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More "Profundity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... proves the profundity of an observation made by Mr. Bagehot —a man who carried away into the next world more originality of thought than is now to be found in the Three Estates of the Realm. Whilst remarking upon the extraordinary reputation of the late Francis Horner and the trifling cost he was put to in supporting ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... in his upper jaw, was very loose, and he easily pulled it out, and that one of his middle teeth in his lower jaw, broke out while he was at dinner." He sat (for the last time) for "a second picture to Mr. Ryley," p. 379. Ashmole's intimacy with Lilly was the foundation of the former's (supposed) profundity in alchemical and astrological studies. In this Diary we are carefully told that "Mr. Jonas Moore brought and acquainted him with Mr. William Lilly, on a Friday night, on the 20th of November," p. 302. Ashmole was then only 26 years of age; and it will be readily conceived how, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... said with equal truth and profundity, knows what a minute may bring forth, much less, therefore, does anybody know what an evening of say two hundred and forty minutes may produce. For instance, Harold Quaritch—though by this time he had gone so far as to freely admit to himself that he was utterly and hopelessly in love with ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... the principal convent which those fathers had in Madrid, conferring its canonries upon ecclesiastics who professed the same doctrines as themselves, and who were, besides, generally venerated for the profundity of their scientific knowledge, as well as for the sanctity of their lives. The canons of San Isidro, to whom allusion has already been made, were Jansenists; and, consequently, they professed opinions ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... nervously pencils his race-card never thinks that the time of weakness and sadness and weariness is coming on; that gray and tremulous old man who bends over the roulette-table never thinks that he will speedily drop into a profundity deeper than ever plummet sounded. The gliding ball does not swing round in its groove faster than the old man's soul fares towards the darkness; and yet he clenches his jaw and engages in the most trivial of pursuits as if he had an eternity before him. The ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... its own manner, with Tom Jones or the Vicar of Wakefield or the Citizen of the World. He produced nothing in writing approaching the magnitude of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or the profundity of Burke's philosophy of politics. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose main business was painting and not the pen, was almost as good an author as he; his Discourses have little to fear when they are set ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... railway you see at once the vastness of London. Roof-tree behind roof-tree, ridge behind ridge, is drawn along in succession, line behind line till they become as close together as the test-lines used for microscopes. Under this surface of roofs what a profundity of life there is! Just as the great horses in the waggons of London streets convey the idea of strength, so the endlessness of the view conveys the idea of a mass of life. Life converges from every quarter. The iron way has many ruts: the rails are its ruts; and by each of these a ceaseless ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... enthusiasm; and the more advanced in years, who have not learned by a diviner wisdom to look upon the human follies and errors by which they have suffered with a pitying and lenient eye, consider every maxim of severity on those frailties as the proof of a superior knowledge, and praise that as a profundity of thought which in reality is but an ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the French spirit seems trivial and superficial, merely wanton and gay, chiefly characterised by that Lubricity which worried the pedagogic Matthew Arnold. The French spirit is more specifically distinguished by its profundity and its seriousness. Without profundity and seriousness, indeed, gaiety and wantonness have no significance. If the Seven Sins had not been Deadly, the Christian Church could never have clothed them in garments of tragic dignity. ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... intermixed some that were produced long ago,—old, faded things, reminding me of flowers pressed between the leaves of a book,—and now offer the bouquet, such as it is, to any whom it may please. These fitful sketches, with so little of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose,—so reserved, even while they sometimes seem so frank,—often but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image,—such trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary reputation. Nevertheless, the public—if ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... which makes him deal with it, in the opening of the Purgatorio, in a wonderfully touching and penetrative way. Hellenism, which is the principle pre-eminently of intellectual light (our modern culture may have more colour, the medieval spirit greater heat and profundity, but Hellenism is pre-eminent for light), has always been most effectively conceived by those who have crept into it out of an intellectual world in which the sombre elements predominate. So it had been in the ages of the Renaissance. This repression, removed ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... another when necessary,—in this atmosphere egoism, as well as altruism, can attain their richest development, and individuality find its just freedom. As the evolution of man's soul advances to undreamed-of possibilities of refinement, of capacity, of profundity; as the spiritual life of the generation becomes more manifold in its combinations and in its distinctions; the more time one has for observing the wonderful and deep secrets of existence, behind the ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... Shakespeare what luminous vapours are to the traveller: he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... romance! Clustered with monasteries and convents, turreted dwellings and sombre monuments, bathed in an atmosphere of orisons and melancholy, threaded by foul and ill-paved alleys, made for crime, intrigue, and mystery; where buried in the profundity of night love and wickedness both stalked forth; strange temples and niches lit by twinkling lamps before the images of saints; recollections of diabolical Inquisitorial rites—a romantic and fantastic shroud, dissipated now, torn into shreds ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... doctor, laying his hand kindly upon her shoulder; "you'll want something fresh again presently. What mine of profundity are you ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... had won me, though not alone. The same gem in a less brilliant setting might have failed to draw my admiration. I was the captive both of the spirit and the form. Soul and body had co-operated in producing my passion, and this may account for its suddenness and profundity. Why I loved her person, I knew—I was not ignorant of the laws of beauty—but why the spirit, I knew not. Certainly not from any idea I had formed of her high moral qualities; I had no evidence of these. Of her ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... soul that wished to be understood and was willing to be intimate. Life astonished her, and her comments on life are her poems. They are often mystical, not to say obscure; and the obscurity, as a rule, is caused by vagueness rather than profundity, by the fact that she hardly knows herself what she feels, or thinks, or believes. But from so gracious a spirit one accepts without demur that which from another would not have passed unchallenged. Miss Coleridge bewitched us with her personality; we knew that her poems were ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... recent poetry would be inadequate without a reference to the 'Ode of Life.' The only fault we have to find with this really remarkable effort—a sort of expansion of Wordsworth's famous Ode—is that it is rather too long for its ideas; but it possesses power, sweetness, occasional profundity, and unmistakable music. It is, when all is said and done, a true 'Ode,' sweeping the reader along as the ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... forth from her those pleasantries at which you will be the first to laugh and those reflections which will startle you by their profundity; now you will see sudden changes of mood and the caprices of a mind which hesitates. At times she will exhibit extreme tenderness, as if she repented of her thoughts and her projects; sometimes she will be sullen and at cross-purposes with you; in a word, she will fulfill the varium et mutabile ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... form known to literature. The simplest, that is to say, in outward form,—it may be indefinitely abstruse as to its inward contents. Indeed, the very cause of its formal simplicity is its interior profundity. The principle of hermetic writing was, as we know, to disguise philosophical propositions and results under a form of words which should ostensibly signify some very ordinary and trivial thing. It was a secret language, in the vocabulary of which material ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... to a nicety his or her seeming at the precise point of utterance of any speech, slight or weighty, nine-tenths of our wit or profundity would remain unspoken. Man always credits woman with knowing exactly what she looks like, and engineering speech and seeming towards the one desired end of impressing him—important Him! He acquits himself of studying the subject! Probably he and she ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... morning in discussing the ultimate difficulties, philosophical, historical, and scientific, which preclude the modern mind from an assent to the philosophy of Catholicism. He displayed on this occasion, a broadness and a balance, if not a profundity of thought, in which many theologians who call themselves liberals are wanting. He spoke even of militant atheists, such as Huxley and Tyndall, without any sarcastic anger or signs of moral reprobation. ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Shakespeare, but few know what the word means. The theatre is crowded to hear Macready's "Hamlet," but it is to see Macready, not to study the drama. When he is gone the play remains; and though it is spoken by stupid men, their dulness cannot affect its profundity and strength. That is the test of art, that it transcends its instruments; and the artist at his piano realizes the soul, though not the effect of the symphony which has spoken to him so ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... lessons of what father and son, loving and giving, trust and life mean, by the sweet experiences of his own father's home and his own mother's love, can grasp these blessed words. They carry the deepest mysteries which will still gleam before us unfathomed in all their profundity, unappropriated in all their blessedness, when millenniums have passed since we stood in the inner shrine of heaven. Wonderful is the word which blesses the child, which transcends the angel ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... intellect, may be designed to stimulate that intellect to strenuous action and healthy effort—as well as to supply, in their solution, as time rolls on, an ever-accumulating mass of proofs of the profundity of the wisdom which has so far anticipated all the wisdom of man; and of the divine origin of both the great books which he is privileged to study as a pupil, and even to illustrate as a commentator,—but the text ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... student were to read the "Works of Margaret Fuller":—"Life Within and Without," "At Home and Abroad," "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," "Art, Literature, and Drama,"—he would be prepared to find eccentricities of style, straining for effect, mystical utterances, attempts at profundity, and stilted commonplace. He would, however, find nothing of this sort, or of any sort of make believe, but simply a writer always in earnest, always convinced, with a fair English style, perfectly intelligible, intent upon conveying ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... do a good deal in that time," I said, not flattering myself on the originality of the remark, but desiring to set him talking. In the country, as elsewhere, we must forego profundity if we ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... divides into that same majority and minority. The world has an instinct for recognizing its own, and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life. From qualities for instance of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise in literature, nor at all less in literature, than ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... of disaster to the fire department by means of black balls and white boards, in fixed combinations; by night, with colored lanterns. Each section of the city has a signal-tower of this sort, and the engine-house is close at hand. Gradskaya Duma means, literally, city thought, and the profundity of the meditations sometimes indulged in in this building, otherwise not remarkable, may be inferred from the fact discovered a few years ago, that many honored members of the Duma (which also signifies the Council of City Fathers), whose names still stood on the roll, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... thinkers, scholars, and authors who are still worthy of this name! Your laments over the general shallowness, thoughtlessness, and superficiality, over self-conceit and inexhaustible babble, over the contempt for seriousness and profundity in all classes, may be true, even as they actually are. Yet what class is it, pray, that has educated all these classes, that has transformed everything pertaining to science into a jest for them, and that has trained them from their earliest youth in that self-conceit and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Ceres' example shows the profundity of these moral truths. She perceived that she had senses. A second was enough to bring about this discovery, to change her soul, to alter her whole life. To have learned to know herself was at first a delight. The {greek here} of the ancient philosophy is not a precept the moral fulfilment ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... express the profundity of his emotion, Dag Daughtry broke off the sentence and drowned it in ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... Thomas Bodza had read and crammed into his head. Once he had even written a dissertation in which, with astonishing profundity and ingenuity, he had demonstrated the striking resemblance and the identical significance of the Greek {GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON} {GREEK SMALL LETTER NU} and the Slavonic tiszi, which dissertation was received with general ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... allusion of more classical beauty, or more finely charged with typical truth? And yet such was one of the common and briefer exercises of the illustrative faculty in this gifted man. On another occasion we heard him dwell on that vast profundity characteristic of the scriptural representations of God, which ever deepens and broadens the longer and the more thoroughly it is explored, until at length the student—struck at first by its expansiveness, but conceiving of it as if it were a mere ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... and immense practice at the bar is more owing to the scarcity of silk-gowns{3} than the profundity of his talents. The perpetual simper that plays upon his ruby countenance, when finessing with a jury, has, no doubt, its artful effect; although it is as foreign to the true feelings of the man, as the malicious grin of the malignant satirist would be to generosity and true ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... brief messages, but in long addresses, which are given every Sunday in our principal cities before large audiences, and in the writing of books of considerable length, but not, as a rule, of any great profundity or literary value. To all these claims, however, we can simply record the verdict "not proven." When a man writes or says anything we want more than his mere assertion to prove that it does not come from his own mind. And, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture, except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. And the way that he makes animals' flesh and blood, insomuch that if the room were darkened ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... neither harmony nor melody, and therefore have a fanatical following among those who labor under like disabilities; the great writers who are unable to attain strength, lucidity, or beauty, and therefore secure praise for profundity and occult wisdom,—none of these influence him. In these, as in other things, the Hohenzollern sanity asserts itself. He recognizes the fact that normal and healthy progress is by an evolution of the better out of the good, and that the true function of genius in every ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucault, to La Bougive, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... or so stupid as not to recognize there also the voice of kindness. And then the vagueness of the warning—because what can be the meaning of the phrase: to spoil one's life?—arrested one's attention by its air of wise profundity. At any rate, as I have said before, the words of la belle Madame Delestang made me thoughtful for a whole evening. I tried to understand and tried in vain, not having any notion of life as an enterprise that could be mi managed. ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... and submitting to his dread experience, Mr. Guppy consults him in the choice of that day's banquet, turning an appealing look towards him as the waitress repeats the catalogue of viands and saying "What do YOU take, Chick?" Chick, out of the profundity of his artfulness, preferring "veal and ham and French beans—and don't you forget the stuffing, Polly" (with an unearthly cock of his venerable eye), Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling give the like order. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... life, among statesmen, men of business, and artisans, exist noble examples of exceptional profundity and reality of knowledge, but in the great average of so-called educated people of our own generation, we find the majority possessing very fragmentary interest in any of the subjects which, as students, were supposed to engage their attention. What they would have ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... from him, and all was dark. He could hardly believe that she was asleep; but it was a relief to him to accept her pretence of it, and to escape all further conversation. He himself slept but little. The mere profundity of the Venetian silence teased him; it reminded him how far ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to Dr. Eames, the Master of Brakespeare College, of his ideas and his purpose gives the note of fooling and profundity ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... talk as well as any one; but he could hold his tongue, if that were more expressive, and he usually did so when his perplexities were greatest. He had been sitting for several evenings in a beer-cellar, smoking his pipe with a profundity of reticence. This attitude was so unbroken that it marked a crisis—the complete, the acute consciousness of his personal situation. It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an evening. At this particular ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... a shudder upon hearing those horrible reverberations, each one telling of the awful profundity of the place— one which, without extensive mining apparatus, I felt that any fathoming for search was out ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... particularly by intelligent and discreet crime. Machiavelli emphasised the separation, at times relative, at times absolute, which exists between politics and morals. His Discourses upon Livius are full of sense, penetration, and profundity; his light works show a singular dexterity of thought united to a fundamental grossness which it would be impossible to misunderstand ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... centre of discussion. His own means of conveying or gathering information was that whereby one person asked a question and another person answered it, and, if the subject proved deeper than the assembled profundity, then one pulled out the proper volume of an encyclopaedia, and the pearl was elicited as ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... the reported lectures on Aristotle is, though cloudy, intelligible. The remainder is a fair specimen of that skimmy-dashy style of thought which glances over the surfaces of things and never reaches their substance or reality, yet boasts of its unlimited profundity because it does not know the meaning of profound. Such thinking must necessarily end in falsity and folly, of which the lecture gives many specimens, which it is worth while to quote, to show what the devotees of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... Just imagine! Here was I, seriously occupied at this very time with the destiny of humanity, thinking of the re-organisation of the social system, of political revolutions, reading all sorts of devilishly-wise books whose abysmal profundity was certainly unfathomable by their very authors—at this very time. I say, I was trying with all my might to make of myself "a potent active social force." It even seemed to me that I had partially accomplished my object; anyhow, at this time, in my ideas about myself, ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... basis of dogma wanting, but the dogma itself is hardly conceived explicitly; all is despatched with a stock phrase, or a quotation from some theological compendium. Ecclesiastical authority acts as if it felt that more profundity would be confusing and that more play of mind might be dangerous. This is that "Scholasticism" and "Mediaevalism" against which the modernists inveigh or under which they groan; and to this intellectual barrenness may be added the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... It was not seen. There was only a black void dividing some clusters of brilliant but remote and diminished lights. There were odd stars which detached themselves from the fixed clusters, and moved in the void, sounding the profundity of the chasm beneath them with lines of trembling fire. Such a wandering comet drifted near where I stood on the verge of nothing, and then it was plain that its trail of quivering light did not sound, but ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... his first creation made an order of angels, and among all made one principal, which was the ——, who would not be content with his estate, but affected the celsitude and rule of Creator, for the which he was divested from the altitude of heaven into the profundity of hell into everlasting darkness, without repair or return, with those that consented unto his pride. So it now lately befell in this our worldly hierarchy of the court by the fall of Queen Anne as a worldly ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... have not arrived at the profundity of the maxim. This inequality is, in a great measure, the result of abuses in the institutions of society. They do not speak of what exists, but of what ought to exist. Every one should be left at liberty to obtain all the advantages of society which he can compass, by the free exertion of ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... dangerous spot on account of the malaria; insomuch that the traveller will make but a brief and careless inquisition for the traces of the old wonder, and will stake his credit before the public, in some Pacific Monthly of that day, that the story of it is but a myth, though enriched with a spiritual profundity which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... been the obstinate injustice of destiny in this case, Thenardier was one of those men who understand best, with the most profundity and in the most modern fashion, that thing which is a virtue among barbarous peoples and an object of merchandise among civilized peoples,—hospitality. Besides, he was an admirable poacher, and quoted for his skill ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... perfect of the AEons, the Abysm, reposed on the bosom of Profundity together with Thought. From their union sprang Intelligence, who had for his ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... be the same after the war." This is one of the consoling platitudes with which people cover over voids of thought. They utter it with an air of round-eyed profundity. But to ask in reply, "Then how will things be different?" is in many cases to rouse great resentment. It is almost as rude as saying, "Was that thought ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... bushes; and, being noticed by the careless passer-by, who cannot see the deep infinity of waters of which it is the symbol, and knows not even whether they exist, is termed "a pretty stream of thought and fancy, but one that hath no profundity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Still, however, a tinge of the old leaven is discernible, even unto this day, in their characters; witches occasionally start up among them in different disguises, as physicians, civilians and divines. The people at large show a keenness, a cleverness and a profundity of wisdom, that savors strongly of witchcraft; and it has been remarked, that whenever any stones fall from the moon, the greater part of them is sure to ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... "Profundity" and "Simplicity"; the faculty of wonder; Browning's first conception of "Pippa Passes"; his residence in London; his country walks; his ways and habits, and his heart-episodes; debates whether to become a clergyman; is "Pippa ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... economy, so infinite and subtile are the forces that enter into its shifting phenomena, is a science of no slight complexity, and that the successful unveiling of its disordered tissue demands, in the first instance, the highest intellectual acuteness and profundity. We here encounter the same obstacles as in metaphysics, except that in the one case the phenomena investigated are subjective, in the other objective. Both conditions have peculiar advantages; both are open to peculiar difficulties, which it ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... thinking," said Captain Reud, placing the forefinger of his left hand, with an air of great profundity, on the left side of his nose, "I have been thinking of the very curious fatality that has attached itself to Mr Silva's ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... overburdened, and loose—almost always vehement and bold. Authors will aim at rapidity of execution, more than at perfection of detail. Small productions will be more common than bulky books; there will be more wit than erudition, more imagination than profundity; and literary performances will bear marks of an untutored and rude vigor of thought—frequently of great variety and singular fecundity. The object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the taste. Here and there, indeed, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... manhood to the brass idol known as a second term. In fact, there was scarcely a prominent political personage in the country for whom George had a good word in every-day conversation. And when the talk was of municipal politics he shook his head with a profundity of gloom which argued an utterly hopeless condition of affairs—a sort of social ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... strengthen the side-wall, or possibly to enlarge the ancient edifice by an additional aisle. Moreover, they had dug an immense pit in the churchyard, long and broad, and fifteen feet deep, two thirds of which profundity were discolored by human decay, and mixed up with crumbly bones. What this excavation was intended for I could nowise imagine, unless it were the very pit in which Longfellow bids the "Dead Past bury its Dead," and Whitnash, of all places in the ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Chaucer. Instances of this occur in such poems as Peter Bell, the Idiot Boy, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, Simon Lee, and the Wagoner. But there are multitudes of Wordsworth's ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly, and which, in their homeliness and clear {229} profundity, in their production of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes, are among the choicest modern examples of pure, as distinguished from decorated, art. Such are (out of many) Ruth, Lucy, A Portrait, To a Highland Girl, The Reverie ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of her eyes, for Folter was busied with her hair; "I want to know your opinion of it." Folter gave a toss of her head that seemed to say, "Have not I spoken?" but what it really did mean, how should other mortal know? for the main obstructions to understanding are profundity and shallowness, and the latter is far the ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... to have maintained the same ideas with more moderation and also with less profundity. He claimed, above all, to be able to make a good orator. According to Plato, it was he whom Socrates most persistently made the butt of ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... until now, he had failed to observe. Longings for the unattainable began to stir within him and take hold of him in a manner entirely new. Hazy, fragmentary glimpses of hitherto undreamed possibilities began to shape themselves in his mind. The immensity and profundity of the universe and the mysterious growth of its hidden life held and ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... Dedication to Marino Faliero. "In the Appendix to an English Work, lately translated into German, and published at Leipzig, a judgment of yours upon English poetry is quoted as follows: 'That in English poetry great genius, universal power, a feeling of profundity, with sufficient tenderness and force are to be found, but that altogether these do not constitute poets,'" etc., etc. (see Poetical Works, 1901, v. 340, 341, and Letters, 1900, v. 100-103). The originals of the Dedication and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... not accuse me of undue prejudice in favor of slavish surrender of volition. I accept in a large measure the view advanced with breadth of learning and defended with profundity of thought by Hegel, that history is the unfolding and realization of freedom. The point I wish to make is that the whole teaching of Bushido was so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice, ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... it is that which attaches me to you. By assuming your likeness yesterday, I became acquainted with your character, and was no less astonished at the profundity and range of your thoughts than at the heroic magnanimity with which these were combined. And now, in addition to these, you are dedicated to the great work of the Lord; for which reasons I have resolved to attach myself as closely ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... — N. depth; deepness &c. adj.; profundity, depression &c. (concavity) 252. hollow, pit, shaft, well, crater; gulf &c. 198; bowels of the earth, botttomless pit[obs3], hell. soundings, depth of water, water, draught, submersion; plummet, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... nothing better to do, towards evening, and finds the contemplation of his own profundity becoming a little monotonous in spite of the vastness of the subject, he often takes an airing in the Cathedral Close and thereabout. He likes to pass the churchyard with a swelling air of proprietorship, and to encourage in his ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... satisfactory way, even to Archie ordering a new suit of clothes. The youth came out temporarily from his usual profundity, and had a real, natural boyish talk with Ralph. The latter recited the incident of the adventure with Billy Bouncer's crowd ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... picture, enveloped, as it were, in its rich gloom, as the painted profundity of a church absorbs one in its depths. And with the impression of its solemn beauty was blent a despairing awe of the artist who, of a little coloured earth, had created such a masterpiece of vitality, thrown on to a thin screen of canvas ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... is never disordered; the luxury of ornament never overloads the chaste eloquence of the principal lines. His best works abound in combinations which may be said to be an epoch in the handling of musical style. Daring, brilliant, and attractive, they disguise their profundity under so much grace, their science under so many charms, that it is with difficulty we free ourselves sufficiently from their magical inthrallment, to judge coldly of ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... free to the room where are hung ten large paintings by the inimitable Frans Hals. Here are the world-renowned Regent pictures set forth in chronological order. Drop the catalogue and use your own eyes. The first impression is profound; not that Hals was profound in the sense of Rembrandt's profundity, but because of the almost terrifying vitality of these portraits. Prosaic men and women, great trenchermen, devourers of huge pasties, mowers down of wine-bottles and beer-tankards, they live with such vitality on the canvases of Hals that you instinctively lower ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... of George Peabody. He was big in body, manly, intelligent and could meet men on a basis of equality. If I were president of a college, I would certainly have a Chair devoted to Psychic Mixability, or Charm of Manner. Ponderosity, profundity and insipidity may have their place, but the man with Charm of Manner keeps his capital active. His soul is fluid. I have never been in possession of enough of this Social Radium to analyze it, but I know it has the power of dissolving opposition, and melting human hearts. But ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... no sandy plain, nor any circumscribed and scant oasis I seem to realize. A forest valley, with rocky sides and brown profundity of shade, formed by tree crowding on tree, descends deep before me. Here, indeed, dwell human beings, but so few, and in alleys so thick branched and overarched, they are neither heard nor seen. Are they savage? Doubtless. They live by the crook ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... lines of care and of reflection, which here and there almost imperceptibly appeared, rendered it all the more charming. In the bold yet beautiful contour of those features, in the full red lips, in the high pale forehead and, above all, in those dark and haunting eyes lay a depth of feeling and profundity and nobleness of thought, which to a reflective mind have a charm infinitely more irresistible than that which belongs to mere youthful perfection. There was a bland beauty in the smile which slept ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... position. Bold though the seaman was, and desperate the circumstances, his strong frame quivered when he gazed down and felt himself gradually toppling. The height he knew to be little short of sixty feet, but in the dark night it appeared an abyss of horrible profundity. A cold sweat broke out upon him, and for one moment he felt an almost irresistible tendency to let go the umbrella and clutch the window-sill, but he was too late. Like lightning he shot down for a couple of yards; then the parachute expanded and checked him with such violence, ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... One of the attaches of the Russian embassy, M. F——, is the favorite dilettante of Buyukdere; he has one of the finest voices I ever heard, and frequently reminded me of the easy humour and sonorous profundity of Lablache. ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... ingenious, or too profound. Yet the English reader likes, or thinks he likes, eloquence; he has a keen sense of humour, and a fair appreciation of wit; and he would be much hurt if he were told that ingenuity and profundity were in themselves distasteful to him. How, then, to give him enough of these qualities to please and not enough to offend him—as much eloquence as will stir his emotions, but not enough to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry home the argument, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... the irresponsible imbecility of a private individual, and not with the profundity of a professional adviser, I should say that if the circumstance of its being too much, weighs upon your mind, you have the haven of consolation open to you that you can easily make it less. And if you ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... lacked the scrupulous patience and the willingness to submerge his own personality which are characteristic of the scientific scholar. His gift was for generalization, and his writings were marked by clarity of thought and wealth of phrase, rather than by profundity. But such qualities brought him remarkable success as a lecturer and essayist, and constant practice gave him a fluency, a vocal control, and a power of verbal expression which assured distinction at the frequent ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... "Sorry to disturb the profundity of your calculations, Mr. Wacker," said Bart quietly, "but in the present instance there could not possibly be any mistake. Our scales were burned up in the fire. The new ones have not yet arrived, and in the meantime, ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... religious, educational and social questions. The Rev. William Durban, the editor, writing from London of John Clifford in the Homiletic Review, styles him "the renowned Baptist preacher, undoubtedly the most conspicuous figure in his own denomination." He speaks of "the profundity of thought," "simplicity and beauty of diction," the "compactness of argument" and "instructive expository character" of ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... so sure that I agree with you, Mr. Bainton,"—said a stout, oily-looking personage, named Netlips, the grocer and 'general store' dealer of the village, a man who was renowned in the district for the profundity and point of his observations at electoral meetings, and for the entirely original manner in which he 'used' the English language; "Public worship is a necessary evil. It is a factor in vulgar civilisations. Without it, the system of religious politics would fall into cohesion,—absolute ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... plan of the campaign of the Austrians is incomprehensible to all our military men—not on account of its profundity, but on account of its absurdity or incoherency. In the present circumstances, half-measures must always be destructive, and it is better to strike strongly and firmly than justly. To invade Bavaria without disarming the Bavarian army, and to enter Suabia and yet acknowledge ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... good many investigations of one sort and another in my time,' pursued Mr. Britain, with the profundity of a sage, 'having been always of an inquiring turn of mind; and I've read a good many books about the general Rights of things and Wrongs of things, for I went into the literary line myself, when ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... prudence, depth, judgment, reason, discernment, judiciousness, reasonableness, discretion, knowledge, sagacity, enlightenment, learning, sense, erudition, prescience, skill, foresight, profundity, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... offensive to the pride, and to many of the prejudices and interests of our age. An author who has been disposed to devote many years to the labour of illustrating this topic, has need of the earnest support of all who prize the truth; and, considering the extent and profundity of his subject, his work, at the best, must be very imperfect, requiring all the forbearance, and even the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... 'r' you," declared the young gentleman with a scowling profundity. "No go. Got to come out your corner 'n' fight. ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... was much changed," Mr. Wentworth declared, in a tone whose unexpressive, unimpassioned quality appeared to Felix to reveal a profundity of opposition. "It may be that she is only becoming what you call a ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... instrument. It was a kind of partnership. He steered for me—I had to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory—like a claim of distant kinship affirmed ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... stirring in her bosom things she could not express; a vague comprehension of the pure spirituality of the man who had died to save her child, a response to the love that had stirred in the bosom now cold beneath the sea. All the primitive deep profundity of the devotion of that wild-hearted man who had brought a wealth of food to her from over the mountains, who had faced death for her on the frozen seas, who had tended her in her time of trial with the gentleness of a woman, his indomitable heroism, the splendor, the dauntless unselfishness ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... speechless for an hour and a half while half a dozen young ladies had discussed the origin of evil with great volubility, and what seemed to her, however it might have impressed metaphysicians, astounding erudition and profundity. She had assisted at that sacred rite of musical devotees, the Saturday night Symphony concert, where a handful of people gathered to hear the music, and all the rest of the world crowded for the sake of having been there. She had been taken by Miss Mott to a select sewing-circle—that ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... was also an end, before nourishing up into the series of which I have synopsized the first issue; for there is another Number One without date, but apparently earlier. This contains some exemplary sentiments "On Solitude," with a touch of what was real profundity in so inexperienced a writer. "Man is naturally a sociable being," he says; "and apart from the world there are no incitements to the pursuit of excellence; there are no rivals to contend with; and therefore there is no improvement.... The heart ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... often heard that the borderline between profundity and insanity was thin and inexact and it was now clear on which side she stood. I looked at Gootes to see how he was taking her hysterical outburst, but he had found a batch of empty testtubes which he was building into ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... alleged for the common belief that both are on the decline. Whether such a belief has any solid foundation in the case of letter-writing, we may be warranted in doubting. Observations of this sort, which have a false air of acuteness and profundity, are repeated periodically. The remark so constantly made at this moment, that nowadays people read nothing but magazines, was made by Coleridge early in this century; and Southey prophesied the ruin of good letters from the penny post. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... was worn back from his face and temples, and left a broad high majestic forehead utterly unrelieved and bare; and on the brow there was not a single wrinkle—it was as smooth as it might have been some fifteen years ago. There was a singular calmness, and, so to speak, profundity of thought, eloquent upon its clear expanse, which suggested the idea of one who had passed his life rather in contemplation than emotion. It was a face that a physiognomist would have loved to look upon, so much did it speak both of the refinement and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... not attempt to defend my remark on the score of profundity; I did not think it profound myself; but I have noticed that the effect of our speeches is not always proportionate with their importance in our own eyes; and if I had shot Mr. D. through and through ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... sympathizes merely in the sense that he understands in his heart as well as in his brain. He has the most unbiassed attitude, I think, of any author in the world. Mr. Edward Garnett, in his introduction to Mrs. Garnett's translation of Tchehov's tales, speaks admirably of his "profundity of acceptation." There is no writer who is less inclined to use italics in his record of human life. Perhaps Mr. Garnett goes too far when he says that Tchehov "stands close to all his characters, watching them quietly and registering their circumstances and feelings ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... satisfactorily account for his present confirmed love of solitude. The position to which he was so unexpectedly called was an exceedingly difficult one for a mind filled, as his was, with ideal visions of liberty and progress, and totally inexperienced in the ways of a selfish world and in the profundity of Jesuitical intrigues; and the unavoidable embarrassments of the time had been increased by the course of his immediate predecessors. Ludwig I., through a sentimental love of the picturesque, had encouraged the multiplication of monasteries and convents and brotherhoods ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... was not only being diverted from her purpose, but led by a side tract to an unexplored profundity. On the further side of it she discerned, dimly, the undesirable. It was a murky region, haunted by still murkier presences, by Lady Cayley and her kind. She persisted with ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... preciousness to cool color above, while it remained itself untouched as the representative of warm reflexes and extreme depth of transparent gloom. We believe this employment of the brown ground to be the only means of uniting majesty of hue with profundity of shade. But its value to the Fleming is connected with the management of the lights, which we have next to consider. As we here venture for the first time to disagree in some measure with Mr. Eastlake, let us be sure that we state ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... answered the colored man with great dignity. "Dey'll take me fo' jest what I am—a mostest profundity educationalized specimen ob de human fambly. But I'se ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... doctrines of mathematics. The same opinion was shared by Pythagoras, the great founder of the science, whose main formula was that number is the essence or first principle of all things. No thinkers ever surpassed the Greeks in originality and profundity; and mathematics, being highly prized by them, were carried to the greatest perfection their method would allow. They did not understand algebra, by the application of which to geometry modern mathematicians have climbed to greater heights than the ancients; but then it is ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... done with amorous grace and attitude, soaring rapture, and profundity of sigh, suspense (more agonizing than suspension), despair, prostration, grinding of the teeth, the hollow and spectral laugh of a heart forever broken, and all the other symptoms of an annual bill of vitality; and ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... lawyer had exceeded expectation, and shone even yet more conspicuously in the less adventitiously aided duties of the judge. Envy itself—and Brandon's political virulence had, despite his personal affability, made him many foes—was driven into acknowledging the profundity of his legal knowledge, and in admiring the manner in which the peculiar functions of his novel dignity were discharged. No juvenile lawyer browbeat, no hackneyed casuist puzzled, him; even his attention never wandered from the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... been by nature what the French call a poseur; or, as one of his own not unkindly intimates has described him, "an innocent charlatan." Although not altogether empty, he was vain; full of talk which had what was most often a false air of profundity; unpractical and incapable in the ordinary affairs of life to a degree not adequately compensated for by such a grasp as he was able to get on the realities that underlie them; and with an imposing aspect which corresponded ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... bricks to strengthen the side-wall, or enlarge the ancient edifice by an additional aisle. Moreover, they had dug an immense pit in the church-yard, long and broad, and fifteen feet deep, two-thirds of which profundity were discolored by human decay and mixed up with crumbly bones. What this excavation was intended for I could nowise imagine, unless it were the very pit in which Longfellow bids the "Dead Past bury its Dead," and Whitnash, of all places in the world, were going to avail itself of our poet's suggestion. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... manner, and matter that is not commonplace. If ever he deviates into any originality of thought, he takes care that it shall be such as excites surprise for its acuteness, rather than admiration for its profundity. He takes care? say rather, that nature took care for him. It is impossible to detract from the merit of these Letters: they are suited to their purpose, and perfect in their kind. They impel to action, not thought. Had they been profound or ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... when he entered the office, was supposed to know everything which a young man had ever known. Those who looked most to dead knowledge were inclined to back him as first favourite. It had, however, been remarked, that his utility as a clerk had not been equal to the profundity of his acquirements. Of all the candidates ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... repeated, as we lay on the hillside, in a tone so musically tender that it chimes in my ear now as I write down his confession. It can surely be no breach of confidence to publish it—it is too creditable to the profundity of Davidson's affections. As I knew him, he was one of the purest ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... part of his fortune in the collection of materials for his history of the wars between France and England, it is not as an historian that he is now remembered; it is as a writer of magnificent prose. His Chroniques, devoid of any profundity of insight, any true grasp of the movements of the age, have rarely been paralleled in the brilliance and animation of their descriptions, the vigour of their character-drawing, the flowing picturesqueness of their style. They ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... everything, without learning anything. It has served an extemporary apprenticeship; it wants no drilling; it never ranks in the awkward squad; it has no left hand, no deaf ear, no blind side. It puts on no look of wondrous wisdom, it has no air of profundity, but plays with the details of place as dexterously as a well-taught hand flourishes over the keys of the pianoforte. It has all the air of commonplace, and all the force and ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... that of "a dog in a coal-box," he picks him up and philosophically informs him that "all the different styles of fence were invented and established for man's protection, not for his destruction. Besides," he adds, with much profundity, "the laws thereto appertaining are based on certain strict principles of honor, which you have unquestionably violated in this case. Now, take my advice, never again engage in fight without having some just cause of quarrel. Thus, at least, you will always come off with credit, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... knees, watching me with an occasional approving nod of his big head. He looked so funny standing there on his little seven-by-nine world, like a clown on a performing ball, that, despite my terrible situation, I shook my sides with laughter. There was no echo in the profundity ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... attempts. In the execution, however, of personal and individual resemblances, the modern statuary is the rival of the ancient: but this is no pure creation of art; observation must here come in: and whatever degree of science, profundity, and taste may be displayed in the execution, the artist is still tied down to the object which is ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... unexpectedly called was an exceedingly difficult one for a mind filled, as his was, with ideal visions of liberty and progress, and totally inexperienced in the ways of a selfish world and in the profundity of Jesuitical intrigues; and the unavoidable embarrassments of the time had been increased by the course of his immediate predecessors. Ludwig I., through a sentimental love of the picturesque, had encouraged the multiplication of monasteries and convents and brotherhoods ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... of the ironies of history that the province over which parties battled with so much display of legal profundity was not yet in the possession of the First Consul. Six months after the ratification of the treaty, in the old Cabildo at New Orleans, Laussat received from the Spanish governor the keys of the city and took possession of the province ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... always, in comfortless Chelsea, at the door of the small house the small rent of which she couldn't help having on her mind, she fatalistically asked herself, before going in, which thing it would probably be this time. She noticed with profundity that disappointment made people selfish; she marvelled at the serenity—it was the poor woman's only one—of what Marian took for granted: her own state of abasement as the second-born, her life reduced to mere inexhaustible ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... we do not possess it; joined to Him as we may be by true faith in Him, it is ours, and with it all the blessings which it brings into our else empty and thirsting hearts. Now all this sets in strong light the dignity and work of Christian men; the profundity and clearness of their religious character is the great sign to the world of the love of God. The message of Christ to man lacks one chief evidence of its worth if they who profess to have received it do not, in their lives, show its value. The characters of Christian people are ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... in respect to brief messages, but in long addresses, which are given every Sunday in our principal cities before large audiences, and in the writing of books of considerable length, but not, as a rule, of any great profundity or literary value. To all these claims, however, we can simply record the verdict "not proven." When a man writes or says anything we want more than his mere assertion to prove that it does not come from his own mind. And, even if we are satisfied that he is not consciously ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... politics, has escaped from his sheath; he is creating out of the ideal and the impossible. We take him for what he is, a posthumous brother of Dante and Michael Angelo. In the clear outlines of his vision, in the intensity, coherency, and inward logic of his dreams, in the profundity of his meditations, in the superhuman grandeur of his conceptions, he is, indeed, their fellow and their equal. His genius is of the same stature and the same structure; he is one of the three sovereign minds ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... know what; and it wasn't Eugenio who would tell him. What Eugenio told him was that he thought the ladies—as if their liability had been equal—were a "leetle" fatigued, just a "leetle leetle," and without any cause named for it. It was one of the signs of what Densher felt in him that, by a profundity, a true deviltry of resource, he always met the latter's Italian with English and his English with Italian. He now, as usual, slightly smiled at him in the process—but ever so slightly this time, his ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... the betting-ring and nervously pencils his race-card never thinks that the time of weakness and sadness and weariness is coming on; that gray and tremulous old man who bends over the roulette-table never thinks that he will speedily drop into a profundity deeper than ever plummet sounded. The gliding ball does not swing round in its groove faster than the old man's soul fares towards the darkness; and yet he clenches his jaw and engages in the most trivial of pursuits as if he had ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... bound from their naturalistic polytheism. Zealous as he was for the pure faith, he realized that mankind could not attain it directly, but must approach it by conceptions of the One God gradually increasing in profundity and truth. The Greek thinkers had approximated closest to the Hebraic God-idea when they conceived one supreme, immanent reason in the universe; and Philo, in carrying his audiences beyond this to the ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... fantastic; the sculpturing is never disordered; the luxury of ornament never overloads the chaste eloquence of the principal lines. His best works abound in combinations which may be said to be an epoch in the handling of musical style. Daring, brilliant, and attractive, they disguise their profundity under so much grace, their science under so many charms, that it is with difficulty we free ourselves sufficiently from their magical inthrallment, to judge coldly of their ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... is and must be, shall be!" Bakahenzie grunted his acknowledgment of the profundity of the statement. "He who would trap the leopard must needs dig the pit!" Another uncompromising silence urged Birnier to force the pace a little: "O son of Maliko, what say the omens and the signs of the evil ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... called it the principle. She watched him. That attitude in which he sat was of a profundity of meditation not to be looked upon without that sense of awe, of oppression, of misgiving that is aroused by the suggestion in man or nature of brooding forces mysteriously engrossed. There came to her, watching him, a thought ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... she was not only being diverted from her purpose, but led by a side tract to an unexplored profundity. On the further side of it she discerned, dimly, the undesirable. It was a murky region, haunted by still murkier presences, by Lady Cayley and her kind. She persisted ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... understands in his heart as well as in his brain. He has the most unbiassed attitude, I think, of any author in the world. Mr. Edward Garnett, in his introduction to Mrs. Garnett's translation of Tchehov's tales, speaks admirably of his "profundity of acceptation." There is no writer who is less inclined to use italics in his record of human life. Perhaps Mr. Garnett goes too far when he says that Tchehov "stands close to all his characters, watching them quietly and registering their circumstances and feelings with such ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... it yet, von Stinnes," Dorn smiled. "I will later. So far I've managed to do nothing more than enjoy myself. Profundity is diverting in New York, but a bore in Berlin. There's too much of it. Good God, man, there are times when I feel that even the buildings of the city ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Rodicaso and friends, Fidelia rose, turned toward them, and made a profound courtesy, as if to signify her abject submission. Signor Rodicaso bowed with equal profundity, and straightway proceeded to make a speech to the lady, in which he spoke of the wild idolatry that he had long felt for her, and alluded most disparagingly to his own merits. If the Signor's statements could be relied on, he was totally unworthy of an alliance with the beautiful ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... made by the devil; or with the Cerinthians and Ebionites and Nazarites (which last discovered that the name of Noah's wife was Ouria, and that she set the ark on fire); or with the Valentinians, who taught that there were thirty AEones, ages or worlds, born out of Profundity (Bathos), male, and Silence, female; or with the Marcites, Colarbasii, and Heracleonites (who still kept up that bother about AEones, Mr. Profundity and Mrs. Silence); or with the Ophites, who are said to have worshipped the serpent; or the Cainites, who ingeniously found out a reason for honoring ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... genius. Such was the case with Dante among the Italians, the father of modern poetry; acknowledging Virgil for his master, he has produced a work which, of all others, most differs from the Aeneid, and in our opinion far excels its pretended model in power, truth, compass, and profundity. It was the same afterwards with Ariosto, who has most unaccountably been compared to Homer, for nothing can be more unlike. So in art with Michael Angelo and Raphael, who had no doubt deeply studied ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... leave much to the reader's acuteness and yet save his labour, not often obscure, and never wearisome, an evident generalisation of long experience, without pedantry, without method, without deductive reasonings, yet wearing an appearance at least of profundity; they delight the intelligent though indolent man of the world, and must be read with some admiration by the philosopher . . . . yet they bear witness to the contracted observation and the precipitate inferences which an intercourse with a single class ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bruyere, to Machiavelli, and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... would be worth more than all that has ever been written about him. But if one would like to dream what his art was like, one may imagine it as combining with the dramatic power of Euphronius and the exquisite loveliness of the Aphrodite cup, Giotto's elevation of feeling and Michael Angelo's profundity of thought. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... there may be some grain of truth in all this, though I am not unmindful of the inevitable conclusion, that my own parabola will some day take its downward course, and I shall sit, quiescent, while the younger men around will demand stormily why I cannot see the grandeur, the profundity, of their newer gods. There lies the tragedy. Those gods, quite possibly, will be greater than mine—must be, if my belief in man be worth anything. Yes, that is the tragedy. I shall be at rest, and the youths ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... in several parliaments, and given bushels of votes. He is a man of that profundity in the matter of vote-giving, that you never know what he means. When he seems to be voting pure white, he may be in reality voting jet black. When he says Yes, it is just as likely as not - or rather more so - that he means No. This is the statesmanship of our honourable friend. It ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... Japan's experience will be like that of Rome I do not believe. For her environment is totally different. But the same struggle of the two conflicting principles is already on. Few, even among the educated classes, realize its nature or profundity. The thinkers who adhere to the principle of apotheosis do so admittedly because they see no other way in which to secure authority for law, whether political or moral. Here we see the importance of those ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... mind. He is one of the most difficult as well as one of the most successful essays in psychological analysis ever attempted by an author; and in his wonderful portrait, which must be closely studied, and not epitomized or reproduced in extracts, we see glowing enthusiasm united to cabalistic profundity, and the most morbid tension of the intellectual powers united to clear and well-defined hopes. How has the author succeeded in making Mordecai so human and so true to nature? By mixing the gold with an alloy of commoner metal, and by giving the angelic likeness ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... danger of a discovery to which thy presence here might lead? Thy expiation is severe. Such as we, alas!" and the monk heaved a sigh, "who cannot feel the vibration of some of the tenderest chords of humanity, know not how to sound in its profundity; but I can judge that it must be grievous to bear. Still it must be so. Go, then, in peace—but go. What I command no longer in the name of thy salvation, I ask of thy heart, for the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... perspective;[450] and their absence in the remaining 22 per cent. might be explained by internal commotions producing irregularities of structure. The absolute depth of spot-cavities—at least of their sloping sides—was determined by Father Secchi through measurement of the "parallax of profundity"[451]—that is, of apparent displacements attendant on the sun's rotation, due to depression below the sun's surface. He found that in every case it fell short of 4,000 miles, and averaged not more than ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... and presented them to his readers free from all processes of demonstration. The structure of the heavens is here reduced to the simple solution of a great problem in mechanics; yet Laplace's work has never yet been accused of incompleteness and want of profundity. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... and a large part of his fortune in the collection of materials for his history of the wars between France and England, it is not as an historian that he is now remembered; it is as a writer of magnificent prose. His Chroniques, devoid of any profundity of insight, any true grasp of the movements of the age, have rarely been paralleled in the brilliance and animation of their descriptions, the vigour of their character-drawing, the flowing picturesqueness of their style. ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... moral basis of dogma wanting, but the dogma itself is hardly conceived explicitly; all is despatched with a stock phrase, or a quotation from some theological compendium. Ecclesiastical authority acts as if it felt that more profundity would be confusing and that more play of mind might be dangerous. This is that "Scholasticism" and "Mediaevalism" against which the modernists inveigh or under which they groan; and to this intellectual barrenness may be added ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... might be the creation of fantastic romance! Clustered with monasteries and convents, turreted dwellings and sombre monuments, bathed in an atmosphere of orisons and melancholy, threaded by foul and ill-paved alleys, made for crime, intrigue, and mystery; where buried in the profundity of night love and wickedness both stalked forth; strange temples and niches lit by twinkling lamps before the images of saints; recollections of diabolical Inquisitorial rites—a romantic and fantastic shroud, dissipated now, torn ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... is generally unsuspected by philosophers and men of science, who are quite aware of its advantage in all departments of BELLES LETTRES; and if you allude in their presence to the deplorably defective presentation of the ideas in some work distinguished for its learning, its profundity or its novelty, it is probable that you will be despised as a frivolous setter up of manner over matter, a light-minded DILLETANTE, unfitted for the simple austerities of science. But this is itself a light-minded contempt; a deeper insight would change the tone, and help to remove ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... profundity, what vastness of knowledge, what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no more muscle than the black drone who fills the pipes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... is that which attaches me to you. By assuming your likeness yesterday, I became acquainted with your character, and was no less astonished at the profundity and range of your thoughts than at the heroic magnanimity with which these were combined. And now, in addition to these, you are dedicated to the great work of the Lord; for which reasons I have ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... Every wave in that illimitable ocean of space is freighted with wisdom, every sound is the tone of undying truth, every breath is redolent of divine wisdom. We wonder now at the wisdom of the sages of our own and of ages gone by—at the learning, the profundity, the astonishing acquirements of the Newtons, the Lockes, the Bacons, the Franklins, and the Humboldts. But when we shall stand, in all the nakedness of pure, unfettered spirit, within the confines of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... seek comfort in the reflection that "the essence of scholarship lay in profundity and acumen rather than in the ability to rattle off pages like so many psalms." Yet those "five hundred leaves" of his ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... making patchwork on the front of the tower, and were sawing a slab of stone and piling up bricks to strengthen the side-wall, or enlarge the ancient edifice by an additional aisle. Moreover, they had dug an immense pit in the church-yard, long and broad, and fifteen feet deep, two-thirds of which profundity were discolored by human decay and mixed up with crumbly bones. What this excavation was intended for I could nowise imagine, unless it were the very pit in which Longfellow bids the "Dead Past bury its Dead," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... of a piece of literature not by the beauty of the style or the profundity of the thought but by the influence it has exercised over men, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius will rank high. Its chief sources were the meditation and observation of its author. If he took some ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... once a visitor at Wendell Phillips's home in Boston, and the music of his voice, the liquid charm of his words, the purity, the transparency of his diction, the profundity of his knowledge, the fascination of his personality, and his marvelous art of putting things, I shall never forget. He sat down on the sofa beside me and talked as he would to an old schoolmate, and it seemed ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... author has sent me a copy of it, without naming himself. He will probably come to see me; he may, perhaps, have come already. What could I say to him? I do not think any one ever wrote worse. He mistakes obscurity for profundity; it is the darkness before ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... placable of the two; he had taken possession of the bench outside, and he had his note-book and much profundity to haul up with it while fish were frying. His countryman had rushed inside to avoid him, and remained there pacing the chamber like a lion newly caged. Their boatmen were brotherly in the anticipation of provision ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... projected it, at a cost of two million francs.[13] His career was splendid. He was clever, industrious, and persevering after his fashion, astute, lively, pretentious, a person ever by well-planned hints leading you to suppose his unrevealed profundity to be bottomless; in a word, in all respects an impostor.[14] He espoused that richly dowered bride the Church, rose to be Archbishop of Toulouse, and would have risen to be Archbishop of Paris, but for the King's over-scrupulous ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... depth, judgment, reason, discernment, judiciousness, reasonableness, discretion, knowledge, sagacity, enlightenment, learning, sense, erudition, prescience, skill, foresight, profundity, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... commenced their system with a Supreme Being, long unknown to the Human race, and still so the greater number of men; the [Greek: Βυθος] [Buthos], or Profundity, Source of Light, and of Adam-Kadmon, the Primitive Man, made by the Demiourgos, but perfected by the Supreme God by the communication to him of the Spirit [[Greek: ΠνεÏμα].. Pneuma]. The first emanation was the Thought of the Supreme Deity [the [Greek: Έννοια].. Ennoia], ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... book which lay on the settle: it was a learned volume, part of the works of Paracelsus, with strange figures and diagrams interwoven with the crabbed Latin text. A passage which he deciphered, abashed him by its profundity, and he laid the book down, and went from one to another of the black-framed engravings; from these to an oval piece in coarse Limoges enamel, which hung over the little shelf of books. At length he heard a step descending from the upper floors, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... habits, customs, usages, and the meditations of the Grecians; the Greek Digamma resolved, Prosody, Composition, both in prose and verse, and Oratory, in English, Latin and Greek; together with various other branches of learning and scholastic profundity—quoi enumerare longum est—along with Irish Radically, and a small taste of Hebrew ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... flourishings. The listeners laughed and applauded by turns; and had now fairly pitted them against each other, as the philosopher of Hopefulness and of the Unhopeful. The contest continued with all that ready wit and philosophy, that mixture of pleasantry and profundity, that extensive knowledge of books and character, with their ready application in argument or illustration, and that perfect ease and good-nature, which distinguish each of these men. The opponents were ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... sentiments or class hatreds and prejudices, and the judge who owes either his election or his appointment to the money or the favor of a great corporation, are alike unworthy to sit on the bench, are alike traitors to the people; and no profundity of legal learning, or correctness of abstract conviction on questions of public policy, can serve as an offset to such shortcomings. But it is also true that judges, like executives and legislators, should hold sound views on the questions of public policy ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... to avoid with equal anxiety a commonplace manner, and matter that is not commonplace. If ever he deviates into any originality of thought, he takes care that it shall be such as excites surprise for its acuteness, rather than admiration for its profundity. He takes care? say rather, that nature took care for him. It is impossible to detract from the merit of these Letters: they are suited to their purpose, and perfect in their kind. They impel to action, not thought. Had they ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... after genius ceased to soar to the heights of philosophy and poetry. The proudest triumphs of genius are in a realm which art can never approach, yet the wonders of art are still among the great triumphs of civilization. Zeuxis or Praxiteles may not have equaled Homer or Plato in profundity of genius, but it was only a great age which could have produced a Zeuxis or Praxiteles. I cannot place Raphael on so exalted a pinnacle as Luther, or Bacon, or Newton, and yet his fame will last as long as civilization ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... sink in a burning lake of brimstone and fire. Those whose sins cause them to sink so low that they no longer can rise to the surface are for ever forgotten by God, i.e., they fade out from the omniscient memory, says the poem—an expression, by the way, of an extraordinary profundity of thought, when closely analysed. The Virgin is terribly shocked, and falling down upon her knees in tears before the throne of God, begs that all she has seen in hell—all, all without exception, should ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... lighted strongly by a two-branched sconce on the wall; and when I stood by her side, not even the shadow of the eyelashes on her cheek trembled. Carlos' lips moved; his voice was almost extinct; but for all his emaciation, the profundity of his eyes, the sunken cheeks, the hollow temples, he remained attractive, with the charm of his gallant and romantic temper worn away ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... arranged in a satisfactory way, even to Archie ordering a new suit of clothes. The youth came out temporarily from his usual profundity, and had a real, natural boyish talk with Ralph. The latter recited the incident of the adventure with Billy Bouncer's ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... on Aristotle is, though cloudy, intelligible. The remainder is a fair specimen of that skimmy-dashy style of thought which glances over the surfaces of things and never reaches their substance or reality, yet boasts of its unlimited profundity because it does not know the meaning of profound. Such thinking must necessarily end in falsity and folly, of which the lecture gives many specimens, which it is worth while to quote, to show what the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... to be found in them wonderful characterization expressed dramatically, namely, before an audience. And this audience is what the scholars seem to forget. For by it is the dramatist limited, since profundity of thought or skill in allusion is good or bad, artistically, exactly in proportion as the thought is ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... buckle on the ponderous armor of the commentators in the contest with more subtle wits, on the interesting doubt of a wrong reading; such men, in the spirit of pedantry, have refused to Lord Brougham the merit of profundity, while they allow that he possesses a sort of superficial knowledge of the classics; they say that he can gracefully skim the surface of the stream, but that its depths would overwhelm him. Now, while this may be true as regards the fact, we dissent from it ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... old women," observed the general, who was so anxious to show his profundity that he quite forgot the invidious character of the comparison, "who are just like trees—as much below the ground as above it. Isn't that true, eh? They're a deal more at home among the people they have buried than among those that are alive. I don't say that's your case, Roscorla. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... of Gretry (1741-1831) was perhaps more elaborate than that of Monsigny, but it fell very far short of profundity. His music excels in grace and humour, and he rarely treated serious subjects with success. Such works as 'Le Tableau Parlant,' 'Les Deux Avares,' and 'L'Amant Jaloux' are models of lightness and brilliancy, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... joyously consoled that they forgot to wipe away their tears. They were bright but not clear—large and shimmering, as if reflected from some invisible sea, not immediately present to his eyes. The gulfs in which they floated were black blue with profundity. There was no moon, but the night was yet so far from dark, that it seemed conscious throughout of some distant light that illumined it without shine. And his heart felt like the night, as if it held a deeper life than he could ever know. He wandered on till he came to the field where he had ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... followed by a sallow-visaged, black-bearded speaker, who poured forth abundant venomous froth of denunciation. He had caught enough of the phraseology of the more philosophical Disciples, to impress the earnest ignorant with some show of profundity. I was glad when his stream dried up. Pendlam next arose and read a paper upon "Magnetisms and Organizations." After him, came forward a gentleman with a model, illustrating the design of a dwelling-house for the Associated Disciples. He showed, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... a greater depth and a still more capacious forehead." "Bless me!" exclaims the craniologist, taking out his rule, "eight inches! who can this be? this is indeed a head—in this there can be no mistake; what depth of intellect, what profundity of thought, must reside in that skull! this I am sure must belong to some extraordinary and well-known character." "Why, yes," says the sculptor, "he is pretty well known—it is the head of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... admonisher of his semblables and to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone be than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously command and promise which on all mortals with ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... generally finds in the faces of those accustomed to command. He had a large face, with large regular features, and large clear gray eyes, all of which united to express an exceeding placidity or repose. It shone with intelligence—a mild intelligence—no way suggestive of profundity, although of geniality. Indeed, there was a little too much expression. The face seemed to express ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... sentiments makes it rigorously impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in making many converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter offers a so much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy, has so many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its multiform appeals ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... visiting him. Now, while making inquiries of him concerning antiquity, I did not conceal from him what delighted me among the moderns; when he spoke about such things with more calmness, but, what was still worse, with more profundity than Madame Boehme; and he thus opened my eyes, at first to my greatest chagrin, but afterwards to my surprise, and at last ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... widely, for these huge weeds threatened them with poison-thorns a good inch long. Then round beyond the gnawed, dismantled stile they came abruptly on the huge cavernous throat of the most westerly of the giant rat-holes, an evil-smelling profundity, that drew them up into a ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... in their present starvation bear abundant witness on every page to the splendid preaching and the skilful pastorate that this parish must at one time have enjoyed. There must have been men of no common ability, as well as of no common profundity of spiritual life in Kilmacolm during those trying years, for the letters they wrote to Rutherford would have done credit to any of Rutherford's ablest and best correspondents—to William Guthrie, or David Dickson, or Robert Blair, or John Livingstone. ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... well as altruism, can attain their richest development, and individuality find its just freedom. As the evolution of man's soul advances to undreamed-of possibilities of refinement, of capacity, of profundity; as the spiritual life of the generation becomes more manifold in its combinations and in its distinctions; the more time one has for observing the wonderful and deep secrets of existence, behind ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... I had met on the first night of my university life. Then she was only in her fifteenth year. I was a junior when she produced her lauded essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," and it revealed to me the profundity of her mind. To match her, I must sit many a night driving my way through difficult pages of the classics, and often when my heart was in some smoky den with a few choice spirits, my body bent over my table and my brain wearied itself with ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... a great deal more, with tipsy profundity and a serio-comic air, and keeping his eye all the time on Mrs Sliderskew, who was unable to hear one word, Mr Squeers concluded by helping himself and passing the bottle: to which ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... all the power and profundity of the male voice, but it was as subdued, as flawless and sympathetic as a distant, deep-toned bell. There was not even a breath of effort in it, nor an insincere expression, and it pursued a theme ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... alleviating an attack of malaria. This, with a similar taste in the arts and literature, soon put us on a friendly and intimate footing. I have met many men of letters, artists and statesmen, but never one who impressed me so much with the profundity of his learning and thought as did Verestshagin, and I ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... after the war." This is one of the consoling platitudes with which people cover over voids of thought. They utter it with an air of round-eyed profundity. But to ask in reply, "Then how will things be different?" is in many cases to rouse great resentment. It is almost as rude as saying, "Was that thought of yours really ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... with an air of legal profundity, says: "This is all very well in its way, George, but it won't stand in law. The law is what you have got to get at. And when you have got at it, you must get round it; and then you must twist it and work ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... virtue of what she was. Her face was a good counsel against discouragement; and the cheerful quietude of her demeanour was a rebuke to all rebellious, cowardly, and discontented thoughts. It was not the striking novelty or profundity of her commentary on life that made it memorable, it was simply the truth of what she said and the gentleness with which she said it. Epigrams are worth little for guidance to the perplexed, and less for comfort to the wounded. But the plain, homely sayings which ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... kinship; and very similar reasons have been alleged for the common belief that both are on the decline. Whether such a belief has any solid foundation in the case of letter-writing, we may be warranted in doubting. Observations of this sort, which have a false air of acuteness and profundity, are repeated periodically. The remark so constantly made at this moment, that nowadays people read nothing but magazines, was made by Coleridge early in this century; and Southey prophesied the ruin of good letters from the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... of light penetrated into the profundity of the cavern. It being high-water, the entrance was closed by the sea. But the artificial light, which escaped in long streams from the skylights of the "Nautilus" was as vivid as before, and the sheet of water shone around the ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... plan because it is to honor old Bauer; for you do not like him," d'Hebonville replied. "If, now, it were a supper to the history teacher, you would agree, I am sure. For de l'Equille praises you on 'the profundity of your reflections and the sagacity of your judgment.' Oh, I've read his notes; or you would agree if it were Domaisen, the rhetoric teacher, who is much impressed—those are his very words, are they not, gentlemen?—with 'your powers of generalization, ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... will do that at some risk at first. When a young lawyer is extremely clear, he is apt to be regarded as not deep. Abstruseness in expression is very frequently regarded as an indication of profundity. Nevertheless, persist in a clear and simple style. Make the statement of your case and the argument in support of your propositions so lucid and plain that the judge or jury will say: "Why, of course, that is so. What is the use of ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... Anatomy of Melancholy, Southey's Doctor. Montaigne, and Swift, he read continually. He was a collector of rare editions of the Classics, and would dawdle over a Greek play, edited by some learned German, for a week at a time, losing himself in the profundity of elaborate foot-notes. He was an ardent admirer of the lighter Roman poets, and believed the Horatian philosophy the only true creed by which a man should shape his existence. But it must not be supposed that books brought repose to the mind and ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... There was a profundity of contempt in Veltman's voice; and a deeper bitterness when he snapped his teeth upon a word which sounded to Hal suspiciously like the Biblical characterization of an ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Names which are met with but once in the annals of science, and there, dimly seen as a star of the least magnitude, have perhaps earned that remote and obscure corner by painful self-denial, by unwearied toil! And yet not only these, but others who have added to diligence high mental acumen or profundity, whose wells of thought are, compared with those of the general mass, unfathomable, earn but a careless, occasional notice—are known but to few of those who daily reap the harvest which they have sown, and who even boast of seeing further than they did, as the dwarf on the shoulders ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... long afternoon in the library of Challis Court. Normally one saw a curious, unattractive, rather repulsive figure of a child; when he looked at one with that rare look of intention, the man that lived within that unattractive body was revealed, his insight, his profundity, his unexampled wisdom. If we mark the difference between man and animals by a measure of intelligence, then surely this child was a very ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... the credulity with which their followers swallow this arrogant dogmatism, as if it were self-evident truth. Let us look at it for a moment. Other religions have their myths, or fables, therefore, the Hebrew and Christian records are fables, says the Rationalist. Profundity of logic! Counterfeit bank bills are common, therefore none are genuine. "The fact is, the pure historic idea was never developed among the Hebrews," i. e., Moses and the prophets were all liars. That is ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... hypothesis of an "over-soul" from whose universal being the ideas of beauty and truth and goodness may be supposed to proceed. It is a clumsy and crude speculation, easy to be grasped by the superficial mind, and with an air of profundity ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... this characteristic is the sense of profundity, of mighty significance. And this feeling is not necessarily an illusion. The nature of our materials — be they words, colours, or plastic matter — imposes a limit and bias upon our expression. The reality of experience can never be quite rendered through these media. The greatest ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... of government, and, therefore, of infinite practical utility in the career reserved for him, it wants too obviously the elevation of a Montesquieu, the philosophy of a Bolingbroke, or the comprehensive profundity of a Burke. It is a work of genius, but by a partisan, an advocate, a man of powerful emotion and vivid conception, having a strong will, a high purpose, and an enduring conviction. With a great, sometimes an inapt parade of erudition, and an occasional loss of time in inflated ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... a writer, Wordsworth not excepted, who reveals more delight in the visions of Nature than Henry Vaughan. He is a true forerunner of Wordsworth, inasmuch as the latter sets forth with only greater profundity and more art than he, the relations between Nature and Human Nature; while, on the other hand, he is the forerunner as well of some one that must yet do what Wordsworth has left almost unattempted, namely—set forth the sympathy of Nature with the aspirations of the spirit that is born of ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... which comes from the Gods, and the heroes a grand, and venerable, and lofty fixedness of mind, and the whole divine race together a perfect preparation for sharing in Plato's most mystical and far-seeing speculations, which he declares to us himself in the Parmenides, with the profundity befitting such topics, but which he (i.e. his master Syrianus) completed by his most pure and luminous apprehensions, who did most truly share the Platonic feast, and was the medium for transmitting ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... the campaign of the Austrians is incomprehensible to all our military men—not on account of its profundity, but on account of its absurdity or incoherency. In the present circumstances, half-measures must always be destructive, and it is better to strike strongly and firmly than justly. To invade Bavaria without disarming the Bavarian army, and to enter Suabia and yet acknowledge the neutrality ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... at the profundity of the maxim. This inequality is, in a great measure, the result of abuses in the institutions of society. They do not speak of what exists, but of what ought to exist. Every one should be left at liberty ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... intelligent and discreet crime. Machiavelli emphasised the separation, at times relative, at times absolute, which exists between politics and morals. His Discourses upon Livius are full of sense, penetration, and profundity; his light works show a singular dexterity of thought united to a fundamental grossness which it would be impossible to ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... "that there is a profundity of meaning in those words, 'Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein,' that we have not yet fathomed. I suspect Wordsworth is not far astray when he suggests that with the passing years we grow away from the simplicity of our faith and the clearness ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... Indian finds it excellent but not ample or satisfying. There is little in it which cannot be found in some of the many scriptures of Hinduism and it is silent on many points about which they speak, if not with convincing authority, at least with suggestive profundity. Neither do I think that Europe is likely to adopt Buddhist or Brahmanic methods of thought on any large scale. Theosophical and Buddhist societies have my sympathy but it is sympathy with lonely workers in an unpopular cause and I am not sure that they ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... once. That would be absurd. The question asked should be answered as simply as possible, the parent remembering that children's questions are usually more profound to the hearer than to the asker. It is difficult for the adult not to read into the child's chance question all the profundity of his own years of experience, and the mother who approaches this subject with dread is almost invariably astonished and relieved to find how easily ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... heard that the borderline between profundity and insanity was thin and inexact and it was now clear on which side she stood. I looked at Gootes to see how he was taking her hysterical outburst, but he had found a batch of empty testtubes which he was building into a perilously ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... has an argument for the deterioration of man, drawn from the fact that the Romans expressed in the same word, supplicium, the two ideas of prayer and punishment (Soirees, 2ieme entretien, i. p. 108). His profundity as an etymologist may be gathered from his analysis of cadaver: ca-ro, da-ta, ver-mibus. There are many others of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... a vindictive eagerness in Fontenoy's voice. Ease was no longer welcome to him, whether in himself or as a spectacle in other men. George, startled from a momentary profundity of sleep, staggered to his feet, and clutched ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wealth of meaning inner in the things they said at dinner! How their conversation sparkled (like the ripples on the deep), Half disclosing, half concealing a Profundity of Feeling Which would move the gay to laughter and incite ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... epoch, but through a certain entireness of moral health and sanity is leading the time steadily forward into its great believing and builded future; though it may follow from his limitations that into this future he cannot accompany it very far. Mr. Carlyle, with a poetic profundity of nature and a force of insight which entitle him not merely to a high place among the men of our time, but to a name among the men of all time, standing face to face with the divine reality and wonder of existence, conversing with the heights and depths of being, and appreciating the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... and Mr. Wynnstay in the drawing-room alone, one on either side of the fire. Lady Charlotte was reading the latest political biography with an apparent profundity of attention; Mr. Wynnstay was lounging and caressing the cat. But both his aunt's absorption and Mr. Wynnstay's nonchalance seemed to Flaxman overdone. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said Clarissa. She turned to Helen with an air of profundity. "I'm convinced people are wrong when they say it's work that wears one; it's responsibility. That's why one pays one's cook more than ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... greatest art. Savages lack self-consciousness and the critical sense because they lack intelligence. And because they lack intelligence they are incapable of profound conceptions. Beauty, taste, quality, and skill, all are here; but profundity of vision is not. And because they cannot grasp complicated ideas they fail generally to create organic wholes. One of the chief characteristics of the very greatest artists is this power of creating wholes which, as wholes, are of infinitely ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... accuse me of undue prejudice in favor of slavish surrender of volition. I accept in a large measure the view advanced with breadth of learning and defended with profundity of thought by Hegel, that history is the unfolding and realization of freedom. The point I wish to make is that the whole teaching of Bushido was so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice, that it was required ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... it fair for us to measure the sagacity of our great jurists by the standard of modern experience. They lived before the acceleration of movement by electricity and steam. They could not foresee the rapidity and the profundity of the changes which were imminent. Hence it was that, in the spirit of great lawyers, who were also possibly men tinged with a certain enthusiasm for the ideal, they began their work by ruling on the powers and limitations of sovereignty, as if they were ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... to Naples," said Byron to Lady Blessington ('Conversations', pp. 238, 239), "you must make acquaintance with Sir William Drummond, for he is certainly one of the most erudite men and admirable philosophers now living. He has all the wit of Voltaire, with a profundity that seldom appertains to wit, and writes so forcibly, and with such elegance and purity of style, that his works possess a peculiar charm. Have you read his 'Academical Questions'? If not, get them directly, and I think you will ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... all sin is ignorance, as we sometimes hear it said with a great show of tolerant profundity. There is some ignorance in all sin, but the essence of sin is the aversion of the will from a law and from a Person, not the defect of the understanding. So far from all sin being but ignorance, and therefore blameless, there is no sin without knowledge, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Without," "At Home and Abroad," "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," "Art, Literature, and Drama,"—he would be prepared to find eccentricities of style, straining for effect, mystical utterances, attempts at profundity, and stilted commonplace. He would, however, find nothing of this sort, or of any sort of make believe, but simply a writer always in earnest, always convinced, with a fair English style, perfectly intelligible, intent upon conveying an idea in the simplest ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... says, "we are certain that if stars of the size and lustre of Sirius, Arcturus, etc., were removed into the profundity of space I have mentioned, they would then appear like the stars which I saw." With the next telescope, which collected nine times more light than the eye, and brought into view objects three times more distant, other and new stars appeared, which were then (3 x 12) thirty-six times ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... right—it is just!" said the professor, solemnly, though still with a sluggish utterance. "I sought to glorify God to the end of mine own glorification, and lo! He hath taken from me my own heart's blood!" Swept off his feet by the profundity of his emotion, the ministerial form of speech, so long disused, rose naturally to the old ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... Will a jealous and dogmatic democracy respect the unintelligible insight of the few? Will a perhaps starving democracy support materially its Soviet of seers? But let us suppose that no utilitarian fanaticism supervenes, and no intellectual surfeit or discouragement. May not the very profundity of the new science and its metaphysical affinities lead it to bolder developments, inscrutable to the public and incompatible with one another, like the gnostic sects of declining antiquity? Then perhaps that luminous modern thing which until ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... made one principal, which was the ——, who would not be content with his estate, but affected the celsitude and rule of Creator, for the which he was divested from the altitude of heaven into the profundity of hell into everlasting darkness, without repair or return, with those that consented unto his pride. So it now lately befell in this our worldly hierarchy of the court by the fall of Queen Anne ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... before this picture, enveloped, as it were, in its rich gloom, as the painted profundity of a church absorbs one in its depths. And with the impression of its solemn beauty was blent a despairing awe of the artist who, of a little coloured earth, had created such a masterpiece of vitality, thrown on to a thin screen of ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... kind of partnership. He steered for me—I had to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory—like a claim of distant kinship affirmed ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... foamflaked sea, roofed with heaven—aware of myself, a consciousness forced on me by these things—I feel that thought must yet grow larger and correspond in magnitude of conception to these. But these cannot content me, these Titanic things of sea, and sun, and profundity; I feel that my thought is stronger than they are. I burn life like a torch. The hot light shot back from the sea scorches my cheek— my life is burning in me. The soul throbs like the sea for a larger life. No thought which I have ever ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... who undertook the task had perhaps the keenest scientific imagination and the most versatile profundity of knowledge of his generation—one is tempted to say, of any generation. For he was none other than the extraordinary Dr. Thomas Young, the demonstrator of the vibratory ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... with marked profundity. One of them, with a puffy, weak, good-natured face, answered her briskly, and after a little raillery she came back to me. I had a question not over discreet ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... relate the instances which fell in my way, of the utter ignorance respecting pictures to be found among persons of the first standing in society. Often where a liberal spirit exists, and a wish to patronise the fine arts is expressed, it is joined to a profundity of ignorance on the subject almost inconceivable. A doubt as to the excellence of their artists is very nervously received, and one gentleman, with much civility, told me, that at the present era, all the world were aware that competition was pretty well at an end between our ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... subject, very readily allows that political economy, so infinite and subtile are the forces that enter into its shifting phenomena, is a science of no slight complexity, and that the successful unveiling of its disordered tissue demands, in the first instance, the highest intellectual acuteness and profundity. We here encounter the same obstacles as in metaphysics, except that in the one case the phenomena investigated are subjective, in the other objective. Both conditions have peculiar advantages; both are open to peculiar difficulties, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... n't do." "It would n't do, it would n't do!" he repeated, as we lay on the hillside, in a tone so musically tender that it chimes in my ear now as I write down his confession. It can surely be no breach of confidence to publish it—it is too creditable to the profundity of Davidson's affections. As I knew him, he was one of the purest of ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... nature is the master of his favors; that he owes nothing to his creatures; that he can dispose of them as he pleases, without any injustice, and without their having any right of complaint; that man is incapable of sounding the profundity of his decrees; and that his justice is not the justice of men. But all these answers, which divines have continually in their mouths, serve only to accelerate the destruction of those sublime ideas which they have given us of the Deity. The result appears to be, that God ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... point of repeating my name but suddenly, after holding my eyes for a moment with a look the profundity and familiarity of which I cannot express, he had broken into the most ghastly haunting laugh I have ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... excellent than Michelagnolo, at least his equal; but in colouring they would have it that he surpassed Buonarroti without a doubt. These humours, having spread among a number of craftsmen who preferred the grace of Raffaello to the profundity of Michelagnolo, had so increased that many, for various reasons of interest, were more favourable in their judgments to Raffaello than to Michelagnolo. But Sebastiano was in no way a follower of that faction, since, being a man of exquisite judgment, he knew the value of ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... of Jesus could not grasp the simplicity and profundity of his message; still less could his opponents. When the crisis came, he alone remained unshaken in his faith. He was accused of blasphemy to the ecclesiastical authorities and of insurrection to the civil rulers. He was condemned and crucified. His followers were scattered every man to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... he knew you," observed Moriarty, with characteristic profundity, as we turned again toward the barracks. The remark broke a spell that ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... upon the matted surface, and follow the guardian behind the altar, in front of the curtain. He makes me a sign to look, and lifts the veil with a long rod. And suddenly, out of the blackness of some mysterious profundity masked by that sombre curtain, there glowers upon me an apparition at the sight of which I involuntarily start back—a monstrosity ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... instantly lay his hand upon the passage, and quote them chapter and verse to the clearing up of all difficulties, and the silencing of all oppugners. Mr. Mackintosh's Lectures were after all but a kind of philosophical centos. They were profound, brilliant, new to his hearers; but the profundity, the brilliancy, the novelty were not his own. He was like Dr. Pangloss (not Voltaire's, but Coleman's) who speaks only in quotations; and the pith, the marrow of Sir James's reasoning and rhetoric at that memorable period might be put within inverted commas. It, however, served ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... now, are swarming more individual entities than there are human beings in the world to-day. It is to us an invisible world. We only guess its nearest confines. With our powerful microscopes and ultramicroscopes, enlarging diameters twenty thousand times, we catch but the slightest glimpses of that profundity of ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... which may arise either from intellectual insufficiency or from an imperfect trust in one's own convictions, procured for Mr. Razumov a reputation of profundity. Amongst a lot of exuberant talkers, in the habit of exhausting themselves daily by ardent discussion, a comparatively taciturn personality is naturally credited with reserve power. By his comrades at the St. Petersburg University, Kirylo Sidorovitch ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... for its peculiar refinement, even if the eyes had not sparkled with such vivid and piercing keenness from under the thick brows, and if the high, smooth, slightly prominent forehead had not borne witness to the power and profundity of his mind. Melissa knew of no one with whom to compare him; he reminded Andreas of the picture of John as an old man, which a wealthy fellow-Christian had presented to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... long flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture, except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. And the way that he makes animals' ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... here is a reading of it by a Unitarian—a reading, I venture to say, for all minds, for all places, for all times—a reading which stands clear of controversial theology, and which, in spite of its profundity, is a message for the simple as well as for ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... 'with the irresponsible imbecility of a private individual, and not with the profundity of a professional adviser, I should say that if the circumstance of its being too much, weighs upon your mind, you have the haven of consolation open to you that you can easily make it less. And if you should ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... than his merits, he disguises himself in a wig and blue spectacles, becomes tutor to her brother, and wins her affections while playing pedagogue. On her acknowledging her attachment, he flings his disguises into the sea, and, in the wildness of his joy at being adored for his profundity in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, Mathematics, Natural Science, and Civil Engineering, folds his loved one in his arms, and springs into the surf, where both ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his face and temples, and left a broad high majestic forehead utterly unrelieved and bare; and on the brow there was not a single wrinkle—it was as smooth as it might have been some fifteen years ago. There was a singular calmness, and, so to speak, profundity of thought, eloquent upon its clear expanse, which suggested the idea of one who had passed his life rather in contemplation than emotion. It was a face that a physiognomist would have loved to look upon, so much did it speak both of the refinement ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... cast upon the placid mirror of a lake. The spectacle arrested him, as it arrested all men, by some occult power beyond the mere attraction of beauty or magnitude; even the teamster never passed it without the tribute of a stone or broken twig tossed into its immeasurable profundity. ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... Why this difference, since the sea seems all alike? The cause lies not in a difference of depth: for the tracts that teem with life are variable in this respect,—sometimes only a few fathoms in profundity, ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... fears and returned to the charming gayety of Florence. She had seen casually, at the Offices, a picture that Dechartre liked. It was a decapitated head of the Medusa, a work wherein Leonardo, the sculptor said, had expressed the minute profundity and tragic refinement of his genius. She wished to see it again, regretting that she had not seen it better at first. She extinguished her lamp and went ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the dream process now gains either sufficient intensity to attract consciousness to itself and arouse the foreconscious, which is quite independent of the time or profundity of sleep, or, its intensity being insufficient it must wait until it meets the attention which is set in motion immediately before awakening. Most dreams seem to operate with relatively slight psychic ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... minority. The world has an instinct for recognizing its own, and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life. From qualities for instance of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise in literature, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... she was much changed," Mr. Wentworth declared, in a tone whose unexpressive, unimpassioned quality appeared to Felix to reveal a profundity of opposition. "It may be that she is only becoming what ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... innocence of primaeval nature; sung tender songs to tender nightingales; went to bed without a candle, that it might gaze on the chubby faces of the stars; discoursed sweet nothings to all who would listen to its nonsense; and displayed (horrendum dictu) the acute profundity of its grief in ponderous folios and spiral duodecimos. The literary world, little suspecting the dangerous consequences of this distressing malady, suffered it to germinate in silence; and not until they became thoroughly convinced that the disorder was of ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
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