"Definable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thus: "Every operation, or process, whereby bodies are made to pass from the fluid to the solid state, and to assume certain fixed, mathematically definable, regular forms." It would be folly for me to attempt to criticise Fresenius, but I give you both definitions, and you can take your choice. The definition of Fresenius, however, will not suit our present purpose, because the crystallization of wrought ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... distinguished from reflex movements as involving the higher nervous centres. I do not like to distinguish them by means of such notions as "consciousness" or "will," because I do not think these notions, in any definable sense, are always applicable. Moreover, the purpose of the theory we are examining is to be, as far as possible, physiological and behaviourist, and this purpose is not achieved if we introduce such a conception as "consciousness" or "will." Nevertheless, it is necessary for our purpose ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... ripest and venerablest of the European nationalities, I should find a race more simple, youthful, and less sophisticated than the one I had left behind me. Yet this was my impression. We have lost immensely in some things, and what we have gained is not yet so obvious or so definable. We have lost in reverence, in homeliness, in heart and conscience,—in virtue, using the word in its proper sense. To some, the difference which I note may appear a difference in favor of the great cuteness, wideawakeness, and enterprise ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... many other gifts, this last and least definable gift of popularity was added to complete them all. Nobody criticised her, nobody was jealous of her, her very rivals lent her their new music and their lovers; and her own discarded wooers always sought her to be a bridesmaid when they married ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... read, without fatigue but on the other hand without passionate eagerness, about a hundred pages before the thought occurred suddenly to me: 'I do not remember having yet come across one single ready-made phrase in this story.' Such was my first definable thought concerning Frank Swinnerton. I hate ready-made phrases, which in my view—and in that of Schopenhauer—are the sure mark of a mediocre writer. I began to be interested. I soon said to myself: 'This fellow has a distinguished style.' ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
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