"Comprehensiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... revealed in a confused and indefinite feeling of some external, supernatural, and bewildering influence which man can not successfully resist; but yet so in harmony with the sinner's inclination, that he can not divest himself of all responsibility. "Homer has no word answering in comprehensiveness or depth of meaning to the word sin, as it is used in the Bible..... The noun amartia which is appropriated to express this idea in the Greek of the New Testament, does not occur in the Homeric poems..... ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... was founded by Protestants, for Protestants, and in the Protestant interest. A Protestant spirit had from the first animated every member of its body corporate. At the present moment, with all its toleration, all its liberality, all its comprehensiveness, and all its scrupulous honour, the genius loci, the guardian spirit of the place, was Protestant. And as a Protestant he said, and said it boldly, Protestant might it evermore remain." To this exposition of the spirit of the College ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... churches. They made every land their own, yet were aliens in all. They lived subject to the laws of the Empire, yet gathered into corporations governed by their own. They were citizens of Rome, yet strangers to her imperial comprehensiveness. In a word, they were like a spirit in the body, but a spirit of uncleanness and of sordid gain. If they hated the Gentile, they could love his vices notwithstanding. If the old missionary zeal of Israel was extinct, they could still purvey ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... glasses, and came in a year or two to have a profound regard for Saunderson, curiously compounded of amusement at his ways, which for strangeness were quite beyond imagination, admiration for his knowledge, which was amazing for its accuracy and comprehensiveness, respect for his honesty, which feared no conclusion, however repellent to flesh and blood, but chiefly of love for the unaffected and shining goodness of a man in whose virgin soul neither self nor this world ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... agent in this was Mr. Ballard, a man self raised from the ranks of labour but indebted for the eminence which he ultimately attained to Mr. Brassey's discrimination in selecting him for the arduous undertaking. He has borne interesting testimony to his superior's comprehensiveness and rapidity of view, the directness with which he went to the important point, disregarding secondary matters and economizing his time ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... says: "CASSELL'S BOOK OF THE HOUSEHOLD is another book, of a class of which many have been issued, and good books too; but this one, by the thoroughness and comprehensiveness of its arrangement, will go far to render the housewife who possesses it independent of all the rest.... Many a housewife will find the articles interesting enough to be taken up ...
— Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery - A Manual Of Cheap And Wholesome Diet • A. G. Payne
... doctrines are founded on a metaphysical theory known as subjective idealism, and advanced centuries before her birth. It posits the all-comprehensiveness of mind and the non-existence of matter. If bodies do not exist, diseases cannot exist, and must be only mental delusions. If the mind is freed of these delusions the disease is gone. This was Quimby's method of procedure already quoted. In Science ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... the sagacious advice which Jethro, the father-in- law of Moses, gave him about the sort of men that he should pick out to be his lieutenants in civic government. Its old-fashioned, simple phraseology may hide from some of us the elevation and comprehensiveness of the ideal that it sets forth. But it is a grand ideal; and amongst the great names of Englishmen who have guided the destinies of this land, none have approached more nearly to it than he whose death has taken away the most striking personality from our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... the brotherhood of man,' as 'the highest conceivable by humanity.' [27:4] He speaks of the 'purity of heart which alone "sees God.'" [27:5] He enforces the necessity of 'rising to higher conceptions of an infinitely wise and beneficent Being ... whose laws of wondrous comprehensiveness and perfection we ever perceive in operation around us.' [28:1] All this is well said, but is it consistent? This universal 'brotherhood of man,' what is it but a 'dogma' of the most comprehensive application? This 'Love to God' springing from the ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... so wide in its comprehensiveness, so beautifully simple in its working, Bonaparte approached Tant Sannie with the book in his hand. Waldo came a step nearer, eyeing it like a dog whose young has ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... up and strengthened by interest. It is also easier to retain and reproduce some idea that has once been grasped with full feeling of interest. An interest that has been developed along all leading lines of study has a proper breadth and comprehensiveness and cannot be hampered and clogged by narrow restraints and prejudice. We admire a person not simply because he has a few clear ideas, but also for the extent and variety of this sort of information. Our admiration ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... modern, and it is commonly restricted to persons connected with daily or weekly newspapers. Many older newspaper men scout it, preferring to be known as publishers, editors, writers, or contributors. Journalism, however, is a word that is needed for its comprehensiveness. It includes the theory, the business, and the art of producing newspapers in all departments of the work. Hence, any school of professional journalism must be presumed to comprise in its scope and detail of instruction the knowledge ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... Christ's Humanity transcends all other men, even the most various, and transcends all gathered together. Every type of excellence is in Him. We cannot say that His character is any one thing in special, it falls under no classification. It is a pure white light in which all rays are blended. This all-comprehensiveness and symmetry of character are remarkably ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... umbrellas. Exquisitely nice in his personal habits, he had the practical democracy of a good-natured young prince; he had never yet seen a human being who awed him, nor one whom he had the slightest wish to awe. His courtesy, had, therefore, that comprehensiveness which we call republican, though it was really the least republican thing about him. All felt its attraction; there was really no one who disliked him, except Aunt Jane; and even she admitted that he was the only person who knew how ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... urged in argument, especially when these consequences are disavowed by the author of it; but, in the present case, the consequences are explicitly declared, not less than the principles,—they are even exhibited as corollaries rigorously deduced from them; and thus the very comprehensiveness of the system, which gives it so much of the aspect of completeness, and which has fascinated the minds of speculative men, always fond of bold and sweeping generalizations, may be found to afford the most conclusive proof of its inherent weakness, and to show that it comes into fatal ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... whereby the claims of the Constitution were vindicated. Whoever is familiar with the history of the period, finds in this remarkable work a memorable illustration of that rectitude and wisdom which presided over the early counsels of the nation, and an evidence of the rare union of sagacity and comprehensiveness, of liberal aspiration and prudential foresight, of conscientiousness and intelligence, which has won for the founders of the republic the admiration of the world. In these pages, how much knowledge of the past is combined with insight as to the future, what common sense is blent with learning, what ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... is a sure thing—I almost wish it wasn't; I mean if I can work it—" He had a sudden vision of the comprehensiveness of the temptation. If only he had been less sure of Dinslow! His assurance gave the situation the ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... where YOU are least at home" In the face of a world of "modern ideas," which would like to confine every one in a corner, in a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be philosophers nowadays, would be compelled to place the greatness of man, the conception of "greatness," precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in his all-roundness, he would even determine worth and rank according to the amount and variety of that which a man could bear and take upon himself, according to the EXTENT ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the "Regne Animal," published in 1828, Cuvier devotes a special section to the "Division of Organised Beings into Animals and Vegetables," in which the question is treated with that comprehensiveness of knowledge and clear critical judgment which characterise his writings, and justify us in regarding them as representative expressions of the most extensive, if not the profoundest, knowledge of his time. He tells us that ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... forms of life are often what is called "comprehensive types"—that is to say, they possess characters in combination such as we nowadays only find separately developed in different, groups of animals. Now, this permanent retention of embryonic characters and this "comprehensiveness" of structural type are signs of what a zoologist considers to be a comparatively low grade of organisation; and the prevalence of these features in the earlier forms of animals is a very striking phenomenon, though they are none the less perfectly organised so far as their own type is concerned. ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... have learnt," he said, "in all my experiments on poor humanity—never to see a man do a wrong thing without feeling I could do the same in his place. I used to pride myself on that once, fool that I was, and call it comprehensiveness. I used to make it an excuse for sitting by and seeing the devil have it all his own way, and call that toleration. I will see now whether I cannot turn the said knowledge to a better account, as common sense, patience, and charity, and yet do work of which neither ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love. Though difficult, it is not impossible; but it requires a breadth of outlook and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest. If ultimate wisdom has not always been preserved by Socialists and Anarchists, they have not differed in this from their opponents; ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... terms, ideas, or things, are definable, and therefore capable of being taught, and what must be left to the teaching of nature: these are the essential qualifications for him who would form good definitions; these are the elements of that accuracy and comprehensiveness of thought, to which allusion has been made, and which are characteristic of "the first ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... to be a profound student, or a comprehensive one? In some degree this must depend upon the direction of the studies: but generally, I think, it is better for the interests of knowledge that the scholar should aim at profundity, and better for the interests of the individual that he should aim at comprehensiveness. A due balance and equilibrium of the mind is but preserved by a large and multiform knowledge: but knowledge itself is but served by an exclusive (or at least paramount) dedication of one mind to one science. The first ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... time of the Conquest, and in that transition period when it was first subjected to European influences. The conception of a work, at so early a period, on this philosophical plan, reminding us of that of Malte-Brun in our own time,—parva componere magnis,-was, of itself, indicative of great comprehensiveness of mind in its author. It was a task of no little difficulty, where there was yet no pathway opened by the labors of the antiquarian; no hints from the sketch-book of the traveller, or the measurements of the scientific explorer. Yet the distances from place ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... the electric bath may be distinguished from those obtained by other modes of faradization by their comprehensiveness. Many groups of muscles may be made simultaneously to contract by this means. The practical bearing of this on the therapeutics of pareses and paralyses, renders it an important characteristic ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... comprehensiveness of the plot in the Miracle Play, the writers of the early Moralities were satisfied with the compression of action effected by the change from the general to the particular theme. This had brought about ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... genius, scholarship, and a capacity for hard work and patient research. In each of these qualities they were supreme. Marx possessed a colossal mind; no thinker upon social subjects, not even Herbert Spencer, has been his superior, for the lonely socialist could claim a comprehensiveness, a grasp of relations and a power of generalization, together with a boldness of conception, which place him in a class by himself. Engels was the able co-adjutor and co-worker with Marx. He was a deep and acute thinker, a most patient investigator, a careful writer. More practical ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... is divided into seven books, and the general classification of diseases is from head to foot—the usual method of that day. The modern reader will probably be surprised at the comprehensiveness of the work, which, besides general diseases, includes considerable portions of physiology, physiognomy, ophthalmology, laryngology, otology, gynecology, neurology, dermatology, embryology, obstetrics, dietetics, urinary and venereal ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... than trained muscle. It is harder to find brains than to find hands. The average mental endowment may be no higher in college than out; but granting it to be as high, the culture which it receives gives it immense advantage. The fruits of that culture, readiness, resources, comprehensiveness, should all be held in the service of the State. Military knowledge and practice should be imparted and enforced to utilize ability, and make it the instrument, not only of personal, but of national welfare. That education ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... first thing we have to do is both clearly to define and understand the meaning of that word "unity." I distinguish the unity of comprehensiveness from the unity of mere singularity. The word one, as oneness, is an ambiguous word. There is a oneness belonging to the army as well as to every soldier in the army. The army is one, and that is the oneness of unity; the soldier is one, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... a shy comprehensiveness, then, to Cynthia, like a child, "I thought maybe you would like some of ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... only the repeal of the Union, but even the separation from the British organization effected, how could they hope to compete in manufacturing skill, and science, with the inventive genius of the American, the systematic comprehensiveness of the Englishman, or the artistic taste of the French? Goods are manufactured for the markets of the world, and the Irish are not yet prepared for such extensive enterprises; and, taking the characteristics of the race into consideration, it is doubtful whether ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... did not disconcert Miss Verney, who returned it with one of equal comprehensiveness. "Yes," she said quickly, and with a slight blush. "With a temperament like Mr. Peyton's I believe it is. Some people can pick themselves up after any number of bad falls: I am not sure that he could. I think discouragement would weaken ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... Nannie "Good-night," while Bellew, unnoticed, slipped certain coins upon a corner of the chimney-piece. So, old Nannie blessed them, and theirs,—past, present, and future, thoroughly and completely, with a fine comprehensiveness that only a genuinely accomplished old witch might hope to attain to, and, following them to the door, paused there with one shrivelled, claw-like ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... of the vessel where he had first entered, and the strong morning light fell full upon his well-knit figure and apparently handsome face. The forehead was rather low, prominent above the eyebrows, and with keen, hollow temples, but deficient both in comprehensiveness and ideality. The hazel eyes were brilliant, but restless and shallow,—the mouth of good size, but with few curves, and perhaps a little too close for so young a face. The well-cut nose and chin and clean fine outline of face, the self-reliant pose of the neck and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... The comprehensiveness and vital nature of the subject, biology, present at once an inspiration and an element of fear to the conscientious teacher. They cause him to regard in utter amazement, the applicant for a position who in answer to question replies "No, I have never taken any courses in biological ...
— Adequate Preparation for the Teacher of Biological Sciences in Secondary Schools • James Daley McDonald
... boisterous rejoicings the restoration of the Monarchy which they felt, with a true instinct, involved the restoration of the old Church of England, the church of their fathers and of the older among themselves, with its larger indulgence for the instincts of humanity, its wider comprehensiveness, and its more dignified and ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... daresay we return to the little world of our daily activities with as distorted a half-memory of what we have seen as that of the African who visited England, and afterwards said he had been in a huge hill which carried him over great waters. The comprehensiveness of our thought, whether we are asleep or awake, no doubt depends largely upon our idiosyncrasies, constitution, habits, and mental capacity. But whatever may be the nature of our dreams, the mental processes that characterize them are analogous to those which go on when ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... the inauguration and maintenance of that policy which in the last four years of Queen Anne so materially recast the whole European situation. About the same time there appeared in London the earliest forms of the periodical essay in the Tatler and the Spectator, which exhibit the comprehensiveness of the Irish temperament in writing by affording a contrast between the Irish force and vehemence of Swift and the Irish play of kindly wit and tender pathos in the deft and dainty periods ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... and the opening of a new way of incorporation among the people of God were clearly contained in the facts. How much Christian narrowness would be blown to atoms if its advocates would do as James did, and let God's facts teach them the width of God's purposes and the comprehensiveness of Christ's Church! We do wisely when we square our theories with facts; but many of us go to work in the opposite way, and snip down facts to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... the true sense in which the word is used in the constitution. The whole turn of the clause containing it indicates an intent to give by it a liberal latitude to the exercise of the specified powers. The expressions have peculiar comprehensiveness. They are "to make all laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by the constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or office thereof." To give the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... the Fourth of July orator of the city of Boston. The Morning Post says, "his ability is so agile, elegant, and hilarious, that his readers generally do not discern the profundity and comprehensiveness of his nature or the progressive power of thought manifested in his writings. We await impatiently the publication of his late oration. It will be an apt opportunity, by the way, to compare Mr. E. Everett with ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... the very first efforts of the United States were to use every power of the navy to destroy and neutralize the effect of the lurking submarine and enter upon a policy of ship construction, which in its gigantic magnitude and comprehensiveness ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... effort. Mr. Macvey Napier has well said: 'So vast a project betokens a consciousness of intellectual power which cannot but excite admiration.' Ralegh may himself not have commenced by realising the gigantic comprehensiveness of his undertaking. An accepted theory has been that his primary idea was a history of his own country, not of the world. It has been usual to cite a sentence of the preface in proof. The passage does not confirm the hypothesis. It runs: 'Beginning ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... ears. A town where such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy, which could not be taken account of in a well-bred scheme of the universe. Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views, and be quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have the honor ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... carry on the work to a glory equal to all that has gone before them. The English tongue is a subject not at all less worthy the labour of such a society than the French, and capable of a much greater perfection. The learned among the French will own that the comprehensiveness of expression is a glory in which the English tongue not only equals but excels its neighbours; Rapin, St. Evremont, and the most eminent French authors have acknowledged it. And my lord Roscommon, who is allowed ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... of simplicity of narrative, with comprehensiveness of detail, admirably adapted for the use of the School-room.—Douglas Jerrald's ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... sitting up late reading some papers on modern Italian history, and in the course of said reading had met with the text of the anathema maranatha pronounced by Pius IX. against disbelievers in his infallibility. The directness, force, and comprehensiveness of the expressions used in this composition made a deep impression upon Lodloe, and as it was not very long he had committed it to memory, thinking that he might some time care to use it in quotation. Now it flashed upon him that the time had come to quote this anathema maranatha, without ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... think, show that there must be some other way of regarding the doctrine of future punishment, which, although not inconsistent with that to which the foregoing interpretation of Matt. xxv. 46 has conducted, differs from it either as to point of view or comprehensiveness. ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... representative in its many phases of love, joy, sorrow, and death? It must be conceded that he House of Life touches many passions and depicts life in most of its changeful aspects. It would afford an adequate test of its comprehensiveness to note how rarely a mind in general sympathy with the author could come to its perusal without alighting upon something that would be in harmony with its mood. To traverse the work through its aspiration and foreboding, joy, grief, remorse, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... wonderful store-house. He treated me with the kindest courtesy, but I have no reason to feel that I was an exception. He stood on that threshold, a welcomer of all scholars, for his good nature was no more marked than the comprehensiveness of his information and the dexterity with which without the least delay, he put into the hands of each searcher the needed books. Perhaps it was an unusual favour that, influenced no doubt, by my good introduction, he took a half-hour ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... prospect of having a bomb thrown at him within two weeks, calmly wrote several documents, then turned his untroubled face to me, and said, in a very confidential, winning tone:—'Monsieur Valmont, you have stated the case with that clear comprehensiveness pertaining to a nation which understands the meaning of words, and the correct adjustment of them; that felicity of language which has given France the first place in the literature of nations. Consequently, I think I see very clearly the delicacies of the situation. We may expect hindrances, ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr |
