"Perspicacious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reflection upon morals. In the first stage reflection does no more than to point out the essential discrepancies and absurdities of the current moral codes. Reflection upon morals begins by being critical and querying. It starts when an individual, a little more thoughtful and perspicacious than his fellows, notes the discrepancies between the customs of different men, and notes also the discrepancies between the threatened results of the violation of traditional codes and the actual results. He may then come to the cynic's ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... bland for human belief, and life for him would have palled. For his inexhaustible energy hungered for action. As soon as his judgment convinced him that a thing ought to be done he set about doing it. Recently, I asked one of the most perspicacious members of his Cabinet, "What do you consider Theodore's dominant trait" He thought for a while, and then replied, "Combativeness." No doubt the public also, at least while Roosevelt was in office, thought of him first as a fighter. The idea that he was ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... Germans, English, and Americans were shut up for two hundred years, as Matthew Arnold puts it. But Duerer was not so immured: even Luther at heart neither was himself, nor desired that others should be, prevented from enjoying the free use of their intellectual powers. It was because he was less perspicacious than Erasmus that he did not see that this was what he was inevitably doing in his wrath ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... by nature as well as by training for the work to which he happily turned his hand. Possessed of a charming style; precise and clear instead of verbose; completely conscious of what he intends to convey and perfectly competent to convey it; and dowered with a perspicacious breadth of view which dwells on all that is important and passes over all that is irrelevant, Captain Mahan has given us two very ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... tragedy, although the superfluity of eight inches of Sendlingen's steel in the side of a young man pronounced dead by asphyxia would have struck one of the laity. But the reporters of the Paris press were more perspicacious. They related that an envoy of a foreign union of unscrupulous capitalists had attempted to rob M. Clemenceau's residence of his inventions and France of a glory, but had been met by his dauntless wife and an assistant who had ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... needless enterprises; of listening to flatterers; of going abroad in the disguise of a private person, and so forth. It is claimed by some of Nobunaga's biographers that he was perfectly honest in presenting this memorial, but others, whose judgment appears to be more perspicacious, consider that his chief object was to discredit Yoshiaki and thus make room for his own subsequent succession ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... way that Sandy went to work to win her: his ways had been odd all his life,—so odd that it had long ago been accepted in the minds of the Charlottetown people that he would never find a woman to wed him; only now and then an unusually perspicacious person divined that the reason of his bachelorhood was not at all that women did not wish to wed him, spite of his odd ways, but that he himself found no ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... then, the manager of the Gymnase is the most perspicacious and far-sighted of men of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac |
