"Attribute" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thus, although I had now been knocking about at sea for more than three years, and had met with many queer experiences, I had never, thus far, heard a sound that I could not reasonably account for and attribute to some known source; yet on this particular night—my second night alone in the longboat—I was sitting comfortably enough in the stern-sheets, steering by a star—for I had no lantern wherewith to illuminate my compass—and ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... whether it brings part of the after-burden with it or not; for sometimes the child brings into the world a piece of the amnios upon its head, and is what mid wives call the caul, and ignorantly attribute some extraordinary virtue to the child so born; but this opinion is only the effect of their ignorance; for when a child is born with such a crown (as some call it) upon its brows, it generally betokens weakness ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... English and American. Where else should we expect to find a thief?—And now you had better get your coffee. Because we have lost a treasure, there is no reason for starving. For my part, I shall break my fast with white wine. I feel unaccountably heated and thirsty to-day. I can only attribute it to the shock of the discovery. And yet, you will bear me out, I supported ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... corroborate it to a small extent. This morning I was confined to my bed with the beginnings of a bad influenzal cold. At midday I developed the Blue Disease, and now I am as well as I have ever been in the whole of my life. I attribute my cure to the ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... as no better than the rudest barbarians, dwelling in caves, subsisting on reptiles, herbs, and wild fruits, and strangers to the simplest arts of civilized life. Other and more reliable traditions, however, attribute to them a knowledge of agriculture, and some little acquaintance with navigation; while there is a strong probability that they were the authors of those huge structures commonly called Cyclopean, remains of which are still visible in many parts of Greece and Italy, and on the western ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... is a rising young man of good family, and that he will never allow you to put your hands into dishwater. I hope this is true and that he does not drink. Rum has certainly paralyzed more dukes and such things than war has. I attribute this to the fact that princes and dukes are generally more reckless about exposing themselves to the demon rum than to the rude alarums and one ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... most encouraging, which they cannot but attribute to the personal efforts and instruction of the faithful Principal, who considers religious instruction a solemn duty which he cannot commit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... not even, we believe, his signature; though we do know something of what Dante did and thought, for his religion and his politics are manifested in his poems; whereas Shakespeare's works have the divine attribute of impersonality. Here is one supreme poet of whom the world would gladly hear anything; but nothing remains to feed the modern appetite, which is never so well gratified as when a rare and sublime genius stands revealed as the writer of ordinary ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... have no say in the matter. As we are made, so we must work out our own salvation. It has been your lot to witness many disasters, but had these things occurred with other girls as the central figure, would you have attributed this hideous curse to their lives? Would you? Never. But you readily attribute it to your own. I am an old man my dear; older to-day, perhaps, by far than my years call for. I have seen so much of misery and trouble that sometimes I have thought that all life is just one long sea of disaster. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... XII altogether incredible. To what end should he, on the one side, engage to assist Cesare with 300 lances to "oppress" the Orsini—if necessary, and among others—whilst, on the other, he goes to Orsini with the story which they attribute to him? What a mean, treacherous, unkingly figure must he not cut as a consequence! He may have been—we know, indeed, that he was—no more averse to double-dealing than any other Cinquecentist; but he was probably as averse to being found out in a meanness and made to look contemptible as ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... do so, sooner or later his dishonesty will be discovered, and will be estimated accordingly. But in this he is to be governed only by the plain rules of honesty which should govern us all. Having said so much, I shall not scruple as I go on to attribute to the pecuniary result of my labours all the importance which I felt them to ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... looked forward to his success. And in what delightful language she had done so! "Faint heart never won fair lady." It was thus, or almost thus, that she had encouraged him. He knew well that she had in truth meant nothing more than her words had seemed to signify. He did not for a moment attribute to her aught else. But might not he get another lesson from them? He had often told himself that he was not in love with Laura Standish;—but why should he not how tell himself that he was in love with her? Of course ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... witchcraft, and charms as fables and illusions, the effects of imagination in weak minds, who, foolishly persuaded of the excessive power possessed by the devil, attribute to him a thousand things which are purely natural, but the physical reasons for which are unknown to them, or which are the effects of the art of certain charlatans, who make a trade of imposing on the simple and ignorant. These opinions are supported by the ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... beauty—just as a lovely face—mind, I say LOVELY, not PRETTY, not HANDSOME—is the outward and visible presence of a lovely mind. Therefore, saying I cannot dissociate beauty from use, I am free to say as many poetic things—though, mind, I don't claim them: you attribute them to me—as shall be of the highest use, namely, to embody and reveal the true. But a machine has material use for its end. The most grotesque machine I ever saw that DID something, I felt to be in its own kind beautiful; ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... our nature to mingle our interests and prejudices with the operation of our reasoning powers, and attribute to the objects of our likes and dislikes qualities they do not possess and effects they can not produce. The effects of the present tariff are doubtless over-rated, both in its evils and in its advantages. By one class of reasoners ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. Aristotle's entire system of philosophy rests upon his book of psychology and that, I think, rests on his statement that the same attribute cannot at the same time and in the same connexion belong to and not belong to the same subject. The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... seeking subtilely for first causes, wishes to place on such foundations the legislation of a people, instead of adapting the laws to their knowledge of the human heart, and to the lessons of history, that it is necessary to attribute all the misfortunes our beautiful France has experienced. These errors have necessarily led to the rule of the men of blood. In fact, who has proclaimed the principle of insurrection as a duty? Who has paid adulation to the nation while claiming for it a sovereignty which it was incapable ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... place of Darwinian principles, new ideas are gradually winning general acceptance, which, while they are in harmony with the principles of adaptation and use, (Lamarck) enunciated before the time of Darwin, nevertheless attribute a far-reaching importance to internal forces of development. These new conceptions necessarily involve the admission that Evolution has not ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... to withhold the name of the man of whom she had so often spoken, or let Katherine know the whole truth and judge for herself? If she decided on the latter, it would break up her friendship with Katherine, and De Burgh would attribute her action to revenge. Should that deter her? No; so long as she was sure of herself, what were opinions to her? The one thing in life to which she clung now was Katherine's affection and esteem; for her she would sacrifice ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... favorable idea of their nature than they are able to maintain in after years. Real life, like the weather, is made up of gray and cloudy days alternating with those when the sun shines and the fields are gay. Young people, however, exhibit fine weather and no clouds. Later they attribute to marriage the evils inherent in life itself; for there is in man a disposition to lay the blame of his own misery on the persons ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... appears to be all a matter of "luck." Country people have always been very superstitious in regard to it; and not understanding the true reasons for a successful or an unsuccessful churning, they attribute any remarkable effects to ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... man, too, may be honest, may be generous, may be pious;—but surely he cannot be manly. The self-conscious assumption of any outward manner, the striving to add,—even though it be but a tenth of a cubit to the height,—is fatal, and will at once banish the all but divine attribute. Before the man can be manly, the gifts which make him so must be there, collected by him slowly, unconsciously, as are his bones, his flesh, and his blood. They cannot be put on like a garment for the nonce,—as may a little learning. A man cannot ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... depend on our knowledge of it, or acceptance of it, it is a fact a truth! How then can any one dare to say that such a man as my farther is a work of the devil? I thought the sin of sins was to attribute to the devil ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... the moor, and afterward in the park. We did not know what to make of it. I should at once have concluded it caused by prelusive illness, but for my remembrance of what both my uncle and myself had seen, so long before, in the thunderstorm; while John, willing enough to attribute its recurrence to that cause, found it impossible to concede that he was anything but well when crossing the moor. I thought, however, that excitement, fatigue, and lack of food, might have something to do with it, and with ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... over the continent. A man born here is distinguishable by his gait from among an hundred other men, so remarkable are they for a pliability of sinews, and a peculiar agility, which attends them even to old age. I have heard some persons attribute this to the effects of the whale oil, with which they are so copiously anointed in the various operations it must undergo ere it is fit either for the European market ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... offering follow discovery. The 'worship' of the Magi cannot have been adoration in the strict sense. We attribute too much to them if we suppose them aware of Christ's divinity. But it was clearly more than mere reverence for an earthly King. It hovered on the border-line, and meant an indefinite submission and homage to a partially discerned superiority, in which the presence of God was in some sort special. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... quicksilver, and innumerable other things, which are transported annually from those provinces. Religion and government are the same as those of Espana; but in those islands that are still unsubdued, foolish idolatry prevails. They attribute immortality to their souls, but they believe that souls wander from one body to another, according to that ridiculous [doctrine of] transmigration invented or declared by Pythagoras. Trading is much in vogue, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... to the authorized source of Christian dogma, would have found themselves completely in accord on all the momentous minutiae of drawing-room conduct; yet Mr. Leath treated his mother's foibles with a respect which Anna's experience of him forbade her to attribute ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... explained. The executorial accounts, whose terrible disarrangement I had aided, five years before, in remedying, still hung over the dying man's head, like a nightmare. He could not die, he said, with the thought in his mind, that any one might attribute this disorder to intentional maladministration—"to ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... to be a very short letter; for I have nothing to tell you, nor any thing to answer. I have not had one letter from you this month, which I attribute to the taking of the packet-boat by the French, with two mails in it. It was a very critical time for our negotiations; the ministry will say, it puts their transactions out ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... when the air is admitted, it was only at his approach that her eyes became smiling and animated. But here in this dear valley every moment appeared an age of pleasure; she saw him all day and was therefore all day happy,— resembling, she often thought, that people of Zinge[273] who attribute the unfading cheerfulness they enjoy to one genial star that ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... chief attribute of Peter's mother, and this spoke from every smile of her amiable face and every movement of her plump but still ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... I felt that now she was mine. Her face, her attitude, had spoken, if not her lips. As for her breaking away, I thought that due to a last recurrence of her old scruples concerning the barrier between us. I did not attribute it to the effect of the sudden intrusion of the gypsy's song. It was by mere accident, I told myself, that her scruples had returned at the moment of that intrusion. What was there in her love that I need ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... people in the streets almost running to their offices, at luncheon they do not masticate their food, they bolt it, and in less than ten minutes are on their way back to their office again. Everyone is urged on by this spirit of haste, and you frequently hear of sudden deaths which doctors attribute to heart failure, or some other malady, but which I suspect are caused by the continual restless hurry and worry. People who are so unnaturally eager to get rich naturally suffer ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... and smells seems to be a common attribute of genius. This sort of sensitiveness has even been credited with being the main-spring of genius, but it is improbable that the curbing of such aversions would in any way endanger it. However this may be, such supersensitiveness ill becomes the rest of us, ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... should you attribute vulgar ingratitude to me?" retorted the Comte reproachfully. "My feelings I imagine are as sensitive as your own. Am I not trying my best to be kind to that Mr. Clyffurde, who is an honoured guest in my house—just because it was Sir Percy Blakeney ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... to find this opportunity of writing to you. Since my last letter, which was dated at Libby Prison, I have been confined at Danville, Virginia; Macon and Savannah, Georgia; and at this point. My health for the most part has been very poor, which I attribute to the inactivity of prison life. I have also suffered much for want of clothing. I have a pair of shoes on to-day that I bought more than a year ago; have run about barefoot for days and weeks during the past summer; many of my comrades have ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... well played, on dinners well digested, snuff gracefully inhaled, and tranquil walks about the town. Nearly all Alencon believed this life to be exempt from ambitions and serious interests; but no man has a life as simple as envious neighbors attribute to him. You will find in the most out-of-the way villages human mollusks, creatures apparently dead, who have passions for lepidoptera or for conchology, let us say,—beings who will give themselves infinite pains about ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... her ghostlike as she passed through the living-room, their startled questions unheeded. Could it be true that she had betrayed every decent attribute of a woman in vain? Why had the counter-attack failed? Because Westerling had been too strong, too clever, for old Partow? Because God was still with the heaviest battalions? Half running, half stumbling, the light of the lantern bobbing and ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... be the cause against which he revolts, will always be sure of a certain ascendency. Men are prone to attribute power to pretension, and he who stands foremost in the breach will at least win the suffrages of those whose cause he assumes to defend. In this way if happened that exactly as my comrades fell in my esteem, I was elevated in theirs; and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... we attribute the daily rotation to the higher region of the heavens, we should have to endow it with force and power sufficient to carry with it the innumerable host of the fixed stars—every one a body of very great compass and much ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... porcelain-painting, which art I kept up for many years, and was, of course, assiduous in visiting the galleries, Green Vault, and all works of art. I became well acquainted with Passavant, the director. I was getting better, but was still far from being as mentally vigorous as I had been. I now attribute this to the enormous daily dose of bromide which I continued to take, probably mistaking its influence for the original nervous exhaustion itself. It was not indeed till I got to England, and substituted lupulin in the form of hops—that is to say, pale ale or "bitter"—in ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... ground, when they are in their flight over certain 'neighbouring fields hereabouts: a relation I should not have made, if I had not received it from several credible men. But those who are less inclined to heed superstition, attribute it to some occult quality in the ground, and to somewhat of antipathy between it and the geese, such as they say is betwixt wolves and scyllaroots: for that such hidden tendencies and aversions, as we call sympathies ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... recognized to the exclusion of other principles of succession. James was not content to ascribe his accession to such mundane circumstances as the personal unfitness of his rivals and the obvious advantages of a union of the English and Scottish crowns; and he was led to attribute a supernatural virtue to the hereditary principle which had overcome obstacles so tremendous. Hence his theory of divine hereditary right. It must be distinguished from the divine right which the Tudors claimed; that was a right which ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... instantly formed. If the goldsmith corroborated his fear, he would publicly attribute the rescued work to the man who created it. And he persisted in this intention, indignantly silencing the secret voice which strove to shake it. It temptingly urged that Myrtilus, so rich in successes, needed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... gentlemen. Instead of the softness and effeminacy which characterizes the men of rank of most countries, they exhibit a union of elegance and strength, of robustness of frame and freshness of complexion, which I am inclined to attribute to their living so much in the open air, pursuing so eagerly the invigorating ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... meaning of Yadayim 3, 5, Adoyot v. 3, Sabbat 1. To what did such diversity of opinion relate, if not to the canonical character of the books? A specific answer to the question is not given by the learned writer,(69) who is too eager in his endeavor to attribute the settlement of the third canon to the great synagogue, and to smooth away all diversities of opinion about several books, after that time, as if none could afterwards question the authoritative settlement by that body. He will not even allow a wider canon to the Alexandrian Jews than that ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... relief and mortification when she at last refused him. We may take it as evidence of the natural want of perception and right instinctive judgment in minor matters which some who knew and loved him attribute to him. But, besides that, the man who found relief in this ill-conceived exercise of humour was one in whom the prospect of marriage caused some strange and ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... country people in the remote American States attribute cancer to an excessively free use of the wild ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... arise altogether from brilliant mental qualities. I am disposed to attribute it to higher reasons. It seems to me that his high moral sense of integrity and right, and the benevolence of his character, had more to do with it. These led him constantly through life to give his customers excellence of quality in the goods he made, combined ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... of St. Theodore, whose fortress, defended by the Venetian mercenaries against the Turks, showed one of those examples of heroic constancy we so generally and erroneously attribute to patriotic courage; for, defying the enemy to the last, the garrison defended the castle until the Turks had stormed and filled it with their numbers, and then blew it up, destroying every one within the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... good; so I say to the reader, with respect to myself, that I disclaim all praise on account of any part I may have taken in the promotion of this great cause, for that I am desirious above all things to attribute my best endeavours in it to the influence of a superior Power; of Him, I mean, who gave me a heart to feel—who gave me courage to begin—and perseverance to proceed—and that I am thankful to Him, and this with the deepest feeling of gratitude and humility, for having permitted me to become ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... "Hendinos," and according to a very ancient custom of theirs, is deposed from his authority if under his government the state meets with any disaster in war; or if the earth fails to produce a good crop; in the same way as the Egyptians are accustomed to attribute calamities of that kind to their rulers. The chief priest among the Burgundians is called "the Sinistus." But he is irremovable and not exposed to any such dangers ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... apparently causeless unfruitfulness in marriage that even physicians, with a knowledge of all apparent conditions in the parties, cannot explain; but when, as elsewhere related in this volume, impregnation by artificial means is successfully practised, it is useless to attribute barrenness to purely ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... direction, he too had believed that the final achievement, the consummation of human life, was this flinging oneself over the precipice, down the bottomless pit of love. Now he realised that love, even in its intensest, was only an attribute of the human soul: one of its incomprehensible gestures. And to fling down the whole soul in one gesture of finality in love was as much a criminal suicide as to jump off a church-tower or a mountain-peak. Let a man ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... shape of a 'French count' (to use Farquhar's phrase in the 'Beau's Stratagem'), who has all the air of a cupidor dechaine. Milady seems highly literary; to which, and your honor's acquaintance with the family, I attribute the pleasure of having seen them. She is also very pretty, even in a morning; a species of beauty on which the sun of Italy does not shine so ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... patience, traits which have been largely amalgamated with the intellectual quickness and emotional nature of the Celt, and have thus produced the prevailing English temperament as we actually know it. To the Anglo-Saxon blood we may doubtless attribute our general sobriety, steadiness, and persistence; our scientific patience and thoroughness; our political moderation and endurance; our marked love of individual freedom and impatience of arbitrary restraint. The Anglo-Saxon was slow to learn, but retentive of what he learnt. ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... which, in the low regions of the atmosphere bring back the cold air of the high latitudes toward the equator. To the general impulsion which these trade-winds give the surface of the sea, we must attribute the equinoctial current, the force and rapidity of which are not sensibly modified by the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... ashamed to attribute such ideas to me!' retorted Arkady hotly; 'I don't consider my father wrong from that point of view; I think he ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... determine and produce their changes; they witness the storm as it rises in its wrath; they listen with awe to the thunder-peal, and gaze with startling terror upon the lightning as it flashes from within the bosom of the black cloud, and are utterly ignorant to what power to attribute the dreadful phenomena; they look upward to the face of the sky, and see the myriad starry hosts that glitter there, and all is to them a mighty maze of dazzling confusion. It is for their fancy to explain, interpret, and fill up the brilliant ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... detail, that the alteration was scarcely visible. She wore the same softly spreading lilac gown, she wrote on her portfolio with the same gold pencil presumably the same thoughts. If her softly drooping curls were faded and cast lighter shadows over thinner cheeks, one could more easily attribute the dimness and thinness to the lack of one's own memory ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... get the base of numeration and the mode of notation so mingled together, that they cannot separate them sufficiently to obtain a distinct idea of either; and some are not conscious that they are distinct, but see in the Arabic mode nothing save decimal notation, and attribute to it all those high qualities that belong to the mode only. The Arabic mode is an invention of the highest merit, not surpassed by any other; but the admiration that belongs to it is thus bestowed upon a quite commonplace idea, a misapplication, which, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... Canadian section, obviously contributed by Mr. CROSBIE GARSTIN, who has knocked about most of the world marked red on the maps. Here his humour and vitality are at their keenest. The rest of a well-told tale I attribute to Mrs. ALFRED SIDGWICK, with the exception of a pugilistic episode, for which I imagine that the male fist was called in to supplement her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various
... concerns of the government in which they were laboring. That there were occasional instances of the disregard of this regulation by the enthusiastic members of the order may be supposed, but it will be unjust and unfounded to attribute to this society a settled policy of interference in the affairs of the nations where they were ...
— Japan • David Murray
... of foliage, generally of laurel, olive, myrtle, ivy, or oak, appear upon coins; sometimes encircling the symbolical figures, and sometimes as chaplets on their heads. According to Strabo, each of these is sacred to some particular personification of the Deity, and "significant of some particular attribute, and in general, all evergreens were Dionysiac plants, that is, symbols of the generative power, signifying perpetuity of youth and vigor." The crowns of laurel, olive, etc., with which the victors in the Roman triumphs ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... more assiduous than he had ever yet shown himself in his attendance upon the Court of Marie de Medicis, constantly joining her evening circle, and absenting himself entirely from the apartments of his royal consort; a circumstance which Anne did not fail to attribute to the evil offices of the Tuscan Princess, who, as she asserted, was perpetually labouring to undermine her dignity, and to usurp her position, Soon, however, it became rumoured that it was to no effort on her own part that the Queen-mother was indebted for the constant society of the monarch, but ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... Pythagoras and Philolaus. In this connection it is curious that he makes no mention of Aristarchus, who I think will be regarded by conservative historians as his only demonstrated predecessor. To the hold of the older ideas upon his mind we must attribute the fact that in constructing his system he took great pains to make as little change as ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... recommending themselves to the Saint, because the boy had inadvertently cut his face with a knife. Although there is no inscription on this work, yet certain memories of old men belonging to our house and the fact that it contains the Vasari arms, enable us to attribute it to him without a doubt. Of this there must certainly have been some record in that convent, but their papers and everything else have been destroyed many times by soldiers, and I do not marvel at the lack of records. The manner of Lazzaro was so ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... Stephen, the eloquent writer in the Edinburgh is a party, political or religious, without a Review? and he replies, "A bell without a clapper." Such a bell would this Association have been without its Journal, and it must gratefully attribute much of its success to the ability with which in the first instance Dr. Bucknill, and subsequently Drs. Robertson, Maudsley, Sibbald, and Clouston, have helped to make an otherwise clapperless ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... "extracts which often attribute to him the very sentiments which he is opposing. But it isn't worth arguing with one of your school, who have the dishonesty to condemn writers whom you are incapable of understanding, on the faith of extracts which ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... rather embarrassing to say. For instance, is the coloration due to the hydrocarbons which the waters hold in solution, or is it because they flow through districts of peat, coal, and anthracite; or should we not rather attribute it to the enormous quantity of minute plants which they bear along? There is nothing certain in the matter. Under any circumstances, they are excellent to drink, of a freshness quite enviable for the climate, and without after-taste, ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... sense of smell has fallen into disrepute, and a deaf person is reluctant to speak of it. Miss Keller's acute sense of smell may account, however, in some part for that recognition of persons and things which it has been customary to attribute to a special sense, or to an unusual development of the power that we all seem to have of telling when some one ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... violent diseases among the operatives. From two to four hundred persons are often confined in workshops six hundred feet long, with no means of ventilation except windows on one side only. The air is breathed and re-breathed, until the operatives complain of languor and headache, which they attribute to overwork. The real cause of the headache is the inhalation of foul air at every expansion of the lungs. If the proprietors would provide efficient means for ventilating their workshops, the cost of construction would be repaid with compound interest, in the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... daughter, however, of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, having and desiring to admit no other opinion but its," as she says in her will. Bourdaloue calls mere (pure) love "a bare faith, which has for its object no verity of the gospel's, no mystery of Jesus Christ's, no attribute of God's, nothing whatever, unless it be, in a word, God." In the presence of death, on the approach of the awful realities of eternity, Madame Guyon no doubt felt the want of a more simple faith in the mighty and living God. Fenelon had not waited ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... sir,' replied Mr Tapley; 'she hasn't gone so far as that yet. Which I attribute principally to my not havin' asked her. But we was wery agreeable together—comfortable, I may say—the night I come home. ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... states "the cost of the mansion now building for Mr. Hope, in the Rue St. Dominique, including furniture and objects of art, is estimated at six hundred thousand pounds!"—[If this is an attribute of Hope, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the cause of the falling of bodies, a gravitating force is spoken of; and thus the ideas of PROPERTY and of FORCE are confounded with each other. Precisely that which is the essential attribute of every force—that is, the UNION of indestructibility with convertibility—is wanting in every property: between a property and a force, between gravity and motion, it is therefore impossible to establish the equation required for a rightly conceived causal ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... do not attribute this crime to Fantomas, then at whose door do you lay it?" demanded the detective, who was well aware that he must guard against being the ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... action, Lord Eynesford did not feel that more was required than a temperately expressed surprise and a hinted disapproval of the course adopted. He declined his wife's invitation to regard the matter in the most serious light, or to attribute any heinous offence to the Premier, contenting himself with remarking that Medland had a more powerful motive to maintain order than any one else; he also ventured to suggest that the best way of considering the question was not through a mist of prejudice against the ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... sensible of her ungraciousness, and to miss the refreshment of cheerful sympathy. On going up after breakfast he found Violet weaker and more ill than he had previously thought her, and her solicitous inquiries about his sister made him the more attribute this to distress at those moody looks. He would not hear of again admitting Theodora, and in bitterness of spirit she wrote the letters, and tried to content Johnnie—all in vain; for strive to conceal it as she would, he always seemed to perceive her bad moods, and never would ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... learn myself to take some vile views from nature. When Will Clerk and I lived very much together, I used sometimes to make them under his instruction. He to whom, as to all his family, art is a familiar attribute, wondered at me as a Newfoundland dog would at a greyhound which showed ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... the richer by two hundred and fifty dollars—as large a "killing" as he had ever made in any single day, one large enough to elevate him to the rank of prince among the "sure-thing snides." He said nothing about his luck to his family, but let them attribute his unprecedented good humor to the news he brought ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... This attribute of our national mind availed even to give rise to an English school of painting. It came late; that it ever came at all is remarkable enough. A people apparently less apt for that kind of achievement never existed. So profound is the English joy in meadow and stream and hill, that, unsatisfied ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... of Oriental customs, which make scarcely any reference to the deification of sex. We have always been told, for example, that Bacchus was the god of the harvest and that the Greek Pan was the god of nature. We have not been told that these same gods were representations of the male generative attribute, and that they were worshipped as such; yet, anyone who has access to the statuettes or engravings of these various deities of antiquity, whether they be of Egypt, of India or of China, cannot fail to see that they were intended to represent generative attributes. On account of the incompleteness ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... trouble to inspect the three volumes in question which are still in the Bibliotheque Nationale. And when he opines that "it (the work) was most probably not commenced earlier than the fifteenth century of our era" (Pref. p. xiii.) M. Hermann Zotenberg, judging from the style of writing, would attribute the MS. to the beginning[FN456] of the xivth century. The French Savant has printed a specimen page in his Histoire d'Ala al-Din (p. 6; see my Suppl. vol. iii., Foreword p. ix.); and now, at the request of sundry experts, he is preparing for publication other proofs which ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... indeed one of the most pleasing pieces of renaissance work in existence, and one would be tempted to attribute it to Joao de Castilho were it not that it is more French than any of his work, and that in 1525 he can hardly have come back to Thomar, where the Claustro da Micha, the first of the new additions, was only begun ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... effect of a flash of unconscious inference from a mass of data buried in the inscrutable darkness of our forgotten self. Together with this, there is also a levelling-up philosophy, a sort of modernized ontologism, which would attribute all natural intuition to a more immediate self-revelation on God's part than seems ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... such places on Vaygats, where their idols are to be found. The Russians call these idols 'bolvany.'[55] Both the Russians and Samoyeds are very tolerant in regard to matters of faith. The Russians, for instance, say that the Samoyeds attribute to their 'bolvans' the same importance which they themselves attach to their sacred pictures, and find in this nothing objectionable. The Samoyeds have songs and sagas, relating among other things ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... God; or those who deny to them the name of saints forget the words of Him Who said: By their fruits ye shall know them; of Him Who said, too: That the unpardonable sin, the sin which shewed complete moral perversion, the sin against the Holy Spirit of God, was to attribute good deeds to bad motives, and say: He casteth out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... "According to Homer, Achilles had a vulnerable heel." It is a vulgar error to attribute this myth to Homer. The blind old bard nowhere says a word about it. The story of dipping Achilles in the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... the prelate, fell on his knees, kissed his hand, and said:—"My lord, in very truth, no one has ever done me so much honor as I have this day received from you. Some attribute to me a sort of sanctity, which noway belongs to me, and which ought to be referred to God alone, the author of every perfect gift. But you, my lord, have wisely separated what is valuable from what is vile, the worthy from the unworthy, the saint from the ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... he was honest and upright. He was a most reliable man; and hence he came to be extensively trusted. Whatever he undertook, he endeavoured to excel in. He would be a first-rate hewer, and he became one. He was himself accustomed to attribute much of his success to the thorough way in which he had mastered the humble beginnings of this trade. He was even of opinion that the course of manual training he had undergone, and the drudgery, as some would call it, of daily labour —first as an apprentice, and afterwards as a journeyman ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... a small glass of brandy, and slowly filled his pipe. Surprised to see that he was remaining at home, Julien rose and began to pace the floor, wondering what could be the reason of this unexpected change. As suspicious people are usually prone to attribute complicated motives for the most simple actions, he imagined that Claudet, becoming aware of the jealous feeling he had excited, had given up his promenade solely to mislead and avert suspicion. This idea irritated him still more, and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... father's daughter, and the attribute of personal dominance that in the man's case had proved so effective in dealing with Milwaukees now made itself felt in the minor question of "transportation" presented by Medenham and his motor. Her blue eyes hardened, ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... intercourse with them. Among his comrades are Mr. Pierce, surgeon, who shot his wife whilst labouring under a paroxysm of madness produced by jealousy; and Captain Good, whose favourite phantasy is the assumption of the attribute of Majesty. There is, in the same division of the establishment, a very diminutive man, who imagines himself to be Lord John Russell. He amuses himself, nearly all day long, with knitting. Captain ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... daughters, and you will be a comfort to your parents, in sickness or in health. "Forgiveness is an attribute of Heaven." ...
— No and Other Stories Compiled by Uncle Humphrey • Various
... sun is dark, the sea stands still, the mountains tremble; "at thy rebuke the sea fled." Alas! what do we mean that we look upon creatures, and act ourselves as if we were independent in our being and moving? How many things fall out and you call them casual and attribute them to fortune? How many things do the world gaze upon, think upon, and discourse upon, and yet not one thought, one word of God all the time? What more contingent than the falling of a sparrow on the ground? And yet even that is not unexpected to him, but it flows from ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... succeeding age, the subject of violent extremes of opinion in the eighteenth century, and so lightly esteemed by some that Hume could doubt if he were a poet "capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined and intelligent audience," and attribute to the rudeness of his "disproportioned and misshapen" genius the "reproach of barbarism" which the English nation had suffered from all its neighbors. Only recently has the study of him by English scholars—I do not refer to the verbal squabbles over the text—been proportioned to his ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... them. Gordon was quick, and could learn from the manners of his companions what had been said about him, and could perceive that they were aware of something of his story. Blake had no such quickness, and could attribute none of it to another. "I am very proud to have the pleasure of making you acquainted with these five young ladies." As he said this he had just paused in his narrative of Mr Whittlestaff's love, and was certain that he had changed the conversation with great effect. But the young ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... instructive discourses of his On the Art of Writing that it is a jolly difficult thing to write a play; that an act is not a chapter of a novel, still less a compote of bits of many chapters; that, while to be charmingly discursive is a paramount quality of the higher type of novelist, the same attribute in a play, whose very breath of life is essential brevity, makes it appear to go on crutches, like his own discomfited hero. It bemuses an audience and gravels the players—as the queer uncertainty of touch of so skilful, so conscientious an actor as Mr. AINLEY sufficiently ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... I attribute this fact to the detestable influence of the theatre, to which nearly all these artists are attached as Kapellmeister, or directors of opera. To this they owe the melodramatic character of their music, even though it is on the surface only—music written for show, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... as anything could be in a city street. No one was supposed to intrude upon him there; but such suppositions are ineffectual against children. From time to time the adamantine gates fell ajar, and in we slipped. It seemed a heavenly place, tenanted by a being possessed of every attribute that our imaginations could ascribe to an angel. The room and its tenant glimmer before me as I write, luminous with the sunshine of more than fifty years ago. Both were equipped for business rather than for beauty; furniture and garments ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... he had always been, and yet the very face of the town was changed to him, his son had left him, even his wife, to whom he had been married for twenty years, was altered. Was it not natural, therefore, that he should attribute all of this to the only new element that had been introduced into his life during these last months, to the one human being alive who was his declared enemy, to the one man who had openly, in the public road, before witnesses, insulted him, to the man ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... regarded with superstitious awe by the Japanese, who attribute to them the power of assuming the human shape in order to bewitch mankind. Like the fairies of our Western tales, however, they work for good as well as for evil ends. To do them a good turn is to secure powerful allies; but woe betide him who injures them!—he and his will assuredly ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... his front seat, the mush and milk dripping down his excited and happy chops. In passing, I may point out that in thus forsaking his breakfast for the automobile he was displaying what is called the power of choice—a peculiarly lordly attribute that, according to Mr. Burroughs, belongs to man alone. Yet Glen made his ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... probably prolonged by the Moor's premature caustic, which stopped the suppuration: but that God's good handiwork, called nature, triumphed at last; and that therefore it came to pass that the prince was out of danger within three days of the operation. But he was taught, it seems, to attribute his recovery to a very different source from that of a German knife. For on the morning of the 9th, when the Moor was gone, and Don Carlos lay seemingly lifeless, there descended into his chamber a Deus e machina, ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... chairs round the hearth where their children once were, but never shall be again—then, truly, can they not escape some part of the sorrow that comes, overwhelming, to those whose suffering no noble thought chastens. For it were wrong to attribute to beautiful feeling and thought a virtue they do not possess. There are, external tears that they cannot restrain; there are holy hours when wisdom cannot yet console. But, for the last time let us say it, suffering we cannot avoid for suffering there ever must be; still does ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... that has been published. It is well calculated to excite the profoundest investigation of the Christian philosopher. Whence came those sudden suggestions, those gloomy fears, those heavenly rays of joy? Much learning certainly did not make him mad. The Christian dares not attribute his intense feelings to a distempered brain. Whence came the invisible power that struck Paul from his horse? Who was it that scared Job with dreams, and terrified him with visions? What messenger of Satan ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... he would produce something compared with which the Highlander at the door of a snuff shop would deserve admiration. If an uninitiated Raphael were to attempt a painting, it would be a mere daub; indeed, the connoisseurs say that the early works of Raphael are little better. Yet, who can attribute this to want of imagination? Who can doubt that the youth of that great artist was passed amidst an ideal world of beautiful and majestic forms? Or, who will attribute the difference which appears between his first ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "The revenue officials would attribute a virtue to the taxpayer, and if he wanted to escape taxation they would require him to prove to them that he lacked the virtue ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... but my friend Boatswain, the great Newfoundland dog, who had conceived a companionable liking for me, and occasionally sought me in my apartment. To the hauntings of even such a visitant as honest Boatswain may we attribute some of the marvellous ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... the possibility of action or calculated inaction of the character above described is not to attribute to Irishmen any special measure of original sin. In every case where the executive power is divorced from the ultimate legislative authority such divergencies are likely to recur; and more than one instance may be found in our own recent history. In 1859 ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... which strikes us as soon as we begin studying primitive folk is the complexity of the organization of marriage relations under which they are living. With most of them the family, in the sense we attribute to it, is hardly found in its germs. But they are by no means loose aggregations of men and women coming in a disorderly manner together in conformity with their momentary caprices. All of them are under a certain organization, which has been described by Morgan in its general aspects ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... universally play on the guitar, singing and composing songs in praise of their sweethearts, and will commonly go to the field with their fiddle; they are merry, witty, and genial, all which I much attribute to the excellent quality of the air. They have a deadly hatred to the French, so that some of our company were flouted at for wearing red cloaks, as ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... its views. It appears to have been with the same motive that the Queen in a proclamation, which generally breathed nothing but benevolence, remitted payment of the subsidies last voted under her brother. Yet we can hardly attribute the result wholly to this. Parliamentary elections are wont to receive their impulse from the mistakes of the last administration and the evils that have come to light: and much had undeniably been done under ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... just what Jacqueline seemed no longer able to do. What energy, what spirit she had, went into the mere business of living, and there was none left for song. A voice is, more than any other physical attribute, the essence of vitality; and nature had other uses just then for ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... scandalised that any one should attribute the possibility of such wayward behaviour to the venerable Earl. In his agitation he ate another muffin. After all, if the nobleman did go jumping in the winter why should this young and horsey man presume ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... believe in the sacred character of Fire, and regard it as the mysterious element of the Universe, which typifies the Divinity. They believe, and practice strictly, with the descendants of Abraham, the law of separation, but not the practice of circumcision. With the ancient Phoenicians, they attribute extraordinary powers, to the wisdom and subtlety of the Serpent, and this reptile holds a high place in their mythology. They regard the Tortoise, as the original increment, and medium of the creation of the Earth, and view the Bear and the Wolf ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... for through all time. In pursuit of this rainbow-gold more blood and brains have been wasted than would have sufficed to make a nation. And yet a breath from Reason blows the thing to tatters, as an uprising wind annihilates a fog. Freedom is an attribute of the Eternal, and creation cannot share it with him, any more than it can share his throne with him. 'The liberty of the subject'! A contradiction in terms. Banish this unutterable folly of freedom, and control the breeding of human flesh as ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... 'No—I attribute no sort of supernaturalism to my fancy about the thing that was really about to take place. By a law of the association of ideas—contraries come into the mind as often as similarities—and the peace and solitude readily called up the notion of what would most jar with them. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... no recurrences of the same aggregate either of causes or results. There being then no historic laws, there can be no Science of History, for science cannot exist without laws. The historic prescience, which is an attribute of Infinite Intelligence, not being regulated by law, or at any rate not by any law except that of causation, is not, technically speaking, a science, and even if it were, would be utterly beyond the reach of human intellect and attainable only by ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... manner, either I am mistaken in believing that I have any talent at all, or you in the selection of the specimens of it. Yet, after all, I cannot but be conscious, in much of what I write, of an absence of that tranquillity which is the attribute and accompaniment of power. This feeling alone would make your most kind and wise admonitions, on the subject of the economy of intellectual force, valuable to me. And, if I live, or if I see any trust in coming years, doubt not but that I shall do something, whatever it ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... among people whose manners in general struck one as so good and, in particular, as so cultivated. The office of the saint—of which the festa is but the annual reaffirmation—involves not the faintest attribute of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... that on the morrow you will start fresh game, and victimize your tailor for another. The innate cruelty of the human animal is gratified, and the idea of a tailor's suffering is never conceived by a customer without involuntary cachinnation. Not only is he denied the attribute of integral manhood—which even a man-milliner by courtesy enjoys—but that principle which induces a few men of enthusiastic temperament to pay debts, is always held a fault when applied to the bills of tailors. And, what is a curious and instructive fact in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... embodying different degrees of rapacity under various names. They have as yet derived little benefit from the government of King Otho, for their taxes are greater now than they were under the Turks, and they very sagaciously attribute the existence of order in Greece to the alliance of the kings of the Franks, not to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... own, but failing in the effort, she threw herself into the Count's arms, hung round his neck, and wept like a, village maiden, whose true love is pressed for the wars. Her husband, a little ashamed, while he was much moved by this burst of affection in one to whose character it seemed an unusual attribute, was, at the same time, pleased and proud that he could have awakened an affection so genuine and so gentle in a soul so high-spirited and ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... in the present infancy of their education. The French officials are so many malignant spies—excepting yourself, indeed," he added, with a smile. "Bonaparte, who rules everywhere, is surrounded by our emigrants, who attribute their sufferings to the blacks; and he is jealous of me. I would rather say he distrusts me. Now you see my position. I ask no white to share its perils. If you go with Hedouville, you shall carry with ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... or preparations for defense, were made in all quarters—Oppugnare aut parare omnibus locis. There is much discussion among the critics whether these verbs are to be referred to the besiegers or the besieged. Cortius and Gerlach attribute oppugnare to the Romans, and parare to the men of Zama; a distinction which Kritzius justly condemns. There can be little doubt that they are spoken of both ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... thoughts of seeing you again, and if you detect any heavy clouds lowering, do not attribute them to deliberate anger, for they will be wholly chased away by your promise to strive more earnestly after the true and pure happiness, based on active exertion. Something hovered before me in my ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... observed, the most distant conception of that sentiment. You may confer numberless benefits upon them for years, and the more that is done for them the more they will expect. They do not seem to comprehend the motive which dictates an act of benevolence or charity, and they invariably attribute it to fear or the expectation of reward. When they make a present, it is with a view of getting more than its equivalent ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... of a great genius bound down by ignoble ties, and powerless in a mean dependence; his age was bitter, like that of a great genius that had fought the battle and nearly won it, and lost it, and thought of it afterwards writhing in a lonely exile. A man may attribute to the gods, if he likes, what is caused by his own fury, or disappointment, or self-will. What public man—what statesman projecting a coup—what king determined on an invasion of his neighbour—what satirist meditating an onslaught on society or an individual, can't give a pretext for ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... been in the water six days and three nights continuously, and yet am nearly as fresh as when I started. I attribute this marvellous fact to my practice of sipping ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... glorious Revolution. The wicked fell into the pit which they had dug for the righteous; the hopes of the Papists were crushed; toleration to worship God was established. Let us follow Bunyan's example, and attribute these mercies to a ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... as the parlor, observes the day. During the Christmas week housekeepers become impressed with the fact that the usual amount of provisions utterly fails to meet the wants of the family. They attribute it to the increased appetites of the establishment. Biddy could tell a different tale, however, and on New Year's Day sets a fine table for her "Cousins" and friends, at the expense of the master of the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Then again, I do not fear Cyril's power just now. He has injured himself deeply, I am happy to say, in the opinion of the wealthy and educated, by expelling the Jews. And as for his mob, exactly at the right moment, the deities—there are no monks here, so I can attribute my blessings to the right source—have sent us such a boon as may put them into as good ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... to what I started to say, Aline is very bitter about matrimony as viewed from my point of view. I am sorry to say I attribute her attitude ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... She was a woman of few words and very shy and reserved. But Raskolnikoff was very superstitious, and traces of this remained in him long after. In all the events of this period of his life he was ever ready to detect something mysterious, and attribute every circumstance to the presence of some ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... and elegance; plays the harp and piano with skill and taste; is a thorough artiste in drawing and painting; and is, moreover, very handsome—though beauty, I admit, is an attribute which in a governess might be very ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... the Moscow women more handsome than those of St. Petersburg, and I attribute this to the great superiority of the air. They are gentle and accessible by nature; and to obtain the favour of a kiss on the lips, one need only make a ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of the body in which we all are members. To accept a primacy in St. Peter, and yet hold it immaterial to the organisation of the Church. To acknowledge one Church, and then divide the unity into fragments. To attribute to the Church the power of the keys, and then deny the force of her indulgences while admitting her absolutions. To approve confession, and practically set it aside. To do and hold these and many other contradictions—what is it but ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... to attribute the advance of the agricultural classes of our civilized peoples, in all that serves to remove them from the brutality of their savage ancestors, altogether to the nature of their work—to the very large element ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... are affixed to several portions of the Book of Proverbs in i. 1, x. 1, xxv. 1, attribute the authorship of those portions to Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel. With the exception of the last two chapters, which are distinctly assigned to other authors, it is probable that the statement of the superscriptions is in the main correct, and that the majority of the ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... upon him with keen observation. The self-contained young professor was as much an unknown quantity as any he asked them to find in the recitation-room. They were baffled by the impersonal attitude he had brought from the university, where the individual counted for little, and were inclined to attribute it to a disposition to ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins |
