"Abstraction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the letters which begin the Greek words meaning "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour." An entire mythology soon grew up around the idea of re-birth. The font was viewed as the womb of the virgin mother church, who was in some congregations, for example, in the early churches of Gaul, no abstraction, but a divine aeon watching over and sympathizing with the children of her womb, the recipient even of hymns of praise and humble supplications. Other mythoplastic growths succeeded, one of which must be noticed. The sponsors or anadochi, who, after the introduction ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... to it, that such a dreamer must have in regard to any reality that threatens to affect the course of his reveries. He had not perhaps taken her marriage into account, except as a remote contingency; and certainly Fulkerson was not the kind of son-in-law that he had imagined in dealing with that abstraction. But because he had nothing of the sort definitely in mind, he could not oppose the selection of Fulkerson with success; he really knew nothing against him, and he knew, many things in his favor; Fulkerson inspired him with ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a little discouraged. He had the illusion that the two hospitals run in France for French soldiers by the Lechford Committee were an illusion, that they did not really exist, that the committee was discussing an abstraction. Nevertheless, each problem as it was presented—the drains (postponed), the repairs to the motor-ambulances, the ordering of a new X-ray apparatus, the dilatoriness of a French Minister in dealing with correspondence, the cost per day per patient, ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... throwing her glance into past times, and talking on in a running tone of complacent abstraction, as if a listener were not a necessity. "Yes; never was I in such a taking as on that Midsummer- eve! I sat up, quite determined to see if John Wildway was going to marry me or no. I put the bread-and-cheese and beer quite ready, as the witch's book ordered, and I opened the door, and I waited ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... one odd piece of practical metaphysics which accompanied what I may call the depth, if I must not call it the intensity, of my abstraction. What philosophers call ME and NOT-ME, EGO and NON EGO, preoccupied me whether I would or no. There was less ME and more NOT-ME than I was accustomed to expect. I looked on upon somebody else, who managed the paddling; I was aware of somebody else's feet against ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... many other tribes. Though such an important chief, he is the meanest dressed of his subjects,—is always filthy,—ever greasy—eternally foul about the mouth; but these are mere eccentricities: as a wise judge, he is without parallel, always has a dodge ever ready for the abstraction of cloth from the spiritless Arab merchants, who trade with Unyanyembe every year; and disposes with ease of a judicial case which would overtask ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... in wretched humor; that was evident. Her gray eyes were granite now indeed. When she wasn't speaking she stared straight in front of her as if at some distasteful abstraction in ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... her book, but seemingly lost in abstraction, did not deign to look at us. Mrs. Dalrymple, however, did the honors with much politeness, and having by a few adroit and well-put queries ascertained everything concerning our rank and position, seemed perfectly satisfied that our ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... displayed before me, as in a piece of arras work, the whole of my past life—not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music; no longer painful to dwell upon; but the detail of its incidents removed or blended in some hazy abstraction, and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this was to be had for five shillings. And over and above the music of the stage and the orchestra, I had all around me, in the intervals of the performance, the music of the Italian language ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... House began to come to the Hall less often, not because they were less welcomed, but because there was a constraint in the air. All seemed preoccupied; conversations ceased abruptly on their entrance, and fits of abstraction would fall from time to time upon their kindly hosts. In the meanwhile, too, the preparations for James Maxwell's departure, which had already begun to show themselves, were now pushed forward rapidly; and one morning in the late summer, when Isabel came up to the Hall, she found ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... ceremonies of a country that give us its religion in the concrete. All beyond is an abstraction. These, with the Bodo and Dhimal, are numerous. Invocations, deprecations, and thanksgivings are all mentioned by Mr. Hodgson; and they are all attended by offerings or sacrifices; libations attend the sacrifices, and feasting ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... pretty well by this time, Hugh," he said. Hugh awoke from his abstraction and displayed immediate interest. "You know that I am straightforward and honest, if nothing else. There is also in my make-up a pride which you may never have observed or suspected, and it is of this that I want to speak before attempting to say something which will depend altogether ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... his letters at four; and was superannuated—such was his impenetrability to learning—at the age of five from the school of which his father had been master. He was moreover till the age of six and a half so frequently subject to long fits of abstraction and of apparently causeless crying that his mother and grandmother feared for his reason and thought him 'an absolute fool.' We are told also by his sister—and there is no incongruity in the two accounts—that he early displayed a taste ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... quickly enough then, so that we began to "think scornful" of seasickness. Fortunately the good ship Buford ploughed her way across the Pacific without meeting another swell, and our pride was not humbled again. We ate quite sparingly for a meal or two, and had fits of abstraction, gazing at the ceiling when extra-odorous dishes were placed in front of us. The Radcliffe girls said that they had passed a strenuous night, engaged in wild manoeuvres to obtain possession of the monkey wrench and feloniously to secrete ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... of a moderate brightness corresponds less with a green of less brightness than with a blue of the same brightness. In order to bring all greens together the Chukches thus require to learn a new abstraction". Of 300 persons who were examined, 273 had a fully developed colour-sense, nine were completely colour-blind, and eighteen incompletely colour-blind, or gave ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... somersaults in fancy, and beating the wind with imaginary pinions. And in this way he regained peace of mind and animal composure, conscious of his limbs, conscious of the sight of his eyes, conscious that the air had a cool taste, like a fruit, at the top of his throat; and at last, in complete abstraction, he began to sing. The Doctor had but one air—"Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre"; even with that he was on terms of mere politeness; and his musical exploits were always reserved for moments when he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that fellow Baxter. Pots of money." The car turned out on to the London road, and the old man rambled on without noticing Vane's abstraction. "Deuced good thing too—between ourselves. Sir James—her father, you know—was in a very queer street. . . . Land, my boy, is the devil these days. Don't touch it; don't have anything to do with it. You'll burn your fingers if ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... of use," said Kreps, and he sighed. "You understand not de yearning, de ideal. Listen! Liebchen, she iss de abstraction, de principle. Aber no. You cannot. De soul iss ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... the possibility that "dear George" might at that very moment have her accurately focussed in the field of his glass, sauntered along the beach with as much of an air of total abstraction as she could conveniently assume on the spur of the moment, and finally, after watching the schooner pass safely into Portsmouth Harbour and there come to ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... white, dreamy, resolute face, that answered the solemn questions of the marriage service in a voice that did not seem her own. Hester was not with them to notice the heavy abstraction that made the bride as if unconscious of her husband's loving words, and then start and smile, and reply with a sad gentleness of tone. No! Hester's duty lay in conveying the poor widow and mother down from Haytersbank ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... etiquette, and agriculture. And not ten among the five hundred—let their minds be ever so good and bright—will be competent, by grace of the requisite specialized mental training, to take hold of a complex abstraction of any kind and make head ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he had fallen, like the rest of us, to think mainly of the house. Now that all the living members of the family were plunged in irremediable sorrow, it was strange how we turned to that conjoint abstraction of the family itself, and sought to bolster up the airy nothing of its reputation: not the Duries only, but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the other, I got a reply by return expressing his disappointment; since then, nothing. During that fortnight of silence the whole of the Turkish Empire has been moving—closing in—on the Dardanelles. Then, by a side-wind I happen to hear of the abstraction of a Russian Army Corps from my supposed command; an Army Corps, who by the mere fact of "being," held off a large force ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... dead abstraction, but a living faith, and it therefore grew and changed with the growth of the mind of man, enlarging its perception of truth. As in the other great faiths, the ascent of the Mount of Vision reveals worlds undreamed, ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... you, now," he faltered. "You have come to disgrace me. What good will that do you, or—or my first wife? You are no abstraction, to represent sowing or reaping, but a flesh-and-blood girl who can ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... more it is beloved of man; but I think that the principle of the refrain, or repetition in music, which as yet governs all decorative art and which Mr. Whistler and others are endeavoring desperately to destroy, acts in music as a sort of animal magnetism or abstraction, ending in an extase. As for the fascination which such wild melodies exert, it is beyond description. The most enraptured audience I ever saw in my life was at a Coptic wedding in Cairo, where one hundred ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... in the fashion which he often loved to use towards such inquirers: "The 'seven spirits' are in the Apocalypse, also in Coleridge and Byron, a common image." . . . "I certainly never intended" (he also said) "to personify wisdom, or philosophy, or any other abstraction." And he summed up the, after all, sufficiently obvious meaning by saying that Numpholeptos is "an allegory of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted conventionally as such by a man who all the while" (as I have once or twice had occasion to say of himself!) "cannot ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... the colonel and his daughter in this same room, which served for sitting-room and library. The dining-room was disused. Things had come by degrees to this irregularity, Mrs. Barker finding that it made her less work, and the colonel in his sorrowful abstraction hardly knowing and not at all caring where he took his dinner. The dinner was carefully served, however, and delicately prepared; for there Barker's pride came in to her help; and besides, little as Colonel Gainsborough attended now to the food he ate, ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... was a handsome, open lad, the Countess acknowledged. Aloud she said: "I dare say every woman loves to have a man fight for her. I do my own fighting, usually, but it's nice to have a champion." Her gaze wandered back to the hotel, then up the pine-flanked valley toward the Chilkoot; her abstraction returned; she appeared to weigh ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... drink should not be taken very cold. If a considerable quantity of very cold food or liquid be taken immediately into the stomach, the health will be endangered, and the tone of the system will be impaired, from the sudden abstraction of heat from the coats of the stomach, and from surrounding organs, to impart warmth to the cold food or drink. This arrests the digestive process, and the food is retained in the stomach too long, ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... and he will comprehend under the term eventualities whatever may happen in the universe, dating from the moment at which he speaks. Democratic writers are perpetually coining words of this kind, in which they sublimate into further abstraction the abstract terms of the language. Nay, more, to render their mode of speech more succinct, they personify the subject of these abstract terms, and make it act like a real entity. Thus they would say in French, "La force des choses veut que les ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... In deep abstraction Blue-Star Woman prepared her morning meal. "Who am I?" had become the obsessing riddle of her life. She was no longer a young woman, being in her fifty-third year. In the eyes of the white man's law, it was required of her to give proof of her membership in the Sioux ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. The absurd abstraction of an intellect verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whose denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is {93} ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Instead of a study of the meaning and relation of facts, it became a cult of abstractions, and the aim of its teachers seemed to be to render the science as little scientific, and as dull, as possible. They set up an abstraction, an "economic man," and created for it a world of economic abstractions. It is impossible to read either Ricardo or John Stuart Mill, but especially the latter, without feeling the artificiality of the superstructures they created, and the justice of Carlyle's description ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... and explained to Lincoln that the padre was the peaceable cure of the neighbouring village, and the friend of Don Antonio; and the hunter, seeing that I did not interpose—for at the moment I was in one of those moods of abstraction, and scarcely noticed what was going on—permitted the priest to pass out. I was recalled to myself more by some peculiar expression which I heard Lincoln muttering after it was over than by the incidents ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... earthquake would have dispersed it; besides the price of admission was enormous and naturally every one wanted the worth of his money. I had a strong glass and eagerly examined the old man and saw that he had long skinny fingers that resembled claws, a cadaverous face and an air of abstraction one notices in very old or deaf persons. To my horror I noticed that the doctor in addressing him spoke through a large trumpet and then it dawned on me that the man was deaf, and hardly was I convinced of this when my right hand neighbor informed me that the Gospadin ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... true to say that, although they thus distinguish the principal qualities of character and conduct with appropriate adjectival terms, they have no substantival terms for the virtues and vices, and that they have not fully accomplished the processes of abstraction implied by the appropriate use ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... conscious that he was very hungry. He hurriedly ate some sandwiches and drank some water, and then, again, he gave himself up entirely to mental labor. When, at last, the noise of machinery above him and the sound of voices aroused him from his abstraction, the car emerged upon the surface of the earth, Clewe hastily slid back the door and stepped out. At that instant he felt himself encircled by a pair of arms. Bryce was near by, and there were other men by the engines, but the owner ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... mercenary marriage, as she had done in another case. She forgot, for the moment, her interest in the Forest news, and though she seemed to be contemplating her beautiful dress for the evening laid out upon the bed, the pensive abstraction of her gaze implied profounder thoughts. Mrs. Betts busied herself with various little matters—sewed on faster the rosette of a white shoe, and the buttons on the gloves that were to be worn with that foam of silvery tulle. What ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... problem; presently she would either shake her head sadly as if the intellectual process were too hard for her and resume her needle, or if she happened to catch my glance, she would start, smile reassuringly at me, and apply herself with exaggerated zeal to her work. These fits of abstraction were not those of a woman speculating on mysteries of the near future. Such Carlotta also indulged in, and they were easy to recognise, by the dreaminess of her eyes and the faint smile flickering about her lips. The moods of knitted brows were periods ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... to Hick Scorner and see the new principle of characterization at work. How much of the old is blended with it may be seen in the opening speech, which is delivered by as colourless an abstraction as ever advocated a virtuous life in the Moralities. A good old man, Pity, sits alone, describing himself to his hearers. To him comes Contemplation, and shortly afterwards Perseverance, both younger men but just as undeniably ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... stillness was once more perfect, Alan shouldered the portmanteau, carried it in, and shut and locked the garden door; and then, once more, abstraction seemed to fall upon him, and he stood with his hand on the key, until the cold began to nibble ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cannot be other than eternal and self-demonstrating, just as 2 x 2 must eternally 4; but it remains only an abstract conception until the Creative Word affords it a field of operation, just as twice two is four remains only a mathematical abstraction until there is something for you to count; and accordingly, as we have already seen, all our reasoning concerning the origin of Creation, whether based on metaphysical or scientific grounds, brings us to the conception of a Universal and Eternal Living ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... another by turns. The novelty of the whole scene appeared for an instant to engross her attention. Every part of the furniture was unlike that of a shepherd's cot; and completely singular and unprecedented by any thing that her memory could suggest. But this self-deception, this abstraction from her feelings and her situation was of a continuance the shortest that can be conceived. All seemed changed with her in a moment. Her eye, which, from a state of languor and unexpressiveness, had assumed ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... an absent look and tone that would probably have been the same if his friend had said that it ran to the moon. The missionary did not observe that his companion was hopelessly sunk in the sea of abstraction. ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... as I have above told you, these two statements are given on the two sides of the same leaf; and the reader must make what he may of them. Setting the best of my own poor wits at them, it seems to me that the merciless abstraction of down is indeed the usual custom of the inhabitants and visitors; but that the 'good lady,' referred to by Mr. Shepherd, manages things differently; and in consequence we are presently farther told ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... was thinking thoughts as widely diverse from these attributed to him as one could easily imagine. Of himself, and his position, scarcely at all. And when he thought, he smiled; but the gravity, the abstraction into which he repeatedly lapsed, seemed to say for him that freedom was to him more than he knew what to do with. No volubility of joy, no laughter, no manifested exultation in deliverance from bondage: 't was a rare case; must one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... of bitter abstraction, he floundered into a marsh and emerged mud-spattered and indignant. Briers tore at him. Below the sun-mottled river glided endlessly on in sylvan peace. The other shore looked better. There the wind-bent shag of trees was greener save when, with a hint of rain, the breeze turned up an under-leaf ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... terrible about his unvarying politeness and his utter disregard of the most potent signs of affection. He made no attempt to keep her at a distance, but merely continued steadfastly to treat her as a mere abstraction. ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... was kneeling in it—inclining himself over its back towards her, and holding her hand in both his own. His body moved restlessly, and it was with what Keats daintily calls a too happy happiness. This unwonted abstraction by love of all dignity from a man of whom it had ever seemed the chief component, was, in its distressing incongruity, a pain to her which quenched much of the pleasure she derived from the ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... were so, for she remembered his abstraction; his mention of Honor had been a bolt from ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... with the idea that I'm in love with her," he said. "That isn't it. That's particularly—not it. I haven't an idea who she is nor any intention of trying to find out. Even if I knew the way to begin getting acquainted with her, I'm inclined to think I'd avoid it. But as an abstraction—no, that's not what I mean—as a symbol of what I'll find waiting for me whenever I get down to the core of things ... I've got a sort of—superstition if I don't do anything to—to break the spell, you know, that sometime she'll come ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... time Mr. Swift had ever been in an airship, he evinced no great astonishment. In fact he seemed to be thinking deeply, and on some subject not connected with aeronautics. Tom noticed the abstraction of his father, and shook his head. Clearly the aged inventor was not ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... small one: the right size is according to the purpose for which the net is to be used in each particular case. So neither can law nor liberty be praised, as Burke says, "on a simple view of the subject, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction." We can only praise either as it is "clothed in circumstances." Commonly we are led to praise the one by getting too much of the other. Confounded in a tangle of fussy, vexatious, perhaps malicious restrictions, men cry loudly for liberty. When people all about us are ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... vocabulary should be taken as evidence, but also their degrees of generality and abstractness; for there are generalities of the first, second, third, &c., orders, and abstractions similarly ascending. Blue is an abstraction referring to one class of impressions derived from visible objects; colour is a higher abstraction referring to many such classes of visual impressions; property is a still higher abstraction referring to classes of impressions received ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... lines, and it is immediately too soft; he draws a curved line, and instantly sees it should have been straight; a straight one, and finds when he looks up again, that it has got curved while he was drawing it. There is nothing for him but despair, or some sort of abstraction and shorthand for cliff. Then the only question is, what is the wisest abstraction; and out of the multitude of lines that cannot altogether be interpreted, which are the really dominant ones; so that if we cannot give the whole, we may at least ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... mental abstraction,—and the subtile genius of the Italian gives him that power in a high degree,—will enable any one to separate betwixt the system and its agents. Some one has remarked, that he could form an abstraction of a lord mayor, not only without his horse, and gown, and gold chain, but even without ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... dated from that night on which he was baptized. Since then he had not once been troubled with bad dreams, and habitually he slept so soundly that he required a lot of rousing in the morning. Another change, among those slight differences that she fancied she observed in him, was his abstraction when reading. Formerly he used to seem particularly alert and vigorous whenever he sat with an open book before him; his whole air was that of lively expectation; the features worked; he was waiting for a passage that he did not agree with. Nowadays he seemed to read in a completely ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... a state of profound abstraction: wondering, probably, whether he was destined to be regaled with a cabbage-stalk or two when he had disposed of the two sacks of soot with which the little cart was laden; so, without noticing the word ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... call out fear, not the godly sort that is afraid of grieving Him by sin, but the physical fear that casts out love. He does not have the sense of moral obligation to God, for that again goes into the abstraction of thought. His religious life begins in feeling, pure and simple, and his creed is in I John, "We love Him ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... to wait for an answer. This famous utterance has been quoted as a text for the anxious inquirer, and preachers have gravely set themselves to answer it. Jesus did nothing of the kind. Evidently it was not a serious inquiry. Pilate flung off the very idea of truth—a mere abstraction, nothing to a practical Roman. Still, though he was not seeking any answer to his question, by the very tone of it he suggested that he did not possess that gem which those who hold it prize above all things. "The Scepticism of Pilate" is the title of ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... passion; and yet I was that man's brother in misfortune, as I knew too well; and once I had so lightly paid away seven hundred thousand francs! The footman pushed the man aside, and the horses sprang forward. As we returned, Foedora, in real or feigned abstraction, answered all my questions curtly and by monosyllables. I said no more; it was a hateful moment. When we reached her house, we seated ourselves by the hearth, and when the servant had stirred the fire and left us alone, the countess turned to me with an inexplicable ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... is an abstraction. Its usual evidence is the possession of property, which may be money, land, goods or chattels, as the case may be. In final analysis this concrete evidence of ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... argument employed by these apologists is, that the 'Proviso,' or a law prohibiting slavery in these Territories, is unnecessary; that it is an abstraction—a 'firebrand' employed by demagogues and factionists to kindle strife in the Democratic party; that the Territories are now free, and that they will so continue, unless an act of Congress is passed establishing ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... Leighton and servant" attracted considerable attention on the Laurentia, but let it be said to Lewis's credit, or, rather, to the credit of his abstraction, that he did not notice it. Never before had Lewis had so much to think about. His parting with his father ought to have been more than a formality. Why had it been a mere incident—an incident scarcely salient among the ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... table. This would be punishable at the Club; but as she would consider it "mean" were any allusions made to it, nothing happens. Towards the end of the hand her attention is apt to wander, and owing to her abstraction play comes to a dead halt. When a hint is offered that we are waiting for her, with prompt and business-like alacrity but regardless of the rigorous formula, "Place your cards, please," she will say, "Who led a spade?" there being at the time a club, a heart, and a diamond on the table. Then, being ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various
... from the rafters, to be ready for distribution after the initiation on the following day. Several friends of the candidate, who are Mid[-e], are stationed at the doors of the Mid[-e]wign to guard against the intrusion of the uninitiated, or the possible abstraction of the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... exercise a strange and potent spell. We feel ourselves beneath the sway of a gigantic genius, intent on solving the severest problems of his art in preparation for the portraiture of some high intellectual abstraction. It should also be observed that notwithstanding their frigidity and statuesque composure, the pictures of "S. Andrew" and "S. Christopher" in the chapel of the Eremitani reveal minute study of real objects. Transitory movements of the body are noted and transcribed with merciless precision; an ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... temper. I do not like the miniature style of portrait-painting, so I shall not catalogue the features of this girl in the orthodox fashion. She would have drawn your eye in any crowd, for she had that look of slight abstraction which always marks those who are used at intervals to forget material things; and the composed mouth and rather square chin hinted at a certain capacity for practical affairs. The storm stirred her blood, and she murmured ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... of intrinsic nature. Too kindly constituted to be very provident, he was yet not imprudent. He had a quiet humorousness of disposition, not out of keeping with a frequent melancholy, the general expression of his countenance being one of abstraction. Like Walt Whitman he ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... or ungoverned propensities, but to the malorganization of society, has shown itself in a strange and ominous indulgence to crime. It was the old fashion, he says, upon hearing of any enormity, to level our indignation against the perpetrator; it is now the mode, to direct it against that culpable abstraction, society. Society is, indeed, the sole culprit. When the novelist has detailed some horrible assassination, or gross adultery, he exclaims, Behold what society has done! The criminal himself passes scathless; if, indeed, he may not put in a claim to our especial ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary. But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod's carpenter was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... yet, from the beginning of time—whether from the world before the flood, or since the reconstruction of the world after—never, to this present epoch, has one single example come down to us of the sober realization of either the economical abstraction or the social abstraction. Primeval chaos, chaos existing before all time, could alone have represented the beau-ideal of each. So far indeed as their own demesnes and domains, Laban and Pharaoh were not without their practical proficiency in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... because it was absurd and which Mrs. Dallow had never had a particular esteem for. The lake, fed by a natural spring, was a liberal sheet of water, measured by the scale of park scenery; and though its principal merit was that, taken at a distance, it gave a gleam of abstraction to the concrete verdure, doing the office of an open eye in a dull face, it could also be approached without derision on a sweet summer morning when it made a lapping sound and reflected candidly various things that were probably finer than itself—the sky, the great trees, the flight of ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... of the things on which it lavishes its sensibilities and its passions. We see in such cases the vision of an individual soul, as we see the vision of an individual countenance. We can describe both, and can let a stranger into our knowledge. But how tell in words, so pure, so fine, so ideal an abstraction as Hamlet? We can, indeed, figure to ourselves generally his princely form, that outshone all others in manly beauty, and adorn it with the consummation of all liberal accomplishment. We can behold in every look, every gesture, every motion, the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... a cheerful companion through the meal, but there were certain intervals of abstraction in her cheerfulness, intervals when she was thinking very rapidly and reconstructing the plan which Pinto had made. So he was one of the rats who were deserting the sinking ship and leaving the Colonel and Crewe to face the music. And Crewe—that ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... Abstract terms are so called as being arrived at by a process of Abstraction. What is meant by Abstraction will be clear from a single instance. The mind, in contemplating a number of substances, may draw off, or abstract, its attention from all their other characteristics, and fix it only on some point, or points, which they have in common. Thus, ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... that it is braver and better and wiser than the rest of the world. Does not every Englishman feel this to be true of his own countrymen? It is consequently not absurd that Frenchmen should think the same of themselves. The French are intensely patriotic—country with them is no abstraction. They moan over its ruin as though it were a human being, and far then be it from me to laugh at them for doing so. When, however, I find persons dressing themselves up in all the paraphernalia of war, visiting tombs and statues in order ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... o'clock when he was aroused from his abstraction by a slight sound, as of stealthy footsteps in the rear of the house. He listened intently for a moment, but hearing nothing further and discovering the lateness of the hour, he hastily extinguished the light and, too exhausted and weary to undress, threw himself as he was upon a couch ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... I am bored to death with Washington a l'Americain. A man!— how dare you call him a man?—don't you know he is a myth, an abstraction, a plaster-of-Paris cast? Did you ever hear any human trait of his noticed? Weren't you brought up to regard him as a species of special seraph, a sublime and stainless figure, inseparable from a grand manner and a scroll? Did you ever dare suppose he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... power and patronage of the household upon the queen, would be setting up a party at court in opposition to the administration of the regent. Sheridan followed on the same side, and was both witty and severe upon the abstraction of the household patronage from the regency, and endeavoured to show that Pitt wanted it for himself, when he could no longer hold his present high office! Colonel Fullarton also argued against the mutilation of the executive government, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and with a wave of her hand she disappeared into the night. Not until she was beyond recall did he realize that he might have kissed her; that she had wanted him to kiss her, for the first time since they had known each other. He sat in abstraction for several moments before he shook the reins in his hand and his ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... a fit of abstraction wrote 'Hamilton' for 'Hastings,'" said Nan to herself one day. But that is something Florrie Hamilton ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... degree of difference, sometimes simply in alphabetical order. In the case of elementary species there is no real type; no one of them predominates because all are considered to be equal in rank, and the systematic species to which they [128] are referred is not a really existing form, but is the abstraction of the common type of all, just as it is in the case of a ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... perfectly at ease, in consequence of her silence and abstraction (for she had not even glanced at me,) I ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... first instance the term "natural laws," or "laws of nature." Events were found to follow each other in a uniform way, and this uniformity was thus sought to be accounted for. Probably in the minds of those by whom the word was thus applied in the first instance Nature was not the mere abstraction it is now, but an unseen power—Deity or subordinate to Deity— working ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... or less abstracted during the entire dinner. He now offered, in a matter-of-fact tone, this explanation of his abstraction much as he might have observed that he would like a partridge, if it had happened to be ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... heretical systems; the sugar-cane monarch, who began his line, could not restrain the tide of the sea, but Sagara-raga, his descendant, who begat a thousand royal sons, he could control the tide of the great sea so that it should come no further. Ganaka, the Rishi, without a teacher acquired power of abstraction. All these, who obtained such renown, acquired powers of themselves; those distinguished before, were afterwards forgotten; those before forgotten, became afterwards distinguished; kings like these and god-like Rishis have no need of family inheritance, and therefore the world ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... creditors, under the sanction of the law, seize upon his lost Willie's portrait, was to him so unexpected and sacrilegious a thing, that he could scarcely realize it, and he stood wrapt in painful, dreamy abstraction, until ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... that day; and Don Guzman saw it in her uneasy and downcast looks, and thinking (conceited coxcomb) that she must be by now sufficiently punished, stole a glance at her now and then, and was not abashed when he saw that she dropped her eyes when they met his, because he saw her silence and abstraction increase, and something like a blush steal into her cheeks. So he pretended to be as much downcast and abstracted as she was, and went on with his glances, till he once found her, poor thing, looking at him to see if he was looking ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... and somewhat troubled in mind as well, by the boy's deep abstraction. That his master the Archbishop cherished any feelings of harshness or resentment towards the solitary little prisoner Hans refused to believe. Indeed, the Archbishop had confided to him that he merely desired to test the child's powers of writing original music. But to ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... body of wits to her benefit; and having secured forty places in the front boxes, had done me the honour to put me in the group. Johnson sat on the seat directly behind me[949]; and as he could neither see nor hear at such a distance from the stage, he was wrapped up in grave abstraction, and seemed quite a cloud, amidst all the sunshine ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... to question him, but she saw that something lay upon his mind, and she became anxious to hear what it was. Mr. Fane preserved a discreet silence. It was not until after dinner that Rupert seemed to awake to a consciousness of his unwonted silence and abstraction. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... not some abstraction that haunts the marble halls at Washington. Nor is it our vast dominion on which, like England's, the sun never sets. You will find it rather in workshop and store and factory; it is no more nor less than our men. If the capital at Washington ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... boundaries are ignored; determinateness is not part of the essence of dynamical doctrine, it is arrived at by the tacit assumption that no undynamical or hyperdynamical agencies exist: in short, by that process of abstraction which is invariably necessary for simplicity, and indeed for possibility, of methodical human treatment. Everyone engaged in scientific research is aware that if exuberant charwomen, or intelligent but mischievous students (who for the moment ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... mind they walked nearly the whole length of the departure platform, and at the western extremity became aware of a slender figure standing back against a pillar. The figure was plainly sunk into a deep abstraction; he was not aware of their approach, but gazed far abroad over ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... destructible and thou art indestructible. Thou art without beginning and thou art without end. Thou art the first and the foremost of Beings. O foremost of righteous persons, tell me the cause of this (Yoga) abstraction. I solicit thy favour, and am thy devoted worshipper, and bow to thee, bending my head." Thus addressed, the illustrious younger brother of Vasava, recalling his mind, understanding, and the senses to their usual sphere, said these words ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... confusion were all the accounts, both personal and official. Mr. Johnson was hardly restrained by his compassion for the orphan from throwing up the executorship in disgust. Mr. Ness roused himself from his scholarlike abstraction to labour at the examination of books, parchments, and papers, for Ellinor's sake. Sir Frank Holster professed himself only a trustee for ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Heliobas. But I kept this thought to myself. In any case, I resolved to go to Paris. The great desire of my life was to be in perfect health, and I determined to omit no means of obtaining this inestimable blessing. Cellini watched me as I remained standing before him in silent abstraction. ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... of the storm having abated, they sat down to supper, but there was little conversation and a good deal of thoughtful abstraction. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... said Leo, looking after him, "to dwell through aeons in monotonous misery in order that consciousness may be swallowed up at last in some void and formless abstraction called the 'Utter Peace.' I would rather take my share of a bad world and keep my hope of a better. Also I do not think that he knows anything of ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... plunged in the deepest abstraction, and spoke not a word until we were entering the depot at Washington, just as the veil of night was falling over ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... avowed moral purpose. In this respect, as well as in some other peculiarities, it is unlike the drama which stands first in the following sheets. Still, the general character is the same in both: in both we have a mixture of fact and fable, of reality and allegory, of individuality and abstraction, with the addition, in the latter case, of the enforcement of a lesson, for the instruction of those to ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... retires to his own room, and relieves them of his tremendous presence. Mr. Gray, who stands for Paul Jones, is more carefully elaborated, but the result is far from satisfactory. We are so constantly told of his calmness and abstraction, of his sudden starts and bursts of feeling, of his low voice, of his fits of musing, that the aggregate impression is that of affectation and self-consciousness, rather than of a simple, passionate, and heroic nature. Mr. Gray does not seem to us at all like the rash, fiery, and dare-devil ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... of to-day is no mere abstraction—as it was, perhaps, in the days of Brook Farm. It is a mode of action. Men whose view of life is perfectly balanced rarely soil themselves with the dust of battle. The heat necessary to produce social ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... June Lane and the surgeon walked some little distance from the house, and became satisfied that they were under the surveillance of the rebel sergeant and his men. This fact so troubled Lane that Suwanee noticed his abstraction and asked him in the evening what was worrying him. The moonlight fell full on ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... in silent sorrow and abstraction: her long clustering tresses fell in luxuriance over her white and polished neck, almost concealing in their profusion the traits of a countenance ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... always be staring in abstraction at nothing in particular as it passed to and fro on the sidewalk in front of the Cafe des Exiles; one could not often or for long at a time succeed in reading a book held open in one's lap, below the level of the cashier's desk, Mama Therese was too brisk for that; one had to do something with one's ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... took down their two satchels from the overhead rack, and waited, in grim abstraction planning and counterplanning against the machinations in whose wiles they two had become ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... Randerson had done nothing—to Owen's knowledge—to earn Dorgan's enmity; Randerson did not deliberately make enemies. Owen wondered if Dorgan were one of those misguided persons who take offense at a look unknowingly given, or a word, spoken during momentary abstraction. ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... and grew convinced that Alexa was a party to the abstraction of the cup. She had, he said, begun to share in the extravagant notions of a group of pietists whose leader was that detestable fellow, Ingram. Alexa was attached to Dawtie, and Dawtie was one of them. He believed Alexa ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... salient features of his mind. Patriotism conceived as an attachment to personal relations, as the service of one man, the subject, to another man, the King, and not the service of an anonymous person, the functionary, to an abstraction, the State, the republic, this was formerly designated by the word faithful, (feal,) which has disappeared from our vocabulary because it is without meaning ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... was the day of presentation for a certain paper, which you, in a fit of abstraction, no doubt, signed with another name ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... abstraction, my first words were, "I must away." I immediately sat down and wrote the Hofrath that I should travel for fourteen days and submit entirely to him. I easily made an excuse to my parents, and at night I was on my ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... that of anger at the abstraction of his medicines; but in the next instant, recollecting that unless immediate steps were taken, the poor animal must inevitably be poisoned, he rushed on deck, without coat or hat, and knife in hand, to the great surprise and scandal of the officer ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... Martin extremely; and partly on this account, and partly because having been, on several late occasions, found at night in a state of abstraction, bordering on insensibility, upon the high road, he had been threatened with dismissal; and, as some said, partly also because of the difficulty of finding anybody to "treat" him as poor Phil Slaney used to do, he for a time forswore alcohol in all its combinations, ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... speculative principle, can only end in a practical acquaintance with individual objects; the operations of the rational faculties, on the other hand, if allowed to go on without a constant reference of external things, can lead only to empty abstraction and barren ingenuity. Real speculative knowledge demands the combination of the two ingredients—right reason and facts to reason upon. It has been well said, that true knowledge is the interpretation of nature; and therefore it requires both the interpreting ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various |
