"Abstract" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... face with a fact. He had intended swinging back through Arizona, where in certain parts cattle still were wild enough to bunch up at sight of a man afoot. His questioning of the dried little man had not been born of any concrete purpose, but of the range man's plaint in the abstract. Still— ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... none of his listeners showed any inclination to cheer. War in the abstract was a thing to cheer about, but war in the concrete—war with its possibilities—thus brought home to each individual mind excited ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... rapidly here, and its flight seems to me to mark two distinct states of existence. My mornings are devoted wholly to reading history, poetry, or belles lettres, which abstract me so completely from the actual present to the past, that the hours so disposed of appear to be the actual life, and those given up to society the shadowy ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... over many a long and rough road. They are wafted like winged seed by the wind, and strike root in regions where they could never have originated. Few classes of ideas bear so plainly the geographic stamp of their origin as religious ones, yet none have spread more widely. The abstract monotheism sprung from the bare grasslands of western Asia made slow but final headway against the exuberant forest gods of the early Germans. Religious ideas travel far from their seedbeds along established ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... sisters and I were all violently argumentative, but our quarrels were all on abstract subjects. We saw little of other children and made no friendships, preferring each other's society to that of outsiders. When I was about 10 a girl of the same age came to stay with us for a few days. When ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... really give the ideas of St. John, but that it represents a mixture of Greek philosophy with Jewish theology, and that its final form, which one of the most eminent among recent Christian scholars has characterized as "an unhistorical product of abstract reflection," is mainly due to some gifted representative or representatives of the Alexandrian school. Bitter as the resistance to this view has been, it has during the last years of the nineteenth century won its way more and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... daughter) Lady Blanche (Professor of Abstract Science) Lady Psyche (Professor of Humanities) Melissa ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... Proposal he had declared with a pretense of knowledge, that Anglo-Saxon was "excepting some few variations in the orthography... the same in most original words with our present English, as well as with German and other northern dialects." But in An Abstract of the History of England (probably revised in 1719) he says that the English which came in with the Saxons was "extremely different from what it is now." The two statements are not incompatible, but the emphasis is remarkably changed. It is possible ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... to hear thus lightly disposed of, the powers of argument that had been thought fairly able to compete with Norman, and which had taxed him so severely. She did not know how differently abstract questions appear to a mature mind, confirmed in principle by practice; and to one young, struggling in self- formation, and more used to theories ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... Then followed an intelligent abstract of the bills he was to introduce —the results of a progressive and statesmanlike brain. There was an account of him as a methodical and painstaking business man whose suggestions to the boards of directors of which ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Jonson's comedy since the days of Aristophanes. "Every Man in His Humour," like the two plays that follow it, contains two kinds of attack, the critical or generally satiric, levelled at abuses and corruptions in the abstract; and the personal, in which specific application is made of all this in the lampooning of poets and others, Jonson's contemporaries. The method of personal attack by actual caricature of a person on the stage is almost ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... hypothesis, we are disposed to adopt Mr. Tyndale's conclusion, that—“the coincidence of two such peculiar monuments in the same island, their non-existence elsewhere, and their being both indicative of some abstract principle of grandeur and power, practically carried out in their construction, are strong reasons for the presumption that they may have had some mutual reference to each other,—as burying places, temples, and altars, and consequently were works ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... situation and take the average condition. Similarly in attempting to remedy a local or special evil, we must avoid the injustice of unduly sacrificing the general welfare. By extreme measures planned to accomplish what may be good in the abstract but is still not practical, we can make the ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... and the men who supported the latter in 1844 were the prototypes of those who worked to oppose Lincoln in 1860, and only worked less hard because they had less chance. The ultra Abolitionists discarded expediency, and claimed to act for abstract right on principle, no matter what the results might be; in consequence they accomplished very little, and that as much for harm as for good, until they ate their words, and went counter to their previous ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... a little too large for assurance on this idea. I felt an impatience to see it opened. About eleven, as nothing seemed happening, I walked back, full of such thought, to my home in Maybury. But I found it difficult to get to work upon my abstract investigations. ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... start. You can only acquire really useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas, and putting those particular ideas together. You cannot make bricks without straw. Do not worry about literature in the abstract, about theories as to literature. Get at it. Get hold of literature in the concrete as a dog gets hold of a bone. If you ask me where you ought to begin, I shall gaze at you as I might gaze at the faithful animal if he inquired which end of the bone he ought to attack. ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... ends with two appendices: the first an abstract of Thomas Candish's circumnavigation; the second an abstract of Dutch expeditions ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... witch, voluptuous, destroying Venus or cold and ungrasped Helen, what was the antique to the art born of the Middle Ages and developed during the Renaissance? Was the relation between them that of tuition, cool and abstract, or of fruitful lore, or of deluding ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... of embodying in rhythm the full beauty of girlhood is unequalled by any other English poet. Heine alone is his peer in this; but even Heine's imagination dwelt more fondly on the abstract pathos and purity of a maiden than on her individual gaiety and courage. In older women, also, these latter qualities were the spells for Browning; and, with him, a girl sets forth early on her brave career. That is the just adjective. His girls are as brave as the young knights of other ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... separation from the faithful attendant who had nursed her during her long illness. Her friends agreed not to have communication with her of any sort. It is needless to give the details of the treatment in this and the following cases. A mere abstract will suffice to indicate the rapid and satisfactory ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... French literature we come across the animal epic, or Roman du Renard, a style of composition which found its latest and most finished expression in Germany at the hands of Goethe, and the allegorical epic, Le Roman de la Rose, wherein abstract ideas were personified, such as ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... him to forget names. Then he was wondering why it was the philosophers had not more to say about the incongruity of people who had never had any trouble of their own sitting in judgment upon people who had known nothing but trouble. He was thinking also that abstract rules did not always fit smoothly over concrete cases, and that it was hard to make life ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... have a horrible suspicion that however much I may try to persuade myself I'm concentrating upon some abstract theme, I've really all the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... impossible for the Pope to live at Rome except as a dependant of the German King. With Tuscany, Lombardy, and Sicily under the imperial control, there was no room for papal action in Italy. In a contest of abstract principles the Emperor had entirely failed to subdue the Pope; and the interest and importance of the contest between Frederick and Alexander lay in the fact that each was the representative of an idea. This is no doubt the reason why Frederick's ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... an abstract of love's noble flame, 'Tis love refined, and purged from all its dross, 'Tis next to angel's love, if not the same, As strong as passion in, though not ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... now establish the plan of the last two volumes of the present work. The first chapter will contain, in a regular series, the emperors who reigned at Constantinople during a period of six hundred years, from the days of Heraclius to the Latin conquest; a rapid abstract, which may be supported by a general appeal to the order and text of the original historians. In this introduction, I shall confine myself to the revolutions of the throne, the succession of families, the personal characters of the Greek princes, the mode ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... should be partaken of by the whole mass of the people; sifting judgments must necessarily go before and along with it. True prophetism everywhere knows of salvation for a remnant only. On [Hebrew: pliTh], which does not mean "deliverance," so that the abstract would thus here stand for the concrete, but "that which has escaped," comp. remarks on Joel iii. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... understand them better. But the Homeric man shows the opposite tendency: he had to translate his internal thoughts into the external shapes of the Mythus before he could grasp fully his own mind. His conception of the world was mythical; this form he understood and not that of abstract reflection. We may well exclaim: Happy Homeric man, to whom the world was ever present, not himself. Yet both sides belong to the full-grown soul, the mythical and the reflective; from Homer the one-sided modern mind can recover a part of its spiritual inheritance, ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... any one who is in the habit of learning foreign tongues. The ear and the tongue gradually become familiar with the peculiarities of inflection and accentuation, and practice fulfils the same function as abstract rules. ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... that occasion, Monsieur—and pardon me, if I say, you immensely exaggerate both its quality and quantity—was quite abstract. I did not care for the vaudeville. I hated the part you assigned me. I had not the slightest sympathy with the audience below the stage. They are good people, doubtless, but do I know them? Are they ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... good of them in any way except one—the way of vivid and loving study, following and feeling the author's meaning all through? To suppose, as I believe some people do, that you can get the value of a great poem by studying an abstract of it in an encyclopaedia or by reading cursorily an average translation of it, argues really a kind of mental deficiency, like deafness or colour-blindness. The things that we have called eternal, the things of the spirit and the imagination, always seem ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... employ Galician for his Cantigas de Santa Maria. The Portuguese nobles, with King Diniz (reigned 1279-1325) at their head, filled the idle hours of their bloody and passionate lives by composing strangely abstract, conventional poems of love and religion in the manner of the Provencal canso, dansa, balada and pastorela, which had had such a luxuriant growth in Southern France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A highly elaborated metrical system mainly distinguishes ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... with very exaggerated notions of what freedom really was. The dominant expression of this idea was that everyone could do as he pleased, and that if the other fellow didn't like it, he, the other fellow, could get out. The often enunciating of abstract principles led to their liberal application to concrete facts. In this application they had able counsel in the ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... the Great Reality; Love the Alpha and Omega of Life; Sex-love the basis of all other loves; Sex-love the true spiritual love; what is love of an abstract God? Love the perfect mathematician; the moral code and Nature; why we cannot break the laws of God; why Love is depicted with bandaged eyes; Eros and Cupid explained; why the Egyptians depicted Horus with finger on lips; some symbolic caricatures in modern civilization; how it is true that ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... certainly would take money out of their pockets without their consent, and therefore it must be true that taxes could be rightly laid only by colonial assemblies, in which alone Americans could be represented. But of what value was it to preserve the abstract right of taxation by colonial assemblies if meanwhile the assemblies themselves might, by act of Parliament, be abolished? And had not the New York Assembly been suspended by act of Parliament? And were not the new ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... in very truth, imbued with little of mere sentiment. He gave little time to discussions belonging solely to the realm of the speculative or the abstract. He was in no sense a dreamer. What Coleridge has defined wisdom—"common sense, in an uncommon degree"—was his. In phrase the simplest and most telling, he struck at once at the very core of the ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... superabundance of matter must have been embarrassing to a writer who, for the present, can only put forward an abstract of his views; and thence it arises, perhaps, that notwithstanding the clearness of the style, those who attempt fairly to digest the book find much of it a sort of intellectual pemmican—a mass of facts crushed ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... of the Goukthrapples or Rentowels) maintained his character with the common people, although he preached the practical fruits of Christian faith as well as its abstract tenets, and was respected by the higher orders, notwithstanding he declined soothing their speculative errors by converting the pulpit of the gospel into a school of heathen morality. Perhaps it is owing to this mixture of faith and practice in his doctrine that, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... houses, the numerals (one, two, three, four), etc., etc., and it is still possible to trace in the modified modern forms of these characters more or less striking resemblances to the objects intended. The next step was to put two or more characters together, to express by their combination an abstract idea, as, for instance, a hand holding a rod father; but of course this simple process did not carry the Chinese very far, and they soon managed to hit on a joint picture and phonetic system, which enabled them to multiply characters indefinitely, new compounds ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... fine wedding, Anton?" asked Pinac gently. He could see that the old man was much moved and he wanted to bring him out of the world of abstract ideas into the world of tangible, ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... Official patronage combined with individual zeal sufficed for the elder branches of the science. A few well-endowed institutions could accumulate the materials needed by a few isolated thinkers for the construction of theories of wonderful beauty and elaboration, yet precluded, by their abstract nature, from winning general applause. But the new physical astronomy depends for its prosperity upon the favour of the multitude whom its striking results are well fitted to attract. It is, in a special manner, the science of amateurs. It welcomes the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... question the right of that society to exist than to criticize the divine ordination of the seasons. His business was with men as they were, not with man as he ought to be,—with the human soul as it is shaped or twisted into character by the complex experience of life, not in its abstract essence, as something to be saved or lost. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the centre of intellectual interest was rather in the other world than in this, rather in the region of thought and principle and conscience than in actual life. It was a generation in which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... gallery of the church on Commencement Day, and heard the speeches. It was very hot, and the speeches were not exactly interesting, being on such subjects as "The Influence of a Republic on Men of Letters," and "The Abstract Law of Justice, as applied to Human Affairs;" but the music, and the crowd, and the spectacle of six hundred ladies all fanning themselves at once, were entertaining, and the girls would not have missed them for the world. Later in the day another diversion was afforded them ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... dominating force in politics, were implacably opposed to woman suffrage and the women had no material influence to counteract them. All the more honor is due, therefore, to those members who loyally supported it in this long contest founded upon abstract right, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... after them out into the hall, Norton somewhat in advance. As de Moche disappeared for his lecture, Kennedy turned to me from Lockwood and caught my eye. I read in his glance that fell from me to the mat that he wished me quietly to abstract the piece of paper which he had placed under it. I bent down and did so ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... for whose purpose this antipathy happens to be convenient, flattering it all they can; saying that though they have no intention of laying hands on an Establishment which is efficient and popular, like the Anglican Establishment here in England, yet it is in the abstract a fine and good thing that religion should [xviii] be left to the voluntary support of its promoters, and should thus gain in energy and independence; and Mr. Gladstone has no words strong enough to express his admiration of the refusal of State-aid by the Irish Roman Catholics, ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... in which you will proceed—do not shift backward and forward from near to far, remote to close in time, general to particular, large to small, important to unimportant, concrete to abstract, physical to mental; but follow your chosen order. Scattered and shifting observations produce hazy impressions just as a ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... perhaps it would be better if he went with her on Saturday night. She agreed. She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male. She was glad that he had suggested coming with her. She thought her ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... eighty dinners were paid for I infer there were eighty diners. They drank one hundred and thirty-six bowls of punch, besides twenty-one bottles of sherry and a large quantity of cider and brandy. An abstract of an election dinner to the General Court of Massachusetts in 1769, showed two hundred diners, and seventy-two bottles of Madeira, twenty-eight bottles of Lisbon wine, ten of claret, seventeen of port, eighteen of porter, fifteen double bowls of punch and a quantity of cider. The clergy were not ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... discuss abstract propositions with you. Our hours are from six to six. You do not choose to keep them and, therefore, you must go. When you are a little more practically inclined, I will speak to the directors for you. You may come and tell me so ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... appearance of two Socialist members of the German Reichstag, who made a tour of this country in 1881 to stir up interest in the cause. It was soon apparent that the growth of the Socialist party organization was hindered by the fact that its methods were too studious and its discussions too abstract to suit the energetic temper of the times. Many Socialists broke away to join revolutionary clubs which were now organized in a number of cities without any clearly defined principle save to fight ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... thought which is the nucleus round which all that is best and highest in India has grown. Much harm has already been done by the circulation of opinions that the culture and philosophy of India was dreamy and abstract. It is therefore very necessary that Indians as well as other peoples should become more and more acquainted with the true characteristics of the past history of Indian thought and form a correct ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... the Soudan Administration, he insisted that his own salary should be further reduced to L3000, to compensate for this further charge. Such an example as this did not arouse enthusiasm or inspire emulation in the Delta. General Gordon never dealt with a question in which abstract justice was deemed more out of place, or had less chance of carrying ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... in judgment on any one's thoughts, and we must not take any man's gauge of character in the abstract as the correct one; only take the ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... It is from no abstract hatred to monarchy that I have dwelt with emphasis upon the crimes of this king, and upon the vices of the despotic system, as illustrated during his lifetime. It is not probable that the military, monarchical system—founded upon conquests achieved by barbarians ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... he who directs the acts of nations, it is he who moves the fleets and armies as if they were pieces on the chess-board; to him, as a rule, is the man of action subordinate, obeying his behests. Rule and governance are his, power both in the abstract and the concrete. Seldom in the history of the world do we come across the men who are at one and the same time statesmen and soldiers, who, taking their destiny in their own hands, work it out to the appointed end thereof. But, as we stray ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... the Council, but all in vain, the Council spending all the morning upon a business about the printing of the Critickes, a dispute between the first Printer, one Bee that is dead, and the Abstractor, who would now print his Abstract, one Poole. So home to dinner, and thence to Haward's to look upon an Espinette, and I did come near the buying one, but broke off. I have a mind to have one. So to Cooper's; and there find my wife ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... curious instruction, which has been drawn with more or less honesty by Wading and Leo Allatius from the archives of the Vatican, is given in an abstract or version by Fleury, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... appear that there is something peculiar in this abstract argument as to the nature of money. But this argument which I have made not for the sake of argument, but for the solution of the problem of my life, of my sufferings, was for me an answer to my question: What ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... on the subject of speechification, and hold that there is, everywhere, a vast amount too much of it. A sense of absurdity would be so strong upon me, if I got up at Birmingham to make a flourish on the advantages of education in the abstract for all sorts and conditions of men, that I should inevitably check myself and present a surprising incarnation of the soul of wit. But if I could interest myself in the practical usefulness of the particular institution; ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... de religion) was never used in Latin, French, or English to mean a pious man, but exclusively for a man belonging to a religious order. See "History of the word religio in the Middle Ages," by. Professor Ewald Fluegel, of Leland Stanford Junior University—an abstract of which is printed in Transactions of American Philological Association, 1902, pp. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... we have made, and the abstract of some of the more interesting parts of the narrative, will be sufficient to relieve us in a great degree from the necessity of criticism. Our readers will, themselves, be able to form a just estimate of the power and skill of the writer, and of the pleasure ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... the whole universe is reconstructed. This essential incompleteness appears, according to Hegel, equally in the world of thought and in the world of things. In the world of thought, if we take any idea which is abstract or incomplete, we find, on examination, that if we forget its incompleteness, we become involved in contradictions; these contradictions turn the idea in question into its opposite, or antithesis; and in order to escape, ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... verb bearing the meaning to choose, and to which there would appear no objection, provided that that meaning were reckoned to be secondary to the signification to eat. The idea implied in the verb to choose is essentially abstract. Not so is that included in either the verb to cut, or the verb to eat. From one of these, which may be considered as collateral primary meanings, it must therefore be deduced. And since it cannot be deduced from the one without the other, it must consequently ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... this chapter have been drawn in diagrammatical form in order to try and show that the musical quality of lines and the emotions they are capable of calling up are not dependent upon truth to natural forms but are inherent in abstract arrangements themselves. That is to say, whenever you get certain arrangements of lines, no matter what the objects in nature may be that yield them, you will always get the particular emotional stimulus ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... first thought was that he had got "into a deucedly uncomfortable fix," and when he stretched out his hand from the bedside the need of fresh clothes appeared less easy to be borne than the more abstract wreck of his career. For the first time he clearly grasped some outline of his future—a future in which a change of linen would become a luxury; and it was with smarting eyes and a nervous tightening of the throat that he glanced about ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... Subject; but having reflected that this same Relation would be of no Use but to Persons of the Faculty who are instructed and experienced in the Knowledge and Cure of Diseases, we have thought proper to add here an Abstract of the different Methods which we have made use of in treating the different Kinds of diseased Persons contained in the five Classes mentioned above; presuming that they may be of Service to the young Physicians and Surgeons that are actually engaged ...
— A Succinct Account of the Plague at Marseilles - Its Symptoms and the Methods and Medicines Used for Curing It • Francois Chicoyneau
... she said, with a certain soothing tone. "We are not made alike, you know; one person is good in one way and one in another." This abstract deliverance was not at all in Lucy's way. She returned to the particular point before them with relief. "England," she said, "must seem strange to you after your own country. I suppose it is much colder ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... "but I wish you'd make an abstract of Mr. Holladay's whereabouts during the whole time he was abroad, and send it to our office not ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... a settler—the man who drags his sustenance, all and every part of it, from the soil in tropical Queensland, as a mere settler very closely resembles that of others who cultivate. If an abstract of the universal experience were obtainable, it would very likely be found to go towards the establishment of a standard from which many would cheerfully desire many cheerful changes. After all, that represents a condition not altogether monopolised ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... renown, and to the schoolmasters, who have instilled their words into the souls of the people. Marvellous power of language, which can incite a prosaic peasant lad to sacrifice life joyfully for an abstract ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... not, then, to respect ANYONE or ANYTHING? Only he is worthy of respect who does not harm his fellows; and of those who do not harm their fellows there are but few. To this point you must pay attention—you must teach him words of variable import, words more abstract, as well ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... two natures—that of Peter Leroux, lifted scarcely one degree above the range of the brute, and that of M. Desalleux, abstract and rectified to the highest pitch of intellectuality—found themselves face to face. A little contest was going on between them. M. Desalleux, sitting in his official place, demanded, upon evidence somewhat ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... to her lodging that the sheriff wanted her, had something to say to her. It was too late; the poor washerwoman was dead. The letter that had brought the sheriff news of his brother's death also gave an abstract of his will; among other bequests he had left six hundred rix-dollars to the glove-maker's widow, who had formerly served his parents. "There was some love-nonsense between my brother and her," quoth the sheriff. "It is all as well she is out of the way; ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... have only taken such provisions, from the piles they have offered us, as were sufficient for our day's wants, and left the rest for them to take away again next morning. In future we had best, each day, abstract a considerable quantity; and place it conspicuously in the center of this shed. The people will perhaps wonder, but will probably conclude that we are laying it by, to make a great ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... no flaw in your abstract of title," replied the dog; "all seems quite regular; but I must not provoke a breach of the peace by lightly relinquishing what I might feel it my duty to resume by violence. I must have time to consider; and in the meantime ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... looked up from his pudding. He was very spiritual, but he had had poor pickings in his previous boarding place, and he could not help a certain abstract ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... the somewhat complex and, in many details, highly-disputed subject of the functions of the bow, I shall prefer to handle the question in the abstract rather than to launch myself on the choppy sea of "technique"; a sea abounding in shoals, reefs, undercurrents and whirlpools; extremely difficult to navigate inasmuch as that no two charts agree. Consequently when the mariner launches his boat the danger to himself ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... with the lark? Nay, what student or philosopher would? albeit the utmost gratification ever earned by either of these in the prosecution of his special calling—in acquiring knowledge, in solving knotty problems, or in scaling the heights of abstract contemplation—is probably as inferior in keenness of zest to that which the poet knows, as the best prose is inferior in charm to the best poetry. It may even be that both poet and philosopher owe, on the whole, more unhappiness ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... knowledge thus differs from science in that the one is held only by the apprehensive powers of the mind, while the other passes beyond these into the reflective or ratiocinative. Pure science, then, must be wholly abstract. The forms and substances of Nature with which the scientific student deals, are only the discrete figures of the young mathematician, to be thrown aside with advancing knowledge. Matter is only the ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... of so many impediments, his genius fulfilled its destiny, and attained at last to the supremacy at which it aimed from the first! His was that deep love of ideal beauty, that passionate pursuit of eloquence in the abstract, that insatiable thirst after perfection in art for its own sake, without which no man ever produced a masterpiece of genius. Plutarch, in his usual graphic style, places him before us as if he were ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... lay by Caelestial Sydney's ARCADY; Heere's a story that doth claime A little respite from his flame: Then with a quick dissolving looke Unfold the smoothnes of this book, To which no art (except your sight) Can reach a worthy epithite; 'Tis an abstract of all volumes, A pillaster of all columnes Fancy e're rear'd to wit, to be The smallest gods epitome, And so compactedly expresse All ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... us to reflect upon the most prominent characteristics of bashful young gentlemen in the abstract; and as this portable volume will be the great text-book of young ladies in all future generations, we record them here ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... realm without previously fixing upon a successor. It is difficult to see, however, by what power or authority such a law could have been enacted, or to believe that monarchs like Darius would recognize an abstract obligation to law of any kind, in respect to their own political action. There is a species of law regulating the ordinary dealings between man and man, that springs up in all communities, whether savage or civilized, from custom, and from the action of judicial tribunals, which the ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... ancient Rome. Now, however, such relics are more carefully preserved; and as the places where they are found in greatest quantity have been taken under the charge of the Government, and soldiers are constantly on the watch, it is not so easy as it used to be to abstract a fragment ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... necessarily a crime. It might even be a virtue, and Madison be applauded for his courage in avowing a change of opinion, if he saw in the practical application of Hamilton's principles dangers that had not occurred to him when looking at them only as abstract theories. But the Federalists believed that Madison, governed by these purely selfish motives, sacrificed his convictions of what was best for the country that he might secure for himself a position on what he foresaw was the winning side. ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... intensely than we should perceive them ourselves, and thereby giving us a sense of heightened vitality; his purpose is research, and his communication consists of nothing but facts. From this perhaps too abstract statement let us take refuge in an example already touched upon—the figure of the Almighty in Uccello's "Sacrifice of Noah." Instead of presenting this figure as coming toward us in an attitude and with an expression that will appeal to our sense of ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... whenever the structure of an animal is perfectly understood, there is no hesitation as to the head under which it belongs. We may consequently test the merits of these four primary groups on the evidence furnished by investigation. It has already been seen that these plans may be presented in the most abstract manner without any reference to special animals. Radiation expresses in one word the idea on which the lowest of these types is based. In Radiates we have no prominent bilateral symmetry, as in all other animals, but an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... address) as a kind of informal diary; and it is characteristic of him, of the man of infinitely curious mind, which this adventurer really was, that there are so few merely personal notes among these casual jottings. Often, they are purely abstract; at times, metaphysical jeux d'esprit, like the sheet of fourteen 'Different ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... order to justify and clarify our concrete moral judgments, that we should reach clear and firmly grounded conclusions upon the underlying abstract questions. And the habit of laying aside upon occasion one's instinctive or habitual moral preferences and discussing with open mind their justification and rationality is of great value to the individual and to society. Hence the ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... not appear, however, that Augustin cared much. In all the conceit of his false knowledge, he had that kind of inhumanity which drives the intellectual to make litter of the sweetest and deepest feelings as a sacrifice to his abstract idol. Not only did he not mind very much if his apostasy made his mother weep, but he did not trouble, either, to reconcile the chimeras of his brain with the living reality of his soul and the things of life. Whatever he found inconvenient, he tranquilly denied, content if he had talked well and ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... retired for an hour to read in her dressing-room, before she directed her attention to the toilet. She opened a book, and ran over a few pages of Madame de Stael's Treatise on the Passions; but such reasoning was too abstract for her present frame of mind, and she ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... speak, feeling, no doubt, that to pursue the subject would be either to court an ethical, even an abstract, disquisition, and this one did not do in anybody's presence, much less one's wife's or daughter's; or to touch on sordid facts of doubtful character, which was equally distasteful in the circumstances. He, too, however, was uneasy that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of the Sciences, the first and most important distinction is between the fundamental sciences, sometimes called the Abstract sciences, and the derivative or Concrete branches. My purpose does not require any nice clearing of the meanings of those technical terms. It is sufficient to say that the fundamental sciences are those that embrace distinct departments of the natural forces or phenomena; ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... unknown. It was the Christmas week, and the market was adorned with evergreens, and dressed with all possible care. The stalls groaned beneath the weight of good cheer—fish, flesh, and fowl, all contributing their share to tempt the appetite and abstract money from the purse. It was a sight to warm the heart of the most fastidious epicure, and give him the nightmare for the next seven nights, only dreaming of that stupendous quantity of food to be masticated by the ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... state, thou perfect model Of heaven itself, and abstract of the angels, Forgive the late disturbance of my soul! I'm clear by nature, as a rockless stream; But they dig through the gravel of my heart, And raise the mud of passions up to cloud me; Therefore let me conjure you, do not go; 'Tis said, the Guise will come ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... stranger. Our train was late, or we should have been here long ago. On reaching the castle it struck me as a good idea to give Lord Littimer a lesson as to his carelessness. My idea was to climb through the window, abstract the Rembrandt, and slip quietly into my usual bedroom here. Then in the morning, after the picture has been missed, I was going to tell the whole story. That is why Mr. Littimer entered this way and why I followed when I found that ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... Third Root Race and the beginning of the Fourth that the Manasaputra descended to endow with mind the bulk of Humanity who were still without the spark, yet so feebly burned the light all through the Atlantean days that few could be said to have attained to the powers of abstract thought. On the other hand the functioning of the mind on concrete things came well within their grasp, and as we have seen it was in the practical concerns of their every-day life, especially when their psychic faculties were directed towards the same objects, ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... habitual bearing to formal philosophy. The consideration of causes, first principles, abstract truths, never, in the dramatist's opinion, cured a human ill. The futility of formal philosophy stands, from this point of view, in ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... acquainted with the most recent metaphysics of his time to know that you cannot think of a tree in general, nor of a triangle in general, but only of some particular tree or triangle.[189] In a similar way he might have known that there never was any such thing as a state of nature in the general and abstract, fixed, typical, and single. He speaks of the savage state also, which comes next, as one, identical, normal. It is, of course, nothing of the kind. The varieties of belief and habit and custom among the different ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Wanton (c. 1550), for instance, represents the consequence of good and evil living, not only by the use of such allegorical characters as Iniquity and Worldly Shame, but also by means of the human beings, Barnabas and Ishmael and their sister Dalila. Thus, although the more abstract moralities persisted until late in the sixteenth century, these other types at the same time helped lead the way to the drama which ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... respect to the crossing of hermaphrodites, the subject is too large for the present volume, and will be more properly treated in a succeeding work. In my 'Origin of Species,' however, I have given a short abstract of the reasons which induce me to believe that all organic beings occasionally cross, though perhaps in some cases only at long intervals of time.[192] I will here just recall the fact that many plants, though hermaphrodite in structure, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... treating the past more kindly to misrepresent it in some particulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination. The eighteenth-century historians were incurious of life. Their spirit was general and abstract; they were in search of philosophical formulas. Gibbon covers his subject with a lava-flood of stately rhetoric which stiffens into a uniform stony coating over the soft surface of life. Scott is primarily responsible for that dramatic, picturesque treatment of history which we find in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of course recollected that in this abstraction of the moral sense, we have to abstract it from the characters ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... one of these endless arguments, of which only Russians are capable. After a separation of many years spent in two different worlds, with no clear understanding of the other's ideas or even of their own, catching at words and replying only in words, they disputed about the most abstract subjects, and they disputed as though it were a matter of life and death for both: they shouted and vociferated so that every one in the house was startled, and poor Lemm, who had locked himself up in his room directly after Mihalevitch arrived, ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... capital ancient Erech, the city of Anu, and of his daughter, the goddess Nana, who afterwards was identified with Ishtar. Anu's spouse was Anatu, and the pair subsequently became abstract deities, like Anshar and Kishar, their parents, who figure in the Babylonian Creation story. Nana was worshipped as the goddess of vegetation, and her relation to Anu was similar to that of Belit-sheri to Ea at Eridu. Anu ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... chronicles of Caesar. They did him good,—in the same way that the making of many shoes would have done him good had he been a shoemaker. In catching fishes and riding after foxes he could not give his mind to the occupation, so as to abstract his thoughts. But Cicero's de Natura Deorum was more effectual. Gradually he returned to a gentle cheerfulness of life, but he never burst out again into the violent exercise of shooting a pheasant. After that his mother died, and again he was ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... is (he answered): it still remains for him to learn particulars—to know, that is, what things he has to do, and when and how to do them; or else, if ignorant of these details, the profit of this bailiff in the abstract may prove no greater than the doctor's who pays a most precise attention to a sick man, visiting him late and early, but what will serve to ease his patient's ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... rose, a trifle excited in the glow of abstract happiness, and walked erratically about, smiling to herself, touching and rearranging objects that caught her attention. Then an innocent instinct led her to the mirror, where she stood a moment looking back into the lovely reflected face with ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... than love had been the creed of her life and the mainspring of her actions, and, save her father and her one friend Radna, she stood aloof from mankind and its loves and friendships, rather the beautiful incarnation of an abstract principle than a woman, to whom love and motherhood were ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... book, as in every other German work that has occasion to touch on abstract matters, there occur sentences couched in a peculiar terminology and not very susceptible of translation. There are one or two sentences of this sort, more especially in the chapter on Religion in the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... so markedly at variance with the idealism of his later years? In all probability it was his rooted suspicion of reasoning as a deliberate and conscious process. Other writers of the century—Addison, for instance—had spoken as if men reasoned from certain abstract ideas (proportion, fitness, and the like) to individual instances of beauty, deciding a thing to have beauty or no, according as it squared or failed to square with the general notion This, as Burke points out, is more than questionable ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... returned to England, having added this great question to the stock of her foremost objects of interest and concern. Such additions, whether literary or social, are the best kind of refreshment that travel supplies. She published two books on America: one of them abstract and quasi-scientific, Society in America; the other, A Retrospect of Western Travel, of a lighter and more purely descriptive quality. Their success with the public was moderate, and in after years she condemned them in very plain language, the first of them especially as 'full ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... appointed to superintend these public works; and as these commissioners were generally destitute of practical knowledge, these Parliamentary grants were usually expended without producing equivalent results. Nothing in the abstract is more reasonable than that any number of individuals should be allowed to associate themselves for the purpose of effecting some local improvement, which would be beneficial to others as well as to themselves; but nothing of this could be attempted ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... J. Brooks, J. W. Merryfield, H. Dean, and F. Crosgrove. During the selection of the jury, it is observed by a correspondent of The Mail, to whom we shall be indebted for the reports of the trial, in making the present abstract, "that Riel anxiously watched the face of every man as he was selected and sworn, as though he could read their inmost thoughts as ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... Juve said with a smile, "the explanation is obvious. If Gurn, whom I charge with the murder of Dollon, had been content merely to abstract the real fragment, he would so to speak have set his signature to the crime. But he was much too clever for that: he was subtle enough to abstract the compromising fragment and substitute another fragment for it—the one found on ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... or plains of uniform character, we could easily apply to it all our rules; but, broken as it is into hills and valleys, filled with stones here, with a bank of clay there, and a sand-pit close by, we are obliged to sacrifice to general convenience, often, some special abstract rule. ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... humiliating question: "How old are you?" Jane had confessed to it. He knew how the outward glow of adoring love had faded as the mind was suddenly turned inward to self-contemplation. He had known it all as abstract fact. Now he saw it actually before him. He saw Jane's stricken lover, bowed beside him in his blindness, living again through those sights and sounds which no merciful curtain of oblivion ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... friendly actions which are the outcome of the state of friendship. The nearest English equivalent to define amikajxoj is friendlinesses. Similarly bonajxoj are goodnesses, or good actions, which necessarily arise from the state of goodness, as represented by the abstract suffix "ec." ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 3 • Various
... simply that peculiar rule, founded upon a peculiar state of society, by the application of which a people or a class allot praise or blame. Nothing is more unproductive to the mind than an abstract idea; I therefore hasten to call in the aid of facts and examples to illustrate ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... says: "Livingstone followed the dictates of duty. Never was such a willing slave to that abstract virtue. His inclinations impel him home, the fascinations of which it requires the sternest resolution to resist. With every foot of new ground he travelled over he forged a chain of sympathy which should hereafter bind the Christian nations ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... abstract of such information for the use of the Board and the Legislature, with plans and suggestions for the better organization and administration ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... new-found element. He clings to mortality; to life, not thought; or, as he puts it, to the concrete, — let the abstract "go pack!" "There's little comfort in the wise," he ends. But in the unfolding of his precocious spirit, the literary control comes uppermost; his boat, finding its keel, swings to the helm of mind. How should it be otherwise for a youth well-born, well-bred, in college air? Intellectual ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... She had talked of love so often as an abstract thing, she had seen so many love-makings of others, and so many men had tried to make love to her in her short brilliant life, and she had always thought it could not come near her, because, of course, she really loved Ronald. She had marveled, indeed, at what people were willing to do, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... him that this line of defence was distasteful to her, that he had no right to make a personal matter of an abstract question of justice. It was through those personalities ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... p. 80. The abstract of the report of the Brook House committee (so that committee was called) was first published by Mr. Ralph (vol. i. p. 177), from Lord Halifax's collections, to which I refer. If we peruse their apology, which we find in the subsequent ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... unbroken course which is the specific characterisation of Michelangelo. As years advanced, his pulses beat less quickly and his body shrank. But the man did not alter. With the same lapse of years, his style grew drier and more abstract, but it did not alter in quality or depart from its ideal. He seems to me in these respects to be like Milton: wholly unlike the plastic and assimilative ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... I would have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes. But I didn't believe them at first—the thing seemed so impossible. The fact is I was completely unnerved by a sheer blank fright, pure abstract terror, unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger. What made this emotion so overpowering was—how shall I define it?—the moral shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad |
