"Illuminative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... school till the Master Himself came to give us His lessons, these great words of my text would not, as they so often do in the mass of professing Christians, lack the verification of experience and the assurance that it is so with us. Have you sat in Christ's school, and do you know the secret and illuminative whispers of His teaching? If not, there is something wrong in your Christian character, and something insincere in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... and the like to match, on a far less basis than lies in those two volumes. Those also, I expect, will be held in memory by the world, one way or other, till the world has extracted all its benefit from them. Graceful, ingenious and illuminative reading, of their sort, for all manner of inquiring souls. A little verdant flowery island of poetic intellect, of melodious human verity; sunlit island founded on the rocks;—which the enormous circumambient continents ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... disagreeably illuminative—and Oswyn believed that under his surface composure he concealed, at least, a terrible wound to his pride—he was not going to allow ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... scarlet butterfly this morning"; and "Sunday, 18th.— ... William wrote the poem on The Robin and the Butterfly." No, beautiful beyond praise as the journals are, it is certain that she was more beautiful than they. And what a discerning, illuminative eye she had! "As I lay down on the grass, I observed the glittering silver line on the ridge of the backs of the sheep, owing to their situation respecting the sun, which made them look beautiful, but with something of strangeness, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... stage, and foreign powers were rapidly building up very formidable air forces. Of these foreign forces we naturally knew most of the French, for France was both our neighbour and our friend. In October 1911 a very full and illuminative report was supplied to the Government by Lieutenant Ralph Glyn, an officer attached to the newly-formed Air Battalion. It described, with reasoned comments, the aeronautical exercises carried out by the ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... though something of a preacher. He did not care so much to stir the depths of feeling as to inform and liberalize. In his imaginative work he let himself go mit holdem Irren and preferred to avoid artificial surprises and stagy contrasts. Wherefore his work is the more illuminative, the more suggestive,—he is the poet of the literary class. Schiller, on the other hand, was an orator who never lost sight of the effect he wished to produce. He worked more intensely, more methodically, and was less dependent upon mood. He is thus the poet of those who care less for ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the illuminative medium is gas. The optical apparatus embraces three-fourths of the circumference of the circle which encloses the light, and the whole of the rays emanating from that part of the light opposed to the optical arrangement are reflected or refracted (as the case may be), so that they ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... authorities—their vain attempts to find evidence against Him, which were met by His silence; His own majestic witness to Himself, which was met by a unanimous shriek of condemnation; and the rude mockery of the underlings. The other Evangelists, especially John, supply many illuminative details; but the essentials are here. It is only in criticising the Gospels that a summary and a fuller narrative are dealt with as contradictory. These three ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... tributary streams: Laotse and Confucius preparing the way for him in China; Pythagoras carrying his doctrine into the West.... Well; here is scope for thought; and for much thought that may be true and deep, and illuminative of future ages; and yet not convenient to write down at ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... well, I grieve to say, reign supreme, much in request, justify its existence, lend itself amiably to, choice galore, call for remark, hail with delight; and forty thousand others. The work of some writers is chiefly made up of these hackneyed locutions. Says Schopenhauer, in an illuminative passage which I cull from his clever but uneven essay "On Authorship and Style":—"Everyday authors are only half conscious when they write, a fact which accounts for their want of intellect and the tediousness of their writings: they do not ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... many terms that should be illuminative have become meaningless. So often has the barren been called "pregnant," the chill of death "the breath of life," the atrophied "pulsating," that when we really come upon a work with beating heart we find it difficult to give it place that has not already been stuffed ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... foot-note which you marked with red ink in the book you so kindly gave me on the subject of Catalysis, which did not pertain to the subject of the volume in question, and yet was so illuminative to any student of chemistry. They have done a great deal with Catalysis in Germany with amazing commercial results, but the subject is one so recent that I had not previously gone ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... always wise; but he falls on the side of Christianity and tenderness and goodness and love—a good way to fall, if one is to fall at all. We love the bishop, and can not help it. He was good to the poor, tender to the unerring, illuminative to those who were in the moral dark, and came over people like a sunrise; crept into their hearts for good, as a child creeps up into its father's arms, and nestles there like a bird. Surely we love the bishop. He is a hero saint. ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... you that this Voice is not only revealing as to Christ's authority and power, and illuminative as to the condition of the disembodied dead, but it is also prophetic as to the future. It tells us that there is nothing impossible or unnatural in that great assurance. 'The hour is coming when they that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth.' There shall ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Humphry Ward's English Poets"; Emerson's Essays: "The Poet" and "Poetry and Imagination"; Wordsworth's Introduction to the "Lyrical Ballads"; Poe's striking little essays on the art of poetry; Aristotle's "Rhetoric"; Macaulay's "Essay on Milton"; Lowell's "Essay on Dryden"; and many a passage of illuminative comment from Milton, from Pope, from Dryden, from Coleridge and from many another. For one who has not known and read much poetry the best introduction to its study may well be the pleasurable reading of some, or of all, of these works, though remembering ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... Spiritual Life to come, may symbolise the process of Purgation and the Baptism of Water; the Autopator, who utters the promises of Christ and who has the power of an Ennead of initiation, may typify the Illuminative Life and the Baptism of Fire; while the Protogennetor, robed in cosmic consciousness, so that he can walk even the waters of the Primal Deep (Noun), who draws forth finally from the material life, may represent the inception of the Life of Union and the Baptism ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... and months of tangled, lurid sensations, of amazing happenings which were yet to come, Norgate never once forgot that illuminative rush of fierce yet sweet feelings which suddenly thrilled his pulses. He understood in that moment the intolerable depression of the last few days. He realised the absolute advent of the one experience hitherto missing from his life. The very ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... myself it appears ridiculous; and I only, as we put it, "throw it out" in order that, if it has the least illuminative value, such a value should not be quite lost. Any reader who regards my particular picture as absurd is perfectly at liberty to form his own pictorial image of what I am endeavouring to make clear. He may, if he pleases, visualize "the soul" as a sort of darkened planet from which the attributes ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... and a far more useful one, as it seems to me, of what Christian faith really is than we derive from many learned volumes and much theological hair-splitting. 'Under His wings shalt thou flee for refuge.' Is not that a vivid, intense, picturesque, but most illuminative way of telling us what is the very essence, and what is the urgency, and what is the worth, of what we call faith? The Old Testament is full of the teaching—which is masked to ordinary readers, but is the same teaching ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... say the syndicated philosophers, "the office takes only eight or nine hours a day. The other fifteen or sixteen, you are free to do as you wish—loaf, study, become an athlete." This illuminative suggestion is usually reinforced by ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... The Prologues and Epilogues of Caxton were chiefly prefixed to translations which have long been superseded; but the comments of this frank and enthusiastic pioneer of the art of printing in England not only tell us of his personal tastes, but are in a high degree illuminative of the literary habits and standards of western Europe in the fifteenth century. Again, modern research has long ago put Raleigh's "History of the World" out of date; but his eloquent Preface still gives ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... which illuminative form of assent, a word spoken as he plunged unwillingly into the thick obscurity on the other side of the revolving doors, was probably the last he ever uttered ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... these matters Swinburne sheds light through the medium of a sound critical judgment, in a style no less conspicuous for its fascination than by reason of its illuminative power. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... and in his early years an admirer of Hofmannswaldau and Lohenstein. Later he turned against them and against the whole tribe of insincere occasional rimesters, who were bringing the poetic art into contempt. His lyric poems are of small account, but his satires are vigorous and illuminative. The text follows Fulda's edition in Krschner's ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... Adventures of Captain Bonneville and Astoria. The latter book was founded on Robert Stuart's Narratives. In 1935 these were prepared for the press, with much illuminative material, by Philip Ashton Rollins and issued under the title of The Discovery of ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... for spanning a fragile analogy between concrete and abstract phenomena of life is apt to weaken the structural strength of his argumentation. Yet even his boldest comparisons do not lack in illuminative suggestiveness. Take, for example, the following passage from Field and Forest: "In the contrast between the forest and the field is manifest the most simple and natural preparatory stage of the multiformity ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... says (Eccl. Hier. v): "The order of pontiffs is consummative and perfecting, that of the priests is illuminative and light-giving, that of the ministers is cleansing and discretive." Hence it is evident that perfection ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... place Montgomery, which it remains to this day. This explains why the superintendent of schools overlooked the temerity of Amzi's great-granddaughter in electing the Main Street fauna as the subject of her commencement address rather than her indebtedness to the poets, though it may not be illuminative as to the holes in Phil's stockings. But on this point ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... out. I found my wife once engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand encounter with the one who does the cooking about some household necessity that was sadly lacking. She was completely baffled. It was pure stalemate, a deadlock. I pulled out my dictionary and suggested to the cook (by illuminative signs) that she should look it up and point to the English word. There was some rejoicing at this, and she at once called upon the collective wisdom of her whole family. At last they got it with much nodding of heads and exhibited the book, buttressed with an eager finger at the place. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... witnessed by Alvira had a salutary effect on her trembling soul. The fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom, erected its watch-tower around the citadel of her heart; the virtues, once entered, were not permitted to flee, and soon won for this penitent soul the sweets of the illuminative degree of sanctity. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... beginning of the Galilean epoch utterly false notions regarding the subject were entertained by the very greatest philosophers—by Galileo himself, for example, and by Kepler—whereas at the close of that epoch the correct and highly illuminative view had been attained. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... he is often to be found deeply immersed in a study of the many experiments that are being conducted. Not infrequently he is actively engaged in the manipulation of some compound of special intricacy, whose results might be illuminative of obscure facts not patent to others than himself. Here, too, is a select little library of ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... pressed, are dangerous; they suggest unwarrantable conclusions. It may be illuminative to liken the development of humanity to the growth of an individual; but to infer that the human race is now in its old age, merely on the strength of the comparison, is obviously unjustifiable. That is what Bacon and the ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... of most strong lion-heart—in whom, as it were, within a frame of oak and iron the gods had planted the soul of 'a man of genius' ... the essential element, as of all such men, not scorching fire (merely), but shining illuminative light ... the most sure-eyed perception of what is what on this God's earth." His invasion of England is known as the Norman Conquest, and it involved the introduction of the feudal system and Norman manners in the habits and speech of the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the form of a lower group, though no doubt fish more nearly related to foetal state" (p. 42). The greater divergence which adults show seems to him to be due to the fact that selection acts more on the later than on the embryonic stages. He realises very clearly how illuminative the theory of evolution is when applied to the puzzling facts of embryonic development. "The less differences of foetus—this has obvious meaning on this view: otherwise how strange that a horse, a man, a bat should ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... C.W.E. Miller of Johns Hopkins University, Professors J.H. Wright and A.A. Howard of Harvard University, and to Mr. A.T. Robinson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Likewise I must acknowledge my obligations, in the elucidation of particularly vexed and corrupt passages, to the illuminative comments of Sturz, or Wagner, or Gros, or Boissee, or all combined. Additional thanks are due to many others who have helped or shall yet help to make Dio in ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... is a phrase which does not exclude—perhaps it even suggests—some hint of dullness. The matter-of-fact people are valuable in their way, but rarely illuminative, and it is because they lack the imagination that means sympathy. Now in Jesus' case there is a quickness and vividness of sympathy—he likes the birds and flowers and beasts he uses as illustrations. They are not the "natural ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... altogether a supernatural work wrought in it by our Lord,—may nevertheless succeed, by lifting up the spirit above all created things, and raising it upwards in humility, after some years spent in a purgative life, and advancing in the illuminative. I do not very well know what they mean by illuminative: I understand it to mean the life of those who are making progress. And they advise us much to withdraw from all bodily imagination, and draw near to the contemplation of the Divinity; for they say that those who have advanced so far would be ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... oil poured upon it, a luminous bottle will be formed; for on taking out the cork, to admit the atmospheric air, the empty space in the vial will become luminous; and if the bottle be well closed, it will preserve its illuminative power for ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... privately printed of an evening passed by me at Woolner, the sculptor's, when Gladstone met Tennyson for the first time? If I had been able to enjoy more of such incidents, I should also have made documents. But my opportunities have been limited. For future historians, the illuminative value of such writing ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... literature of the Christians. He is in admiration of the traditional figure of the Founder of their Church. He quotes certain phrases, especially from the four orthodox Gospels. They move him to eloquence, and their poignancy and illuminative power have an effect upon his friends. He ends by saying: "For my part, I have come to make it a sort of rule to act as this Man Christ would have had me act. He seems to me to have led the most perfect life I ever read of, and the practical maxims ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... which, though often interesting, are pretty identical, save when written by little prigs. But the letters of an undergraduate—especially when the person is Matthew Arnold, and the University the Oxford of the years 1841-45—ought to be not a little symptomatic, not a little illuminative. We might have learnt from them something more than we know at present about the genesis and early stages of that not entirely comprehensible or classifiable form of Liberalism in matters political, ecclesiastical, and general which, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... here. In short, throughout the book, he is invaluable as a critic, if not impeccable in criticism. His faults, and the causes of them, are obvious, separable, negligible: his merits (the chief of them, as usual, the constant shower of happy and illuminative phrase) as rare in quality as ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... exalted altitude play all manner of wild and romantic games. And yet they would also take up books into those cool branches and do lessons! Of Ste at this period his governess remarks, "It gave him great pleasure to enter a new rule in arithmetic"—an illuminative sentence, in which one sees the governess ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... then, with Dionysius (Div. Nom. iv), that the light was the sun's light, formless as yet, being already the solar substance, and possessing illuminative power in a general way, to which was afterwards added the special and determinative power required to produce determinate effects. Thus, then, in the production of this light a triple distinction was made between light and darkness. First, as to the cause, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... agent except electricity. For instance, coal-gas exhausts only about 6- 1/2 times its volume of air when it is burnt; but since, volume for volume, acetylene ordinarily yields from three to fifteen times as much light as coal-gas, it follows that the same illuminative value is obtainable from acetylene by considerably less exhaustion of the air than from coal-gas. The exact ratio depends on the degree of efficiency of the burners, or of the methods by which light is obtained ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... a cruel man, either, and so his remark is illuminative, for it shows a certain attitude of mind, and it shows women where they have made their mistake. They have been too patient and unassertive—they have not set a high enough value on themselves, and it is ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... take a liberty and run our eyes over the bookshelves we find many volumes relating to the development of sea power and textbooks of an old vintage on the sailing of ships and like matters. And if we were to pry into the drawers of an old walnut cabinet in the study we should find illuminative data touching the life of Andrew Kelton. It is well for us to know that he was born in Indiana, as far as possible from salt water; and that, after being graduated from Annapolis, he served his country until retired for ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... to Robert that events would transpire during the night which would be illuminative, but he could not be persuaded to indicate to the curious youth just ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... His mind, however, traveled faster than we did. He often stopped me to make a change in a line or in the business which to me was not at all clear. You could not always grasp, at once, just what he was aiming at. But once understood, the idea became illuminative, and extended into the next, or even to succeeding acts of the play. He could detect a weak spot quicker than any one I ever knew, and could remedy or straighten it out just ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... Spaniards had discovered the value of the pelts of the fur-bearing animals of California, and a few venturesome spirits were soon to learn that the western mountains, forests and rivers abounded in the same profitable game. In his interesting and illuminative American Fur Trade of the Far West, Chittenden has shed a flood of ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... which they were executed, as commonly received; but who ever has tried to comprehend the movements of the vessels on June 1st, as I elicited them? Assuming their correctness, it was a mere mental diversion, in result rather confusing than illuminative to a student; whereas ships arranged like beads on a string can give an impression fundamentally correct, and to be apprehended at a glance. So far from tending to lucidity, accumulation of detail in pursuit ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... Osmyn Zelma first revealed her tragic power. In her fitful tenderness, in the passionate reproaches which she stormed upon him, in her entreaties and imprecations, she was the poet's ideal, and more. She dashed into the crude and sketchy character bold strokes of Nature and illuminative gleams of genius, all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various |
