"Intangible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... raise its cover. The man almost shuddered as he bent over and looked in, curious as though these things had never before met his gaze. There was a dull odor of dead flowers long boxed up. A faint rustling as of intangible things became half audible, as though spirits passed out at this contact ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... community be properly cared for. The financial burden is becoming a heavy one; it will become a crushing one unless steps are taken to make the feeble-minded productive (as described in the next chapter) and an intangible "sinking fund" at the same time created to reduce the burden gradually by preventing the production of those who make it up. The burden can never be wholly obliterated, but it can be largely reduced by a restriction of the reproduction of those who are themselves ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... the HELOISE for DILETTANTE ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric prudence which guided him among so many thousand follies and insanities. It would be well for all of the GENUS IRRITABILE thus to add something of skilled labour to intangible brain- work. To find the right word is so doubtful a success and lies so near to failure, that there is no satisfaction in a year of it; but we all know when we have formed a letter perfectly; and a stupid ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... them, nor to these latter any more than to those who never thought of them: things like the dust carried and whirled about to and fro by the tempest, or vanishing as the smoke, or delusive as a dream, or intangible as a shadow; which, when absent, need not be despaired of by them that have them not, and, when present, cannot ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... the form of steady poverty amid expanding wealth. That is the simultaneous discovery which raised the ridicule of the Times—that, and the further discovery that, in Carlyle's phrase, "the Empire of old Mammon is everywhere breaking up." The intangible walls that resisted so obstinately are fading away. The power of wealth is suspected. Strike after strike secures its triumphant penny, and no return of Peterloo, or baton charges on the Liverpool St. George's Hall, driving the silent crowd over the edge of its steep ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... father." Maggie spoke slightingly, but with a tone of doubt. It was not the sort of picture that eighteen has been taught to like—yet the picture did possess an intangible something that provoked doubt as to its quality. "You sure do look ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... close upon it. It is made visible, tangible, in the struggles, in the contacts of the fine consciences, in their perplexities, in the sophism of their mistakes. For a fine conscience is naturally a virtuous one. What is natural about it is just its fineness, an abiding sense of the intangible, ever-present, right. It is most visible in their ultimate triumph, in their emergence from miracle, through an energetic act of renunciation. Energetic, not violent: the distinction is wide, enormous, like that ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... than the biography of great men. Through a succession of individuals we trace the character and destiny of nations. THE PEOPLE glide away from us, a sublime but intangible abstraction, and the voice of the mighty Agora reaches us only through the medium of its representatives to posterity. The more democratic the state, the more prevalent this delegation of its history to the few; since ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... incorporeal are such as are intangible: rights, for instance, such as inheritance, usufruct, and obligations, however acquired. And it is no objection to this definition that an inheritance comprises things which are corporeal; for the fruits of land enjoyed by a usufructuary are corporeal too, and obligations ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... no cause for suspicion but his own intuition and the intangible evidence of tone and look all as obvious to the others as to him. But he was at once doubtful and relieved when the haggard wretch at the door, mustering his courage, replied: "Know Royston McGurny! None better. Knowed him ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... dark ray—with a streaming and energetic suggestion of FORCE about it, such as the ascending jet of water from a powerful fire-engine affords. It was curious to see a good strong shadow of an earthly object cast upon so intangible a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The intangible and shapeless suspicions which Ethel had caught from Leonora took a misty form and substance, only to be immediately dispelled in that inconstant mind by the sudden refreshing sound of Milly's voice: 'We've called to take Ethel home, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... pleasant to be alone with painful thoughts in the White Silence. The silence of gloom is merciful, shrouding one as with protection and breathing a thousand intangible sympathies; but the bright White Silence, clear and cold, ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... Ridgar, drawn by that intangible sense of eyes upon him, raised his head; and, as their glances met, that great void flashed suddenly into full panoply of life peopled with a ring of painted faces against the background of a night forest, a leaping fire, and the heroic figure of a tall woman who stood ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... some intangible force being exerted, may seem reasonless. Yet, my instinct warns me, that it is not so. In these things, reason seems to me less to ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... few of their college bills unpaid, who cannot think of buying that lovely little Elzevir which Smith has for sale at auction, of which Smith does not dream of the value, sixty thousand dollars seems as intangible as sixty million sestertia. Clarke, second, how much are sixty million sestertia stated in cowries? How much in currency, gold being at 1.37 1/4/? Right; go ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... of Clarissa's visits to the painter's lodgings? what possible reason could she have for going there? Miss Granger's suspicions were shapeless and intangible as yet, but she did suspect. More than once—many times, in fact—during the painting of the portrait, she had seen, or had imagined she could see, signs and tokens of a closer intimacy between the painter and her father's wife than was warranted by their ostensible acquaintance. The ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... twice the chance of the other of dying in a hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's vested ideas,—blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible private truth. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... to be envied, and genius very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's vested ideas,—blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... could revisit the body in the tomb ... and could reincarnate it and hold converse with it.' Again there was the 'Khu', the 'spiritual intelligence', or spirit. It took the form of 'a shining, luminous, intangible shape of the body.'... Then, again, there was the 'Sekhem', or 'power' of a man, his strength or vital force personified. These were the 'Khaibit', or 'shadow', the 'Ren', or 'name', the 'Khat', or 'physical body', and 'Ab', ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... everything went smoothly enough, and the work upon the great story progressed to the author's satisfaction; but as Easter approached something queer seemed to develop in the Dampmere cottage. It was undefinable, intangible, invisible, but it was there. Dawson's hair would not stay down. When he rose up in the morning he would find every single hair on his head standing erect, and plaster it as he would with his brushes dipped in water, it could not be induced ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... all nature, animate and inanimate. The Rev. S.R. Riggs, who for forty years has been a student of Dakota customs, superstitions, etc., says, Tahkoo Wahkan, p. 55, et seq.: "The religious faith of the Dakota is not in his gods as such. It is in an intangible, mysterious something of which they are only the embodiment, and that in such measure and degree as may accord with the individual fancy of the worshiper. Each one will worship some of these divinities, and neglect or despise others, but the great object of all their worship, ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... but with that subtle lack of response to Lucy's sympathy which had seemed to spring first into existence on the day of Nemi. Lucy had never felt at ease with her since then, and her heart, in truth, was a little sore. She only knew that something intangible and dividing had arisen between them; and that she felt herself once more the awkward, ignorant girl beside this delicate and high-bred woman, on whose confidence and friendship she had of course no claim whatever. Already she ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... direction of the poet, and shaking hands with feline amiability. "I cannot think of another example of such rapid success," continued Finot, looking from des Lupeaulx to Lucien. "There are two sorts of success in Paris: there is a fortune in solid cash, which any one can amass, and there is the intangible fortune of connections, position, or a footing in certain circles inaccessible for certain persons, however rich they may be. Now ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Indian felt the ground for tracks and pitfalls and sticks, that might crackle. Louis, with his whole face pricked forward, trusted more to his eyes and ears and that sense of "feel," which is—contradictory as it may seem—utterly intangible. Once the Indian picked up a stick freshly broken. This was examined by both, and the Indian smelt it and tried his tongue on the broken edge. Then both fell on all fours, creeping under the branches of the thicket ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... whispering of summer winds. Everything is lifted up from the plane of labor to the plane of love, and a glory spans your life. With your friend, speech and silence are one; for a communion mysterious and intangible reaches across from heart to heart. The many dig and delve in your nature with fruitless toil to find the spring of living water: he only raises his wand, and, obedient to the hidden power, it bends at once to your secret. Your friendship, though independent ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... us the wisdom of all past experience, but it develops into a spiritual atmosphere in which we live, move and have our being. This was Comte's idea, that the spiritual life is developed out of tradition, that the world's experiences have produced for us intangible hopes, yearnings and aspirations; awe, reverence and sense of subtle mystery: mystic trust, faith in invisible memories, joy in the unseen power of thought and love; and that these create for us a spiritual world most real in its nature, and most powerful in its influence. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... only in intelligence and efficiency, but in an intangible something referred to as "personality". If your acquaintance is applying for a certain position, and has named you as one of his references, you will be asked by the appointing officer to tell what you know of the candidate's experience, his knowledge and skill in the ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... Throp's wife." Now I had always been curious to know who Throp's wife was, and wherein her "thrangness" consisted, and what might be Throp's view of the matter; but all my inquiries threw no light upon the problem, and it seemed as though Throp's wife were going to prove as intangible as Mrs Harris. But I am not the man to be put off by feminine elusiveness, so I made a vow that I would give up smoking until I had found Throp's wife and made her mine. My summer holiday was coming on, and ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... an intangible something about music, which may prove baffling when it comes to reducing it to cold scientific symbols and descriptions. Take, for instance, quality of tone. Each one of us knows perfectly the ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... intangible shadow of pomp and luxury, while the substance was actual penury. But her inborn fertility of invention, her abundant resources, her tact in accommodating herself to circumstances, and her inexhaustible energy, had endowed her with the faculty of making the best of her contradictory position, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... answered Mr. Magee. It came to him suddenly that in each person's definition of this intangible thing might lie exposed something of both character and calling. At the far end of the table Mrs. Norton's lined tired face met his gaze. To ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... preservation? For if it be said that the former creations are only the creations of our imagination, without objective value, may it not equally be said of the latter that they are only the creations of our senses? Who can assert that there is not an invisible and intangible world, perceived by the inward sense that lives in the service of ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... newness and beauty that pleased our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed for ever in immutable grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavouring it, falls more below himself, and is, more even than ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... being finally installed mistress in one of those shadowy estates which the distinguished Hibernian described with such eloquence. That these hopes did not materialize was entirely due to Cockburn, who took pains to enlighten the good woman upon the intangible character of the Hibernian's possessions, thus saving the innocent maiden from the clutches of the bold, bad adventurer. At least, that had been Cockburn's account of it when ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Rot in men, is a tendency to lurk and lounge; to be at street-corners without intelligible reason; to be going anywhere when met; to be about many places rather than at any; to do nothing tangible, but to have an intention of performing a variety of intangible duties to-morrow or the day after. When this manifestation of the disease is observed, the observer will usually connect it with a vague impression once formed or received, that the patient was living a little too hard. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... observe how authors and men of talent have increased, so vastly out of all proportion with other classes of men. Observing it, the political economist may well shout 'Io triumphe!' for that even in so delicate and intangible a matter as intellectual gifts, the famous doctrine of supply and demand is so thoroughly carried out. We raise, however, no hue and cry after 'poor trash.' Neither have we the blood-thirsty wish to run to ground the panting scribbler, or to adorn ourselves with the glories of his 'brush.' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and motioned him to sit beside me on the sofa. In the firelit room faint fragrance of the flowers with which he kept it filled crept to us, and around it we both glanced as if its spirit were not intangible; and at unspoken thought ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... animal, was resumed, shewing the absolute identity of the brain with a galvanic battery. Nor is this a very startling idea, when we reflect that electricity is almost as metaphysical as ever mind was supposed to be. It is a thing perfectly intangible, weightless. Metal may be magnetized, or heated to seven hundred of Fahrenheit, without becoming the hundredth part of a grain heavier. And yet electricity is a real thing, an actual existence in ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... churches, factories on it, slipping out of its cocoon at last—its little, old, faded, tied-down cocoon, and sailing upon the air—sailing with him, sailing with the churches, with the factories, and with the schools, with History, through the Invisible, through the Intangible—out ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... thoughtfully; "and you have placed a problem before me, my boy, that I feel is as difficult to resolve. I am very, very glad that you have kept it in your own breast, Severn; and the more I think of it the more I feel that it is only an intangible vapour of the brain. But, all the same, the matter is so mysterious and so important that I should not be doing my duty if I did not have ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... interested in him than Jean were grateful to Geoffrey Stonor when he smiled. They felt relieved from some intangible responsibility for the order ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... from in turn. The women of some tribes brand their children, filling in the wound with a blue dye, that serves as an identification if they happen to be snatched away. The various religious ideas of these pagans are intangible and indeterminate. The forest seems to be the abiding-place of gods. Some tribes will offer feasts to these divinities, either leaving the flesh and rice out in the woods to find that it has disappeared next morning, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... misapprehension of the value of the existing symbolism. That masonry is a union of equal rights is not affected by the presence of the degrees, provided that their symbolic significance is not overstepped. The degrees form a constituent part of the symbolic custom itself and like it are to be intangible. ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... the door. It still lacked an hour of midnight, when Marion, had promised to come to him. He was wildly impatient and to his impatience was added the fear that had filled him as he hovered over Obadiah, a nameless, intangible fear—something which he could not have analyzed and which clutched at his heart and urged him to follow the path that led to Marion's. For a time he resisted the impulse. What if she should come by another ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... intangible presence, something mysterious, but omnipotently alive; something that excited these three sisters; something that atoned, that not only consoled for suffering and solitude and bereavement, but that drew its strength from ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... words, but she was retreating rapidly; she gave him a smile over her shoulder, however, that was at once full of mirth and something more—something that he could not explain or grasp any more than he could the soft, silvery light of the moon that filled the sky, and was as real as it was intangible. He walked away as if in a dream; he continued his aimless wanderings for hours, but swift as were his strides a swifter current of passion, deep and strong, was sweeping him away from Jennie Burton and the power ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... the subject, and as they rode along in silence, each was thinking of the curious web of emotions that was moulding their lives and making definite objects grow from intangible impulses. He was hardly conscious yet what a motive force in his plans Liddy was destined to be; and she was filled with a new and sweet consciousness of a woman's power to shape a man's plans in life. When her home was ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... something sublimely beautiful in life that she had never yet experienced, something that unknowingly she had been waiting for; something that must come to her at last. . . . She wondered if the young man sitting so close to her were ever stirred by such rapturous, intangible thoughts. With quickened interest she turned to look at him, and met his deep eyes intent ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... matrimonial market. There was, however, that constantly recurring statement, "Oh, she's engaged to Paul Abbot," and that, presumably, accounted for the lack of those attentions in society which are so intangible when assailed, and yet leave such a void when omitted. Mrs. Abbot put it very plainly to ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... perseverance enough after the form that baffles and eludes you. Beauty is a thing severe and unapproachable, never to be won by a languid lover. You must lie in wait for her coming and take her unawares, press her hard and clasp her in a tight embrace, and force her to yield. Form is a Proteus more intangible and more manifold than the Proteus of the legend; compelled, only after long wrestling, to stand forth manifest in his true aspect. Some of you are satisfied with the first shape, or at most by the ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... nature are a vacuum, and a plenum. The plenum is body, or tangible nature; the vacuum is space, or intangible nature. "We know by the evidences of the senses (which are our only rule of reasoning) that bodies have a real existence, and we infer from the evidence of the senses that the vacuum has a real ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... objects appear in many respects as in a painting. Thus you see, in a painting done on a flat surface, objects which appear in relief, and in the mirror—also a flat surface—they look the same. The picture has one plane surface and the same with the mirror. The picture is intangible, in so far as that which appears round and prominent cannot be grasped in the hands; and it is the same with the mirror. And since you can see that the mirror, by means of outlines, shadows and lights, makes objects appear in relief, you, who have in ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... remains of human beings, nearly always past recognition or identification, except by guesswork, or the locality where they were found. Articles of domestic use scattered through the rubbish helped to tell who some of the bodies were. Part of a set of dinner plates told one man where in the intangible mass his house was. In one place was a photograph album with one picture recognizable. From this the body of a child near by was identified. A man who had spent a day and all night looking for the body of his wife, was directed to her remains by ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... was complete, and the young man understood, as clearly as if she had told him in so many words, that she was not a widow and that her husband was the cause of her sorrow. His quickened instinct marvelously divined (or else it was conveyed to him by some intangible method of hers) that the Count de Vaurigard was a very bad case, but that she would ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... eyes and studied the towering crag above their heads; when she lowered them again, her gaze for an instant met Tony's. There was a new light in his eyes—amusement, triumph, something entirely baffling. He gave her the intangible feeling of having at last got the mastery ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... the brightest star; those of life and death, and all of the mystery of mysteries. She went to sleep struggling with the ancient problem: 'Do the dead return? Are there, flowing about us, weird, supernatural influences as potent and intangible as electric currents?' In her sleep she continued her interesting investigations, but her dreaming vision explained the evening's problem by showing her the camp-fire made, the bacon and coffee set thereon, by a very nice young man with ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... chilled through and through with fear, sheer childish dread of the intangible and unknown terrors that lurked in the blackness above her. It was as if, rendered supersensitive by strain and excitement, the quivering filaments of her subconsciousness, like spiritual tentacles feeling ahead of her, had encountered and recoiled from a shape of evil, a specter of horror ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... who are continually in the homes of others. They have no sanctity of the life within; there are no shrines set apart for the family union, and the worship of the spirits of their ancestors. I cannot well explain to thee, the something intangible, the thick grey mist that is always there to put its bar across the open door of friendship between the woman of the Occident and ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... him from under her lashes. What could she do with this man? Nothing affected him. He seemed to have crossed some intangible barrier and to stand closer to her than any ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... Anthony was unwise enough to smile. Unfortunate man! In some intangible manner his smile made her mistress of the situation—with an air of injured righteousness she went emphatically to the closet and began pushing her laundry violently into the bag. Anthony watched ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Peyton say, and realized that they were still talking about Mina Raff. She wouldn't attract him, Lee Randon, in the least, he was sure of that ... no wistful April moon. What, then, did engage him? He was unable to say, he didn't know. It was something intangible, a charm without definite form; and his thoughts returned to Cytherea—if he could grasp the secret of her fascination he would be able to settle a great many disturbing feelings and needs. Yes, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... over this painful yet intangible episode. Was the pain all of his own creating? or had it been produced by something external? And he got the answer that brooding always gives—it was both. He was morbid, and had been so since his visit to Cadover—quicker to register ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... words he has known applied to things perceivable by touch, but to things perfectly intangible he never knew them applied. Those words in their wonted application always marked out to his mind bodies or solid things which were perceived by the resistance they gave. But there is no solidity, no resistance or ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... in the journey Tom could not have accounted for himself in the ethical field. Something, a thing intangible, had gone out of him. He could not tell what it was; but he missed it. The kindly Gordon nature was intact, or he hoped it was, but the neighbor-love, which was his father's rule of life, seemed not to have come down to him in its ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... bars in triumph. Ladies of wealth were as much compelled as the men to lead a respectable life. According to a tendency common to all civilizations, public feeling set them up as symbols; they were, by their austere magnificence, to represent both the splendour of wealth and its intangible. The old habits of gallantry had been reformed, Tut fashionable lovers were now secretly replaced by muscular labourers or stray grooms. Nevertheless, scandals were rare, a foreign journey concealed nearly all of them, ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... hereafter, to explain; but it is not to be reduced to line and rule—not to be measured by angles or described by compasses—not to be chipped out by the geologist, or equated by the mathematician. It is intangible, incalculable—a thing to be felt, not understood—to be loved, not comprehended—a music of the eyes, a melody of the heart, whose truth is ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... back, abundant and misty, unearthly and adorable, a mass of tawny hair that seemed to have hot sparks tangled in it. Another nuisance was the atmosphere of Royalism, of Legitimacy, that pervaded the room, thin as air, intangible, as though no Legitimist of flesh and blood had ever existed to the man's mind except perhaps myself. He, of course, was just simply a banker, a very distinguished, a very influential, and a very impeccable banker. He persisted ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... after he looked at her she was aware, in a curious, sickening way, that no such person as he had ever before seen her. He was pale, gray-eyed, intelligent, amiable. He appeared to be a man who had been a gentleman. But there was something strange, intangible, immense about him. Was that the effect of his presence or of his name? Kells! It was only a word to Joan. But it carried a nameless and terrible suggestion. During the last year many dark tales had gone from camp to camp in Idaho—some too strange, too horrible ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... weapons to fight it; a large and specially fitted Crookes tube operated by powerful storage batteries and provided with peculiar screens and reflectors, in case it proved intangible and opposable only by vigorously destructive ether radiations, and a pair of military flame-throwers of the sort used in the World War, in case it proved partly material and susceptible of mechanical destruction—for like the superstitious Exeter ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... so vague, so intangible, I cannot comprehend your meaning," said the man, with an impatient shrug of his broad shoulders. "I do not doubt the existence of God," he continued, "nor His omnipotence, for I believe that the Creator must have all power over His own creation. But how—how can suffering humanity ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... acquiescence in certain possible things which might be supposed to happen to his soul, which, after all, he was comfortably certain never would happen, or the acquiescence in certain supposititious sacrifices for the good of that most intangible of all abstractions, Being in general, it was a dry, calm subject. But when it concerned the immediate giving-up of his slave-ships and a transfer of business, attended with all that confusion and loss which he foresaw at a glance, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... fascination of the mysterious, she exploited it with a profound understanding of the human heart. She mingled the realities of life with the mysteries of thought, and the sun of her revelations is always veiled by intangible clouds. From her gospel one might cull at random scores of phrases that defy human understanding. "Evil is nothing, no thing, mind or power," she says in Science and Health. "As manifested by mankind, it stands for a lie, nothing claiming to be something." And again—"Mortal existence ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... there was something at once more intangible and yet more vital and positive that made the man a piece with the natural world about him. Perhaps it was that he had lived so many months of so many years in the open that he had grown to be true ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... I asked. She had now taken the chair fronting me. We were stiffly seated as if for a business interview. I had a desire to take the poor figure in my arms, but I felt as if she were as intangible as a spirit. When mental pain has devoured the body, as physical pain so often does, there is something thrice ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... her fought squarely against this obsession of the intangible; but it persisted and prevailed. The mocking shadows crowded about her, compelled her to a discomfortable realisation of her solitude in a station needing the perpetual alertness of armed men to ensure peace and safety. For Kohat city boasted a creditable average of bad characters and murder ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Gaunt felt the intangible calm that hung about this man: this woman saw beneath it flashes of some depth of passion, shown reluctant even to her, the slow heat of the gloomy soul below. It frightened her, but she yielded: her will, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... good burgher is mending his boots, or a baker drawing a batch of dough. O night and powers of heaven, how perfect is the blackness of your infinite vault—how lofty, how remote its inaccessible depths where it lies spread in an intangible, yet audible, silence! Freshly does the lulling breath of night blow in your face, until once more you relapse into snoring oblivion, and your poor neighbour turns angrily in his corner as he begins to be conscious of your weight. Then again you awake, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... which the term has under the code duello governing "affairs of honour." It carries no connotation of honesty, veracity, equity, liberality, or unselfishness. This national honour is of the nature of an intangible or immaterial asset, of course; it is a matter of prestige, a sportsmanlike conception; but that fact must not be taken to mean that it is of any the less substantial effect for purposes of a casus belli than the material assets of the community. Quite the contrary: "Who steals ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... intangible, but terribly sure something haunts and hunts the King from the first. His virgin mother is suspected by the one nearest her of the most serious offense that can be charged against a woman. The shadow that later grew ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... no engagement, only a something altogether intangible and vague, understood to be an understanding. And Lucia adored him. If she had not adored him he might have been urged to something irretrievable and definite. As it was, there was no need, and nothing could have been more soothing than the ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the life out of it. This power of three men to get together, steal the privilege from the people, and by their joint action to produce a fourth body (corpus), behind which they hide and push their schemes—an intangible something which outlives them all—that is the power that is undermining this government. It's against the Constitution. Old Chief Justice Marshall in his verdict (which ushered in the reign of corporations, in this country) distinctly said that ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... scene, which is sometimes performed after Valentine's death and sometimes before it. Margaret is kneeling in the shadowy minster, striving to pray, but the voice of conscience stifles her half-formed utterances. In Gounod's libretto, the intangible reproaches which Margaret addresses to herself are materialised in the form of Mephistopheles, a proceeding which is both meaningless and inartistic, though perhaps dramatically unavoidable. In the,' last act, after a short scene on the Brocken and a conventional ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... race, but the strange and mysterious product of all our complicated desires which have been accumulating in us for centuries but which have been turned aside from their primitive and divine object and have wandered after a mystic, imperfectly perceived and intangible beauty. There are some women like that, who blossom only for our dreams, adorned with every poetical attribute of civilization, with that ideal luxury, coquetry and esthetic charm which surround woman, a living statue ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... furs around her neck. All through the day, during the luncheon in an unpretentious little inn, and the leisurely homeward drive, she had been once more entirely herself, pleasant and sympathetic, ignoring absolutely the intangible barrier which had grown up between them, soon to be thrown down for ever or ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the case of Antonia and Nina and Lena and Aissa, Conrad has been enabled to convey, by means of an art far subtler than appears on the surface, a strange revival, in the case of every person who reads the book, of the intangible memories of the sweetness and mystery of such a person's ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... American opened his right fist and held to the light that which had been concealed, close wadded in his grasp,—a square of sheer linen edged with lace, crumpled but spotless, and diffusing in the unwholesome den a faint, intangible fragrance, the veriest wraith of that elusive perfume which he would never again inhale without instantly recalling that night ride through London in the intimacy of ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the budding dawn of manhood he stands looking wide-eyed into the long vistas opening before him; when he first becomes conscious of the awakening and quickening of strange desires and unknown powers; when what he sees and feels is still shadowy and mystical enough to be intangible, and, so, more beautiful; when his imagination is unsullied, and his faith new and whole—then it is that love wears a halo. The man who has not loved before he was fourteen has ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... had heard, she could not doubt she had received but a too true sample of experiences innumerable. One result was, that, young as was Hester, she no longer shrank from the thought of that invisible, intangible solvent in which the generations of man vanish from the eyes of their fellows. She said to herself what a blessed thing was death for countless human myriads—yea doubtless for the whole race! It looked sad enough for an end; ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... either absorbent or diffusive, and wholly electrical? Whether the fluid phenomena of the Will, a matter generated within us, and spontaneously reacting under the impress of conditions as yet unobserved, were at all more extraordinary than those of the invisible and intangible fluid produced by a voltaic pile, and applied to the nervous system of a dead man? Whether the formation of Ideas and their constant diffusion was less incomprehensible than evaporation of the atoms, imperceptible indeed, but so violent in their effects, ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... was a rival she did not understand. Nor could she understand its seductions. Had it been a woman rival, another girl, knowledge and light and sight would have been hers. As it was, she grappled in the dark with an intangible adversary about which she knew nothing. What truth she felt in his speech made the ...
— The Game • Jack London
... quite proud to be seen in the company of so stately a gentleman as Major Strickland, who was dressed this afternoon as for a visit of ceremony. He had on a blue frock-coat, tightly buttoned, to which the builder had imparted an intangible something that smacked undeniably of the old soldier. He wore a hat rather wide in the brim; a high stiff checked cravat; a white vest; and lacquered military boots, over which his tightly-strapped trousers fell without a crease. He had white buckskin gloves, a stout silver-headed ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... with the Sassafras, he went home discomforted and even flustered. That hand was too much like the hand of possession. The girl was stealing over him like a light, intangible vapor. He struck ahead with a quicker gait, as if trying to outwalk a creeping fog. One consolation, however: Hortense had come like a puff of wind. Even a second squall from the same quarter ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... that surround it by no material elements, but by the principle of life in which its individuality consists, which is to make it a new being, instead of a fellow-cell with those that build up the body of the parent animal and remain component parts of it. This intangible something is the subtile element that eludes our closest analysis; it is the germ of the immaterial principle according to which the new being is to develop. The physical germ we see; the spiritual germ we cannot see, though we may trace its action ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... out. Here, in the gray station, in this damp hour of dawn, he had touched something magnetic—some force that drew and held him. A quality intangible and indescribable seemed to emanate from this unknown boy, some strange radiance of vitality that flooded ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... Far East and gathers some of the occult knowledge of that far-off land. Into the woof of an Eastern rug is woven the soul of a woman. Into the glisten of a scarab is polished the prophecy of a life. Into the whole charming romance of the book is woven the thread of an intangible, "creepy," mysterious force. What is it? Is it a joke? ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... unhinged and half open as it had been when he had awakened to his painful and inexplicable predicament. He went through, fumbling in his pocket for matches. The damp chill of the hall nauseated him as it had done before, seemed to place about his throat an intangible band that made breathing difficult. Before he could get his match safe out the doctor had struck a wax vesta. Its strong flame played across ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... place in his household. The rice and fish are boiled in a pot and then allowed to cool in the same vessel or poured out to cool in a large earthen or wooden bowl. Then Mr. Tao together with Mrs. Tao and all the young Taos squat on their heels around the mixture and satisfy that intangible thing called the appetite. They do not use chop sticks as the Chinese do, but the rice and fish are caught in a hollow formed by the first three fingers of the right hand. The thumb is then placed behind the mass. ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... to him; then suddenly it turned, and Marsham saw the well-known face, intent, kindly, a little frowning, as though in thought, but showing no consciousness of his, Oliver's, presence or plight. He himself wished to speak, but was only aware of useless effort and some intangible hinderance. Then Ferrier moved on toward a writing-table with drawers that stood beyond the fireplace. He stooped, and touched a handle. "No!" cried Oliver, violently—"no!" He woke with shock and distress, his pulse racing. But the feverish state began again, ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... essays—those rapt and secret confessions of his own heart—were a delight to him. He began to taste the transport, the intoxication of an author. And, oh, what a luxury is there in that first love of the Muse! that process by which we give palpable form to the long-intangible visions which have flitted across us;—the beautiful ghost of the Ideal within us, which we invoke in the Gadara of our still closets, with the wand of ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... too fine a point upon it, they were influenced by rank and wealth. No doubt the better sort of them believed that those who were superior to them in these indisputable respects were superior also in the more intangible qualities of sense and knowledge. But the mass of the old electors did not analyse very much: they liked to have one of their "betters" to represent them; if he was rich they respected him much; and if he was a lord, they liked him the better. The issue put before these ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... happy she knew Katie was to have him with her. She talked of the responsibility it brought Katie, and as they talked it did seem responsibility, and responsibility was another thing which stole subtly up around her, chaining her with intangible—and because ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... is too intangible, the second too narrow. The rude savage does not philosophize on phenomena; the enlightened student sees in them but interacting forces: yet both may be profoundly religious. Nor can morality be accepted as a criterion of religions. The bloody scenes in the Mexican teocalli were merciful compared ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... beside the running stream sings to him of Mount Abora and of the old heroes of the elder days. If the Egyptologist or the archaeologist could revive within him one-hundredth part of the elusive romance, the delicate gaiety, the subtle humour, the intangible tenderness, the unspeakable goodness, of much that is to be found in his province, one would ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... behind an opaque glass through which one can see only the reflection of one's own nose. To see as far as possible the good, the bad, about, around, yonder, everywhere; to perceive the continual gravitation of all tangible and intangible things towards the necessity of the decent, the ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... any of the members of Wily's lock-step staff were Authority. Rather, they all gave obeisance to the intangible Authority of Science, and stood together as self-appointed vicars of that Authority, demanding penance for the slightest blasphemy against it. And each one stood in living ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... about four thousand, spread over a large territory; they did not want to desert their palmetto thatched cabins and strenuously-cleared acres; they disliked crowding into towns; they saw no justice in paying to intangible and alien proprietors a penny tax on their tobacco exports to New England—though they paid it nevertheless. They particularly objected to the interference of Governor Berkeley, for they knew him well. And when the free election of their assembly was attacked, they sent emissaries ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... not imagine that all this is put into words, or that we have certain hours for studying how to make good wives, or that it is as rigid or exhausting as a broom drill. It is the intangible, esoteric philosophy which permeates the households of thousands of American families, where the mothers are the companions and confidantes of the daughters. It is an understood thing. You would be surprised to know how young some girls are when they have thoroughly ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... as individual responsibility," returned my husband. "As to social responsibility, it is an intangible thing; very well to talk about, but reached by no law, either of conscience or the statute-book. You and I, and every other living soul, must answer to God for what we do. No custom or law of society will save us ...
— The Son of My Friend - New Temperance Tales No. 1 • T. S. Arthur
... but in that moment a slight, a barely perceptible, revulsion of feeling had taken place in him. The instant that Trina gave up, the instant she allowed him to kiss her, he thought less of her. She was not so desirable, after all. But this reaction was so faint, so subtle, so intangible, that in another moment he had doubted its occurrence. Yet afterward it returned. Was there not something gone from Trina now? Was he not disappointed in her for doing that very thing for which he had longed? Was Trina the submissive, the compliant, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... it was because of some wordless, intangible reason, that only lovers know, which made Diana seem more beautiful, more pure, her touch more sacred, and Enoch stronger, ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the business problem with which he came daily in contact as closely as he could with the little experience which had as yet come to him. What man of affairs does not recall how intangible was that turning-point, in his own early business career, before which he felt hopelessly submerged in that sea of infinite detail, vainly struggling to gauge its currents and to escape its undertow; after which he found himself ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... the memory of the Dead.—Religion seems to have very little place in the Athenian funeral: there are no priests present, no prayers, no religious hymns. But the dead man is now conceived as being, in a very humble and intangible way, a deity himself: his good will is worth propitiating; his memory is not to be forgotten. On the third, ninth, and thirtieth days after the funeral there are simple religious ceremonies with offerings of garlands, fruits, libations and the like, at the new ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... will go on exactly as one would wish; he does not conceive it possible that any one can raise even a single difficulty in the way of what he calls his SYSTEM. And, in fact, what objection can be offered to a conception so radically null, so intangible as that of M. Blanc? The most curious part of his book is in the select collection which he has made of objections proposed by certain incredulous persons, which he answers, as may be imagined, triumphantly. These critics ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... town he saw the green-patched farm, the little gray cabin where his mother and Lucy slept, no doubt dreaming of the hopes he had fostered in them. Some doubt, some fear, intangible and inexplicable, passed over him as he looked. Would all be well with Lucy? There was indeed much to be feared, and he could never give happiness full rein until he had her ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... schoolmaster I have got a bit ahead of my history. Soon after the opening of the new year—ten days or so later it may have been—I had begun to feel myself encompassed by a new and subtle force. It was a thing as intangible as heat but as real as fire and more terrible, it seemed to me. I felt it first in the attitude of my play fellows. They denied me the confidence and intimacy which I had enjoyed before. They whispered together in my presence. In all this I had not ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... freedom,[227] he escapes with perfect impunity! Is he not a most marvelous proper rogue? But perhaps the reason the abolitionists do not lay hands on him is that he is an imaginary being, who, though intangible and invisible, will yet serve just as well to create an alarm and keep up a great excitement as if ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... to this man of whom she saw so little, and yet with whom she felt on close, intangible terms of intimacy! His work tied him to London, and of late years she had not been much in London. He knew very little of her movements. Why, this very letter had been sent to her, care of her London club, the club which had its uses—principally—when ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... inventiveness, the stout enterprise, the free government, the wise and equal laws, the noble literature, of this fortunate island and its majestic empire beyond the seas, and the discretion, valour, and tenacity by which all these great material and still greater intangible possessions had been first won, and then kept, against every hostile comer whether domestic or foreign, sent through Macaulay a thrill, like that which the thought of Paris and its heroisms moves in the great poet of France, or sight of the dear ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... loses more than George Sand,—who has so much to lose! The qualities sacrificed, though almost intangible, are essential to the force of her charm. The cement is taken away and the fabric coheres imperfectly; and whilst the beauties of her manner are blurred, its blemishes appear increased; the lengthiness, over-emphasis of expression, questionable taste of certain passages, become ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas |
