"Actuality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the contest was the manner in which the "sporting editor'' gave actuality to the contests by pictorial representations. One competition took the form of a shooting match. The house organ contained an enormous target with two rings and a bull's eye. When a salesman qualified with orders for $625, he was credited with a shot ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... especial genre: her worthless little incident stared at her, naked and scraggy, from the sheet; she had no wealth of words at her disposal in which to deck it out. So, with a sigh, she turned back to the advice Cupid had given her, and prepared to make a faithful transcript of actuality. She called what she now wrote: "A Day at School", and conscientiously set down detail on detail; so fearful, this time, of over-brevity, that she spun the account out to twenty pages; though the writing of it was as ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... to, and moved about in it as a stripped young swimmer might have kept splashing through blue water and coming up at any point that friendliness and fancy, with every prejudice shed, might determine. Rupert expressed us all, at the highest tide of our actuality, and was the creature of a freedom restricted only by that condition of his blinding youth, which we accept on the whole with gratitude and relief—given that I qualify the condition as dazzling even to himself. How can it therefore not be interesting to see ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... half-surprise that I couldn't see them; particularly as each of the Hunchberg's developed a character entirely his own to the last peculiarity, such as the aged Aunt Cooley Hunchberg's deafness, on which account Beasley never once forgot to raise his voice when he addressed her. Indeed, the details of actuality in all this appeared to bring as great a delight to the man as to the child. Certainly he built them up with infinite care. On one occasion when Mr. Hunchberg and I happened to be calling, Hamilton remarked with surprise that Simpledoria ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... existence, being, entity, ens[Lat], esse[Lat], subsistence. reality, actuality; positiveness &c. adj.; fact, matter of fact, sober reality; truth &c. 494; actual existence. presence &c. (existence in space) 186; coexistence &c. 120. stubborn fact, hard fact; not a dream &c. 515; no joke. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the Campo Santo. There are, of course, enough poor falterings of allegory and tradition in the marble walls and floors of this vast residence of the dead (as it gives you the cheerful impression of being), but the characteristic note of the place is a realism braving it out in every extreme of actuality. Possibly the fact is most striking in that death-bed scene where the family, life-size and unsparingly portraitured, and, as it were, photographed in marble, are gathered in the room of the dying mother. She lies on a bedstead which bears every mark ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... that the spectacle was depressing to hopeful initiative. At all events, it was plain that the new policy was suffering from a certain flatness on the further side. As a ballon d'essai it lacked buoyancy; and no doubt Mr Farquharson was right in declaring that above all things it lacked actuality, business—the proposition, in good set terms, for men to turn over, to accept or reject. Nothing could be done with it, Mr Farquharson averred, as a mere prospect; it was useful only to its enemies. We of the young countries must be invited to deeds, not theories, of which ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... murderer owed more than that to Fate. It was to that grim goddess he was indebted for the last wonderful touch of actuality which lifted the whole contrivance so superbly above the realm of artifice. Suspicion was in the last degree unlikely in any case, but Hazel Rath's entry and loud scream, just before the moment ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... They fail to recognize that a work of art has a language, with a vocabulary and grammar, which has to be mastered through study. A work of art is a possibility of a certain complex of values, not a given actuality that can be grasped by merely stretching out the hand. Very little of any work of art is given—just a few sense stimuli; the rest is an emotional and meaningful reaction, which has to be completed in a determinate fashion. A work of ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... Moscow) was another of my amusements that summer. At that period Monte Cristo and Taine's works had just appeared, while I also revelled in stories by Sue, Dumas, and Paul de Kock. Even their most unnatural personages and events were for me as real as actuality, and not only was I incapable of suspecting an author of lying, but, in my eyes, there existed no author at all. That is to say, the various personages and events of a book paraded themselves before me on the printed page as personages and events that were alive and real; and although I had ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... the young man's cerebrum and cerebellum for an anatomical examination, proceeding strictly according to the rules of dissection, as he had so frequently done in actuality. He hunted for the centre of stupidity, which undoubtedly composed the American's whole soul, though his impudence, which he possessed in a rare degree, may also have had its seat in the brain. Frederick had to laugh. In his amusement he realised that little ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... the reasoned conclusion of philosophy what is rather a faith than a demonstration, but none the less, all honest thinking has hitherto been brave enough to recognize the reality of evil and to test the power of God and His love and goodness not by the actuality of present pain, or the confusion of present sin, but rather by the power which He offers us of growing through pain to health or else so bearing pain as to make it a real contribution to character and of so rising above sin as to make penitence and ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... bills to be of all denominations, and some so large as exquisitely to stagger imagination, others charming by their number and crispness—the dignified, orange paper of a man of assured position and wealth-crackling greenbacks the design of which tinged the whole with actuality. He was specially partial to engravings of President Lincoln, the particular savior and patron of his race. This five hundred dollars he was adding to an unreckoned sum of about two thousand, merely as extra ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... whole thing seemed incredible, and the reiterated questions of his Chief, who was a prudent man, might have shaken a less convincing witness. But Renwick had dreamed no dream, and the returning ache in his arm left no room to doubt the actuality of his experience. ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... impossible for him to do so. Wordsworth saw in Endymion merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth's message, being repelled by its form, and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden from him. The ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... popular and ancient city, famous for the edict of Nantes, and more famous still, perhaps, because of the revocation of that edict by Louis XIV, which led to disastrous religious wars. Nantes is also famous as the birthplace of Jules Verne, whose "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," became an actuality during the world war. It is a city of about 150,000 and is an important industrial center, having extensive shipyards, factories, wharves, etc. It is on the right bank of the Loire River, about thirty-five ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... suffrage if you allow female suffrage to go hand in hand with it. I believe that if there is any one influence in the country which will break down this tribal antipathy, which will make the two races one in political harmony and political action, not in actuality as races by amalgamation, but which will induce that harmony and that co-operation which may bring about the highest state, perhaps, of social civilization and development, it is the fact that woman and not man must interfere in order to smooth the pathway for these two races to go ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Presbyterians regarded that document as a necessary but unintelligible evil—the sorrow that haunted the Sabbath. I knew it by rote, Effectual Calling and all, but did not perceive that it possessed either meaning or actuality. Nobody was so unkind as to interpret the significance of the questions and answers; but somebody did interpret them for Stevenson, or his early genius enabled him to discover what it is all about, as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been reelected once or twice, and the newspapers were still indulging their familiar strain of irresponsible and ineffective criticism. The dark world behind him had become more populous and bold, and the forces for good still seemed unable to organize and cooeperate toward making betterment an actuality. But new people were always flocking in—people from the farms, villages and country-towns of the Middle region—and bringing with them the uncontaminated rustic ideals of rightness and decorum: a clean ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... sunshine, and together with these, gifts of humour and pathos to which Crabbe could make no pretension. From Chaucer, Crabbe passes to the great but very different master, on whom he had first built his style. Was Pope, then, not a poet? seeing that he too has "no small portion of this actuality of relation, this nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere"? Here again, of course, Crabbe overlooks one essential difference between himself and his model. Both were keen-sighted students of character, and both described sordid and worldly ambitions. But ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... had been his, but no other ten days of his life had seemed so eventful or passed so swiftly. For at last he stood before his goal, had actually fastened his eyes upon so much of it as might be seen through its gate. Never had he achieved so much downright actuality. ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... of the art of story-telling, the narrators must have gone to actuality to get suggestions for their character-drawing; and nothing is commoner than the accusation that this or that novelist has stolen his characters ready-made,—filching them from nature's shop-window, without so much as a by-your-leave. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... households of her countrywomen, Nina had long since begun to think—first in fun and then more seriously—of the palaces of Italy as so many spider webs waiting for the American gilded fly. It was at the Palazzo Scorpa that her theory became actuality. ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... white-washed the pavement at my feet. At the corner a train of the elevated railroad rushed by with a clattering roar and a trailing plume of white steam. Then a cable-car clanged past with incessant bangs upon its gong. Thus it was that I came back to the world of actuality. ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... feel of the bailer's cold metal had given him a momentary sense of oneness with his own world. Now this inrush of hideous, demoniac figures beneath the flare of green flames was like a fevered vision of the infernal regions come suddenly to actuality. ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... in his discourse that one might think at first sight that boys at a school might not have the opportunity to violate the tremendous Commandments; but, he said, this was not so. The Commandments were as much a living actuality in school life as they were in the larger world. Coming events cast their shadows before them; the child was the father of the man; what a boy was at school, such would he be in after life. Theft, the boys perhaps thought, was not a sin which immediately concerned ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... drawbacks! This army of servants—which might be an army of slaves without a single manly right, so mute, impassive, and highly trained it is—the breeding of a tyrannous temper in the men, of a certain contempt for facts and actuality even in the best of the women. Mrs. Wellesdon poured out her social aspirations to me. How naive and fanciful they were! They do her credit, but they will hardly do anyone else much good. And it is evident that they mark her out in her own circle, that they have brought her easily ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... satisfaction of vulgar appetites. Preoccupation with the other world in this long period weakens man's hold upon the things that make his life desirable. Philosophy is sunk in the slough of ignorant, perversely subtle disputation upon subjects destitute of actuality. Theological fanaticism has extinguished liberal studies and the gropings of the reason after truth in positive experience. Society lies prostrate under the heel of tyrannous orthodoxy. We discern ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... the literal evidence, is an essential function. Any mode of conceiving the universe which makes an appeal to this generous power, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping to create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he is willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... disaster the eternal laughter—in which she trusted—had rung harshly sardonic, to the breaking down of self-confidence, and light-hearted, cynic philosophy. It scared her somewhat. It made her feel old. It chilled her with suspicion of the actuality of The Four Last Things—death and judgment, heaven and hell. The power of a merry scepticism waxed faint amid the scream of shells and long-drawn, murderous crackle of the mitrailleuse. Helen, indeed, became actively superstitious, thereby falling low in her own self-esteem. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... to forms. The actual future of democracy, however, rests upon deeper issues. It is bound up with the general advance of civilization. The organic character of society is, we have seen, in one sense, an ideal. In another sense it is an actuality. That is to say, nothing of any import affects the social life on one side without setting up reactions all through the tissue. Hence, for example, we cannot maintain great political progress without ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... 188. Possibility, Probability, and Actuality.—It has been stated, in Section 175, that reasoning leads to probable truth, and that this probability may become so strong as to be accepted as certainty. In common speech this difference is borne in mind, and ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... joy while the poor woman who had been an unconscious barrier between them lies dead under their roof. It is a somewhat painful episode, and precludes anything like high esteem for Rutherford, but it has the quality of intense actuality. ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... individual, compounded of several bodies, certain bodies be separated, and if, at the same time, an equal number of other bodies of the same nature take their place, the individual will preserve its nature as before, without any change in its actuality (forma). ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... announced for immediate publication is The Man in the Platinum Mask by Samson Wolf (Black and Crosswell). By a curious and wholly undesigned coincidence the name of the hero is ATTILA, while a further touch of actuality is lent to the romance by the fact that the author's aunt's first husband fought in the Italian ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... the prevailing ones; in actuality the ethics and methods of the propertied class were all powerful. The Church might preach equality, humility and the list of virtues; but nevertheless that did not give the propertyless man a vote. Thus it was, that in communities professing ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... time many mysteries in Roman history and in contemporary life. The ancient writers and moralists wrote so much of Roman corruption, because—nearer in this, as in so many other things, to the vivid actuality—they understood that wars, revolutions, the great spectacular events that are accomplished in sight of the world, do not form all the life of peoples; that these occurrences, on the contrary, are but ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... a tithe of the excitement and attention caused by William H. Vanderbilt's death. The newspaper offices hotly issued page after page of description, not without sufficient reason. For he, although untitled and vested with no official power, was in actuality an autocrat; dictatorship by money bags was an established fact; and while the man died, his corporate wealth, the real director and center, to a large extent, of government ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... it modify orthodox opinions? Chiefly in humanizing them, in making the gospel story "palpitate with actuality" to quote the French phrase which Matthew Arnold loved to use. These people on the stage at Ober-Ammergau are not lay figures, mere abstract representations of the virtues or the opposite. They live, breathe and act just as if they were actors ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... myself to the belief that life was beginning to be more interesting to him than art. But there suddenly appeared the book which made him famous, a book both masterly and delicate, full of subtle analysis and perception, and with that indescribable sense of actuality which is the best test of art. The style at the same time seemed to have run clear; he had gained a perfect command of his instrument, and I had about this book, what I had never had about any other book ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... at an angle of from twenty to thirty degrees. The course is only 2677 yards in playing distance. On paper this gives the impression of being nothing out of the ordinary, but confronted with it in actuality, it is about as hard a proposition as any victim of the golf habit could tackle. The only course one can compare with it here is Oakland, and the latter is a billiard table by the side of it. At the finish of the thirty-six holes Vardon said, 'I never felt so fagged out in my life. In ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... millionaires few and far between. This is especially the case in Adelaide, where the condition of the poorer class is better, and that of the richer worse than in any of the other colonies. In Melbourne the masses seem worst off, and the display of riches, if not the actuality thereof, is most noticeable. In Sydney the signs of wealth are not wanting to an examiner, but a superficial observer would say that there were not half as many wealthy men as in Melbourne. Few South Australians get beyond the ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... he wasn't rudely evasive. Moreover she surely wasn't quick to take offence, wasn't irritable; she could be trusted to wait. So when he said to her, "Ah don't talk of anything I've done, don't talk of it here; there's another man in the house who's the actuality!"—when he uttered this short sincere protest it was with the sense that she would see in the words neither mock humility nor the impatience of a successful ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... its whirring note and they fell silent. Upon the silver sheet there took shape and actuality the moving barge with its banners and streamers and costumed actors. Then a flash was given of the Indians gathering on the wild shore—wondering, excited, not a little fearful of the strange appearance ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... artist from Maine, turned to Rome as his artistic Mecca. Since then the Eternal City has always been his home, but his frequent and prolonged sojourns in America have kept him closely in touch with its national life. Mr. Simmons is the idealist who translates his vision into the actuality of the hour and who also exalts this actuality of the hour to the universality of the vision. In the creation of portrait busts and of the statues and monumental memorials of great men he infuses into them the indefinable quality of extended relation which relegates his ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... understand the words of the law; for I prefer to call in question your intelligence rather than the justice of the legislator. You are mistaken in your application of the principle, In pari causa possessor potior habetur: the actuality of possession here refers to him who possessed at the time when the difficulty arose, not to him who possesses at the time of the complaint. And when the code prohibits the reception of actions possessoires, in cases where the possession is not of a year's duration, it simply means that ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... have done that, even in a dream. And how wondrously real! Her hand felt quite solid, there were tears trickling down her cheeks, tears that sometimes dropped on to his own hand with an incredible effect of actuality. It was even more vivid than his Sword-dream which was always so extraordinarily realistic and clear. And there, yes, by Jove, was dear old Auntie Yvette, smiling and weeping simultaneously. Such a dream was the next best thing to reality—save that it brought home to one too vividly what ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... the harmony of souls of which Plato speaks. It is true marriage as I have sometimes visualised it in my dreams, but which, unfortunately, I shall hardly be able to realise in actuality." ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... less, than other people. They do all their work three times over: once in anticipation, once in actuality, once in rumination. I do mine in actuality alone, doing it ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... most part of a replaceable nature, need be only trivially referred to, the incident, indeed, being generally regarded as a most cordial and pressing variety of foreign politeness), but also—in the lack of highly-spiced actuality—with subtly-imagined and truly objectionable instances. These calumnies they have not hesitated to commit to the form of printed books, which, falling into the hands of the ignorant and undiscriminating, may even suggest to their ill-balanced ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... resolutely declined—she must, she insisted, maintain her obligation along with his. However, Fanny, like all other women, he thought, was entirely ignorant of the principle of which money was no more than a symbol: she saw it not as an obligation, or implied power, but as an actuality, pouring from a central inexhaustible place of bright ringing gold ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... experience is deserted, and the supposed requirements of fiction have been listened to; whatever has really affected the public mind is, we are equally, certain, the transcript of some actual incident, character or emotion. Note, moreover, that beyond this basis of actuality these writers have the further advantage of deep feeling united ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... which the means of planning, producing, and distributing goods is controlled by a central government that theoretically seeks a more just and equitable distribution of property and labor; in actuality, most socialist governments have ended up being no more than dictatorships over workers ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... himself down with the vacuous and the trivial. Thus he runs a risk of losing the deep-lying truth which constitutes the real nature of the poetical. He would fain imitate an actual occurrence, and does not consider that a poetic representation can never coincide with actuality, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Pleasure. Aristotle now goes back to his starting point—the nature of the Good, and Happiness. He re-states his positions: That Happiness is an exercise or actuality [Greek: energeia], and not an acquirement or state (hexis), That it belongs to such exercises as are worthy of choice for their own sake, and not to such as are worthy of choice for the sake of something ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... conscientious chronicler of the events he observed, hence are the laurels of the historian equitably his. Similar to the hasty entries in a journal, daily written, his letters possess an unstudied freshness, a convincing actuality, that would undoubtedly have been marred by the retouching required to perfect their literary style. The reproach of carelessness in neglecting to systematise his manuscripts applies more to the collection in the Opus Epistolarum than ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... down from the lips, models of tale-telling for children. Emma had two classes of story: the one concerned itself with rich children, the other with poor; the one highly fanciful, the other full of a touching actuality, the very essence of a life such as that led by the listeners themselves. Unlike the novel which commends itself to the world's grown children, these narratives had by no means necessarily a happy ending; for one thing Emma saw too deeply into the ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... the rose itself, was smiling upon him. As in a dream he heard her name, "The Comtesse Sylvie Hermenstein" and his own, "Mr. Aubrey Leigh"; he was dimly aware of bowing, and of saying something vague and formal, but all the actuality of his being was for the moment shaken and transfigured, and only one strong and overwhelming conviction remained,—the conviction that, in the slight creature who stood before him gracefully acknowledging his ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Fa Fai. "The buildings in question undoubtedly exist at the indicated position. If, therefore, the actuality is to be maintained, it is necessary either to raise their stature or to cut down the trees obscuring them. To this gentle-minded person the former alternative seemed the less drastic. As, however, it is regarded in a ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... meditation, and I hope that my accuracy will be trusted. In justice to myself, and to allay the fears of prospective readers, I beg to point out that the few historical allusions are never dragged in for the sake of parading my unique erudition, but that each of them is closely related to actuality; either throwing a light on the nature of current events or affecting directly the fortunes of the people of whom ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... bowl of flowers removed from the table, did their mistress address either of them. Conversation after the first few amenities speedily became almost a monologue. One man talked whilst the others listened, and the man who talked was Oliver Hilditch. He possessed the rare gift of imparting colour and actuality in a few phrases to the strange places of which he spoke, of bringing the very thrill of strange happenings into the shadowy room. It seemed that there was scarcely a country of the world which he had not visited, a country, ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... nay, the possibility, of self-sacrifice, except where there is misery? How can good, the good which is highest, find itself, and give utterance and actuality to the power that slumbers within it, except as resisting evil? Are not good and evil relative? Is not every criminal, when really known, working out in his own way the salvation of himself and the world? Why cannot he, then, take ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... fail to be present in any relation, be it ever so intimate, because that which is common to the two is perhaps never common only to them but belongs to a general conception, which includes much else, many possibilities of similarities. As little actuality as they may have, often as we may forget them, yet here and there they crowd in like shadows between men, like a mist gliding before every word's meaning, which must actually congeal into solid corporeality in order to be called ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... with, life gives us opportunities and no more. We may, in and through it, become wise, good, pure, happy, noble, Christ-like, or we may not. The opportunity is there, swinging, as it were, in vacuo. Lay hold of it, says he, and turn it into more than an opportunity—even an actuality and a fact. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... exasperated Jew. The figures in which we can easily recognise his hand in the earlier historical plays are indeed marked by his prevailing sanity of perception; always they show the play of the seeing eye, the ruling sense of reality which shaped his life; it is this visible actuality that best marks them off from the non-Shaksperean figures around them. And in the wonderful figures of Falstaff and his group we have a roundness of comic reality to which nothing else in modern literature thus far could be compared. But still this, the most remarkable of all, remains ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... benediction; and her hands clasped Arthur's wedding present, a bag of alligator skin bearing her initials in gold. One blissful month ago she and George had been married, and now, on the reluctant return from a camp in the Adirondacks, they were confronting the disillusioning actuality of the New York streets at eight o'clock in the morning. While Gabriella waited, shivering a a little, for the air was sharp and her broadcloth dress was not warm, she amused herself planning a future which appeared ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... are endowed with. The term 'Buddha-nature,'[FN165] as accepted generally by Buddhists, means a latent and undeveloped nature, which enables its owner to become Enlightened when it is developed and brought to actuality.[FN166] Therefore man, according to Zen, is not good-natured nor bad-natured in the relative sense, as accepted generally by common sense, of these terms, but Buddha-natured in the sense of non-duality. A ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... Champnell, I wish to point out, and to emphasise the fact, that I am not prepared to positively affirm what portion of my adventures in that extraordinary, and horrible place, was actuality, and what the product of a feverish imagination. Had I been persuaded that all I thought I saw, I really did see, I should have opened my lips long ago, let the consequences to myself have been what they might. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... vast size and power—a veritable dragon or serpent, such as legend attributes to vast fens or quags where there was illimitable room for expansion. A glance at a geological map will show that whatever truth there may have been of the actuality of such monsters in the early geologic periods, at least there was plenty of possibility. In England there were originally vast plains where the plentiful supply of water could gather. The streams were deep and slow, and there were holes of abysmal depth, ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... cruise, but it was impossible. Romance was always smothering her, edging her off, when she approached the sinister. Perhaps if she had heard ribald songs, seen evidence of drunkenness; if the crew had loitered about and been lacking in respect, she would have been able to grasp the actuality; but so far the idea persisted that this could not be anything more than a pleasure cruise. Piracy? ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... treatise which displays an absolute avoidance of mere compilation, and it is pervaded by such a tone of earnestness, and contains so many original observations, that the reader is inducted by it out of the usual book-land of idealism into the substantial region of actuality and ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... widely current recently, are put out of court by it. The pleasant interpretations mediocrity formulates of the universe are torn to tatters. There is at least the refreshment of standing face to face with brute actuality, though it crash all our "little systems" to the ground. Philosophy must wait. The interpretations cannot be hastened, while the facts are multiplying with such bewildering rapidity. The one certainty is that an entirely new world is being ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... daughter, Helena, aged nineteen, and I were lured into the maw of this hellish monster by a robot calling for help in our television screen. This thing, known to man as Asteroid Moira, is, in actuality, one of the gigantic mineral creatures which inhabited a planet before it exploded, forming the asteroids. Somehow it survived the catastrophe, and, forming a hard, crustaceous shell about itself, has continued to live here in space ...
— The Beast of Space • F.E. Hardart
... talk well. He had, in an unusual degree, the art of putting things vividly and crisply, and he possessed an extraordinary memory for those little details which give actuality to the picture. When he described the shooting of a presidential candidate, Dodgson could see the man with his grimy hands and torn collar, crumpling up as the volley from the firing party caught him. The editor himself had never come in contact with crude realities such ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... not too sure of that. Bracing I say, because of its bareness and precariousness, its sense of ultimate insecurity. I came back to earth not discouraged or dismayed, but more conscious than ever of the urgency of practical problems and the actuality of life. And so, as I say, out of my breathless ramble among ultimate causes and conceptions, I came back to the world with a great sense of zest and relief, as the diver of whom I spoke sees the water grow paler and greener before his swimming eyes, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the two, since he can crack a nut, while the mountain can do no such thing. The parallel is close enough between this impudence and the attitude—implied, if not expressed—of too much modern criticism towards the sort of qualities—the easy, indolent power, the searching sense of actuality, the combined command of sanity and paradox, the immovable independence of thought—which went to the making of the Lives of the Poets. There is only, perhaps, one flaw in the analogy: that, in this particular instance, the mountain was able to crack nuts a great ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... no longer terrified, and had recovered her nerve, but she still found it difficult to believe she was not dreaming. It seemed more like a nightmare than actuality that she should be sitting in a pitch-dark car, talking of love and Don Carlos to a Spanish outlaw who had captured her, and whose arm encircled her waist. She was not conscious of fear now, but Cojuelo's reply to her question scared her ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... it was soon felt that a new power had arisen. The Commissioner was not only a name but an actuality. Nothing was so trivial as to escape his attention; nothing too wide for him to grasp. He knew his men—it is said that he knows every man in the force, an exaggeration with a great deal of truth in it—and they ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... Vedantins, acknowledging two kinds of conscious existence, the terrestrial and the spiritual, point only to the latter as an undoubted actuality. As to the terrestrial life, owing to its changeability and shortness, it is nothing but an illusion of our senses. Our life in the spiritual spheres must be thought an actuality because it is there that lives our endless, never-changing ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... falling back upon the Bible. Considering the fact that our earlier sacred books indicate approval by the Almighty of some of the most bloodthirsty peoples and most cruel wars ever known, such a recommendation seems lacking in "actuality." ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... war are merely transient. Men suffer untold discomforts, and yet, when these sufferings are over and mind and body are at ease for a while, they are completely forgotten. The only mark they leave is the disinclination to undergo them again. But on those who do not realize them in their actuality, they cause a far ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... flooding the edge of the deck of The Aloha, cast four shadows sharply upon the smooth boards. Lined up at the rail stood the four adventurers, and the glass passed from one to another like the eye of the three Grey Sisters. The far beacon appeared and disappeared, but its actuality might not be doubted. If Jarvo and Akko were to be trusted, there in the velvet distance lay Yaque, and Med, the King's City, and the light upon the very palace of its ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... one story. An episode of one experience, having been transferred to an earlier one, becomes rationalized in adaptation to its different environment. This process of psychological transference is the explanation of the reference to Elephantine as the source of the d'd', and has no relation to actuality. The naive efforts of Brugsch and Gauthier to study the natural products of Elephantine for the purpose of identifying d'd' ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... present in an earnest desire for the future." It is the pathetic confession of a dreamer. Yet this dreamer was also a keen analyzer, a tireless creator of beautiful things. In them he sought and found a refuge from actuality. The marvel of his career is, as I have said elsewhere, that this solitary, embittered craftsman, out of such hopeless material as negations and abstractions, shadows and superstitions, out of disordered fancies and dreams ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... holding clearly the absolute justice of the American contention, demonstrated both by the faulty character of the method and the outrageous injustice in results, let us not be blind to the actuality of the loss Great Britain was undergoing, nor to her estimate of the compensation offered for the relinquishment of the practice. The New England States, which furnished a large proportion of the maritime ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... that Paris is beginning to shake off the paralysis imposed by the outbreak of the war. Undisturbed by the turmoil, the forty "immortal" Academicians are continuing their labors on the Dictionary of the Academy. They are approaching the end of the letter "E" and are to-day discussing, with singular actuality, the word "Exodus." May that mean the German exodus from ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... are many ways by which even a near translation of the economic pact into actuality may work hardship—even disaster—to American commercial interests. No matter which way we turn when peace comes we shall face the proverbial millstones in the shape of two great alliances. One is the Allied Group, jealous of our new wealth and world power, bitter with the belief ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... through those battles unscathed while wreaking havoc and destruction among the massed ships of the Misfits. They had no Guessers. (Or no trained Guessers, he amended. The potential might be there, but certainly the actuality was not.) ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... thousands of busy typewriters working on death's manuscript. After that had come bayonet charges against dummies, rifle-ranges and trench-digging—all the industrious pretence at slaughter which prefaces the astounding actuality. We were far away from all that now; the brown figures had melted into the brownness of the hills. There might have been no war. Perhaps there wasn't. Never was there a world more grey and quiet. I grew sleepy. My head nodded. I opened my eyes, pulled myself together and again ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... publicly to undertake to eat the first engine which ever crossed that formidable gulf. But engineers and craftsmen set to work with a will, and before long what had appeared an impossibility was rapidly taking shape as an actuality. Eight hundred yards in length, the greater portion was constructed on timber piles, over 500 in number, in 113 spans, driven into the sand. The navigable channel, at the Barmouth end, was crossed ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... lungs have almost failed. After I enter your mind, my last act will be to release the simple block that makes Timmy an imbecile ... he will awaken and not know that he has slept all his life until this moment when he becomes in actuality an ordinary, quite intelligent boy. He will not grieve unduly for Homer, and I who have two bodies and am at home in neither of them will be a record that will finally be ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... be wondered at that a speech so delivered—a mere soliloquy—should fail to be impressive. It was too far and away unreal—had too little actuality to reach the poor humble breasts that were panting for excitement and exhortation. But once throughout it all was there a touch of that somewhat sardonic humour that sometimes delights even Lord Salisbury's political foes. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... battle of Manila Bay will to the future appear one of the decisive events of history, for there the visions of the few, which had quickened unconsciously the conceptions of the many, materialised as suddenly as unexpectedly into an actuality that could be neither obviated nor undone. What Dewey's victory was to the over-sea expansion of the United States, what the bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861 was to the sentiment of Union in the Northern States, that Paul ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... be crazy, she would have thought she knew it. Everybody around her believed in enchantments; nobody had any doubts; to doubt that a castle could be turned into a sty, and its occupants into hogs, would have been the same as my doubting among Connecticut people the actuality of the telephone and its wonders,—and in both cases would be absolute proof of a diseased mind, an unsettled reason. Yes, Sandy was sane; that must be admitted. If I also would be sane—to Sandy —I must keep my superstitions about unenchanted and unmiraculous locomotives, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was living under the conditions which brought this modern attitude of the Papacy into potent actuality. He was surrounded by intellectual and moral forces of recent growth but of incalculable potency. One of the first acts of his reign was to advance six members of the moderate reforming party—Sadoleto, Pole, Giberto, Federigo, Fregoso, Gasparo Contarini, and G.M. Caraffa—to ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... certainly be felt, and the rain, and the heat of the fire. From the descriptions he had amassed through his unwearied questioning, he had pieced out for himself a quaint little world of color and light,—how like or unlike the actuality no one ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... raise feelings of intense emotion, of horror or grief, or of both. Failing in this, it fails altogether. To this end Seneca introduced his Ghost, and his disciples filled their speeches with passionate outcry and lurid pictures of horrible events unfit to be presented in actuality. Gorboduc rained death upon a whole nation, Tancred and Gismunda invoked every awful epithet and gruesome description of dungeon and murder, for the same purpose. But the purpose remained unfulfilled—at least, for an English audience nurtured on more vigorous diet than mere words. The ear cannot ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... nothing, (5) the unity of the human race, (6) the origin of evil from freedom, and the inalienable nature of freedom, (7) the two Testaments, (8) Christ as God and Man, the unity of his personality, the truth of his divinity, the actuality of his humanity, the reality of his fate, (9) the redemption and conclusion of a covenant through Christ as the new and crowning manifestation of God's grace to all men, (10) the resurrection of man in soul and ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... attainment or enjoyment of the sovereign good. So far as the happiness of man is something created, existing in the man himself, we must say that the happiness of man is an act. For happiness is the last perfection of man. But everything is perfect so far as it is in act; for potentiality without actuality is imperfect. Happiness, therefore, must consist in the last and crowning act of man. But it is manifest that activity is the last and crowning act of an active being; whence also it is called by the philosopher "the second act." And hence it is that each thing ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... thing, no mere man surely would attempt the task of depicting the sweet girl graduate in her native lair, often as the converse has been done. Certainly it is improbable that he would manage to convey such an impression of actuality. For I am sure the life of an Oxford ladies' college must be, for many, very much what it was for Cherry Hawthorn. But I am afraid this is about all that I can honestly say in praise of the story. Cherry was a young woman with red hair (it is bright vermilion in the ugly picture of her on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... specialist fatigue and impatience. It is very easy for writers like myself to deal in the broad generalities of Socialism and urge their adoption as general principles; it is altogether another affair with a man who sets himself to work out the riddle of the complications of actuality in order to modify them in the direction of Socialism. He finds himself in a jungle of difficulties that strain his intellectual power to the utmost. He emerges at last with conclusions, and they are rarely the obvious conclusions, as to what needs to be done. Even the ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... "fixing the laws and usages at war on the land"? Have you never read the terms of this convention, have you never glanced through the sixty-odd articles which today, in the presence of the nameless horrors in which we lend a hand, offer a prodigious interest to actuality? ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... facts thoroughly well known, changed with each repetition. A month after an occurrence one might search in vain for the actuality. It was more difficult to learn truthful details than anywhere I had been. The French are niggardly of publications concerning Tahiti. An almanac once a year contained a few figures and facts of interest, but with no newspapers within thousands of miles, every ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... read at the fire of the forge where he worked as blacksmith; and that the men whom he led to Cambridge, from Rhode Island, were the best disciplined, equipped, uniformed, and maintained, of the whole Yankee army at that time. As for Philip's gift of translating printed matter into actuality, I remember how, when we afterward came to visit strange cities together, he would find his way about without a question, like an old resident, through having merely read descriptions ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... their vital manifestation may be kept in abeyance for five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty years. Though not living any more than the wheat, they also retain the potentiality of manifestation of life; and for each alike, in order that this potentiality may pass into actuality, the first requisition is water with which to restore them to that possibility of molecular rearrangement under the influence of incident forces, of which the absence of water had deprived them, and without which, life in any real sense ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... actuality of which hath not its origin in God: Chaos spirituale:- [Greek text which ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the escape into Europe, where the old enchantress appears to be now prowling in poverty and degradation, concludes the curious story. The narrative bears marks of having passed through a French translation and then a British version. To disentangle the thread of actuality that probably runs through it would be too troublesome and futile; but the truths that the wily Melek cannot help telling—the facts of the harem and of Eastern life that involuntarily sprinkle it all like a flavoring of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... old Parisian quay, the belittered print-shop, the pleasant afternoon, the glimpse of the great Louvre on the other side of the Seine, in the interstices of the sallow estampes suspended in window and doorway—all these elements of a rich actuality availed only to mitigate, without transmuting, that general vision of a high, cruel pillory which pieced itself together as I drew specimen after specimen from musty portfolios. I had been passing the shop when I noticed in a small vitrine, ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... victories which the Russians think to win in Silicia. Rumor has it that the Germans have even encircled Paris and are at Fontainebleau to the south-southeast. This is highly improbable, but we have already seen that the wildest improbability of one day becomes an actuality the next. Everyone at the Embassy, and indeed all Paris, is desperately anxious for news. Even unfavorable news would be better than this prolonged suspense. Everyone inquires and wonders and queries, but no one knows what the real situation ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... remark, for the benefit of any medical reader, that it involved the use of two pails, one full of water, the other empty. When he got through the ablution, one pail was empty, and the other full. My authority for the actuality of this remarkable proceeding was some inmate of the house at the time, and I give credence to the story because it was not ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... loved to hear him. The way he reared such fabulous superstructures upon slight incidents, interpreting thus his complex being to himself, was uncommonly interesting. It was observing the creative imagination actually at work, and the process in a sense seemed sacred. Only the truth and actuality with which he clothed it all made me a little ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... an incredible incident, so incredible that next day she still had great difficulty in deciding whether it was an actuality or a dream. She heard a little very familiar sound. It was the last sound she would have expected to hear and she turned sharply when she heard it. The paper-covered door in the wall of her husband's apartment opened softly, paused, ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells |
