"Adequacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... alternatives of a well-stocked wardrobe. If such subsidiary members as Mrs. Leveret were fluttered by the thought of exchanging ideas with the author of "The Wings of Death," no forebodings of the kind disturbed the conscious adequacy of Mrs. Plinth, Mrs. Ballinger and Miss Van Vluyck. "The Wings of Death" had, in fact, at Miss Van Vluyck's suggestion, been chosen as the subject of discussion at the last club meeting, and each member had thus been enabled to express her own opinion or to appropriate ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... Hawke's adequacy to his present fortune betrayed itself again in a phrase to Warren, "I have nothing so much at heart as the faithful discharge of my duty, and in such manner as will give satisfaction both to the Lords of the Admiralty and yourself. This shall ever be my utmost ambition, and ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... to express with any adequacy his sympathy for a girl whose father had flirted with the gallows so shamelessly. Walker had courageously entered express cars and jumped into locomotive cabs in the pursuit of his calling and this was much nobler than shooting a man ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... Balaklava, and it was believed that four English (not Turkish) redoubts had been taken; and, while the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade had been announced, the success of the heavy cavalry was not yet known. Anxiety began accordingly to be felt at home as to the adequacy of the allied forces to encounter the Russian army, augmented as it now was by the troops which had recently evacuated the Principalities. Accordingly fresh efforts were being made to engage Austria in effectual alliance with ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... victorious. The same forms of expression, lacking this spirit, would have lacked the triumph. All of them, indeed, are not equally fine. Mr. Irving's 'Mathias' and 'Louis XI,' are higher performances than his 'Shylock' and 'Dorincourt,' higher in imaginative tone and in adequacy of feeling and treatment. But, throughout all these forms, the drift of his spirit, setting boldly away from conventions and formalities, has been manifested with delightful results. He has always seemed to be alive with the specific vitality of the person represented. He has never seemed a wooden ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... the substitutional adequacy of images. E. g., I imagine my absent dog, Bismarck's dog, whom I know only pictorially, and finally, the dog of Alcibiades, whose appearance is known only by the fact that he was pretty and that his master had cut off his tail. In this case, the representative value of these ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... and with no indifference to morality. In the same way there has been much discussion of his style, which seldom achieves beauty, and sometimes falls short of correctness, but which still more seldom lacks force and adequacy to his own purpose. On the whole, to write with the shorthand necessary here, it is idle to claim for Balzac an absolute supremacy in the novel, while it may be questioned whether any single book of his, or any scene of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... on the whole-whether it furthers the life process taken impersonally. For this is the basis of award of the instinct of workmanship, and that instinct is the court of final appeal in any question of economic truth or adequacy. It is a question as to the award rendered by a dispassionate common sense. The question is, therefore, not whether, under the existing circumstances of individual habit and social custom, a given expenditure ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... and government. Reverting, therefore, to those tests of conduct which recognise, the independent existence of social as well as self-regarding springs of action, I shall now make some remarks on the appropriateness and adequacy, for the purpose of designating such tests, of the three classes of terms, noticed above. To begin with happiness or pleasure. Taking happiness to mean the balance of pleasures over pains, and degrees of happiness ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... Unity of control; adequacy of area; schools of various types, sufficient in number, and suited to meet the need for the supply of the various services required by the State; a common basis in elementary education; means of higher education ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... picturesque style to bear upon this story. Taken for all in all, it is one of the most pleasing of all his productions in fiction, and it affords a view of certain phases of American, or perhaps we should say of New York, life that have not hitherto been treated with anything like the same adequacy and ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... sweep the Elbe-Sazawa Tract clear of them, after all. Maria Theresa having answered No, it is likely the Austrians will try to get across: Be vigilant therefore, ye mounted sentries. Or will they perhaps make an attempt on Prag? Einsiedel, who has no garrison of the least adequacy, apprises us That "in all the villages round Prag people are busy making ladders,"—what can that mean? Friedrich has learned, by intercepted letters, that something great is to be done on Wednesday, 18th: he ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... more desirable than that the matter should be advanced to the third of its natural stages by being submitted to the critical test of experience. Nothing short of this will ever satisfy the mass of mankind of the feasibility of the system proposed, or of its adequacy to meet the evils complained of; nothing less will set free the minds of many thousands of intelligent persons to inquire into other methods of reform than the fair trial of the single-tax system, and its failure to cure the evils which its author expected it to cure. The difficulty, which indeed ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... is in existence; no critical appreciation of his work as a whole, and as correlated with the circumstances and affected by the changes of his life, has, so far as I am aware, been attempted. To perform either of these two tasks adequately, or even with any approach to adequacy, a writer should at least have the elbow-room of a portly volume. To attempt the two together, therefore, and to attempt them within the limits prescribed to the manuals of this series, is an enterprise which I think ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... equity in the universe, in the various spectacle outside our minds, and the most terrible nightmare the human imagination has ever engendered is a Just God, measuring, with himself as the Standard, against finite men. Ultimately there is no adequacy, we are all weighed in the balance and ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... sentence into one that is clumsy and halting is certainly not to reproduce it, no matter how exactly the separate words are rendered, or how closely the syntactic constructions match each other. And this consideration seems conclusive as against the adequacy of the literalist method. That method is inadequate, not because it is too REALISTIC, but because it runs continual risk of being too VERBALISTIC. It has recently been applied to the translation of Dante by Mr. Rossetti, and it has sometimes led him to write curious verses. For ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Mr. Pound's output, discuss the adequacy of the following: "When content has become for an artist merely something to inflate and display form with, then the petty serves as well as the great, the ignoble equally with the lofty, the unlovely like the beautiful, the sordid as the clean.... Real feeling consequently becomes rarer, and the ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... death of their parents, at an early age. The eldest was not yet able to provide fully for their support, but did all he could in hunting, and with his aid, and the stock of provisions left by their father, they were preserved and kept alive, rather, it seems, by miraculous interposition, than the adequacy of their own exertions. For the father had been a hermit,[66] having removed far away from the body of the tribe, so that when he and his wife died they left their children without neighbors and friends, and the lads had no idea that there was a human being near them. They did not even ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... and those of its personages to whom we must now return—with very little to which pen can do justice, except what the reader's imagination probably has already anticipated; for though thrilling events may be described with a good degree of adequacy, there are yet certain states of high wrought feeling that language can never but feebly portray. The search for the lost maiden, on the eventful night of her capture and escape, had been, as the reader will have inferred, ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... truancy, and the abundance of newspaper advertisements for fugitives reinforces the impression that the need of deterrence was vital. Whippings, instead of proving a cure, might bring revenge in the form of sabotage, arson or murder. Adequacy in food, clothing and shelter might prove of no avail, for contentment must be mental as well as physical. The preventives mainly relied upon were holidays, gifts and festivities to create lightness of heart; overtime and overtask payments to promote zeal ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... William the Silent had denounced the persecution of sincere belief. Early Baptists like Busher and Richardson had finely denied its validity. Roger Williams in America, Milton in England had attacked its moral rightness and political adequacy; while churchmen like Hales and Taylor and the noble Chillingworth had shown the incompatibility between a religion of love and a spirit of hate. Nor had example been wanting. The religious freedom of Holland was narrow, as Spinoza had found, but it was still freedom. Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... by remarking that the subject of Colonial verse, and the immense future before the English-speaking poets, is allied to a question that is very great, the adequacy or inadequacy of English poetry—British, American, and Colonial—to the destiny of the race that produces it. The article enunciated the thesis that if the English language should not in the near future contain ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... anything is by FEELING that too much: so, by the same token, when we don't feel the excess (and I am contending, mind, that in "The Awkward Age" the multiplicity yields to the order) how do we know that the measure not recorded, the notch not reached, does represent adequacy or satiety? The mere feeling helps us for certain degrees of congestion, but for exact science, that is for the criticism of "fine" art, we want the notation. The notation, however, is what we lack, ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... the Vandykes behind the guests, and the great mirrors in between—came back to the table, and passed from face to face, till again it rested upon David. The conviction of her husband's handsome looks and natural adequacy to this or any world, with which her survey ended, brought with it a strange mixture ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... an institution for teaching purposes, its school-room and class-rooms should be the most essential portion of its plant. Without discussing the adequacy of the definition, we will begin with these. We were not ill provided; with an exception or two, the rooms appropriated for class-rooms answered the purpose well. Some of them were spacious; the rest were large ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... who comforted him in his closing years; a man of fervent, impulsive temperament, and a lover of music, he was sincere in controversy, magnanimous in character, and of deep religious faith; the richness, melody, and simplicity of his poetry, the sublimity of his great theme, and the adequacy of its treatment, place him among the greatest poets of the world; in later years he leaned to Arianism, and broke away from the restraints of outward religious practice; his last prose work, a Latin treatise on "Christian Doctrines," ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... As concerns the adequacy of the arrangements on land for resisting the invader if he succeeded in reaching the shore, it is difficult to speak. It was almost a matter of course that Leicester was given the command, though ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... he muttered scornfully, emphasizing the dangerously explosive consonants in a manner which expressed with complete adequacy, not only his indignation against the entire medical profession, but his utter and profound contempt for the fatuities of the ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... his devotion to the doctrines of Hartley, it is clear from his poetry and letters, that Coleridge very early had doubts concerning the adequacy of the intellect as an instrument for arriving at truth, and that at the same time the conviction was slowly gaining ground with him that an act of the will is necessary in order to bring man into contact with reality. ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... when partisanship with its personalities and bitterness does not satisfy the public. We have seen things on too large a scale now to believe in the importance of trifles, or in the adequacy of trifling men. We must have men who are large enough to be international and national at the same time, to be politicians and yet American statesmen, to subordinate always the individual ambition and the party advantage ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... minute I was shown into the Editor's room, where again I was struck by the imaginative adequacy of the surroundings. Before coming to the man himself let me say something of these. The floor was not bare or even sprinkled with sawdust, as it might easily have been, but it was covered by a comfortable carpet, probably from Axminster. Comfort was indeed the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... concerning the universe as a whole, and concerning the nature of ultimate reality. Whether this be the case or not, the more modest function we have spoken of can certainly be performed by philosophy, and certainly suffices, for those who have once begun to doubt the adequacy of common sense, to justify the arduous and difficult labours ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... although it is only in a few instances—as in the description of King's College, Cambridge—that these sonnets possess force or charm enough to rank them high as poetry, yet they assume a certain value when we consider not so much their own adequacy as the greater inadequacy of all rival attempts in ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... makes him self-sufficient for the struggle which such exaltation demands, which is bad. In that partial understanding he departs from truth. And what is it that makes the futility of so much present preaching? It is the acceptance of this doctrine of man's moral adequacy and consequently the almost total lack either of the assurance of grace or of the appeal to the will. No wonder such exhortations cannot stem the tide of an ever increasing worldliness. Such preaching stimulates the mind; in both the better and the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... thought to affirm that the expression is figurative and nothing more. The doctrine of natural selection may be a huge mistake; but, if so, this is not because it consists of any unmeaning metaphor: it can only be because the combination of natural causes which it suggests is not of the same adequacy in fact as it is ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... complaints His change of mind about going home Learns Cornwallis's order to seize Spanish treasure-ships Directs captains under his orders not to obey Letter illustrative of the characteristics of his orders Adequacy of his measures to the requirements of the case Determines not to use his leave of absence Orde arrives off Cadiz Indications of the French fleet leaving Toulon Nelson receives word of the seizure ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... suicide, since riff-raff can neither govern nor will let anyone else govern except the highest bidder of bread and circuses. There is no public enthusiast alive of twenty years' practical democratic experience who believes in the political adequacy of the electorate or of the bodies it elects. The overthrow of the aristocrat has created the ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... that with Mr. Casaubon's learning he must have before him the same materials as German scholars—has he not?" Dorothea's timidity was due to an indistinct consciousness that she was in the strange situation of consulting a third person about the adequacy ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... and very naturally, widens the gulf which separates them is their view of the adequacy or inadequacy of the present human life to satisfy ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... language is the creation of thought, the sensible vesture with which it clothes itself, and becomes, as it were, incarnate—if the perfection and efficiency of language depends on the maturity and clearness of thought, we conclude that the wonderful adequacy and fitness of the Greek language to be the vehicle of the Divine thought, the medium of the most perfect revelation of God to men, can only be explained on the assumption that the ages of philosophic thought which, in Greece, preceded the advent of Christianity, were under the immediate ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... lawful order of Nature, and the adequacy of the natural powers of our mind to understand the mysteries (popularly so appraised) of heaven and earth, the singular expository style of the Ethics emphasizes in unmistakable fashion. Even for our ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... coiner of apothegms himself, that of being content with a half truth when the whole truth cannot be conveniently crowded into narrow compass. Herein lies, I think, the chief source of Arnold's occasional failure to quite satisfy our sense of adequacy or of justice, as, for instance, in his celebrated handling of the four ways of regarding nature, or the passage in which he describes the sterner self of the working-class as liking "bawling, hustling, and smashing; the ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... person. With all possible confidence, however, in the innate vigour of these propositions, I cannot suppose that they do not require all possible adventitious strengthening to be qualified to displace the doctrine to which they are opposed. I proceed, therefore, to test somewhat further the adequacy of the description of justice which they involve by confronting it with certain intricate problems, in presence of which the rival utilitarian definition will be found to be ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... the friendships of women in distinct classes will add clearness to the treatment, and will also make it easier to suggest, with some approach to adequacy, the wealth of the topic. It is natural to begin with instances within the limits of blood relationship, and between persons of opposite sex. The relations of conscious affection among those of near kindred are but too apt, from the blunting influence ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... dangerous for a vessel trying to enter or leave the port. "Great Britain," wrote Madison, "has already in a formal communication admitted the principle for which we contend." The difficulty turned on a point of definition, as to what situation, and what size, of a blockading division constituted adequacy. The United States authorities based themselves resolutely on the position that the blockaders must be close to the ports named for closure, and denied that a coast-line in its entirety could thus be shut off from commerce, without specifying the particular harbors before ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... from its beginnings; almost, we might say, a biological poetry; and the greater the intellectuality and poetic abstraction the greater the possible range. Yet we must not expect this scope of speculation in us to go with adequacy or exhaustiveness: on the contrary, mathematics and religion, each in its way so sure, leave most of the ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... with the introduction of the Navy Estimates, Parliamentary peace suddenly dissolved. It was the old quarrel between Ministers and the Opposition as to the adequacy or the reverse of the Government's naval programme. The Angel-Quinston and the Angel-Hugo-Sizzle contrived to keep the debates free from personalities and pinpricks, but an enormous sensation was created ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... technical results; but there is no antagonism between the boldest originality and the most complete mastery of craftsmanship. There is, rather, a deep and vital relationship between the two. For every art is a language, and to secure power and beauty and adequacy of expression a man must command all the secrets and resources of the form of speech which he has chosen. The power of the great artist rests, in the last analysis, upon the freedom with which he uses his ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... gives us a contemptible idea of the taste of the Saracens at this period, which indeed, in architecture, seems to have been far inferior to that of the later princes of Granada, we cannot but be astonished at the adequacy of their resources to carry such magnificent designs into execution. Their revenue, we are told in explanation, amounted to eight millions of mitcales of gold, or nearly six millions sterling; a sum fifteen-fold ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... possessed with an unusual but quite overmastering hankering to visit her cousin Suzette Brankley. They met but rarely at each other's houses and very seldom anywhere else, and Elaine for her part was never conscious of feeling that their opportunities for intercourse lacked anything in the way of adequacy. Suzette accorded her just that touch of patronage which a moderately well-off and immoderately dull girl will usually try to mete out to an acquaintance who is known to be wealthy and suspected of possessing brains. In return Elaine armed herself with that particular brand of mock ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... definite provision be made by law not only for the protection of Federal officers, but for a full trial of such cases in the United States courts. In recommending such legislation I do not at all impeach either the general adequacy of the provision made by the State laws for the protection of all citizens or the general good disposition of those charged with the execution of such laws to give protection to the officers of the United States. The duty of protecting its officers, as such, and of punishing those who assault ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... scruples, may tell how the land may be made secure without them. You shall advise me of everything and of the account given to you by the commander and officers of the said galleys, as to their condition, adequacy, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume IX, 1593-1597 • E. H. Blair
... been carried, Aristotle improved the detail, and gave breadth and precision to many a part. If Plato possessed greater imaginative splendour and more enthusiasm in austerity, Aristotle had perfect sobriety and adequacy, with greater fidelity to the common sentiments of his race. Plato, by virtue of his scope and plasticity, together with a certain prophetic zeal, outran at times the limits of the Hellenic and the rational; he saw human virtue so ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... will be the result, and such crowds will flock to them, that their very walls will seem almost to burst, and such songs of joy will continually pour forth as will make all people in love with the religion that makes for every-day life, and hence the religion that is true and vital. Adequacy for life, adequacy for everyday life here and now, must be the test of all true religion. If it does not bear this test, then it simply is not religion. We need an everyday, a this-world religion. All time spent in connection with any other ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... seriously maintained by a number of distinguished persons that man "is in duty bound to limit the number of his children as well as the sheep on his farm; the number of each to be according to the adequacy of his ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... supposing him to have bestowed upon it a very cursory and inattentive perusal. In the compendium of the Essay, made use of in the Letters on Natural Magic, it is quite impossible to arrive at any distinct conclusion in regard to the adequacy or inadequacy of the analysis, on account of the gross misarrangement and deficiency of the letters of reference employed. The same fault is to be found in the "Attempt &c.," as we originally saw it. The solution ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... agree to plot out or imagine a succession of 'curves' representing the advantage to be obtained from each additional unit of size in dignity, adequacy of representation, supply of members for committee work, healthiness, etc., and the disadvantage of each additional unit of size as affecting convenience of debate, etc. The curves of dignity and adequacy might be the result of direct estimation. The curve of marginal ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas |
