"Tentative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... growth did not profess to be, at any time; Switzerland and San Marino were too limited in extent to afford any valuable examples; Venice while professedly a republic had been as unique and inimitable as her own island home. Then there were a few experiments here and there, tentative movements barren of results, and that was all that the civilized world had to offer of practical knowledge of democracy at that time. Beyond this were the speculations of philosophers and the dreams of poets. Or perhaps the terms should be reversed, for the dreams were oft-times more real and ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... unities. He did not write 'The Bride of Messina' in any doctrinaire spirit,—either to reform the German drama, or to furnish a model for imitation. The play is simply an aesthetic experiment; a tentative excursion into a field confessedly 'strange'. What Schiller wished was to produce upon a modern audience, by an original treatment of a medieval theme, a tragic effect similar to that which, as he supposed, must have been produced upon ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... by a menace. Already Sir Hamilton Seymour, the British Ambassador at St. Petersburg, had been sounded by the Czar. It was on that occasion that Nicholas uttered the historic phrase that "the sick man was dying," meaning the Ottoman Empire. It was then, too, that tentative offers were made to England to let her take Egypt and the island of Candia, provided Russia could make ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... to engage on any very careful tests as to the sensitiveness of Lola's skin. Yet I have made certain preliminary notes as to what I hope to do in this connexion, and have also begun with a few tentative attempts. I first tried her sensibility to various degrees of warmth by teaching her the use of the thermometer. I made a drawing of a thermometer—according to its actual size—and added principal numbers ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... temporary make-shifts of boards, of logs, of canvas, prematurely decayed, and in some instances abandoned for a newer erection, or degraded to mere outhouses—it presented with singular frankness the nomadic and tentative disposition of its founder. It had been repaired without being improved; its additions had seemed only to extend its primitive ugliness over a larger space. Its roofs were roughly shingled or rudely boarded and battened, and the rafters of some of its "lean-to's" ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... of tentative measures or of incidents which taught both parties that they could not, either of them, hope to completely destroy their opponents, the two allied brothers received at Verdun, whither they had repaired ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... in the otherwise exact reproduction of the Grand Trianon. According to documents published in the seventeenth century, and especially to the tentative drawings made by Lepautri himself, the Grand Trianon architect, that monument was originally to be decorated over its high balustrade railings with some artistic devices and groups of children, each to be found in the present French monument. ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... could all be done over British territory, with the part over Lakes Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika covered by hydroplanes. The moment men were released from the war, surveying of this route was begun and tentative plans made for landing-fields every 200 ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... It was a tentative reply, the man having a seafaring appearance. Her father was not at home, and Pleasant knew it. 'Take a seat by the fire,' were her hospitable words when she had got him in; 'men of your ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... He avoided Saunders's tentative gaze. "I reckon I won't, to-day, anyway," he faltered. "I never was much of a hand to hang about big ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... records were left incomplete. Their previous records and their prospects of further partial or complete failure seem to justify an estimate of 55 per cent (1,070) of these uncompleted grades as either tentative or actual but unrecorded failures. Therefore we virtually have 1,070 other failures belonging to these pupils which are not included in Table I. Accordingly, since the number can only be estimated, the fact that they are not incorporated in ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... the Director of Transports was asked how long it would take to despatch 49,000 men and 8,000 horses. His reply was that in the then state of the labour market, four to five weeks would be required. Tentative enquiries of this kind, and the evidently critical state of affairs in South Africa, had led the Transport department, as early as July, to make for eventualities every preparation that was possible within the department—such ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... Miss Lou, he soon ventured to breathe her name in a tentative way. "Hush!" she whispered. Then his heart beat thick with overpowering emotions of gratitude, admiration and love. Entering the garden, she led the way quickly toward Aun' Jinkey's cabin, and at a point where the shrubbery was thickest about the path, turned ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... a judgment, and makes a previous test impossible. If we are prudent then, we shall rein in our impulse to affection as we do chariot horses. We make a preliminary trial of horses. So we should of friendship; and should test our friends' characters by a kind of tentative friendship. It may often happen that the untrustworthiness of certain men is completely displayed in a small money matter; others who are proof against a small sum are detected if it be large. But even if some are found who think it mean to prefer ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... and pen, Mr. Talmage advocated the establishment of an independent Chinese Union Church of the Presbyterian order. Even then the Reformed Church was not fully persuaded and did not give her hearty assent. The resolution of 1864 was only tentative. It was a plea for toleration. This was not strange. It was one of the earliest efforts, if not the earliest, for church union and separate autonomy on heathen soil. It was a new departure. But the battle was really won. The question was never broached again. The strongest ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... claims of religion were drawn into the arena, and, as neither the extreme Scholastics nor the extreme Humanists had learned to distinguish between dogmas and systems, between what was essential and what was tentative, there was grave danger that religion would suffer in the eyes of educated men on account of the crude methods of those who claimed ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... Feeding Compared; Standard Rations; Why Tentative Dietary Standards; Amounts of Food Consumed; Average Composition of Foods; Variations in Composition of Foods; Example of a Ration; Calculations of Balanced Rations; Requisites of a Balanced Ration; Examples; Calculations of Rations for Men at ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... known as secondary sex characters. To put our statement in the paragraph above in another form, the primary and secondary sex do not always correspond in all details. We shall find as we proceed that our original tentative definition of sex as the ability to produce in the one case sperm, in the other eggs, is sometimes difficult to apply. What shall we say of a sterile individual, which produces neither? The problem is especially embarrassing when the primary ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... in the midst of young forest trees. Why is it that a forest is always a surprise in France? Is it that we have such a respect for French thrift, that a real forest seems a waste of timber? There are forests and forests; this one seemed almost a stripling in its tentative delicacy, compared to the mature splendor of Fontainebleau, for example. This forest had the virility of a young savage; it was neither dense nor vast; yet, in contrast to the ribbony grain fields, and to the finish of the villa parks, was as refreshing to the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... every part of which is being illuminated almost every year by fresh discoveries, such a sketch as the present can be merely tentative, and must soon, in many of its parts, grow antiquated and be superseded. And where so much depends on the selection of some facts out of many which might have been employed, it will no doubt appear ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... state's worst enemies those citizens who at the top and bottom of the social scale have no other ambition than to hang on and suck the life-blood of the nation. Great things may be hoped from the new science of eugenics, when it has passed out of its tentative and experimental stage. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Universities and all the Academies of Europe.[2] There are innumerable verses, French and Italian, in all stages, occasionally attaining the finality of these lines, which appear in half a dozen tentative forms: ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... than the wheat, we should ask ourselves whether our own lack of vigilance and forethought did not contribute to the luxuriant growth of tares in a soil naturally congenial to them. After many hesitations, and some tentative and half-hearted steps, we at length recognised that intellectual partnership however imperfect must lead towards a closer political partnership. It became, indeed, impossible for us to refuse to do so without being untrue to the principles that had governed ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... come home," she remarked, with a tentative flourish of the scissors. "I declare he gets handsomer every day that he lives. It suits him somehow to fill out, or it may be that I'm partial to fat like my ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... not entirely of this strange half-caste, whose beauty was provoking, although he resolutely repelled her tentative advances, that Grantham was thinking. In that last gesture when she had scornfully tossed her head in turning aside, had lain a bitter memory. Grantham stood for a moment watching the swaying draperies. Then, dropping the end of his cigarette ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... after another, the combination of words (in whose case this occurs) is said to be vitiated by ambiguity.[1689] By ascertainment (of faults and merits), called Sankhya, is meant the establishment, by elimination, of faults or merits (in premises and conclusions), adopting tentative meanings.[1690] Krama or weighing the relative strength or weakness of the faults or merits (ascertained by the above process), consists in settling the propriety of the priority or subsequence of the words employed in a sentence. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... remembered how timid, tentative, and dear the postal and telephone services of even the most civilized countries still are, and how inexorably the needs of revenue, public profit, and convenience fight in these departments against the tradition of official leisure and dignity. There is no reason now, except that the thing ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... stile that led into the fields, and sat there for a moment. Lucia's tentative melodies were still faintly audible, but soon they stopped, and he guessed that she was looking out of the window. She was too great to take part in the morning spying that went on round about the Green, but she often saw a good deal from her window. He wondered what Mrs ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... to stand consistent, superstition Stringo, strictum bind stringent, restrict Struo, structum build construe, destruction Tango, tactum touch intangible, tact Tempus, temporis time temporize, contemporary Tendo, tensum stretch distend, intense Teneo, tentuin hold tenure, detention *Tendo try tentative, attempt Terminus end, boundary terminal, exterminate Terra earth territory, inter Torqueo, tortum twist distort, tortuous Traho, tractum draw extract, subtraction Tumeo, tumidum swell tumor, contumacy Turba tumult, crowd turbulent, disturb *Unus one unify, triune, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... her room, going over her dresses with that French maid. I don't know as she's got anything fit to wear to that dinner," Mrs. Spragg added in a tentative murmur. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... lamp, laid out his papers in the prospect of an evening of uninterrupted work. He was surprised, however, after a little interval, by the sound of uncertain and shuffling steps on the half-lighted passage outside, the noise of some heavy article set down on the floor, and then a tentative knock at his door. A little impatiently he ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... their noble lineage—among whom assuredly he does and will shine—but whose acute consciousness of something meretricious in his metal, made him doubt if the public would accept coinage from his mint; and so caused him to wear tentative disguises, whether he elaborated a romance or a keen and playful witticism—and who really did injustice to his own powers,—not from modesty but meanness,—even he, the son of a prime minister and heir to a peerage—a man who was himself always something of a trickster, now ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... leave of each other she promised to continue to be his guide; and during the fortnight which followed they roamed the hills in happy comradeship. In most of the village friendships between youths and maidens lack of conversation was made up for by tentative fondling; but Harney, except when he had tried to comfort her in her trouble on their way back from the Hyatts', had never put his arm about her, or sought to betray her into any sudden caress. It seemed to be enough for him to breathe ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... But what strikes one about her most is summed up in the word 'ability.' She is essentially able. The work which that wonderful left hand of hers finds to do, it does with a certainty that makes most other work look tentative beside hers. The gestures and poses she chooses in her models show how little she fears drawing, while the gistness of her criticism has a most solvent effect in dissolving the doubts that hover round ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... far apart and they cannot write to each other. When, at last, they are brought together, there will be no fight at all, because they will overwhelm their enemies. That time, madame, has not come yet. We are only at the stage of tentative underground rumblings. But a little eruption is enough to wipe out one man if he ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... he received a reply, somewhat longer than his own epistle. The writer was clearly keeping himself in a tentative attitude. Still, he wrote something about his own position and his needs. He was a teacher in a school in South London, living in lodgings, with his evenings mostly unoccupied. His habits, he declared, were Bohemian. Suppose, by way of testing ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... opposite alliance would alone be an adequate counterpoise; and the experiment might at least be tried whether such an alliance was possible. At the beginning of August, therefore, Stephen Vaughan was sent on a tentative mission to the Elector of Saxe, John Frederick, at Weimar.[617] He was the bearer of letters containing a proposal for a resident English ambassador; and if the elector gave his consent, he was to proceed with similar offers ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... to be Dick who was suddenly awakened at what he judged to be the middle of the night. And the manner of his awakening was this. He seemed to be dreaming that he was buying a new pair of shoes and, after having tried on several tentative pairs in a shop, the salesman, who was attired in the full regalia of a cowboy, gave Dick's left foot a sharp kick as if to indicate that he should ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... at night. Lanterns are suspended everywhere from the trees. The front of the players' cart is seen protruding up-stage left. The philosopher is seated on the steps of the car smoking a pipe. The blind girl with strange, tentative footsteps and feeling hands is busy with duties ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... to this tentative remark; but it was from no objection any longer in her mind to such a relation in the abstract. She had not yet at all consented with herself to abandon the faith of her father, but she did not see, and indeed it were hard for ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... should frame for itself. In our own case, such distance is that from Honolulu to Guam, in the Ladrones,—3,500 miles. The excellent results obtained from our vessels already in commission, embodying as they do the tentative experiences of other countries, as well as the reflective powers of our own designers, make it antecedently probable that 10,000 and 12,000 tons represent the extremes of normal displacement advantageous for the United States battleship. ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... post-offices. The minimum amount of insurance to be issued probably will be $1,000, and the maximum $10,000, with any amount between those sums in multiple of $500. There will be provision for payments in case of disability as well as death, according to the tentative plan. ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... much promise by accepting a glass of something from the hands of a beautiful but thoughtless girl, pampered child of the banker with whom he had secured a position. For a dread moment Marcella seemed to recall that the fatal draught was named "punch." But after a tentative sip of the compound at hand, she decided that it must have been something else—doubtless "a glass of sparkling wine." For this punch before her was palpably of a babe's innocence. Indeed it tasted rather like an inferior lemonade. But it was cold, and Marcella ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... is ever before my mind, and I am fearful of doing these disciplines an injustice. The ability and pugnacity of the partisans of natural science make them formidable persons to contradict. The tone of tentative inquiry, which befits a being of dim faculties and bounded knowledge, is the tone I would wish to take and not to depart from. At present it seems to me, that those who are for giving to natural knowledge, as they call it, the chief ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Burleson dreamily, then turned, musing with bent head, sounding a note, a tentative chord. And then ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... like a public fountain. At the back of his mind there was a flickering thought that he wanted to do something, a vague feeling that he had some sort of an appointment which he must keep; but he was unable to think what it was. Meanwhile, he conducted tentative experiments with his breath. It was so long since he had last breathed that he had ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... like to cable to-night," he urged, "that you have signed. They are holding back the public announcement of the Secretary's route until hearing from Your Excellency. This is only tentative," he pointed out; "the Senate must ratify. But our Senate will ratify it, and when you sign now, it ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... makes the following "tentative inductions." 1. Boys preponderate in the illegitimate lines. 2. Girls preponderate in the intermarried branches. 3. Lines of intermarriage between Jukes show a minimum of crime. 4. Pauperism preponderates in the consanguineous lines. 5. In the main, crime ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... out of a mere negation, the abolition, viz., of the old political freedom, we may easily conceive that there would be an interval of fluctuating, and tentative efforts to supply its place, before a new comic form could be developed and fully established. Hence there may have been many kinds of the Middle Comedy, many intermediate gradations, between the Old and the New; and this is the opinion of some men of learning. And, indeed, historically considered, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... questions, but to call forth thought and originality, to present opportunities for closer observation than was ever evoked by observation lessons, and for experiments full of meaning and full of zest. Naturally we do not despise correct information, but these children are very young and all this work is tentative. We are never dogmatic, it is all "Do you think they might have ..." or "Well, I know what I should have done; I should have ..." and the teacher's reply is usually "Suppose ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... TO THE WORK.—Under Traditional Management the tentative calendar might cause speed, but could not direct speed. Under Transitory Management elimination of waste by prescribed methods and routing increases output. This increase becomes greater under Scientific Management. Standardized routing designs the shortest paths, the least wasteful ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... seeking occupation in England. The sea was my playground in youth and I understood very perfectly the mechanism to be under my control. That Ben would select me seemed improbable and I regarded this tentative opening as unlikely to introduce me to my first objective. I forged certain foreign letters of commendation and left it at that. He approved, however. He liked Italians, from experience of them aboard ship, and he appreciated my letter and my imaginary war record. ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... tentative remarks to the nearest miner, and receiving only short, gruff replies, the traveller resigned himself to uncongenial silence, staring moodily out of the window at the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... from 16 mi. W, 3 mi. S Piedra) tend to fill a gap in the known distribution of this species. Previously it was known from Matamoros, Tamaulipas (Miller, 1897:108), to the north and from Bledos, San Luis Potosi (Dalquest, 1953:61), to the south. Assignment to the subspecies L. b. ornatus is tentative and is based primarily on the scanty cover of hair toward the margin of the interfemoral membrane and scanty cover of hair on the ventral surface of the membrane along the forearm. Adequate comparative material of L. b. ornatus from southern ...
— Extensions of Known Ranges of Mexican Bats • Sydney Anderson
... be little doubt that the two tentative voyages were highly profitable, for Drake was able to fit out his third expedition with a care and completeness almost unknown at that time. The ships were "richly furnished, with victuals and apparel for a whole year: and no lesse heedfully provided of all manner ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... men, including Charley Jake, the hedge-carpenter, Elijah New, the parish clerk, and John Pitcher, a neighbouring dairyman, the shepherd's father-in-law, lolled in the settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over tentative pourparlers on a life-companionship, sat beneath the corner cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot where she was. Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more prevailed in being unhampered ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... not realized. Rumania, too, had aspirations in the direction of recovering lost territories, but her grievance in this respect was equally divided between Russia and Austria, for, while the one had despoiled her of Bessarabia, the other had annexed Transylvania (Siebenbuergen). Hence the Russian tentative conquest and occupation of the Bukowina paved the way for Rumania, should she decide on intervention. The road was clear for her to step in and occupy the Bukowina (which Russia was prepared to hand over), and probably Transylvania as well, which ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... lay very still, feeling with all my body. After a while my sensations seemed to be concentrated in my fingers, and I perceived that the grass blades were sharp as knives, and hurt my hands cruelly. I tried to get up cautiously, so as not to cut myself on the sharp grass. I put down a tentative foot, much as my kitten treads for the first time the primeval forest in the backyard. All at once I felt the stealthy patter of something creeping, creeping, creeping purposefully toward me. I do not know how at that time the idea was in my mind; I had no words for intention ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... chanced to be. He whose talk at Kelmscott had been of ‘Blessed Damozels’ and ‘Roman Widows’ and the like, talked now of the wanderings of Ulysses, of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ of ‘Sir Patrick Spens,’ and even of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym’ and ‘Allan Gordon.’ And on hearing a friend recite some tentative verses on a great naval battle, he looked about for sea subjects too; and it was now, and not later, as is generally supposed, that he really thought of the subject of ‘The White Ship,’ a subject apparently so alien from ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... over-estimated; his standards being the most definite in the world, the most easily and promptly appealed to, and the most identical with what happens to be the practice of the French genius itself. The Englishman is not-quite so well off, but he is better off than his poor interrogative and tentative cousin beyond the seas. He is blessed with a healthy mistrust of analysis, and hair-splitting is the occupation he most despises. There is always a little of the Dr. Johnson in him, and Dr. Johnson would have had woefully little patience with that tendency to weigh moonbeams which in Hawthorne ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... this faith is always vague, tentative, and inconclusive. He is certain of something, but he cannot say what; yet he knows that he is certain, although, if he were to try to express his certainty in any old terms, he would reject it himself. He knows; ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... resulted in approximately the above program—professional preparation for all teachers in the high school and that along the four lines suggested. But the movement has gone much farther than suggested by my statement. The results are found in something more authoritative and more permanent than tentative agreement among educational leaders, or even among educational institutions. The law-making bodies of the land have taken a part, and by legal enactment have required about what I have suggested. The State of North Dakota, for example, requires professional equipment of every teacher ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... his team, and what was of far greater importance, his team knew him. They were partly of French-Canadian stock, not as large as Farquhar McNaughton's big, fat blacks, but "as full of spirit as a bottle of whisky," as Aleck himself would say. Their first tentative pulls at the stump were taken with caution, until their driver and themselves had taken the full measure of the strength of the enemy. But when once Aleck had made up his mind that victory was possible, and had given them the call ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... genius, nothing can be stiled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind. Demonstration immediately displays its power, and has nothing to hope or fear from the flux of years; but works tentative and experimental must be estimated by their proportion to the general and collective ability of man, as it is discovered in a long succession of endeavours. Of the first building that was raised, it might be with certainty ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... soon become conscious of this close tentative scrutiny, and at first she had been inclined to resent its cool deliberateness. But, remembering that a man certainly has a right to learn well the character of the woman whom he may ask to be his wife, she felt ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... conceived, imply one another, the difference between the two positions ceases to be one of ends and becomes one of means. But every problem of means is one of extreme complexity which can only be solved, in the most tentative way, by observation and experiment. And opinions based upon such a process, though they may be strongly held, cannot be held with the simplicity and force of a religious or ethical intuition. We might, ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... but in the opposite direction, which further puzzled Shannon. But he was a stock horse first and a hurdle racer as an afterthought; and a good stock horse knows his rider's mind, if that rider is a good man. He made one tentative movement towards his paddock mates, now moving away towards the gate; then, feeling the touch of Wally's hand on the bit, and the light pressure of his knee, he decided that some new game was on foot, and ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... free to pucker her mouth into a funny little grimace that denoted amusement, surprise and sympathy, all together. "Then I'll ask Barbara Gordon to give you a separate trial later," she said kindly. "Nothing will be really decided to-morrow. We only make tentative selections to submit to Mr. Masters when he comes up next week. He's the professional ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... the sole reference in the interview to the murder. I take it for tentative, and that Hamlet is satisfied by his mother's utterance, carriage, and expression, that she is innocent of any knowledge of that crime. Neither does he allude to the adultery: there is enough in what she cannot deny, and that only which can be ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... entrance at each side, so that the bird could go into his house at one doorway and out at the other, the room being too small to permit of his turning around in it. Thinking the nest might be occupied, in a tentative way I tossed a small club up among the branches, when to my surprise a magpie sprang out of the nest, and, making no outcry, swung around among the trees, appearing quite nervous and shy. When she saw me climbing the tree, she set up such a ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... heard of my giving parties to ladies, of my driving them out to picnics, or of my concocting prize poems, my mental life at Oxford was far from being a life of idleness. On the contrary, from my second year of residence onward I was constantly engaged in tentative sketches of a book in which I hoped some day to give a comprehensive picture of the moral and intellectual condition to which my Oxford experiences had by that time raised or reduced me. That book was The New Republic, with regard to which in this ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... members of their families, or by poorly paid employees who by one chance or another are not in a free and independent relation to them. Many abuses exist in these "sweatshops." The law so far is scarcely more than tentative, but in these successive acts provisions have been made by which all manufacturers or contractors must keep lists of outworkers engaged by them, and submit these to the factory inspectors ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... wrong way with a tentative woolly-gloved finger. "Plitty, high hat," she cooed. "Can plitty little Fay have ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... concerning the supernatural exert such an enormous influence in early society. In a world where everything was yet to be learned, man's first attempts at understanding himself and his fellows were necessarily blundering and tentative. His first attempts at explanation are expressed in terms of his own nature. He sees himself, his own passions, strengths, and weaknesses reflected in the nature around him. This is the outstanding, dominating fact in primitive life. Leave out this consideration and primitive sociology ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... rose that morning I had a tentative plan for stirring him to action. I was elaborating it on the way down town in my electric. It shows how badly Anita was crippling my brain, that not until I was almost at my office did it occur to me: "That was a tremendous luxury Roebuck ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... strong "partisan" feeling of one man for another—fruit of the ineradicable sex antagonism which so often colours the judgments men pass on women and women on men. Then had come love, against which he had striven in vain, and gradually, out of love, had grown a new tentative belief which the pitiful culmination of the Raynham episode had suddenly and very ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... monster,—and to make it the very business and object of the war to sweep it out of existence. But that will be the end; and for the way, things will work out their own issues. And in the mean time I do not see that anything could be better than the cautious and tentative manner in which the President ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... petted or perhaps even romped with. The man gave a faint but promising sign of intent to romp, by swinging his small and very shiny brown bag to and fro as he walked. Thus ever did the Master swing Lad's precious canton flannel doll before throwing it for him to retrieve. Lad made a tentative snap at the bag, his tail wagging harder than ever. But he missed it. And, in another moment the man stopped swinging the bag and tucked it under his arm again as he began to mumble with a bit ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... child of M. Offenbach's genius, and the now somewhat faded spectacular muse, flourished at the time of which I write in three of our seven theatres for months,—five, from the highest to the lowest being in turn open to it,—and had begun, in a tentative way, to invade the deserted stage even so long ago as the previous summer; and I have sometimes flattered myself that it was my fortune to witness the first exhibition of its most characteristic feature in a theatre into which ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... expands into the dome of heaven with its eternal fires, and bids us turn to the third of the ancient sages whose speculations are aiding our steps in this tentative study. ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... made him a tentative offer to that effect, my boy, and, now that the first flush of his rage is over, he is a coyote lacking the courage to kill. He will agree to your proposal, and I shall take occasion to warn him that ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... omnigraph, but monographs. Let Shakespeare be, and give eye and ear to his history, comedy, tragedy; and when we have done with them, one by one, we shall discover how the aggregated mass climbs taller than highest mountains. This method, in tentative fashion, I propose to apply in some studies in this volume, or other volumes, believing that the company of those who love Shakespeare can never be large enough for his merits, and that many are kept away from the witchery of him because they do not well know ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... She made tentative efforts at remonstrating with him. Her father, whom she saw now and then, said that Edward was much too generous to his tenants; the wives of his brother officers remonstrated with her in private; his large subscriptions made it difficult for their ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... the gravity of the case, and also the tentative character of the operation under lethodyne. At first, she shrank from taking it. "No, no!" she said; "let me die quietly." But Hilda, like the Angel of Mercy that she was, whispered in the girl's ear: "IF it succeeds, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... conclusion was easy to foresee; for, even at that period, England took part in a tentative Renaissance that preceded the great one of the sixteenth century. At the time when Italy produced Petrarca and Boccaccio, and France had Froissart, England produced Chaucer, the greatest ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... Life. We saw in history the persistent emergence of a human type so fully aware of this Reality as to subdue to its interests all the activities of life; ever seeking to incarnate its abiding values in the world of time. And further, psychology suggested to us, even in its tentative new findings, its exploration of our strange mental deeps, reason for holding such surrender to the purposes of the Spirit to represent the condition of man's fullest psychic health, and access to his real sources of power. We found in the universal existence of religious institutions further ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... Warburton her own duty was to hold her tongue. It was difficult to interrogate without appearing to suggest; Pansy's supreme simplicity, an innocence even more complete than Isabel had yet judged it, gave to the most tentative enquiry something of the effect of an admonition. As she knelt there in the vague firelight, with her pretty dress dimly shining, her hands folded half in appeal and half in submission, her soft eyes, raised and fixed, full of ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... night, if Mr. Wendover should begin to realise the brutality of Selina's not turning up at all. The comfort had been, hitherto, that he didn't realise brutalities. There were certain violins that emitted tentative sounds in the orchestra; they shortened the time and made her uneasier—fixed her idea that he could lift her out of her mire if he would. It didn't appear to prove that he would, his also observing Lady Ringrose's empty box without making an encouraging comment ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... at the bare proposal of such an experiment. Neither his knowledge of chemistry, nor the present uncertain value attaching to "molecular machinery," would justify him, for a moment, in entering upon such a purely tentative and empirical ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... of inevitable degeneration and decay—inevitable because it was prescribed by the nature of the universe. We have only an imperfect knowledge of the influential speculations of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles, but we may take Plato's tentative philosophy of history to illustrate the trend and the prejudices of Greek thought on this subject. The world was created and set going by the Deity, and, as his work, it was perfect; but it was not immortal and had in it ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... her eyeless sockets and found a piece of fibrous grass, with which she proceeded to bind together the adjoining parts that had formed the knee. When she had done, he gave one or two carefully tentative stamps. ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... an easy union entered upon and maintained so long as both parties are pleased. This arrangement has one manifest advantage,—Eskimo annals tell of no unhappy marriages. When unhappiness conies in at the door of the igloo, marriage flies out of the chimney. When a woman leaves her tentative husband, she takes herself and her babies back to the paternal topik, and no odium attaches. As the marriage vows melt into the Arctic air, the quondam husband is expected, however, to play the game. Last winter a young Nunatalmute and his sorry spouse ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... many, however, who were possessed of either her courage or her indiscretion. They all agreed, though, that Andrew Johnstone was the one insurmountable barrier to their hopes. Most of the other elders had been approached in a tentative way. Peter McNabb was a broad-minded man with such a passion for music that, though he looked askance at any innovation, yet he would have welcomed anything that would help the singing. Old Donald Fraser considered an organ ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... only one final and satisfactory solution: that was the abolition of dual ownership—in other words, the buying out of the landlord and the establishment of the tenant in the single and undisputed ownership of the soil on fair and equitable terms. A tentative start had been made in land purchase by the Land Purchase Act of 1885—called, after its author, the Ashbourne Act. This experiment had proved an immense success, for in six years the ten millions sterling assigned for its operations were exhausted and 25,867 tenants had been ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... Indra, let me laud him, admitting here, the irregular retention of Vikara{n}a in the aorist, which can be defended by analogous forms such as g{r}-{n}-sh-{n}i, st{r}-{n}-sh-{n}i, of which more hereafter. However, all these translations, as every real scholar knows, are, and can be tentative only. Nothing but a complete Vedic grammar, such as we may soon expect from Professor Benfey, will give us ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... front of their huts, began to pound away at the rice or maize that would form the evening meal, girls were collecting their water pots preparatory to a walk down to the river, and enterprising goats made tentative forays through gaps in the ill-kept fences of neighbouring garden plots; their hurried retreats showed that here at least someone was keeping alert and wakeful vigil. Behind a hut perched on a steep hillside, just opposite ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... which doubles its moral powers has this defect: it often leads to a one-sided development, quite at variance with the many-sidedness of actual realities, and arrests the growth of personality. Something akin to this was seen in Germany in the tentative scheme of an attack en masse. United will and action are essential to give force its greatest value. They must go hand in hand with the greatest spiritual independence and resourcefulness, capable of meeting any emergency and solving ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... which would have been scouted by their fathers; but they are themselves as ready as their fathers were to scout any further new suggestion, and it is only by iteration and reiteration that the shorter steps of tentative experiment can be urged ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... to shelter Her delicate head Would quicken and quicken Each tentative tread If drops chanced to pelt her That summertime spills In dust-paven rills When thunder-clouds thicken And birds close ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... complete resemblance. It is 'a life-long task ere the lump be leavened.' This likeness does not reach its completeness by a leap. It is not struck, as the image of a king is, upon the blank metal disc, by one stroke, but it is wrought out by long, laborious, and, as I said, approximating and tentative touches. My text suggests that to us by its addition, 'So are we, in this world.' The 'world'—or, to use modern phraseology, 'the environment'—conditions the resemblance. As far as it is possible for a thing encompassed ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Babs and Alicia and had them witness a tentative agreement, which had to be ratified by a board of directors of a corporation back on Earth. That board would jump at it, but the stipulation for possible cancellation had to be made. It was mumbo-jumbo. Cochrane felt ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... careful study of all data attainable, may be considerably increased. The mere collection of facts, however, cannot be prosecuted to advantage without predetermined rules of judgment, nor can they be classified at all without the adoption of some principle which involves a tentative theory. More than a generation ago Baader noticed that scientific observers only accumulated great masses of separate facts without establishing more connection between them than an arbitrary and imperfect classification; and before ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... if she would fain summon that understanding spirit and in her arms seek the comfort that none other in this world could give her. So thoroughly did she abandon herself to this first—and final—paroxysm of despair that she failed to hear a tentative rap upon the front door and, shortly, the tread of rough-shod feet on the board walk round the house. Her first intimation that some one had arrived to comfort her came in the shape of a hard hand that thrust ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... and Independents. First in order came the adherents of the established church, a church which was in a very real sense the creation of Queen Elizabeth and of her times— for all that had gone before was unstable and tentative, and might readily have been altered by a ruler of different character or policy. When Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558 the great body of the people of England, from a religious point of view, was still a fluid mass, a ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... and religion.' This was four hundred years ago! And now the Portuguese can be safely snubbed and sat upon, even by a SALISBURY! But if your prudent Premier doesn't 'stiffen his back' a bit, with regard to the tougher and tentative Teuton, 'the arts and valour' of the Britishers will not make as great an impression on the minds of the Africans as your ill-used East African ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... the tentative character of any interpretation for the closing lines, we may mention Jeremias'[1186] supposition that it is a deceased sister who addresses her sorrowing brother at the end of ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... taught me landscape-painting if I had asked him, and I did at a later period study water-color with him; but his practice in oil did not suit me, for this reason: it was entirely tentative, he was constantly demolishing his work, so that it was hard to see how a pupil could possibly follow him. The advantage in working under his eye would have been in receiving a great variety of sound artistic ideas; ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... branch dealing directly with the military use of the fleet. The Secretary of the Navy has also felt the lack of responsible advisers to aid him in reaching conclusions and deciding important matters between coordinate branches of the Department. To secure these results he has inaugurated a tentative plan involving certain changes in the organization of the Navy Department, including the navy-yards, all of which have been found by the Attorney-General to be in accordance with law. I have approved the execution of the plan proposed because of the greater ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... failures, and I grew More tentative and undecided, Consulted friends, and found they knew As little as or less than ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... the musicians now leaned together for a moment. The violins wailed in sad search for the accord, the assistant instrument less tentative. All at once the slack shoulders straightened up firmly, confidently, and then, their feet beating in unison upon the floor, their faces set, stern and relentless, the three musicians fell to the work and ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... was likely to be received from any hand clasp, no matter where given or with whom exchanged, and a princess or a countess was as likely to bestow it upon you as any ordinary person whom you might chance to meet. The pressure itself was merely a tentative question which might be translated by the words: "Are you a nihilist?" and you might understand it and reply to it by a returning pressure of acquiescence, or ignore it utterly, as you pleased. The pressure ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... to the rocky face where the steepness kept the snow from hanging. The sun was now shining full upon them, adding its heat to that produced by the exertion. The advance was slow and tentative for some time, resulting in several failures; and so painfully steep had the place become that Dale twice, to Saxe's great relief, suggested that it would be better to give it up, and the guide seemed to be unwillingly ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... now—?" said Lichfield. Then there was a tentative invitation or two, and I cut the knot by accepting all of them, and talking to every woman as though she were the solitary specimen of feminity extant. It was presently agreed that gossip often embroidered the actual occurrence and ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... traps for her in a tentative form; that is to say, they placed suppositious propositions before her and cunningly tried to commit her to one end of the propositions without committing themselves to the other. But she always saw the game and spoiled it. The trap was ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... the beauty of the proportions and general disposition. The apse, with its three little windows, has the perfect charm of grace and simplicity. A structural peculiarity, to be especially noted as one of the tentative efforts of Romanesque art, is the use of half-arches for the vaulting of the two narrow aisles. Unfortunately, the plastering mania, which has robbed the interior of so many French churches of their venerable air, has not spared this one. A singularly broad flight of steps, partly ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... establishment of direct lines of steamers between North and South America has been brought to the attention of Congress by my predecessor and by Mr. Root before and after his noteworthy visit to that continent, and I sincerely hope that Congress may be induced to see the wisdom of a tentative effort to establish such lines by the use ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... mystic freemasonry between the discriminating guests of the Lotus. Perhaps they were drawn one to another by the fact of their common good fortune in discovering the acme of summer resorts in a Broadway hotel. Words delicate in courtesy and tentative in departure from formality passed between the two. And, as if in the expedient atmosphere of a real summer resort, an acquaintance grew, flowered and fructified on the spot as does the mystic plant of the conjuror. For a few moments they stood on a balcony upon ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... the portiere aside with a curved hand and gracefully separated fingers; it was a staccato movement and her body followed it after an instant's poise of hesitation, head thrust a little forward, eyes inquiring and a tentative smile, although she knew precisely who was there. You would have been aware at once that she was an actress. She entered the room with a little stride and then crossed it quickly, the train of her morning gown—it cried out of luxury with the cheapest voice—taking folds ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... to combine a good deal of pleasure with his business," was the tentative response, and Abbot knew that he was expected to ask the nature of Mr. Hollins's pleasures. He was silent, however, much to his mother's disappointment, for he had heard from other sources of the frequency with ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... drew up a sort of tentative agreement with Tom, binding his firm to pay a large sum in case the young inventor was successful, and then the contractor left, promising to have the rock samples come ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... pass is described as surpassing in its difficulties the conception of any European. It consists of impervious forests, steep ravines, and dismal swamps. A survey for the line was impossible, and a tentative process would have broken the spirit of the best men. I therefore arranged a plan of operations founded on a determination of the absolute latitudes and the difference of longitudes of the two extremities. The difference of ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... overwhelming victory for Tilden and Hendricks. There was, however, a single exception. The New York Times had gone to press with its first edition, leaving the result in doubt but inclining toward the success of the Democrats. In its later editions this tentative attitude was changed to the statement that Mr. Hayes lacked the vote of Florida—"claimed by the Republicans"—to be sure of the required votes in ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... having the tentative introduction of Lydia at once cut off, and yet the proposition seemed to him natural. Indeed, as they turned into Mill Street it occurred to him that Jeff might be providing solitude and a fitting place to talk. As they went down the old street, unchanged ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown |
