"First-hand" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... last beamed upon him, he laid up his lugger, wound up his affairs, and hurried off to Sydney, secretly, to dispose of his prize first-hand. An expert weighed the treasure, scrutinised it shrewdly through a microscope, and handed it back with a casual remark that it was a pretty curio, but that its market value was about half a crown. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... of its existence, that is to say, 1884, the Committee on Haunted Houses of the S. P. R. had selected and made an analysis of some sixty-five cases out of hundreds submitted to it, twenty-eight of which rested upon first-hand and superior evidence.[1] It is worthy of remark, in the first place, that these authentic narratives bear no relation whatever to the legendary and sensational ghost-stories that still linger in many English and American magazines, especially in the ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... get much of a chance to think straight at any time. I guess if he did, the whole scheme would fall to pieces. That's why I say civilized man does not only not think, but perhaps can't think. His brains are not trained to it. Give the average man something with real, straight, original, first-hand thought in it, and he's simply unable to tackle it. His brain has not been cultivated. He wilts mentally. It's like putting the work of a man on a boy. Catch what I mean? Now a savage gets more of a chance. It was that way with ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... all parts of the United States, and the number of earnest requests for a History of American Literature on the same plan, have led to the writing of this book. It has not appeared sooner because the author has followed his rule of making a careful first-hand study, not only of all the matter discussed, but also of a far greater amount, which, although it must be omitted from a condensed textbook, is, nevertheless, necessary as a background for ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... fertile districts near the sea have made a greater advance towards civilisation than the tribes of the desert interior. This is the view of men who have studied the Australian savages most deeply at first hand, and, so far as I can judge of the matter without any such first-hand acquaintance, I entirely agree with their opinion. I have given my reasons elsewhere and shall not repeat them here. All that I wish to impress on you now is that in aboriginal Australia a movement of social ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... Its Provinces, is much the best. Trout, The Railways of Canada (1871), and the article by T. C. Keefer in Eighty Years' Progress of British North America (1863), are useful for the early period, but are scarce. There is, however, a wealth of first-hand material—pamphlets, travellers' notes, company reports, Hansard debates, committee inquiries, and departmental returns. The largest collections of such material are to be found in the Parliamentary Library, Ottawa, the Library of the Department of Railways ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... trenches since January. There was a time when this sector of the line was regarded as a Vale of Rest. Bishops were conducted round with impunity. Members of Parliament came out for the week-end, and returned to their constituents with first-hand information about the horrors of war. Foreign journalists, and sight-seeing parties of munition-workers, picnicked in Bunghole Wood. In the village behind the line, if a chance shell removed tiles from the roof of a house, the ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... herewith, in neutralized and collapsed state, for the manufacture of simulacra thereof. One regrets to say that they number three thousand eight hundred forty-six, comprising all aboriginals within the quarantined area who had first-hand knowledge of the anachronisms caused by Foraminifera's importation of contemporary ...
— The Day of the Boomer Dukes • Frederik Pohl
... had not sunk into his consciousness that his unyouthful knowledge of life in the raw would be the means of success in literature; therefore he discoursed of imaginary things and persons, lords and ladies, days of chivalry and what not—anything but out of his priceless first-hand lore. At the same time, however, he kept a small diary which, in the days when he had found himself, helped in visualizing his tramp life, ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... of fuel for the entire year was reduced to "30 cords of maple wood and 2 chaldrons of coal." Frequently appeals were made to the Home Government for assistance, but the authorities disagreed in their opinions on the actual state of the College. They had little first-hand knowledge of the facts, and their attitude was one of indifference or at least delay. Lord Stanley wrote from the Colonial Office: "I cannot but regret that the circumstances of this Institution should have hitherto ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... barbarous ling ch'ih, 'lingering death' or 'slicing to pieces,' invented about A.D. 1000 and abolished in 1905, was inflicted for high treason, parricide, on women who killed their husbands, and murderers of three persons of one family. In fact, until some first-hand knowledge of Western systems and procedure was obtained, the vindictive as opposed to the reformatory idea of punishments continued to obtain in China down to quite recent years, and has not yet entirely disappeared. Though the crueller forms of punishment ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... villages, with their straw-thatched, highly decorated houses, dwell barbarous brown men practising customs so incredibly eerie and fantastic that a sober narration of them is more likely than not to be greeted with a shrug of amused disbelief. One who has no first-hand knowledge of the Sumatran tribes finds it difficult to accept at their face value the accounts of the customs practised by the Bataks of Tapanuli, for example, who, when their relatives become too old and infirm to be of further use, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... to speak English. Bela's first-hand observations of the great white race had been limited to half a score of individuals—priests, policemen, ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... wholesale national abuse has disarmed us from resenting some equally immoderate criticism of our own character and morals. To Russia also we can bear no grudge, for we know that there is no real public opinion in that country, and that their press has no means for forming first-hand conclusions. Besides, in this case also there is a certain secular enmity which may account for ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ease, which leads the man who possesses it into fields where he has no sure footing because he has no first-hand knowledge, and therefore no real power; and against this tendency, so prevalent in this country, the need of concentration must continually be urged. The great majority of men lack the abounding vitality which must find a variety of channels ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... lifelong adherence to a metre—the heroic couplet—with which this same poetic diction was most closely bound up. He did not always escape the effects of this contagion, but in the main he was delivered from it by what I have called a first-hand association with man and nature. He was ever describing what he had seen and studied with his own eyes, and the vocabulary of the bards who had for generations borrowed it from one another failed to supply him with the words he needed. The very limitations of the first five-and-twenty years of his ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... concerned, almost every one now can paint as well as is in the least desirable. The same mutatis mutandis holds good with writing as with painting. We want less word-painting and fine phrases, and more observation at first-hand. Let us have a periodical illustrated by people who cannot draw, and written by people who cannot write (perhaps, however, after all, we have some), but who look and think for themselves, and express themselves just as they please,—and this we certainly have ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... Histoire Gnrale, and the well-known works of Luchaire, Voigt, Hefele, Bezold, Janssen, Levasseur, Creighton, Pastor. In some cases, as in the opening of the Renaissance, the Lutheran Revolt, and the French Revolution, I have been able to form my opinions to some extent from first-hand material. ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... Gildas, probably the Historia Brittonum, a Passion of St. Alban, and the Life of Germanus of Auxerre by Constantius"; while he refers to lives of St. Fursa, St. Ethelburg, and to Adamnan's work on the Holy Places. Cf. Sandys, i. 468; Camb. Lit., i. 80-81. Bede also got first-hand knowledge: the Lindisfarne records provided him with material on Cuthbert; information came to him from Canterbury about Southern affairs and from Lastingham about Mercian affairs. Nothelm got material from the archives at ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... to me," Passarelli said tightly. "You forget that I've had first-hand experience with that little lady. She gave me the business right in my courtroom. I'm no credulous egghead like Lindstrom. I know the difference between sleight of hand and an hallucination. She made me see just what ...
— Modus Vivendi • Gordon Randall Garrett
... find such authorities as Dr. L. O. Howard, the United States Entomologist, Professor Le Conte, Mr. Charles Drury, of Cincinnati, and others, including a mass of medical witnesses, declaring from first-hand observation that the kissing-bug bite causes much swelling and severe pain. Le Conte, indeed, compares the effect to snake bite, and states that people are seriously affected for a week. A case is recorded from Holland, South Carolina, where there ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... sight of placer gold. Quartz mining has never had the slightest attraction for me, but to see the gold washed out of the sand, to see it appear bright and shining in the black sand in the bottom of the pan, is really worth while. It is first-hand contact with Nature's ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... popular literature of the day. Naturally Mr Kipling made full use of his opportunity. He did not write of India because India was essential to his genius, but because he was shrewd enough to realise that nothing could better serve the purpose of a young author than to exploit his first-hand acquisition of an inexhaustible store of fresh and excellent material. India was annexed by Mr Kipling at twenty-two for his own literary purposes. He was not born to interpret India, nor does he throw his literary ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... education throughout the land; it is the almost inevitable incident of educational growth, and leaves the deeper question of the legitimate demand for the higher training of Negroes untouched. And this latter question can be settled in but one way,—by a first-hand study of the facts. If we leave out of view all institutions which have not actually graduated students from a course higher than that of a New England high school, even though they be called colleges; if then we take the thirty-four remaining institutions, we may clear up many misapprehensions ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... early to a printer—which trade he pursued with diligence and profit for the rest of his life in London and its immediate neighbourhood. After his literary success, he gathered round him a circle of ladies and gentlemen interested in literature: but he never had any first-hand acquaintance with general society of the "gentle" kind, much less with that of the upper classes. Fielding (1707-1754), on the contrary, was a member (though only as the son of a younger son of a younger son) of a family of great antiquity ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... architecture; with the theory of, and if possible with some practice in, attack and defence in sieges and storms, winter campaigns and long drawn- out wars. And then, impossible as it sounds and is, along with all that we would need to have a really profound, practical, and at first-hand acquaintance with the anatomy of the human subject, and especially with cardiac anatomy, as well as with all the conditions, diseases, regimen and discipline of the corrupt heart of man. And then it is enough to terrify any one to open this book or to enter this church when he is told that ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... which promises to be less onerous to me and more satisfactory to the reader. This is nothing less than to make use of the various manuscripts which I have by me bearing upon the subject, and to add to them the first-hand evidence contributed by those who had the best opportunities of knowing Major-General ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Contains a graphic, first-hand account of Italy's entrance into the war, as well as a remarkable analysis of the larger aspects of the struggle. ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... of the social elevation of their sex, it appears to the writer that Anglo-Indian ladies fall far short of what they might do. A fair number do interest themselves in their Indian sisters through the lady missionaries and lady doctors, but first-hand knowledge of the lives of Indian women is very rare indeed. Our late revered Queen's interest in India and in the womanhood of India is well known, but her feeling about the duty of Anglo-Indian ladies I have never seen recorded. Speaking at Balmoral to an Indian Christian ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... to any phase of art without an opportunity of comparison, such as the exposition affords. The retrospective aspects of the exhibition are absorbingly interesting, not so much for the presentation of any eminently great works of art as for the splendid chance for first-hand comparison of different periods. Painting is relatively so new an art that the earliest paintings we know of do not differ materially in a technical sense from our present-day work. Archaeology has disinterred various badly preserved and unpresentable relics of old arts such as sculpture and ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... introductory address, insisted that the divided state of public opinion on all these matters was a scandal to science,—absolute disdain on a priori grounds characterizing what may be called professional opinion, while indiscriminate credulity was too often found among those who pretended to have a first-hand ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... chapter and the next did not fall under my own observation. I derived my knowledge of them from various sources, chiefly from conversations with Bob Power, who had, as will appear, first-hand knowledge. In the third chapter I begin my own personal narrative of the events which led up to the final struggle of Ulster against Home Rule and of the struggle itself. Accidents of one kind or another, the accidents ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... in charge of the paper's make-up, a true news-hound with an untainted delight in the unusual and striking, no matter what its setting might be, who had been called into the conference, advocated "smearing it all over the front page, with Banneker's first-hand statement for ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... given. Of recent years most treatises on physical optics, e.g. those of P. K. L. Drude, A. Schuster, R. W. Wood, have been written largely on the basis of the general physics of the aether; while the Collected Papers of Lord Rayleigh should be accessible to all who desire a first-hand knowledge of the development of the optical side of the subject. See also MOLECULE, ELECTRICITY, LIGHT and RADIATION. (J. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of a heart-to-heart talk between old John Bannister and his doctor. The doctor spoke earnestly of nervous prostration and stated without preamble the exact number of months which would elapse before Mr. Bannister living his present life, would make first-hand acquaintance with it. He insisted on a regular routine of exercise. The gymnasium came into being, and Mr. Steve Dingle, physical instructor at the New York Athletic Club, took up a position in the Bannister household which he was wont to describe ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... good tight case. Tombstone was startled by the news that Juan Soto had been a member of a bandit band in California. The sheriff was able to give some first-hand testimony concerning the defendant's nocturnal habits. But the community's excitement slumped to sullen anger when the jury brought in its verdict and Juan Soto smiled as he departed from ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... residential clients became temporary parts of our family, I helped support and encourage our residents through their fasting process. I'm a natural teacher (and how-to-do-it writer), so I found myself explaining many aspects of hygienic medicine to Isabelle's clients, while having a first-hand opportunity to observe for myself the healing process at work. Thus it was that I became the doctor's assistant and came ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... find no better picture of his court than that which Sir Walter Scott has drawn so vividly in Peveril of the Peak; or, if one wishes first-hand evidence, it can be found in the diaries of Evelyn and of Samuel Pepys. In them we find the rakes and dicers, full of strange oaths, deep drunkards, vile women and still viler men, all striving for the royal favor and offering the filthiest lures, amid routs and balls and noisy entertainments, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... days of Portuguese exploration, it may also be said, information, first-hand news of the new countries and their dangers, was absolutely needed, and if the Negroes and the Azaneguy Moors could not or would not speak some Christian tongue and guide the caravels to Guinea, ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... believe. Appointed colonel of the 10th of the Line in February, 1869, he was stationed at Lorient and at Limoges during the eighteen months before the war with Germany. He busied himself during this period with the preparation of his work, soliciting from all sides first-hand information. It was slow in coming in, due certainly to indifference rather than ill-will. He made several trips to Paris for the purpose of opening the eyes of those in authority to the defective state of the army and the ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... or Welsh Mr Arnold knew at first-hand, I cannot say: he frankly enough confesses that his knowledge was very closely limited. But what is really surprising, is that he does not seem to have taken much trouble to extend it at second-hand. A very few Welsh triads and scraps of Irish are all that, even in translation, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... Stones and Gems by Edwin W. Streeter; Chapman & Hall, London, 1877. This is a book of 264 pages with nine illustrations. It contains much of value and was unsurpassed in its day. Its first-hand accounts of numerous important, even celebrated diamonds and other precious stones will always make it valuable ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... ticklish associations that worked themselves off thus; maybe it was the first instance of my committing myself to a breach of camp etiquette. Be that as it may, my innocently expressed sentiment gave rise to bewildering dissertations on entomology, and most remarkable and startling tales from first-hand experience. ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... purchasers of girls. Friendly and confidential relations were established with some of the most influential White Slave dealers. By these means valuable first-hand information was obtained regarding the White Slave trade. The agents were told the price of girls, the methods employed in the business, and, in some cases, the corrupt relations existing between the traders and ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... practical exercises many suggestions as to experiments that you can make with your class or with individual members. Do not neglect this first-hand teaching. It will be a delight to your pupils. In many cases it will be best to finish the experiments or observational work first, and later turn to the text to amplify the ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... suppose I was back at breakfast with some record of the place—would I not in that case be thought an even more worthy associate? Then, if Summerlee carried the day and some means of escape were found, we should return to London with first-hand knowledge of the central mystery of the plateau, to which I alone, of all men, would have penetrated. I thought of Gladys, with her "There are heroisms all round us." I seemed to hear her voice as she said it. I thought also of McArdle. What a three column article for the paper! ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... secondary and tertiary mammalian and pseudo-mammalian factors in the free larval forms of various marine organisms. Moreover, a vigorous fire of mutual criticism was going on now between the Imperial College and the Cambridge Mendelians and echoed in the lectures. From beginning to end it was first-hand stuff. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... capital at the period of its highest grandeur and magnificence — "things which I saw and came to know" he tells us — and that of Nuniz because it contains the traditional history of the country gathered first-hand on the spot, and a narrative of local and current events of the highest importance, known to him either because he himself was present or because he received the information from those who were so. ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... the Sulu Archipelago that had been overlooked—that was really the incredible part of it. Dennison had first-hand knowledge that there wasn't a rock in the whole archipelago that had not been looked over and under by ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... the trees will furnish material for both art and nature study lessons. As far as circumstances permit the real trees should be studied, giving the children first-hand experience whether it be much or little. They should test the trees they cut by comparing them with real trees of the same variety. If this is impossible, the best pictures available should be used. (See notes ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... solved many little sums set her by my friend, Fraeulein M. D. (at the time that lady had been staying with me on the farm to gain first-hand experience in the work), and on one occasion when Fraeulein M. D. said, "Where is your mistress?" Lola spelt out that I was in the "segenhaus," which was quite true, I having told her shortly before that I was going there. To the great amusement of the ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... and administrative work began to claim much of the time he would willingly have bestowed upon distinctly zoological research. His lectures on Natural History of course demanded a good deal of first-hand investigation, and not only occasional notes in his fragmentary journals, but a vast mass of drawings now preserved at South Kensington attest the amount of work he still managed to give to these subjects. But with the exception of the Hunterian ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... incoherent experiences of life, begin to be noticeable. While listening to Strauss discussing any worldly question, be it marriage, the war, or capital punishment, we are startled by his complete lack of anything like first-hand experience, or of any original thought on human nature. All his judgments are so redolent of books, yea even of newspapers. Literary reminiscences do duty for genuine ideas and views, and the assumption of a ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... a surgeon. By the kind treatment of his new master Exquemelin soon regained his health, and at the same time picked up the rudiments of the craft of barber surgeon. He was in all the great exploits of the buccaneers, and writes a clear, entertaining, and apparently perfectly accurate first-hand account of these adventures. He returned to Europe in 1674, and shortly ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... people of my class and kind, I may add the testimony of first-hand information, that a large proportion of them, at the present time, have come to regard passing pleasure and acts of immediate self-interest as the chief object and motive of their lives. It is the pleasure of eating and drinking which concerns them and ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... no intensive work with them, and the following notes make no pretense of being first-hand knowledge. I have drawn on all possible sources for this scanty information, but am mostly indebted to the letters and reports of the late Governor Bolton, who, without doubt, knew more of this people than any ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... what was going on in the rest of the world. Obviously no first-rate writer could have afforded to appear in person not only because of damage to his stature lest it be noted he was doing his own spadework; but, more important, first-hand observation might limit his capacity for rationalizing the situation into the mold demanded by the bias of his commentator or columnist. It was always difficult to maintain author integrity when the facts did not support the sensationalism required by the employers, ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... was demanded were that the complications resulting from the revolutionary crisis throughout the Continent made it essential that the Foreign Office should be in a position, in dealing with the chancelleries of Europe, to obtain direct recognition, and as a result first-hand information, as to the attitude of the Holy See in any situations which might arise; and the acceptance by Parliament of the change of policy which the Bill was intended to effect, on the understanding that diplomatic ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... shipboard rats, and transmission of tropical fevers, as well, by the medium of shipboard water buckets infected with mosquito larvae from the tropics, was beyond the capacity of both medical theory and of first-hand observation. ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... power of emotion acquired through the exercise of daily affairs; a power of imagination won from having dwelt upon the things of life with intentness, a power of sympathy obtained from seeing the things of others as you meet them day by day; and a first-hand knowledge of the sights and sounds and beauties of Nature, a knowledge of bird and flower, tree and rock, their names and some of their secrets—knowledge accumulated from actual contact with the real ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... concerning which our impressions are otherwise altogether and inexpressibly unimportant; it is a question of ethics and not aesthetics, as most of our simple-hearted company suppose it to be; and, if we are dishonest, we pretend to have felt and thought things at first-hand from them which we have learned at second-hand from our reading. I will confess, for my small part, that I had more pleasure in the coloring and feeling of some of the older canvases and in here and there a Titian than in all the Raphaels in the ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... by means of a case of which I happen to have first-hand knowledge. In Jersey, near the bay of St. Brelade, is a cave, in which we dug down through some twenty feet of accumulated clay and rock-rubbish, presumably the effects of the last throes of the ice-age, and came upon a pre-historic hearth. There were the big stones that had ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... see, Mr. Wentworth? If you could only get for a moment into the stream of experience where Joe and the others brought me! A picture is art as long as it's alive—as long as it can give back the fresh, first-hand impulses that were put into it. After that—when life has flowed on and set up new impulses requiring a different expression—then a picture drops back upon a lower level. ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... their number and variety. He had a beautiful untrained tenor voice; he could improvise, with a startling brilliance, rapidly and loudly, on the piano. He was a good amateur medium and telepathist, and had a considerable first-hand knowledge of the next world. He could write rhymed verses with an extraordinary rapidity. For painting symbolical pictures he had a dashing style, and if the drawing was sometimes a little weak, the colour was always pyrotechnical. ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... make you any extended address of mere thanks, still less of mere eulogy. I prefer to speak, and I know you would prefer to have me speak, on matters of real concern to you, as to which I happen at this moment to possess some first-hand knowledge; for recently I traversed certain portions of the British Empire under conditions which made me intimately cognizant of their circumstances and needs. I have just spent nearly a year in Africa. While there I saw four British protectorates. I grew heartily ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... gratifying as far as it goes; it is good prima facie evidence of pecuniary success, and consequently prima facie evidence of social worth. But dress has subtler and more far-reaching possibilities than this crude, first-hand evidence of wasteful consumption only. If, in addition to showing that the wearer can afford to consume freely and uneconomically, it can also be shown in the same stroke that he or she is not under the necessity of earning a livelihood, the evidence of social ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... blackboard and chart, clears up any lurking mysteries of the anatomy, or enlivens the subject with an incursion into physiology, embryology, or comparative morphology of the parts under observation. Thus by the close of the session the student has something far more than a mere first-hand knowledge of the anatomy of the crawfish—though that in itself were much. He has an insight also into a half-dozen allied subjects. He has learned to look on the crawfish as a link in a living chain—a creature with physiological, psychological, ontological affinities ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... be active participants in the lesson. They must use their eyes, hands, and even their noses in gaining first-hand impressions, and they are to be required to express in their own way the things that they discover. The beautiful flower with its face like that of an animal is an appeal to the child's imagination, and the child's interest in the use of things is utilized in the study of the ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... oil boom story I heard first-hand the other day. I believe it, but you couldn't get those men around the corner store ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... Field-Marshal Sir John French I have been deeply indebted to many of his personal friends for helping me with first-hand impressions of our General in the Field. A number of military writers have been almost equally helpful. Among those to whom I owe sincere thanks for personal assistance are Lady French, Mr. J.R.L. French, Mrs. Despard, Field-Marshal Earl Roberts, Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood, General Bewicke ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... him so highly that he had always his portrait before him while he sat at work. So Schiller looked up to Shakspeare, whom he studied reverently and zealously for years, until he became capable of comprehending nature at first-hand, and then his admiration became even more ardent ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... prospered, social needs were more closely attended to, and, most important of all, peace was maintained. The House of Commons had opened its doors to men of moderate means, and the Labor party, consisting of working men, miners, and those with first-hand knowledge of industrial conditions, came into existence as an ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... interested in the news of Peter Sinclair's illness. He knew that in a short time various rumours would be circulating throughout the parish. But he would have exact information and would be able to impress all by his hints of superior and first-hand knowledge. ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... table was monopolised by Osmond Hall, who began to discuss the scenario of a new play he was writing. "My play," he began, "is going to be called 'The King of the North Pole.' I have never been to the North Pole, and I don't mean to go there. It's not necessary to have first-hand knowledge of technical subjects in order to write a play. People say that Shakespeare must have studied the law, because his allusions to the law are frequent and accurate. That does not prove that he knew law any more than the fact that he put a sea in Bohemia proves that he did not know geography. ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... hazardous mission, and one which also involved tact, diplomacy, and a first-hand knowledge of the wilderness. But we are not much surprised to find Washington, at twenty-one, given the commission of major and ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... of the fact itself, at first-hand, across a whirlwind of distracted rumors new and old about the fact, let us be thankful to Wilhelmina. Seckendorf's hopeless attempts to resuscitate extinct English things, and make the Prussian ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... was not intended as a hunting-trip but as a scientific expedition. Before starting on the trip itself, while travelling in the Argentine, I received certain pieces of first-hand information concerning the natural history of the jaguar, and of the cougar, or puma, which are worth recording. The facts about the jaguar are not new in the sense of casting new light on its character, although they are interesting; ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... to do meanwhile? Most religions offer formal official statements of what they believe God to be. They say what God's nature is, and set forth His attributes. Friends make no such pronouncement; and I, for one, am glad there is none. Man's words about God cannot substitute for a first-hand experience of the living reality. Friends are directed to seek for the reality within themselves. Meanwhile, we are called upon to have faith that God exists and that it is possible for us to meet with ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... Gloucester fishermen which first made his reputation. They are told by the wharf-rat in dialect with a casual reportorial air which is tolerably convincing, and it is clear that they are based on a background of first-hand experience. Mr. Connolly's hand is not entirely subdued to the medium in which he has chosen to work, but the result is a certain ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Captain J.O.C. Hasted, D.S.O., for permission to use his lecture on the Samarra battle. I could have used this lecture still more with great gain; but I did not wish to impair its interest in itself, as it should be published. From Captain F.J. Diggins, M.C., I gained a first-hand account of the capture of the Turkish guns. And Major Kenneth Mason, M.C., helped me with information in the Tekrit fighting. My brother, Lieutenant ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... are changing, for easy transportation has brought the outside world to their once isolated home. It is therefore highly important that they be studied first-hand now for they will not long stay as ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... it does not profess to be the evidence of an eyewitness. It is a chronicle, founded, like other chronicles, on such evidence and records as the chronicler could get hold of. The only one of the evangelists who professes to give first-hand evidence as an eyewitness naturally takes care to say so; and the fact that Matthew makes no such pretension, and writes throughout as a chronicler, makes it clear that he is telling the story of Jesus as Holinshed told the story of Macbeth, except that, for a reason to be given later on, he must ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... seemed to him a truth, he then applied his intellect to it to bolster up that truth. Hence it is that, however opinionated Strindberg may at times seem, his writings carry that conviction which we receive only when the author reproduces' truths he has obtained first-hand from life. One-sided he may occasionally be in Married, especially in the later stories, but rarely unfaithful. His manner is often to throw such a glaring searchlight upon one spot of life that all the rest of it stays in darkness; but the places he does show up ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... assortment of their less perishable contents, we can frame a fairly adequate notion of the home-life of Neanderthal man. I have already alluded to my excavations in Jersey, and need not enter into fuller details here. But I should like to put on record the opinion borne in upon me by such first-hand experience as I have had that cultural advance in Mousterian days was almost as portentously slow as ever it had been before. The human deposits in the Jersey cave are in some places about ten feet ...
— Progress and History • Various
... written these things about boys and men because it is in that connection that I can speak from first-hand knowledge. But several women doctors have told me of late that there is a very real need that girls also should be helped in view of the similar danger which lies in their path. With them the habit is no doubt ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... their hostess gushingly, circulated compactly, talking to each other in low voices. Nan knew they were watching her, and that they had come for the sole purpose of getting first-hand details of her fiasco for later recounting in drawing-rooms where, undoubtedly, even now awaited eager auditors. She came to a decision. The matter could not be worse. When, the three came to make ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... great, and it was knowledge of the best. It is seldom that you find so great a man of action who was also a man of such wide and accurate knowledge. I happened to be impressed by his knowledge of natural history and literature and to have had first-hand evidence of both, but I gather from others that there were other fields of knowledge in which he was also remarkable. Not long ago when an English friend of mine was dying, his business agent came over to see him. One of the family asked the agent whether ...
— Recreation • Edward Grey
... Library at Baltimore a full record of the Lanier family in England. In investigating the state of art in Elizabeth's time he came across in Walpole's "Anecdotes of Painting" references to Jerome and Nicholas Lanier, whose careers he followed with his accustomed zeal and industry through the first-hand sources which the library afforded. There is no more characteristic letter of Lanier's than that written in 1879 to Mr. J. F. D. Lanier, giving the result of this investigation. He there tells the story of ten Laniers who enjoyed the personal favor of four ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... long he had tried to stifle the cry of that same famine, that same hunger of unplaced energy, by industrious work. He had examined, noted, here and there transcribed, passages from deeds, letters, order-books, and diaries offering first-hand information regarding former generations of Calmadys. It happened that studies he had recently made in contemporary science, specially in obtaining theories of biology, had brought home to him what tremendous factors in the development and fate of the individual are both evolution and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... compare with the languages of the Western world? The answers given to this question have varied considerably. But it is noteworthy that those who most depreciate the qualities of Chinese are, generally speaking, theorists rather than persons possessing a profound first-hand knowledge of the language itself. Such writers argue that want of inflection in the characters must tend to make Chinese hard and inelastic, and therefore incapable of bringing out the finer shades of thought ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... D'Ewes, whose family belonged to the same part of Suffolk as Bacon's sprang from, was not friendly to Bacon, but that fact will not suffice to account for his statement. He was an upright and honorable man of scholarly habits, and, moreover, a trained lawyer, who had many opportunities of obtaining first-hand information, for he had lived in the Chancery office from childhood. He is very precise as to Bacon's homosexual practices with his own servants, both before and after his fall, and even gives the name of a "very effeminate-faced ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Josephus, and contrasted with the [Hebrew: Yosifon la-Romim], or "Latin Josephus." When the genuine works of our worthy became known to the Jews, Yosippon was regarded as the true representative of the Jewish point of view against the paganizing traitor. Its author had not a first-hand acquaintance with our Josephus. He knew him only through the Latin versions, which were mixed with much later material. Possibly he meant to pass off his work as the Hebrew original of the Jewish history, and confused Joseph ben Gorion with Joseph ben Mattathias; ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... very careful about what I put in the paper. I want everything, as I told you; Don't you remember the sketch I gave you of my ideals? But I want it in the right way and of the right brand. If I can't get it in the shape I like it I don't want it at all; first-rate first-hand information, straight from the tap, is what I'm after. I don't want to hear what some one or other thinks that some one or other was told that some one or other believed or said; and above all I don't want ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... somebody who knew all the circumstances. Phil's personal knowledge of the facts did not extend beyond the point where he had fallen unconscious in the bedroom, and a talk with Musard offered the best available substitute for his own lack of first-hand impressions. ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... I'm going to show you the inside of that ship. I won't show you my engines, but I will prove to you that there are no rocket motors in her. That way, when you write up the story, you'll be able to say that you have first-hand knowledge ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... things which we call Nature is, however, too vast and various to be studied first-hand by any single mind. As knowledge extends there is always a tendency to subdivide the field of investigation. Its various parts are taken up by different minds, and thus receive a greater amount of attention than could possibly be bestowed on them if each investigator aimed at the mastery of the whole. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... because they grow, and politics, not less than corn! Oh, my friend, say what you please, argue how you like, this crowding together of men and women in unnatural surroundings, this haste to be rich in material things, this attempt to enjoy without production, this removal from first-hand life, is irrational, and the end of it is ruin. If our cities were not recruited constantly with the fresh, clean blood of the country, with boys who still retain some of the power and the vision drawn from the soil, ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... authority do not budge an inch to get possession of such power. We are constantly warned by political pessimists that Germany is making gigantic strides, and that we ought to keep a vigilant outlook. Yet we do nothing to obtain first-hand information of the resources of a nation of sixty-five millions, who is certainly a formidable commercial rival, and who to-morrow may meet us in deadly encounter.[20] On the other hand, we are told with equal persistence by political optimists ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... that larger moiety of the material at Westhaven Street which White from his extensive experience of the public patience decided could not possibly "make a book," consisted of notes and discussions upon the first-hand observations Benham had made in this or that part of the world. He began in Russia during the revolutionary trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and from place to place in Bessarabia and Kieff, where during a pogrom ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... it to show that there are possibilities in developing the oak. I think our mutual friend, J. Russell Smith, would probably like to hear this as he advocates the use of oaks, and I agree with him that there are possibilities for human food to be used first-hand. I am all out of sympathy with second-hand food production as pork or beef or any meat products, as you know. One reason is that it is economically wrong as it takes many times more acreage to produce meat than vegetables for the same amount of food energy to be derived. My authority, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... the telephone yourself, old chap, and ask your questions first-hand," said Sir Reginald, handing over ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... endeavours to show that this story is pure fiction. His arguments, in many cases advanced with no little subtlety and precision, do not appear (to me at least) to be convincing. We have much to weigh in the contrary balance: Mrs. Behn's manifest first-hand knowledge of, and extraordinary interest in, colonial life; her reiterated asseverations that every experience detailed in this famous novel is substantially true; the assent of all her contemporaries. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... firing on women and children," but, for the most part, these rumours were discredited as impossible, at most being put down as some accidental clash between military and civilians, and it was only as people rushed into the street and heard the stories of the encounters first-hand that they began to realize that ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... the lesson here taught if we do not apply it to tendencies in ourselves, and humbly recognise that we are in danger of being 'hindered,' however 'well' we may have begun to 'run,' and that our only remedy is to renew continually our first-hand vision of 'the great works of the Lord,' and our consecration to His service. It is a poor affair if, like Israel, our devotion to God depends on Joshua's life, or, like King Joash, we do that which is 'right in the eyes of the Lord all the days ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... answered Mr. Barrymore. "I don't know anything at first-hand about the road, but at the garage they tell me motors occasionally do it. The gradients are steep according to the route-book, but unless there's something worse than meets the eye there, our car will get through ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... little opportunity for reading. But he took in much knowledge at first-hand by observation, which was perhaps better; and as he hit against all sorts of minds, he became in time somewhat reflective and philosophical. Through daily view of the yellow water, and perhaps the glare of the bright ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... in very deed be thankful that since the day of all these happenings, Indians have, as Mr. Gokhale tells us, "climbed in the field of law, to the very top of the tree," and can now deal out first-hand justice to ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... to hastily fill in a few blanks in my previous sketch of our island career and to pass on to features of novelty and interest—vignettes of certain natural and unobtrusive features of the locality, first-hand and artless. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... for a tourist to arrive at a just opinion on this subject as for the average Frenchman. The traveller will not find it easy to acquire the necessary first-hand data, while the other is ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... properly to be written by a layman who is also a Christian man of business. It is inserted here mainly to challenge inquiry and to provoke thought. The writer has no first-hand acquaintance either with business life or with business methods. He desires simply to chronicle an impression that the level of morality in the business world has been declining in recent years, and that the more thoughtful and candid of Christian laymen in business ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... the country and its industries at his fingers' ends, and he spoke like a man who had gained his information at first-hand. I listened attentively, for I guessed in some queer fashion of my own that the maps and that foolish cryptogram, the shooting on the beach and the piece of driftwood were all somehow connected. But either I must have missed some very obvious ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... beginning of the Historical period, the first-hand information—for it is almost superfluous to remark that none of the Greek authors speak from personal observation—flows from two sources; from the inhabitants of western and southern Gaul, and from the Ph[oe]nicians. The text of Herodotus ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... I had my ghost—a first-hand, authenticated article. I would write to the Society for Psychical Research—I would paralyze the Empire with the news! But I would, first of all, put eighty miles of assessed crop land between myself and that dak-bungalow before nightfall. ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... various essays of which this book is comprised, has not been altogether easy. Some literary defects and absence of unity are, by the nature of the scheme, inevitable: we hope these are counterbalanced by the collection of first-hand evidence from those in a position to speak authoritatively of the professions which they follow. Experientia docet, and those who desire to investigate the conditions of women's public work in various directions, ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... did not recall just what she had said, but she knew she had by no means revealed the true extent of her intimacy with the shopkeepers. She went on with the letter. "'I have lately received some first-hand information concerning these young women, who seem to have fulfilled my prophecy that they would lose no opportunity to ingratiate themselves. I fear you have been too credulous, my dear Virginia, but I will not enter into the matter further till I ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... or perhaps her misfortune, her happening on events first-hand that way. She read the letter of course, sympathized with Mrs. Sears, patted her check and told her not to worry, that everything would be all right and to set right still, that she'd be right back to do the dishes and ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... what end the son of his boss could serve by joining a Labour Union. He finally came to the conclusion that this was but another instance of an "Intellectual" studying the social and economic side of Industry from first-hand observation. It was a common enough thing in the Old Land. He was conscious of a little contempt for this dilettante sort of Labour Unionism, and he was further conscious of a feeling of impatience and embarrassment at Captain ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... the French side that one might chiefly draw those vivid and sometimes questionable glimpses at first-hand, that can best add to Lockhart's presentment. One must compare his retreat from Russia with Rapp's and other remembrancers' accounts, and be reminded by Rapp to go on to Jomini's Vie Militaire, and even turn for a single personal reminiscence to a flagrant ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... took an opportunity of retailing Mr. Pilgrim's conversation to Mrs. Phipps, who, as a victim of Pratt and plethora, could rarely enjoy that pleasure at first-hand. Mrs. Phipps was a woman of decided opinions, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... envoys, great ecclesiastics, and papal legates came together with navigators and conquerors, cosmographers, colonial officials, and returning explorers from antipodal regions—Spain's empire builders. It was in such society he collected the mass of first-hand information he sifted and chronicled in the Decades and the Opus Epistolarum, which have proven such an inexhaustible mine for students of Spanish and Spanish-American history. Truly of him may it be said that nothing human was alien to his spirit. Intercourse with him was ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... "First-hand source. I ran across Rooke himself and it was he who told me. They're to be ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... educated, and wrote with difficulty. The narrative of his first voyage was written by George Best from an account furnished by Frobisher himself, whom Best accompanied on his second and third voyages. The present narrative has therefore all the value of a first-hand record, and it is included in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... good for anything else. On the other hand, these empty heads, still keeping something of their old appearance, now appeared animated by the grand sentiment of maternity—an abstract maternity which seemed to be extending to all the men of the nation—a desire for self-sacrifice, of knowing first-hand the privations of the lowly, and aiding all the ills that flesh ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the evidence we now possess, we feel bound to admit the existence of such knowledge, is it not more reasonable to suppose that the men who first told the story were the men who knew, and that the confusion was due to those who, with more literary skill, but less first-hand ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... preliminaries and fundamentals of Civics can omit some consideration of the vast and ever growing literature of cities. But how are we to utilise this? How continue it? How co-ordinate it with the needed independent and first-hand survey of city by city? And how apply this whole knowledge of past and present towards ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... of it." Further, although Colonel David Collins was not in Sydney at the time of the discovery, what he wrote in his account of the English Colony in New South Wales (2nd edition, London, 1804), was based on first-hand information; and he was no less direct in his statement: "There was every appearance of an extensive strait, or rather an open sea"; and he adds that Bass "regretted that he had not been possessed of a better vessel, which would have enabled him to ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... responsible, prior to the 'Belfast Address,' is embodied in the following extract from a brief article written as far back as 1865: 'Supposing the molecules of the human body, instead of replacing others, and thus renewing a pre-existing form, to be gathered first-hand from nature, and placed in the exact relative positions which they occupy in the body. Supposing them to have the same forces and distribution of forces, the same motions and distribution of motions—would this organised concourse of molecules ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... adept at conventional conversation. If you can't say something original I shall go back to Bubu le Vainqueur, whose society for the last three days has afforded me infinite delectation. Although his views of life may be what Melford would call depraved, at any rate they are first-hand. He does not waste his time in futile politeness." Suddenly he paused, and seized me by the shoulder and shook me, as he had often done before. "Creep out of that shell of gentility, you little hermit-crab," ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... out some diving equipment, so as to obtain a first-hand feel for diving. It is related that something went wrong, too much air was sent down, and he surfaced rapidly upside down. A similar episode is related in ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... he is very anxious to love him first-hand, and what you tell him about God does not seem to him to be good. Surely neither man nor woman can love because of what seems not good! I confess one may love in spite of what is bad, but it must be because of other things ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... overlooked the fact that the admiral himself was in Manila Bay and in Manila City at the time he sent this cablegram. The statements in question were not rumours, they were deliberate expressions of opinion on the part of a man who had first-hand information and knew what he ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... well known that Isom had abused her, that her life had been cheerless and lonely under his roof. Those who did not know it from first-hand facts believed it on the general notoriety of the man. Contact with Isom Chase had been like sleeping on a corn-husk bed; there was no comfort in it, no ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... have too much common sense to accept such reports as final. News from biassed sources is always accepted with reservation, and not fully believed unless confirmed from independent sources. Furthermore, Americans have never lacked for first-hand information from Germany. Direct wireless reports from your country to several stations in America have given us a valuable check on cable reports. German papers come to us regularly, and are continually ...
— Plain Words From America • Douglas W. Johnson
... Grecque, and brushes aside the three earlier and bigger books rather hastily, though he allows "interest" to both Cleveland and the Doyen. Perhaps, before "coming to real things" (as Balzac once said of his own work) in Manon, some remarks, not long, but first-hand, and based on actual reading at more than one time of life, as to her very unreal family, may be permitted here, though they may differ in opinion from the judgment of these two ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... one has hitherto thought of tapping this source of information. In and about 1887 the papers teemed with articles that outlined the history of music during the first fifty years of Victoria's reign; but I have not seen one that attempted to derive first-hand information from the sources referred to, nor indeed does the subject of 'Dickens and Music' ever appear to have received the attention which, ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... we shall see, that the origin of Home's miracles in broad daylight or artificial light, could never be traced to fraud, or, indeed, to any known cause; while the one case in which imposture is alleged on first-hand evidence occurred under conditions of light so bad as to make detection as difficult as belief in such circumstances, ought to have been impossible. It is not easy to feel sure that we have certainly detected a fraud in a dim light; but it is absurd to believe in a ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... lustrous evening wear of the waiters. No sooner was the innkeeper's judgment rendered than a keen thrill of resentment, or at least amusement, ran through the general breast. From every quarter the reporters hastened to verify the fact at first-hand, and then to submit it to the keeper of every other eminent inn or eating-house in the city and learn his usage and opinion. These to a man disavowed any such hard-and-fast rule. Though their paying guests were ordinarily gentlemen of such polite habits as to be incapable ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Linguistics in the University of Michigan being thus employed in path-hunting upon a lonely mountain-top in Mexico. Truly, adversity brings us strange bedfellows; but far stranger are the straits into which a man comes who takes up with the study of archaeology at first-hand. But my path-hunting was without result, for nowhere along the edge of the plateau was there a break fit for the descent of any creature save such as had wings. At the end of near an hour the clouds once more lifted; and ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... ages of poetic inspiration, however, the versifiers have no vision of the world, but only of its pale mirrored reflections in visions dead and gone, and some jolt is needed to bring the poets back to first-hand observation. Such a jolt are the new poets. Spoon River is a medicine, a splendid tonic. But the form of Spoon River is not conditioned by eternal needs, only by temporary ones. Its complete absence of ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... Briskows' turned out to be less irksome than the visitor had anticipated, for the afternoon was spent with Buddy examining the Briskow wells and others near by. It was an interesting experience, and Gray obtained a deal of first-hand information that he believed would come in handy. Buddy's first mistrust was not long in passing, and, once Gray had penetrated his guard, the boy was won completely, the pendulum swung to the opposite extreme, and erelong suspicion changed to liking, then to approval, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... "What has Mr Wentworth been doing? When you keep a Low-Church Curate, you never can tell what he may say. If he had known of the All-Souls pudding he would have come to dinner, and we should have had it at first-hand," said Mrs Morgan, severely. She put away her peach in her resentment, and went to a side-table for her work, which she always kept handy for emergencies. Like her husband, Mrs Morgan had acquired some little "ways" in the long ten years of their engagement, one of which ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... 'ghosts' are hallucinations produced by the direct action of one mind, or brain, upon another), while Thyraeus doubted whether the noises heard in 'haunted houses' were not mere hallucinations of the sense of hearing. But all these early writers, like Cardan, were very careless of first-hand evidence, and, indeed, preferred ghosts vouched for by classical authority, Pliny, Plutarch, or Suetonius. With the Rev. Joseph Glanvil, F.R.S. (circ. 1666), a more careful examination of evidence came into use. Among the marvels of Glanvil's and other tracts usually published ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... of less immediate kin to the owners, being only the son of a former Jordas, and in the enjoyment of a Christian name, which never was provided for a first-hand Jordas; and now as his mistress looked out on the terrace, his burly figure came duly forth, and his keen eyes ranged the walks and courts, in search of Master Lancelot, who gave him more trouble in a day, sometimes, than all the dogs cost in a twelvemonth. With a ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... all the materials made available by the industry of later scholars, and records the history of seventeen regular, and five temporary or projected, theatres. The book is throughout the result of a first-hand examination of original sources, and represents an independent interpretation of the historical evidences. As a consequence of this, as well as of a comparison (now for the first time possible) of the detailed records of the several playhouses, many ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... strange that a professed Radical should come to be the chosen advocate of a movement which has for its aim the revival of an ancient tyranny. Shows how even Radicalism can fall into academic grooves and miss the essential truths of its own creed. Believe me, Pagett, to deal with India you want first-hand knowledge and experience. I wish he would come and live here for a couple of years ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... value as a mere intellectual achievement; as a store of information about Greek literature; and as an original or first-hand statement of what we may call the classical view of artistic criticism. It does not regard poetry as a matter of unanalysed inspiration; it makes no concession to personal whims or fashion or ennui. It tries by rational ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... which the crew listened in rapt attention, consumed nearer six than two, or even five hours. These men were hungry for authentic first-hand information—being too old to ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... note that he was always reading some vital book. It might be some out-of-the-way book, but it had the root of the human matter in it: a volume of great trials; one of the supreme autobiographies; a signal passage of history, a narrative of travel, a story of captivity, which gave him life at first-hand. As I remember, he did not care much for fiction, and in that sort he had certain distinct loathings; there were certain authors whose names he seemed not so much to pronounce as to spew out of his mouth. Goldsmith was one of these, but ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... too, however much he might rebuke himself for it. Human life at first-hand had not been too plentiful with him. The Imp's excitement infected him. "And he's back here after all!" she cried. "At least—Heavens, they'll be ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... the North of England, taking part in an excursion to the New Forest, called on Wallace and confided to him the dream of his life—a first-hand knowledge of tropical nature. When I visited 'Old Orchard' in the summer of 1903, I found that Wallace was intently interested in two things: his garden, and the means by which his young friend's dream might best be realised. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... it affords besides an admirable training. For the artist works entirely upon honour. The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the quest of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap accomplishment which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires - these they can recognise, and these they value. But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which the artist so ardently desires and so keenly ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the totals of the different sheets and compared them, with the 412 millions we had given the public, which was now indelibly, the world over, a matter of record. Again I stopped to congratulate myself on my good fortune in securing this first-hand evidence of the fraud that had been practised on ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... of books is supplementary—that they form an indirect means to knowledge when direct means fail—a means of seeing through other men what you cannot see for yourself; teachers are eager to give second-hand facts in place of first-hand facts. Not perceiving the enormous value of that spontaneous education which goes on in early years—not perceiving that a child's restless observation, instead of being ignored or checked, should be diligently ministered to, and made as accurate and complete ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... his wife Anna (Wiederkehr), was born at Bremgarten, Aargau, on the 18th of July 1504. He studied at Emmerich and Cologne, where the teaching of Peter Lombard led him, through Augustine and Chrysostom, to first-hand study of the Bible. Next the writings of Luther and Melanchthon appealed to him. Appointed teacher (1522) in the cloister school of Cappel, he lectured on Melanchthon's Loci Communes (1521). He heard Zwingli at Zuerich in 1527, and next year accompanied him to the disputation at Berne. He ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... and his wife were familiar with every detail of it. What is even more remarkable is that the next day, Monday evening, I met Liputin, and he knew every word that had been passed, so that he must have heard it first-hand. Many of the ladies (and some of the leading ones) were very inquisitive about the "mysterious cripple," as they called Marya Timdfyevna. There were some, indeed, who were anxious to see her and make her acquaintance, so the intervention ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... gave the date of his death as November 17, 1372. As to the book itself, its material is evidently borrowed chiefly from other writers, especially from the account of the travels of Friar Odoric and from a French work on the East, and only a small part contains first-hand information. Numerous manuscripts exist, in several languages. The English version is probably not the work of the original writer, but it is, nevertheless, regarded as a standard ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... we find that all begin in the atmosphere of "phenomena." The divine Man who founds the religion, and those who immediately surround Him, are always people who have a knowledge of more worlds than one. And because they are possessors of that first-hand knowledge, they are able to speak with authority. Now, the authority that should be recognised in all these matters is simply ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... life and achievements held his deepest thought for nearly a quarter of a century. Certainly his services to his country rank close to Washington's. Marshall's sympathetic understanding of his subject, his first-hand knowledge of events with his remarkable powers of expression qualified him to produce the masterpiece that has come ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... both these pamphlets will prove useful to those who have little first-hand knowledge of what his enemies said of Pope and will help to warn the novice of the fatal ease with which we can read "with but a Lust to mis-apply,/ Make Satire a Lampoon, and Fiction, Lye" (Epistle ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... he knew very little of them really. To them he had always remained Mr. Arundel; no one called him Ferdinand; and he only knew the gossip also available to the evening papers and the frequenters of clubs. But he was, however, good at inventing; and as soon as he had come to an end of first-hand knowledge, in order to answer her inquires and keep her there to himself he proceeded to invent. It was quite easy to fasten some of the entertaining things he was constantly thinking on to other people and pretend they were theirs. ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... communications would have surprised anybody who did not know Tilling. A less subtle society, when assured from a first-hand, authoritative source that a report which it had entirely refused to believe was false, would have prided itself on its perspicacity, and said that it had laughed at such an idea, as soon as ever it heard it, as being palpably ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... solutions of the Albanian problem was that which Dr. Mueller very seriously, not to say ponderously, put forward in 1916.[73] This gentleman, with a first-hand knowledge of the country, which he gained during the War, did not minimize the task which would face the Prince of Wied on his return. Of that wooden potentate one may say that his work in Albania did ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... Gex is your enemy, Mrs. Cullerton," I said. "I have first-hand knowledge of it. Indeed, on the night of the ball at the Villa Clementini, he had in his pocket the wherewithal to bring upon you an illness which must inevitably prove fatal. He had a little glass tube which he had ordered Moroni to prepare, but which the doctor himself urged ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... regular meeting," adds the governor, "such was the excited state of the public mind at that time, I am convinced South Carolina would not now have been a member of the Union. The people are very far ahead of their leaders." Ample first-hand evidence of South Carolina's determination to secede in 1850 may be found in the Correspondence of Calhoun, in Claiborne's Quitman, in the acts of the assembly, in the newspapers, in the legislature's vote "to resist at any and all hazards", ...
— Webster's Seventh of March Speech, and the Secession Movement • Herbert Darling Foster
... matter for literature in the essay, quite apart from any story. But the essay, like the story, unless it is to compete at a disadvantage with science and philosophy, must rely upon first-hand personal acquaintance with life, and artistic expression. The more abstract and theoretical it becomes, the more precarious its worth. I do not mean that the essayist may not generalize, but his generalizations should be limited to the scope of his experience of life. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker |
