"Lucidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pendant la Guerre de l'Independence Americaine, 1877, Histoire, etc., sous la premiere Republique, 1886, most valuable works; a third vol., Hist., etc., sous le Consulat. M. le Capitaine DESBRIERE, Projets de Debarquement, 2 vols., 1901, a phase of the great war told with all the care and lucidity which distinguish the best French ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... great merit to the mind of a foreigner denied the lucidity of our Italian intelligence—it was adorably simple. I can give it to you now in a nutshell as I learned it later, not as I knew it then, for I did not know it then. Nobody knew it then except Messer ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... had consumed his milk and biscuits. The light had come back to his eyes and the colour to his cheeks, as he set himself with great vigour and lucidity to explain the situation. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... else. He, not Tolstoi or Turgenieff, is the typical Slav writer. But the chief peculiarity of the Russian soul is that it is not ashamed to express what all men feel. And this is why Dostoievsky is not only a Russian writer but a universal writer. From the French point of view he may seem wanting in lucidity and irony; from the English point of view he may seem antinomian and non-moral. But he has one advantage over both. He approaches the ultimate mystery as no Western writer, except, perhaps, Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever approached it. He writes with human nerves upon parchment made of human ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... danger of his reading these remarks, I may treat him as public property. With his diminutive stature and his perpendicular spirit, his flushed face, expressive protuberant eyes, high peremptory voice, extreme volubility, lucidity and neatness of utterance, he reminded me of the gentry who figure in the revolutions of his native land. If he was not a fierce little Jacobin, he ought to have been, for I am sure there were many men of his pattern on the Committee of Public Safety. He knew absolutely what he was about, understood ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... reputation of Sir Robert Ball as a writer on astronomy at once popular and scientific is in itself more than sufficient recommendation of his newly published 'Atlas of Astronomy.' ... The introduction is written with Sir Robert Ball's well-known lucidity and simplicity of exposition, and altogether the Atlas is admirably adapted to meet the needs and smooth the difficulties of young and inexperienced students of astronomy, as well as materially to assist the researches of those that are ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... enough what had happened: his hostess had forgotten that he was coming. Young as Faxon was, this sad lucidity of soul had been acquired as the result of long experience, and he knew that the visitors who can least afford to hire a carriage are almost always those whom their hosts forget to send for. Yet to say that Mrs. Culme had forgotten him was too crude a way of putting it Similar incidents ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... Prof. Sherman's great work Roman Law in the Modern World, Boston, 1917. The learned author has laid philosophical lawyers of all countries under heavy obligations by this splendid book, as noted for its lucidity as ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... clearness of vision and truthfulness of presentment of Burns, growing out of them it may be, is that graphic power in which he stands unexcelled. He is a great artist, and word-painting is not the least of his many gifts. He combines terseness and lucidity, which is a rare combination in letters; his phrasing is as beautiful and fine as it is forcible, which is a distinction rarer still. Hundreds of examples of his pregnant phrasing might be cited, but it is best to see them in the poems. Many have become everyday expressions, and ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... us and shrieked away into the distance; and again the man beside me flinched, but I did not. I was thinking, with odd lucidity, of many things, among them Dunny and his old house in Washington, into which I should never again let myself with my latch-key, sure of a welcome at any hour of the day or night. My guardian's gray head rose before me. My heart tightened. The finest, ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... lost and an irretrievable error committed by a brief break in the lucidity of the intellect or in the train of thought. "He who would be Caesar anywhere," says Kipling, "must know everything everywhere." Nearly everything comes to the man ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... of a happy life are the same, as Plato insisted. [Footnote: See, for example, The Gorgias, 503, 504.] In order to yield satisfaction, the different parts of life must exemplify identity of motive, continuity and orderliness in the fulfillment of purpose, lucidity of relation, yet diversity for stimulation and totality. There must be a selective scheme to absorb what is congenial and reject the unfit. This sense for form in life may lead to the same results as morality, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... Barber, the point on the Nile nearest to the Red Sea, and thence up the river to Gordon; but, after considerable hesitation, the military authorities decided that this was riot a practicable plan. Upon that, he foresaw, with perfect lucidity, the inevitable development of events. Sooner or later, it would be absolutely necessary to send a relief expedition to Khartoum; and, from that premise, it followed, without a possibility of doubt, that it was the duty of the Government to do so at once. This he ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... Presbyterianism; her answers to the questions given her when arraigned before the Sessions for having left the Church; her conversation on Orthodoxy with some Hicksites who called on her, and her arguments on silent worship. They all show remarkable reasoning power, great lucidity of thought, and great faculty of expression for so ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... there to be reckoned with. What is it then, this persistent, obscure, unnameable Thing? What is it? The question haunts the mind; it will not be put aside; and the Greek at last, like other men under similar conditions, only with a lucidity and precision peculiar to himself, makes the reply, "it is something like myself." Every power of nature he presumes to be a spiritual being, impersonating the sky as Zeus, the earth as Demeter, the sea as Poseidon; from generation ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... qualified by nature for an historian than for a dramatist. He was formed to excel in all departments of literature, and the admirable lucidity of style and soundness and impartiality of judgment displayed in his historical writings will not easily by surpassed, and will always recommend them as popular expositions of the periods of ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... took up a corner of the big white apron she insisted upon wearing, and pleated it between her fingers as she told her grace everything with a surprising lucidity. ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... Battles &c. of this War, "BY THE ROYAL STAFF-OFFICERS"—which, for the last thirty or forty years, is used as Text-Book, or Military EUCLID, in the Prussian Cadet-Schools,—appears to possess the fit professorial lucidity and amplitude; and, in regard to all Official details, enumerations and the like, is received as of CANONICAL authority: it is not accessible to the general Public,—though liberally enough conceded ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention to it. What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be in itself to call it 'chance.' It may be a bad thing, it may be a good thing. It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an unimaginably perfect way. All you mean by calling it 'chance' is that this is not guaranteed, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... one of mine, or rather of my family. I have no such materials as you, and (our objections already made) your attack fills me with despair; it is direct and elegant, and your style is always admirable to me - lenity, lucidity, usually a high strain of breeding, an elegance that has a pleasant air of the accidental. But beware of purple passages. I wonder if you think as well of your purple passages as I do of mine? I wonder if you think as ill of mine as I do of yours? I wonder; I can tell you at least what is wrong ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the day was spent in seeing more visitors and in philosophical and moral talks, in which Sand developed his social and religious theories with a lucidity of expression and an elevation of thought such as he had, perhaps, never before shown. The governor of the prison from whom I heard these details, told me that he should all his life regret that he did not know shorthand, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... and the scherzo is approached with eagerness. Again there is no disappointment. On numerous occasions I have testified my regard for this movement in warm and uncritical terms. It is simply unapproachable, and has no equal for lucidity, brevity and polish among the works of Chopin, except the Scherzo in C sharp minor; but there is less irony, more muscularity, and more native sweetness in this E flat minor Scherzo. I like the way Kullak marks the first ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... and the woods and lake were all seen under that softened light which immediately precedes his appearance, and which perhaps is the most witching period of the four and twenty hours. It is the moment when every thing is distinct, even the atmosphere seeming to possess a liquid lucidity, the hues appearing gray and softened, with the outlines of objects defined, and the perspective just as moral truths that are presented in their simplicity, without the meretricious aids of ornament or glitter. In a word, it is the moment when the ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... editions is witness to its extraordinary popularity among intelligent minds, and hardly supports the belief that his scientific work has been forgotten. Nor can this popularity be a matter of much surprise, for few travellers have possessed Wallace's powers of exposition, his lucidity and charm of style. Professor Strasburger of Bonn has declared that through "The Malay Archipelago" "a new world of scientific knowledge" was unfolded before him. "I feel it ... my duty," he adds, "to proclaim ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... case the sacrament should be bestowed on them if there be fear of danger otherwise it is better to wait until the time when they are sane, so that they may receive the sacrament more devoutly. But if during the interval of lucidity they manifest no desire to receive Baptism, they should not be baptized while ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... This state of lucidity enabled her to take note of all that was being said. The talk ran more on general questions, and less on people, than she was used to; but though the allusions to pictures and books escaped her, she caught and stored up every personal reference, and the pink ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Monty Merriweather, with succinct lucidity, grinning at his comrades. "Say, fellows, you know how Hicks dreads a cold shower-bath; well, some of you rage at him from the other side of the rock, while I climb up the rope-ladder and close with him! Then some of you prehistoric pachyderms ascend, and ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... Purchas appears to have greatly relished Ramusio's comparative lucidity: "I found (says he) this Booke translated by Master Hakluyt out of the Latine (i.e. among Hakluyt's MS. collections). But where the blind leade the blind both fall: as here the corrupt Latine could not but yeeld a corruption of truth in English. Ramusio, Secretarie to the Decemviri ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... singular vividness; then the difficulty has ceased to exist. And thus, in two successive stages of study, the same reader may justly censure Sordello for its obscurity of style, and justly applaud it for a remarkable lucidity in swiftness. Intelligent, however, as Browning was, it implied a curious lack of intelligence to suppose that a poem of many thousand lines written I in shorthand would speedily find decipherers. If we may trust the words of Westland Marston, recorded by Mr W.M. Rossetti ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... then express it in words that give it forth clearly. No verbiage, no fog or clouds, no jargon, but simplicity, lucidity, vividness, and power. ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... immediate departure, for it helped nobody to see the martyred St. Sebastian, and it was merely odious for St. Sebastian himself. In fact, at this moment, when Michael was rowing them back across the full-flooded estuary, Francis was explaining this with his customary lucidity. ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... Stainer, Mus. Doc. New edition of a standard text-book which presents the principles of harmony with conciseness and lucidity. 1 ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... He does not refer to Anthony Collins' essay on Liberty, published thirty-three years before, in which the same question is treated to the same effect, with singular force and lucidity. It may be said, perhaps, that it is not wonderful that the two freethinkers should follow the same line of reasoning; but no such theory will account for the fact that in 1754, the famous Calvinistic divine, Jonathan ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... wrote a volume of verses, entitled The Berlin and Amsterdam "Kuhl- festival" at the Gathering of Lutherans and Calvinists, which sufficiently attests his insanity. The following is a specimen of the lucidity of his works: "The more I continued my doctrines, the more opposition I received, so that also the higher world of light with which I am illuminated, in their light I was enlightened, or shadowed, when I proceeded, and in their light lit I up ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... out that the great students are those who have combined the Teutonic thoroughness with the French comprehensiveness and lucidity. Gibbon and Mommsen are the great examples to which he points. England surely has been very rich in writers thorough and lucid, but we may observe that they follow rather the eighteenth-century tradition, with its intelligible common sense, ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... to Gertrude's company, that person was Jack also. Jack never had been able to see why the priest should visit his master, and had on several occasions expressed his opinion on that point with much decision and lucidity. If, therefore, Mr Bastian would keep away from the house until Gertrude started on her eventful walk, he was not very ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... historians is in the first rank, and if the vast scale of his work and the enormous mass of detail involved in it are considered along with the learning and research employed in accumulating the material, and the breadth of view, lucidity of arrangement, and sense of proportion which have fused them into a distinct and splendid picture, his claims to the first place cannot be lightly dismissed. His style, though not pure, being tinged with Gallicisms, is one of the most noble in our literature, rich, harmonious, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... discussion as to the formation of the membranes of the human stomach, in which they used words that were over a foot long by actual measurement. I have never heard such splendid words in my life; but such were their grandiloquent profundity, and their far-reaching lucidity, that I understood rather less about it when they had finished than I did when ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... that publication, perhaps the most wonderful in the whole world, entitled a "Compendium of the Census of the United States," issued with every decade. These volumes, accessible to everybody, and arranged with marvelous skill and lucidity, offer to the social observer a complete, accurate, and suggestive survey of every field comprised within the vast domain of the national interests. An evening's address would not more than suffice to indicate the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... her heart was beating so violently that there was a rush in her ears like the noise of the river after rain, and she did not immediately make out what he was answering. But as she recovered her lucidity she said to herself that, whatever he was saying, she must not hear it; and she began to speak again, half playfully, half appealingly, with an eloquence of entreaty, an ingenuity in argument, of which she had never ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... great structural tendencies, or energies, or "qualities," as he calls them, which are common both to the inner and the outer universe. There are, he declares again and again with painful reiteration, but with little advance of lucidity, seven of these fundamental laws or energies or qualities, like the sevenfold colour-band of the rainbow, though they can never be untangled or sundered or thought of as standing side by side, for together in their unity and ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... better things sunk at my age in such dishonour." St. George, in the same contemplative attitude, spoke softly but deliberately, and without perceptible emotion. His tone indeed suggested an impersonal lucidity that was practically cruel—cruel to himself—and made his young friend lay an argumentative hand on his arm. But he went on while his eyes seemed to follow the graces of the eighteenth-century ceiling: "Look at me well, take my lesson to heart—for it is a lesson. Let ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... question leaves nothing to be desired in the way of lucidity. Now, supposing I should happen to feel some repugnance to those delicate attentions on Morillo's part that you have just alluded to, what inducement would be sufficient to persuade you to 'bout ship, and land me on the wharf at Kingston, instead ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... it seemed at least possible, the retreating lady had been smartly punished. Serve her right—oh, serve her right a thousand times for having dared to trifle! Desire wasted no pity on her. But what of him? With merciless lucidity Desire's busy brain created the missing acts which might have brought the professor's tragedy of errors to a happy ending. It would have been so simple—if Benis had only waited. Even pursuit would not ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... mouth to whose lips divine kindness lent its sweetness. They were wholesome, full, red lips, finely wrinkled, sinuous, mobile, by which nature had given expression to noble feelings; lips which spoke to the heart and proclaimed the man's intelligence and lucidity, a gift of second-sight, and a heavenly temper; and you would have judged him wrongly from looking merely at his sloping forehead, his fireless eyes, and his shambling gait. His life answered to ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... indebted for all knowledge of this anomalous tractate to the "Agricultural Biography" of Mr. Donaldson, who seems disposed to give a sheltering wing to the curious theory broached, and discourses upon it with a lucidity and coherence worthy of a state-paper. I must be permitted to quote Mr. Donaldson's language:—"The author's ideas are no romance or chimera, but a very feasible entertainment of the undertaking, when a social revolution permits the fruits of all climes to be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... important details of style that women's work falls short, but in qualities even more vital. Fashion, to refer again to that branch of journalism, is a complicated and difficult subject, requiring for its adequate treatment the utmost orderliness and lucidity. Yet fashion articles are seldom arranged with any skill, and seldom lucid. The subject is usually handled after a haphazard method resulting in misty paragraphs of which often not even the writers could explain ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... life. "I was saying that a person's age is different according to circumstances," he explained, with dignity, if not lucidity. "You take Genesis's father. Well, he was married when he was sixteen. Then there was a case over in Iowa that lots of people know about and nobody thinks anything of. A young man over there in Iowa that's seventeen years old began ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... court, and could mention one who has done them all in a single decision, and that not a very long one. The amazing feature of the matter is that all these methods are lawful—made so, not by legislative enactment, but by the judges. Language can not be used with sufficient lucidity ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... owes George MacDonald gratitude it will never repay;—such spiritual souls are never paid in the coin of this world. In "Robert Falconer," he taught his time with a lucidity and sweetness that none but Tennyson and Browning have equaled, and that not even they have surpassed, that a "loving worm within its clod were lovelier than a loveless God upon his Throne," and in "Thomas Wingfold" he has traced ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... Caracci invented fresh attitudes and showed complete mastery of the human form, their types remained commonplace. Though their chiaroscuro was accurately based on that of Correggio, it lacked his aerial play of semitones. Though they went straight to Titian for color, they never approached Venetian lucidity and glow. There was something vulgar in their imagination, prosaic in their feeling, leaden in their frigid touch on legend. Who wants those countless gods and goddesses of the Farnese Gallery, those beblubbered saints and colossal Sibyls of the Bolognese Pinacoteca, those ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... opera, 'Oberon,' is one of the few works written in recent times by a foreign composer of the first rank for the English stage. The libretto, which was the work of Planche, is founded upon an old French romance, 'Huon of Bordeaux,' and though by no means a model of lucidity, it contains many scenes both powerful and picturesque, which must have captivated the imagination of a musician so impressionable as Weber. The opera opens in fairyland, where a bevy of fairies is watching the slumbers of Oberon. The fairy king ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... reason with a quickness that surprised Madame Rameau. He was, indeed, one of those men in whom excess of drink, when slept off, is succeeded by extreme mildness, the effect of nervous exhaustion, and by a dejected repentance, which, to his mother, seemed a propitious lucidity ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the bar whom I have ever heard reasoned with such perfect lucidity. He would explain a case which his client the solicitor would have wrapped up in fifty or sixty brief sheets, and involved in as much obscurity as it were well possible, to a committee in a few minutes; and I have often thought his clients never understood their own ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... knowledge of a subject without being able to impart any information about it. Successful action, as in arts, crafts, games, sports, and the like, must needs have subtle and accurate knowledge behind it; but the possessor of such knowledge is seldom able to impart it with any approach to lucidity. On the other hand, it frequently happens that one who has a retentive memory is able to impart information glibly and correctly, without possessing any real knowledge of ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... made him restless in the thought that she was accusing him of ingratitude—perhaps of behaviour unworthy a gentleman. Yes, there was the true sting. Dyce Lashmar prided himself on his intellectual lucidity, but still more on his possession of the instincts, of the mental and moral tone, which are called gentlemanly. It really hurt him to think that anyone could plausibly assail ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... in the least mollified but instead swinging to a certain degree of lucidity that was nevertheless governed largely by the hoot he had ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... not entirely melted before the commencement of the ensuing winter. In the summer months they are consequently filled with vast masses of ice broken up into a thousand fantastic forms, and presenting by their lucidity a singular contrast to the sombre vaults and massive ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... will experience the same pleasure as I do when you take them up, and you will at once compare them with some one of the old masters whose rival indeed he is. You will find even greater charm in the style of his historical compositions, in its terseness, its lucidity, smoothness, brilliancy and stateliness, for there is the same vigour in the historical harangues as there is in his own orations, only rather more ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... he produced two considerable works, "Principes de la Guerre" and "De la Conduite de La Guerre," which give a high idea of their author's character and talent. There is nothing in them that ought to scare away the average reader. Their style has the geometrical lucidity which is the polytechnician's birthright, but in spite of the deliberate impersonality generally attached to that style of writing, there emanates from it a curious quality which gradually shows us the author as ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... by a worn-out civilisation, has had to wait six centuries for life to be put into it by a finer-strung people at a chaster and more braced period of history. Nor should we be satisfied with such loose phrases as this, leading one to think, in a slovenly fashion (quite unsuitable to Tuscan artistic lucidity), that the difference lay in some vague metaphysical entity called spirit: the spirit of the Tuscan stonemasons of the early Middle Ages altered the actual tangible forms in their proportions and details: this spiritual quality affects us in their carved and inlaid marbles, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... at his convent of St. Mary of the Angels (Portiuncula), October 4, 1226, in perfect lucidity of mind, with patience and simple resignation, while giving good counsel to his brethren. Of death he spoke gently as "our sister death;" and when, during his illness, his physician was obliged to cauterize him with a red-hot ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... long hidden from them. I can scarcely open a chapter, in the Old Testament, that some passage does not strike me as going to prove this identity, between the red men and the Hebrews; and, were they all collected together, and published in a book, mankind would be astonished at their lucidity and weight. As for scalping, it is a horrid thing in our eyes, but it is honorable with the red men; and I have quoted to you the words of the Psalmist, in order to show the manner in which divine wisdom inflicts penalties on sin. Here is plain justification of the practice, provided ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... are pro-German as well as those who are not, could go to Berlin and learn something, not only of the language and intellectual history of Prussia, but of the standpoint of her people—and of the disadvantages as well as the advantages of an excessive lucidity of conception. Nowhere else in Germany that I know of is this to be studied so advantageously and so easily as in Berlin, the seat of Government, the headquarters of Real-politik, and it seems to me most apparent among the ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... guests at the house were dressing for dinner, Rnine handed the deed to Hortense. She seemed dazed by all that she had heard; and the thing that bewildered her even more than the relentless light shed upon her uncle's past was the miraculous insight and amazing lucidity displayed by this man: the man who for some hours had controlled events and conjured up before her eyes the actual scenes of a tragedy which no one ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... I said; "but remember your head has not grown a particle larger since the Spring of 1844, nor your body less; but had the same idea of Ethics been then presented to you, you would certainly not have seen its lucidity." ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... event—there were advantages without doubt in the circumstance which subjected one to being perpetually pointed out as a daughter of a multi-millionaire. As this argued itself out for her with rapid lucidity, she bent and kissed Rosy once more. She even tried to do it lightly, and not to allow the rush of love and pity in her soul ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and meet with the dungeon or the stake as the reward of contumacy. In the end everybody seems to be indifferent, satisfied with vacuity, enamored of insipidity. The brightest episode in this dreary period is the emergence of modern music with incomparable sweetness and lucidity. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... country people are going to get on at all. Here we find that by talking with great emphasis in the very broadest Scotch—by simply calling soap sape and a church a kirk you can quite frequently bring it off and make yourself understood. I had a most exhilarating hour of mutual lucidity with the one that makes furniture in the carpenter's shop. It seemed to me that he called a saw a zog, which was surely quite good enough; and when he referred to a hammer as a hamer it might surely be said to be equivalent to calling a spade ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... himself to be drawn into these mysteries. He had time for everything. It afforded him relaxation, and a means of observation. On one occasion, he followed the refugee to a garden where a person of "perfect lucidity" prophesied. The sibyl was a believer as well as a seer and pretended to communicate with God in person. I do not know exactly what supernal secrets the woman revealed, while she slept, but ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... was interested. I explained his error, and departed. I recovered my equanimity. That took time. I felt soiled, degraded. And then to-day I meet him again, unashamed, actually claiming recognition. I repeated my explanation with uncompromising lucidity——" ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... a subject which has an obvious controversial side with strength, and there are convincing qualities as well as lucidity in the views so ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... the accent of pent-up sincerity, and even relieved because she was able to say something which she felt was true. For the last few days she had felt herself several times near that madness which is but an intolerable lucidity ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... misleading the minds of Germany, Wagner was still young: that he guessed, or rather fully grasped, that the only thing which Germans take seriously is—"the idea,"—that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, wonderful; that among Germans lucidity is an objection, logic a refutation. Schopenhauer rigorously pointed out the dishonesty of Hegel's and Schelling's age,—rigorously, but also unjustly, for he himself, the pessimistic old counterfeiter, was in no way more "honest" ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... persistency than William Law, but it can hardly be doubted that he narrowed the range of his influence by the views he expressed with regard to culture and to all human learning. He forgot that, without the logic, the wit, the irony, the singular force and lucidity of style displayed in his own writings, he would have lost the power as a religious teacher which he was so eager ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Mrs. Lie is, in a certain way, the complement to her husband. She possesses what he has not; and he possesses what she, in her modest self-extinction, would never dream of laying claim to. The spirit of order, adjustment, and lucidity is strong in her; while he, in his fanciful exuberance, is often overwhelmed by his material, and is unable to get it into shape. Then she quietly steps in and separates the dry land from the water in his ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... great poem but of Christian Apologetics down to our own day, when Pope Leo XIII directed that all Catholic seminaries and universities implant the doctrine expounded by Thomas, Angel of the Schools. A philosopher whose breadth and lucidity of mind gave such perennial interest to a system of thought that it is still followed more generally than that of any other school of philosophy—taught in the regular course even at Oxford, Harvard, Columbia—such a philosopher could have left the impress of his ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... working for a repeal of the odious stamp law, and at length got a hearing at the bar of the House of Commons, where he was extensively and exhaustively examined upon American affairs. In this famous examination he won respect for the lucidity of his statements and his conciliatory address. It soon became evident that the Stamp Act could not be enforced. No one could be compelled to buy stamps or pay tariff taxes if he preferred to withdraw from ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... Then he suspected that the strength of his patients came in part from the fever his treatment produced in them. But he was only a pioneer; the method would improve later. Was it not already a miracle to make the ataxic walk, to bring consumptives back to life, as it were; even to give hours of lucidity to the insane? And at the thought of this discovery of the alchemy of the twentieth century, an immense hope opened up before him; he believed he had discovered the universal panacea, the elixir of life, which was to combat ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... and have a tentative place assigned them in his philosophy. Many of us are profusely original, in that no man can understand us—violently peculiar ways of looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when great peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual command of all the classic expository apparatus. Bergson's resources in the way of erudition are remarkable, and in the way of expression they are simply phenomenal. This is why in France, where l'art de bien dire counts for so much and is ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... OF THE EXCHEQUER'S Budget statement was praised by his predecessor for its ability and lucidity. Personally, I thought rapidity was its most notable characteristic. Unhampered by manuscript (save a couple of sheets of notepaper containing a few of the principal figures) and relying upon his exceptional memory, he rattled through his thousand-million ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... is really, for the civilised world at this day, what Petrarch has been too enthusiastically declared to be—the first of the moderns. He is so as against even the great Rabelais, because Rabelais misses directness, misses universality, misses lucidity, in his gigantic mirth; he is so as against Petrarch, because he is emphatically an impressionist where Petrarch is a framer of studied compositions; he is so against Erasmus, because Erasmus also is a framer of artificial compositions ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... contemporaneous with his incumbency of the Greek professorship at Lund (1812-1824). In this period he enriches Swedish literature with a series of lyrics which still rank among the best both in point of lucidity of thought and brilliance of diction. Only a few that stand out most prominently in a list of about one hundred poems from this ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... elegance and precision, Lyly attained a lucidity almost unequalled among his contemporaries. His attention to form saved him from the besetting sin of Elizabethan prose,—incoherence by reason of an overwhelming display of ornament. His very illustrations were subject ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... sweet features, her figure, her hand, so finely modelled, closer than when he accompanied his friend in their wild rush through the streets, he was struck by the surprising phenomenon of the moral second-sight which a man exalted by love invariably finds within him. With what lucidity had Michel Chrestien read into that soul, that heart, illumined by the fires of love! Thus the princess acquired, in d'Arthez's eyes, another charm; a ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... Ferrara, the friends of Don Juan, and the prince himself gave an exclamation of horror. Two hundred years later, under Louis XV, well-bred persons would have laughed at this sally. But perhaps at the beginning of an orgy the mind had still an unusual degree of lucidity. Despite the heat of the candles, the intensity of the emotions, the gold and silver vases, the fumes of wine, despite the vision of ravishing women, perhaps there still lurked in the depths of the heart a little of that respect for things human and divine which struggles until the ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... of restoring lucidity and clearness to his judgment. He turned his eyes towards the soup which the jailer had brought, rose, staggered towards it, raised the vessel to his lips, and drank off the contents with a feeling of indescribable pleasure. He had often heard that ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... are made with great lucidity. The result is the throwing of an additional flood of light on the already dazzling truths of Holy Writ. The uses of such a work are self-obvious; and when we add that the plan is carried out with all the ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... by day he heard him go over the same ground again and again. His life in Egypt for the last few months was expressed in broken sentences and vivid declarations, uttered sometimes with astonishing gravity and lucidity. At times Abdul was deceived into thinking that he was conscious, that his reasoning powers had returned, that he was quite sensible. But he was soon undeceived by a sudden breaking-off in the continuity of the words, or a return to confused, half-meaningless sentences. It ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... jurisprudence; for she did not know how to spend her days when she had reviewed her flower-beds and given her orders to the gardener. Gifted with an excellent memory, and the talent which some women have for hitting on the right word, she could talk on any subject with the lucidity of a studied style. And so men came from Cosne, from la Charite, and from Nevers, on the right bank; from Lere, Vailly, Argent, Blancafort, and Aubigny, on the left bank, to be introduced to Madame de la Baudraye, ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... judgment of ideas, and rarely sympathetic. Where the best thoughts of the ablest men are to be displayed, it would be tempting to present an array of luminous points or a chaplet of polished gems. In the hands of such artists as Stahl or Cousin they would start into high relief with a convincing lucidity that would rouse the exhibited writers to confess that they had never known they were so clever. Without transfiguration the effect might be attained by sometimes stringing the most significant words of the original. Excepting ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Father Brown, with lumbering lucidity, "as you wouldn't leave any tracks for the police, of course somebody had to. At every place we went to, I took care to do something that would get us talked about for the rest of the day. I didn't do much harm—a splashed wall, spilt apples, a broken ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... question is whether a word for word version of the Arabian Nights, executed with peculiar literary vigor, exact scholarship, and rare insight into Oriental modes of thought and feeling, can under any shadow of presence be classed with 'the garbage of the brothels.' In the lack of lucidity, which is supposed to distinguish English folk, our middle-class censores morum strain at the gnat of a privately circulated translation of an Arabic classic, while they daily swallow the camel of higher education based upon minute study of Greek and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... The waters of the Rhone and the Arve, the murmur of the river, the austerity of its banks, the brilliancy of the foliage, the play of the leaves, the splendor of the July sunlight, the rich fertility of the fields, the lucidity of the distant mountains, the whiteness of the glaciers under the azure serenity of the sky, the sparkle and foam of the mingling rivers, the leafy masses of the La Batie woods,—all and everything delighted me. It seemed to me as though the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... thought as she brushed out her hair and put it up in a big, gleaming knot. Here she had been engaged for a whole hour and a half, and was getting calmer every minute, instead of the reverse. She astonished herself by the lucidity of her brain, although it only worked by snatches—there being lacunae when she could not have told what she was doing. And yet, as she had approached the house, sitting again beside the Colonel, she had looked with a new thrill of interest at its imposing battlemented facade. The great ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... interrupted at this point by the appearance of a buffalo, which showed that we were drawing near to the scene of action. But as Makarooroo's description is not remarkable for lucidity, I may explain here that the hopo, or trap, consists of two parts; one part may be termed the conducting hedges, the other the pit at their termination, and into which the game is driven. The conducting hedges ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... the facts which by general consent in the present stage of psychological science require study is the nature, and if possible the cause, of a special lucidity, a sensitiveness of perception, or accessibility to ideas appearing to arrive through channels other than usual organs of sense, which is sometimes met with among simple people[1] in a rudimentary form, and in a more developed ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... wandering from the immediate point of discussion, and her anxiety to avoid involving herself or her husband in trouble, had created a chaotic confusion in her mind, which somewhat interfered with the lucidity of her statements. Little by little, however, Maryllia extracted a sufficient number of facts from her hesitating and reluctant evidence to gain considerable information on many points respecting the management of her estate, and she began to feel that her return home was providential and had ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... green fields then lay between Kensington and Fulham where are now the museums, and there the larks sang and the hawthorn bloomed. After an early dinner we passed the afternoon in talk on art and artists. Pyne was one of the best talkers on art I ever knew, and a critic of very great lucidity; his art had great qualities and as great defects, but in comparison with some of the favorites of the public of that day he was a giant, and in certain technical qualities he had no equal in his generation except Turner. He had the dangerous tendency, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... things at their worst, if we take, in view of the most formidable hypothesis, the necessary precautions, let us keep the lucidity of our spirit, the firmness of our reason. To judge from all the common elements, it does not seem that the international situation is desperate. To be sure, it is grave, but all chances of an amicable adjustment ...
— 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
... Monday, March 2.—In speech of flawless lucidity displaying perfect command of columnar figures upon which strength of British Navy is based, the WINSOME WINSTON moved Supplementary Estimates amounting to two and a-half millions. These raise total expenditure of year ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... clustered cupolas assist the general effect of roundness aimed at by the architect. Such a church as this proves how much may be achieved by the happy distribution of architectural masses. It was the triumph of the best Renaissance style to attain lucidity of treatment, and to produce beauty by geometrical proportion. When Leo Battista Alberti complained to his friend, Matteo di Bastia, that a slight alteration of the curves in his design for S. Francesco at Rimini would 'spoil his music,' cio che tu muti discorda ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... contemporary one we possess. He traces her malady from its incipiency, through the successive disquieting manifestations of hysteria, melancholia, and fury, broken by periods of partial and even complete mental lucidity. Such intervals became rarer and briefer as time ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt |
