"Dissect" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... things, have opened bodies in order to lay those parts open to view. And yet empirics say that they are not the better known for that; because it is possible that, by being laid open and uncovered, they may be changed. But is it possible for us, in the same manner, to anatomize, and open, and dissect the natures of things, so as to see whether the earth is firmly fixed on its foundations and sticks firm on its roots, if I may so say, or whether it hangs in the middle of a vacuum? Xenophanes says that the moon is inhabited, and that it is a country of many cities and ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... awoke just as—oh, can't you understand what I mean? When anything arouses you suddenly, you are not positive whether you dreamed, or—and yet you know that— Dear me, Terence, must I dissect the most elementary sensations in order to accommodate your extremely ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... self-questioning, had become more and more frequent. He had made in the past few months a new and most interesting acquaintance—himself. All the years of his over-hurried, over-cultivated, ambitious life he had delved into the psychology of others. It had been his pride to divine motives, to dissect personalities, to classify and sort the brains and natures of men. Now for the first time he had turned the scalpel upon himself. He was amazed, he was shocked, almost frightened. He could not hide from ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... you can neither handle nor weigh, analyse nor dissect, is naturally regarded as intractable and troublesome; nevertheless, however intractable and troublesome he may be to reduce to any of the existing scientific categories, we have no right to allow his idiosyncrasies to deprive ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... will gainsay this genius of his. John Luther Long's novel was unerringly dramatized; Richard Walton Tully, when he left the Belasco fold, imitated the Belasco manner, in "The Bird of Paradise" and "Omar, the Tentmaker." And that same ability Belasco possesses to dissect the heart of a romantic piece was carried by him into war drama, and into parlour comedies, and plays of business condition. I doubt whether "The Auctioneer" would read well, or, for the matter of that, "The Music Master;" Charles Klein has written more coherent dialogue than is to be found ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... back and forth with his eyes fastened on him, and now and then chafing with visible impatience to reply. At length Breckinridge ceased, and Baker took the floor, and proceeded, with a skillful and unsparing hand, to dissect the sophistry and falsehood of the treason that had just ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... their Thoughts, I have been forced to relinquish that Opinion, and have therefore endeavoured to seek after some better Reason. In order to it, a Friend of mine, who is an excellent Anatomist, has promised me by the first Opportunity to dissect a Woman's Tongue, and to examine whether there may not be in it certain Juices which render it so wonderfully voluble [or [3]] flippant, or whether the Fibres of it may not be made up of a finer or more pliant Thread, or whether there are not in it some particular ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... played with children, worked in his garden, been friends with the common folk, not from any high motive, but to keep himself from insanity! He had had to use any material at hand, and it had brought about certain results that Ledyard would dissect and toss aside, he would never believe! Still the attempt to live on, as he had lived, must be undertaken. A ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... thirteenth century also the arch-enemy of the papacy, the Emperor Frederick II, showed his free-thinking tendencies by granting, from time to time, permissions to dissect the human subject. In the centuries following, sundry other monarchs timidly followed his example: thus John of Aragon, in 1391, gave to the University of Lerida the privilege of dissecting one dead criminal ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... reader will understand that our present inquiry is only into the laws which regulate the mechanism of Style. In such an analysis all that constitutes the individuality, the life, the charm of a great writer, must escape. But we may dissect Style, as we dissect an organism, and lay bare the fundamental laws by which each is regulated. And this analogy may indicate the utility of our attempt; the grace and luminousness of a happy talent will no more be acquired by a knowledge of these laws, than the ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... silly," laughed Grace. "You're thinking of vivisection. I wouldn't cut up anything alive for all the world. The girls did dissect crabs and lobsters, and even rabbits, last year, but they were dead long before they ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... vegetable life, he will lay a broad, and at the same time solid, foundation of biological knowledge; he will come to his medical studies with a comprehension of the great truths of morphology and of physiology, with his hands trained to dissect and his eyes taught to see. I have no hesitation in saying that such preparation is worth a full year added on to the medical curriculum. In other words, it will set free that much time for attention to those studies which bear ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... 23. Dissect out a long bone from one upper and one lower limb and one of the largest ribs. Prepare cultures from the bone marrow in each case. Set aside these bones for the ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... wigs. According to Southey (v. 393, bk. iii., in the original edition of his "Joan of Arc,") she "appalled the doctors." It's not easy to do that: but they had some reason to feel bothered, as that surgeon would assuredly feel bothered who, upon proceeding to dissect a subject, should find the subject retaliating as a dissector upon himself, especially if Joanna ever made the speech to them which occupies v. 354-391, bk. iii. It is a double impossibility: 1st, because a piracy from Tindal's "Christianity ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... Although squeamish as a race about inflicting much pain in cold blood, they will systematically infect other animals with their own rank diseases, or cut out other animals' organs, or kill and dissect them, hoping thus to learn how to offset their neglect of themselves. Conditions among them will be such that this will really be necessary. Few besides impractical sentimentalists will therefore oppose it. ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... actual life; it is a spiritual action: it hears and sees by spiritual senses. And then—Ah, there is something terrible in being alone—alone! She called this out loudly, wringing her hands. Kitty gave a queer smile. It was incredible to her that a woman could thus dissect herself for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... the place when there came a rumour of the doings of those wretches, Burke and Hare, who were said to have made a living by murdering victims—by placing pitch plasters on their mouths—and selling them to the doctors to dissect. At this time a little boy had not come home at the proper time, and the mother came to our house lamenting. The good woman was in tears, and refused to be comforted. There had been a stranger in the village that day; he had seen her boy, he had put a pitch plaster on his ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... than one cares to count, for of books worth reading or remembering, there has been the fewest number within these latter days. And it must be conceded, in the beginning, that Hall Caine has written a book—a live book—and that no one will dissect it without finding blood ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... which always preferred the tortuous to the straight path. He published, accordingly, the Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis. But Pope had mistaken his powers. He was a great master of invective and sarcasm: he could dissect a character in terse and sonorous couplets, brilliant with antithesis: but of dramatic talent he was altogether destitute. If he had written a lampoon on Dennis, such as that on Atticus, or that on Sporus, the old grumbler ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... likes him,—however, the Lord only knows. Another man's soul, thou knowest, is a dark forest, much more the soul of a young girl. Now, there's Schurotchka's soul—try to dissect that! Why has she been hiding herself, and yet does not go away, ever since ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... "It is both cruel and superfluous to dissect the bodies of the living, but to dissect those of the dead is necessary for learners, for they ought to know the position and order which dead bodies show better than a living and wounded man. But even the other things which can only be observed in the living, practice itself will show in the ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... no coarse scene-painter can charm us with an allusion so delicate and perfect. But what bitter satire, what relentless dissection of diseased subjects! Well, and this, too, is right, or would be right, if the savage surgeon did not seem so fiercely pleased with his work. Thackeray likes to dissect an ulcer or an aneurism; he has pleasure in putting his cruel knife or probe into quivering, living flesh. Thackeray would not like all the world to be good; no great satirist would like society ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... referring to it afterward, called it naked luck. I would rather agree with Grim than argue with any inky theorist on earth, having seen too many theories upset. Luck looks to me like a sweeter lady, and more worshipful than any of the goddesses they rename nowadays and then dissect in clinics. At any rate, by naked luck I prodded Abdul Ali where he kept his supply of mistakes. Instead of calling my bluff, as he doubtless should have done, he set out to win me over to his point of view. Whichever ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... this was a sincere tribute. Clemens always regarded with awe William Dean Howells's ability to dissect and photograph with such delicacy the minutiae of human nature; just as Howells always stood in awe of Mark Twain's ability to light, with a single flashing sentence, the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... subordination of all these to his love of truth." This, as an analysis of Darwin's mental equipment, seems to us incomplete, though we do not pretend to mend it. We do not think it is possible to dissect and label the complex qualities which go to make up that which we all recognise as genius. But, if we may venture to criticise, we would say that Mr. Huxley's words do not seem to cover that supreme power of seeing and thinking what the rest of the world had overlooked, which ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... in Heidelberg, that city which Eichendorff called "itself a magnificent Romanticism." The earlier group was largely North German and brought with it clear perception and a certain power of analysis, an ability to dissect and to reason. With the Heidelberg group the South begins to play a larger part, though there were a number of North Germans in it. The richer fancy, the longer literary tradition, now add color to their productions. It is significant, too, that though "castle Romanticism" does not die out, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... desire to know the sources of your worry study each worry as it comes up. Analyse it, dissect it, weigh it, examine it from every standpoint, judge it by the one test that everything in life must, and ought to submit to, viz.: its usefulness. What use is it to you? How necessary to your existence? How helpful is it in solving the problems that confront you; how far does it aid you in their ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... stumbling, but it is not any excellence of method that can supply it with the material of knowledge. Those however who aspire not to guess and divine, but to discover and know; who propose not to devise mimic and fabulous worlds of their own, but to examine and dissect the nature of this very world itself; must go to facts themselves for everything. Nor can the place of this labour and search and worldwide perambulation be supplied by any genius or meditation or argumentation; no, not if all men's wits could meet in one. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... outright, or to steal from the lives of men and women he has known or heard of. People who can analyse their own feelings are never feeling enough to hurt them much; a medical student could not take his scalpel and calmly dissect out his own nerves. You may try to analyse pain and pleasure when they are past, but nothing is more strangely and hopelessly undefined than the memory of a great grief, and no analysis of pleasure can lead to anything but the desire for more. The only real psychologists have been the great ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... he said; "but to understand, you must first hear some other things." He hesitated, face to face with an analysis of murder. The position was at once stimulating and appalling. To dissect and reduce to its elements that grisly murder-devil which had once possessed his own soul, and whose writhings beneath the scalpel he would therefore feel as his own—here loomed a prospect large and terrible! Nevertheless, Balder ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... hours, between the forenoon and afternoon lectures, I go to the dissecting-room, where, in company with another young naturalist who has appeared like a rare comet on the Heidelberg horizon, I dissect all manner of beasts, such as dogs, cats, birds, fishes, and even smaller fry, snails, butterflies, caterpillars, worms, and the like. Beside this, we always have from Tiedemann the very best books for reference and comparison, for he has a fine library, especially rich in anatomical works, and ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... be impossible in an exposition of this kind to dissect these essays in detail, nor would it be desirable. Many of the suggestions with regard to actual practice, suggestions that might be embodied in modern legislation, are open to criticism in detail, and I would not pin Mr Wells down to the letter of any one of them. He has certainly ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... and romps like a brat that has been bred in a barrack yard. This little lady is educated with much care, and watched so closely by the Duchess and the principal governess, that no busy maid has a moment to whisper, "You are heir of England." I suspect if we could dissect the little head, we should find that some pigeon or other bird of the air had carried the matter. She is fair, like the Royal Family, but does not look as if she would be pretty. The Duchess herself is very pleasing and affable in her manners. I sat by Mr. Spring ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... in the young man's nature to refuse forgiveness or dissect generosity. He instantly, and almost without thought, accepted the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... could be found. Practically none of them had been removed from the insoluble mucilaginous covering. Here and there an isolated specimen was all that could be seen. So closely were these small crystals enveloped with the mucilaginous matter that it was almost impossible to separate or dissect them ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... riflemen; then, if venison was needed, we put the dog out on the hills; one boat went to overhaul the set lines baited the evening before for the lake trout. When the hunt was over we generally went out to paddle on the lake, Agassiz and Wyman to dredge or botanize or dissect the animals caught or killed; those of us who had interest in natural history watching the naturalists, the others searching the nooks and corners of the pretty sheet of water with its inlet brooks and its bays and recesses, or bathing from the rocks. Lunch was at midday, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... student who had long been anxious for that portion of the human subject to dissect. There was no answer, and the murderer resumed: 'Talking of business, you must pay me; your accounts, ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the gregarious kind, or in which the carriage as well as the horses was the property of the voiturier, and the passengers mere pic-nics, was before us in ascending a long hill, affording an excellent opportunity to dissect the whole party. As it is a specimen of the groups one constantly meets on the road, I will give you some idea of the ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... entertained, naturalists became fully aware that these facts of structural resemblances running through groups subordinate to groups were really facts of nature, and not merely poetic imaginations of the mind. No one could dissect a number of fishes without perceiving that they were all constructed on one anatomical pattern, which differed considerably from the equally uniform pattern on which all mammals were constructed, even although some mammals bore an extraordinary resemblance to fish ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... speculative discussion, to the most ignorant of men; but what a world of other wonders should we discover should we penetrate into the secrets of physics, and dissect the inward parts of animals, which are framed according to ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... some anomalous symptoms which had excited the curiosity of his medical attendants. Upon his seeming decease, his friends were requested to sanction a post-mortem examination, but declined to permit it. As often happens, when such refusals are made, the practitioners resolved to disinter the body and dissect it at leisure, in private. Arrangements were easily effected with some of the numerous corps of body-snatchers, with which London abounds; and, upon the third night after the funeral, the supposed corpse was unearthed from a grave ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... man as accomplishing a deed, as a factor in an event. His primary business is to report action, not to philosophize or to dissect character or to paint landscape. Yet so sensitive is he to the environing circumstances of action, and so bent upon displaying the varieties of human motive and conduct, that he cannot help reflecting ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... stranger. It is true that I knew Robert Gale in the old days, but look at the years that have passed. He would probably not have remembered me, and how could I have explained? It would have been like tearing my inmost heart out and laying it on the table for him to dissect as he chose. My story was my own—I have hugged it very close—until you came. And yet I think I always knew that some day, through no effort of mine, the veil would be lifted. I was certain of it, and in that certainty I could wait with some degree of patience until the moment came. Sometimes ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay |
