it is, perhaps, on the whole the best; and its result is extremedy handy for the memory (as somebody has pointed out) ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... baby colony of Georgia. James Oglethorpe, a kind-hearted man, with a wig that fooled more than one poor child of the forest, conceived the idea of founding a refuge for Englishmen who could not pay up. The laws were very arbitrary then, and harsh to a degree. Many were imprisoned then in England for debt, but those who visit London now will notice that they ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... the fact clearly focussed, with its less clearly defined fringe: Bergson's sweeping assumption of the existence of a further vast field of virtual knowledge in order to account for it, does, at first sight, seem arbitrary and unwarranted and in. need of considerable justification before it can be accepted. For him the problem then becomes, not to account for our knowing as much as we do, but to see why it is that we do not know a great deal more: why our actual knowledge does not cover the whole field ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... always been engaged in an opposite party to Somerset; and it was not likely that factions which had secretly prevailed even during the arbitrary reign of Henry, should be suppressed in the weak administration that usually attends a minority. The former nobleman, that he might have the greater leisure for attending to public business, had, of himself and from his own authority, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher opposition of poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary psychology of the last century, and with it the prejudice that there can be but one only beauty of prose style, I propose here to point out certain qualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they apply to the literature of fact, apply still ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... respects the rights even of brute matter and arbitrary symbols. If he writes the same word twice in succession, by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not the first-comer the prior right? This act of abstract justice, which I trust many of my readers, like myself, have often performed, is a curious anti-illustration, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... this evidently point out the origin of "Jim-jam bugs" in No. IX, and the better known modern synonym for brain, "bug-house," but it indicates the arbitrary tendency of all language to create gradations of caste in parts of speech. It is to this mysterious influence by which some words become "elegant" or "poetic," and others "coarse" or "unrefined," that we owe the contempt in which slang is held ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... I gave, and notwithstanding Colonel Littlefield's good intentions, I blush to tell you that the party returned loaded with plunder. Sir, till now, I never wished for arbitrary power. I could gibbet half a dozen good whigs, with all the venom of an inveterate tory. The party had not been returned an hour, before I had six or seven persons from New-Rochelle and Frog's Neck, with piteous applications for ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... of her, and often infects her, is free from any responsibility. Moreover, the State has no right to act against responsible persons under the pretext that their future sentiments or actions would have dangerous consequences for others; this would lead to arbitrary abuse of power. The insane, and habitual criminals make the only exceptions, for their abnormal and irresponsible cerebral organization is ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... tell you off-hand that this is a father-complex dream. Certain symbols seem to be put into complex catalogues. But it is all too arbitrary. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... finished the constitutional party and overthrew Redmond's power. We had incurred the very great odium of accepting even temporary partition—and a partition which, owing to this arbitrary extension of area, could not be justified on any ground of principle; we had involved with us many men who voted for that acceptance on the faith of Redmond's assurance that the Government were bound by their written word; and now ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... and a lover: The man is supposed to be the lover, the woman the beloved. Now, in the urge of power, it is the reverse. The woman must submit, but deeply, deeply submit. Not to any foolish fixed authority, not to any foolish and arbitrary will. But to something deep, deeper. To the soul in its dark motion of power and pride. We must reverse the poles. The woman must now submit—but deeply, deeply, and richly! No subservience. None of that. No slavery. A deep, unfathomable ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... perhaps that the English was a good deal better than usual There can therefore be no possible reason for erecting an artificial barrier between him and his readers of to-day, especially as that barrier would be not only artificial but entirely arbitrary. I shall however return to this point in some prefatory remarks ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... the year, was the conscription of a regiment of Christian soldiers by the Persian government. This was made in that arbitrary and oppressive manner, in which Moslems deal with their Christian subjects. The Romanists, also, taking advantage of the edict of toleration, and relying on French protection, became very unscrupulous and troublesome. Mar Shimon, having been recognized by ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... particular objects. A great deal of the furniture of ancient tyranny is worn to rags; the rest is entirely out of fashion. Besides, there are few statesmen so very clumsy and awkward in their business as to fall into the identical snare which has proved fatal to their predecessors. When an arbitrary imposition is attempted upon the subject, undoubtedly it will not bear on its forehead the name of Ship-money. There is no danger that an extension of the Forest laws should be the chosen mode of oppression in this age. And when we hear any instance of ministerial rapacity ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... his life, and no better life than one written by himself. The old style of criticism, which strove to separate an author's productions from his life, and even from the age in which he lived, to set up an arbitrary canon of taste, and to select one or two great painters or poets as ideals because they seemed to illustrate that canon, has passed away. We are beginning to feel that art is a part of history and of physiology. That is to say, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Disposition is of a very different Turn: Her Thoughts are wholly bent upon Conquest and arbitrary Power. That she has some Wit and Beauty no Body denies, and therefore has the Esteem of all her Acquaintance as a Woman of an agreeable Person and Conversation; but (whatever her Husband may think of it) that is not sufficient for Honoria: She waves that Title to Respect as a mean Acquisition, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... couldn't it be done on a voluntary basis?" Bassett demanded. "These arbitrary rulings are bound to result in frustrations. And can you imagine what will happen to the individual family constellations? Take a couple that already has two youngsters, as of now. Suppose the wife submits to the inoculations for her next child and it's born with a size-mutation. ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... sympathy with the mass of the poor, anxious not merely to rescue them from the oppressions of the rich, but also to create in them habits of self-relying industry; lastly, during his temporary possession of a power altogether arbitrary, not merely an absence of all selfish ambition, but a rare discretion in seizing the mean between conflicting exigencies. In reading his poems we must always recollect that what now appears commonplace was once new, so that to his comparatively unlettered age the social ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... reduction to the absurd, we have not been so unfortunate as to discover it. Mr. Wilson is a man who, to use Carlyle's favorite expression, has "swallowed all formulas." The principles that have generally been held to govern the use of language appear to him mere arbitrary rules, invented by the "sevenfold censorship" and the Spanish Inquisition, for the purpose of preventing the free communication of ideas. All such trammels he rejects; and, accordingly, we have to thank him, so far as mere style ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... as it is on testimony alone (and which so often compels him to renounce to-day what he thought certain yesterday),—may be not unjustly considered as more allied to Faith than Reason. It may be said, perhaps, that the above classification of the truths received by Reason and Faith respectively is arbitrary; that even as to some of their alleged sources, they are not always clearly distinguishable; that the evidence of experience may in some sort be reduced to testimony,—that of sense, and testimony reduced to experience,—that of human veracity under given circumstances; both being founded upon ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... of a lapse of sixty years, the historian who attempts to portray the era of Lincoln is still faced with almost impossible demands and still confronted with arbitrary points of view. It is out of the question, in a book so brief as this must necessarily be, to meet all these demands or to alter these points of view. Interests that are purely local, events that did not with certainty contribute to the final outcome, gossip, as well ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... of Evan's has put up a dozen tasteful, but inexpensive, Colonial cottages, and Evan has planned the grounds that surround them, about an acre being allotted to each house, for lawn and garden of summer vegetables, though no arbitrary boundaries separate the plots. The houses are intended for people of refined taste and moderate means who, only being able to leave town during the school vacation, from middle June to late September, yet desire to have a bit of garden to tend and to have flowers about ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... You ought to direct your whole endeavors to giving the king views tending to peace, and especially to the relief of the people, to moderation, to equity, to mistrust of harsh and violent measures, to horror for acts of arbitrary authority, and finally to love of the Church, and to assiduity in seeking good pastors for it." Neither Fenelon nor Madame de Maintenon had seen in the revocation of the edict of Nantes "an act of arbitrary authority, or a harsh and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... If these facts, and the actual prosperity of these islands could be generally known throughout the South, it would do more to induce the whites to take hold of the freed-labor system than all the general orders and arbitrary commands that General ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... which brought the news of his younger brother's death, visibly fretting over it long afterwards. Still, for the most part, in their perfect health, nothing seemed to reach them but their own boyish ordinances, their own arbitrary "form." It was an absolute indifference; most striking when they lifted their well-trained voices to sing in choir, vacant as the sparrows, while the eloquent, far-reaching, aspiring words floated melodiously from them, sometimes, with truly medieval license, singing ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... up to Garry for a decision and as he was the leader his word always went, though he was never arbitrary and generally talked things over before ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... year or two of education, when our best opportunities occur, some insight will be gained into the deeper meaning of all these things. It may then be understood that they are something more than arbitrary rules; there may come the understanding of what is beautiful in human intercourse, of the excellence of self-restraint, the loveliness of perfect service. If this can be seen it will tone down all that is too uncontrolled and make self-restraint acceptable, and will deal with the conventions ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... mistake," said he; "of course that constable was very arbitrary in his manner, but he IS the constable, just the same. I inquired and found that he is. The arrest was perfectly legal. You had much better stay in jail until morning, and submit to a fine which would probably be merely nominal. ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... a literary form. This is for others, not for himself; consequently he must, before all things, desire to be intelligible, and to be so he must adapt his expressions to the mental condition of his audience. If he employs arbitrary symbols, such as old words in new and unexpected senses, he may be clear as daylight to himself, but to others, dark as fog. And the difficulty of original writing lies in this, that what is new and individual must find expression in old symbols. This difficulty can only be mastered by a peculiar ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... his triumph at the polls in 1857, Lord Palmerston had been somewhat arbitrary in his demeanour, and had defied public opinion by taking Lord Clanricarde into the Government, after some unpleasant disclosures in the Irish Courts. While walking home on the 18th, after obtaining an immense majority on the India Bill, he was told by Sir Joseph Bethell that he ought, like ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... me believe black is white. I know the Advocate sleight-of-hand, and won't be taken in. An example has become necessary here,—those Scoundrels (CANAILLEN) having so enormously misused my name, to practise arbitrary and unheard-of injustices. A Judge that goes upon chicaning is to be punished more severely than a highway Robber. For you have trusted to the one; you are on your guard against ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the only kind of government under which enterprises against the spirit of the law can be put down. Yes. Arbitrary rule is the salvation of a country when it comes to the support of justice, for the right of mercy is strictly one-sided. The king can pardon a fraudulent bankrupt; he cannot do anything for the victims. The letter of the law ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... judge by the descriptions given to us of him. He was a dashing, courageous, scientific genius, gifted with natural instincts, disciplinary wisdom, deplorable sentimentality, and an artificial, revengeful spirit of hatred that probably became real under the arbitrary circumstances of war, but, I should say, was rarely prominent. His roaming attacks on the French were probably used more for effect, and had, we hope, only a superficial meaning. But be that as it may, it detracts from the dignity of an officer occupying, as he ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... was the richest and most intractable old woman in the county of Woldshire. In her dealings with the world in general her manner suggested a blend between a Mistress of the Robes and a Master of Foxhounds, with the vocabulary of both. In her domestic circle she comported herself in the arbitrary style that one attributes, probably without the least justification, to an American political Boss in the bosom of his caucus. The late Theodore Thropplestance had left her, some thirty-five years ago, in absolute possession of a ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... parts—compensation of growth—the position of buds with respect to the axis of the plant—and lastly, analogous variation. These several subjects so graduate into each other that their distinction is often arbitrary. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... necessitate the perpetual search after manifestations of miraculous power and perpetual "catastrophes." Creation is not a miraculous interference with the laws of nature, but the very institution of those laws. Law and regularity, not arbitrary intervention, was the patristic ideal of creation. With this notion they admitted, without difficulty, the most surprising origin of living creatures, provided it took place by law. They held that when God said, "Let the waters ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of this architectural splendor is due to the present Emperor, who has wrought a great change in the aspect of the city within a very few years. A traveller, if he looks at the thing selfishly, ought to wish him a long reign and arbitrary power, since he makes it his policy to illustrate his capital with palatial edifices, which are, however, better for a stranger to look at, than for his ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... discipline. York acted without regard to his instructions, and without having received any orders from me to enter into so dangerous a course, and I ought not afterward to approve what one of my generals has done in so reckless and arbitrary a manner. That would be rendering obedience dependent on the whims and inclinations of every officer of my army. Unconditional obedience, entire subordination of the individual will—that is the bond which ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... public policy or public security. 2. The provisions of this Chapter shall be without prejudice to the applicability of restrictions on the right of establishment which are compatible with this Treaty. 3. The measures and procedures referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2 shall not constitute a means of arbitrary discrimination or a disguised restriction on the free movement of capital and payments as defined in Article 73b. ARTICLE 73e By way of derogation from Article 73b, Member States which, on 31 December 1993, enjoy a derogation on the basis of existing ...
— The Treaty of the European Union, Maastricht Treaty, 7th February, 1992 • European Union
... urban, and bade the local justice act as a sort of guardian over the laborers in his district. To relieve poverty poor laws were passed; to prevent the decline of productivity corn laws were passed fixing arbitrary prices for grain. For a time monopolies creating artificial prosperity were granted to individuals and to corporations for the manufacture, sale, or exploitation of certain articles, such as ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... still an extravagant fanatic, and so hard hearted that he became cruel. One of the heaviest accusations against him, which his apologists could not deny or justify, was the famous auto-dae-f[e], in which he proceeded in a most arbitrary and despotic manner. Father Landa destroyed many precious memorials, which to-day might throw a brilliant light over our ancient history, still enveloped in an almost impenetrable chaos until the period of the conquest. Landa saw in books that he could not comprehend, cabalistic signs, and invocations ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... petty and most annoying experiences to which the traveler is subjected is the arbitrary tax of time and money put upon him by the small officials, of every rank, in the employment of the government. By this system of small taxes upon travelers, a considerable revenue is realized. Where this is known, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... Preparatory to this end, he had during his short rule destroyed the liberty of the press, tolerating that portion of it only which openly advocated the establishment of a monarchy. The better to secure the success of his ultimate designs, he had by an arbitrary decree convoked a Congress, not to be elected by the free voice of the people, but to be chosen in a manner to make them subservient to his will and to give him absolute control over ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Polk • James Polk
... perhaps anarchical. Nor is a sudden revelation very convincing in modern times. In the space of three minutes, Nora, who has been her husband's sensual toy, and has taken pleasure in being that, and only that, leaves her husband and her children, as has been said, for school-books. A more arbitrary piece of stage craft was never devised; but it was not the stage craft the critics were accustomed to, and the admirers of Ibsen did not dare to admit that he had devised Nora to cry aloud that a woman is more than a domestic animal. It would have ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... at once, whoever you are. You have no right to interfere with people's habits. You have no right to be so arbitrary." ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... involuntarily looked round to see whether Miss Petrie was near. Had she been there nothing would have been said beyond the shortest farewell greeting. But Miss Petrie was afar off, electrifying some Italian by the vehemence of her sentiments, and the audacious volubility of a language in which all arbitrary restrictions were ignored. "Are you ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... forceful and convincing suggestion rather than by a tightly rendered photographic fact. The great pictures are first those of a strong suggestive quality and, secondly, those possessing a certain something the artist calls design - meaning thereby a more or less arbitrary arrangement of form and colour effects which will please the eye. The idea of design has not struck the Portuguese artist as yet; at least it is not apparent in the pictures of that section. The technical ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... within the rigid lines of any literary circle; nor shall I press him into the narrow frame of school or party; nor stamp upon him the distinctive label of any particular ism. He would break such fetters; his free spirit, his great individuality would overflow the arbitrary confines of "the sole Truth," "the only true principle." The waves of his soul would break down all artificial barriers and rush out to join the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... fulness—ought to have more of this earth than mere common men, and still more than thin-faced people—mere people, not men—in black coats? Did he dimly claim the rights of strength in his mind, and arrogate to himself the prerogatives of arbitrary kings? Who knows what big processes of reasoning, dim and big, passed through his mind in the summer days? Did he conclude he had a right to take what others ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... the young man, indulging in a final, a fairly sinister, study of such a dealer in the arbitrary, made sure of the extent, whatever it was, of his own wrong. "Not one ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... gradual extinction of light in its passage through space,[109] and sought to confer upon this celebrated hypothesis a definiteness and certainty far beyond the aspirations of its earlier advocates, Cheseaux and Olbers; but arbitrary assumptions vitiated his reasonings on this, as well ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... the inevitable results of the conditions. There would also have been disorder and violence in the North and to a far greater degree, had the results of the war been reversed—an arbitrary and tyrannical system of restoration insisted upon—the established order of things destroyed homes broken up the people impoverished, and hordes of unscrupulous adventurers swarmed up from the South and overrun ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... the import of English- dyed cloths), injured the trade of the West Riding manufacturers considerably. Their independence of character, their dislike of authority, and their strong powers of thought, predisposed them to rebellion against the religious dictation of such men as Laud, and the arbitrary rule of the Stuarts; and the injury done by James and Charles to the trade by which they gained their bread, made the great majority of them Commonwealth men. I shall have occasion afterwards to give one or two instances of the warm feelings and extensive knowledge on subjects of both ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... admiration for the thoroughness and ingenuity of Linnaeus's work, repelled by his method. Thus by way of reaction, his thought was brought into its own creative movement: 'As I sought to take in his acute, ingenious analysis, his apt, appropriate, though often arbitrary laws, a cleft was set up in my inner nature: what he sought to hold forcibly apart could not but strive for union according to the inmost need of my ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... Geoffrey Chaucer, "the father of English poetry," was appointed clerk to the works of Saint George's Chapel, at a salary of two shillings per day (a sum equal to 657 pounds per annum of modern money), with the same arbitrary power as had been granted to previous surveyors to impress carpenters and masons. Chaucer did not retain his appointment more than twenty months, and was succeeded ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... are very simple. The father has theoretically absolute power of life and death over his wife, children, and slaves. In practice, however, this power is seldom used to its full extent. An arbitrary exercise of domestic authority over his wife and children would arouse the antagonism of her relatives and lead to a rupture of friendly relations. Hence, in family dealings there are displayed on one side paternal affection and leniency and on the other filial devotion ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... musicians ordered into our presence to play that Sweet Bye and Bye again, which they did. Then I saw that she was right, and gave her permission to hang the whole band. This little relaxation of sternness had a good effect upon the queen. A statesman gains little by the arbitrary exercise of iron-clad authority upon all occasions that offer, for this wounds the just pride of his subordinates, and thus tends to undermine his strength. A little concession, now and then, where it can do no harm, is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... according to which a basket of cherries, gathered and eaten the next minute, are called wealth, while that title is denied to the acquired skill of those who are acknowledged to be productive labourers, is a purely arbitrary division, and does not conduce to the ends for which classification ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... there in this vast territory one might come across the occasional trading posts of the wide-reaching Hudson Bay Company, at each of which the resident factor ruled with the arbitrary power ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... expressions. I am quite aware that the difference between the anecdotes belonging to this division and to the last division termed "Wit and Humour" is very indistinct, and must, in fact, in many cases, be quite arbitrary. Much of what we enjoy most in Scottish stories is not on account of wit properly so called, in the speaker, but I should say rather from the odd and unexpected view which is taken of some matter, or from the quaint and original turn of the expression made use of, or from the simple and matter-of-fact ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... readily the one Anarchy, and the other Oligarchy, or the Tyranny Of A Few. And that which offendeth the People, is no other thing, but that they are governed, not as every one of them would himselfe, but as the Publique Representant, be it one Man, or an Assembly of men thinks fit; that is, by an Arbitrary government: for which they give evill names to their Superiors; never knowing (till perhaps a little after a Civill warre) that without such Arbitrary government, such Warre must be perpetuall; and that it is Men, and Arms, not Words, and Promises, that make the Force and ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... constitution was in time restored, and the Church and the Crown were invested with greater powers than they had enjoyed previously to their overthrow. So hateful had been the consequences of Whig rule, that the people were inclined rather to trust the talons of arbitrary power than to take refuge under the wing of these pretended advocates of popular rights. A worthless monarch and a corrupted court availed themselves of the offered opportunity; and when James the Second ascended ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... country's savior. Frontenac had been recalled because he quarreled with the intendant and he quarreled with the Jesuits and he quarreled with the fur traders; but his bitterest enemies did not deny that he could put the fear of the Lord and respect for the French into the Iroquois' heart. Arbitrary he was as a czar, but just always! To be sure he mended his fortunes by personal fur trade, but in doing so he cheated no man; and he worked no injustice, and he wrought in all things for the lasting good of the country. Homage ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... without which events had a knack of not moving; and when the army of Empleados became Cesantes, this work, of course, began all over again. The railway engineers form a separate body, the country being mapped out into arbitrary divisions, each under the charge of one engineer-in-chief, with ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... attempts that have been made to glorify him socially—attempts, it must be remembered, in which he himself and his sons were in after years the leaders—are entirely mistaken. That strange instinct for consistency which makes people desire to see the outward man correspond, in terms of momentary and arbitrary credit, with the inner and hidden man of the heart, has in truth led to more biographical injustice than is fully realised. If Columbus had been the man some of his biographers would like to make him out—the nephew or descendant of a famous French Admiral, educated ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... given prominence in the Declaration of Independence was that the English Crown had "abolished the free system of English laws in a neighbouring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same arbitrary rule into these colonies." The measure which was in the minds of the signers was the Quebec Act of 1774; and the feature ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Arabian traveller, that after the year 879 the main sources of revenue in Canton were the duties on salt and tea. Marco Polo records the deposition of a Chinese minister of finance in 1285 for his arbitrary augmentation of the tea-taxes. It was at the period of the great discoveries that the European people began to know more about the extreme Orient. At the end of the sixteenth century the Hollanders brought the news that a pleasant drink was made in the East from the leaves of a bush. ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... further would but add to the instances, without deepening the impression, of the measureless power of the ideal element in war, alike in the history of the great races of the past and of the present. Even the wars which seem most arbitrary and, to the judgment of their contemporaries, purposeless, acquire, upon a deeper scrutiny and in after ages, a profound enough significance. Behind the immediate occasion, trivial or capricious, sordid or grandiose, the destiny of the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... do anything he chose, it had been used by the Tartar hordes to designate the lower class of their horsemen. From the princes of the House of Rurik these southerly districts passed into the possession of Lithuania, and, later, into those of Poland. Little Russia was another arbitrary name anciently given to a great part of what has been also known as the Ukraine. No fixed geographical limits can be assigned to either of these designations, and especially to the Ukraine of the Poles or the Muscovites; for as the borders or marshes became safe and populated, they were absorbed ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... humble petition will give an idea of the arbitrary power exercised by the "Saltpeter maker" in the days of Good Queen Bess; and of the useful monopoly that functionary contrived to make of his employment, in defiance of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... its antique elements, and also from that of its Christian elements, and we could in the same way present theses which would show its development from the standpoint of the Romance or of the English influence. And yet latterly an exactly contrary attempt has been made—in a spirited, if somewhat arbitrary book by Nadler, which consists in trying to build up the history of German literature entirely upon the peculiarities of the different tribes and provinces. For the essence of the German, nay, even of the Swabian, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... have not the power of voting out their rulers, or of limiting or stopping their supplies; they have therefore the right of rebellion. Rebellion is, in China, the old, often exercised, legitimate, and constitutional means of stopping arbitrary and vicious legislation and administration." Will it be necessary to resort to revolution in order to effect needed reforms? ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... may deem reasonable. If they cannot make them do this by persuasion, fine, or imprisonment, they cause their pits to be opened by their own soldiers or native officers, and the grain to be sold at an arbitrary price. If, in a hundred pits thus opened, they find one in which the corn happens to be damaged by damp, they come to the sage conclusion that the proprietors must be what they have all along supposed them to be, and treated ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... an ingredient in our mental attitude is strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day; but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is only legitimate when used in the interests of one particular proposition,—the proposition, namely, that the course of nature is uniform. That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... was almost exclusively that of awe; though crossed at times by a not unpleasant sense of liberty, as he could but confess to himself, pondering, in the actual absence of so weighty and continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which Roman religion and Roman law gave to the parent over the son. [17] On the part of his mother, on the other hand, entertaining the husband's memory, there was a sustained freshness of regret, together with the recognition, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... still hurt, for it is very humiliating to be picked up and moved about by an arbitrary, peremptory, unreasonable, omnipotent, invisible Providence, still, when a man has been as kind and generous and thoughtful as you have heretofore been towards me, I suppose he has a right to be an arbitrary, peremptory, unreasonable, invisible Providence if he chooses, and ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... it would be a curious illustration of the history of the Revolution. Upon the lid were engraved some bad verses, the purport of which was as follows: "Stones from those walls, which enclosed the innocent victims of arbitrary power, have been converted into a toy, to be presented to you, Monseigneur, as a mark of the people's love; and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... was a term of reproach given to those who, in the civil wars, opposed Divine truth, and promoted popery and arbitrary domination. Clarendon calls it 'a term imposed upon those that the puritans wished to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... "we take into consideration such factors as physical build and muscular development. We don't train undersized boys to be freight handlers. But in general the division is arbitrary. And you'd be amazed how they respond to it. To keep a check on things, we interview our students twice a year to see how ...
— When I Grow Up • Richard E. Lowe
... of mental exertion; having short memories, dense intelligence, feeble reflective powers, they recoiled with repugnance from any occupation that demanded close study or deep thought. Had the abhorred effort been extorted from them by injudicious and arbitrary measures on the part of the Professor, they would have resisted as obstinately, as clamorously, as desperate swine; and though not brave singly, they were ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... choose to call our consistency somewhere, we shall find ourselves with as many names as atoms and possible combinations and permutations of atoms. The lines we draw, the moments we choose for cutting this or that off at this or that place, and thenceforth the dubbing it by another name, are as arbitrary as the moments chosen by a South-Eastern Railway porter for leaving off beating doormats; in each case doubtless there is an approximate equity, but it is of a very rough and ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... declaration from her Imperial Chancellor on August 26, 1915, wherein he endeavored to placate American feeling by declaring that the sinking of the Arabic, if caused by a German submarine, was not a "deliberately unfriendly act," but, if the accepted version of the disaster proved to be true, was "the arbitrary deed of the submarine commander, not only not sanctioned but decidedly condemned by the German Government," and that the latter, being "most anxious to maintain amicable relations with the United States, would express its deep regret and make full reparation." ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... no parasite under the name of priest, nor tribute under the name of victim, nor empire under the name of altar; their dogmas and morality, jumbled together, were only self-preservation; and their religion, an arbitrary idea without influence on the mutual relations existing between men, was but a vain homage paid to the visible powers ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... Disposed the suffering world's oppressed affairs, Had sacred right's eternal rule been left To crafty politicians' partial sway! Then power and pride would stretch the enormous grasp, And call their arbitrary portion, justice: Ambition's arm, by avarice urged, would pluck The core of honesty from virtue's heart, And plant deceit and rancour in its stead: Falsehood would trample then on truth and honour, And envy poison sweet benevolence. ...
— The Earl of Essex • Henry Jones
... the direst confusion by our social state, our war of each against all, necessarily remain confused and foreign to the working-man when mixed with incomprehensible dogmas, and preached in the religious form of an arbitrary and dogmatic commandment. The schools contribute, according to the confession of all authorities, and especially of the Children's Employment Commission, almost nothing to the morality of the working-class. So short-sighted, so stupidly narrow-minded is the ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... Oriental as the scene,—heartless arbitrary insolence on the part of my employers; homelessness, forlornness, helplessness, mortification, indignation, on mine. Fears and misgivings crowded and stunned me. My tears fell thick and fast, and, weary and despairing, I closed my eyes, and tried to shut out ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... can see easily the results of this experiment in huddling for protection. Only ten per cent of the adult population was born in the county, and yet the blacks outnumber the whites four or five to one. There is undoubtedly a security to the blacks in their very numbers,—a personal freedom from arbitrary treatment, which makes hundreds of laborers cling to Dougherty in spite of low wages and economic distress. But a change is coming, and slowly but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to town and leaving the broad acres behind. Why is this? Why do not the Negroes ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre, and great hills pile themselves upon each other's shoulders. Fielding's characters were always great to the full stature of a perfectly arbitrary will. Already in Scott we begin to have a sense of the subtle influences that moderate and qualify a man's personality; that personality is no longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is resumed into its place in the constitution ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... difficult to account for. Accordingly, I visited a great almshouse, and was glad to observe how unexceptionably all the parts of the establishment were carried on, and what an orderly life, full-fed, sufficiently reposeful, and undisturbed by the arbitrary exercise of authority, seemed to be led there. Possibly, indeed, it was that very orderliness, and the cruel necessity of being neat and clean, and even the comfort resulting from these and other Christian-like restraints and regulations, that constituted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... gloomy grandeur, or of dreadful sublimity, around her; other images, equally gloomy and equally terrible, gleamed on her imagination. She was going she scarcely knew whither, under the dominion of a person, from whose arbitrary disposition she had already suffered so much, to marry, perhaps, a man who possessed neither her affection, or esteem; or to endure, beyond the hope of succour, whatever punishment revenge, and that ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... incident of the spectacles is no fiction. Well would it be for the South American Republics at this day, as well as for the good name of Spain, if the poor aborigines of South America had nothing more serious to complain of than the arbitrary act of the dishonest governor referred to; but it is a melancholy fact that, ever since the conquest of Peru by Pizarro, the Spaniards have treated the Indians with brutal severity, and it is no wonder that revenge of the fiercest nature still lingers in the breasts of the descendants ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... the one who shows the gradual processes of unfoldment and growth in the mind and body, and in all the outworkings of the material world. He who breaks down arbitrary distinctions in every realm of life does the most toward liberating and enlightening the world. We are from infancy so accustomed to petty distinctions which have originated in ignorance, and from long use have been formulated ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... execution. The house was immediately kindled into a flame by this information. The officers and Pauncefort, agent for the regiment, were examined: then it was unanimously resolved that such a practice was arbitrary, illegal, and a violation of the rights and liberties of the subject. Upon further inquiry, Pauncefort and some other agents were committed to the custody of the sergeant, for having neglected to pay the subsistence money they had received for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... leaving home again, under such distressing circumstances, would make him; she used all the arguments which her reason could suggest, to persuade me that it was my duty to bear with his temper, and to submit to his will, however arbitrary. But, as I was now of age, and as I had laboured incessantly in my father's business for nearly five years, and had scarcely ever left it for a day, I was mortified at his unnecessary severity, in denying me the privilege of a day or two upon such an occasion; ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... which the following article was found:—"I bequeath to John Wilkes, late member of parliament for Aylesbury, five thousand pounds sterling, as a grateful return for the courage with which he defended the liberty of his country, and opposed the dangerous progress of arbitrary power." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... nature of Life, which have fallen within my knowledge, presuppose the arbitrary division of all that surrounds us into things with life, and things without life—a division grounded on a mere assumption. At the best, it can be regarded only as a hasty deduction from the first superficial notices of the objects that ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
