"Circumscribe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mind.(1) In new and unknown combinations the impression must act by sympathy, and not by rule, but there can be no sympathy where there is no passion, no original interest. The personal interest may in some cases oppress and circumscribe the imaginative faculty, as in the instance of Rousseau: but in general the strength and consistency of the imagination will be in proportion to the strength and depth of feeling; and it is rarely that a man even of lofty genius ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... inexorable limits of possibility. They have only begun to discover how narrow these limits are to them. Unexpected obstacles have arisen on every side, and the soaring purposes of the rebellion have vainly beaten their bruised and wearied wings against the solid walls which circumscribe them within the humble limits of their present uncertain hopes and expectations. The Federal Government, on the other hand, has not changed its purpose, as avowed in the beginning, to restore the national authority, in its unity and integrity, over the whole country. The prospect of accomplishing ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... The decision to circumscribe the use of economic sanctions against off-base discrimination made sense. Closing a base because of discrimination in nearby communities was practically if not politically impossible and might conceivably become a threat ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... remainder at an easy rate to the generality of the people. Some of the neighbouring parishes, however, were angry that he would not serve them likewise, and called him a wicked and extortionate forestaller; but he made it plain to the meanest capacity, that if he did not circumscribe his dispensation to our own bounds it would be as nothing. So that, although he brought a wonderful prosperity in by the cotton-mill, and a plenteous supply of corn in a time of famine, doing more in these things for the people than all the ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... firmandi. Cum tibi feliciter sagina cesserit, et tori creverint: nec vires unquam opimi bovis, nec pondus aequabis. Adice nunc, quod maiore corporis sarcina animus eliditur, et minus agilis est. Itaque, quantum potes circumscribe corpus tuum, et animo locum laxa. Multa sequuntur incommoda huic deditos curae. Primum exercitationes, quarum labor spiritum exhaurit, et inhabilem intentioni ac studiis acrioribus reddit; deinde copia ciborum ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... gradually making advances to usurp the whole civil power. They dreaded still more dangerous consequences from the claims of their own sovereign, who resided among them, and who, in many other respects, possessed such unlimited authority. They therefore deemed it absolutely necessary to circumscribe this branch of prerogative; and accordingly, in the preceding session, they passed a bill against the establishment of any ecclesiastical canons without consent of parliament.[*] But the house of lords, as is usual, defended the barriers of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... in minority,-the Church to whom he ought as a Magistrate (Isaiah XLIS. 23) 'to bow down with his face toward the earth and lick up the dust of her feet,'—her to subject to his political drifts and conceived opinions by mastering her revenue, and so by his examinant Committees to circumscribe her free election of ministers,—is neither just nor pious: no honour done to the Church, but ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... War, or of oppression exercised in defiance of acknowledged rights and of the accepted principles of equity—a lamentable period, in which every bloody contest originated in the determination of the one party to circumscribe or destroy, and of the other to maintain in its integrity the fundamental basis of toleration laid down ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... council ever since the conclusion of the peace. The extreme Roman Catholics, recognizing the instability of Catharine, had long since begun to base their hopes upon Henry of Anjou's influence. Their opponents accepted the issue, and resolved to circumscribe the duke's inordinate powers. Three of the marshals of France—Montmorency, his brother Damville, and Vieilleville—presented themselves at a meeting of the royal council held in the queen mother's sick-chamber (on the second of May, 1568), to remonstrate against Anjou's ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... with the imperative laws and lines which circumscribe the fashionable world will realize just how marked a departure it was. It was a remarkable party. The very highest and most sought after of the fashionable world were there, a few of them, and John Warden was ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... night By X times ox times moose, And build an igloo on the site Of its hypotenuse; If we circumscribe an arc about An Arctic dog and weigh A segment of it, every doubt Is made as clear as day. We also get the price of ice ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... themselves conspicuous there. Some minds are tempered happily, and mixt With such ingredients of good sense and taste Of what is excellent in man, they thirst With such a zeal to be what they approve, That no restraints can circumscribe them more Than they themselves by choice, for wisdom's sake. Nor can example hurt them. What they see Of vice in others but enhancing more The charms of virtue in their just esteem. If such escape contagion, and emerge Pure, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... four-handed pets I have a young Rhesus monkey (Macacus Rhesus), by no means the most intelligent member of the community, but gifted with an amount of meddlesome pluck which often makes it necessary to circumscribe the freedom of his movements. One day last spring, when he joined an assembly of his fellow-boarders on a sunny porch, the shortness of his tether did not prevent him from picking a quarrel with a big ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... to circumscribe the procedure and the dialectic of reason; we must also endeavour to discover the sources of this dialectic, that we may have it in our power to give a rational explanation of this illusion, as a phenomenon of the human mind. For the ideal, of which ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... created vacancies, in order that he might fill them with his own friends. I think the number of removals and appointments is said to be two thousand. While the administration and its friends have been attempting to circumscribe and to decry the powers belonging to other branches, it has thus seized into its own hands a patronage most pernicious and corrupting, an authority over men's means of living most tyrannical and odious, and a power to punish free men for political opinions ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... to reduce them to absolute slavery; of the preliminary measures she had already taken by erecting forts upon many of the great rivers of their neighborhood; of the ulterior intentions she thus announced to circumscribe their pastoral lands, until they would all be obliged to renounce their flocks, and to collect in towns like Sarepta, there to pursue mechanical and servile 5 trades of shoemaker, tailor, and weaver, such as ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... hold in, keep under, bridle, curb, keep, repress, check, hinder, keep back, restrict, circumscribe, hold, keep down, suppress, confine, hold back, keep ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... nature whereof we speak is made known by its independency of those limitations which circumscribe us on every hand. The soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts all experience. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of time ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the temple at Jerusalem—the world, it must be remembered, was supposed to have that very oblong form,[66] which has been here symbolized. If, for instance, on a map of the world we should inscribe an oblong figure whose boundary lines would circumscribe and include just that portion which was known to be inhabited in the clays of Solomon, these lines, running a short distance north and south of the Mediterranean Sea, and extending from Spain in the west to Asia Minor in the east, would form an oblong ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... domestic code from every ingredient not congenial with the precepts of an enlightened age and the sentiments of a virtuous people, seeks by appeals to reason and by its liberal examples to infuse into the law which governs the civilized world a spirit which may diminish the frequency or circumscribe the calamities of war, and meliorate the social and beneficent relations of peace; a Government, in a word, whose conduct within and without may bespeak the most noble of all ambitions—-that of promoting peace on earth and good will ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson
... character, and fully established the fact not only of a future intention to infringe the rights of the emancipated classes, but of the actual commencement and extensive progress of a Colonial system for that purpose. The object of the laws is to circumscribe the market for free labour—to prohibit the possession or sale of ordinary articles of produce on sale, the obvious intention of which is to confine the emancipated classes to a course of agricultural servitude—to give the employers a monopoly ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... conclusions. With what ardour our minds respond to real events with literary deductions. Upon a train of incidents, as unconnected as life itself, we are wont to clap a booky ending. An instinctive desire for completeness animates the human mind (a struggle to circumscribe the infinite). We would like to have life "turn out"—but it doesn't—it doesn't. Each event is the beginning of a whole new genealogy of events. In boyhood I remember asking after every story I heard: "What happened next?" ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... limit, the mercy of God. It acts merely upon those who were not, and never could be made, the objects of mercy; and it acts upon these according to the full measure of their ill-desert, as well as according to the exigencies of the moral empire of God. It has no limits, except those which circumscribe and bound the objects of ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... in every word of it the liberal men were sensitively anxious to put no fetters on each other; and their reluctance to circumscribe their own personal freedom was extreme. This was the cause that had thus far prevented any effectual organization, and it now withheld the members from any but the most tentative methods. Having escaped from the bondage of sect, they were suspicious ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... friends, or of experience, or of historical knowledge. The satisfactory solution is, that Edmund Burke possessed and had sedulously sharpened that eye, which sees all things, actions, and events, in relation to the laws that determine their existence and circumscribe their possibility. He referred habitually to principles. He was a scientific statesman; and therefore a seer. For every principle contains in itself the germs of a prophecy; and, as the prophetic power ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... take Cuba for the slavery party, to permit States to be carved out of Mexico, and others to be made ready by subdividing Texas. The process which is about to be accomplished reminds me of the measures taken to combat a vast conflagration: the first thing done is to circumscribe its locality. ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... this, it is, surely, superfluous to answer the question that has once been asked, whether Pope was a poet? otherwise than by asking in return, if Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found? To circumscribe poetry by a definition, will only show the narrowness of the definer, though a definition, which shall exclude Pope, will not easily be made. Let us look round upon the present time, and back upon the past; let ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... could forgive this? For my part, I never can, and never will! I admire Wordsworth; as who does not, whatever they may pretend? but for that short sentence I have a lingering ill-will at him which I cannot get rid of. It is surely presumption in any man to circumscribe all human excellence within the narrow sphere of his own capacity. The 'Where are they?' was too bad! I have always some hopes that De Quincey was leeing, for I did not myself hear Wordsworth utter ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... with the peers of song; Johnson, whose discriminative criticism reaches perhaps its highest level in his Life of Pope, in reply to the question which had been asked, even in his day, whether Pope was a poet? asks in return, 'If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?' and adds that 'to circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer, though a definition which shall exclude Pope will not readily be made.' Joseph Warton, too, Johnson's contemporary and friend, while preferring the Romantic School to the Classical, ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... were of our own white race—Circassians. But Malek had unwittingly created, out of the slaves, a dangerous power. They, not many years afterward, deposed and murdered his son, and placed their general on the throne. For several generations they ruled Egypt. To circumscribe their power a new army of Mamelukes was formed, called the Borgis. But the cure was as bad as the disease. In 1382 the Borgi Mamelukes rose up, overthrew their predecessors, and made their leader, ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... length once begun, a new era may be said to have commenced with regard to them, and it is to be hoped that increasing wisdom and liberality of ideas may clear away some of the remaining obstacles which for so long encumbered, and even yet impede and circumscribe within a very narrow circle, the natural course of their commerce. For the Spanish Government are far from following a similar policy to that of the great Henry the Fourth of France, who, as an encouragement to the manufacturing industry of the country, rewarded those silk manufacturers who ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... wouldst inquire demand; For I have mark'd it, where all time and place Are present. Not for increase to himself Of good, which may not be increas'd, but forth To manifest his glory by its beams, Inhabiting his own eternity, Beyond time's limit or what bound soe'er To circumscribe his being, as he will'd, Into new natures, like unto himself, Eternal Love unfolded. Nor before, As if in dull inaction torpid lay. For not in process of before or aft Upon these waters mov'd the Spirit of God. Simple and mix'd, both ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... Chaos heard his voice: him all his Traine Follow'd in bright procession to behold Creation, and the wonders of his might. Then staid the fervid Wheeles, and in his hand He took the golden Compasses, prepar'd In Gods Eternal store, to circumscribe This Universe, and all created things: One foot he center'd, and the other turn'd Round through the vast profunditie obscure, And said, thus farr extend, thus farr thy bounds, 230 This be thy just Circumference, O World. Thus God the Heav'n ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... think, a great deal owing to this habit of mind that the manners of the Burmese are usually so good, children in civilization as they are. There is amongst them no rude inquisitiveness and no desire to in any way circumscribe your freedom, by either remark or act. Surely of all things that cause trouble, nothing is so common amongst us as the interference with each other's ways, as the needless giving of advice. It seems to each of us that we are responsible, not only for ourselves, ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... circumscribe the Bed of Death have other emblems carved upon them too; there is a double frieze of oak above the pillars, and on it appears the skull and crossbones, the spade and mattock, the fragments of pitiful anatomy that marked the ghastly trade of sexton in the sixteenth century. ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... so anxious. Do say what you saw!" Thus urged by his sister, the blind man describes the occurrence from his point of view, carefully and conscientiously. The care and conscience are chiefly needed to limit and circumscribe a sudden image of a lady of irreproachable demeanour besieged by an unexpected dog. So sudden that it merely appeared as a fact in space, without a background or a foothold. It came and went in a flash, Adrian said, leaving him far more puzzled to account ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... clay may circumscribe my sphere; Yet in confinement I may labor still In work which harmonizes with Thy will, And e'er rejoice ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... Declaration of Independence, and should take heart to begin again the battles their forefathers fought, that thus truth and liberty and righteousness and justice and all the Christian virtues might not be lost in the land; and none might dare limit and circumscribe the principles on which the temple of liberty was being built. Thus, by these centuries of growth and life God said to our people, "I have given you this key to your history, the union of liberty and an enlightened faith—faith and freedom. Be true to these. This do and thou ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 1, January, 1890 • Various
... called Lake Horicon, "and draw a line to the north pole, and another due west to the Rocky Mountains, and you will have your eastern and southern boundaries. As to the other lines you need not be particular, as you will find no Dr. Marsh in your way to circumscribe your ambition." At the date of which we write, a few small settlements only had been formed within the limits of the Mission, but emigration was moving rapidly in that direction, and it was believed that an ample field ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... one another, regulated the distances of the planets and size of the planetary orbits. In support of this theory he writes as follows: 'The orbit of the Earth is the measure of the rest. About it circumscribe a dodecahedron. The sphere including this will be that of Mars. About Mars' orbit describe a tetrahedron; the sphere containing this will be Jupiter's orbit. Round Jupiter's describe a cube; the sphere including this will be Saturn's. Within the Earth's orbit inscribe an icosahedron; ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... returned the naturalist, clearing his throat in some intellectual confusion at the vigorous attack of his companion, "your deductions, if admitted by the world, would sadly circumscribe the efforts of reason, and much abridge the boundaries ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... mountains, and thus take A fit and unwalled temple, there to seek The Spirit, in whose honor shrines are weak, Upreared of human hands. Come and compare Columns and idol-dwellings, Goth or Greek, With Nature's realms of worship, earth and air, Nor fix on fond abodes to circumscribe thy prayer." ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... himself clear of the "external relation," to use Mr. Herbert Spencer's phraseology, he has much less difficulty with the "internal relation." The ill-tempered person, on the other hand, can make very little of his environment. However he may attempt to circumscribe it in certain directions, there will always remain a wide and ever-changing area to stimulate his irascibility. His environment, in short, is an inconstant quantity, and his most elaborate calculations and precautions must ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... of permissiveness have led to practices that circumscribe and hamper life. Their declared objective is the liberation and enlargement of human life and well being. Where they have been tested out they have proved themselves to be obstructive and destructive rather than creative ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... bide my time," he said to himself; "but I'll circumscribe 'em yet, as sure as my name's ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... territorial bills and the fugitive slave law the South had gained all it could reasonably claim. The effect of these measures, Mr. Clay thought, would be to allay agitation and pacify and harmonize the country. At all events it will greatly circumscribe the field of agitation: for none of these measures can be opened for renewed action except the fugitive slave bill; and when the dispute is narrowed down to that single ground the slaveholding States have decidedly the advantage. The Constitution is with them, the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... more by the splendor of her virtues and her learning, than by the glory of her royal birth. In the variety of her commendable qualities, I am less perplexed to find matter for the highest panegyric than to circumscribe that panegyric within just bounds. Yet I shall mention nothing respecting her but what has ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... moderate human step or pace, between the third of the length of the body of a tall and short man, etc. etc. Professor Smyth has collected several of the estimations thus adduced by Newton as "methods of approach" to circumscribe the length of the Sacred Cubit, and omitted others. Adding to eight of these alleged data, what he mistakingly avers to be Sir Isaac's deduction of the actual length of the Sacred Cubit in British inches—(namely, 24.82 instead ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... and it is from these that Hamsun's problems spring. A man may prosper or suffer by being himself, and in neither case is the fault his own. There are factors that more or less fatally influence and circumscribe the supremely important factor that is his own self. Roughly these fall into three groups suggestive of three classes of relationships: (1) between man and his general environment; (2) between man and that ever-present force of life which we call love; and (3) ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... captain of engineers—and you saying mass." The Bourbons were very right in considering these as monarchical symptoms; but shrewd observers perceived clearly in whose favour such changes were designed to operate. It appears that some of Napoleon's colleagues made a last effort to circumscribe his power, by urging on him the necessity of his immediately placing himself at the head of the armies in the field; expecting, no doubt, great advantages, could they remove him from the seat of government, at the ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... been lost by the unlettered writers of their own wills: and it has often been said, that were the matter to begin again, it should be decided that such a devise should carry a fee simple, as every body is sensible testators intend, by these expressions. The courts, therefore, circumscribe the authority of this chain of decisions, all hanging on the first link, as much as possible; and they avail themselves of every possible circumstance which may render any new case unlike the old one, and authorize them to conform their judgments to common sense, and ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... chill doth circumscribe the dreaming man, because the spring is cold. The fragrant whiff, which wafts itself into man's nose, is ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... have returned from Lancs., and ascertained that my property there may be made very valuable, but various circumstances very much circumscribe my exertions at present. I shall be in town on business in the beginning of November, and perhaps at Cambridge before the end of this month; but of my movements you shall be regularly apprised. Your objections I have in part done away by alterations, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... scale on which the universe is built. Comprehend, if you can, the vast dimensions of our sun. Stretch outward through his system, from planet to planet, and circumscribe the whole within the immense circumference of Neptune's orbit. This is but a single unit out of the myriads ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... of duty of everything that is particular and local and isolated. The natural tendency of human nature is to particularize our relations to God and bound our relations to our fellow-men; to narrow our relations to God so as to embrace only our direst needs, and to circumscribe our relations to man so as to include in the field of responsibility only those who are our kin or our own kind. The time has certainly come for us to take larger views of the world, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... the game. But these substances are not essentially laboratory products. The laboratory combines, it does not create anything. These substances are scattered throughout nature. In their free state, they surround and enter into us, they determine our will, they circumscribe our freedom of device, which is merely the illusion engendered within us by ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... circumscribe', to draw a line around, to limit; describe'; inscribe'; prescribe', to order or appoint; pro-scribe' (literally, to write forth), to ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... marked the uttermost excursion of astronomical knowledge as it respected our solar group. For about a quarter of a century after Herschel's discovery the world rested upon it as a finality. The orbit of Uranus was thought to circumscribe the whole. But in the meantime, observations of this orbit led to the knowledge that it did not conform in all respects to astronomical and mathematical conditions. The orbit showed irregularities, disturbances, perturbations, that could not be accounted for when all of the known ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... do here give this public notice that my resolutions are to circumscribe within this discourse the whole stock of matter I have been so many years providing. Since my vein is once opened, I am content to exhaust it all at a running, for the peculiar advantage of my dear country, and for the universal benefit of mankind. Therefore, hospitably considering ...
— English Satires • Various
... good decent woman against whom the tongue of rumor might wag in vain; but Mrs. Cafferty was the mother of six children and her natural kindliness dared not expand to their detriment. Furthermore, the fact of her husband being out of work tended to still further circumscribe the limits of her generosity. She divined a lean pot in the Cafferty household, and she saw the young man getting only as much food as Mrs. Cafferty dared to give him, so that the pangs of his ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... from the seed thus planted, that has established our relations among ourselves over our wide heritage, and established our relations with the rest of the world, what is its outlook to-day? What is it in the sense of material prosperity? Who can measure it? Who can circumscribe it? Who can, except by the simple rule of three, which never errs, determine its progress? As the early settlement of Plymouth is to the United States of America, as it now is, so is the United States of America to the future ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... ethical fulness and symmetry of character, which all should seek; and when science shall be advanced far beyond the barriers that circumscribe it at present, men and women will seek the profound and intuitive anthropologist for consultation, as they now seek the physician for the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... the compasse of the Law. And this is a cause of many unnecessary Processes. For when I consider how short were the Lawes of antient times; and how they grew by degrees still longer; me thinks I see a contention between the Penners, and Pleaders of the Law; the former seeking to circumscribe the later; and the later to evade their circumscriptions; and that the Pleaders have got the Victory. It belongeth therefore to the Office of a Legislator, (such as is in all Common-wealths the Supreme Representative, be it one Man, or an Assembly,) to make the reason ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... against such mighty odds was understood, standing there with no encompassing walls to mark the boundary of its field. It was like the struggle of a man who stands alone in the vastness of life with no definite aim to circumscribe his endeavor, wasting his feeble illumination upon a little ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... wish I could give you their lucubrations on ideas and incorporeals, on finite and infinite. Over that point, now, there is fierce battle; some circumscribe the All, others will have it unlimited. At the same time they declare for a plurality of worlds, and speak scornfully of others who make only one. And there is a bellicose person who maintains that war is the father of the universe. [Footnote: Variously attributed to Heraclitus, who denies ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... vinashtih—this great destruction he cannot bear, and accordingly he toils and suffers in order that he may gain in stature by transcending his present, in order to become that which he yet is not. In this travail is man's glory, and it is because he knows it, that he has not sought to circumscribe his field of action, but is constantly occupied in extending the bounds. Sometimes he wanders so far that his work tends to lose its meaning, and his rushings to and fro create fearful eddies round ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... strained and the solution of the problem seems farther away than ever, we must be candid and seek the cause of failure in the methods that we have been using. In the past, the white man's idea of the solution has been contrary to the Negro's idea. The white man has been trying to circumscribe the Negro's sphere, at the same time, the Negro has been trying to know the truth which would make him free; yet, both claim to be trying to solve the same problem. Before a satisfactory solution of the problem can be had, it will be necessary for the best white people and the best class of ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... reception. composition &c. (inclusion in a compound) 54. V. be included in &c.; come under, fall under, range under; belong to, pertain to; range with; merge in. include, comprise, comprehend, contain, admit, embrace, receive; inclose &c. (circumscribe) 229; embody, encircle. reckon among, enumerate among, number among; refer to; place with, arrange with, place under; take into account. Adj. included, including &c. v.; inclusive; congener, congenerous; of the same class &c. 75; encircling. Phr. a maximis ad minima[Lat], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... in an hour fraught with fate that I have assembled about me all the representatives of the German people. For almost half a century we have been able to keep to the path of peace. The attempts to attribute a warlike temperament to Germany and to circumscribe its position in the world have often put to severe tests the patience of our people. With unswerving honesty, my Government, even in provoking circumstances, has pursued as its highest aim the development of all moral, spiritual, and economic powers. The world has been witness how ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... the town of toughs or draw no pay. The Mayor and Council were paralyzed in a double sense: by the wild audacity of this proposal, and by their memory of recent threats of the thug-leaders that they would massacre the Council to a man if any further attempts were made to circumscribe their activities. Some were openly for declining the offer, but in the end a majority gained heart of Stoudenmayer's own ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... the action of a peculiar fluid, sometimes flowing, sometimes at rest. Such conceptions have their advantages and their disadvantages; they afford peaceful lodging to the intellect for a time, but they also circumscribe it, and by-and-by, when the mind has grown too large for its lodging, it often finds difficulty in breaking down the walls of what has become its prison ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... to so good purpose as in other places of his office, not so much for want of encouragement among 'em here, as on account of the haughty jealousy of their neighbours, who, it seems dreading in them a rival, took care to clip his wings and circumscribe his flights; the former, more especially, being, by these and other means so much worn, he performed his office but lamely, which gave occasion to some who had their own private interest more at heart, than that of the public, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... round. "You are quite right to circumscribe me. There is nothing so boring as the gratitude that will out. It is only the absence of it, too plainly expressed, that is unpleasant. But you won't find that in me either." She gave him a smile as she lowered her parasol to turn into the shop of Lahiri Dey, licensed to sell European ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... what shall it say but this? 'Here is the change beginning, here the lines Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss The limit time ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... malice, if not to the influence, of sectarians, in their efforts to make use of this odious persecution of servant boys and servant girls, of widows and orphans, to build up their own tottering conventicles, and to circumscribe the giant strides of what they call "the ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... saw-pits were immediately set to work, and four ship carpenters attached to the battalion, for the purpose of directing and completing this necessary undertaking. In prosecuting it, however, so many difficulties occurred, that we were fain to circumscribe our original intention; and, instead of eight houses, content ourselves with four. And even these, from the badness of the timber, the scarcity of artificers, and other impediments, are, at the day on which I write, so little advanced, that it will be well, if at the close of the ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay • Watkin Tench
... wherein resistance is overcome by a minimum of force; and elastic surfaces obey the converse of that law in opposing certain external influences. It is a property of conic sections that a straight line, centred in the apex, and caused to circumscribe the surface of the cone, will apply itself continuously to all consecutive parabolic curves. Hence curves similar to the flight of projectiles, and to those formed by the flection of elastic surfaces, may be described on a large scale simply by causing a straight line or beam to revolve ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... perforated by several minute foramina—from this part of the lateral process there is in many species a prominent ala or keel prolonged to the bottom of the cell—which ala not unfrequently divides into two branches, which, again coalescing at the bottom of the cell, circumscribe a more or less oval space, the bottom of which is also perforated by minute foramina or apparent foramina, and which is often covered over by a transparent convex membrane. This membrane, however, as well as that which covers in the subavicularian ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... human body is easily acclimated, in any region of the world. I believe the time is swiftly approaching when empires and continents shall as freely commingle their population as do states and neighborhoods. To limit or obstruct this intercourse, is to impoverish and circumscribe human happiness. Civilization will remove those causes which now engender pestilence and death, and neutralize the effects of ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... are the data on which they form their opinions—so that to cut off the discussion of other personalities, on ethical grounds, is like any other stiff and Puritanical attempt to limit interests, to circumscribe experience, to maim life. The criticism, then, or the discussion, of other people is not so much a CAUSE of interest in life, as a SIGN of it; it is no more to be suppressed by codes or edicts than any other form of temperamental activity. It is no ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... distance from the town, on a specially reserved area in the middle of the marshes. The body, wrapped up in coarse matting, was placed upon a heap of reeds and rushes saturated with bitumen: a brick wall, coated with moist clay, was built around this to circumscribe the action of the flames, and, the customary prayers having been recited, the pile was set on fire, masses of fresh material, together with the funerary furniture and usual viaticum, being added to the pyre. When the work of cremation was considered to be complete, the fire was extinguished, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... order is plain, if for no other reason than that he never produced a work in any of the greatest forms of poetry. The drama, the epic, the lyric, were all outside his range. On the other hand, unless a definition of poetry be framed—and Dr. Johnson has well remarked that "to circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer"—which shall exclude all gnomic and satiric verse, and so debar the claims of Hesiod, Juvenal, and Boileau, it is impossible to deny that ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... intellectual course, never for a moment swerved from the noble doctrine of unbounded liberty of thought and speech. To him the rights of intellect were sacred; and all kings, teachers, or priests who sought to circumscribe the activity of discussion, and to check by force the full development of the reasoning powers, he regarded as enemies to the independence of man, who did their utmost to destroy the spiritual ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... state a powerful sovereign, and at the same time elective, is, in my opinion, to entertain two incompatible designs. To reduce hereditary royalty to the condition of an elective authority, the only means that I am acquainted with are to circumscribe its sphere of action beforehand, gradually to diminish its prerogatives, and to accustom the people to live without its protection. Nothing, however, is farther from the designs of the republicans of Europe than this course: as many ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... intellect stands in two ways towards God. First, to know God as He is, and in this manner it is impossible for the intellect to circumscribe something in God and leave the rest, for all that is in God is one, except the distinction of Persons; and as regards these, if one is removed the other is taken away, since they are distinguished by relations only which must be ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... would be insufficient to guard so extensive a line, and that it would be hopeless to endeavour to starve out men who could at all times make raids over the country around them. The first step to be taken must be to endeavour to circumscribe their limits. Orders were at once sent to the British tribes in south and midlands to send all their available men, and as these arrived they were set to work to clear away by axe and fire the trees and bush on the eastern side of the ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... I would not by any means have it understood that I would limit or circumscribe the mental development of the Negro-student. No race can be lifted until its mind is awakened and strengthened. By the side of industrial training should always go mental and moral training, but the pushing of mere ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... lay down on the theological chart the road-place to which my bark has drifted, and to mark the spot and circumscribe the space within which I swing at anchor, let me first thank you for, and then attempt to answer, the objections—or at least the questions—which you ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... nevertheless, so poignantly, the universality of sorrow; thus has recently been discerned on the faces of the Byzantine saints "the terror of the millennium," a terror which is an equivoke, or an artificial legend invented by modern scholars. But historical criticism tends precisely to circumscribe vain imaginings and to establish with exactitude the point of view from which ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... set us the example of an outgoing look directed far beyond the limits of the existing churches, far beyond the point of present achievement. We are but too apt to circumscribe our operative thoughts and our warm sympathies within the circle of our sight, or of our own personal associations. Our selfishness and our indolence affect the objects of our contemplations quite as much as they do the character ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... This was probably wholly unauthorized, as it was six years before Georgia ceded it to the United States, and ten years before Congress had power to prohibit the importation of slaves into that State. But these facts show a strong disposition on the part of "the fathers" to curtail and circumscribe slavery, even in the far south, and at the hazard, ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... been felt as to the stability of some portions of the south side, and it has been found necessary to underpin some of the buttresses of the Choir and the walls of the Transept with large slabs of Yorkshire stone. It has also been deemed desirable to circumscribe the two round towers of the south west ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... luxury of mere sensation. But in the depth of winter, when Nature lies despoiled of every charm, and wrapped in her shroud of sheeted snow, we turn our gratifications to moral sources. The dreariness and desolation of the landscape, the short gloomy days and darksome nights, while they circumscribe our wanderings, shut in also our feelings from rambling abroad, and make us more keenly disposed for the pleasures of the social circle. Our thoughts are more concentrated; our friendly sympathies more aroused. We feel more sensibly ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... particular the love and favour of God ought to be the matter of our supreme and habitual desire, to which every other should be subordinated; it follows, that the love of human applause must be manifestly injurious, so far as it tends to draw down our regards to earthly concerns, and to bound and circumscribe our desires within the narrow limits of this world. Particularly, that it is impure, so far as it is tinctured with a disposition to estimate too highly, and love too well, the good ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... territory north of said Missouri Compromise line, Slavery or involuntary servitude (except for crime) shall be prohibited." As has been lucidly stated by another,—[Greeley's History]—"while seeming to curtail and circumscribe Slavery north of the above parallel (that of 36 30' north latitude), this measure really extended it northward to that parallel, which it had not yet approached, under the flag of Texas, within hundreds of miles. ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... social function is, for important reasons, bestowed on birth instead of being put up to competition, all free nations contrive to adhere in substance to the principle from which they nominally derogate; for they circumscribe this high function by conditions avowedly intended to prevent the person to whom it ostensibly belongs from really performing it; while the person by whom it is performed, the responsible minister, does obtain the post by a competition ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... the Unity of Action. With respect to the Unity of Time, we find in Aristotle no more than the following passage: "Moreover, the Epos is distinguished from Tragedy by its length: for the latter seeks as far as possible to circumscribe itself within one revolution of the sun, or to exceed it but little; the Epos is unlimited in point of time, and in that respect differs from Tragedy. At first, however, the case was in this respect alike ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Cardinal to accede to a reconciliation with his long-estranged benefactress; but he soon silenced these natural impulses to dwell only upon the dangers of her reappearance in France, which could not, as he believed, fail to circumscribe his own absolute power—a power to which he had laboriously attained not more by genius than by crime—which had been cemented by blood, and heralded by groans. Nor was this the only consideration by which Richelieu was swayed when he resolved that the Queen-mother should never ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... Sir, of the narrowness of the sphere which I now occupy. Secluded, in a great measure, from the world, with small means, and no adventitious aid from men of science; with little patronage to extend my influence, and powerful enmities to circumscribe it; what can my efforts avail in attempting to counter-act a current of opinion? Yet I am not accustomed to despondence. I have contributed in a small degree to the instruction of at least four millions of the rising generation; and it is ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... their salutations, his greeting in reply, being all regulated with the utmost nicety. He can only wear a special garb. He must never cut his hair. His nails must be suffered to grow long. And so on and so forth. Such disabilities, indeed, are wont to circumscribe the life of all sacred persons, and can be matched from every part of the world. But they may fairly be cited here, as helping to fill in the picture of what I have called the precautionary or ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... consideration or experience. But if we require more, and ask for a definition which will stand the test of philosophical examination, we must reply that such only can be given as is dependent upon the satisfaction of the inquirer. Progressive minds will find it difficult to circumscribe the meaning of words, especially on matters with which they ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... sigh of compassion rises in my bosom, when the spontaneous tear starts from my eye, what frigid moralist shall "stop the genial current of the soul?" shall say to the tide of passion, So far shall thou go, and no farther?—Shall man presume to circumscribe that which Providence has ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... go out of his way to inform them of his heterodox views, content to comprehend the crowd rather than be misunderstood by it. He knew that the bigger soul includes the smaller and that the smaller can never circumscribe the bigger. Such money as was indispensable for the endowment of research he earned by copying texts and hunting out references for the numerous scholars and clergymen who infest the Museum and prevent ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... day. I said, 'Alla, you certainly are no piker. You'll go out and mace a good fellow for a big feed just as if he was a John. Now, that ain't right. When you are out with a James go to it and eat your head off. But when you are out with some one in the business or a newspaper man be circumscribe. Though you may want to wade through the whole dope sheet hitch your desire and order what you think he can afford, and lay back until you get a ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... the result of those experiences must ultimately determine our understanding of life. We know instinctively that if we grow contemptuous of our fellows, and consciously limit our intercourse to certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect, we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... conferred on the mlencchas (foreigners) no grant of Hindustan inscribed on imperishable brass. Shivaji strove to drive them forth out of the land of his birth, but he was guiltless of the sin of covetousness. Do not circumscribe your vision like frogs in a well. Rise above the Penal Code into the rarefied atmosphere of the sacred Bhaghavad Gita and consider the ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... monuments, like himself, are perishable and frail; and in the boundless annals of time his life and his labors must equally be measured as a fleeting moment. Of a simple and solid edifice it is not easy, however, to circumscribe the duration. As the wonder of ancient days, the Pyramids attracted the curiosity of the ancients: a hundred generations, the leaves of autumn, have dropt into the grave; and after the fall of the Pharaohs and Ptolemies, the Caesars and caliphs, the same Pyramids stand erect and unshaken ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... you are not one of the men who grudge women the chance to prove what is in them—who would treat us like china dolls and circumscribe us by conventions? I know you are not, because I have heard you inveigh against that very sort ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... without any exception of persons, and that the difference of creeds, invented by the human understanding, will make no difference in the eternal happiness of man. Thus it does not narrow the sphere of salvation. It does not circumscribe it either by numerical or personal limits. There does not appear therefore to be in the doctrines of the Quaker religion any thing that should narrow their love to their fellow creatures, or any thing that should generate a spirit of rancour or contempt towards others on account ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... far enough we find government nearly everywhere in the hands of a King and privileged class. In its earlier stages the constitutional struggle was between monarchy and aristocracy, the King seeking to make his authority supreme and the nobility seeking to limit and circumscribe it. Accordingly, government oscillated between monarchy and aristocracy, a strong and ambitious King getting the reins of government largely in his own hands, while the aristocracy encroached upon the power and prerogatives of a weak and incompetent one. ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... a schoolmaster, so many good marks for this quality, and so many bad marks for that. Biographers will weigh me grocerwise, as Kant weighed the Deity. Ugh! You can only be judged by your peers or by your superiors, by the minds that circumscribe yours, not by those that are smaller than yours. I tell you that when they have written three tons about me, they shall as little understand me as the Cosmos I reflect. Does the pine contradict the rose or the lotusland the iceberg? I am Spain, I am Persia, I am the North Sea, I am the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... bodies men starve their souls. How many longings are crushed or neglected by him who pushes eagerly after any one longing! We have either to race from one course to another, splitting life into intolerable distractions, or we have to circumscribe and limit ourselves in order to devote all our power to securing one; and if we secure it, then a hundred others will bark like a kennel ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... this source, the vegetable bodies growing upon the surface of the land. Here is a source provided for the supplying of mineral fire, a source which is inexhaustible or unlimited, unless we are to circumscribe it with regard to time, and the necessary ingredients; such as the matter of light, carbonic matter, and the hydrogenous principle. But it is not upon any deficiency of this kind that our author founds his estimate; ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... with ample funds for the Moonbeam, and all other delights. He might pay off Moggs and Neefit, and no longer feel that Polly,—poor dear Polly,—was a millstone round his neck. And he would indeed, in this event, be so well provided, that he did not for a moment doubt that, if he chose so to circumscribe himself, Clarissa Underwood might be his wife. All the savings of the Squire's life would be his,—enough, as the opposing lawyer told him with eager pressing words, to give him an estate of over a thousand a year at once. ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... Governor Treadwell opposed it on the ground that such "unalterable" regulations were unnecessary where, as in a republic, all power was vested in the people. Alexander Wolcott objected that such a "bill would circumscribe the powers of the General Assembly" and also because of his disapproval of some of its clauses. [216] When the draft of fourth section was under discussion, namely that "No preference shall be given by law to any religious sect or mode of worship," the Kev. Asahel Morse, a Baptist minister, ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... commanding part of thy soul be ever subject to any variation through any corporal either pain or pleasure, neither suffer it to be mixed with these, but let it both circumscribe itself, and confine those affections to their own proper parts and members. But if at any time they do reflect and rebound upon the mind and understanding (as in an united and compacted body it must needs;) then must thou not go about to resist sense and feeling, it being natural. ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... wear out with those they destroy, and a new or reformed religion is almost always accompanied with new and vigorous developments in a new and progressive Government. The shackles which have paralyzed the mind, forbidding its development, are broken; the unnatural superstition ceases to circumscribe and influence its operations; and thus emancipated, it recovers its elasticity and springs forward toward the perfection of the Creator. Rescued from these baleful influences, the new organization is vigorous and rapid in its growth, yielding the beneficent blessings natural ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks |
