"Impersonal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... just read Karen Woodruff's last letter, and he was in the mood, charmed, amused and touched, that her letters always brought. Never, he thought, had there been such sweet and such funny letters; so frank and so impersonal; so simple and so mature. During these months of their correspondence the thought of her had been constantly in his mind, mingling now not only with his own deep and distant memories, but, it seemed, with hers, so that while she still walked with him over the hills of his ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Reed, its victim and by no means of doubtful understanding, could ever do. She heard him talked about in a fashion that she found revolting. Her old-time comrade was as much a man as ever, despite his injuries, as sane in all his outlook, as whimsical and impersonal in his fun. She therefore resented the universal attitude of regarding him as a crushed archangel, a candidate for repeated and unlimited doses of mental gruel. If ever a man needed solid social nutriment, it was this energetic ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... the events and persons that the cumulative impression shall express his own judgment, indicate his own design, and convey his own feeling. His individuality is so vast, so purified from eccentricity, and we grasp it so imperfectly, that we are apt to deny it altogether, and conceive his mind as impersonal. In view of the multiplicity of his creations, and the range of thought, emotion, and character they include, it is a common hyperbole of criticism to designate him as universal. But, in truth, his mind was restricted, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... knew now what that anguish was. It was the twining of body from spirit that is called the bitterness of Death; for not all of the body are the pangs of that severance. With that terrible sword of impersonal Pain the God of Peace makes sorrowful war that Peace may come again. With its flame He ringed the bastions of Heaven when Satan made assault. Only on the Gorgon-image of that Pain in the shield may weak man ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... serious view of the very special service to which I was foresworn: the more I thought of it, in one sense, the less in another, until my only chance was to go forward with grim humour in the spirit of impersonal curiosity which that attitude induces. In a word, and the cant one which yet happens to express my state of mind to a nicety, I had already "weakened" on the whole business which I had been in such a foolish hurry to undertake, though not for one reactionary moment upon her for ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... Civil War every one began to move in America, and the immigrants, moving in, moved also, so that roots were pulled up everywhere and the town one lived in became as impersonal as a hotel, the farm no more human than a seed-bed. Literature of the time shows this in two ways: the rarity of books that give a local habitation and a name to the familiar, contemporary scene; and a romantic interest, as of the half-starved, in local color stories of remote districts ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... again at his mother's knee, listening to that fanciful conception of the little silver chain that stretched so far. There rushed in on him, too, other memories, blinding ones that hurt. True, every day at the little house a spray of lilies of the valley were delivered; but with that impersonal gift which cost him nothing but the drawing of a check he had dismissed his mother from his busy mind, letting her stay in loneliness, ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... Organum opens. He now reverted to the form of the aphorism, and resolved to throw the materials of the Cogitata et Visa into this shape. The result is the Novum Organum. It contains, with large additions, the substance of the treatise, but broken up and rearranged in the new form of separate impersonal generalised observations. The points and assertions and issues which, in a continuous discourse, careful readers mark and careless ones miss, are one by one picked out and brought separately to the light. It begins with brief, oracular, unproved ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... his diary and correspondence, who deeply attracted him, and who might have attracted him as far as marriage had he not already received the Holy Spirit's prevenient grace of virginity. That is to say, he found "a being," to use his impersonal term, whose name and identity he is careful to veil, awkwardly enough at times with misleading pronouns, whose charm was so great as to win from him what would have been, in his normal state, a marital affection. ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... and they were so very human in their protests—and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretense of apology, without the homage of a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... sunk almost to a whisper. His eyes dusky, compelling, yet strangely impersonal, held hers by some magic that was too utterly intangible to frighten her. With a sigh she yielded to the mastery ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... dwelling upon this folly, with a sense of impersonal pleasure in it as complete through his years as if he were already a disembodied spirit, the pulse of the engines suddenly ceased, and he joined the general rush to the rail, with a fantastic expectation ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that point, but only its quality or mode of operation. The Orthodox attribute to God a strictly moral, which is a specific method of action, addressed to purely personal or subjective issues; their opponents, a strictly physical, which is a universal method, addressed to purely impersonal and objective issues. The one party assigns to God a finite personality, or one limited by Nature; the other, an indefinite personality, as identified with natural law. The Orthodox, of course, maintain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... with his soup, or Sir James Brennan with the ounce of snuff round his studs. No. Perhaps Maisie's right." "I have plenty of ambition—I am burning with it, and I have an intuition that this is one of the widest and finest fields in the world—for impersonal ambition, that is, ambition above money, ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... means, literally, it is fought; translate freely, the battle is fought, or the contest rages. The verb pugno in Latin is intransitive, and so does not have a personal subject in the passive. A verb with an indeterminate subject, designated in English by it, is called impersonal.] ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... a man was an obstacle race made out of pleasant obstacles. Out of any homely and trivial object he could drag reels of exaggeration, like a conjurer. Nothing could be more shy and impersonal than poor Arthur's photography. Yet the preposterous Smith was seen assisting him eagerly through sunny morning hours, and an indefensible sequence described as "Moral Photography" began to unroll about the boarding-house. It was only a version of the old photographer's joke which produces the ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... not attempt a reply. He looked with a sort of impersonal curiosity at his hand and forearm, where the dog had bitten him in several places. That had happened a good while ago, he reasoned; the blood had dried, the marks of the dog's teeth ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... greeted him with a smile of apprehension which plainly amused him. Beatrice was frankly impersonal in her attitude; he represented a new species of the genus man, and she, too, evidently regarded him in the light of a strange animal, viewed ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... emotionalised his mental life. Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own. The end of these discourses was that one night during which she had shown every sign of unusual excitement, Mrs. Sinico caught ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... Parthenon or of St. Peter's at Rome. This awakening and gratification of the aesthetic sense seems to be the first advance from a condition of mere animal existence, in which food, shelter, and comfort are the only considerations, to tastes and desires that are higher and, consequently, more impersonal. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... is markedly absent. The sun-goddess is the principal deity but remains simply prima inter pares. But in the ancient religion of China, T'ien or Heaven, also called Shang-ti, the supreme ruler, though somewhat shadowy and impersonal, does become an omnipotent Providence without even approximate rivals. Other superhuman beings are in comparison with him merely angels. Unfortunately the early history of Chinese religion is obscure and the documents scanty. In India however the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... and public temper. As his social acquaintanceships lay chiefly among the Conservatives, he had no difficulty in getting frank expressions of their views. In the following sentences he sums up the more moderate and impersonal of these, as he heard and ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... Lisle, however, played the game. She did not encounter Norah often, and when she did it was in Mrs. Atkins' presence: and on these occasions she maintained an attitude of impersonal politeness which made it hard to realize that she and the butler had indeed bathed together on the floor of the cottage. She found various matters in her little sitting-room: an easy-chair, a flowering ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... had each been leading the sheltered, impersonal, and, above all, financially easy existence which is the compensation life offers to those men and women who deliberately take upon themselves the yoke of domestic service, they had both lived in houses overlooking ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... sympathy survived. Indeed I heard him murmur "Ghastly nuisance," but I knew it was of the integrity of his domestic accord that he was thinking. With my eyes on the dog lying curled up in sleep in the middle of the porch I suggested in a subdued impersonal tone: "Yes. Why not let yourself ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... observation shows, that, as time runs on, matter tends more and more to become goods, the blind forms of motion in nature to become useful labor and useful sustenance, impersonal and objectless existence to be transformed into personal property and personal culture, Schaeffle inclines to the belief that the whole mechanism of unconsciously governing nature is destined ultimately to aid in the realization of moral good, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... certainly unbalanced, so far as her grievance against you is concerned. But I feel sure that were you to explain matters to her, and let her understand that your action in losing her the position at the studio was quite impersonal on your part, she will realize the folly of what she has done, ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... in, contritely. "Please don't be so dreadful about it. After all, you asked me, didn't you? Perhaps I've hurt your vanity. There, I didn't mean that, either. Oh, dear, let's talk about something impersonal. We get ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... slowly together, and when he spoke his voice was sharp and quick and wholly impersonal. ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... the life of Rashi. Owing to various causes not a single work is extant that might be used as a guide for the establishment of minor facts. Generally speaking, Jewish literature in the middle ages was of an impersonal character; practically no memoirs nor autobiographies of this period exist. The disciples of the great masters were not lavish of information concerning them. They held their task to be accomplished when they had studied and handed ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... upon each, for near a minute at a time, the same hard and thoughtful stare. As he thus looked he seemed to forget himself, the subject and the company, and to become absorbed in the process of his thought; the look was wholly impersonal: I have seen the same in the eyes of portrait-painters. The counts upon which whites have been deported are mainly four: cheating Tembinok', meddling overmuch with copra, which is the source of his wealth and one of the sinews of his power, 'peaking, and political intrigue. I felt guiltless ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on the advocate—deceit, falsehood, bluster, clamour, pushing,' for the quiet life of a literary man (especially as we should probably never have heard his name had he done otherwise). Not that the life was so quiet as it might have been. He could not keep his satire impersonal enough to avoid incurring enmities. He boasts in the Peregrine of the unfeeling way in which he commented on that enthusiast to his followers, and we may believe his assurance that his writings brought general dislike ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... seemed to Peter that the Spirit of the House had received him; it was so men dream of home-coming, without sensible displacement of a life going on in it, lovely and secure, as a bark slips into some still pool to its moorings. He yielded himself naturally to the impersonal intimacy of her welcome and all the sordid ways of his life ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... spoke little. Her mind was full of Hanson's coming, and of the revelation of dancing which she meant to show him and, incidentally, Saint Harry. It was not until later in the day that she remembered how impersonal, according to her standards, her conversation with Seagreave had been. Not once, either by word or look had he told her that she was beautiful and to be desired. A new experience for her; never before had she encountered such an attitude in ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... 'Tell the truth and shame the Devil' is a very pretty sentiment, it need not necessarily mean anything. The Devil, if there be a personal devil—and it has been pointed out, with some show of reason, that an impersonal one could scarcely carry out such enormous contracts—would, in all probability, rather approve than otherwise of indiscriminate truth-telling. Irritation is the root of all evil; and there is nothing more irritating ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... self looms large, even in the crisis of supreme self-sacrifice. In the passive part, which even the most active among us play for the greater portion of our lives, self is merged in the detached and impersonal interest which we take in what passes before our eyes. Yet must we describe these things only as they are designed and coloured by our proper eyes, and therefore, with no greater hope of accuracy than to approximate to the general ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... been deprived of a more legitimate outlet for these emotions. Concentrated on the boy, they had sufficed for him. The Marvin girls had long ago given him up as hopeless. They fell back, baffled, their keenest weapons dulled by the impenetrable armour of his impersonal gaze. ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... beautiful melody and graceful embellishments, it represents Mozart at his best, expressing in a form as clear and finely finished as a delicate ivory carving that mood of restful, sunny, impersonal optimism which is the essence of most of his musical creations. It is like some finely wrought Greek idyl, the apotheosis of the pastoral, perfect in detail, without apparent effort, gently, tenderly emotional, ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... session of Congress, Hamilton also sent in Reports on Trade with India and China, and on the Dutch Loan. He was fortunate in being able to forget his enemies for days and even weeks at a time, when his existence was so purely impersonal that every capacity of his mind, save the working, slept soundly. By now, he had his department in perfect running order; and his successors have accepted his legacy, with its infinitude of detail, its unvarying practicality, ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... was to tell in the deadly, impersonal way of hospitals, while he nodded swift comprehension. There had been a runaway—a woman on a big, white-eyed bay, that had taken fright at an automobile; a swift rush up the Driveway, a lunge over the neck of the pursuing horse, then a man wrenched from his saddle and ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... hesitated. In the thraldom of his selfish passion for Mrs. Dall he dared not contemplate a collision with her countrymen. He would have again sought refuge in his passive, non-committal attitude, but he knew the impersonal character of Indian retribution and compensation—a sacrifice of equal value, without reference to the culpability of the victim—and he dreaded some spontaneous outbreak. To prevent the enforced expiation of the crime by ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... maintained that the ceremonial fires have no necessary reference to the sun but are simply purificatory in intention, being designed to burn up and destroy all harmful influences, whether these are conceived in a personal form as witches, demons, and monsters, or in an impersonal form as a sort of pervading taint or corruption of the air. This is the view of Dr. Edward Westermarck[799] and apparently of Professor Eugen Mogk.[800] It may be called the purificatory theory. Obviously the two theories postulate two very different ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Prichard for this knowledge of Mrs. Marrable's sister without narrowing the issue to the simple question:—"Who and where is she?" And if those grave old eyes, at rest now that the topic had become so impersonal to them, were fixed upon her waiting for the answer, how could she find it in her heart to make the only answer possible, futile fiction apart:—"It is you I am speaking of—you are Mrs. Marrable's sister, and each has falsely thought the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... go home to his empty house. But recently the plant had gone on double turn, and Herman was soon to go on at night. Here was the gang's opportunity. Everything was ready but Herman himself. He continued interested, but impersonal. For the sake of the Fatherland he was willing to have the plant go, and to lose his work. He was not at all daunted by the thought of the deaths that would follow. That was war. Anything that killed and destroyed was fair in war. But he did not care to place himself in danger. Let ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... weakness of a thwarted thing, Pride is the weakness of a thing unpraised. But he, this man.... He would be like a child Girt with the tomes of some vast library, Who reads romance after romance, and smiles When every tale ends well: impersonal As God he grows—melted in suns and stars; So would this boundless man, whom none could spy, Taunt him with virtue, censure him with vice, Rejoice in all men's joys; with golden pen Write all the live romances of the earth To a triumphant ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... commonplace. Unlike the heroes of Homer, they repress their fears—they repress everything, save their irrepressible flatulence of mind. They are expansive in unimportant matters and at wrong moments—blown about in a whirl of fatuous extremes. The impersonal note has vanished. Why has it gone, Mr. Denis?" he suddenly asked. "And when did ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... something of an individual, active, sexual, and at last, personal character." (Chips, vol. ii., p. 55.) Here the concrete is derived from the abstract—the personal conception is represented as coming after the impersonal conception; and through such transformation of the impersonal into the personal, Prof. Max Mueller considers ancient myths to have arisen. How are these propositions reconcilable? One of two things must be said:—If originally there were none of these abstract nouns, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... there seemed to come up to him, straight out of the river, strange impersonal noises that had to do with no definite sounds. He was reminded of a story that he had once read, a story concerning a nice young man who caught the disease known as the Horror of London. Peter thought that in the air, coming from nowhere, intangible, floating between the river and the ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... of mind or feeling. In this respect it was diametrically opposed to the academic and the classic. In French painting it came forward in opposition to the classicism of David. People had begun to weary of Greek and Roman heroes and their deeds, of impersonal line-bounded statuesque art. There was a demand for something more representative, spontaneous, expressive of the intense feeling of the time. The very gist of romanticism was passion. Freedom to express itself in what form it would was a condition ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... is much higher in the cities than in small towns or rural regions. Fortunate that couple who start their married life in a town small enough so that neighbors are interested and helpful. The city apartment house is the most impersonal form of dwelling mankind has devised. If the first home does not have all the modern improvements, it is no great tragedy. More marriages are wrecked by too much free time than by too many home tasks to perform. Our grandparents married in the days of covered wagons and sodhouses and drought; ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... mythological compositions of the Pura@nas the gods lost their character as hypostatic powers of nature, and thus became actual personalities and characters having their tales of joy and sorrow like the mortal here below. The Vedic gods may be contrasted with them in this, that they are of an impersonal nature, as the characters they display are mostly but expressions of the powers of nature. To take an example, the fire or Agni is described, as Kaegi has it, as one that "lies concealed in the softer wood, as in a chamber, until, called forth by the rubbing in the early morning hour, ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... is plain: that it is not until the poet himself and all who knew him are dead, and his lines speak only with the naked and impersonal appeal of ink, that his value to the race as a permanent pleasure can ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... history of a great statesman's career. That statesman's name, but for the dark and tragic scenes with which it was ultimately associated, might after the lapse of two centuries and a half have faded into comparative oblivion, so impersonal and shadowy his presence would have seemed upon the great European theatre where he was so long a chief actor, and where his efforts and his achievements were foremost among those productive of long enduring ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... he means. He figures to himself the nation as a vast hierarchy of liberties, an autonomy of States within the empire, of provinces within the State, of communes within the province, of proprietors within the commune. Equality is equality of rank, of worth, of wealth, of force, but impersonal equality before the law is for him an unnatural thing, an invention of the professors ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... frank interrogation in her eyes showed clearly, showed cruelly, how detached, how impersonal, her interest was. ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... the fire an' het me up some coffee," he said, still in that impersonal way which was so disturbing only because it was not his way. "I've harnessed up. I'm goin' to the street. You remember where that Brahma stole her nest? I've got to have two eggs for ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... to the knowledge of this truth which came into the world with Christmas, perhaps because he, more than any other, has tried to think and to live Christianity. When once you have got this vital truth into your mind, the whole universe is luminously filled with the possibilities of impersonal, unselfish happiness. The joy of living is suddenly expanded to the dimensions of humanity, and you can go on taking your pleasure as long as there is one unfriended soul and ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... all right, but they're so confounded trite and impersonal. People prefer to read anecdotes about the people rather than a listing ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... overestimate the value of these benefactions to men of talent and genius. Where would Wordsworth have been, what could he have done, without the gift bestowed upon him by Raisley Calvert! In America such assistance is oftener given in the more impersonal way of endowment of chairs or creating of scholarships. No method less personal or more elevating for the development of the scholar and man of genius could ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... to be done," he said at last. His voice, meant to be impersonal, was only stern. "That ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... not altogether banter, for there had been times in Carmen's career when the externals of the Roman Church attracted her, and she wished she had an impersonal confidant, to whom she could confess—well, not everything-and get absolution. And she could make a kind of confidant of a sympathetic ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in else there are no rights to be considered. Labor apart from a person laboring and property apart from a person owning are impersonal and no ethical or moral laws can be applied to them. They are only physical forces and material things. The wind may push against a tree and overcome its resistance and the tree falls. That is merely ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... gift of Religion to Science is the demonstration of the supernaturalness of the Natural. Thus, as the Supernatural becomes slowly Natural, will also the Natural become slowly Supernatural, until in the impersonal authority of Law men everywhere recognize the Authority ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... the hand Max held out, and then did nothing with it, in the aloof, impersonal way that had always irritated Max, and made him want to fling away the unresponsive fingers. Now, however, for the first time in his life he did not notice. He was lost in his desire for and fear ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... in her attitude toward the universe, which appeared to her, not as it did to Virginia, in mere formless masses of colour out of which people and objects emerged like figures painted on air, but as distinct, impersonal, and final as a geometrical problem. She was one of those women who are called "sensible" by their acquaintances—meaning that they are born already disciplined and confirmed in the quieter and more orderly processes of life. Her natural intelligence having overcome the defects of her education, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the third vowel as its centre, it does not soon betray it. The highest thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not obviously ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... old-fashioned honesty that makes a man a grafter," he said. "It's seeing the duties and privileges of a public office in a private and personal way, instead of in a public, impersonal one; being kind to old friends who need a helping hand, and grateful to people who've held out helping hands to you. Well, and women have been trained for hundreds of years to see things in that private ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... their skins turned to snowy whiteness by leprosy, men with limbs swollen to four or five times natural size by elephantiasis, palsied men and women broken with age, who hope to win Heaven (or that impersonal absorption into the Divine Essence which is the nearest Hindu approach to our idea of Heaven) by dying in the ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... for the night. She never spoke to her mother about the election, for, as George suspected, she had not paid the slightest attention to him; and as to exchanging with her mother a single word upon such a subject as politics, or upon any other subject which was in any way impersonal,—she never did such ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... this author, the more apparent these faults become and the more one regrets the lacunae in the text. Notwithstanding numerous articles which deal with this work, some from the pens of the most profound scholars, its author is still shrouded in the mists of uncertainty and conjecture. He is as impersonal as Shakespeare, as aloof as Flaubert, in the opinion of Charles Whibley, and, it may be added, as genial as Rabelais; an enigmatic genius whose secret will never be laid bare with the resources at our present command. As I am not writing for scholars, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... which wastes the energy of the greater part of mankind. It seems curious to measure the force wasted in sensitiveness to public opinion as you would measure the waste of power in an engine, and yet it is a wholesome and impersonal way to think of it,—until we find a better way. It relieves us of the morbid element in the sensitiveness to say, "I cannot mind what so-and-so thinks of me, for I have not the nervous energy to spare." It relieves us still more of the tendency to morbid feeling, if we are wholesomely ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... with the entree that the blow fell, and I had a curious, impersonal sort of feeling that on every night to come, should I live for a hundred years, each future entree of each future dinner would recall the sensation of this moment. Something inside me, that was ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... was brief and able, eloquent from the simplicity and earnestness of her heart, logical from the well disciplined vigor of her mind. She was followed by Miss Anthony, morally as inevitable and impersonal as a Greek chorus, but physically and intellectually individual, intense, original, full of humor and good nature—anything but the roaring lioness of newspaper reports some years ago. Mrs. Davis, of Rhode Island, spoke briefly ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... instantaneous. For law and order, as such, she had an instinctive antipathy, as in all contests whatsoever her one general rule was: "Side with the weaker." And it cannot but have been perceived that so much sympathy with weakness could hardly have been in the gift of weakness. No; Aunt Tipping was entirely impersonal in these charities of feeling, and it was because there was so much sterling honesty and strength hidden in her little wiry frame, that she could afford so much succour to those who ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... remained. To explain the symbol a myth was created, which kept sufficiently near to the original idea as to retain evidence of its close connection with the descent of property; and thus was launched the dateless, impersonal, unlocalised story which Mr. Campbell has given as a specimen of vagrant traditions, which "must have been invented after agriculture and fixed habitations, after laws of property and inheritance; but it may be as old as the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, or ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... to Sampaolo, and marry your cousin. So"—her eyes on her drawing, she spoke slowly, with an effect supremely impersonal—"so you would come to your own again; and so a house divided against itself, an ancient noble house, would be reunited; and an ancient historic line, broken for a little, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... the pantomime of the store, not as a bit of tragedy—she was careful about that—but as something witnessed by an impersonal spectator and ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... proceedings or by settlement out of court. You see, I had planned it all out. The school would have been founded—I, we would have founded it. What difference, I said, did thirty millions or fifty millions make to an impersonal school, a school not yet even in existence? The twenty million dollars or so difference, or even half of it, meant life and ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... author never openly preaches. His best effects are obtained by quiet satire conveyed in the gradual limning of his characters, and by occasional incidents of which each is allowed to give its own lesson to the reader. The facts have all the advantage of a studiously calm and impersonal presentation. ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... he wished to write was "a book on the duties of women, more especially to their husbands." One feels, again, that in his defence of the egoism of the great reformers, he was apologizing for a vice of his own rather than making an impersonal statement of truth. "How can a tall man help thinking of his size," he asked, "when dwarfs are constantly standing on tiptoe beside him?" The personal note that occasionally breaks in upon the oracular rhythm of the Table Talk, however, is a virtue in literature, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... a steady mechanical creep which had in it an impersonal quality—the movement of the wave, or of the breeze, or of the cloud. He followed his directions literally, without an inquiring gaze at anything. It could have been seen that the boy's ideas of life were different from those of the local boys. Children begin with detail, and learn up to ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... coloured with an equal care, but by means of the bold, broad touches necessary for their effective presentation on a canvas so large and so crowded. Such figures are, indeed, but the component features of one great form, and their actions only so many modes of one collective impersonal character,—that of the Parisian Society of Imperial and Democratic France; a character everywhere present and busy throughout the story, of which it is the real hero or heroine. This society was doubtless selected for characteristic ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for a space. Somebody was singing in the room behind them, and through the open window he could see the stars in the soft indigo above the great sweep of prairie. He noticed them vacantly and took a curious impersonal interest in the two dim figures standing close together outside the window. One was a young English lad, and the other a girl in a long white dress. What they were doing there was no concern of his, but any trifle that diverted his attention a moment was welcome in that time ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... that it was not so strange a thing, after all. To take the Lady Barbara, first. Up to the time of her visit to London, Lord Farquhart had been to her something of a figurehead. She had considered him merely as a creature quite inanimate and impersonal, who was to be forced upon her by her father's will just as she was to be forced upon him. But Lord Farquhart in the flesh was a young man of most pleasing appearance, if of most exasperating manners. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... doing much. He was gentle, he was listening, and on his face a frown of concern. His face continually surprised her, it was so fine and alive and near, by comparison with Ninian's loose-lipped, ruddy, impersonal look and Dwight's thin, high-boned hardness. All the time Cornish gave her something, instead of drawing upon her. Above all, he was there, and she could ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... the It which he had seen first in his glorious, passionately selfish ecstasy on his wedding day; then glimpsed in the awful orderliness of the universe,—the It that held the stars in their courses! Perhaps the tiny, personal thing, Joy, and the stupendous, impersonal thing, Law, and the mysterious, unseen thing, Life, were all one? "Call it God," Maurice had said of ecstasy, and again of order; he did not call Jacky's milky lips "God." The little personality which ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... conscious of a faint, almost impersonal, resentment against destiny when he stayed at Merefield. It was obvious to him that the position of heir there was one which would exactly have suited his tastes and temperament. He was extremely pleased to belong to the family—and it was, indeed, a very exceptional family as regards ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... has seemed to the author of these poems—which of course are offered as absolutely impersonal—that they are the expression of various representative moods of human feeling and various representative aspects of human experience, and that therefore they may possibly possess the inherent right ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... not dare to serve you or Jem so; but I thought the school was impersonal, and could ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... badly scratched knee, and one case of pinkeye. Betsy and I are being polite, but cool, toward the doctor. The annoying thing is that he is rather cool, too. And he seems to be under the impression that the drop in temperature is all on his side. He goes about his business in a scientific, impersonal way, entirely courteous, but ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... your eyes are concerned, between you and me. Make the best instead of the worst of your strange position here. It offers you a new sensation to amuse you while you are ill. You have a nurse who is an impersonal creature—a shadow among shadows; a voice to speak to you, and a hand to help you, and nothing more. Enough of myself!" she exclaimed, rising and changing her tone. "What can I do to amuse you?" ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... recognize the public advantage of making all nominations, as nearly as possible, impersonal, in the sense of being free from mere caprice or favor in the selection; and in those offices in which special training is of greatly increased value I believe such a rule as to the tenure of office should obtain as may induce men of proper qualifications to apply themselves ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... this short day of frost and sun to sleep before evening" is the one intolerable misuse of life.[5] Sometimes the feeling is expressed with the vivid passion of a lyric:—"To what profit? for thou wilt not find a lover among the dead, O girl";[6] sometimes with the curiously impersonal and incomparably direct touch that is peculiar to Greek, as in the verses by Antipater of Sidon,[7] that by some delicate magic crowd into a few words the fugitive splendour of the waning year, the warm lingering days and sharp nights of ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... of age when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, he remembers little of his life as a slave. The master was kind in an impersonal way but made no provision for his freedmen as did many other Southerners—usually in the form of land grants—although he gave them their freedom as soon as the proclamation was issued. Berry learned from his elders that their master was a noted duelist and owned ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... embodies is something more abstract than concrete, not necessarily inspired by the person to whom its deference is shown. Like all greetings exchanged in the midst of crowds or in public places, it is somewhat impersonal in manner. Personal recognitions and distinctions are reserved for more private occasions. One's greetings to fellow-guests at a reception are uniformly affable, irrespective of personal preferences. Though ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... this little tale over and over again in the days that followed, and many times since then that impersonal and mysterious guide of the schoolmaster's fancy has ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... are most concerned, naturally, with wholly impersonal verse, and in it the aged poet is never wholly absent from English thought. As the youthful singer suggests the southland, so the aged bard seems indigenous to the north. It seems inevitable that Gray should depict the Scotch bard ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... solemn as I feel over taking such a step for two as I am deciding on, I can't help looking forward to scribbling a terse and impersonal account of my having proposed to the man of my choice in this strong-minded book, adding a few words of sage advice for the Five, locking it and handing it, key and all, to Jane with a dramatic demand that she put her hundred thousand dollars ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... prosaic alternative between comfort and discomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow. Now that the hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the most part is so vague and accommodating, when even war is a vast impersonal business, nationality seems to have slipped into the place of honour. It has become the one eloquent, public, intrepid illusion. Illusion, I mean, when it is taken for an ultimate good or a mystical essence, for of course nationality is a fact. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... and while she granted their worth, they were more picturesque about their own affairs than when she came in close contact with them. Those were her first impressions. And so she looked at Roaring Bill Wagstaff, over the way, with a quite impersonal interest. ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... From all these impersonal considerations the girl was brought back to the vital phases of her life by the harsh voice of one of the men. "Lize Wetherford is goin' to get jumped one o' these days for sellin' whiskey without a license. I've told her ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... sharply divided the court. On one hand one saw the dock and the defending counsel's seat steeped in frigid light, while, on the other, was the little, isolated jury box in the shade. This contrast seemed symbolical of justice, impersonal and uncertain, face to face with the accused, whom the light stripped bare, probed as it were to his very soul. Then, through a kind of grey mist above the bench, in the depths of the stern and gloomy scene, one ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... her welfare was very diverting. "In other words, they can quickly discover the young woman who goes about unprotected? Don't you think that the trend of the conversation has taken rather a remarkable turn, not as impersonal ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... the coward who bolts, leaving his black man to take the brunt of it, or who sticks but loses his head. Each new employer must be very closely and interestedly scrutinized. In the light of subsequent experience, I can no longer wonder at Memba Sasa's first detached and impersonal attitude. ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... Free States as to the mode in which the free sentiment of the people should operate the strictly Anti-Slavery men were to some extent responsible. It is difficult to convince an ardent reformer that the principle for which he contends, being impersonal, should be purified from the passions and whims of his own personality. The more fervid he is, the more he is identified in the public mind with his cause; and, in a large view, he is bound not merely to defend his cause, but to see that the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... strongly that such work as you describe the critic producing—and creative such work must undoubtedly be admitted to be—is, of necessity, purely subjective, whereas the greatest work is objective always, objective and impersonal. ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... years there'll hardly be a big railroad man in the country who wasn't born in sight of the Rockies." Unlike Mr. Fowler, whose mind ran in a groove leading directly to business, the judge had a natural bent toward generalization, and when dining, preferred to discuss impersonal topics. He was a tall, florid man with an immense paunch flattened by artificial devices, and a vitality so excessive that it overflowed in numberless directions—in his hearty animal appetites, in his love of sports, in his delight in the theatre and literature, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... by this sudden turn. The situation had become almost impersonal. "I'm sorry," she said. She wished that she could have thought of a better remark—a better one came in the night, when she was going over the whole affair—but he seemed ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... leaning back in his big chair, the winter sunshine streaming in the window behind him, and a dozen jars of fragrant winter flowers making the whole room sweet, that Susan came in, unhesitatingly. It was the mood of all his moods that she liked best; interested, interesting, impersonal. ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... and impersonal; they concern the comforts and welfare, of each and every one of us, to a greater or less extent, but in a purely material ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... and looking at her. He felt the different tone that had got into their talk. It had been impersonal a ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... the sustainer of his life and health and happiness. With some the worship was purely and wholly material—the sun was viewed as a huge mass of fiery matter, uninformed by any animate life, unintelligent, impersonal; but with others, sun-worship was something higher than this: the orb of day was regarded as informed by a good, wise, bright, beneficent Spirit, which lived in it, and worked through it, and was the true benefactor of mankind and sustainer of life and of the universe. Sun-worship of ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... kill one spider, you merely make room in the overflowing economy of nature for another to pick up a dishonest livelihood? Have you ever reflected that the prime blame of spiderhood rests with Nature herself (if we may venture to personify that impersonal entity); and that she has provided such a constant supply or relay of spiders as will amply suffice to fill up all the possible vacancies that can ever occur in insect-eating circles? Unless you have considered all these points carefully, and have an ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... and Adam Beck are just the sort of audacious public-interest performers that a man like him should be after. He seemed to have an insatiable capacity for picking out little filaments of dry-as-dust technique from which on behalf of an impersonal client like the city of Toronto he could manage to inveigle a web of silk about any anti-civic despot who regards a city as a thing to be worked for dividends, and people merely as common ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... sheltering influence, to which he had succumbed with an effortless, an almost fatalistic impulse, finding there, at any rate, a refuge from the horrors of his empty days. It was all abstract and impersonal at first, this jealousy which had come so suddenly to disturb the serenity of an almost too perfect day, but as the hours passed it seemed to him that his thoughts dwelt more often upon the direct cause of his brief separation ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ignorant humanity. Outside of ourselves there stretches away on every side an infinitude of space without sound, without light, without colour, a solitude traversed only in every direction by an inconceivably complex web of silent and impersonal forces. That, if I understand it aright, is the general conception of the world which modern science has ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... that simple rudeness which at times professed to be almost impersonal, and which Rosalie had usually tried to believe was the outcome of a kind of cool British humour. But this time she started a ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... last in a pause by the roulette table at the rear of the room. Curious to watch the game in being, he lingered there, head cocked shrewdly on one shoulder, a speculative pensiveness informing his eyes, his interest plainly aloof and impersonal. This despite the fact that his emotions of intestinal felicity were momentarily becoming more intense: the torchlight procession was in full swing, leaving an enduring refulgence wherever ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... her courteously, recovering his composure with a smile that was not without self-ridicule, and in a moment they were talking again upon impersonal matters. But the episode, slight though it was, dwelt in Dinah's mind thereafter with an odd persistence. She felt as if Isabel had given her a flashlight glimpse of something which otherwise she would scarcely have realized. In that single fleeting ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... on, but whether their outlook be wide or narrow, personal or impersonal, they work in their way and something is ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... was shining, the road white and dusty, the mountains of Elvira purple to the tops and there splashed with silver. When he spoke, his voice was changed. Neither now nor hereafter did he discourse of money-gold and nobility flowing from earthly kings with that impersonal exaltation with which he talked of his errand from God to link together east and west. But he drew them somehow in train from the last, hiding here I thought, an earthly weakness from himself, ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... feared a similar exhibition on my part and did not wish me to attend your combat. He says now that I shall go to no more. I certainly made myself ridiculous. I enjoy a fair fight, whatever the outcome may be, but I despise murder. My act was entirely impersonal, Sir Count." ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... gives the same dramatic conflict, while its detached and impersonal refrain gives it strikingly the character of the Scotch ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... destroyed in this room, that a methodical dissecting process had begun which would continue move by move and hour by hour until the Federation's scientists were satisfied that no further scraps of information could be drained from the prisoners. The investigation might be completely impersonal; but the fact that they were being ignored here as sentient beings, were not permitted to argue their case or offer an explanation, seemed more chilling than deliberate brutality. And yet, Halder told himself, he couldn't really blame anyone ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... comeliness! You do not want them for yourself, perhaps not even for your son, but you look on smiling; and when you recall their images—again, it is with a smile. I defy you to see or think of them and not smile with an infinite and intimate, but quite impersonal, pleasure. Well, either I know nothing of women, or that was the case with Bethiah McRankine. She had been to church with a cockade behind her, on the one hand; on the other, her house was brightened by the presence of a pair of good-looking young fellows of the other sex, who were ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... though he had heard him, Phadrig came towards them at the moment, and said in his polite, impersonal tone: ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... one impersonal glance, saw that she had destroyed him utterly, relented, and graciously acquiesced. When they left the office Matt Peasley was stepping high, like a ten-time winner, for he had suddenly made the discovery that life ashore ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... on to 1917 each oncoming debutante was taught by her mother to give unto the genus, married man, her most impersonal manner, lest she provoke his "undesirable attentions." If poaching was done, it was from behind a tree. Unmarried girls knew that their place was not in somebody else's home in those days. The wives could protect their preserves by the simple expedient of "talking about" any unmarried ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... the Aztecs the sun is said to have been attacked by a hunter and grievously wounded by his arrows.(6) The Gallinomeros, in Central California, seem at least to know that the sun is material and impersonal. They say that when all was dark in the beginning, the animals were constantly jostling each other. After a painful encounter, the hawk and the coyote collected two balls of inflammable substance; the hawk (Indra was occasionally a hawk) flew ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... of Matthew and Mark have not nearly the same stamp of individuality. They are impersonal compositions, in which the author totally disappears. A proper name written at the head of works of this kind does not amount to much. But if the Gospel of Luke is dated, those of Matthew and Mark are dated ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... Lido?" she asked presently, in her crispest Italian. She was sitting on the carpeted steps at the prow, whence she had been regarding, with a quite impersonal interest, the swaying motion of the supple, picturesque figure at the oar. She was not sure that she altogether approved of the broad white straw hat, with fluttering ends of blue ribbon, nor of the blue ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... Densher saw it, meanwhile went on—amplified soon enough by the advent of two other guests, stray gentlemen both, stragglers in the rout of the season, who visibly presented themselves to Kate during the next moments as subjects for a like impersonal treatment and sharers in a like usual mercy. At opposite ends of the social course, they displayed, in respect to the "figure" that each, in his way, made, one the expansive, the other the contractile effect of the perfect white waistcoat. A scratch ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... let them be rich; let them be blood-suckers; so much, God willing, shall they regorge into the treasury of the empire. Let but Heaven smile upon our party, and the Cassiani shall return to the republic its old impersonal supremacy." ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... is involuntary; reflection is personal, spontaneity is impersonal; reflection is analytic, spontaneity is synthetic; reflection begins with doubt, spontaneity with affirmation; reflection belongs to certain ones, spontaneity belongs to all; reflection produces science, spontaneity ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the rule of 'every man for himself' was the rule of happiness. But at last it turns out as a matter of experience, and so plainly that it is coming to be even generally admitted—it turns out that the only real happiness is in a kind of impersonal higher life, where the happiness of others counts with a man as essential to his own. He that loves his life does really turn out to lose it, and the new commandment proves its own truth ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... is wise to restrict the use of postals to impersonal communications; but if they must be used, the message should be brief with an apology for its use. It is a good plan in addition to omit the usual My dear, and to sign with the initials only ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green
... so. What I mean is that these old Catholic churches seem different. In our own churches you have a feeling of being—what do you say?—personally conducted. As if you were a visitor being shown children's trinkets. There is something impersonal—something boundless—in churches like this one here. The silence makes you think that there is nobody in them—or that perhaps ... ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... this in a perfectly impersonal tone, but something about the quality of his voice made Marise flash a quick glance at him. His eyes met hers with a sudden, bold deepening of their gaze. Marise's first impulse was to be startled and displeased, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... drop of rain seen in its falling through the air? Indistinguishable the particle was in the cloud whence it came; indistinguishable it will become again in the ocean whither it is bound. Its personality is but its passing phase from a vast impersonal on the one hand to an equally vast impersonal on the other. Thus seers preached in the past; so modern science is hinting to-day. With us the idea seems the bitter fruit of material philosophy; by them it was looked upon as the fairest ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... it was. Even on business Dudley's brain ran on lines of its own; you might tell him a thing till you were black in the face, and he would never believe it. Lately, between drugs and drink, he was past assimilating any impersonal ideas at all. Macartney was so worried about him that he'd told off Baker, one of his new men, to go wherever Dudley went. I had no use for the man: he was a black and white looking devil and slim as ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... Pettibone looked down his torso with an impersonal eye. "I think the greenish skin pigmentation is a result of mineral-heavy vapors that occur during certain seasons. The growth. As to my ...
— Say "Hello" for Me • Frank W. Coggins
... fact and color, memory and make-up, his stories were delightful. Also, after the manner of men who seek to influence a young girl's mind and heart, he lent her books to read, and he marked his favorite passages, which he discussed afterward. They were not passages of abstract thought and impersonal sentiment, like the penciled notes in Alick Corfield's literary loans, but scenes of passion or of pathos, going straight to the heart of youth, which feels rather than reflects, or descriptions of places which were equal to pictures of human life. Under Alick's guidance she had fallen ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... seemed to be eternally running up and down his ladder, shifting it here and there across the vast white background of canvas, drawing great meaningless lines in distant expanses of the texture, then, always consulting her with his keen, impersonal gaze, he pushed back his ladder, mounted, wiped the big brushes, selected others smaller and flatter, considering her in penetrating silence between ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... of Nature given to man,"—this interfusion of human interest with the sublimity of moor and hill,—formed a typical introduction to the manner in which Wordsworth regarded mankind to the end,—depicting him as set, as it were, amid impersonal influences, which make his passion and struggle but a little thing; as when painters give but a strip of their canvas to the fields and cities of men, and overhang the narrowed landscape with the space and ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... mere mention of the authors from whom Berlioz drew his subjects: Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Scott, Virgil, Hugo, shows the wide range of his reading and the difference in output which would inevitably result. The previous impersonal attitude towards music is shown by the very names of compositions which, broadly speaking (till the beginning of the 19th century) were seldom more than Symphony, Sonata, or Quartet, No. so and so; while the movements, in an equally mechanical way, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... and there will be much more likelihood that we may presently find, what it is impossible to find now, a number of devoted men and women ready to give their whole lives, with a quasi-religious enthusiasm, to this great task of peace establishment, finding in such impersonal work a refuge from the disappointments, limitations, losses and sorrows of their personal life—a refuge we need but little in more settled and more prosperous periods. They will be but the outstanding individuals in a very universal ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... indifference which her father, Prince Tchereteff, might have displayed when ordering a spy or a traitor to be shot, she retraced her steps to the house, where all seemed to sleep, murmuring, with cold irony, in a sort of impersonal affirmation, as if she were thinking not of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and he pondered it a long while, finding himself at last forced to conclude that there is no moral law except one's own conscience, and that the moral obligation of every man is to separate the personal conscience from the impersonal conscience. By the impersonal conscience he meant the opinions of others, traditional beliefs, and the rest; and thinking of these things he wandered round the Druid stones, and when his thoughts returned to ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... no reply. Her futility was beginning to weary him. She saw it and again attempted an impersonal ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... had not loved to moralise; neither, may we add, would he have been his father's son; but (what is worthy of note) his moralisings are to a large extent the moral of his own career. He was among the least impersonal of artists. Except in the "Jolly Beggars," he shows no gleam of dramatic instinct. Mr. Carlyle has complained that "Tam o' Shanter" is, from the absence of this quality, only a picturesque and external piece of work; and I may add that in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in a great measure to his preoccupation, which made him deaf at times to what the others were saying. He knew that they were quite impersonal in their talk, and so he drifted into ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... in his light-blue eye, answered with a cordial nod; and in two minutes a lively conversation had begun between them on purely impersonal subjects suited to the intelligence of the crowd they were in. This did not last, however. An opportunity soon came for them to stroll off together, and presently Mr. Ransom found himself closeted with this man who he had reason to believe was the sole holder of the key to the ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... to allow Kitty the chance of making any of her spiteful little speeches about Dora in presence of the visitor, kept the conversation upon purely impersonal topics, until they rose from table, and the two gentlemen strolled out upon the porch at the western door; while Kitty ran up to call Dora, whom she found sitting beside the bed, with Sunshine's head lying ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... willing industry. Neither let the child conceive of you as an impersonal necessary part of the household machinery, nor as an unwilling martyr to household necessities. Most mothers err in one or the other of these two directions, and many of them err in both: they either, (a) perform the innumerable services of the household so quietly and steadily ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... loyalty to life as opposed to death, or to health as against disease. It is more than that. The lifeward effort of some beings clashes with the corresponding attempt to live on the part of others, and the actualization of one impersonal ideal of beauty, truth, or society exacts the sacrifice of one set of human lives and favors the survival of another, so that an opposition in ideals may mean an antagonism in the struggle of classes and masses ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... passed in review, while the bonnet had been changed three times over before the critic was satisfied. It would never do to spoil an effect which had been achieved with so much trouble; so the unselfish creature gulped down her tears, and tried to talk cheerfully on impersonal topics, keeping her eyes fixed on the landscape the while, lest the sight of her child might prove too much for ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... grades of religious ideas have been identified, and classified as Naturalism and Animism. In the plane of Naturalism the belief obtains that a vague impersonal force, which may have more than one manifestation and is yet manifested in everything, controls the world and the lives of human beings. An illustration of this stage of religious consciousness is afforded ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... reason of the notional term added. But if the word "generandi" [of being begotten] is taken as the gerundive of the passive verb, the power "generandi" is in the Son—that is, the power of being begotten. The same is to be said if it be taken as the gerundive of an impersonal verb, so that the sense be "the power of generation"—that is, a power by which it ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... and I think she would. Now, don't be silly; give the ring to Roger, and if you want something grander than this bronze jig for Ken, get him a book. As handsome a book as you choose; but a book. Or something that's impersonal. Not a ring or a watch-fob, ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... called hello with irritated insistence, and finally succeeded in raising Central's impersonal: "Number, please?" Whereupon he flung himself angrily ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... lay-brother, burning, impersonal, saw not a particular young man and a case compounded of mixed elements, but—The Enemy! against whom night and day he waged ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... and his leather polished, is usually the man who is brightly polished inside. Spit and polish teaches a man to come out of the trenches from seeing his pals killed, and to carry on as though nothing abnormal had happened. It educates him in an impersonal attitude towards calamity which makes it bearable. It forces him not to regard anything too tragically. If you can stand aside from yourself and poke fun at your own tragedy—and tragedy always has its humorous aspect—that helps. The songs which have been inspired ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... difference in men as in women," said the Young Man in an impersonal tone. "I may be right or wrong, you see, but I imagine he would feel something like this: From boyhood he has understood that away out in Canada there is a little girl growing up who is some day to be his wife. She becomes his boyish ideal of all that is good and true. He pictures ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... therefore, can so accommodate this truth to us as not to leave the belief in it an act of mental ascent and trust, of faith as distinguished from sight. Divest reason of its trust, and the universe stops at the impersonal stage—there is no God; and yet, if the first step in religion is the greatest, how is it that the freest and boldest speculator rarely declines it? How is it that the most mysterious of all truths is a universally ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... place of the living word of the philosopher. (Compare the contrast of Phaedrus, and Laws; also the plays on the words nous, nomos, nou dianome; and the discussion in the Statesman of the difference between the personal rule of a king and the impersonal reign of law.) The State is based on virtue and religion rather than on knowledge; and virtue is no longer identified with knowledge, being of the commoner sort, and spoken of in the sense generally understood. Yet there are many traces of advance as well as retrogression ...
— Laws • Plato
... brute," Lindsay went on with most impersonal solicitude, "and can support her. I suppose there isn't any way one could do anything for her. I heard a story only yesterday about a girl changing her mind on the way out. By Jove, I didn't suppose it ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... point as politely as I could, and my mind was at once set at ease by the purely impersonal way in which he ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates |
