"Abstract" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for play is not to be found, of course, in conscious art, which, though it be derived from play, is itself an abstract, impersonal thing, and depends largely upon philosophical interests beyond the scope of childhood. It is when we make castles in the air and personate the leading character in our own romances, that we return ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... appearance the least important, lead to changes in fortune, there is not, to my mind, a deeper cause and opportunity for thought. For something in our ordinary actions resembles the little blunted arrows we shoot at targets; little by little we make of our successive deeds an abstract and regular entity that we call our prudence or our will. Then comes a gust of wind, and lo! the smallest of these arrows, the very lightest and most ineffective, is wafted beyond our vision, beyond the very horizon to the dwelling-place of ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... reflected, as he worked his way through the bottle of Mumm's which he had had the forethought to abstract from the supper-table as a nerve-steadier, it wasn't really stealing. Dash it all, the man had given him the money! It was his own! He had half a mind—he poured himself out another glass of the elixir—to give Sir Thomas a jolly good talking-to into the bargain. ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... morning with a vivid sense of the pain and terror of life. He had been clamoring to have those Reds punished; but somehow or other he had thought of this punishment in an abstract way, a thing you could attend to by a wave of the hand. He hadn't quite realized the physical side of it, what a messy and bloody job it would prove. Two hours and more he had listened to the thud of a whip ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... botanic physician of Ohio, with several other physicians, both of the old and the new school, whom I have not named, do not hesitate to regard a pure vegetable diet, in the abstract, as by far the best for all mankind, both in health ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... to you that I don't believe in anything; and what is science—science in the abstract? There are sciences, as there are trades and crafts; but abstract ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... States Embassy in Mongolia, P. O. Box 1021, Ulaanbaatar [976] (11) 329095 FAX: Flag description: three equal, vertical bands of red (hoist side), blue, and red; centered on the hoist-side red band in yellow is the national emblem ("soyombo" - a columnar arrangement of abstract and geometric representation for fire, sun, moon, earth, water, and ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... his demesnes, and by dues from his military tenants, does not appear at first to have imposed, by legislative authority, general taxes to provide for the security and good government of the community.—These were abstract notions, not prevalent in ages when the monarch was a lord paramount rather than a supreme magistrate. Many of the feudal perquisites had been arbitrarily augmented, and oppressively levied. These the Great Charter, in some cases, reduced to a certain sum; while ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... objection to their use as conventional symbols. Homer's gods, says Pope in his preface, are still the gods of poetry. Their vitality was nearly extinct; but they were regarded as convenient personifications of abstract qualities, machines for epic poetry, or figures to be used in allegory. In the absence of a true historical perception, the same view was attributed to Homer. Homer, as Pope admits, did not invent the gods; but he was the "first who brought them into a system ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... him. In Hades fortune was a material personality, and not an abstract idea as she is with us, and when she met Bonaparte on his triumphal march along the Styx, she yielded to that fascination which even phlegmatic Englishmen could not deny that he possessed; and when at this meeting the man of ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... the Unity did not reach Judaism as an abstract philosophical truth. Hence, though the belief in the Unity of God, associated as it was with the belief in the Spirituality of God, might have been expected to lead to the conception of an Absolute, Transcendent Being such as we meet in Islam, it did not so lead in Judaism. Judaism never attempted ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... Miss Vervain's need of instruction is—that your idea is a very good one." He mused in silence his wonder that so much addlepatedness as was at once observable in Mrs. Vervain should exist along with so much common-sense. "It's certainly very good in the abstract," he added, with a glance at the daughter, as if the sense must be hers. She did not meet his glance at once, but with an impatient recognition of the heat that was now great for the warmth with which she was dressed, ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... should find coins and models in it, and so forth. Yet it was a little too large for assurance on this idea. I felt an impatience to see it opened. About eleven, as nothing seemed happening, I walked back, full of such thought, to my home in Maybury. But I found it difficult to get to work upon my abstract investigations. ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... inquiry. Indeed, it holds true, by and large, that nothing else than this German-dynastic complement of ways and means has, or can effectually, come under their observation in such a degree of intimacy as to give body and definition to the somewhat abstract theorems on cultural aims and national preconceptions that have come to them from outside. In short, they have borrowed these theoretical formulations from abroad, without the concrete apparatus of ways and means in which these ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... leagues of Hodge-trod arable or pastoral, not more than a snuff-pinch for gaping tourist nostrils accustomed to inhalation of prairie winds, but enough for perspective, from those marginal sands, trident-scraped, we are to fancy, by a helmeted Dame Abstract familiarly profiled on discs of current bronze—price of a loaf for humbler maws disdainful of Gallic side-dishes for the titillation of choicer palates—stands Clashthought Park, a house of some pretension, ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... the tragic themes of the Niblung legend, with the tale of Finnesburh, or even with the historical seriousness of the Maldon poem, it lacks weight. The largest of the extant poems of this school has the least important subject-matter; while things essentially and in the abstract more important, like the tragedy of Froda and Ingeld, are thrust away into the corners ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... language that are read with more delight, or are more impressed upon the memory, than that preliminary discourse. One of its excellencies has always struck me with peculiar admiration: I mean the perspicuity with which he has expressed abstract scientifick notions. As an instance of this, I shall quote the following sentence: 'When the radical idea branches out into parallel ramifications, how can a consecutive series be formed of senses ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... something besides abstract ideas and principles. Hence the desire for symbols—something visible to the eye and that appeals to the senses. Every nation has a flag that represents the country—every army a common banner, which, to the soldier, stands ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... in general, this careless fitting of ornament is, in very truth, an evidence of life in the school of builders, and of their making a due distinction between work which is to be used for architectural effect, and work which is to possess an abstract perfection; and it commonly shows also that the exertion of design is so easy to them, and their fertility so inexhaustible, that they feel no remorse in using somewhat injuriously what they can replace with so ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts Became gratefully strange Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it Death ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... of being cultivated judiciously in such a way as will, on the whole, bring best return. I believe that a serious study of the best way of developing and utilizing this faculty, without prejudice to the practice of abstract thought in symbols, is one of the pressing desirata in the yet ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... in regeneration," said Pierre, with a trembling voice and some difficulty in utterance due to his excitement and to being unaccustomed to speak of abstract matters in Russian. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Our abstract does, at best, but scanty justice to the most interesting, as well as most valuable, of modern works of travel. It has revolutionized our ideas of African character as well as of African geography. It shows that Central Africa is peopled by tribes barbarous, indeed, but far from manifesting ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... helps him to keep the constant stock of goods that at any time is a potential million of dollars. A permanent body of any kind, if it is made up of shifting tissues, is commonly described by the use of an abstract term. A waterfall, made as it is of rapidly changing drops of water, is spoken of as a "water power," since the power is the abiding thing. An endless series of living human beings is described as "humanity," since that remains through all personal changes. ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... participation in the apology; and, a few moments later, the apothecary and both ladies (the one as fond of the abstract as the other two were ignorant of the concrete) were engaged in an animated, running discussion on art, society, climate, education,—all those large, secondary desiderata which seem of first importance to young ambition and secluded beauty, ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... "Otherwise," they thought, "psychology will be unable to move forward a single step, and may even obstruct every other branch of Natural History." Instances have not been wanting of physiology poaching on the preserves of purely metaphysical and abstract knowledge, all the time feigning to ignore the latter absolutely, and seeking to class psychology with the positive sciences, having first bound it to a Bed of Procrustes, where it refuses to yield its secret to ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... Miss Abercrombie, "a great many of us feel like that when we are young and hot-headed. I nearly said empty-headed. Then we read fat books about the divine right of Motherhood, Free Love and State Maternity. All very well in the abstract and fine theories to argue about, but they do not work in real life. Believe me, the older you get the more and more you realize how far away they all are from the ideal. Marriage may be sometimes a mistaken solution, but at present it is ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... one of all the busy men I watched quite knew what he was doing. They juggled with figures, made precis of the reports of money markets, dissected and analysed the balance sheets of railway companies, decoded messages from London or from Paris, transcribed formulae as abstract, as remote from tangible things as the x and y of algebraic equations. These men all worked—the apologue of the quadratic equation held my mind—moving their symbols here and there, extracting ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... the moods of this old school-friend had begun to stir me. Meeting her on my daily walks to town by the back way through the new avenue, I found her seemingly anxious to avoid me, and difficult to warm to any interest but in the most remote and abstract affairs. Herself she would never speak of, her plans, cares, ambitions, preferences, or aversions; she seemed dour set on aloofness. And though she appeared to listen to my modestly phrased exploits with attention ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... blemish of coquetry. Intelligent, yet modest to the verge of shyness, eager yet reserved, warm hearted yet charmingly impersonal with him, he realized that she was finding, with him, only the happiness of speech with mankind in the abstract. And so she poured out to him her heart, long stifled in the abyss of her isolation; and, gazing into his eyes, she was gazing merely toward all that was bright and happy and youthful and responsive, and he ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... His image, as it detaches itself little by little from the episodes of the play, and is further characterised by the [62] songs of the chorus, has a singular completeness of symbolical effect. The incidents of a fully developed human personality are superinduced on the mystical and abstract essence of that fiery spirit in the flowing veins of the earth—the aroma of the green world is retained in the fair human body, set forth in all sorts of finer ethical lights and shades—with a wonderful kind of subtlety. In the course of ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Emperor of Brazil by imperial decree declared the Amazon to be open to the frontier of Brazil to the merchant ships of all nations. The greatest living British authority on this subject, while asserting the abstract right of the British claim, says: It seems difficult to deny that Great Britain may ground her refusal upon strict law, but it is equally difficult to deny, first, that in so doing she exercises harshly an extreme and hard law; secondly, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... Abyss of the Unknowable, the synthetical hieroglyph of an illimitable pastless futureless Present. To the uttermost bounds of space rushes the Voice of Ages, unheard save in the concentrated unity of the thought-formulated Abstract, and eternally that Voice formulates a Word which is glyphed in the ...
— Hebrew Literature
... eventually decided to compromise—to follow partly the one order and partly the other. The first volume is made up of essays in which the idea of evolution, general or special, is dominant. In the second volume essays dealing with philosophical questions, with abstract and concrete science, and with aesthetics, are brought together; but though all of them are tacitly evolutionary, their evolutionism is an incidental rather than a necessary trait. The ethical, political, and social essays composing the third volume, though mostly written ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... e.g., tono tachi 'lords.' The particle xu forms the plural for noble things but not those of the highest rank; e.g., samurai xu 'nobles (nobiles), but not lords (domini).' The particle domo is suffixed to words which indicate humble things, either abstract, animate, or inanimate; e.g., fiacux domo 'farmer,' ixi domo 'stones,' mma domo 'horses.' The particle ra forms the plural of nouns which indicate very low things which are to be despised; e.g., Iudeo ra 'Jews.'[56] The case particles which ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... the short of the argument lie just here. Literature is not an abstract Science, to which exact definitions can be applied. It is an Art rather, the success of which depends on personal persuasiveness, on the author's skill to give as on ours ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... verse of the first chapter of Genesis is as evidently a different word from the two lights spoken of in the fourteenth verse, as the singular is different from the plural; and the thing signified by it is as distinct from the things spoken of in the fourteenth verse, as the abstract is from the concrete; as, when I say of the first, "light travels 195,000 miles per second," but mean a totally distinct subject when I say, "Extinguish the lights." The Hebrew words are even more palpably different, the word for light, in the third ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... music in my hand, and waiting for a moment until he gave me the signal, sung it after the best wise I could—not very brilliantly, I dare say, but with at least all my heart poured into it. I had one requisite at least of an artist nature—I could abstract myself upon occasion completely from my surroundings. I did so now. It was too beautiful, too grand. I remembered that afternoon at Koeln—the golden sunshine streaming through the painted windows, the flood of melody poured forth by ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... that stage. In almost all of them, except "German East" and Kiao Chao, the object had been achieved within a few weeks of the outbreak of hostilities, and even the bitterest foes of the side-show in the abstract will admit that the ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... this account were there many who told Phineas that he ought to bring the action. Among these none were more eager than his old friend Lord Chiltern, the Master of the Brake hounds, a man who really loved Phineas, who also loved the abstract idea of justice, and who could not endure the thought that a miscreant should go unpunished. Hunting was over for the season in the Brake country, and Lord Chiltern rushed up to London, having this object among others of a very pressing nature on his mind. His saddler had to ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... capital ancient Erech, the city of Anu, and of his daughter, the goddess Nana, who afterwards was identified with Ishtar. Anu's spouse was Anatu, and the pair subsequently became abstract deities, like Anshar and Kishar, their parents, who figure in the Babylonian Creation story. Nana was worshipped as the goddess of vegetation, and her relation to Anu was similar to that of Belit-sheri to Ea at Eridu. Anu and Ea were originally identical, but it would appear that ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... Lenine, like most of the Intelligentsia of the period, gave up a good deal of his spare time to teaching small groups of uneducated working-men the somewhat abstract and intricate theories and doctrines of Socialism. To that excellent practice, no doubt, much of Lenine's skill as a lucid expositor and successful propagandist is due. He has written a number of important works, ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... example of doing any work is more valuable than an abstract statement. For this purpose I shall direct the building of a common table with a drawer in it and show how the work is done ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... general quality of earnest and reasoned, yet at the same time almost passionate, impatience which was to devote us for some time to variety, almost to incoherency, of interest. We had fared across the sea under the glamour of the Swiss school in the abstract, but the Swiss school in the concrete soon turned stale on our hands; a fact over which I remember myself as no further critical than to feel, not without zest, that, since one was all eyes and the world decidedly, at such a pace, all images, it ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... representing one of the twelve moral virtues. Only six books and the fragment of a seventh were written. By way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary interest, Spenser undertook to make his allegory a double one, personal and historical, as well as moral or abstract. Thus Gloriana, the Queen of Faery, stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth, {72} to whom the poem was dedicated. Prince Arthur is Leicester, as well as Magnificence. Duessa is Falsehood, but also Mary Queen of Scots. Grantorto is Philip II. of Spain. Sir ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... for any report to do justice to that sermon. An abstract of it has come down to us; but it is little more than a skeleton, lacking the flesh and blood and ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... more complete satisfaction of his thought, the reader is referred to Mr. Swainson's volume "On the Natural History and Classification of Quadrupeds," p. 274, where he has given us an incoherent abstract of Colonel Smith's article on the Bovinae, without, however, making the least attempt to verify the statements there recorded. The descriptions and characteristics are avowedly Colonel Smith's; but, in justice to the latter gentleman, it must be added, ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... curve of beauty, and they misunderstood the language of admiration. The latter I suspect to be at the root of the whole matter. Poets were, as we shall presently see, everlastingly praising small waists, and women fell into the error of supposing that a small waist was, in the abstract, a beauty and an attraction. When or where the mistake originated I cannot tell, but here are the words of praise of probably a fourteenth-century lover: "Middel heo hath menskful smal," or, "She hath a graceful small waist." At a later day Master Wither included in the attractions of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... projectiles on their errands of mashing German dugouts. He did not like gunnery where he did not see his target naval fashion, but he had done so well that he was kept at it. His latest sonnet was to an abstract girl somewhere in France which the Socialist, who was a man of critical judgment in everything and of a rollicking disposition, praised very highly and read aloud with the elocution ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... brief span of life and far, far more power than that which was given to those who wrote of him in a hurry during his lifetime.... Do you wonder, then, that I should rather elect to regard Irving in the abstract, when called upon to suggest a fitting monument, than to promise a faithful portrait?... Let us be grateful, however, that a great artist is to be commemorated at all, side by side with the effigies of great Butchers ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... in war in the abstract; he considered it one of the necessary evils, essential to the very existence of nations. This was nothing more than the logical sequence of his course in embracing those theories of evolution which ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... which he laid hold of some of those weak points which the Church, of course, has in common with every other institution in the world. Eloquence has a way of evaporating in print, even when the report is immediate. But his peroration was one which startled his hearers out of a calm abstract interest to all that keen personal feeling which accompanies the narrative of facts known to an audience, and affecting people ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... lies, or to detect any lurking obscurity, as those critics found themselves to unravel my logic. Possibly I may not be an indifferent and neutral judge in such a case. I will therefore sketch a brief abstract of the little paper according to my own original design, and then leave the reader to judge how far this design is kept in ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... is well known in England as a writer on the Southern States, was at this time secretary to a sanitary commission on the army, and published an abstract of the results of the inquiries made, on which I believe perfect reliance may be placed. This inquiry was extended to two hundred regiments, which were presumed to be included in the army of the Potomac; but these regiments were not all located on the Virginian side of the river, and must not therefore ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... much in need of sound guidance. Though Scharnhorst had pointed out the way of salvation, a strategic tempter was soon at hand in the person of General von Phull, an uncompromising theorist who planned campaigns with an unquestioning devotion to abstract principles. Untaught by the catastrophes of the past, Alexander once more let his enthusiasm for theories and principles lead him to the brink of the abyss. Phull captivated him by setting forth the true plan of a defensive campaign which he had evolved from patient study of the Seven Years' War. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... make an important contribution to morality. Indeed our children, when they have been able to occupy themselves freely with intelligent work, and have also been free to respond to their internal wants, to occupy themselves for a long time with chosen stimuli, to perform abstract operations when they were sufficiently mature, to concentrate their minds in meditation, have shown that order and serenity have been evolved within them; and after this, grace of movement, the capacity for enjoyment of the beautiful, sensibility to music, and finally, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... the social system to observe steadily, and with an eye obscured by no beam of prejudice, the result of the experiment that is making on the other side of the Atlantic. If I mistake not, they might learn there, better than by any abstract speculation, what are the points on which the magistrates of a great people should dictate to them and on what points they should be left freely to their own guidance, I sincerely believe, that if a fire-worshipper, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... necessary to discuss here the abstract question—Is a church an essential want of man, so as to be needed by him forever? It is enough to show that a church is needed now, and will be, for a long time to come. Every religion has had its church. No sooner does a new idea arise, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... excelled in early life were in this direction, and at no time in his career did he display any emotional enthusiasm on subjects of general concern. But, on the other hand, he was unflinching in his adherence to abstract principle. Though not carried away by the extravagance of Rousseau, he was thoroughly discontented with the political state of Geneva. He was by early conviction a Democrat in the broadest sense of the term. Indeed, it would ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... fortitude, than the grace of sensibility. Do not, however, confound fortitude with apathy; apathy cannot know the virtue. Remember, too, that one act of beneficence, one act of real usefulness, is worth all the abstract sentiment in the world. Sentiment is a disgrace, instead of an ornament, unless it lead us to good actions. The miser, who thinks himself respectable, merely because he possesses wealth, and thus mistakes the means of doing good, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... really give the ideas of St. John, but that it represents a mixture of Greek philosophy with Jewish theology, and that its final form, which one of the most eminent among recent Christian scholars has characterized as "an unhistorical product of abstract reflection," is mainly due to some gifted representative or representatives of the Alexandrian school. Bitter as the resistance to this view has been, it has during the last years of the nineteenth century won its way ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... never quite followed Poe's advice to abandon allegory. The Scarlet Letter and his other romances are not, indeed, strictly allegories, since the characters are men and women and not mere personifications of abstract qualities. Still, they all have a certain allegorical tinge. In the Marble Faun, for example, Hilda, Kenyon, Miriam, and Donatello have been ingeniously explained as personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... to the Agent of the Governor-General in the Saugor and Nerbudda territories, requesting that he would carry into execution his sentences on Thugs, and not make any reference to Government for confirmation, but merely submit to Government abstract statements of sentences; but desiring that the sanction of the King of Oude should be required before any capital sentence was carried into effect. No capital sentence was from that time passed. As all prisoners will be tried on the general charge, no capital sentence ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... strongly, more weakly otherwhiles; yet I ever believed both that Thou wert, and hadst a care of us; though I was ignorant, both what was to be thought of Thy substance, and what way led or led back to Thee. Since then we were too weak by abstract reasonings to find out truth: and for this very cause needed the authority of Holy Writ; I had now begun to believe that Thou wouldest never have given such excellency of authority to that Writ in all lands, hadst Thou not ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... of Paris under Louis Philippe; the Ballanche of medicine and one of the defenders of the abstract doctrines of Van Helmont; chief of the "Vitalists" opposed to Brisset who headed the "Organists." He as well as Brisset was called in consultation regarding a very serious malady afflicting Raphael de Valentin. [The ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... many types of astronomers—from the stargazer who merely watches the heavens, to the abstract mathematician who merely works at his desk; it has, consequently, been necessary in the case of some lives to adopt a very different treatment from that which seemed suitable ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... (c), "The Wonderful Tree," which was collected by Mr. Rusk, and of which I have only an abstract,— ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... grand special loathing. There is everywhere some creature which to some individual is an object of dread—a creature to be shrunk from and shuddered at. Mrs Brown's horror was frogs. Jacky knew this well. He also knew of Mrs Brown's love for cranberry-jam, and her having put up a special pot. To abstract the pot, replace it by a similar pot with a live frog imprisoned therein, and then retire to chuckle in solitude and devour the jam, was simple and natural. That the imp had done this; that he had watched ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... after all, it was, in a way, just what nations do. When they love a great and noble thing, they embody it—they want it so that they can see it with their eyes; like liberty, for instance. They are not content with the cloudy abstract idea, they make a beautiful statue of it, and then their beloved idea is substantial and they can look at it and worship it. And so it is as I say; to the Dwarf, Joan was our country embodied, our country made visible flesh cast in a gracious ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and their dependence." Now it was less that Billy tried to translate Pete's thought and more that he endeavored to follow his own. "It puts it up to a man so. And their beauty and purity and innocence and simplicity—." Billy seemed to be ransacking his vocabulary for abstract nouns. ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... for the handicap under which Mr. Herrick, for all his intelligence and conscience, has labored as an artist. That handicap is a certain stiffness on the plastic side of his imagination. His conceptions come to him, if criticism can be any judge, with a large touch of the abstract about them; his rationalizing intelligence is always present at their birth. Nor do his narratives, once under way, flow with the sure, effortless movement which is natural to born story-tellers. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... reality do not perfectly correspond to them. The phylogenetic school commits the capital mistake of presenting a transformation which can be realized only in logical concepts, as an actually occurring process, and of confounding an abstract operation with concrete fact. "The logical transformation of the concept ape into the concept man is no genealogical process." The mathematician may logically 'develop' the concept of a circle from that of a polygon, but it by no means follows ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... in the mood in which I was, nothing so exhausting as the abstract! and closed the book desperately to resume my diary, neglected since the awful events of Beauseincourt, but always to me a resource in time of trouble and of solitude. Of pens, ink, paper, there was no lack, and I wrote one day, Penelope-wise, what I destroyed ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... and as it is curious and important, not merely on account of the geographical knowledge it conveys, but also from the insight it gives us into the commercial transactions of the countries which he visited, we shall give rather a full abstract of it, availing ourselves of the light which has been thrown upon it by the learned and judicious ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... in her life, and that, having failed once, she must fail again, and again, and again—as if her whole subsequent life must be one long failure. But a greater crisis had followed hard upon the heels of the first—the struggle with self, the greatest struggle of all. Against the abstract principle of evil the woman who had failed in the material conflict with a masculine, masterful will, had succeeded, had conquered self, had been true when it was easy to be false, had dared the judgment of her peers so only that she ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... modern times. His mother was a French lady, of Huguenot descent, and biographers have been fond of tracing in his character the various qualities of his parents. To the shrewdness and persistence, the administrative ability, and the taste for abstract reasoning which we are wont to find associated in the highest type of Scottish mind he joined a truly French vivacity and grace. His earnestness, sincerity, and moral courage were characteristic alike of Puritan and of Huguenot. In the course of his short life he exhibited a remarkable ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... and his sense of justice stirred to some degree in behalf of the slave. At the same time it must be remembered that the contest of the Americans was primarily for the definite legal rights of Englishmen rather than for the more abstract rights of mankind which formed the platform of the French Revolution; hence arose the great inconsistency in the position of men who were engaged in a stern struggle for liberty at the same time that they themselves were holding ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... seedlings, about 1 inch in height, shortly before the protrusion of the leaves, were first traced. They were illuminated exclusively from above; for, as will hereafter be shown, they are excessively sensitive to the * We are indebted to the Rev. G. Henslow for an abstract of the views which have been held on this subject, ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... thoughts, no arguments adequate to that strife. Had he been a Papist he might have turned with hope, even with pious confidence, to the Holy Stoup, the Bell and Book and Candle, to the Relics, and hundred Exorcisms of his Church. But the colder and more abstract faith of Calvin, while it admitted the possibility of such possessions, supplied no weapons of ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... here made to speak in his own tongue, the Provencal. According to Dante, (De Vulg. Eloq. 1. 1. c. 8.) the Provencal was one language with the Spanish. What he says on this subject is so curious, that the reader will perhaps not be displeased it I give an abstract of it. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... those trifling logical schools that are among us. They are so far from minding chimeras and fantastical images made in the mind that none of them could comprehend what we meant when we talked to them of a man in the abstract as common to all men in particular (so that though we spoke of him as a thing that we could point at with our fingers, yet none of them could perceive him) and yet distinct from every one, as if he were some monstrous Colossus or giant; yet, for all ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... have these disfranchising enactments had upon the status of the Negro? Has he lost nothing more than the bare right to vote? Has he been deprived of nothing but an abstract right to a voice in the affairs of government and of no other privilege than the possibility of a share ...
— The Disfranchisement of the Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6 • John L. Love
... for a division, and though both he and Dr. Dagger declared his collar-bone quite repaired, his wife could not be satisfied without hearing for herself a verdict to the same effect from the higher authorities, being pretty sure that whatever their report might be, his abstract would be 'All ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... much I lose! Sir, you have wronged me to amount beyond Acres, and gold, and life, which makes them rich. And compensation I demand of you, Such as a man expects, and none but one That's less than man refuses! Where's the maid You falsely did abstract? ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... directed by an idea based solely upon an abstract theory, must be driven by a trained intelligence. In this case the abstract theory that every prisoner must be watched must support itself unaided by Casey's behavior. Not even Joe's intelligence was trained to a degree where ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... Strait work was begun on two of the greatest tubular bridges of England. In Germany, Schoenbein invented gun-cotton. About the time of the death of Friedrich Bessel, the great German astronomer, one of the greatest triumphs of abstract astronomical reasoning was achieved. In France, Leverrier had worked out the position of the planet Neptune, finally determining it on September 23. He communicated this to Johann Galle at Berlin, who discovered the planet on the same night. Adams, in England, a ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... the case, as both of the papers you name are ready to debate the subject, and it is evident that the writers upon both sides of the question believe what they say. I don't think it worth our while to enter into the abstract question here, and so we'll drop it for something else. You are aware, I presume, that we have to make a change of train at the frontier on account of the different gauges of the railways ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... occasions on which it has served its purpose; it has conveyed different ideas in different places; but is it not still grander to think of it under the three aspects of soul, body, and motion? Merely to regard it in the abstract, apart from its functions, its effects, and its influence, is enough to cast one into an ocean of meditations? Are not most words colored by the idea they represent? Then, to whose genius are they due? If it takes great intelligence ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... Mr. Hater and I to the office, and there I made an end of my book of contracts which I have been making an abstract of. Dined at home, and spent most of the day at the office. At ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... contest, as vehemently, these theories. She did not believe them a bit. They were founded, she felt, on the tragedy of Keggo's own case. Keggo was unfairly, though very naturally, arguing from the particular to the general, from the personal to the abstract. But how could she reply to Keggo, "Of ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... and frequently by his daughter; when, with a small osier basket to receive plants, and another filled with cold refreshments, such as the cabin of the shepherd did not afford, they wandered away among the most romantic and magnificent scenes, nor suffered the charms of Nature's lowly children to abstract them from the observance of her stupendous works. When weary of sauntering among cliffs that seemed scarcely accessible but to the steps of the enthusiast, and where no track appeared on the vegetation, but what the foot of the izard had left; they would ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... nature. Faculties of kindred qualities may be grouped together, and their antagonisms represented in the opposite arc of the circle. Let us employ a circle to represent mind. The conception of the abstract quality of good, requires contrast with one of a converse nature, bad, (see Fig. 69). Opposite faculties may be portrayed in the same manner. The functions of the cerebrum and spinal system may be symbolically represented ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... magnificent conception. I suppose such impatience is as natural and understandable as it is unfortunate. None of us escape it. Much of this early Socialism is as unreal as mathematics, has much the same relation to truth as the abstract absolute process of calculation has to concrete individual things; much of it more than justifies altogether that "black or white" method of criticism of which I wrote in the preceding chapter. They were as downright and unconsidering, as little ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... be a pure fabrication, concocted by some Parisian litterateur, I cannot know what degree of credit, if any, is to be given to such a statement. All I wish to communicate at present for the information of your Querist C. W. B. is this, that I have read an account and abstract of Messrs. Huc and Gabet's Travels in one of the ablest and best conducted French reviews, La Revue des Deux Mondes; in which not the least suspicion of fabrication is hinted, or the slightest doubt expressed as to the genuineness of these Travels. Mr. Princep, also, in his work ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various
... that the great improvers or benefactors of mankind are to be found. The works of the most illustrious names were little valued at the times when they were produced, and their authors either despised or neglected; and great, indeed, must have been the pure and abstract pleasure resulting from the exertion of intellectual superiority and the discovery of truth and the bestowing benefits and blessings upon society, which induced men to sacrifice all their common enjoyments and all their privileges as ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... Occasional intimations to this effect dropped from him in his conversations with my brother and others. But, on the whole, the simple fact was that he never ventured to go deeply into the fundamental questions. His official duties left him little time for abstract thought; and his surpassingly ingenious and versatile mind employed itself rather in framing excuses for not answering than in finding thorough answers to possible doubts. He adopted a version of the doctrine crede ut intelligas, and denounced ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... think so,' returned his companion. 'Half a dozen nephews shall erase her title, please heaven! Abstract your mind from the subject at present: you are too prone to covet your neighbour's goods; remember this neighbour's goods ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... this wrong itself, by being continued two hundred years, becomes, in its turn, an acquired right, is not explained in the address to which we allude. The principal fault to be found with such reasoning as this of the Prussian Conservatives, is that it is altogether too vague and abstract. There can be no development without something new; there can be, in social affairs, nothing new without some sort of innovation. Innovation, as such, can therefore not be condemned without condemning ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... importance of the individual instance as against the generalisation. All our social, political, moral problems are being approached in a new spirit, in an inquiring and experimental spirit, which has small respect for abstract principles and deductive rules. We perceive more and more clearly, for example, that the study of social organisation is an empty and unprofitable study until we approach it as a study of the association and inter-reaction of individualised human beings ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... would prevail where women became fellow-workers with men might be inferred on abstract grounds: but practical experience confirms this. The actor oftenest marries the actress, the male musician the female; the reception-room of the literary woman or female painter is found continually frequented by men of her own calling; the woman-doctor associates continually with and often ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... defrauding the poor or defacing tombstones. Politics, too, home and foreign, is a fertile source of difference of opinion; and yet gross abuse, on paper, of each other, by political disputants, discussing abstract questions having no present relation to power or pay, are ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... the grace of Galileo's speech and presence put the abstract Ricci in the shadow. The right man can make anything interesting, just as Dean Swift could write an entrancing essay with the broomstick as a central theme. The man's the thing, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... two natures—that of Peter Leroux, lifted scarcely one degree above the range of the brute, and that of M. Desalleux, abstract and rectified to the highest pitch of intellectuality—found themselves face to face. A little contest was going on between them. M. Desalleux, sitting in his official place, demanded, upon evidence somewhat insufficient, the head of Peter Leroux, accused of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... expose that fanatical spirit by which it appears the reformers were frequently actuated. Perhaps the people were not disposed to relish a jest on that side: perhaps the greater simplicity and the more spiritual abstract worship of the Protestants gave less hold to ridicule, which is commonly founded on sensible representations. It was, therefore, a very agreeable concession which the king made to the Catholic party, to suppress entirely ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... Salamanca were great schools of magic. The teachers taught that all knowledge might be obtained by the assistance of fallen angels. These teachers were skilled in the abstract sciences, in alchemy, in the various languages of mankind, and of the lower animals, divinity, magic, and prophecy. They professed to possess the power of controlling the winds and waters, and of influencing the stars. They also pretended to be able to cause earthquakes, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... after a separation which had lasted for many years, and those passed in two different worlds, neither of them clearly understanding the other's thoughts, not even his own, holding fast by words, and differing in words alone, disputed about the most purely abstract ideas—and disputed exactly as if the matter had been one of life and death to both of them. They shouted and cried aloud to such an extent that every one in the house was disturbed, and poor Lemm, who had shut himself ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... and the soul of her shuddered at the sight of him combining with the thing that he suggested. But her glance was steady and her lips maintained their smile, just as if that ugliness of his had been invested with some abstract beauty existing only to her gaze; a little colour crept into her cheeks, and red being the colour of love's livery, ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... here, Andy," said Henslowe nervously stroking his moustache. "You care much more about your work than any abstract idea of asserting your right of individual liberty. Even if you don't get caught.... I think the chances of getting caught are mighty slim if you use your head.... But even if you don't, you haven't enough money to live for ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos |
