"Conception" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the berlingot as it turned through the iron gates and took the road to Troyes. Laurence repeated the old man's last words. But sage experience should not present itself to the eyes of youth in a berlingot, colored stockings, and a queue. These ardent young hearts had no conception of the change that had passed over France; indignation crisped their nerves, honor boiled with their noble ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... But the draft of it was; the idea of it had been conceived eight months ago. Perhaps she had thought of her story before Vickers had thought of his. Perhaps? No; it was very probable; there was no doubt of it, in fact. That was the important thing: the conception of the idea, not the execution. And if this was true, her claim ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... with magnificent artifice, and at once fresh emotions began to stir. Love had endured its little hour, and stern ambition now asserted itself. Oh, to be a splendid fellow like this, self-contained, ready of speech, agile beyond conception, braving the forces of society, his hand against everyone, yet always getting the best of it! What freshness of humour, what courtesy to dames, what triumphant ability to discomfit rivals, frock-coated and moustached though they might be! And what a grand, self-confident ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... on England, does the real reason of this singular idiosyncrasy appear. The company of the Heptameron are the latest representatives, at first hand, and with no deliberate purpose of presentment, of the mediaeval conception of gentlemen and ladies who fleeted the time goldenly. They are not themselves any longer mediaeval; they have been taught modern ways; they have a kind of uneasy sense (even though one and another of themselves may now and then flout the idea) of the importance of other classes, ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... labour to the very utmost of their strength for the salvation of others without the hope of earthly reward. Of the practical common sense, the resource, the readiness for every form of usefulness of those Officers and Soldiers, the world has no conception. Still less is it capable of understanding the height and depth of their self-sacrificing devotion to God ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... is within the bounds of Hell; and if thou didst see everything therein that again would be as nought when compared with the unutterable woe of the Bottomless Pit; for it is impossible to have any conception of the life in the Uttermost Hell." Then suddenly the heavenly Eagle caught me up into the vault of the accursed gloom by a way I knew not, where, from the court, across the entire firmament of dark-burning Perdition, and all the land of oblivion up to the ramparts ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... Hence the scientific conception of the universe repels many people. They are not equal to it. To think of life as involved in the very constitution of matter itself is a much harder proposition than to conceive of it as Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge do, as an independent ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... The conception of a fitting, permanent, earthly abode for Jehovah, and for the ark and the sacred symbols therein, was David's. He it was who took the ark to Jerusalem and placed it in a temporary tabernacle or tent while he collected ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... very genial social qualities. His predominating passion in this relation is a love of hunting. I have been told that he is especially great on bears. With all your experience of this manly pastime in America, I doubt if you can form any conception of the bear-hunts in which the Autocrat of all the Russias has distinguished himself. Any body with nerve enough can kill a grizzly, but it requires both nerve and money to kill bears of any kind in the genuine autocratic style. By an imperial ukase it has been ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... in the world—the more for her behaviour in this matter. I only doubt if Gilbert have any conception ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at any old house authentically haunted. The architect will forget in his study of life the formalities of science, and, while his practiced eye will prevent him from erring in technicalities, he will advance, with the ruling feeling, which, in masses of mind, is nationality, to the conception of something truly original, ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... train of lofty conception pervades the writings of the prophets. "Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out the heavens with a span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance? Behold, the nations are as a drop ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... steamer with two funnels: "Thlee piecee bamboo, two piecee puff-puff, walk-along inside, no can see." Here the "walk-along," the motive power, is "inside" with a vengeance. I have not at this moment the remotest conception where the engine-room is, or where lies the descent to that Avernus. Not even the communicator-gong can be heard in the hotel. I have not set eyes on an engineer or a stoker, scarcely on a sailor. The captain I do not even know by sight. Occasionally ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... Demetrius enslaved Megara and rased it to the ground. On his asking whether Stilpo had lost anything, he replied, "Certainly not, for war can make no havoc of virtue." Corresponding and consonant to this is the answer of Socrates, who when asked, I think by Gorgias,[16] if he had any conception as to the happiness of the King of Persia, replied, "I do not know his position in regard to virtue and education: for happiness lies in these, and not in ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... to let him have a tailed coat that "half," although every other boy of his age had gone into tails already? Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life, that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... sketched with considerable power. The last one, 'Hell in Paradise,' is terrible in the probable truth of conception." ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... "Prodigious conception! I never saw such ahead for seeing with a lightning glance all the outlying ramifications and possibilities of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he said quietly, "you and I would not be speaking of Him, my dear sir. Of what, of whom, are we speaking? Whom hast thou denied?" he suddenly asked with exulting austerity and authority in his voice. "Who invented Him, if He did not exist? Whence came thy conception of the existence of such an incomprehensible Being? didst thou, and why did the whole world, conceive the idea of the existence of such an incomprehensible Being, a Being all-powerful, eternal, and infinite in ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... restless and crowded, which some actually are, in a degree. But canvases like "The Garden" and "The Bay Window" and "The Boudoir" are real jewels of light and colour. "The Bay Window" is the most placid of his canvases and in conception much finer than his outdoor subjects. Frieseke's clear, joyous art is typically modern, and expresses the best tendency of our day. Luis Mora's two watercolours, while illustrative, hold their own in Frieseke's company. Tanner's big religious canvas falls far below ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... of this same year a highly ingenious device was discovered through a hitch, which unfortunately ruined the smugglers' chances. In its broad conception it was but a modification of an idea which we have already explained. In its application, however, it was unique and original. At half-past six on this morning a fore-and-aft-rigged vessel was observed to be sailing into Chichester harbour. When first ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... thou said this to the Publican, it had been a high and rampant expression; but to say this before God, to the face of God, when he knew that thou wast vile, and a sinner from the womb, and from the conception, spoils all. It was spoken to put a check to thy arrogancy, when Christ said, "Ye are they which justify yourselves before me; but God knoweth ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... perverse widow's name upon a tree-trunk; or Sir Roger at bowls, or riding to hounds, or listening—with grave courtesy—to Will Wimble's long-winded and circumstantial account of the taking of the historic jack. Nor is the conception less happy of that amorous fine-gentleman ancestor of the Coverleys who first made love by squeezing the hand; or of that other Knight of the Shire who so narrowly escaped being killed in the Civil Wars because he was sent out of the field upon a private ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... a god as the greatest and highest gradually brought forth the conception of a supreme Lord of all beings (Prajapati), not by a process of conscious generalization but as a necessary stage of development of the mind, able to imagine a deity as the repository of the highest moral and physical ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... the Mexican nation was still in its swaddling clothes. Its birth had hardly cost a pang; but its infancy, its childhood, and its youth, were to be attended with a series of convulsions, the fruits of the vicious seeds sown in the conception of the new State. By the pronunciamiento of a part of a regiment of the King's Creole troops the connection between Spain and Mexico was severed forever, and the colonel of these troops became the Emperor of Mexico. In this revolution the nation acquiesced, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... after study, from A Death in the Desert to Bishop Blougram's Apology. Some carry us from early Christianity through the mediaeval faith; others lead us through the Paganism of the Renaissance and strange shows of Judaism to Browning's own conception of religion in the present day contrasted with those of the popular religion in Christmas-Day ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... just like furlough." I rather think the assertion is an inheritance from former days and the cadets of those days, for the similarity at present between first-class camp and furlough is beyond our conception. There is none, or if any it is chimerical, depending entirely on circumstances. In the case of a small class it would be greater than in that of a large one. For instance, in "train drill" a certain number of men are required. No more are necessary. ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... own feelings for a young baby, for he wrote to Fox (July 1840): "He [i.e. the baby] is so charming that I cannot pretend to any modesty. I defy anybody to flatter us on our baby, for I defy any one to say anything in its praise of which we are not fully conscious...I had not the smallest conception there was so much in a five-month baby. You will perceive by this that I have a fine degree ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... he. "You certainly deserve credit, friend Midas, for striking out so brilliant a conception. But are you quite sure that this will ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... yet to learn the elevating, refining power of labor, when organized as it can, and assuredly will be. At present we have no adequate conception of this influence. It is solely for the sake of labor, for the sake of human activity, that it may fill as many and as wide and deep channels as possible, and thus permit man's varied life and capacities to flow freely forth, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... felt somewhat ashamed of my imperfect sagacity in having up to this period been entirely blind to those aspects. The truth is, every human being is a mystery, and remains so to the last. We fancy we know a character; we form a distinct conception of it; for years that conception remains unmodified, and suddenly the strain of some emergency, of the incidental stimulus of new circumstances, reveals qualities not simply unexpected, but flatly contradictory of our previous conception. We judge of a man by the angle ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... smoking his pipe and trying to form some conception of the wealth under that concrete floor. It was no use. Jim Loudons probably understood a little more nearly what those books would mean to the world of today, and what they could do toward shaping the ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... the public interest. The welfare of the party was closely bound up with the profit of special interests, such as public service corporations and insurance companies. The prevalent condition of affairs was shrewdly summed up in a satiric paraphrase of Lincoln's conception of the American ideal: "Government of the people, by the bosses, for the special interests." The interests naturally repaid this zealous care for their well-being by ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... country and reached the banks of the Mississippi. They went by way of the Great Lakes; and from Green Bay, in canoes, by way of Fox River and the Wisconsin. Marquette had solemnly contracted, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, that if the Virgin would permit him to discover the great river, he would name it Conception, in her honor. He kept his word. In that day, all explorers traveled with an outfit of priests. De Soto had twenty-four with him. La Salle had several, also. The expeditions were often ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... are inextricably bound up with the beginnings of the Reformation. It is a common belief that the Reformation in Europe worked a radical change in the doctrines of religious men, raising up two parties with diametrically opposing creeds. Such a conception, however, is misleading. The Reformation was not so much a religious as a political revolt. It was the natural outcome of a growth in the power of northern Germany at a moment when Rome was losing her political prestige. The alliance ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... Theories Scope of the Imagination Newton and the Emission Theory Verification of Physical Theories The Luminiferous Ether Wave-theory of Light Thomas Young Fresnel and Arago Conception of Wave-motion Interference of Waves Constitution of Sound-waves Analogies of Sound and Light Illustrations of Wave-motion Interference of Sound Waves Optical Illustrations Pitch and Colour Lengths of the ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... popular conception that the church led the way into California strange, when we understand that it is to the writings of Fray Francisco Palou, friend, disciple, and successor of Junipero, that all historians turn for the account of the occupation. ...
— The March of Portola • Zoeth S. Eldredge
... telegram was certainly one of the most explicit and distinct records of the kind that his lordship had ever perused. He had paid but a moderate degree of attention to it, but had experienced no difficulty whatever in pricking out Mr. Forrest's track on a map, and in forming a distinct conception of his journey. (Cheers.) It only remained for his lordship to ask them to join him in drinking the sentiment of Australian Exploration, and at the same time to drink the health of Mr. Alexander Forrest, whose name was ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... girl. Examples: Few city girls have much chance to be in the country. An effort should be made to get them out on hikes, and week-end camping trips. Some homes and schools do not teach the girls such practical things as cooking, bedmaking, while some groups of girls have no conception of obligation to other people or any sense of citizenship. In each case, the wise captain attempts to discover the novel activity, which besides being helpful, will attract the girls. The wise captain does not expect girls to pay great attention to any one subject for very long, and does ...
— The Girl Scouts Their History and Practice • Anonymous
... of to-day. We are called upon to dislodge what is easily the most popular god in the calendar, albeit the littlest; that fat fluttering small boy, congenitally blind, with his haphazard archery playthings; that undignified conception, type of folly change and irresponsible mischief, which so amazingly usurps the name and place of love. Never was there a more ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... 15 of August (being wt the Scots the 5 and observed by them in remembrance of Gourie conspiracie) came about to be observed feste de Nostre Dame, who hath 4 or 5 fests in the year, as the annuntiation, the conception, hir purification; and this was hir death and ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... residing in one of the most delightful spots in America, surrounded by the most exquisite scenery that was ever beheld. There is one thing however that is annoying. The country people will not use or adopt that pretty word Epaigwit, 'the home of the wave,' which rivals in beauty of conception an eastern expression. The place was originally granted to a fellow of the name of Umber, who was called after the celebrated navigator Cook. These two words when united soon became corrupted, and the magnificent sheet of ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... infirmities of his growing age. The youth was never weary of listening to the tales of his sire's youthful adventures; and had not yet in the smallest degree lost the conviction, that his father was the greatest man in the world. The grandest triumph possible to his conception was, to return to his father, laden with the spoils of one of the hated giants. But they both were in some dread, lest the thought of the loneliness of these two might occur to them, in the moment when decision ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... ruin. What reliance could repose upon a house, divided against itself—not safe from the extravagance and pillage of its own members? The public eye, ever watchful and timid, waits scarcely for the show of danger to take alarm and withdraw its favour. Michael shrunk from the bare conception of an act of violence. It was more agreeable, in an hour of self-collectedness, to devise a remedy, which, if it did not cure the disease, helped at least to cicatrize the immediate wounds. He looked from Brammel to Brammel's father for indemnification. And the old man was in truth a rare ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... as the stage-wise render them, and when I have told you about this you will catch the point at once and ever after be able to "read the signs" with a clear conception of their import: ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... we say any thing more upon the great topic of capital? Were the nation now in its sober senses, the facts which we have stated, and for the accuracy of which we pledge ourselves, would surely be enough to awaken it to a true conception of the vortex into which it is plunging. But as every man will no doubt think—with the ordinary self-delusion of our kind—that the scheme in which he is individually embarked is an exception from the common rule; let us ask each speculator candidly to make ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... men among the Bakwains as to their former knowledge of good and evil, of God and the future state, they have scouted the idea of any of them ever having been without a tolerably clear conception on all these subjects. Respecting their sense of right and wrong, they profess that nothing we indicate as sin ever appeared to them as otherwise, except the statement that it was wrong to have more wives than one; and they declare that they spoke in ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... are great differences, surely thoughts like these, engraven in the hearts of a young people, will lead, in the great and glorious future that lies before them, to a conception of justice, to a method of dealing with crime, very different from what we know ourselves. They are now very much as we were sixteen centuries ago, when the Romans ruled us. Now we are a greater people, our justice is better, our prisons are better, our morality is ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... language. Its style is elegant and pure. And if the translator has not, as many of his brethren have done, suffered the spirit of the original totally to evaporate, he apprehends it will be found to contain much novelty of conception, much classical taste, and great spirit and beauty in the execution. It appears under the name of Cadwallo, an ancient bard, who probably lived at least one hundred years before the commencement of our common era. The manners of the primitive ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... still the unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings; such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain: be still the leaven, That spreading in this dull and clodded earth Gives it a touch ethereal—a new birth: Be still a symbol of immensity; A firmament reflected in a sea; 300 An element filling the space between; An unknown—but ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... pleasure, but in the hour of solitude and of golden opportunity, it is "flat, stale, and unprofitable." He marks off the year by its festivals, and distributes the day into hours of food, rest, and folly. In short, he holds no serious conception of life, and he is untouched by lofty sentiment. The great drama of existence, with its solemn shifts of scenery and its impending grandeur, is but a pantomime to him; and he a thoughtless epicurean, a grinning courtier, a scented fop, a dancing puppet, on the mighty stage. And ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... learn something, not only of the language and intellectual history of Prussia, but of the standpoint of her people—and of the disadvantages as well as the advantages of an excessive lucidity of conception. Nowhere else in Germany that I know of is this to be studied so advantageously and so easily as in Berlin, the seat of Government, the headquarters of Real-politik, and it seems to me most apparent among the highly ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... yourself in this respect, I will, if you consent, become your husband, and the happiest of men. For the present, I only entreat you not to turn such loving and guileless feelings as mine into the street; for if your master, who has no conception of them, should come to know my aspirations, he would condemn me to exile from your presence, and that would be the same thing as sentencing me to death. Suffer me, senora, to see you until you believe me, considering that he does not deserve the rigorous punishment of being ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Universe One Spirit receive the curse, Alas for Heaven! If there be Doom for one, Thou, Master, art undone! "Were I a Soul in Heaven, Afar from pain;— Yea, on thy breast of snow, At the scream of one below, I should scream again— Art Thou less piteous than The conception of ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... must nearly have dotted down The methods of our master-stroke to-morrow: I have no clear conception of its plan, Even in its leading lines. What ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... sleeper!' cried his friend. 'Now, what is a light sleeper? I often hear the expression, but upon my life I have not the least conception ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... geologist such rivers are not mysteries. The lower strata of the limestone formation are hollowed out into vast cavernous channels and chambers, through which rolls for ever the hoarse murmur of multitudinous waters. It would require the conception of a Milton or the stern Florentine who pictured Malebolge to depict those hollow passages and lofty galleries, wrought into fantastic shapes by carbon chisels, and all pure snow-white, yet unrecognizable in the sublime ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... say, I got nothing out of this summer, in a literary way, except the story which I called The Steadfast Widow Delaney, a conception which came to me on my solitary ascent of Sierra Blanca. All the beauty and drama, all the humor and contrast of the trip with the Palmers, had no direct fictional value to me. It is hard to explain why, but so it was. I did not so much as write a ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... alleviate those painful anxieties which good people at that period were accustomed to cherish for a family, but especially to evince the unceasing regard of Heaven to the interests of Israel, the commissioned spirit announced to her the conception of a son; and giving her at the same time some directions respecting her own mode of living, and the devotement of the future Samson as a Nazarite from the womb, assured her that be should become the deliverer of Israel from Philistine ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... I had chosen was of a dull red tint, not unlike that of Leighton's picture, but I had no fear of seeming to copy Leighton. What true artist ever fears he may be considered a copyist? He knows the strength and vitality of his conception will need no spokesman ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... own, while hundreds of novels which created more sensation at the time of their appearance have fallen into everlasting oblivion. And this triumph is not only due to literary excellence, but to the human excellence of the conception which Goldsmith gave ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... expelled from the uterus is really a foetus or a mole, and therefore the result of conception, or the coat of the uterus, and unconnected with pregnancy, the examination of the substances expelled must be carefully made. Moles are blighted foetuses. An examination of the woman will be necessary, though it is not easy during the early months of pregnancy, and especially ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... its largest aspect, it should be perfectly clear that any institution must know what its ideals are before it can become coherent and confident, and that there must be present in the form of clearly available ideas an imaginative conception of the good ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... story, increasing its hold on the reader steadily ... remarkably good in both conception and ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... appearance of aged, venerable beings, short of stature, with white beards. Country, town, and human habitations are alike haunted by psychic beings whose condition cannot be exactly expressed by the word spirit, neither form of Chinese belief admitting of the conception of a pure ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... way of fatal necessity, and without the intervention of a will and an intelligence? This is the remark of Newton. Study carefully the systems of materialism: their authors declare that to have recourse to God in order to account for the universe is a puerile conception unworthy of science, because all explanation must be referred to fixed and immutable laws; and then you will be for ever surprising them in the very act of the adoration of circumstances. Convenient deities these, which they ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... unlovely dwellings. In the middle of the fifth century men rose above this ideal. They began to recognize private houses and to attempt an adequate grouping of their cities as units capable of a single plan. But they did not carry this conception very far. The decorative still dominated the useful. Broad straight streets were still few and were laid out mainly as avenues for processions and as ample spaces for great facades.[4] Private houses were still of small account. The notion that ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... Lamartine's conception of love was a sort of mild ecstasy, the sacred rapture in which the senses play no part, and noble emotions that cause neither trouble nor remorse. He ever regarded love as a kind of sublime and passionate religion, of which 'Le Lac' was the most ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... predicate,—he, of course, assumes that the hearer already understands. Settle, then, which—plant or ivy—Dickens supposed the reader to know least about, and which, therefore, Dickens was telling him about; and you settle which word—plant or ivy—is the subject. (Is it not the writer's poetical conception of "the green ivy" that the reader is ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... on that bare, wind-swept prairie meant toil and infinite pains, but a garden like that of the Dunbars represented in addition something of genius. In conception, in design, and in execution the Dunbars' garden was something apart. Visitors were taken 'round to the back street to get a glimpse of the ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... General Udby, completely overshadowed the girlish charm of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Had Rupert been consulted would he have liked playing the game at all—holding the cards in the wrong hand as he did from the very start without the slightest conception of what the game really was and why they were playing it? But it is quite obvious now to anyone looking back over the years that had the cards of his life been shuffled by his Auntie Gracie before her elopement to the Klondyke with Ex-Senator ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... swallowed them, and then it took the long ridge of hills to the east, until only the crests of the pine-trees lifted themselves above it; but Pelle did not as yet give himself up for lost; for behind all his anxiety lay a confused conception of Mount Ararat, which kept up his courage. But then it became so dreadfully cold that Pelle's breeches seemed to stick to his body. "That's the water," he thought, and he looked round in alarm; the rock had become a little island, and ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... weaknesses of humanity, "only to remember"—to quote the eloquent tribute paid to him by Mr. Laurier, then leader of the opposition—"that his actions always displayed great originality of view, unbounded fertility of resources, a high level of intellectual conception, and above all, a far-reaching vision beyond the event of the day, and still higher, permeating the whole, a broad patriotism, a devotion to Canada's welfare, Canada's advancement, and Canada's glory." His obsequies were the most stately and solemn that were ever witnessed ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... tends to try and make people locally discontented, contented with pseudo visions of distant realms where the cities are of gold, where blue skies are never hidden by yellow fog. But is it a false idealism? If it is, it is that conception which has made men leave their homes in England to build up the Imperial Empire which is the daughter of the Great Imperial Island. The vision may not be always useful, but Imperialism has done much to make ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... the audacious conception of this instrument ever entered the imagination of man, before he had ever drawn a musical sound from pipe or string, the chambers where the royal harmonies of his grandest vocal mechanism were to find worthy reception ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... natural cause of corruption and decay: but that which is not material, can have no extension; and what has no extension, possesses no space; and of such beings, the mind itself, which you pretend to be such a being, has no conception.' ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... now inaccessible. The only bird new to me which I obtained at Lorok was the fine long-tailed parroquet (Palaeornis longicauda). The people here assured me that the country was just the same as this for a very long way—more than a week's journey, and they seemed hardly to have any conception of an elevated forest-clad country, so that I began to think it would be useless going on, as the time at my disposal was too short to make it worth my while to spend much more of it in moving about. At length, however, I found a man who knew ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... superior to the foibles which beset humanity. If it had been his conception of duty which impelled him to take a high line with Beaumaroy, there was now in his feelings, although he did not realize the fact, an alloy of less precious metal. He had demanded an ordeal, a test—that he should see Mr. Saffron and judge for himself. The test ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... women.'... Of Maria Edgeworth, the woman, one cannot easily say too much in praise. That home life, so loving, so wise, and so helpful, was beautiful to its end. Miss Zimmern has treated it with delicate appreciation. Her book is refined in conception and tasteful in execution,—all, in short, the cynic might say, that we expect a woman's book ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... one complete narrative, but eventually decided not to depart from my original purpose. There is some reason to believe that the account of the work of the Grand Fleet gave the nation a fuller conception of the services which the officers and men of that force rendered in circumstances which were necessarily not easily appreciated ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe
... thoughtfully, "you haven't spoiled the picture. Really I began it with a very definite conception of what I was going to do. It will be done in that way or ...
— Different Girls • Various
... Mr. Risley has produced a novel which for conception, dramatic power, and sheer strength of characterization will stand head and shoulders above the ordinarily well done novel of the day. In it for the first time Mr. Risley "finds himself" and strikes the strong, clear note he will sound, with ever increasing ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... "indeed you've a wrong conception of the matter. There is to be no stage play or newspaper work in the case. It will be quietly adjusted. The Ravenels are not people to permit any publicity. There will be compromises. Mrs. Ravenel, I hope, ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... "Forgive me, sir, I cannot promise the general this in anticipation. I could not bring it into harmony with my conception of the duty ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... facts. This boy claimed that he had become the recipient of some High Order of Imagination. He, the Learned Judge, had not the remotest idea what this order meant, and he firmly believed nobody else in Court had the faintest conception either concerning such a possession. However, children would be children, which was unfortunate, as he himself considered that children should be always, ahem! grown up, yes, or nearly always. That is to say, as often ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... the first to fulfil Luther's prophecy. In 1549 he began publicly to propound a doctrine in which he abandoned the forensic conception of justification by imputation of the merits of Christ, and returned to the Roman view of justification by infusion i.e., by infusion of the eternal essential righteousness of the divine nature of Christ. According to his own statement, he had harbored ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... benevolent Clara. While he was talking, he seemed to recede a great way from her; his tones to ring hollowly upon her hearing, his form to grow indistinct. Was he playing with her suspense, or could it be that he—a being with heart and nerves like hers, had no conception of the rack on which she waa stretched—no suspicion that every one of his deliberate sentences was a turn of the screw that redoubled her torture? The Ayletts were a strong-willed race, and she repressed all sign of suffering save intense ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... especially from the particular intimacy there seemed to exist between them: whereupon, in the tone of a guardian rather than a lover, he took upon him to chide her for the disreputable company she kept. Miss Jennings was haughty beyond conception, when once she took it into her head; and as she liked Miss Price's conversation much better than Talbot's, she took the liberty of desiring him "to attend to his own affairs, and that if he only came from Ireland to read lectures about ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... plainly brought out in the foregoing supposed statement by a member of the trust, that it is possible by means of the trust to greatly reduce expenses in many directions as well as to increase receipts, and we begin to form some conception of the profits which this trust is harvesting. If we wish to put the statement in figures, suppose we take the annual consumption of linseed oil in the country at thirty million gallons. Then the profits of the trust from the increased prices alone will ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... famous statesman, William Ewart Gladstone, while many of the better-class literary journals vied with one another in according me an almost enthusiastic eulogy. Such authorities as the "Athenaeum" and "Spectator" praised the whole conception and style of the work, the latter journal going as far as to say that I had beaten Beckford's famous "Vathek" ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... enormous majority of human beings stayed at home at last; from the cradle to the grave they lived, married, died in the same district, usually in the same village; and to that condition, law, custom, habits, morals, have adapted themselves. The whole plan and conception of human society is based on the rustic home and the needs and characteristics of the agricultural family. There have been gipsies, wanderers, knaves, knights-errant and adventurers, no doubt, but the ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... suggested by physicians. It was also the one method of birth control countenanced by the ecclesiastics. Women are learning from experience and specialists are discovering by investigation that the "safe period" is anything but safe for all women. Some women are never free from the possibility of conception from puberty to the menopause. Others seemingly have "safe periods" for a time, only to become pregnant when they have begun to feel secure in their theory. Here again, continence must give way, as a method of ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... soon occupied the public mind. A waterside strike paralysed for a time the commerce of the country, and introduced the era of "Labour." The predominance of Darwin, with his "struggle to live," gave way to the humanitarian conception of a struggle to let others live. In some respects the new movement was a return towards the principles of Christianity, which had seemed to be surrendered in the war period. As such it was hailed by ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... answering to more important and tested realities. Their marriages were a success; their children were well brought up, under light but effective control; and, if it be true, as Americans are ready to say, that the old conception of marriage is being slowly but profoundly modified over large sections of their great Commonwealth, towards a laxity undreamt of half a century ago, the Ellesboroughs could neither be taxed nor applauded in the matter. ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... many-hued cordial from a crystal thimble set on a golden stem. There was a girl with a flowery face, dressed like Titania with braided sapphires in her hair. There was a room where the solid, soft gold of the walls yielded to the pressure of his hand, and a room that was like a platonic conception of the ultimate prison—ceiling, floor, and all, it was lined with an unbroken mass of diamonds, diamonds of every size and shape, until, lit with tail violet lamps in the corners, it dazzled the eyes with a whiteness that could be compared only with itself, beyond ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... few touches of his magic pencil the Laureate has drawn a powerful picture of such a state of things in ancient Britain, of which we can scarcely deny the literal faithfulness. It is not a poetic conception; it ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... of the Delta: Sibu and Nait, Osiris and Isis, SU and Nephthys—Heliopolis and its theological schools: Ra, his identification with Horus, his dual nature, and the conception of Atumu—The Heliopolitan Enneads: formation of the Great Ennead—Thot and the Hermopolitan Ennead: creation by articulate words and by voice alone—Diffusion of the Enneads: their connection with the local triads, the god One and the god ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... all by Aristotle or his commentators; and the duty of the critic was to consider whether the author had infringed or conformed to the established rules, and to pass sentence accordingly. I will not say that the modern critic has abandoned altogether that conception of his duty. He seems to me not infrequently to place himself on the judgment-seat with a touch of his old confidence, and to sentence poor authors with sufficient airs of infallibility. Sometimes, indeed, the reflection that he is representing not an invariable tradition but the last new aesthetic ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... the Tennessee, down the Tennessee to the Ohio, and if need be, down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and keep drifting until he found some spot exactly suited to his taste. Temperamentally, he was well adapted to drifting. No conception of vicarious activity could ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... but universal that King Wilhelm throughout the eventful years which followed was but the figure-head of the ship at the helm of which stood Bismarck, strong, shrewd, subtle, cynical, and unscrupulous. This conception I believe to be utterly wrong. I hold Wilhelm to have been the virtual maker of the united Germany and the creator of the German Empire; and that the accomplishment of both those objects, the former leading up to ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... before the reader at once, or to set out several propositions at the same time, as belonging to one general truth. In order that the reader may get the complete picture or the complete thought, he must hold in mind often a whole paragraph before he unites it into the one conception the author intended. In narration one action is completed; it can be dropped. Then another follows, which can also be dropped. They need not be held in mind until the paragraph is finished. Narration is exactly suited to the means of its ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... Commonwealth may be summed up under the two heads of lack of organization and irresponsible leadership outside Parliament. Is it possible that the dangers may be avoided and the requisites secured by a change in electoral machinery? Those who have no conception of the working of social forces, and who do not trace the law of causation into the realm of mind, will be inclined to scoff at the suggestion. To them the only hope of improvement lies in appealing to the people to elect better men. They ignore entirely the reciprocal relation of the Parliament ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... the psychological phenomena of religion in its entirety. You descend from the realm of philosophy to assume the role of scholastic—to dispute with little men anent points of doctrine, to wrangle with dogmatists regarding their conception of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... joyous earnest spirit pervades her work, and her sympathy is unbounded. She loves them with her whole heart, while she lays bare their little minds, and expresses their foibles, their faults, their virtues, their inward struggles, their conception of duty, and their instinctive knowledge of the right and wrong of things. She knows their characters, she understands their wants, and she desires to help them. The only sure talisman against domestic trouble she evidently ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... do, whether it be right or wrong. His will, and his will alone, is their law. If the wife of a slave were ordered by a master to submit herself to his lusts, and therefore to commit adultery, or if her husband were ordered to steal any thing for him, and therefore to commit theft, I have no conception that either the one or the other would dare to disobey his commands. "The whip, the shackles, the dungeon," says Mr. Steele before mentioned, "are at all times in his power, whether it be to gratify his lust, or display his authority[3]." Now if the master has the power, a just, and ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... intercourse—whose wish was so beautiful that there were no experiences in this world to satisfy it. And these children of the moon, with their unappeased longings and futile dreams, were a finer race than the children of the sun. This conception flooded the boy's heart like a second moonrise, flowed through him indefinite and strong, while he lay deathly still for ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... alike impel her to have done with it all; and a pistol-shot ends what is surely one of the most poignant character-tragedies in literature. Ibsen's brain never worked at higher pressure than in the conception and adjustment of those "crowded hours" in which Hedda, tangled in the web of Will and Circumstance, struggles on till she is too ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... full-rigged sailing vessel and a big modern steamer hung on the wall above his books. On another wall were three small prints, landscapes where there were great distances with much light and warmth. Over his bed hung an artist's conception of "Lorna Doone," a beautiful face, framed in a mass of auburn hair, with smiling lips, and a dreamy look in ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... State Monthly is one of the standard publications of its class. It is not surpassed by any of its elders in the matter of chaste typography and beauty of illustration, while its literary conception and display are of intrinsic worth.—Gazette and Chronicle. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... able to get over the first impression would have discerned something good, and honest, and out of the common in this half-shattered creature. A devoted admirer of Bach and Handel, a master of his art, gifted with a lively imagination and that boldness of conception which is only vouchsafed to the German race, Lemm might, in time—who knows?—have taken rank with the great composers of his fatherland, had his life been different; but he was born under an unlucky star! ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... regard to the demoniacal beings whom they generally call chorti or devils. Still more clearly is the contrast between those ideas brought out by the other stories, many in number, into which those powers of darkness enter. It is evident that the traditions from which the popular conception of the ghostly enemy has been evolved must have been of a complex and even ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... tripped up to relieve Martha, dreaming nothing at all of that other doubt to which the important personage downstairs was now subject. Dorothy was, in truth, very fond of the new friend she had made; but it had never occurred to her that he might be a possible suitor to her. Her old conception of herself,—that she was beneath the notice of any man,—had only been partly disturbed by the absolute fact of Mr. Gibson's courtship. She had now heard of his engagement with Camilla French, and saw in that complete proof that the foolish man had been induced ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... of convenience, a man considering it his duty to provide for the legitimate continuation of his family. The Doric tribe did not attempt to disguise this principle in its plain-spoken laws; the rest of Greece acknowledged it but in silence, owing to a more refined conception of the moral significance ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... instrumental power; established in a community to whose intelligence and generosity its support may be safely confided, and whose educational institutions are rapidly realizing the conception of a university; countenanced by the gentleman who conducts the United States Coast Survey with such scientific skill and administrative energy; committed to the immediate supervision of an astronomer to whose ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... continuations, serviceable enough but without improvement, of those in Jeronimo, Pedringano being a second edition of Lazarotto. But from the outline sufficient may be gathered to make unnecessary a long analysis of the author's new and greatest creation. We see in it originality of conception; we are touched by its intense humanness and by its inherent simplicity; but we are startled by its change, its growth, under the influence of circumstances, to a certain subtle complexity. All are great qualities, ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... drawn upon these for my material, and in this painting you have a blending of several of them. Of course, I have taxed my imagination to some extent. The central object, the globe, air-ship, or whatever you may be pleased to call it, is your own conception, or my ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... wouldn't have cared a rap whether anyone else saw them or not. He would not have bothered, usually, to give any form to his conceptions. Simply to have had the sensation would have for him been enough. But since simians love to be noticed, it does not content them to have a conception; they must wrestle with it until it takes a form in which others can see it. They doom the artistic impulse to toil with its nose to the grindstone, until their idea is expressed in a book or a statue. ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... of Life Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function Chapter Three: Education as Direction Chapter Four: Education as Growth Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education Chapter Eight: Aims in Education Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education Chapter Thirteen: The Nature ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... was rather on the side of the Imperialists, as the futile expedition to Peking had left the rebels in a somewhat aimless state, not quite knowing what to do next. It is true that they were busy spreading the T'ai-p'ing conception of Christianity, in establishing schools, and preparing an educational literature to meet the exigencies of the time. They achieved the latter object by building anew on the lines, but not in the spirit, of the old. Thus the Trimetrical Classic, the famous schoolboy's handbook, a veritable guide ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... finally outroot us. Here is Sutter, building his fort on the Sacramento! He's a good fellow, yet I'll have to burn New Helvetia about his ears some day. Russian or Swiss, French or Yankee, it's all the same. The 'Gringo' is the worst of all. Poor Conception de Arguello. She waited long for her dead ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... Shamanism or Animism there may or there may not be a belief in or conception of a single all-powerful Creator above and beyond all.[12] Usually there is not such a belief, though, even if there be, the actual government of the physical world and its surroundings is believed to lie in the hands of many spirits or gods benevolent and malevolent. Earth, air, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... my reconstruction was not wholly satisfactory, because there were several loose ends in it. At that time I believed he was the murderer, and I was anxious to frighten the truth out of him in order to see where my reconstruction was at fault. His story proved that my original conception of the crime was the correct one, and my mistake was in departing from it, and ignoring some of my original clues in order to square the new facts with a fresh theory. I should never have lost sight of my first conviction that there were ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... them as God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of the other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer. One is the great Outward God; the other is the Inmost God. The first idea was perhaps developed most highly and completely in the God of Spinoza. It is a conception of God tending to pantheism, to an idea of a comprehensive God as ruling with justice rather than affection, to a conception of aloofness and awestriking worshipfulness. The second idea, which is opposed to this idea of an absolute God, is the God of the human heart. The writer would ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... the conjectures as to her motive, the guess of Miss Pauline Hall showing a high order of ingenuity and sustained reflection. It was Miss Hall's belief that nature had not endowed Miss Russell with beautiful legs. This theory was impossible of acceptance by the male understanding, but the conception of a faulty female leg was of so prodigious originality as to rank among the most brilliant feats of philosophical speculation! It is strange that in all the controversy regarding Miss Russell's aversion to tights ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... adequate to its appropriate service, and of its possessing that portion of good opinion which shall entitle it to the respect of its antagonists, unless it live and act, for a length of time, under a distinct conception of the kind and degree of hostility to the executive government, which is fairly warrantable. The Party must cease indiscriminately to court the discontented, and to league itself with Men who are athirst for innovation, to a ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... suddenly, "what is your conception of prayer? Evadne says it means to her communion and companionship with Jesus. She says it is 'the practice of ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... his fertile brain was holding the rapt attention of several hundred men and women; and across the broad land that night four other dramas were being successfully acted. People were discussing his theories, denouncing or approving his conception of life. The struggle was past, his royalties were making him rich. And here he was this night, drinking the cup of bitterness, of unhappiness, the astringent draft of things that might and should have been. The coveted grape was sour, the desired apple was withered. ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... blowing-up of mines, the cries of the combatants, the shrieks of the wounded, the loud clang of the martial bands, the wild huzzas of the stormers, the defiant shouts of our gallant fellows,—all these must be thrown in, and yet after all no adequate conception can be formed of that midnight scene of slaughter and destruction. Our men fought fiercely and desperately; soldiers and sailors vied with each other in their feats of gallantry. Bravely they stood ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... this time of her first coming into Galilee, the angel Gabriel was sent to her from God, to declare to her the conception of our Saviour, and the manner and way ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... hypothesis, and the grand law in physics of the correlation of forces, all interdependent, and revealing to us the mode in which the Creator of the Universe works in the world of matter, together form an immeasurably grander conception of the order of creation and its Ordainer, than was possible for us to form before these laws were discovered and put to practical use. We may be allowed, then, in a reverent spirit of inquiry, to attempt to trace the ancestry of ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... to a new conception of the worth and the capacity of the individual mind, and for the first time in history recognized the full social meaning of personality in man. It sanctioned and authenticated the right of the individual to think for himself, and it developed clearly the idea that ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... without. He does not understand them. He does not know where they come from. He does not know what they mean. He is ill-prepared to face them, and now he goes one way and now the other. He has just about as clear a conception of the value of time as a child has. He has not outgrown childhood in that respect. He cannot possibly play a waiting game. That is the last thing that he can do. If the sun shines to-day it is always going to be bright ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... side, from every mouth. Even Livia and Julia, who in Palmyra had been used to the goblets and wine-cups of the Eastern Demetrius, showed amazement, not less than the others, at a magnificence and a beauty that surpassed all experience, and all conception. Just above where the bowl was placed, hung the principal light, by which the table and the apartment were illuminated, which, falling in floods upon the wrought or polished metal and the thickly strewed diamonds, caused it to blaze with a splendor ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware |
