"Inexact" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said, are incomplete and inexact to a degree that will shock any person with a scientific knowledge of Polish pronunciation. In the present instance brevity seemed of ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... idea of the past become inexact by the mere decay and disappearance of essential features, it becomes positively incorrect through the gradual incorporation of elements that do not properly belong to it. Sometimes it is easy to see ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... not appear to me to be worth trying for—it will not be because I have shrunk from the amount of labour, where labour could do anything. I have worked at poetry; it has not been with me reverie, but art.' That her rhymes were inexact, especially in such poems as 'The Dead Pan,' she did not deny; but her defence was that the inexactness was due to a deliberate attempt to widen the artistic capabilities of the English language. Partly, perhaps, as a result ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... of one tribe, the Bakalai, in which the women worship a particular divinity named Njambai.[26] This writer is even more inexact than Stanley, hence, we get very little scientific data from his voluminous works. From what he says of Njambai,[F] I am inclined to believe that he is a negro Priapus; this, however, is a conjectural belief and ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... account is inexact, and many of the more recent narratives are not only exaggerated, but ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... the Platonic [Greek: en], was, as we said. In ratione et disserendo: an instance of Cicero's fondness for tautology, cf. D.F. I. 22 quaerendi ac disserendi. Quamquam oriretur: the sentence is inexact, it is knowledge which takes its rise in the senses, not the criterion of truth, which is the mind itself; cf. however II. 30 and n. Iudicium: the constant translation of [Greek: kriterion], a word foreign ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... it, and fewer still that dare to reveal it; they are afraid of the coarse world and its summary judgments and can get no farther than the plain meaning of traditional language. In this conventional tongue, which is voluntarily inexact for the sake of social simplification, words are careful not to unveil, by expressing them, the many shades of reality in its multiple forms. They imprison it, codify it, drill it; they press it into the service ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... explanation can be offered of language like this. [Reading from letter.] "From the first moment I saw you, I felt that you were entirely different from any woman I have ever met——" A monstrously inexact statement to start with. And a woman who is capable ...
— Dolly Reforming Herself - A Comedy in Four Acts • Henry Arthur Jones
... usual version of the attack at Trafalgar has of late been elaborately disputed by capable critics. I myself have no doubt that they are quite mistaken; but it would be curious to investigate how far their argument derives from inexact phraseology—as, for example, the definition of "column" and "line" ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long ere he has made the circuit the whole figure will have changed. Life may be compared, not to a single tree, but to a great and complicated forest; circumstance is more swiftly changing than a shadow, language much more inexact than the tools of a surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and are renewed; the very essences are fleeting as we look; and the whole world of leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds of time. Look now for your shadows. O man of ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Merchants, refugees, spies, adventurers desirous of bettering their condition, were continually moving, singly or in bodies, from one land to another, and through them a considerable acquaintance with mundane affairs generally was spread abroad. The knowledge was, of course, very inexact. No surveys were made, no plans of cities or fortresses, no maps; the military force that could be brought into the field by the several nations was very roughly estimated; but still, ancient conquerors did not start ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... the average lover of poetry can carry. It is needless to say that there are born rhymers, who think in rhyme and whose fecundity of imagery is multiplied by the excitement of matching sound with sound. They are often careless in their prodigality, inexact in their swift catching at any rhyme-word that will serve. At the other extreme are the self-conscious artists in verse who abhor imperfect concordances, and polish their rhymes until the life and freshness disappear. For sheer improvising cleverness ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... all Bacon, has risen to so noble and profound a conception of this most strangely commingled of all human affections. There is no modern thinker, again, who makes Beauty—all that is gracious, seemly, and becoming—so conspicuous and essential a part of life. It would be inexact to say that Emerson blended the beautiful with the precepts of duty or of prudence into one complex sentiment, as the Greeks did, but his theory of excellence might be better described than any other of modern times by the [Greek: kalokagathia], ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... mechanical construction by examining say a steam-engine, and counting the number of screws employed in holding it together. Previous to the time at which the subject occupied the attention of our mechanic, the tools used for making screws were of the most rude and inexact kind. The screws were for the most part cut by hand: the small by filing, the larger by chipping and filing. In consequence of the great difficulty of making them, as few were used as possible; and cotters, cotterils, or forelocks, ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... particular, 'Unity' and 'Being,' which had grown up in the pre-Socratic philosophy, and were still standing in the way of all progress and development of thought. He does not say with Bacon, 'Let us make truth by experiment,' or 'From these vague and inexact notions let us turn to facts.' The time has not yet arrived for a purely inductive philosophy. The instruments of thought must first be forged, that they may be used hereafter by modern inquirers. How, while mankind ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... old judge mused aloud, "whatever hardship it may seem to work to these unknown heirs like your California cousins. For you must see that human life could not go on unless we cleaned the slate sometimes arbitrarily, and began all over. It is better for everybody to accept certain inexact or unjust conditions rather than to disturb the whole fabric of human society by attempting to do exact justice, which, after all, is in itself a human impossibility. That is what our good people, reformers and anarchists alike, often fail ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... women in Yloilo, and 983 men in Cebu, the rest being dispersed over the coast villages and the interior. The most competent local authorities in two provinces proved to me that the figures relating to their districts were inexact, and all other information on the subject which I have been able to procure tends to show that the number of resident Chinese was underrated. I estimate that just before the Rebellion of 1896 there were 100,000 ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... 46, note, applies also to the authorship of this letter. 2 J. Bigelow, Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin, vol. iv., p. 378. 3 Chap. 46. 4 Chap. 21. The quotation from the statute is inexact. 5 Since the writing of this letter an Instruction of this kind is arrived, which has been communicated by the Governor to his Majesty's Council; and is recorded in ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... many another bird and beast, furnishes much doubtful weather lore for credulous and inexact observers. "When the woodpecker pecks low on the trees, expect warm weather" is a common saying, but when different individuals are seen pecking at the same time, one but a few feet from the ground, and another among ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... This phenomenon is not new but is as old as the world; and it is not supernatural but is subject to the eternal laws that govern all that exists. This phenomenon has been usually defined as "intercourse with the spirit world." That definition is inexact. Under such a definition the spirit world is contrasted with the material world. But this is erroneous; there is no such contrast! Both worlds are so closely connected that it is impossible to draw a line of demarcation, separating the one from the other. We say matter is composed ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... holes of his waistcoat, and passed twice or thrice up and down the, room, with a tantalizing air. Ephraim Flagg had given up driving the stage between New London and Norwich, and had recently taken to books, and so studied certain exact and inexact sciences, as they were called, and neglected all business, that it was feared he would become a town tax. In addition to this he had made himself famous for quarreling with all those who differed with him on the peculiarities of his ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... those of his own country. He wrote with too flowing a pen to be careful about precision, and had too much love of the picturesque to resist the temptation of embellishing a good story. His narrative of continental transactions is in particular extremely inexact. But the chief cause of his offending also gives special value to his work; he was a man of strong views and his sympathies and prejudices colour every line he wrote. His standpoint is that of a patriotic Englishman, indignant at the alien invasions, at the misgovernment of the king, ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... 27 (inexact quotation).—The story told in this section was a favourite of St. Charles Borromeo (Alban Butler, Lives of Saints, ed. ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... lucid arrangement; a mass of details is given, but the links whereby the generalizations from these are sought to be established, are here and there wanting, and here and there obscure. It is probably the fault of the subject, which is in its character inexact; but we certainly expected that more had been done; and from some passages in the early portions of the work, we were induced to believe that the author had succeeded in proving races of mankind to be more distinctly deducible from their sources, and that their physical and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... Utrecht, visited London, and saw, as one of the most interesting sights of the city, a dramatic performance at the Swan. Later he communicated a description of the building to his friend Arend van Buchell,[248] who recorded the description in his commonplace-book, along with a crude and inexact drawing of the interior (see page 169), showing the stage, the three galleries, and the pit.[249] The description is headed: "Ex Observationibus Londinensibus Johannis de Witt." After a brief notice of St. Paul's, and a briefer reference to Westminster Cathedral, the traveler begins to describe ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... all labour in style; a morning is cheerfully devoted to verifying a quotation, by one who will not spare ten minutes to reconstruct a clumsy sentence; a reference is sought with ardour, an appropriate expression in lleu of the inexact phrase which first suggests itself does not seem worth seeking. What are we to say to a man who spends a quarter's income on a diamond pin which he sticks in a greasy cravat? A man who calls public attention on him, and appears in a slovenly undress? Am I to bestow applause on some insignificant ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... given me greater relief. When we got back to my house we found the friend we had left there quite unruffled and not much concerned to know the facts of our adventure. My impression is that he had been taking a nap on my lounge; be appeared refreshed and even gay; but if I am inexact in these details he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the difference of nine or ten minutes in the estimated inclination of the entrance passage corresponds to a very considerable interval in time, certainly to not less than fifty years. (Exact calculation would be easy, but it would be time wasted where the data are inexact.) ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... progress of the banquet, the story of Jason was enacted. Time there certainly was for the play. La Marche estimated forty-eight dishes to every course, though he qualifies his statement by the admission that his memory might be inexact. These dishes were wheeled over the tables in little chariots before each ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... expressing in poetry his acute and subtle sense of its beauties—by lavishing on it (as we say) 'the colours of his imagination,' He was then an 'individual mind'—according to the current, but (as Shelley held) inexact terminology. He has now, by death, wholly passed out of the class of individual minds; and he forms a portion of the Universal Mind (the 'One Spirit') which is ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... brevity it will always be in the sense that, if God is what we have inferred from His manifestations, He must be this or that. In other words, having to some degree worked my own way out of fear I must tell how I came to feel that I know the Unknowable, doing it with the inexact phraseology which is all ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... several horses at once, involved him in a charge of Pelagianism, or something like it, which he wrote much to disprove, but which has so far lasted as to justify modern theologians in regarding his ideas on this and other theological points as, to say the least, confused. All over his work inexact quotation from memory, illicit argumentation, and an abiding inconsistency, mar the intellectual value, affecting not least his famous Liberty of Prophesying, or plea for toleration against the new Presbyterian uniformity,—the conformity of which treatise with modern ideas ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... to colleagues in all parts of the country, Susan, as the contributions began to come in, struggled to decipher the often almost illegible, handwritten manuscripts, many of them careless and inexact about dates and facts. To their request for data about her, Lucy Stone curtly replied, "I have never kept a diary or any record of my work, and so am unable to furnish you the required dates.... You say 'I' must be referred ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... in which the poems are printed is in no sense original, but is that followed in most standard textbooks. Naturally such artificial divisions as "Pagan" and "Christian" are inexact. The "pagan" poems are only largely pagan; the "Christian" predominatingly Christian. On the whole, the grouping is perhaps accurate enough for practical purposes, and the conformity to existing textbooks makes ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... said that there were no inexact statements made by the communicator during all these sittings? There are some, but very few. I shall speak of them in the following chapter. In any case, there is no trace of a single intentional untruth in the whole ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage |
