"Penetrative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... general it may be said that they bear witness alike to the diversity of his knowledge and the penetrative power of his intellect. The wide range of his subjects, however, deprives his papers when taken together of the weight which might attach to a series of related discussions. And, remarkable as is De Quincey's aptitude for analysis and speculation, more than once we have to regret the lack ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... nephew, Henry Coleridge. His criticisms of Shakspere are nothing but notes, made here and there, from a course of lectures delivered before the Royal Institute, and never fully written out. Though only hints and suggestions, they are, perhaps, the most penetrative and helpful Shaksperian criticism in English. He was always forming projects and abandoning them. He projected a great work on Christian philosophy, which was to have been his magnum opus, but he never wrote it. He projected an epic poem on the fall ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... can't climb out of deep holes, Boss," he was saying excitedly. "Lay a big barrage against them—no, not on them—in front of them—always in front of them. Pull it back as they come on. But churn h—l out of the ground in front of them! Get the rocketmen to make a penetrative time rocket. Shoot it into the ground in front of them, deep enough to be below their canopy ray, see, and detonate under them as they ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... profound religious convictions, the faith and charity of the latter being especially vivid and pervading. The one has a preponderance of the beautiful gift of a rich fancy, while to the other was given in greater degree the power of the penetrative and sympathetic imagination. The one, as we read, recalls to us a glittering heap of precious, shining jewels; the other, the first cluster of spring violets, wreaths of virginal lilies and midsummer roses, growths ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the young gentleman Mr. Roger Morton recommends?" Here Mr. Plaskwith took out a huge pocketbook, slowly unclasped it, staring hard at Philip, with what he designed for a piercing and penetrative survey. ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... paused, and gazed through the stony shroud, as if, by very force of penetrative sight, I would clear every lineament of the lovely face. And now I thought the hand that had lain under the cheek, had slipped a little downward. But then I could not be sure that I had at first observed its position accurately. So I sang again; for the longing had grown ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... clear-sighted, discriminating, penetrative, shrewd, crafty, keen, perspicacious, subtile, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... With none of these conditions could Lois be satisfied. Then, there were the women who always spoke as if a man were an animal and a woman were not a woman, but a spirit; but Lois was very much a woman! She settled at last, after penetrative thought, on one husband and wife, the latter a plain little person no longer young. Every man liked to go to her charming, comfortable house; every man admired her; and that her husband, a very handsome man himself, admired her most of all was unobtrusively evident. Every look, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... slower ship, as the Carondelet was, has presented her stern to the enemy, she has thrown up the game, barring some fortunate accident. The aggregate weight of metal discharged by each ironclad from all its guns was nearly the same,[12] but the Arkansas had a decided advantage in penetrative power by her four 6.4-inch rifles. Her sides, and probably her bow, were decidedly stronger than those of her opponent; but whatever the relative advantages or disadvantages under other circumstances, the ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... with the speech of this people, it was thick. In their rare physical beauty, the color of their eyes and hair, and in their fascinating dress, they had struck me as being utterly unlike any people ever seen by me. But it was perhaps in their clear, sweet, penetrative voice, which sometimes reminded me of a tender-toned wind instrument, that they most ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... found in Bellini or Perugino, will attain the most profound and serene color, while it will never betray into looseness or audacity. But if in the mind of the painter invention prevail over veneration,—if his eye be creative rather than penetrative, and his hand more powerful than patient—let him not be confined to a system where light, once lost, is as irrecoverable as time, and where all success depends on husbandry of resource. Do not measure out to him his sunshine in inches of gesso; let him have the power of striking it ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... commonplace with the penetrative terseness that made him a master of the apophthegm, pronounced it "not to be enough to have great qualities: a man must have the economy of them." Or, as another writer says: "Empire in this world belongs not so much to wits, to talents, and to industry, as to a certain skilful economy ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... few trials he can imitate them, if not excel their Leeds, provided he has a steady hand. And it is to forward this end that this paragraph is written. African game require "bone-crushers;" for any ordinary carbine possesses sufficient penetrative qualities, yet has not he disabling qualities which a gun must possess to be useful in the hands ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... and pictures. That marvelous intelligence which was her pride, burned brightly in a long series of historians and annalists, who have handed down to us the biography of the city in volumes as remarkable for penetrative acumen as for definite delineation and dramatic interest. We possess picture-galleries of pages in which the great men of Florence live again and seem to breathe and move, epics of the commonwealth's vicissitudes from her earliest commencement, detailed tragedies ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... the incredible speed of twelve thousand miles a second, while the meteors of the midnight sky fly at the speed of only forty miles a second. Those alpha particles are helium atoms. They are much larger than beta particles, and have less penetrative power. Sir J. J. Thomson has devised a method by which he has been able to photograph the atoms. The photographic plate upon which their flight is recorded suggests a shower of shooting stars. Oxygen is found to be made up of atoms ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... appearance only, few would have given Villiers credit for being the man of penetrative and almost classic refinement he really was,—he looked far more athletic than aesthetic. Broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a round, blunt head firmly set on a full, strong throat, he had, on the whole, a somewhat obstinate and pugilistic air which totally belied his ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... remain upon it, no longer that whiles you can say the Miserere Psalm very leisurely. Then pour it upon the sugar, or sugar and Eggs. Thus you have only the spiritual parts of the Tea, which is much more active, penetrative and friendly to nature. You may from this regard take a little more of the herb; about one dragm of Tea, will serve for a pint of water; which makes three ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... Testimony English Testimony Maiden Fancies Pathologic Love A Modern Sentiment Persians, Turks, and Hindoos Love Despised in Japan and China Greek Scorn for Woman-Love Penetrative Virginity ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... farther ask you to read, in the same volume, the close of the chapter 'Of Imagination Penetrative,' pp. 120 to 130, of which the gist, which I must give as the first principle from which we start in our to-day's inquiry, is that "Imagination, rightly so called, has no food, no delight, no care, no perception, ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... of arthritis due to penetrative wounds (because of the important function of this joint and its large capsule, which when inflamed discharges synovia in a manner that closure of such an open joint is seldom possible) a very ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... gathered in its corporate experience through the ages. The valuable content of his message, so far as he succeeds in delivering one, the ideas with which his words are freighted, bear the marks of the slow accumulations of spiritual experience, and they reveal the rich and penetrative influence of the social group in which the mystic's inner life formed and ripened. They have a history as ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... Corps, the flower of the Prussian Army, were sent like a catapult at the gap in the French line, immediately in front of Rheims. Five times they charged, and with such heroic daring and such penetrative energy that General Foch did not dare break from his position. As they came up for the fifth assault, a wild cheer of admiration broke out along the French line. But the rifles spoke steadily, none the less for that. After the fifth assault, barely a hundred men were left, nearly all wounded. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... to find in Pope such compression of meaning as in the first, or such penetrative sarcasm as in the second of the passages I have underscored. Dryden's satire is still quoted for its comprehensiveness of application, Pope's rather for the elegance of its finish and the point of its phrase than for any deeper qualities.[82] I do not remember ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... accommodation for penitents here. Amid such surroundings to be a miserable sinner must be indeed a pleasure. The spire is two hundred and fifty feet high. I mounted and saw the great bell, over three tons in weight. I also saw the bishop's robes of wondrous richness and penetrative virtue, the consecrated slippers which the acolytes wear, with their scarlet robes, remindful of Egyptian flamens and African flamingoes; the blessed candle-box and the seven-times blessed candles, which at once drop tallow on the holder's ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... moving force, and recognizes two original forces, repulsive, expansive superficial force or force of contact, by which a body resists the entrance of other bodies into its own space, and attractive, penetrative force or the force which works at a distance, in virtue of which all particles of matter attract one another. In order to a determinate filling of space the co-operation of both fundamental forces is required. In opposition to ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... did not have penetrative power [Illustration: Cross section of Belgian Type of Fortress. The forts at Liege were of this type and long withstood the ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... my employer. As he stood before me, I surveyed him; a well-formed gentleman, above the ordinary height, with pale complexion, set off by dark, penetrative eyes; a shapely head covered with long, heavy masses of straight dark hair. The impression his appearance conveyed to me was that of a person benevolent but apathetic; unhappy without the will or power ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... while often beautiful, lack the penetrative quality seen so constantly in Wordsworth and Browning; these greater poets saw nature not only with their eyes, but with their minds. Their representations glow with enduring beauty, but they leave in the spectator something even greater than beauty, something ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... when he looked at her was quite the same light that shines in all men's eyes when the desire of love is upon them. He did not dream how ardent and masculine his gaze was, nor that the warm flame of it was affecting the alchemy of her spirit. Her penetrative virginity exalted and disguised his own emotions, elevating his thoughts to a star-cool chastity, and he would have been startled to learn that there was that shining out of his eyes, like warm waves, that flowed through her and kindled ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... a good proof of their penetrative force, the influence on the new Stirling, who writes "The Secret of Hegel." He is quite as much a student of Carlyle to learn treatment, as of Hegel for his matter, and plays the same game on his essence-dividing German, which he has learned of you on Friedrich. I have read a good deal in this ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... he was, if anything, rather above middle height, and, especially latterly, somewhat stout; his forehead was of splendid proportions, recalling instantaneously the Stratford bust of Shakespeare; and his gray-blue eyes were clear and piercing, and characterized by that rapid, penetrative gaze so ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... in following the original, but he bases his demand on a truth largely ignored by translators up to this time, the essential relationship between thought and style. He makes the following surprisingly penetrative comment on the nature and significance of Calvin's Latin style: "I considered how the author thereof had of long time purposely labored to write the same most exactly, and to pack great plenty of matter in small room of words, yea and those so circumspectly and precisely ordered, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... it; then and now Reason may very well say to me, "You are in very great danger"; but I am not in any danger, because I am guided whenever necessary by some condescending sagacity far more sagacious than my poor Reason, infinitely more penetrative and effectual than any sense of eye or ear. I remain fully convinced that at this time, at any rate, it was an outside sagacity which guided ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... of course, only mere surmises, but Liszt, although often wrong as to incidents, is, thanks to his penetrative genius, generally right as to essences. Indeed, if George Sand's surroundings and Chopin's character and tastes are kept in view nothing seems to be more probable than that his over-delicate susceptibilities may have occasionally been shocked by unrestrained vivacity, loud laughter, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... theoretic illumination. The colours of thin plates, for example, occupied the attention of Robert Boyle. In his 'Experimental History of Colours' he contends against the schools which affirmed that colour was 'a penetrative quality that reaches to the innermost parts of the object,' adducing opposing facts. 'To give you a first instance,' he says, 'I shall need but to remind you of what I told you a little after the beginning of this essay, touching the blue and red and yellow that may be produced upon ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... be window'd in great Rome and see Thy master thus with pleach'd arms, bending down His corrigible neck, his face subdu'd To penetrative shame; whilst the wheel'd seat Of fortunate Caesar, drawn before him, ...
— Antony and Cleopatra • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... for as much as one that takes the course of years to produce its slow results? The most ephemeral of all our literary productions—the daily paper—is incalculably the most influential, and its influence largely depends on this dynamic quality that has been noted—the penetrative power of a thing of light weight moving at a high speed. And this penetrative power effective literature must have to-day on account of the vastly ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... Robespierre with a dagger, Billaud roaring out proposals to arrest this person and that Robespierre gesticulating, threatening, yelling, shrieking. His enemies knew that if he were once allowed to get a hearing, his authority might even yet overawe the waverers. A penetrative word or a heroic gesture might lose them the day. The majority of the chamber still hesitated. They called for Barere, in whose adroit faculty for discovering the winning side they had the confidence of long experience. Robespierre, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... intellectual beauty and aesthetic delight. But the palace of art, made the palace of the soul, becomes its dungeon-house, self-generating and filling fast with all loathsome and deathly shapes; and the heaven of intellectual joy becomes at last a more penetrative and intenser hell. The "Idylls of the King" are but exquisite variations on the one note—that the only true and high life of humanity is the life of full and free obedience; and that such life on earth becomes of necessity one of struggle, ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... oscillate in ultra-red periods. Let us apply this test to the radiation from a flame of hydrogen. This flame consists mainly of incandescent aqueous vapour, the temperature of which, as calculated by Bunsen, is 3259 deg.C, so that, if the penetrative power of radiant heat, as generally supposed, augment with the temperature of its source, we may expect the radiation from this flame to be copiously transmitted by water. While, however, a layer of the bisulphide of carbon 0.07 of an inch in thickness transmits ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... question as to the point at which the contest between shot and armour will be brought to a standstill. That it cannot proceed indefinitely may be confidently taken for granted. The plate-makers thicken their armour while the gun-makers enlarge the size and increase the penetrative power of their weapons, until the weight that has to be carried on a battle-ship renders the attainment of ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... as a man of State, two personalities, two mental existences, which blended but ill with one another. There was the contemplator of great human forces, the intelligent, if not deeply penetrative, reader of the signs of the times, the brooder through long years of imprisonment and exile, the child of Europe, to whom Germany, Italy, and England had all in turn been nearer than his own country; and there was the crowned adventurer, bound by his name and position to gain for ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... indeed," assented our host. "Shrewd, observant, penetrative. I have often wondered if this man of mine would find any great difficulty in seeing through a ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... thou, whose penetrative wisdom found The South-Sea rocks and shelves, where thousands drown'd, When credit sunk, and commerce gasping lay, Thou stood'st; nor sent one bill unpaid away. When not a guinea chink'd on Martin's ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... the making of poetry are three: personalizing, combining and versifying," it is obvious that we have been dealing with the first two. If we prefer to use the famous terms employed by Ruskin in Modern Painters, we have been considering the penetrative, associative and contemplative types of imagination. But these Ruskinian names, however brilliantly and suggestively employed by the master, are dangerous tools for the beginner in the ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... notion of a natural state as proper to each substance was vigorously combated by the Honourable Robert Boyle (born 1626, died 1691), a man of singularly clear and penetrative intellect. In A Paradox of the Natural and Supernatural States of Bodies, Especially of the Air, Boyle says:—"I know that not only in living, but even in inanimate, bodies, of which alone I here discourse, ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... no penetrative mind To know these fellows: when You meet them, you, unless you're blind, At ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... we find first the species kept in the memory; secondly, the vision itself, which is caused by the penetrative power of the soul, that is, the faculty of imagination, informed by the species; and thirdly, we find the intention of the will joining both together. But each of these trinities falls short of the Divine image. For the species of the external body is extrinsic to the essence of the soul; while ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... common: they were poets and moralists. They reproduced the conditions of life in the light of penetrative observation and ideal contemplation; they illustrated its duties in their breach and in their observance, by precepts and well-chosen portraits of character. The particular form in which they wrote makes little ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... vivifying and fertilising influence over the minds of others his intellect was bound to be of the dispersive order; it was essential that he should "take all knowledge to be his province," and that that eager, subtle, and penetrative mind should range as freely as it did over subject after subject of human interest;—illuminating each of them in turn with those rays of true critical insight which, amid many bewildering cross-lights ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... the stories in this chapter as dryly as I could. Yet it would be interesting to analyze the fascination they exercised over our Elizabethan playwrights, some of whose Italian tragedies handle the material with penetrative imagination. For the English mode of interpreting southern passions see my Italian Byways, pp. 142 et seq., and a brilliant essay in Vernon ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Sketch. The author of Uncensored Celebrities is far too modest when he calls his new work a "sketch." It is a genuine biography with that special accent due to the biographer's personality and his power of what I may call penetrative synthesis. By that I mean the insight into character which coordinates and builds—the sort of biography that makes a legend about ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... feeling entreaty in the air, sat down and raised his voice. It was a penetrative voice, too, filling the house with its echoes, echoes that scarcely died away before a soft ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... from this toil of clay Already freed, with eager joy who hail'd The mirror of eternal truth unveil'd, Mid light effulgent and celestial day:— I, more than cherub, whose unfetter'd soul With penetrative glance aspir'd to flow Through nature's veins, and, still creating, know The life of gods,—how am I punish'd now! One thunder-word hath ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... interesting and sometimes disconcerting. Zilla was an active, strident, full-blown, high-bosomed blonde. When she condescended to be good-humored she was nervously amusing. Her comments on people were saltily satiric and penetrative of accepted hypocrisies. "That's so!" you said, and looked sheepish. She danced wildly, and called on the world to be merry, but in the midst of it she would turn indignant. She was always becoming indignant. Life was a plot against ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... greatly from those described by Lenard as cathode rays. The most marked difference between the two is the fact that Roentgen rays are not deflected by a magnet, indicating a very essential difference, while their range and penetrative power are incomparably greater. In fact, all those qualities which have lent a sensational character to the discovery of Roentgen's rays were mainly absent from those of Lenard, to the end that, although Roentgen has not been working in an entirely ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... once more listening. The night was intensely calm;—not a cloud crossed the star-spangled violet dome of air wherein the moon soared serenely, bathing all visible things in a crystalline brilliancy so pure and penetrative, that the finest cuttings on the gigantic grey facade of Notre Dame could be discerned and outlined as distinctly as though every little portion were seen through a magnifying glass. The Cardinal's tall attenuated figure, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... this adjunct, sweete; but yet very improperly, for it differeth not only from sacke in sweetness and pleasantness of taste, but also in colour and consistence, for it is not so white in colour as sack, nor so thin in substance; wherefore it is more nutritive than sack, and less penetrative."—Via recta ad Vitam longam, 4to, 1622. In Howell's time, Canary wine was much adulterated. "I think," says he, in one of his Letters, "there is more Canary brought into England than to all the world besides; I think also, there is a hundred times more drunk under the name of Canary wine, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... monarch's "unfortunate subjects,"—so they were described in the memorial—besought the king's "gracious majesty," of his "well-known munificence," to grant them a something towards the drinking of the royal health. (Ah, with what keen eyes and penetrative genius did little Charles, from his corner, watch the strange sad stream of humanity that trickled through the room, and may be said to have smeared its approval of that petition!) And while Mr. Dickens was enjoying his prison honours, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... magic art, Had plumbed ('twas said) the human heart, Whom for the penetrative ken Wherewith he probed the souls of men The Public and the Public's wife Declared synonymous with Life,— Sat idle, being much perplexed What Attitude to study next, Because he would not wholly tell Which Pose was likeliest to sell. To him the Muse: ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... questioning, counsel, encouragement, or reproach without the spoken word; to send the message by the law of suggestion from mind to mind. The mental intimation will reach the one to whom it is sent if the conditions for telepathy are observed, for thought is far more penetrative than the Roentgen ray, and the atmosphere is magnetic, and carries it as the wire does the electric current. All these finer conditions are beginning to make themselves felt as practicable forces. Humanity is becoming "plastic ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... Mr. Edwardes I stood in the front quadrangle and whistled. My whistle is unmusical and penetrative, useful only when a dog has been lost, and some man, whom I did not know, put his head out of his window and said abruptly, "For heaven's sake shut up that vile noise;" another man chucked a penny into the quad and ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... bound to convict in order to sustain their reputation for intelligence. One of Mr. Middleheath's favourite tricks for disabusing a jury of the belief that they possessed any common sense was, before addressing them, to stare each juryman in the face for half a minute or so in turn with his piercing penetrative eyes, accompanying the look with a pitying contemptuous smile, the gaze and the smile implying that counsel for the opposite side may have flattered them into believing that their intelligences were fit to try such an intricate ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... they were taken they died from insupportable dolour. As soon as any man, invaded these bulls, they rushed with such, terrible press upon him that they struck him to the earth, taking no fear of hounds, sharp lances, or other most penetrative weapons."—Boetius, Chron. Scot. Vol. I. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... nonce we had forgotten the other man. But now I noticed that the pseudo-bandits wore a watchful and not unhopeful air. And suddenly one of them whistled—a thin, shrill note that had, as Tish later remarked, great penetrative power without ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... as the typical Westerner of the forum, the rostrum, and the tribune, as he stood to be inaugurated under the war-cloud in 1861. But there is another Lincoln as dear to the common people—the Lincoln of happy quotations, the speaker of household words. Instead of the erect, impressive, penetrative platform orator we see a long, gaunt figure, divided between two chairs for comfort, the head bent forward, smiling broadly, the lips curved in laughter, the deep eyes irradiating their caves of wisdom; ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... delicacy of Roman satire died with him; to reappear in our own Augustan age with Addison and Steele, to find faint echo in the gentle preachments of Cowper, to impress itself in every page on the lambent humour, the self-accusing tolerance, the penetrative yet benignant wit ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... instance, that I stood in the room over Arthur's dressing room, and that it was into the ceiling under me that the second—or probably the first—bullet had penetrated. I know, as it happens, very little of firearms, but I did realize that a shot from a.45 Colt automatic would have considerable penetrative power. To be exact, that the bullet had probably either lodged itself in a joist, or had penetrated through the flooring and might be ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... reference to his painting of stones in the last note to Sec. 28 of the chapter on Imagination Penetrative, Vol. II. ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... is in goodness a penetrative power that nothing can withstand. Cunning and malice melt away before its mild, open, steady glance. Not alone on the fields where chivalry charges for laurels, with helmet and breastplate and lance in rest, can ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... one was taken away. They all escaped, being, it was thought, epidemic-proof. There was my broker, Don Christo Christiano—called by Don Manuel "El Sweaga" (the Swede)—whom nothing could strike with penetrative force, except a commission. ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... such verses, we find ourselves very far away indeed from the veritable poetry of Japan,—from those compositions which, with a few chosen syllables only, can either create a perfect colored picture in the mind, or bestir the finest sensations of memory with marvelous penetrative delicacy. The Daikoku-mai are extremely crude; and their long popularity has been due, I fancy, rather to the very interesting manner of singing them than to any quality which could permit us to compare them with the ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... morning Doris wondered what had happened. There was a loneliness in the very air, as there had been when Uncle Leverett died. The sky was overcast, not exactly promising a storm, but soft and penetrative, as if presaging sorrow. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... mind had not the penetrative, illuminating quality of genius, he was not without some very definite qualifications for his task. The sturdy temper of his intellect fits him for a subject which is beset with pitfalls for the sentimentalizer. A finer sense might ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... career he was to run. The internal and the outward nature were made clear to his eyes, year after year, as they opened on the day. He was not admitted to the practical initiation till not one earthly wish chained that sublimest faculty which you call the IMAGINATION, one carnal desire clouded the penetrative essence that you call the INTELLECT. And even then, and at the best, how few attained to the last mystery! Happier inasmuch as they attained the earlier to the holy glories for which Death is ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... flew about over the slippery rocks, and felt like a cochin-china fowl, or muscovy duck, or dodo, trying to keep pace with a humming-bird. Their voices were well suited to their small brilliant forms; not loud, though high-pitched and singularly musical and penetrative, like the high clear notes of a skylark at a distance. They also reminded me of certain notes, which have a human quality, in some of our songsters—the swallow, redstart, pied wagtail, whinchat, and two or three others. Such pure and beautiful sounds are sometimes heard in human voices, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... missile which, when it strikes a bone, flattens out and splatters, creating a jagged wound which it is almost impossible to treat or heal. The Germans, in ordinary, use a steel jacketed bullet which possesses high penetrative powers, while the French at the beginning of the war were using the ordinary ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... returned to me, and I returned to Halicarnassus and—kicked him. That sounds very dreadful and horrible, and it is, if you are thinking of a great, brutal, brogan kick, such as a stupid farmer gives to his patient oxen; but not, if you mean only a delicate, compact, penetrative punch with the toe of a tight-fitting gaiter,—addressed rather to the conscience than the shins, to the sensibilities rather than the senses. The kick masculine is coarse, boorish, unmitigated, predicable only of Calibans. The kick feminine ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... which for them he is really the creator—this is the way of his criticism; cast off in a stray letter often, or passing note, or lightest essay or conversation. It is in such a letter, for instance, that we come upon a singularly penetrative estimate of the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... in surprise; but his blunter perception proved less penetrative than the keen insight of the women, and he simply wondered what this rather rough looking stranger could know about it, anyhow. He expressed a hope that it might be as Mr. Gray said. For himself he hadn't much faith. ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... smooth,—as Friedrich, too, had his well-nigh fatal difficulties on the road. Again, says the Plutarch, they are very brave men both; and of a clearness and veracity peculiar among their contemporaries. In Chatham, too, there is something of the flash of steel; a very sharp-cutting, penetrative, rapid individual, he too; and shaped for action, first of all, though he has to talk so much in the world. Fastidious, proud, no King could be prouder, though his element is that of Free-Senate and Democracy. And he has a beautiful ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... think it probable that many readers may be surprised at my calling Scott the great representative of the mind of the age of literature. Those who can perceive the intense penetrative depth of Wordsworth, and the exquisite finish and melodious power of Tennyson, may be offended at my placing in higher rank that poetry of careless glance and reckless rhyme in which Scott poured out the fancies of his ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... and attitudes of body that it was susceptible of being viewed in; kissing me in every part, the most secret and critical one so far from excepted that it received most of that branch of homage. Then his touches were so exquisitely wanton, so luxuriously diffused and penetrative at times, that he had made me perfectly rage with titillating fires, when, after all, and much ado, he had gained a short-lived erection, he would perhaps melt it away in a washy sweat, or a premature abortive effusion, that provokingly mocked my eager desires: or, if carried home, how faultered ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... explanations for her withdrawal from the debate, and when Mary Brooks innocently inquired "what little yarn" she told the registrar, that she could get away so often, Eleanor fixed her with an unpleasantly penetrative stare and answered with all her old-time hauteur that she ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... sword, as trowel, or as pocket-comb, the beak of the bird has to be pointed, the collection of seeds may be conveniently intrusted to this otherwise penetrative instrument, and such food as can only be obtained by probing crevices, splitting open fissures, or neatly and minutely picking things up, is allotted, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... "sleuth," a being of great national importance, but repulsive and dangerous as an associate. Yet by a turn of Fortune's wheel I came not only to know William Dawson, but to work with him, and almost to like him. His penetrative efficiency compelled one's admiration, and his unconcealed vanity showed that he did not stand wholly outside the human family. Yet I never felt safe with Dawson. In his presence, and when I knew that somewhere round the corner he was carrying on his mysterious investigations, ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... Miss Wilkes had become queerly penetrative, and spoke in a way that made one think of a beetle being pinned through the thorax, "——that David Cairns merely used his artistic intelligence for our entertainment; that Andrew Bedient is merely an interesting type of sailor and wanderer who ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... and a shrill penetrative whistle from the rear of the house, now told of Theodore's activities at the window of the room where he and his father were imprisoned. He was doubtless making ready to let ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... very birth. She treads as though her footsteps had been among marble palaces, beneath roofs of fretted gold, o'er cedar floors and pavements of jasper and porphyry—amid gardens full of statues, and flowers, and fountains, and haunting music. She is full of penetrative wisdom, and genuine tenderness, and lively wit; but as she has never known want, or grief, or fear, or disappointment, her wisdom is without a touch of the sombre or the sad; her affections are all mixed ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... knew, have gathered from Sinfi, and from other sources, that I was mourning the loss of a Welsh girl in humble life; but during our very brief intercourse in Wales neither of us had mentioned the matter to the other. Now, however, in my present dire strait I longed to call in the aid of his penetrative mind. ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... in all its manifestations. She did not pride herself on her knowledge, nor reproach herself for her ignorance. In every way she formed a striking contrast to her friend, Miss Vincent. Every word they spoke betrayed the difference between them: the sharp tones of Lurida's head-voice, penetrative, aggressive, sometimes irritating, revealed the corresponding traits of mental and moral character; the quiet, conversational contralto of Euthymia was the index of ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... vegetable chemistry, might personify sap as a pale, liquid maiden, ascending through the roots and veins to meet air, a blue boy robed in golden warmth, descending through the leaves, with a whisper, to her embrace. So the personifications of death in literature, thus far, give us no penetrative glance into what it really is, help us to no acute definition of it, but poetically fasten on some feature, or accident, or emotion, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... whole. His works are mainly masses of fine, splendid, or humorous writing, heaped together; the parts are seldom forged into one, or connected by any indissoluble link. His so-called Dramas are only poems divided into chapters. Further, he had little of what Mr. Ruskin calls penetrative imagination. So it has been plausibly said that he made his men after his own image, his women after his own heart. The former are, indeed, rather types of what he wished to be than what he was. They are better, and worse, than himself. They have stronger wills, more definite purposes, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... become master of the learning of every nation, of all tongues, dead or living, and of every literature, western and oriental; who has pursued all the speculations of science to their last term; who has lived in all orders of society, and observed man in every phase of civilisation; who has a penetrative intellect which enables him to follow as by intuition the most profound of all questions, and a power of communicating with precision the most abstruse ideas; whose wealth would make Monte Cristo seem a pauper; who is so far above his race that woman seems to him ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... she asked the group collectively, in a voice that was singularly clear and penetrative. "I haven't seen him for the ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... a venerable figure with hair as white as snow, and a face strikingly characterized by benevolence. It bore marks of thought, however, and penetrative insight; although the keen glances of the eyes were now somewhat bedimmed with tears, which the aged shed, or almost shed, on lighter stress of emotion than would elicit them ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... any indifference towards her, but in the end, a sweet smile em eloped her face, and the pleasantest conviction of a young life seemed to thrust itself upon her. She was forced to tell herself that his eyes never turned from her, until they had looked into hers with that deep penetrative glance that makes us feel that a soul is looking into another soul. His hand had never been drawn away from hers until she had detected that slight, almost unwilling pressure that has only one meaning. When the tongue will not be the ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... strongly marked countenance of the true Italian character; handsome dark eyes, with a penetrative glance, gloomy or bright according to the sentiment which they express; dangerous eyes, it seems to me, they would be to those on whom their glance was directed in love. The countenance is pale; the features are regular—even ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... education, but her penetrative power extends into every branch of industry and economics. In November 1916, a Munich expert was put in charge of the College of Forestry, and an economic society was started in Constantinople on German lines ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... of this "old Man eloquent" will long remain a subject of debate, but no one can rise from his works without recognising a moral grandeur in him that far out-tops the very human flaws that may even serve to make him more penetrative to our own ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... far surpassing their mere addition. The creations of our mind are, of course, mere spiritual existences, things of seeming, akin to illusions; and yet our mind can never rest satisfied with an unreality, because our mind is active, penetrative and grasping, and therefore craves for realisation, for completeness and truth, and feels bruised and maimed whenever it hits against a dead wall or is pulled up by a contradiction; nay, worst of all, it grows giddy and faint when suddenly brought face to face ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... must send the two pieces back to Glen. Which I will do, together with this letter. Let me see what you write. I think you have a very penetrative glimpse into character, which comes from perfect disengagement and sympathy controlled by a critical sense. The absence of egotism is ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... characterized by the coarseness of its fibre and the acrid nature of its intellectual secretions. It is to a certain extent penetrative, as all creatures are which are provided with stings. It has an instinct which guides it to the vulnerable parts of the victim on which it fastens. These two qualities give it a certain degree of power which is not to be despised. It might perhaps be less mischievous, ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... with me to the Palace: nor wot I the manner of my going and the mode of my coming is alike unknown to me." The Caliph hearing these her words marvelled at this her tale with exceeding marvel and fell into the uttermost of wonderment, but bethinking him of his Wazir, a man of penetrative wit, sagacious, astute, argute exceedingly, he summoned him to the presence and acquainted him as soon as he came with this affair and what had befallen his daughter; to wit, how she was borne away in her bed without knowing whither ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... sign-post to Erebus, is strong enough to go the other way. This strength of optimism, indeed the strength we find always underlying his tolerance, his radicalism, his searches, prophecies, and revelations, is heightened and made efficient by "imagination-penetrative," a thing concerned not with the combining but the apprehending of things. A possession, akin to the power, Ruskin says, all great pictures have, which "depends on the penetration of the imagination into the true nature of the thing represented, and on the scorn of the imagination ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives |
