"Conception" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to imagine that they should continually be improving themselves, in either body or mind. If they take up a sport, it is because the sport may improve their health. And if the hobby is intellectual it must needs be employed to improve their brain. The fact is that their conception of self-improvement is too narrow. In their restricted sense of the phrase, they possibly don't need improving; they possibly are already improved to the point of being a nuisance to their fellow-creatures; possibly what they need is worsening. In the broad and full sense of the phrase self-improvement, ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... must go together. The day for irrelevant statues, as for wall pictures, is over. As a matter of fact sculpture is always part of an architectural conception. And since churches are all museum stuff, since industry is our business, now, then let us make our places of industry our art—our ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... of whose magnitude no Persian has conception; a conflict in which the sea was tossed and the heavens rent by thunderings of iron monsters. Any one of them would have blown to atoms ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... loudly echoed by all the knights present, who, having been trained in the school of chivalry, have an exalted conception of love, hold all women in high honour, and deeply resent the attempt just made to degrade them. Tannhaeuser, whose once pure and noble nature has been perverted and degraded by the year spent with Venus, cannot ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... This conception has in divers ways so imbedded itself into the musical literature for little children, that all efforts to uproot it have so far been apparently futile. There are, however, very many supervisors of school music, and the number is growing, who have recognized that this treatment of ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... financiers were considering in what degree their action had affected the ratio between silver and gold, or that sharp politicians were wondering how the outbreak in Swat might be made to influence the impending bye-elections. These ignorant tribesmen had no conception of the sensitiveness of modern civilisation, which thrills and quivers in every part of its vast and complex system at ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... concludes the series of "The Influence of Sea Power upon History," as originally framed in the conception of the author. In the previous volumes he has had the inspiring consciousness of regarding his subject as a positive and commanding element in the history of the world. In the War of 1812, also, the effect is real and dread enough; but to his own country, to the United ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... in truth goes to the very root of his idea. Familiarity, akinness, is the basis of attraction and affection. The desire of wisdom, or the love of beauty, is therefore nothing but the yearning of the soul to join itself to what is akin to it. This is the leading conception of the two great mystical dialogues, the Symposium and the Phaedrus. In the former, Socrates, in the words of the stranger prophetess Diotima, traces the path along which the soul must travel, and points out the steps of the ladder to be climbed in ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... long suffering, looking for each day to be my last. I felt that no human power on earth could help me. No language can describe, and God only knows, the agony I suffered. From what I have already written, you may form some faint conception of my physical condition at the end of six years' treatment by the best medical aid I could get in the section where I was living. I also used for some time (with no benefit), "Warner's Safe Cure," and in fact, tried every means that I could hear of, but to no permanent relief. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... considering that very few indeed are those who really believe in a Deity out of such as pretend to do so. It is impossible for an intellectual being to believe firmly in that of which he can give no account, or of which he can form no conception. I hold the Deity, the fancied Deity, at least, of whom with all his attributes such pompous descriptions are set forth to the great terror of old women and the amusement of young children, to be an object of which we form (as appears when we scrutinise into our ideas) no conception ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... those times, pasted inside Jose's wooden chest when he left home for school; later on it was preserved in an album and went with him in all his travels. Afterwards it faced Bougereau's splendid conception of the Christ-mother, as one who had herself thus suffered, consoling another mother grieving over the loss of a son. Many years afterwards Doctor Rizal was charged with having fallen away from ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... held, had been laid down once for all by Aristotle or his commentators; and the duty of the critic was to consider whether the author had infringed or conformed to the established rules, and to pass sentence accordingly. I will not say that the modern critic has abandoned altogether that conception of his duty. He seems to me not infrequently to place himself on the judgment-seat with a touch of his old confidence, and to sentence poor authors with sufficient airs of infallibility. Sometimes, indeed, the reflection ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... whatever to their feet. Jack felt completely bewildered at the noise and fury of the wind. He had thought that after the gale they had passed through south of the Cape, he knew what bad weather was; but this was beyond anything of which he had the slightest conception. ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty
... they really are, on that account,' said Quilp, pressing his arm. 'You'll have no conception of the value of your prize until you draw close to it. ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... God's conception of life is surely greater than these, yet He never gave a definition. Jesus said it is more than meat, that it is worth more than all the world, that it does not consist in abundance of things, that it is eternal, but He nowhere tells us what it is, for He can not. It is ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... productions rise to uncontested supremacy, however imperfectly they were understood when they first appeared in the earlier years of this century; and, though in his later works and in advanced age, force and precision of execution have not accompanied his vivacity of conception, public opinion has gradually and steadily advanced to a more just appreciation of his power. He is the Shelley of English painting—the poet and the painter both alike veiling their own creations in the dazzling splendor of the imagery with which they are surrounded, mastering every ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... But before the audacious conception of this instrument ever entered the imagination of man, before he had ever drawn a musical sound from pipe or string, the chambers where the royal harmonies of his grandest vocal mechanism were to find worthy reception were shaped ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... any thing more upon the great topic of capital? Were the nation now in its sober senses, the facts which we have stated, and for the accuracy of which we pledge ourselves, would surely be enough to awaken it to a true conception of the vortex into which it is plunging. But as every man will no doubt think—with the ordinary self-delusion of our kind—that the scheme in which he is individually embarked is an exception from the common ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... applause of living and deathless masters sanctioning the enthusiasm of the popular crowd, what struck me more than the precision of drawing, for which the artist has been always renowned, and the just, though gorgeous affluence of colour which he has more recently acquired, was the profound depth of conception, out of which this great work had so elaborately arisen. That monk, with his scowl towards the printer and his back on the Bible over which his form casts a shadow—the whole transition between the medieval ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... laugh just then. He had discovered some larger chests, containing some large gold candlesticks, which the captain informed them, were to ornament the church of our Lady of the Conception, in Madrid. There were just three of them, enormous and massive articles, not less than five feet high, besides, a quantity of rich plate of gold and silver. Morton sent back Evans to make a report to the captain. Lord Claymore heard ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... all conception wonderful. I stood at the east end of Bourke Street, not a year ago, looking at the black swarming masses, which thronged the broad thoroughfare below. All the town lay at my feet, and the sun was going down beyond the distant ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... Of the first rank are those gathered not far from the confines of the mediaeval Isle of France. They too, are best representative of the true Gothic spirit, while the southernmost examples, those of Dijon and Besancon, are of manifest Romanesque or Byzantine conception. Each, too, is somewhat reminiscent of the early German manner of building, the latter in respect to the double apse, which is often found across the Rhine, but seldom seen in France. The most northerly of all is at St. Omer, where are the somewhat battered remains of a satisfactory ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... possibly have been prejudiced, from the fact that Mrs Morley, though very kind and motherly to all the young officers, had found it necessary to encourage him less than the rest. Ensign Holt, and indeed most of his brother officers, had no conception of the principles which guided the Misses Morley or their parents. They looked upon their colonel as not a bad old fellow, though rather slow; but somehow or other he managed to keep his regiment in very good order, and all the men loved him, and looked up to him as to a father. It was his ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... the full conception of the fact was sudden, for the influence had been gradually stealing over him—he felt a terrible coldness, a coldness more piercing than any he had before experienced even in Russia; and with the coldness there came ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... men have some vague flitting ideas of the general perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur. One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home, however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you suppose that that poor ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... the type itself is original. Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving are distinctly the pioneers in the production of the modern short story, and neither has been surpassed on his own ground; but Poe has been vastly the greater influence in foreign countries, especially in France. Poe formed a new conception of the short story, one which Professor Brander Matthews[1] has treated formally and explicitly as a distinct literary form, different from the story that is merely short. Without calling it a distinct form, Poe implied the idea in a review of ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... designated by some other name. It should also be observed that the forms of religion were constantly undergoing changes of greater or less importance. Nor must we lose sight of the fact that different nations embodied the same idea under different terms. The conception of the phlegmatic Norseman would be different from that of the imaginative Oriental, and the language of the refined Greek would be far other than that of the rude American savage. But yet the same truth may be found to underlie all, the outward ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... priests have their rattles out of their hands. You hear them calling from the house-tops, and the beat of bare feet on the dancing places. But the summer after Father Letrado built his chapel of the Immaculate Virgin at Halona and the chapel and parish house of the Immaculate Conception at Hawikuh, he set his face against the Rain Dance, and especially against the Priests of the Rain. Witchcraft and sorcery he called it, and in Zuni to be accused of ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... sight; but colder judgments pronounced Ronald's initiatory achievement a pledge of power, and all the more decisive because the execution of the youthful hand obviously had not kept pace with the strong conception of the fervid brain. ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... woke up to the day's work. A tall pajama-clad man spied me and was the first to come over. He was a very serious-looking gentleman and with his full-bearded face looked not unlike the artist's conception of the Saviour. He bade me welcome in the usual generous terms of the Brazilians and invited me into the house, where I again met Coronel da Silva. This first-mentioned grave-looking man was Mr. da Marinha. The kindness with which he welcomed me was most grateful; ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... small occasional services, whether volunteered or asked for by others, should never be rewarded. Only readiness to serve, without payment, develops the joy of generosity. When the child wants to give away something, people should not make a presence of receiving it. This produces the false conception in his mind that the pleasure of being generous can be had for nothing. At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experiences of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses. This is what ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... beginning of all things is found in the watery abyss. Two abysmal powers (Tiamat and Apsu), represented as female and male, mingle their waters, and from them proceed the gods. The list of deities (as in the Greek cosmogony) seems to represent several dynasties, a conception which may embody the belief in the gradual organization of the world. After two less-known gods, called Lahmu and Lahamu, come the more familiar figures of later Babylonian writing, Anu and Ea. At this point the list unfortunately ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... likewise, you will find words of exactly the same kind, which show that the men who wrote them had no clear conception, if any conception at all, ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the Conception district of Panay saves life, and San Pascual Bailon cures barrenness. A Manila milkman who was punished for selling watered milk expressed surprise at the complaints of his customers, because no wrong had been committed, inasmuch as he had used nothing but holy water, which was far superior ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... character of the Indian all look alike. The mind is confused amid a riotous and fantastic display of colours. The fact is that the minor details of Indian dress are an index to Indian character and often tell the story of his position in the tribe, and surely tell the story of his individual conception of the life here, and what he hopes for in the life hereafter, and like the laurel wreath on the brow of the Grecian runner, they spell out for us his exploits and achievements. To the white man all these decorations are construed as a few silly ornaments, the indulgence of ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... greatly blaming herself for having left me too long in that ignorant state, began to give me religious instruction. It was too early, since at that age it was not possible for me to rise to the conception of an immaterial world. That power, I imagine, comes later to the normal child at the age of ten or twelve. To tell him when he is five or six or seven that God is in all places at once and sees all things, only produces the idea of a wonderfully active and quick- sighted person, with ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... key-idea occurred to me than the basic conception underlying all these rows of twigs and bugs suddenly flashed into clear meaning before me. The simplicity of it ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... pantheism; but the Oriental idea may serve to render it more comprehensive. The ideas of divine Mother and divine Creator may be studied in a thousand forms; I am now referring rather to the sentiment, to the feeling, than to the philosophical conception. ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... closed, and the sweet mouth slightly parted in a dreamily serious smile. The right forefinger was laid lightly on the lips, as though suggesting silence; and in the left hand was loosely clasped a bunch of poppies. That was all. But the poetry and force of the whole conception as carried out in the ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... every action performed by an individual would contribute to individuality; and, conversely, every action performed by the state, which conceivably could be left to individuals, would diminish individuality. Such a conception derives from the early nineteenth century principles of an essential opposition between the state and the individual; and it is a deduction from the common conception of democracy as nothing but a finished political organization in which the popular will prevails. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... these, was the sense that church life was a means to an end, not an end in itself, and that that end was the building up of a true and noble Christian life in all its different phases. Surely no higher conception of a church's sphere can be found, and to this I believe to be due more than to any other one thing the ...
— Sixty years with Plymouth Church • Stephen M. Griswold
... state than any other, more hopefully! But would they be admitted there? Where then shall they go? Let those who can, answer these questions. In view of them, and such like, the scheme of colonization rises in magnificence and grandeur beyond conception. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... hopes, and fears of these maritime townships have been worthily made vocal by Dr. George Macdonald. He has done this with a grace and an artistic conception that raise his stories to a very high rank in pure literature. I am afraid Macdonald is not much read by the present generation: his stories are too long, too philosophical, perhaps too poetical, for the taste of to-day. Every book of his is saturated ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... corresponding to the English term, "My country." In ancient times, this could only mean, "My clan-territory." But with the passing away of the clans the old word has taken on a new significance. The new word, "ai-koku-shin," refers not to love of clan, but to love of the whole nation. The conception of national unity has at last seized upon the national mind and heart, and is giving the people an enthusiasm for the nation, regardless of the parts, which they never before knew. Japanese patriotism ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... served to magnify the conception of the incredible vastness of that deposit. The skirts of the Antarctic Continent had proved to be rich in minerals wherever the rocks could find a place to penetrate through the gigantic burden of ice, and the principal ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... initiative. It forms incomparably the largest performance of our period in poetry. Victor Hugo's Legende des Siecles alone might be named with it for largeness, and even that with much less of a new starting-point in conception and treatment. Whitman breaks with all precedent. To what he himself perceives and knows he has a personal relation of the intensest kind: to anything in the way of prescription, no relation at all. But he is saved from isolation by the depth of his Americanism; with the movement of his predominant ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... was thrown up against the pirates of the Amazon, some idea can be gained as to the importance of the official establishments of the city. Of religious buildings it would be difficult to find more than two, the small Church of the Conception and the Chapel of Notre Dame des Remedes, built on a knoll which overlooks the town. These are very few for a town of Spanish origin, though to them should perhaps be added the Carmelite Convent, burned down in 1850, of which only the ruins remain. The population ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... or conquest of foreign territory, the Government means-conformably to the conception of democratic rights in general, and the rights of the working-class in particular-all union to a great and strong State of a small or weak nationality, without the voluntary, clear and precise expression of its consent and desire; whatever be the moment when such ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... if not approved, at least tolerated in the past which are not in accord with the ethical conception ...
— The New York Stock Exchange and Public Opinion • Otto Hermann Kahn
... kindled new aspirations within his breast. Life must have meant more to him from that hour. He had glimpses of possibilities he had never dreamed of before. It is always so when Jesus truly comes into any one's life. A new conception of character dawns on the soul, a new ideal, a revelation which changes all thoughts of living. The friendship ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... noble. When he makes the old senators speak, we recognise men with the souls of kings. Manlius regards the claim of the Latins for equal rights as an outrage and a sacrilege against Capitoline Jupiter, with a truly Roman arrogance which would be grotesque were it not so grand. [49] The familiar conception we form in childhood of the great Roman worthies, where it does not come from Plutarch, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... to form a general conception of the aspect which under such economic conditions the social relations must have assumed; but to follow out in detail the increase of luxury, of prices, of fastidiousness and frivolity is neither pleasant nor instructive. Extravagance and sensuous enjoyment formed ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... regularly moved particles of mass; all that takes place mechanical movement, viz., the combination, separation, dislocation, oscillation of bodies and corpuscles; mathematics the organon of natural science! Into this circle of modern scientific categories are articulated, further, Galileo's new conception of motion and the conception of atoms, which, previously employed by physicists, as Daniel Sennert (1619) and others, is now brought into general acceptance by Gassendi, while the four elements ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... imperial visit he meant to assert any supremacy over England. Sigismund assured them he did not, and was allowed to land. We may look to this English parade of independence as our last reminder of the old mediaeval conception of the Emperor as being at least in theory the overlord of the whole ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... here nothing of that "divinity which doth hedge a king." In these volumes Napoleon appears as a man, a very great man, still a mere man, not, a demigod. Their perusal will doubtless lead to a truer conception of his character, as manifested both in his good and in his evil traits. The former were natural to him; the latter were often produced by the exceptional circumstances which surrounded him, and the extraordinary temptations to which he ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... enunciated their words more distinctly than they do, it would be quite impossible to follow the difficult text on first hearing. Beyond this, however, very little preparation is necessary; especially the study of lists of Leitmotive should be avoided, since they give a totally wrong conception of the music. We cannot study an edifice by looking at the bricks of which it is built. Lectures with musical illustrations, provided they are really well done, by a competent pianist, are valuable, and it is also of use to study selected scenes ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... does not diminish, but spreads like a moving cloud over other and new fields; and whoever has called that a golden period, when difference of opinions, or, as some are accustomed to express it, the disputes of the learned, will be finished, has as imperfect a conception of the wants of science, and of its continued advancement, as a person who expects that the same opinions in geognosy, chemistry, or physiology, will be maintained ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... which it would be impossible for Stella to quench. She knew that Stella had seen in Penloe a young man greatly beyond her expectations; even beyond her ideal. Penloe lived in a world that Stella had only just a faint conception of. It was his intellect, his exceptionally fine personality, manifested in such a fine, manly form she admired. But, above all, Stella could see that he had emptied himself of all save love. And that was so broad, so deep, so far reaching, so universal in its sympathies, that ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... obscurities through occult qualities, could maintain a hypothesis, beside which occult qualities are commonplace. What does he understand, I ask, by the union of the mind and the body? What clear and distinct conception has he got of thought in most intimate union with a certain particle of extended matter? Truly I should like him to explain this union through its proximate cause. What clear and distinct conception has he got of thought in most ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... Since according to the Philosopher (Peri Herm. i), words are signs of ideas, and ideas the similitude of things, it is evident that words relate to the meaning of things signified through the medium of the intellectual conception. It follows therefore that we can give a name to anything in as far as we can understand it. Now it was shown above (Q. 12, AA. 11, 12) that in this life we cannot see the essence of God; but we know God from creatures as their principle, and also by way of excellence and remotion. In ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... were bound to the southward, by the order of his Britannic majesty, to observe a transit of the planet Venus over the Sun, an astronomical phenomenon of great importance to navigation, he could form no other conception of the matter, than that it was the passing of the North ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... "You have no conception," said he at length, "of the torment that some of your careless words cause. You do not know what you do, or what you say. There is something that I can not tell, whatever be the price of silence—something that ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... Sir Louis's favour that he had probably no idea whatever of the estimation in which such young ladies as Mary Thorne are held by those who are nearest and dearest to them. He had no sort of conception that she was regarded by her uncle as an inestimable treasure, almost too precious to be rendered up to the arms of any man; and infinitely beyond any price in silver and gold, baronets' incomes ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... present, small was the amount of time really abstracted from that which he had disposable for general purposes; amongst which purposes ranked foremost his literary pursuits. And, however much he transcended the prevailing conception of his order, as sketched by satiric and often ignorant novelists, he might be regarded, in all that concerned the liberalization of his views, as pretty fairly representing that order. Thus, through every real ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... he, "exalted objects of divine solicitude. Hopeless looks and dwarfish lives are fearful protests against the pitiless avarice of the faithless rich. This or that conception of the redemptive economy, or concerning the personnel of its central figure, may be tolerated, but there can be no hopeful sign for him who actively or passively oppresses God's ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... precisely in so far as he rejects the simplifying and reducing process of the average man who at an early age puts Life away into some snug conception of his mind and race. This one turns the key. He has released his will and love from the vast Ceremonial of wonder, from the deep Poem of Being, into some particular detail of life wherein he hopes to achieve comfort or at least shun pain. Not so, the artist. In the moment ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... architectural detail, in which he idealised all the gods of Olympus. Each fair young goddess, each strong and perfect god, stood in its particular niche and indicated its penchant by a tripod, a peacock, an apple or a caduceus, as clue to the proper name. Such airy beauty, such dainty conception, makes of the gods rulers of aesthetics, if not of fate. This series of Mantegna was the inspiration two centuries later of the Triumphs of the Gods, and similar hangings of the ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... before the dissolution of his army, and cross a wide and deep river full of ice, in the dead of winter, and strike, like the hammer of Thor, upon his unwary foe, rudely disturbing his complacent dreams, was a conception of exceeding brilliancy, and it at once stamped Washington as a military genius of the first order. And with such an army to make such an attempt! Said one of the officers of the period in his memoirs: ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Louise's identity was but a mild shock to Lawford after all. His preconceived prejudice against the ordinary feminine member of "The Profession" had, during his intercourse with Cap'n Abe's niece, been lulled to sleep. Miss Louder and Miss Noyes more nearly embodied his conception of actresses—nice enough young women, perhaps, but entirely ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... than candor, that the Aztecs, and all the other people found in the country, were "savages" not greatly different from the wild Indians farther north, while he admits the significance and great antiquity of these ruins. His conception of their antiquity is somewhat extreme, for he says they must have existed "for thousands of years" when the Spaniards arrived. If he had maintained that civilized communities were there "thousands of years" ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... complacently congratulated the country that the slavery question had been settled peacefully and forever by the compromise measures of 1850. He little knew how ineffective were those compromises; he never dreamed that it was a question that no compromise could settle permanently, and probably had no conception of the new force that was to be given to it during his own term of office. Stephen A. Douglas, an acknowledged aspirant to the Presidency, being Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, introduced and carried through Congress a measure called the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which, in providing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... of my personality as a thing apart from the phenomena of my life. When I try to form such a conception I discover that, as Coleridge would have said, I only hypostatise a word, and it alters nothing if, with Fichte, I suppose the universe to be nothing but a manifestation of my personality. I am neither more nor less eternal than I ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... dehumanized, disintegrated, decomposed, and diabolized in passing through the minds of the half-civilized banditti who have peopled and unpeopled the world for some scores of generations, that it has become a mere algebraic x, and has no fixed value whatever as a human conception. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... The conception of James Quincy Holden was a most carefully-planned parenthood. It was not accomplished without love or passion. Love had come quietly, locking them together physically as they had been bonded intellectually. ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... ingredient. Used pure or with white lead it was eligible in oil, in which it worked and dried well. It was also employed in enamel painting as it vitrified without change. In this state it was called Giallolino di fornace, and was introduced as a pigment for artists, under the erroneous conception that vitrification gives permanence to colours, when in truth it only increases the difficulty of levigation, and injures their texture for working. We have spoken of Naples yellow in the past tense, because the pigment now sold as such is generally, or ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... supposed that the right-hand figure was erected by Sapor II., and the other afterwards added by Sapor III.; but the unity of the whole sculpture, and its inclusion under a single arch, seem to indicate that it was set up by a single sovereign, and was the fruit of a single conception. If this be so, we must necessarily ascribe it to the later of the two monarchs commemorated, i.e. to Sapor III., who must be supposed to have possessed more than usual filial piety, since the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... continuously, on him. He did not know very much about Greatorex, after all, and he could not be sure that his man would turn up entirely sober. He was unaware of Greatorex's capacity for substituting one intoxication for another. He had no conception of what the smell of that lighted and decorated room meant for this man who lived so simply and profoundly by his senses and his soul. It was interfused and tangled with Greatorex's sublimest feelings. It was the draw-net of submerged memories, of secret, unsuspected passions. ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... such absurd tenets, which he hath confuted. Hierome, Austin, and other Fathers of the church, hold that the soul is immortal, created of nothing, and so infused into the child or embryo in his mother's womb, six months after the [1010]conception; not as those of brutes, which are ex traduce, and dying with them vanish into nothing. To whose divine treatises, and to the Scriptures themselves, I rejourn all such atheistical spirits, as Tully did ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... treated that mysterious subject mystically: it endeavored to illustrate what it could not explain; to excite an appropriate feeling, if it could not develop an adequate idea; and to make the image a mere subordinate conveyance for the conception, which itself never ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... The manner of the orator—downcast, as with the inward oppression of the same solemnity that he, in speaking, cast like a spell on the audience—indefinitely heightened the magical power of the awful conception excited. Not Bourdaloue himself, with that preternatural skill of his to probe the conscience of man to its innermost secret, could have exceeded the heart-searching rigor with which, in the earlier part of the discourse, Massillon had put to the rack the quivering consciences of his hearers. The ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... A lyric conception—my friend, the Poet, said—hits me like a bullet in the forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned as white as death. Then comes a creeping as of centipedes running down the spine,— then a gasp and a great jump of the heart,—then a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... inimitable charm and delicate humor. It is "the story the robins tell as they huddle beneath the holly on the Eve of Christmas"—the sensation created by the birth of the first baby, among the animals on earth, the angels in heaven, and even in the mind of the surprised Almighty Himself. The conception of the Deity is a primitive one, as required by the nature of the tale, and the story should be read ...
— Christmas Outside of Eden • Coningsby Dawson
... moulds them to important events, building the interesting and the sublime on the simple and the ordinary. I have not these gifts, but I have the love for the gifts, the sense of their existence in others, and a sort of conception of the time and the place in which they should be employed; and often, as I pass along, I select groups and note incidents that with the child of genius would be seed for a golden harvest. And scenes, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... open, and the water would rise and fall, full of rapid swirls and eddies, though far above the entrance of these tunnels. Through the man hole in the discharge culvert the issuance from the pipes could be seen, and its volume was beyond conception. It flowed rapidly through the culvert, and its outfall was a solid prism of water, the full size of the tunnel, projecting ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... intensity of such a conviction, I am here to assert that a Christianity which is not based upon the conviction of sin is an impotent Christianity, and will be of very little use to the men who profess it, and will have no power to propagate itself in the world. Everything in our conception of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and of His work for us depends upon what we think about this primary fact of man's condition, that he is a sinful man. The root of all heresy lies there. Every error that has led away men from Jesus Christ and His Cross may be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... He sent his manuscript to the press with hardly any alteration, and took for his motto, Prolem sine matre creatam;[1] in allusion to the originality of his conception, and the total want of any previous model on which it had been formed. The work appeared in the month of July 1748; and its success, so far as the sale went, was prodigious. Before two years had elapsed, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... "But," "if," "unless," "I am mistaken," and "it may be so," were words and phrases excluded from the province where he held sway. Trained to great dexterity in artificial methods, accurate, ready, with entire command of his resources, he had no belief in minds that listen, wait, and receive. He had no conception of the subtle and indirect motions of imagination and feeling. His influence on me was great, and opposed to the natural unfolding of my character, which was fervent, of strong grasp, and disposed to infatuation, and ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Lady Lugard's Tropical Dependency. He next takes up the Negro in the Spanish exploration but has little or nothing to say about the Negroes in connection with other explorers. His treatment of the development of the slave trade and of the introduction of slavery shows a slightly improved conception of his task. In his discussion of the Negroes in the colonies, into which he works servitude and slavery, the Indian, the mulatto, the free Negro, and efforts for social betterment, he presents a veritable hodgepodge. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... representatives of the Dominion Parliaments, who have been visiting England, says quietly—"the growth of our Navy, since the outbreak of war, which has gone on, and which at this moment is still going on, is something of which I do not believe the general public has the slightest conception." ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "Wells Report" in October, 1906, recommended cordial co-operation with the Labour Party, including the running of candidates for Parliament, and it "warmly endorsed the conception of Socialists whenever possible,... standing as Socialists in Municipal and Parliamentary elections." In January, 1908, a scheme for effecting this was adopted by the Society. In May, 1908, Mr. Wells, writing to "Fabian News," said ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... not designed as a biography, but is rather a portrait. And, to speak more carefully still, it is not so much this, as my conception of what a portrait of Hawthorne should be. For I cannot write with the authority of one who had known him and had been formally intrusted with the task of describing his life. On the other hand, I do not enter upon this attempt as a mere literary performance, but have been assisted ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... happiest, a public is the proper sphere of virtue and talent, so clear, superior, and decided as yours. I say this with the more confidence, as I have really, from your letter, obtained a better conception of the queen's case, than from all that I have been able to read and hear upon the subject in London. The rule you lay down is excellent. Public safety is certainly the only principle which can justify mankind ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... architectural ruins of enormous massiveness and strength. But they were some ten miles distant, and through the highly rarefied atmosphere that intervened it was impossible to obtain any very clear conception of their character, except that they were undoubtedly of human origin and of quite unexpected extent. One thing, however, was certain, in the light of Menzies' story, as recounted to them by his and their friend Mitchell, ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... had never been aware before that the Civil War in America was not printed matter but a fact only about ten years old. Of course. He was a South Carolinian gentleman. I was a little ashamed of my want of tact. Meantime, looking like the conventional conception of a fashionable reveller, with his opera-hat pushed off his forehead, Captain Blunt was having some slight difficulty with his latch-key; for the house before which we had stopped was not one of those many-storied houses that made up the greater ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... illustrations from the pencil of Capt. Eastman, a gentleman of the army of the United States, and has been received by Congress and the diurnal and periodical press with decided approbation. It is a work which is national in its conception and manner of execution; and, if carried out according to the plan exhibited, will do ample justice, at once to the Indian tribes, their history, condition, and destiny, and to the character of the government as connected with them. We have been reproached by foreign pens for our treatment of ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... "I'm afraid my conception of a good time," Davenant smiled, "might be more feasible without the cash than with it. After all, money would be a doubtful blessing to a bee if it took away the task of going out to ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... more. This is—what it pretends to be a joint production, in the conception of the story, the exposition of the characters, and in its literal composition. There is scarcely a chapter that does not bear the marks of the two writers of the book. S. L. C. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... creeks, which everywhere intersect the country: beside, their prows afford more protection from surprise, and they conceive their town as safer by being surrounded by a jungle and situated in a swamp; nor have they any conception beyond water-carriage. ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... most probably the visible sky with its sun, moon, and stars, its aurora-lights, its thunders and its lightnings. The heavens themselves were thought divine. Then a personal deity of the heavens, coupled with the name of his abode, was the next conception; finally this sky-god was chosen to represent the supreme Ruler. To the sky, the sky-god, and the supreme God, the term ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... admit that I have bestowed no little trouble upon this matter in order to obtain a clear conception of it. One may reasonably be amazed at the numerous ideas and conjectures which authors have recorded on the subject, especially when they give a decision respecting the fiery phenomenon; and this very matter was of the greatest importance to me. I perceived ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... Achilles was not merely sulking in his tent, as some of his friends seem to have supposed. An epic in a series of epic idylls cannot be dashed off like a romantic novel in rhyme; and Tennyson's method was always one of waiting for maturity of conception and execution. ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... like to know all about it. It is not to my mind that a cultivated man should be quite thrown out by any topic of conversation, or that there should be any form of human endeavour or accomplishment which he has no conception of. ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... in running over the mill books. Perhaps it politely anticipates what is expected! So much the better, say, for you expect what all men give—love and devotion. You would not know a man who could not love you. Your little world is a circle of possibilities. Let me explain. Each lover is a possible conception of life placed at a slightly different angle from his predecessor or successor. Within this circle you have turned and turned, until your head is a bit weary. But I stand outside and observe the whirligig. Shall I ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... are dumb, so they were not permitted to open their mouths. For that matter they did not wish to be allowed to ask any questions, or to discuss anything. They would not have been able to. They sat there and listened to what was said, but they had but a very hazy conception of what it was ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... of the United States since the foundation of the Government to cultivate relations of peace and amity with all the nations of the world, and this accords with my conception of our duty now. We have cherished the policy of non-interference with affairs of foreign governments wisely inaugurated by Washington, keeping ourselves free from entanglement, either as allies or foes, content to leave undisturbed with them the settlement of their own domestic concerns. ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... Here there is a real basis of geographical fact; of which fable has only taken advantage, without creating it. The Uttara Kurus were formerly quite independent of the mythical system of dvipas, though they were included in it at an early date." Again the same writer says at p. 65: "That the conception of the Uttara Kurus is based upon an actual country and not on mere invention, is proved (1) by the way in which they are mentioned in the Vedas; (2) by the existence of Uttara Kuru in historical times as a real country; and (3) by the way in which the legend makes mention of that ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... is the combustion theory, which, though bearing the seal of ages, is obnoxious both to common and philosophic reasoning. This theory presupposes a consumption of material beyond all conception, and the supply of which has been no small tax upon the scientific imagination. The source of this supply has been claimed to be the subsidence of useless worlds, and of asteroids, and meteors, showered down upon its surface. Estimates have been carefully ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... would be a pleasant change after the day's duties. Allow me to disillusion you. If, years ago, I had ever conceived a glorious future in which my autograph might be of value to the more promiscuous collectors, that conception has now been shattered. Four years in the Army has absolutely spoilt the market. Even were I revered in the year 2000 A.D. as Shakespeare is revered now, my half-million autographs, scattered so lavishly on charge-sheets, passes, chits, requisitions, ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne |
