"Referable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Marquise d'Aiglemont's age, this first, this most poignant pain of all, is always referable to the same cause. A woman, especially if she is a young woman, greatly beautiful, and by nature great, never fails to stake her whole life as instinct and sentiment and society all unite to bid her. Suppose that that life fails her, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... strong man, who was still bearing the little child in the same position in which it rested when he passed me at the door of the hotel. The same fixed look of independence was in his face and his position. There was much of sternness on the face of the woman, but it was marked by pain, referable perhaps to her situation, and to the marks of recent grief. Something was to be done, but what I could not yet determine. As I pressed nearer to the man the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... mother had aimed too high and had overshot her mark. The influence indeed of her guileless and unworldly nature remained impressed upon my brother even during the time of his extremest unbelief (perhaps his ultimate safety is in the main referable to this cause, and to the happy memories of my father, which had predisposed him to love God), but my mother had insisted on the most minute verbal accuracy of every part of the Bible; she had also dwelt upon ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... slavery in this District, but sometimes recommending Congress to consider the means of abolishing slavery in the States. I should be sorry to be called upon to present any resolutions here which could not be referable to any committee or any power in Congress; and therefore I should be unwilling to receive from the legislature of Massachusetts any instructions to present resolutions expressive of any opinion whatever on the subject of slavery, as it exists at the present moment in the ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... innumerable bridges, and an utter lonesomeness, and ceaseless sudden turns and windings. One could not resist a vague feeling of anxiety, in these strait and solitary passages, which was part of the strange enjoyment of the time, and which was referable to the novelty, the hush, the darkness, and the piratical appearance and unaccountable pauses of the gondoliers. Was not this Venice, and is not Venice forever associated with bravoes and unexpected dagger-thrusts? That valise of mine might represent fabulous wealth to the ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Ruanwelle, a fort about forty miles distant from Colombo, derives its name from the sands of the river which flows below it,—rang-welle, "golden sand." "Rang-galla," in the central province, is referable to the same ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... Sunday morning; that, he said, applied to scores of other people besides himself. Then there was his alleged disturbed appearance and guilty demeanour. The evidence of that was, he contended, doubtful in any case, and referable to another cause; as also his leaving Dunedin in the way and at the time he did. He scouted the idea that murderers are compelled by some invisible force to betray their guilt. "The doings of men," he urged, "and their success are regulated ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... be a curious and instructive inquiry, could we institute it with success, how much of the contempt of danger manifested by the wandering knight was referable to genuine valor, and what proportion to the strength of a Milan coat, and the temper of a Toledo or Ferrara blade. And it would be still more curious, although perhaps not so instructive, to estimate the purity and fidelity of the heroines of chivalry; to ascertain the amount of true devotion ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... the things that struck me as being referable to nothing but the teaching of the Holy Spirit, was the interest manifested by this boy for the Jews. His active Protestantism was easily accounted for; but to give him an idea of Judaism would have been impossible. He could not read. His knowledge of language did not go far enough to ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... they are relieved if a Christian woman visits them and lays her hand upon them. Such service is always rewarded by a gift of gold and silver."[A] These folk evidently correspond to the Kirkgrims of Scandinavian countries, and the traditions respecting both are probably referable to the ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... oceanic Mammalia—the whales—show striking resemblances to those prodigious, extinct, marine reptiles, the Ichthyosauria, and this not only in structures readily referable to similarity of habit, but in such matters as greatly elongated premaxillary bones, together with the concealment of certain bones of the skull by ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... banks of the Yamuna where Krishna sported. These legends must have been prevalent in India some time before they travelled so far. Some of them are depicted on a pillar found at Mandor and possibly referable to the fourth century A.D. See Arch. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... and extremely uncertain of my sense of touch, both in the left leg and the left hand and arms. I had been taking some slight medicine of Beard's; and immediately wrote to him describing exactly what I felt, and asking him whether those feelings could be referable to the medicine? He promptly replied: 'There can be no mistaking them from your exact account. The medicine cannot possibly have caused them. I recognise indisputable symptoms of overwork, and I wish to take you in hand without any loss of time.' They have greatly modified since, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... father, "is strictly referable to natural causes. These poor people infect one another with their superstitions, and so repeat in imagination the images of terror ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... nothing can evade their full, explicit declaration concerning the principle of a right in the people to choose,—which right is directly maintained, and tenaciously adhered to. All the oblique insinuations concerning election bottom in this proposition, and are referable to it. Lest the foundation of the king's exclusive legal title should pass for a mere rant of adulatory freedom, the political divine proceeds dogmatically to assert,[80] that, by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... during motor activity. Warned by this weariness, the man takes rest—may indeed be forced to do so; but, unless I am mistaken, he who is intensely using the brain does not feel in the common use of it any sensation referable to the organ itself which warns him that he has taxed it enough. It is apt, like a well-bred creature, to get into a sort of exalted state under the stimulus of need, so that its owner feels amazed at the ease of its processes ...
— Wear and Tear - or, Hints for the Overworked • Silas Weir Mitchell
... the number of undoubtedly Ganoid fossil Fishes, and great as is their range in time, a large mass of evidence has recently been adduced to show that almost all those respecting which we possess sufficient information, are referable to the same sub-ordinal groups as the existing 'Lepidosteus', 'Polypterus', and Sturgeon; and that a singular relation obtains between the older and the younger Fishes; the former, the Devonian Ganoids, ...
— Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... everything in architectural design is relative; it is to be considered in relation to the expression and design of the whole, and ornament is to be placed where it will emphasize certain points or certain features of the building. It must form a part of the grouping of the whole, and be all referable to a central and predominating idea. A building so planned, built, and decorated becomes, in fact, what all architecture—what every artistic design in fact should be—an organized whole, of which every ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... beithluisnion, from the name of its two first letters, beith, which signifies a birch-tree, and luis, the mountain-ash. If this kind of writing had been introduced in Christian times, it is quite unlikely that such names would have been chosen. They are manifestly referable to a time when a tree had some significance beyond the useful or the ornamental. It has been supposed that the names of the letters were given to the trees, and not the names of the trees to the letters. It is at least certain ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... draw it back by means of a string. Another seems to have been to thump on bedroom doors with a boot-heel, the unmistakable marks of which remain to this day, and were pointed out to me by our hostess. If there are really any noises not referable to ordinary domestic causes, it is not improbable that these practical jokers made a confidant of some one about the estate, who amuses himself by occasionally—it is only occasionally that the more remarkable noises are said to be heard—repeating their tricks. The steward or factor on the ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... shift—inimitably at odds with any active freshness. And the stale and the light, even though so scantly rebounding, the too densely socialised, group was the English, and the "positive" and hardy and steady and wind-washed the French; and it was all as flushed with colour and patched with costume and referable to record and picture, to literature and history, as a more easily amusing and less earnestly uniform age could make it. When I speak of this opposition indeed I see it again most take effect in an antithesis that, on one side and the other, swallowed ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... cunninghami. Lindley and Hutton figure in their fossil flora a minute branch of Dacrydium cupressinum, in order to show how nearly the twigs of a large tree, from fifty to a hundred feet high, may resemble some of the "fossils referable to Lycopodiaceae." More than one of the Oolitic twigs in my collection are of a resembling character, and may have belonged either to cone-bearing trees or to club mosses. Respecting, however, the real character of at least ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... have been solved by recent travellers, and not a few of them are referable to polar ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... the whole as so many days, refer the sum to the cycle of 260 days, which will in almost every case measure them evenly as a whole, or by its leading factor, 13. That the smaller series attached to day columns are all multiples of 13 and referable to the cycle of 260 days has been shown by Foerstemann as well as in the preceding part of this paper. But it is worthy of note that the difficulty mentioned occurs only in reference to series found in that portion of the Dresden manuscript which Foerstemann has designated Codex B (page ...
— Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices • Cyrus Thomas
... who found perfection of form and finish in the lilies of the Madonna. Finally there is the correspondence, in action as well as repose, of body, limbs, head, and face, to which, under inspiration of the soul, the air and manner of lovely women are always referable. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... screen and put them in a portfolio. A slight sense of profanation ensued; not so much of infidelity towards those two dear friends, nor certainly of irreverence towards Mr. Watts or the late Sir Edward Burne-Jones, but referable to the insistence with which I had clamoured for those portraits, the delight experienced at their arrival, and the solid satisfaction anticipated ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... refer to a previously-implanted conviction in ourselves of their rationality and justice. Or why declare that 'the Lord is holy, just and good' unless there is recognised and independent conception of holiness and goodness, to which the subsequent assertion is referable? 'You know what holiness is, what it is to be good? Then, He is that'—not, 'that is so—because he is that'; though, of course, when once the converse is demonstrated, this, too, follows, and may be ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... not obvious why the author objects to "chance" or "external conditions making a woodpecker." He allows that variation is ultimately referable to conditions and that the nature of the connexion is unknown, i.e. that the result is fortuitous. It is not clear in the original to how much of the ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... because differences of religion, nationality, race, can neither with safety nor propriety be permitted to enter into the party contests. The unanimity with which the Negro voters acted with a party was not referable to any race prejudice. On the contrary, the Negroes invited the political cooperation of their white brethren, and voted as a unit because proscribed as such. They deprecated the establishment of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... afterwards reviving in the middle ages, and gradually growing more intense in modern times as material has been offered for it through the increase of knowledge or the activity of speculation; varying in name, in form, in degree, but referable to similar ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... good, yet not so as to place his end in this his own good: even as one may have another special love for one's neighbor, besides the love of charity which is founded on God, when we love him by reason of usefulness, consanguinity, or some other human consideration, which, however, is referable to charity. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... a kind of lameness connected with, or attributable to, the kennel. According to the early opinion of Mr. Asheton Smith, who is a good authority, it was referable to some peculiarity in the breed or management of the hounds; but, agreeably to a later opinion, it is dependent on situation and subsoil, and may be aggravated or increased by circumstances over which we have no control. Some kennels are in low and damp ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... pleased" each time Beauty offered a wisdom I accepted, became an unanswerable conviction I could not argue about; but that the guidance—waking a responsive emotion in myself of love—was referable to any particular name I could not, by any stretch of desire or imagination, ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... sensible observations on this subject. When all that has been said about it is carefully examined, it is clear that various circumstances have given rise to the misconception. Much of it is applicable to the whale;[6] much is referable to thick, low, fog-banks, which even experienced seamen have mistaken for land,[7] an opinion coinciding with what has been said of this same Kraken, by a Latin ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... addressed him when he spoke. 'That wine cheereth man, your Lordship very well knows,' quoth Davie, in his dry way: and seeing his Lordship had drank a bottle and a half since he sat down, I should think he did, my dears. 'But this, that wine cheereth God, is referable to the drink-offering commanded by God of the Jews, wherein the wine doth seem to typify the precious blood of Christ, and the thankfulness of him that hath his iniquity thereby purged away. For in the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Numbers you shall find this drink-offering ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... infrequently cloudy, opalescent and chatoyant, and is then known as "cymophane" (Gr. [Greek: kyma], a "cloud"). The cloudiness is referable to the presence of multitudes of microscopic cavities. Some of the cymophane, when cut with a convex surface, forms the most valuable kind of cat's-eye (see CAT'S-EYE). A remarkable dichroic variety of chrysoberyl is known as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... if any, I should say, were Buddhist. Those in or upon the edge of the water were rather, I should suppose, referable to the worship of the Nagas, or snake-gods. The figures in all the temples are almost always in an erect position, and I have never been able to discover any ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... passengers betokened anything but respectful astonishment, and that various telegraphic communications appeared to be passing between them and some persons outside the vehicle, whereupon it occurred to him that these demonstrations might be, in some remote degree, referable to the humorous deportment ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... disfigures Sydney Smith's controversial method. In 1810 he wrote, very characteristically, about his friend Lord Grey—"His deficiency is a want of executive coarseness." This is a fault with which he could never have charged himself. His own "executive coarseness" is referable in part to the social standard of the day, when ladies as refined as the Miss Berrys "d——d" the too-hot tea-kettle, and Canning referred to a political opponent as "the revered and ruptured Member." In a similar vein Sydney jokes incessantly about skin-disease ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... beginning, but under encouragement did very fairly. There was a want of breadth observable in his rendering of the cheeks, as well as the appetite, of the boy; and there was a certain tameness in his fairy, referable to an under-current of desire to account for her. Still, as the first lumbering performance of a good-humoured monster, ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens |
