"Pertinence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in succession to George Yeardley, who had been left as deputy by Dale on his return to England in 1616, but the cost of getting the new governor out to his post seems to have been met entirely by his own associates. The arrangement has an obvious pertinence to an understanding of Argall's unhappy experience as governor, for he was later charged with neglect of the public interest through too great concern for his own personal interests. But here the emphasis belongs to the equally obvious fact that some of the adventurers were responding ...
— The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624 • Wesley Frank Craven
... madmen whose faculties shine at times with unwonted brilliancy, Balthazar was never more gracious and delightful in his tenderness than at this moment. He was full of attention to his children, and his conversation had the charms of grace, and wit, and pertinence. This return of fatherly feeling, so long absent, was certainly the truest fete he could give his wife, for whom his looks and words expressed once more that unbroken sympathy of heart for heart which reveals to each a delicious oneness ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... early days of the confederacy beset the traveler in threading his way through the forest, from one Indian nation to another, are vividly described in this section. The words are still employed by their speakers as an established form, though they have ceased to have any pertinence to their present circumstances. ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... she cried indignantly. "'Pertinence, indeed!" as she tossed her head clear of the big fingers that were ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... has no pertinence or meaning in Rosaline's mouth. Biron is supposed to be young in the play, and he has never been distinguished for his gravity, but for his wit and humour: the Princess calls him "quick Biron." The two lines are clearly Shakespeare's criticism of himself. When he wrote the sonnets ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Pepoli, who are in Rome for the winter, whether they would be good for her to know?—That is pretty nearly the form of her question. As one third of the winter is gone, and one half will be, before her question can be answered, I fear, it will have lost some of its pertinence. Well, it will serve as a token to pass between us, which will please me if it do not Margaret.—I have had nothing to send you tidings of. Yet I get the best accounts from home of wife and babes and friends. I am seeing this ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... In the hasty glance just now given to the coins of Greece, we have found material that will help to an understanding of what is impressed upon the coins of our own country. There would be no less of propriety and pertinence in asking what significance these symbols have brought to us from the time they were struck in faith and in awe by the very shrines of the gods in the temples of Greece. We may say that these symbols have no significance for us; but centuries hence, when the beginnings of our government ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... University. Upon his return to Jamaica his patron sought his appointment as a member of the governor's council but without success; and he then became a schoolmaster and a poet on occasion in the island capital. Williams described himself with some pertinence as "a white man acting under a black skin." His contempt for his fellow negroes and particularly for the mulattoes made him lonely, eccentric, haughty and morose. A Latin panegyric which is alone available among his writings is rather a language exercise than ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... a natural disposition to forgive butlers—Pharaoh, for instance, felt it. There hovers around butlers an atmosphere in which common ethics lose their pertinence. But mine was a rare bird—a black swan among butlers! He was more than a butler: he was a quick and brightly gifted man. Of the accuracy of his taste, and the unusual scope of his endeavour, you will be able to form some opinion ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... enchainment. He detested a chopped, jerky style, that into which the French are prone to fall. Certain it is, and from obvious causes, that much of the secret of style lies in aptness of sequence, thought and word, through an irresistible impulsion and pertinence, leaping forth nimbly, each taking its place promptly, because naturally and necessarily. Through fusion and close coherency and dependence, the flow is at once smooth and lively. The grace as well as the strength of the living physical body depends ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... reason to doubt his gratitude. He is rather intense about it. And—I don't know that my regret is precisely on Mr. Lindsay's account. Did I say so?" They were simple, amiable words, and their pertinence was very far from insistent; but Alicia's crude blush—everything else about her was so perfectly worked out—cried aloud that it was too sharp a pull up. "Perhaps though," Hilda hurried on with a pang, "we generalise too much ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... dismissed as mere "miniature work" than is Wordsworth's "Daffodils," which they parallel in delicacy of perception, intensity of vision, and perfection of accomplishment. The question of bulk, length, size, has quite as much pertinence in one case as in the other. In his work in this sort, MacDowell is often as one who, having fallen, through the ignominies of daily life, among the barren makeshifts of reality, "remembers the enchanted ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... The pertinence of Eddington's statement is shown immediately one considers what a person would know of the world if his only source of experience were the sense of sight, still further limited in the way Eddington describes. Out of everything that the world brings to the totality of our senses, there ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... fifteen, had been engaged in a series of enterprises to gain his livelihood, and had perfectly failed in every one of them, the question of his future means of subsistence must have presented itself as a subject of no little pertinence, not to say urgency. However, at that time Patrick seems to have been a young fellow of superabounding health and of inextinguishable spirits, and even in that crisis of his life he was able to deal gayly with its problems. In that very year, 1759, Thomas Jefferson, then a lad of sixteen, ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... by exquisite pertinence, melody, and the implied power of writing with exuberance, if need be, that beauty and truth become identical in poetry, and that pleasure, or at the very worst, a balm in our tears, is drawn ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various |
