"Recondite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the question of individuality, a subject quite too large and too recondite for present discussion. The conclusion of the whole matter, however, is, that individuality—that very ground of being as distinguished from thing—is not attained in Nature at one leap. If anywhere truly exemplified in ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... anybody, yet she could, under cover of gentle candour, plant her shafts. She planted one now in answering: 'I don't think that you would, either of you, take to one another. Helen's flavour is rather recondite.' ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... a vague gesture of distaste. "Oh, thank you," he replied; "but, do you know, I don't think I like deans, Mrs. Dewsbury." Mrs. Dewsbury's smile was recondite and diplomatic. "Then you'll exactly suit one another," she answered with gay wisdom. "For, to tell you the truth, I don't think ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... short list indeed might be made to embrace the root-stories—the uhrsagen, as a German might call them. And really when we reflect that many of the most threadbare jests which figure in the recondite tomes of Mr Joseph Miller are to be found, crystallized in attic salt, in the pages of Hierocles, and represented as forming part of the "Hundred merye Talis and Jeastis" which delectated the citizens of ancient ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... my own private opinion that these mystic words contain some prodigiously recondite meaning; or, perhaps, arise from one of those awful incidents, of which Hoffman encountered so many among the ghost-seeing, all-believing Germans. But don't take it on my simple assertion, but judge for yourself. I shall tell you, word for word, the story as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... Waves,' on the 29th January 1897. "There is, however, to our thinking" wrote the Spectator at the time "something of rare interest in the spectacle presented of a Bengalee of the purest descent possible, lecturing in London to an audience of appreciative European savants upon one of the most recondite branches of the modern physical science." He was then invited to address the Scientific Societies in Paris. "Prof. J. C. Bose" wrote the Review Encyclopedique, Paris "exhibited on the 9th of March before the Sorbonne, an apparatus of his invention for demonstrating the ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... inferior writers could have poured out with the utmost facility on such an occasion. Yet it might possibly be mentioned that a poet of the highest order would have produced the effect by more direct means. Remorse overpowering and absorbing does not embody itself in these recondite and, one may almost say, over-ingenious fancies. Hawthorne does not give us so much the pure passion as some of its collateral effects. He is still more interested in the curious psychological problem than moved ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... presence—though afterwards all eyes dimly recognise it, on its being shown to them, as something more vivid than their own faint experience, yet either kindred to it, or virtually one and the same. Almost all human nature can, in some measure, understand and feel the most exquisite and recondite image which only the rarest genius could produce. Were it not so, great poets might break their harps, and go drown ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... allegiance of a lofty mind, cannot injure any. It can be preached without hesitation, for it does not attract the ignorant, who turn away from it as dry, stiff, and uninteresting. But there are teachings which deal with the constitution of nature, explain recondite laws, and throw light on hidden processes, the knowledge of which gives control over natural energies, and enables its possessor to direct these energies to certain ends, as a chemist deals with the production of chemical compounds. Such knowledge may ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... their attention and seemed to them the ultimate thing. Not so M. Bergson: he is a microscopic psychologist, and even in man what he studies by preference is not some integrated passion or idea, but something far more recondite; the minute texture of sensation, memory, or impulse. Sharp analysis is required to distinguish or arrest these elements, yet these are the predestined elements of his fable; and so his anthropomorphism is far less ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... replying, 'No, you don't. You know that is not what I meant. You are a fool.' You remember the boy in Pickwick, who on his father finding fault with him for something wrong he had done, offered to kill himself if that would be any satisfaction to his parent. In this case you have a more recondite instance of this peculiar folly. Here the primary course is tacitly assumed, without being stated. The primary impulse of the human being is to take care of himself; the opposite of that of course is to kill himself. And ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... music unless he had, in all literalness, his "hand" in it. He never liked to hear any one else play the piano, still less the violin; concerts of all sorts were likely to bore him; and he never really rose to an understanding of the more recondite and elaborate musical forms: to have his fingers on the keyboard—especially when improvising in a ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... challenge for this poet the gift of imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. . . But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... there is nothing recondite about it. There are a great many philosophers—let us say Plato, Aristotle, Antisthenes, and your spiritual fathers, Chrysippus, Zeno, and all the rest of them; what was it that induced you, leaving the rest alone, to pick out the school you ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... an atmosphere of penetrating fragrance, the gentle potency of which had recalled her from her death-like faintness. The scene around her looked like enchantment. Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits, into a series of beautiful apartments, not unfit to be the secluded abode of a lovely woman. The walls were hung with gorgeous curtains, which imparted the combination of grandeur and grace, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... M. St. Hilaire are really far lighter than he supposes. It is true that he has picked most of the little information he possesses in regard to Spanish history out of the professor's work, and has strewed his pages with copious extracts from this recondite source. But, in making his acknowledgments, he might have gone still farther back. M. St. Hilaire is a laborious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... reader will say that these are truisms. To be sure they are. And yet if he considers only the judgments which are every day pronounced, he may easily be led to believe that these truisms are most recondite truths now for the first time revealed. When Liszt after his first return from Switzerland did not find Thalberg himself, he tried to satisfy his curiosity by a careful examination of that pianist's compositions. The conclusions he came to be set forth in a criticism ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... border-families who had never heard of such a thing; that it contained many words and expressions hitherto entirely unknown in the particular dialect in which it was written; and, moreover, that it multiplied complicated and recondite patterns of tartans in a manner so remarkable that Sir Walter Scott, to whom part of Mr. Sobieski Stuart's transcript of the ancient MS. was submitted, was led to suspect "that information as to its origin might be obtained even in a less ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... His pension, too, was stopped, and he was obliged to become a tutor to a young Englishman of fortune. With him he visited many parts of Switzerland and Germany, and spent a portion of his leisure in writing, not only his "Travels," but his recondite "Dialogue on Medals,"—a book of considerable research and great ingenuity, which was not published, however, till after his death. From Germany he passed to Holland, where he heard the sad intelligence that his father was no more. During his stay in Holland, he watched ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... bargained for. Ostensibly engaged with the life of the Bobbin Boy, we are covertly introduced to the majority of all the boys that ever were born and came to anything. The advertised story is a kind of mother-hen who gathers under her wings a numerous brood of biographical chicks. Quantities of recondite erudition are poured out on the slightest provocation. Nat's unquestioned superiority to his schoolmates evokes a disquisition for the encouragement of dull boys, in which we are told that "the great philosopher, Newton, was one of the dullest scholars in school when he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... student of the works of Beethoven; his edition of the sonatas is noted for recondite learning, clearness and exactness in the smallest details. Through his recitals in America he did much to make these works better known and understood. Nor did he neglect Chopin, and though his readings of the music of the great Pole may have lacked in sensuous beauty of touch and tone, their interpretation ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... coun- try, in which they had established their kingdom of Septimania, till the year 713, when they were expelled by the Moors of Spain, who ushered in an unillumined period of four centuries, of which no traces remain. These facts I derived from a source no more recondite than a pamphlet by M. Viollet-le-Duc, - a very luminous description of the fortifications, which you may buy from the accomplished custodian. The writer makes a jump to the year 1209, when Carcassonne, then forming part of the realm ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... onward from the title-page, and haunts these impassioned pages. Phrases of a recondite and elaborate description, such as "Oui, monsieur," "Tres-bien," and "Entrez," adorn the sportive conversation of this cultivated circle. Sometimes, with higher flight, some one essays to gambol in the Latin tongue: "It seemed to me that old Tempus must ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... extravagance of whose images was well-nigh unbounded. The passion for intricate and far-sought metaphor which had possessed Donne was accompanied in his work and even more in that of his followers with a passion for what was elusive and recondite in thought and emotion and with an increasing habit of rudeness and wilful difficultness in language and versification. Against these ultimate licences of a great artistic period, the classical writers invoked the qualities of smoothness and lucidity, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... fortissimo form. For the player and for the hearer this piece, when well treated, is one of the most pleasing piano solos possible to mention. I do not know, however, that it is necessary to turn it wrong side out in the effort to find some hidden or recondite meaning. It is pleasing and well made rather than deeply impassioned, and it is a mistake to ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... a ruddy, active man, with fine hair, that retained its strength and brownness to the last, but he had a courageous spirit and a remarkably intelligent mind. He was a man of the finest culture, and was often, and never vainly, consulted by his son Robert concerning the more recondite facts relating to the old characters, whose bones that poet liked so well to disturb. His knowledge of old French, Spanish, and Italian literature was wonderful. The old man went smiling and peaceful to his long rest, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... writings are few. Two little educational books are worth mentioning: a book of Latin prose exercises, called Nuces, the sentences of which are full of recondite allusions, curious humour, and epigrammatic expression; and a slender volume for teaching Latin lyrics, called Lucretilis, the exercises being literally translated from the Latin originals which he first composed. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... Shakespeare quotes or adapts biblical phrases with far greater frequency than he makes allusion to episodes in biblical history. But many such phrases enjoyed proverbial currency, and others, which were more recondite, were borrowed from Holinshed's 'Chronicles' and secular works whence he drew his plots. As a rule his use of scriptural phraseology, as of scriptural history, suggests youthful reminiscence and the assimilative tendency ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... presumptuous in me to pretend to instruct Mr. Gladstone in matters which lie as much within the province of Literature and History as in that of Science; but if any one desirous of further knowledge will be so good as to turn to that most excellent and by no means recondite source of information, the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," he will find, under the letter E, the word "Evolution," and a long article on that subject. Now, I do not recommend him to read the first half of the article; but the second half, by my friend Mr. Sully, is really very good. He will there ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... conscience traverses so lightly, so amiably. For the material in which he works is no more a creation of his own than the sculptor's marble. Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists. A writer, full of a matter he is before all things anxious to express, may think of those laws, the limitations of vocabulary, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... his students:— "Never forget, gentlemen, that you have to deal with an ignorant public." The dictum may fairly be extended from medical knowledge to general information amongst the many headed of England; and the Publisher, when rejecting a too recondite book, will repeat parrot-fashion, The English public is not a learned body. Equally valid is the statement in the case of the Anglo-American community which is still half-educated and very far from being erudite. The vast country ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... him from that particular charge of which his own knowledge enables him to judge. In the trust that I may be able to clear him from a few more charges, I write these pages, premising that I do not profess to have access to any new and recondite documents. I merely take the broad facts of the story from documents open to all; and comment on them as every man should wish his own life to be ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... her own great-aunts, listened languidly to the kind of talk that the originals might have exchanged about the same table when New York gentility centred in the Battery and the Bowling Green. Mr. Dagonet was always pleasant to see and hear, but his sarcasms were growing faint and recondite: they had as little bearing on life as the humours of a Restoration comedy. As for Mrs. Marvell and Miss Ray, they seemed to the young man even more spectrally remote: hardly anything that mattered to him existed for them, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... the Byzantines, [Greek: chorion], the country. The literal meaning of a word is earlier than its artificial and poetical signification. And one can easily conceive how, when the style Chora was no longer literally correct, men abandoned the sober ground of common-sense and history to invent recondite meanings inspired ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... oblivious whence it blows. Demand of lilies wherefore they are white, Extort her crimson secret from the rose, But ask not of the Muse that she disclose The meaning of the riddle of her might: Somewhat of all things sealed and recondite, Save the enigma of herself, she knows. The master could not tell, with all his lore, Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped; Ev'n as the linnet sings, so I, he said;— Ah, rather as the imperial nightingale, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... purifications, incantations, and sacrifices. They possessed a traditional knowledge which had come down from father to son, and which none thought of questioning. The laity looked up to them as the sole possessors of a recondite wisdom of the last importance ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... petulant gaze would wander up and down her bare arms and across her bosom. At intervals, with her ringed fingers she would lift the short skirt—a nothing, an imperceptibility, half an inch, with glance downcast; and the effect was profound, recondite, inexplicable. Her style was not that of a male dog-dancer, but it was indubitably clog-dancing, full of marvels to the connoisseur, and to the profane naught but a highly complicated series of wooden noises. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... another subject connected with our firmament, of a more subtle and recondite character than even its colour. I mean that 'mysterious and beautiful phenomenon,' as Sir John Herschel calls it, the polarization of the light of the sky. Looking at various points of the blue firmament through a Nicol prism, and turning the prism round its axis, we soon notice ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... Sciences: But his Acquaintance was rather That of a Traveller, than a Native. Nothing in Philosophy was unknown to him; but every Thing in it had the Grace and Force of Novelty. And as Novelty is one main Source of Admiration, we are not to wonder that He has perpetual Allusions to the most recondite Parts of the Sciences: and This was done not so much out of Affectation, as the Effect of Admiration begot by Novelty. Then, as to his Style and Diction, we may much more justly apply to SHAKESPEARE, what a celebrated Writer has said of MILTON; Our Language sunk under him, and was unequal ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... trenching upon that more intimate relationship of the great opposites under consideration which has been designated Rest in Motion. More intimate relationship, I say,—at any rate, more subtile, recondite, difficult of apprehension and exposition, and perhaps, by reason of this, more central and suggestive. An example of this in its physical aspect may be seen in the revolutions of the planets, and in all orbital or circular motion. For such, it will be at once perceived, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... diligence as the condition on which all these shall actually become ours, and, passing into our lives, will there produce all these graces which the Apostle goes on to enumerate. The condition is nothing recondite, nothing hard either to understand or to practise, but it is simply that commonplace, humdrum virtue of diligence. If we will put it forth, then the gifts that God has given, and which are not really ours unless ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... understand that, in the present case at all events, neither fulfilment of prophecy nor answer to prayer had been disregarded.—And the hard-bitten, irascible, old trainer, Tom Chifney, was happier—probably really the happiest of the lot—since he demanded nothing more recondite and far-reaching than restoration to favour, and due recognition of the importance of his calling and of the merits of his horses.—And nice, funny, voluble, little Dick Ormiston was happier too. Richard's heart went out strangely to ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... that this statement that Life is a texture of births may be accepted by minds of the most divergent religious and philosophical profession. No fundamental or recondite admissions are proposed here, but only that the every-day life for every-day purposes has this shape and nature. The utter materialist may say that life to him is a fortuitous concurrence of atoms, a chance kinking in the universal fabric of matter. It is not our present business ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... oddly mingled; in his sober moments he thought of the unusual and eccentric with undisguised aversion, and yet, deep in his heart, there was a wide-eyed inquisitiveness with respect to all the more recondite and esoteric elements in the nature of men. The latter tendency had prevailed when he accepted Raymond's invitation, for though his considered judgment had always repudiated the doctor's theories as the wildest nonsense, ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... understand and whom a majority of those who interest themselves in literature can more or less appreciate. He makes no excessive demand either on the intellect or on the faculty of sympathetic emotion. On both sides of Lamb, however, there lie literatures more difficult, more recondite. The "knowledge" side need not detain us here; it can be mastered by concentration and perseverance. But the "power" side, which comprises the supreme productions of genius, demands special consideration. You may have arrived ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... latitudes, and altitudes are levelled into one genial temperature. Man alone, that is to say, the social man alone, can want and duly conceive and invent that which is digestion going forth into nature as a creative art, namely, cookery, which by recondite processes of division and combination,—by cunning varieties of shape,—by the insinuation of subtle flavors,—by tincturings with precious spice, as with vegetable flames,—by fluids extracted, and added again, absorbed, dissolving, and surrounding,—by the discovery and cementing of new amities ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... at the age when girls seemed feckless creatures, whose aimings were inexplicable, both as concerned existence in general, and, more concretely, as touched gravel-shooters and snowballs, and whose reasons for bursting into tears were recondite, one had perceived the difference. One wondered about ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... to something less recondite. We are like God in that we can love; we are like Him in that we can perceive the right, and that the right is supreme; we are like Him in that we have the power to say 'I will.' And these great capacities demand that the creature who thus knows himself to be, who thus knows the right, who thus ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... certain that the poet was also the singer of his own verses. His earliest audiences were probably scholars, and this may have tempted Kalir to indulge in the recondite learning which vitiates his hymns. At his worst, Kalir is very bad indeed; his style is then a jumble of words, his meaning obscure and even unintelligible. He uses a maze of alphabetical acrostics, line by line ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... apparent existence of an unchosen ruler. The poorer and more ignorant classes—those who would most feel excitement, who would most be misled by excitement—really believe that the Queen governs. You could not explain to them the recondite difference between "reigning" and "governing"; the words necessary to express it do not exist in their dialect; the ideas necessary to comprehend it do not exist in their minds. The separation of principal power from principal station is a refinement which they could ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... they brought the good News to Aix," "Evelyn Hope," "The Pied Piper of Hammelin," "A Grammarian's Funeral," "A Death in the Desert." It was long before England recognised that in B. she had received one of the greatest of her poets, and the causes of this lie on the surface. His subjects were often recondite and lay beyond the ken and sympathy of the great bulk of readers; and owing, partly to the subtle links connecting the ideas and partly to his often extremely condensed and rugged expression, the treatment of them was not ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... demand, well fed With mine own larder's dainties, where, indeed, Such cakes of myrrh or fine alyssum seed, Thin as a mallow-leaf, embrowned o' the top. Which, cracking, lets the ropy, trickling drop Of sweetness touch your tongue, or potted nests Which my recondite recipe invests With cold conglomerate tidbits—ah, the bill! (You say), but given it were mine to fill My chests, the case so put were yours, we'll say (This counter, here, your post, as mine to-day), And you've an eye to luxuries, what harm In smoothing down your palate with the charm Yourself ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... describes just as correct a parabola as if you were already dead. Mechanical movements have not the characteristic of appropriateness, unless by accident, as when a drunken man falls into a waterbutt and is sobered. But reflex and voluntary movements are not ALWAYS appropriate, unless in some very recondite sense. A moth flying into a lamp is not acting sensibly; no more is a man who is in such a hurry to get his ticket that he cannot remember the name of his destination. Appropriateness is a complicated and merely approximate idea, and for the present we shall do well to dismiss it from ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... Italy, in a high-pitched tone about the satisfaction which he experienced in England. A most pleasant and wholesome climate (he was most sensitive to it); so much humanity and erudition—not of the worn-out and trivial sort, but of the recondite, genuine, ancient, Latin and Greek stamp—that he need hardly any more long to go to Italy. In Colet he thought he heard Plato himself. Grocyn, the Grecian scholar; Linacre, the learned physician, who would not admire them! And ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... the choral songs are, and ever must have been, the most difficult part of the tragedy; there occur in them the most involved verbal compounds, the newest expressions, the boldest images, the most recondite allusions. Is it credible that the poets would, one and all, have been thus prodigal of the stores of art and genius, if they had known that in the representation the whole must have been lost to the audience,—at a time ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... and she was I saw an inch taller than his squat solidity. A tall lady in rose-pink had taken possession of Guy, Evesham and Lady Ladislaw made the two centres of a straggling group who were bandying recondite political allusions. Then came one or two couples and trios with nothing very much to say and active ears. Philip and I brought up the rear silently and in all humility. Even young Guy had gone over our heads. I was too full of a stupendous realization for any words. Of ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... nothing save that we know not what it is. All unknown to herself, it wraps its owner round with airs the which to breathe uplifts the spirit, and yet, may be, perturbs the heart, of man. Even its effects are recondite and obscure. It allures; but how it allures now man shall tell. It impels; but to what, does not appear. It rouses all manner of hopes, stirs sleeping ambition, and desires and aspirations unappeasable; but for what ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... installed at Hanover Lodge and, before half a day was over, had wormed her way into the confidence of the housekeeper, had won a right to use the kitchen, had consulted the cook on several recondite subjects and furnished her with a new receipt for elderberry wine, and had taken over the whole matter of the preserving for the year. She had arrived a little late, but the gardener had orders ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... person. From the first and always the habit of his mind was that of direct action upon every subject that he had to deal with, through his own reflection, and along the broad primary lines of common sense. There is never in his thought anything subtle or recondite,—no mental movement through the media of books; but there is good evidence for saying that this bewildered and undeveloped youth, drifting about in chaos, did in those days actually get a taste for ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... apparent causes is correlated: A with p^{1} B with p^{11}, X with p^{111}. Or, again, it may be that none of the recognised antecedents is effective: as we here depend solely on observation, the true conditions may be so recondite and disguised by other phenomena as to have escaped our scrutiny. This may happen even when we suppose that the chief condition has been isolated: the drinking of foul water was long believed to cause dysentery, because it was a frequent antecedent; whilst observation ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... of the keenest I ever knew. The most difficult problems of mathematical astronomy and the most recondite principles that underlie the theory of the celestial motions were to him but child's play. His works place him among the first mathematical astronomers of the age, and yet they do not seem to do his ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... expert architectural mind, peeping acutely into recondite motives and half-accomplished purposes in such matters, could detect the circumstance which had determined that so noticeable peculiarity of ground-plan. Its kernel was not, as in most similar buildings of that date, [3] a feudal ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... so becoming to a man as an air of mystery. Mystery is the very key-stone of all that is beautiful in poetry, all that is sacred in faith, and all that is recondite in transcendental psychology. I am writing a ballad which is all mystery; it is 'such stuff as dreams are made of,' and is, indeed, stuff made of a dream; for, last night I fell asleep as usual over my book, and had a vision of pure reason. I composed five ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... Mercury. Mr. Ledger well remarks, in his interesting work,[14] that if there be inhabitants on Mercury the notions of "perihelion" and "aphelion," which are here often regarded as expressing ideas of an intricate or recondite character, must on the surface of that planet be familiar to everybody. The words imply "near the sun," and "away from the sun;" but we do not associate these expressions with any obvious phenomena, ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... illustration of our subject to a certain point. It does not indeed seat itself merely in centres of the world; this is impossible from the nature of the case. It is intended for the many, not the few; its subject matter is truth necessary for us, not truth recondite and rare; but it concurs in the principle of a University so far as this, that its great instrument, or rather organ, has ever been that which nature prescribes in all education, the personal presence ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... and its conditions undergo a great revolution, the consequences of which are so momentous that we shall have to trace them in some detail. Fortunately, the considerations which are necessary are not recondite, and all the facts are ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... thus far to mellow years, were I unmindful of the gratifications I enjoyed while a fellow laborer in your noble pursuits. The press is the representative of the intellectual man on earth; it is the expositor of his cogitative powers; the promulgator of his most recondite labors; the strong arm of his support in the defence and maintenance of his inherent rights as a member of the social compact; the vindicator of his claims to the exalted station of one stamped in the express image of God; it is the charter of freedom to ameliorated man in the glorious strife ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... all countries is an inquiry of the deepest interest and of the vaguest result. For, the desire of the pious to trace throughout all creeds the principles of the one they themselves profess—the vanity of the learned to display a various and recondite erudition—the passion of the ingenious to harmonize conflicting traditions—and the ambition of every speculator to say something new upon an ancient but inexhaustible subject, so far from enlightening, only perplex our conjectures. Scarcely is the theory of to-day established, than the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... like capitals the two pillars fronting the high altar. I am now sorry for our haste, but one has not so much time for enjoying such churches in their presence as for regretting them in their absence. One should live near them, and visit them daily, if one would feel their beauty in its recondite details; to have come three thousand miles for three minutes of them is no way of making that beauty part of one's being, and I will not pretend that I did in this case. What I shall always maintain ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... who are for giving to natural knowledge, as they call it, the chief place in the education of the majority of mankind, leave one important thing out of their account: the constitution of human nature. But I put this forward on the strength of some facts not at all recondite, very far from it; facts capable of being stated in the simplest possible fashion, and to which, if I so state them, the man of science will, I am sure, be willing to allow their ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... religion of the Mandans, say Lewis and Clarke, (vol. i. p. 138,) consists in the belief of one Great Spirit. As their belief in a Supreme Being is firm and sincere, so their gratitude to Him is fervent and unvarying. They are tormented by no false philosophy, led astray by no recondite opinions of controversialists, whether He is all in all, or shares a "divided throne." Simple and unenlightened sons of nature, they hold the belief which has never failed to present itself to such, that there is a God, and to be grateful and worship that God ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones |
