"Acquirement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Bench to know that his Lordship is fully justified in assuring us that "there is nothing [of the kind (?)] so dangerous as for one not of the craft to tamper with our free-masonry." Remembering, then, that genius, though it reveals general and even particular truths, and facilitates all acquirement, does not impart facts or the knowledge of technical terms, in what manner can we answer or set aside the question that we have partly stated before,—How did it happen, that, in an age when it was a common practice for young ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... conquest and settlement of the broad plains (pampas) and the frozen region of the south, a new world was created, much as in the United States of America a new world was created by the acquirement and settlement of the western plains, mountain ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... some point in their healing power, but this was thought to be never failing in its virtue to alleviate, if not to cure. Women in the last few years have been wiser than the doctors, for while they looked only at alleviation of pain, wives and mothers began to look beyond that, at the probable acquirement of the taste for drink, and now this prescription is becoming less frequent. Let the women of Canada banish this liquor from their sideboards and kitchens, and from their medicine chests. Let it be given as medicine, only as a last ...
— Why and how: a hand-book for the use of the W.C.T. unions in Canada • Addie Chisholm
... society will be disposed to support it, and also because the nation, enlightened by its actual happiness, will not be easily drawn to the pursuit of something always represented as better, but ever uncertain of acquirement. In the second case, on the contrary, the passions and interests of many individuals, differing in themselves, and all, more or less, abstracted from any feeling for the public good, are neither instructed by ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... you are sure to find them on opposite sides of the question. This is the sickening part of it. People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking. We meet neither with modest ignorance nor studious acquirement. Their knowledge has been taken in too much by snatches to digest properly. There is neither sincerity nor system in what they say. They hazard the first crude notion that comes to hand, and then defend ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... island pointed the inclination of Society to another exponent of those virtues. A ribbon of the Legion of Honour or a string of medals may prove a person's courage; a title may prove his birth; a professorial chair his study and acquirement; but it is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. The umbrella has become the acknowledged ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... world ye know not what fountains of love will be opened in your hearts or what exquisite delight your minds will receive when the secrets of the world will be unfolded to you and ye shall become acquainted with the beauty of the universe—Your souls now growing eager for the acquirement of knowledge will then rest in its possession disengaged from every particle of evil and knowing all things ye will as it were be mingled in the universe & ye will become a part of that celestial beauty that ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... rare facility of expression, and their natural aptitude for the acquisition of other languages. Theophilie Gautier used to say, that the most profitable book for a professional writer to read is the dictionary; that is, that a mastery of words is his most valuable acquirement. The extraordinarily rich synonomy of some American tongues, notably the Algonkin, the Aztec, and the Qquichua, attests how sedulously their resources have been cultivated. Father Olmos, in his grammar of the Aztec, gives many examples of twenty and thirty synonymous expressions, all in current ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... But, if during its development, or after the completion of the development any one of the inborn characters of an individual is modified by some occurrence, the change thus produced is known as an acquired character, or, shortly, as an acquirement. ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... I knew not the distinguishing term of a single halyard, save the "topping lift," and even that scant knowledge was idle, for I was blankly ignorant of the place and purpose of the oddly-named rope. Necessity drove me to the acquirement of boat sense, and now I manage my home-built "flattie"—mean substitute for the neat yacht which necessity compelled me to part with—very courageously in ordinary weather; and I am content to stay at home when Neptune ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... much valuable advice against the time when they should be old enough to assume the management of their father's house. The sweet unselfish lady of Beaubocage had indeed undergone hard experience in the acquirement of the domestic art. Heaven and her own memory alone recorded those scrapings and pinchings and nice calculations of morsels by which she had contrived to save a few pounds for her outcast brother. Such sordid economics show but poorly on earth; but it is ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... interested in them. Where the concern is large, and can afford a remuneration sufficient to attract a class of candidates superior to the common average, it is possible to select for the general management, and for all the skilled employments of a subordinate kind, persons of a degree of acquirement and cultivated intelligence which more than compensates for their inferior interest in the result. It must be further remarked that it is not a necessary consequence of joint-stock management that the persons employed, whether ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... nothing. He gave his days and nights to the acquirement of various sciences. He understood anatomy better than any surgeon of his time; he knew history like a Benedictine, and the antiquities of Rome as a botanist does his favourite flora. But architecture was the art ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... only a random thought; I didn't expect you to understand it. How did you get your English; is it an acquirement, or ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... believe, sir, the winged word in daily use to mark those of us who may still cling to the effete and obsolete belief that music remains a science, difficult of acquirement and not either a toy art, or a mere nerve titillater. We are not, sir, by any means ashamed to bear the stigma of being academic; on the contrary, we feel it a genuine compliment—gratifying because, although perhaps unintentionally ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... whatever may be the disadvantages of the Law as a profession, in spite of the aspersions cast upon it by disappointed suitors, over-nice moralists, and malicious wits, it can boast of one signal advantage over all other business callings,—that eminence in it is always a test of ability and acquirement. While in every other profession quackery and pretension may gain for men wealth and honor, forensic renown can be won only by rare natural powers aided by profound learning and varied experience in trying causes. The trickster and the charlatan, who in medicine ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... silent rumination—a few moments brought our Heroes to the Horse Guards; and as the acquirement "devoutly to be wished" was a general knowledge of metropolitan manners, they proceeded to the observance of Real ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... importance of the idea as behind, distinct from, and manifested through, the technical means. The vocal machinery must necessarily be in first-class order, but the influence of the mind upon the body is so intimate and so extraordinary that even technical acquirement hangs to no small ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... Monetary payment for the work of their best years would not compensate them for the loss of the holdings, the value of which has been created by their own intelligent work. In England farmers of this type would assuredly have a lease, and their Irish brethren hold that schemes for the gradual acquirement of land by tenants should be accompanied by the "Three F's," and extended over fifty instead of thirty-five years. The latter plan would, they think, be of little use to the present tenant, as it would practically raise his rent too far, and thus prevent ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... mirrors spake the truth. Mr. Corny Brannigan had acquired the outward polish, if nothing more. Long and keen observation of polite society had gained for him its manner, its genteel air, and—most difficult of acquirement—its repose ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... locality, suggests the many advantages that accrue from attrition and propinquity. Everybody is stirred to increased endeavor; everybody knows the scheme which will not work, for elimination is a great factor in success; the knowledge that one has is the acquirement of all. Strong men must match themselves against strong men: good wrestlers will need only good wrestlers. And so in a match of wit rivals outclassed go unnoticed, and there is always an effort to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... without genius, yet as genius cannot exist, certainly not manifest itself, without talents, I would advise every scholar, who feels the genial power working within him, so far to make a division between the two, as that he should devote his talents to the acquirement of competence in some known trade or profession, and his genius to objects of his tranquil and unbiassed choice; while the consciousness of being actuated in both alike by the sincere desire to perform his duty, will alike ennoble ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... condition continues to exist. If they were warned against the possibility of self-abuse arising in innocent ways, as well as in more reprehensible ways, they would exert their influence against its acquirement. If however a boy discovers accidentally a condition of which he was innocent, and of which he does not know the significance, it is human nature that he should investigate the phenomenon and in the end suffer as a consequence. In the effort to relieve some local irritation he may handle himself ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... himself characteristics of tone and treatment hitherto unknown to players. After his return to Genoa he composed his first "Etudes," which were of such unheard-of difficulty that he was sometimes obliged to practice a single passage ten hours running. His intense study resulted not only in his acquirement of an unlimited execution, but in breaking down his health. His father was a harsh and inexorable taskmaster, and up to this time Paganini (now being fourteen) had remained quiescent under this tyrant's ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... without Marie consenting to quit that happy home. The sterling education she had received was lodged in a vigorous brain, which contented itself with the acquirement of knowledge. Yet she had remained very pure and healthy, even very naive, maidenly by reason of her natural rectitude. And she was also very much a woman, beautifying and amusing herself with a mere nothing, and ever showing gaiety and contentment. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... comfortable sort of place, isn't it, father?" Fred asked, following his father's look and thought from the Morris chair to the student's lamp, and all those other things which nowadays seem an inevitable part of the acquirement of learning. ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... state of general culture, become out of date, may be rejected, and that that which has proved itself inimitable may be appropriated; in general, so that it may be kept up to the requirements of the times. And, finally, the school must, by examinations and reports, aid the pupil in the acquirement of a knowledge of his real standing. The examination lets him know what he has really learned, and what he is able to do: the report gives him an account of his culture, exhibits to him in what he has made improvement and in what ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... music? She could play on an ancient spinet which was one of the chief treasures of the "best parlour" of Briar Farm, and she could sing old ballads very sweetly and plaintively,—but of "technique" and "style" and all the latter-day methods of musical acquirement and proficiency she was absolutely ignorant. Foreign languages were a dead letter to her—except old French. She could understand that; and Villon's famous verses, "Ou sont les neiges d'antan?" were as familiar to her as Herrick's "Come, my Corinna, ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... for, and excuse the tyranny of man, many ingenious arguments have been brought forward to prove, that the two sexes, in the acquirement of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character: or, to speak explicitly, women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue. Yet it should seem, allowing them to have souls, that there is but one way appointed ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... terms for three years, and was duly called to the Bar; but no evidence came home as to the acquirement of any considerable amount of law lore, or even as to much law study, on the part of the young aspirant. The learned pundit at whose feet he had been sitting was not especially loud in praise of his pupil's industry, though he did say a pleasant word ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... second son of Jonas Brown, of Brown Hall, the magistrate by whom Tim Reynolds and the others had been committed to Ballinamore, and, like his father, was most unpopular in his own country. He was arrogant, overbearing, conceited, and passionate—without any rank which could excuse pride, or any acquirement that could justify conceit. It is, however, as a gentleman jockey that we are at present to make his acquaintance, and in that capacity he was about as much inferior to the grooms by whom the horses were trained as Bob was superior to them. He had courage enough, however, and would ride at anything; ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... with which the preternatural powers of mind design the witchery of the world. Ah, how different in depth and majesty were those intercommunications of idea between Ernest Maltravers and a woman scarcely inferior to himself in capacity and acquirement, from that bridge of shadowy and dim sympathies which the enthusiastic boy had once built up between his own poetry of knowledge and ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from all the peasant classes of Europe and the East have many of them lacked also the chance to be drilled in the things that belong to private and personal habit demanded by our civilization. It may be that for such the public school is the only medium for the belated acquirement of such habits; but if publicity in drill and lack of reserve and modesty be the price paid for wholesale instruction it may injure those with good breeding at command in their own homes by lowering their standards, ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... road to learning, no short cut to the acquirement of any valuable art. Let photographers and daguerreotypers do what they will, and improve as they may with further skill on that which skill has already done, they will never achieve a portrait of the human face divine. Let biographers, novelists, and the rest of us groan as we may ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... be expected in such a state of things, are the least respectable members of the community. The only unprofessional man that I know in Philadelphia (and he studied, though he does not practice, medicine) who is also a person of literary taste and acquirement, has lamented to me that all his early friends and associates having become absorbed in their several callings, whenever he visits them he feels that he is diverting them from the labor of their lives, and the earning of their ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... But Cyrus' acquirement of the chunk of hair was his last triumph. His downfall was near; and, although it involved Cecily in a most humiliating experience, over which she cried half the following night, in the end she confessed it was worth undergoing just to get ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... no one with the dry chronicles of a law office. The acquirement of learning is a slow process in life, and perchance a slower one in the telling. I lacked not application during the three years of my stay in Richmond, and to earn my living I worked at such odd tasks as came ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the need of such mental drill, such deliberate selective acts, in respect to the smaller matters of life. You willingly spend time and money over that narrowing and sharpening of attention which you call a "business training," a "legal education," the "acquirement of a scientific method." But this new undertaking will involve the development and the training of a layer of your consciousness which has lain fallow in the past; the acquirement of a method you have never used before. It is reasonable, even reassuring, that hard work and discipline ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... private audiences, and superintended all the arrangements of the household. The rest of the day was devoted to the enormous correspondence and affairs of administration which devolved upon him as first minister of state and treasury. He was very ignorant. He had no experience or acquirement in the arts either of war or peace, and his early education had been limited. Like his master, he spoke no tongue but Spanish, and he had no literature. He had prepossessing manners, a fluent tongue, a winning and benevolent disposition. His natural ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... arrived at by the Gun Club, to the disparagement of Texas, every one in America, where reading is a universal acquirement, set to work to study the geography of Florida. Never before had there been such a sale for works like "Bertram's Travels in Florida," "Roman's Natural History of East and West Florida," "William's Territory of Florida," and ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... and a residuum. Very much of him, too much perhaps, had gone into the acquirement and perfect performance of the caecal operation; the man one met in the social world was what was left over. It had the effect of being quiet, but in its unobtrusive way knobby. He had a knobby brow, with an air about it of having recently been intent, and his conversation was curiously ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... also privately bought the manuscripts belonging to the extensive and important collection of Professor Van Ess of Darmstadt, together with a number of his early printed books. Phillipps was indefatigable in the acquirement of his treasures, and at the time of his death his library contained some sixty thousand manuscripts, and a goodly collection of printed books. He writes: 'In amassing my collection of manuscripts, I commenced with purchasing ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... Duclos; "and I will tell you how. The great Conde, you will allow, was no fool; and the Duchesse de Longueville is cited as one of the wittiest women that ever lived. The Regent was a man who had few equals, in every kind of talent and acquirement. The Prince de Conti, who was elected King of Poland, was celebrated for his intelligence, and, in poetry, was the successful rival of La Fare and St. Aulaire. The Duke of Burgundy was learned and enlightened. His Duchess, the daughter of Louis XIV., was remarkably clever, and wrote epigrams and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... what could be more soothing and refreshing than to gaze upon this charming pastoral scene? This azure earth, this verdant sky, this lovely maid who combined in her person all the simpering charms of youth, and never, for one misguided moment, troubled her ochre head over the acquirement of that higher knowledge which, as we all know, is the proud prerogative of man! What price shall I say for 'The Maiden's Dream'? No bids! Put it down if you please, Joshua. We have no art collectors with us to- night. Let me have the ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... again. Psychologically it is to repeat the processes of mind which were called into operation the first time the stimulus in question started a mental reaction. The nervous system of man is so constituted that in the acquirement of knowledge, each time the nerve centers react to the same stimulus, the tendency so to react becomes stronger, under the mere presence of the stimulus, starts up an automatic sort of reaction, and we say that the child knows ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... Federal commander at Manassas, and a trained soldier of unusual acquirement, was so hounded and worried by ignorant, impatient politicians and newspapers as to be scarcely responsible for his acts. This may be said of all the commanders in the beginning of the war, and notably of Albert Sidney Johnston, whose ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... son, born and reared in the midst of that ostentatious greatness which he looked on as his own by divine right; whereas his father remembered that it had chiefly become his by fortuitous acquirement, and much of it by means not likely to look well in the sight of Heaven. This son was Charles, count of Charolois, afterward celebrated under the name of Charles the Rash. He gave, even in the lifetime of his father, a striking specimen of despotism to the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... many women are frivolous, that they seem scarcely to have a serious thought, that the energies of their minds—if they have any—are bent upon the acquirement of a thorough knowledge of the latest foreign fashion, heedless whether they ruin father or husband or not. So there are—those especially who are taught to think it very "unfeminine" to be "strong-minded" enough to be independent, who deem ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... in republics become the origin of the most forceful aristocracies. As a rule commerce enriches the cities and their inhabitants, and increases the laboring and mechanical classes, in opening more opportunities for the acquirement of riches. To an extent it fortifies the democratic element in giving the people of the cities greater influence in the government. It arrives at nearly the same result by impoverishing the peasant and land owner, by the many new ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... in the present essay; but, so far as they bear on any question discussed, they merely furnish additional evidence on the side which I have taken. Thus, in the present case, I assume that the luxuries of civilized life are in possession harmless, and in acquirement serviceable as a motive for exertion; and even on those favourable terms, we arrive at the conclusion that the nation ought not to indulge in them except under severe limitations. Much less ought it to indulge in them if the temptation consequent on their possession, ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... Acknowledge (letters, etc.) avizi. Acknowledgement (letters, etc.) avizo. Acknowledgment konfeso. Aconite akonito. Acorn glano. Acoustics akustiko. Acquaint sciigi. Acquaintance konato. Acquainted, to be konatigxi. Acquiesce konsenti. Acquire akiri. Acquirement akiro. Acquisition akirajxo. Acquit (debt) kvitanci. Acquit (blame) senkulpigi. Acrid acida. Acrimonious akretema. Acrobat ekvilibristo. Across trans. Act agi. Act (statute) regulo, legxo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... unless a man has acquired diction and come in contact with style, for all the arts rest on the imitation of accepted models. Many students in all schools of journalism come from immigrant families and are both inconceivably ignorant of English and inconceivably satisfied with their acquirement of English, as we all are with a strange tongue we have learned to speak. Even in families with two or more generations of American life, the vocabulary is limited, construction careless, and the daily contact with any literature, now that family prayers and Bible ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... at the failure of the expedition. Ridicule is the most powerful of weapons. Man is not half so humorous as the dog or the elephant. With the latter it is an instinct. With the former it is an acquirement. Still, the perception of humor is fairly general. Don't argue with your opponent, Kill him with ridicule. Laughter is deadly. When the people laugh at a Government it can put its spare collar and shirt in its red handkerchief, and retire to the privacy ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... training them to domestic usefulness. Ill do they requite parental affection, which has devoted, perhaps, a considerable portion of hard-earned profits to their education in useful branches of knowledge, or to their acquirement of polite accomplishments: by refusing to assist in family arrangements, or to submit to that wise after-discipline, by which they may be prepared to occupy important situations in future life. It is not the proper business of a woman to shine, to court admiration, or to display superficial ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... daughter, greatly surpassed the Earl and her eldest brother in every point of knowledge, and even learning, as I may say, although both ladies owe that advantage principally to their own cultivation and acquirement. ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... what he wanted to do, and he knows, better than any one else, how nearly he has done it. In judging his own technical skill in the accomplishment of his aim, it is easy for him to be absolutely unbiased, technique being a thing wholly apart from one's self, an acquirement. But, in a poem, the way it is done is by no means everything; something else, the vital element in it, the quality of inspiration, as we rightly call it, has to be determined. Of this the poet is rarely a judge. To him it is a part of himself, and he is scarcely ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... depths of philological despair. Twenty-five years of preliminaries might have been avoided by changing the peg in the scale of creation, and the studies of the boy might have begun where now they end. Twenty-five years in the span of life would thus have been saved, had what must be a universal acquirement been incorporated into the original programme of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Virginia Central Railroad, before named) we find the extreme minimum of 234 feet. Such a track does not admit of high speeds, and its very use implies the existence of natural obstacles which prevent the acquirement of great velocities. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... Mrs. Clayton's delight and edification, for the benefit of my own lungs, which suffered from such confirmed silence, as I had at first indulged in. His exquisite ear—his prodigious memory—aided him in the acquirement of words, and even long and difficult sentences, of which he delivered himself oracularly when engaged ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... reserves; a reduction is made for men serving at remote Asiatic posts; the War Office may send soldiers into the reserve before the end of their terms. Reduction is also made, from eleven to thirteen years and a half, for various degrees of educational acquirement. Exemptions are also made for family reasons and on account of peculiar occupation or profession. Individuals who personally manage their estates or direct their own commercial affairs (with the exception ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... general education had been great and remarkable. Music [223], from the earliest time, was an essential part of instruction; and it had now become so common an acquirement, that Aristotle [224] observes, that at the close of the Persian war there was scarcely a single freeborn Athenian unacquainted with the flute. The use of this instrument was afterward discontinued, and indeed proscribed ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Public Schools the whole education of children is directed to the cultivation of their heads or intellectual faculties alone. The heart, with all its moral and mysterious emotions, is entirely neglected. Every mental power and acquirement is intended and directed to promote their prosperity, success, and happiness in this life; at least this is what is sought and promised as the reward of study and application. They are constantly presented with the bright side of the ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... an accomplishment as an "acquirement or attainment that tends to perfect or equip in character, ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... was broken—but the contents still a secret. Poor Agnes had learned to write as some youths learn Latin: so short a time had been allowed for the acquirement, and so little expert had been her master, that it took her generally a week to write a letter of ten lines, and a month to read one of twenty. But this being a letter on which her mind was deeply engaged, her whole imagination aided her slender literature, ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... will gain any thing, must give up something; he that wishes to improve his understanding, his manners, or his health, must contradict his will. This may not be an easy task; but you will find it much harder to suffer that contempt, which is always the portion of those who neglect the acquirement of wisdom and of virtue. The wisest of men are often obliged to adopt the principle I have been recommending to you. I will tell you an anecdote, in confirmation of this assertion: 'A gentleman appointed to a government abroad, consulted an eminent person, ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... arms; and to this end the readiest and most efficient means lie in the encouragement of rifle-practice, by the organization of rifle-clubs, the institution of shooting-matches for prizes, and the inculcation by all available methods of a taste for the acquirement of an art which constitutes the vital spirit of military efficiency. Wherever clubs can be formed, a course of drilling should be entered upon in connection with target-practice; but thousands of able-bodied men throughout ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... circumstances—he had never learned. It belongs to the department of Common Sense, in which, unfortunately, there has never been a professor at West Point. His after life does not seem to have been favorable to its acquirement. Withal, the hauteur characteristic to Cadets clung to him, and on many occasions rendered him unfortunate in his intercourse with volunteer officers. Politeness with him, assumed the airs and grimaces of a French dancing-master, ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... in literature and the arts,—the display of gorgeous prodigality,—raised him to a sort of chivalrous rivalry with Francis I. In mental culture he excelled George IV., who owes much of his reputation for capacity and acquirement to an imposing manner, and the eagerness to applaud a prince: stripped of this charm, his ideas and language appeared worse than common when he put them on paper. Both had the same dominant ambition to be distinguished and imitated, as the arbiters of fashion in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... letter did he trouble himself with anything but the primitive needs of primitive man. Here, however, he permitted himself the luxury of a brief but wholly satisfactory interval of summary. The fortunes of the road had forced him into the prodigal acquirement of a corncrib and a mule when he had meant to please Brian by his economy. He had burned the one and abandoned the other, wholly necessary irregularities. He had thrashed a farmer. A fugitive from justice he had ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Miss Matty could teach children anything, it would throw her among the little elves in whom her soul delighted. I ran over her accomplishments. Once upon a time I had heard her say she could play "Ah! vous dirai-je, maman?" on the piano, but that was long, long ago; that faint shadow of musical acquirement had died out years before. She had also once been able to trace out patterns very nicely for muslin embroidery, by dint of placing a piece of silver paper over the design to be copied, and holding both against ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... very pretty child, and she lost none of her comeliness and none of her sweetness of character as she approached maturity. I was impressed with this upon my return from college. She, too, had pursued those studies deemed necessary to the acquirement of a good education; she had taken a four years' course at South Holyoke and had finished at Mrs. Willard's seminary at Troy. "You will now," said her father, and he voiced the New England sentiment regarding young womanhood; "you will now return to the quiet of your ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... of man project itself athwart whatsoever of knowledge or surmise, of imagination, understanding, faculty, acquirement, or natural disposition, he has in him; and, like light through coloured glass, paint strange pictures 'on the rim of the horizon' and elsewhere! Truly, this same 'sense of the Infinite nature of Duty' is the central part ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... happens that a really great collection of books is sold otherwise than at auction. The collector recognizes that the taste and judgment displayed by him in the acquirement of his library will, by the medium of the auctioneer's carefully prepared catalogue, be made evident to all succeeding generations of book lovers. How many would to-day know the names of George Brinley, John Allan, and William Menzies, were it not ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... Englanders were mainly farmers, hunters, and fishermen. Commerce was slow to grow up among them. Trade was the means towards supporting a religious state; not a method for the acquirement of wealth. By and by, however, manufactures of cotton and woollen fabrics grew up, lumber was floated down to the coast, gunpowder and glass were made, and fish were cured for winter use and to be sent abroad. They ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... this world would not be lost, but that if rightly applied, it would make her spirit brighter, and fit it for a continually increasing and glorious expansion in the life to come; and she had wisdom enough to know that every intellectual acquirement was adding to the talent intrusted to her, and thus honoring the gracious Giver. So she determined to strive earnestly to improve her new privileges, and thus repay her benefactor as well as adorn ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... understand that it was good to be smart always, and even smarter at church. Religious fervour, if it ran to limpness of dress, or form, or mind, was punishable according to law. A wholesome spirit of competition was encouraged, not in the taking of many prizes, the attending of many services, or the acquirement of much Euclid, but in dress, smartness, and ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... work, fast and eat at such times as might be convenient. He was considered by his friends to be a rather cold, steady man, who concealed under an indifferent manner an almost insatiable ambition. He certainly had given way to an entire absorption in his profession, and in the dogged acquirement of one language after another as occasion seemed ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... requires the strictest application and on this account it is a valuable factor in the acquirement ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... to be expressed. He has done just as much towards being that which we ought to respect as a great painter, as a man who has learned how to express himself grammatically and melodiously has towards being a great poet. The language is, indeed, more difficult of acquirement in the one case than in the other, and possesses more power of delighting the sense, while it speaks to the intellect, but it is, nevertheless, nothing more than language, and all those excellences which are peculiar to the painter as such, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... from executioners, barbers, shepherds, Jews, gipsies, midwives, and fortune-tellers; from high and low, from learned and vulgar. In the sketch I have given of his career in that volume you hold, I have copied out a few words of his upon the acquirement of knowledge which affect ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... nations were not to be set on the same plane with the Greeks and Romans: "The former have either not raised themselves, or have raised themselves only to a slight extent, above that type of culture which should be called a mere civilisation and bourgeois acquirement, as opposed to the higher and true culture of the mind." He then explains that this culture is spiritual and literary: "In a well-organised nation this may be begun earlier than order and peacefulness in the outward ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure. This definition is useful; but as it would include novels and other works of fiction, which yet we do not call poems, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... shall we say of the actual acquirement of knowledge?—is the body, if invited to share in the enquiry, a hinderer or a helper? I mean to say, have sight and hearing any truth in them? Are they not, as the poets are always telling us, inaccurate witnesses? and yet, if even they are inaccurate and indistinct, ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... policy and choosing the agents of the government under which they live. I can imagine none better than that now accepted by a majority, I believe, of the American people, namely, evidence of intelligence and the possession of a certain degree of education and of character evidenced by the acquirement of a modicum of property and the payment of a minimum tax. It was for regulation of the full suffrage in this manner that I contended in our constitutional convention of 1898, to wit: the admission to the franchise ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... spend their youth under the glare of city lights. Some know Orion when he shines gloriously in the winter heavens. Many are able to point out the north star, or pole star, as everybody should be able to do. All this forms a good beginning, and may serve as the basis for the rapid acquirement of a general knowledge of the geography of ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... Philippine question was up in the Senate, I made a speech in which I compared Senator Hoar with his colleague, Senator Lodge, said that Senator Lodge had no such fear as did Senator Hoar on account of the acquirement of non-contiguous territory, and made the remark that Senator Hoar was far behind the times. He was not present when I made the speech, but afterwards read it in the Record. He came down to my seat greatly out of humor one day and stated that if three-fourths ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... advantage to a plant to be sterile with half its brethren, that is, with all the individuals belonging to the same form? Moreover, if the sterility of the unions between plants of the same form had been a special acquirement, we might have expected that the long-styled form fertilised by the long-styled would have been sterile in the same degree as the short-styled fertilised by the short-styled; but this is hardly ever the case. On the contrary, there ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... the fact that with the development of the nervous system there arise impulses for hundreds of new kinds of movements which the child can learn to suppress or to control only with the passing of time. This is the age at which the child is exposed to the acquirement of many undesirable muscular habits, such as various kinds of fidgetings, biting of the finger-nails, twirling of buttons, wrinkling of the forehead, shruggings, swaying the body, rolling the tongue, tapping with the fingers ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... any white quadruped or bird were crossed by a male of a black breed, and the male and female offspring were paired together, will it be pretended that the grandchildren would not inherit a tendency to blackness from their male grandfather? The acquirement of new characters by the sterile worker-bees is a much more difficult case, but I have endeavoured to shew in my 'Origin of Species,' how these sterile beings are subjected to the power ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... these six, O king, conduce to the happiness of men. These six are always miserable, viz., the envious, the malicious, the discontented, the irascible, the ever-suspicious, and those depending upon the fortunes of others. These six, O king, comprise the happiness of men, viz., acquirement of wealth, uninterrupted health, a beloved and a sweet-speeched wife, an obedient son, and knowledge that is lucrative. He that succeedeth in gaining the mastery over the six that are always present in the human heart, being thus the master of his senses, never committeth sin, and therefore ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... who have outdone that ruggedness, can forgive him his frequent use of a warm general tone inclining to brownness. His ideal of form and of composition he possessed complete from the beginning; his mastery of light and color and the handling of materials was slower of acquirement; but he did acquire it, and in the end he is as absolute a master of painting as of drawing. He did not see nature in blue and violet, as Monet has taught us to see it, and little felicities and facilities of rendering, and anything approaching cleverness or the parade of ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... inventors who apply them. Liaison is maintained at all points, but the attack varies from time to time. It may be intense at certain places and other sectors may be quiet for a time. There are occasional reverses, but the whole line in general progresses. Each year witnesses the acquirement of new territory. It is seen that through the centuries there is an ever-growing momentum as knowledge, efficiency, and organization increase the strength of this invading army of ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... streets of bawling costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames—such was the background of our days. We went across St. Margaret's Close and through the school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all these things. We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was necessary for Greek epigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest played games. We dipped down into something clear and elegantly proportioned and time-worn and for all its high resolve of stalwart virility a little feeble, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... species by mingling, as is generally assumed, then, since varieties cross readily and their offspring is fertile inter se, there is a fundamental distinction between varieties and species. Mr. Darwin therefore labors to show that it is not a special endowment, but an incidental acquirement. He does show that the sterility of crosses is of all degrees; upon which we have only to say, Natura non facit saltum, here any more than elsewhere. But, upon his theory he is bound to show how sterility might be acquired, through natural ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... fleeting, dreaming, vaporing imagery. Yet it is nothing. We exist in eternity. Dissolve the body and the night is gone; the stars are extinguished, and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of virtue, the approval ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... general, and by no means brilliant as a conversationist, where poetry, literature, or the fine arts were concerned, could talk freely, and with good sense, too, in her own family circle. She cannot justly be called a romantic person: nor were her literary acquirement great: she never opened a Shakspeare from the day she left the stage, nor, indeed, understood it during all the time she adorned the boards: but about a pudding, a piece of needle-work, or her own domestic affairs, she was as good a judge as could be found; ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... occupation for which he was designed, from repining led him to resist, and from resisting, to rebel. He eloped from his friends, and contrived to enter the army. But, fond of the polite arts, and eager for the acquirement of knowledge, he found not this way of life much better adapted to his inclination than that from which he had escaped; he soon grew weary of it, was reconciled to his father, and entered at the Temple. But here, too volatile for serious study, and too gay for laborious application, ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... the lesser classificatory groups represent smaller sections of the one unique order of Nature. Note that Lamarck's Echelle is in no way a morphological one, and was not intended to be such. It is a scale of increasing physiological differentiation, and the stages of it are marked by the acquirement of this or that new organ (cf. Oken). "Observation of their state convinces one that in order to produce them successively Nature has proceeded gradually from the simpler to the more complex. Now Nature, having had in mind the realisation ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... deeper, and in many senses more difficult, more complicated and involved. It requires more than the average intellect, energy, attention, patience, and courage, and that singular but imperial quality, at once a gift and an acquirement, presence of mind—{anchinoia}, or nearness of the {nous}, as the subtle Greeks called it—than almost any other department of human thought and action, except perhaps that of ruling men. Therefore it is, that we hold ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... for forty-seven years was the admiration of the frequenters of concerts and theatres of both those cities as principal violoncello. To the extraordinary merits of Mr. HERSCHEL was united considerable acquirement in the superior branches of mechanics and philosophy, and his affinity to his brother, Sir WILLIAM HERSCHEL, was not less in science than ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... acquirement of knowledge with words, and they end with words; but an unnatural civilization has taught man to walk the greater part of his intellectual journey by means of arbitrary systems of writing and printing. When ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... Dereham. George was now six years old, acutely observant of the things that interested him, but reluctant to proceed with studies which, in his eyes, seemed to have nothing to recommend them. Books possessed no attraction for him, although he knew his alphabet and could even read imperfectly. The acquirement of book-learning he found a dull and dolorous business, to which he was driven only by the threats or entreaties of his parents, who showed some concern lest he should ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... Government to allow the Israelites themselves, the people by whose agency this boon has been given to mankind, to have the direction of those establishments in which they are to be trained in the true knowledge of their own inalienable inheritance. For the acquirement of knowledge in secular science and literature they should also have the appointment of their own teachers, such whose competency may be approved of by His Majesty's Minister of Public Instruction, or should be allowed to ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... woman. Variety is the talisman by which she commands all hearts and gained her monarch's. She is only consistent in being delightful; but, though changeable, she is not capricious. Each day displays a new accomplishment as regularly as it does a new costume; but as the acquirement seems only valued by its possessor as it may delight others, so the dress seems worn, not so much to gratify her own vanity as to please her friends' tastes. Genius is her idol; and with her genius ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... Longfellow: "Mr. Longfellow is not a scholar in the German sense of the word—that is to say, he is no pedant, but he certainly is a scholar in another and perhaps a higher sense. I mean in range of acquirement and the flavor that comes with it." Those words might have been written of himself. It is sixty-five years since Lowell was appointed to his professorship at Harvard, and during this long period erudition ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... another, and he says, 'I am Culture, and intellectual acquirement; or my name is Education, and I am going to make the tree good in the most scientific fashion, because what makes men bad is that they do not know, and if they only knew they would do the right.' Now, I thoroughly believe that education diminishes ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... telling stroke had yet been struck—nothing worthy the vaulting ambition of a soldier accomplished. Fighting is a soldier's profession, and the peculiar opportunities afforded by a siege, for the acquirement of fame and distinction, were too rare to be let pass unseized. How much the Commander and his staff may have been influenced by considerations of this kind, is not easy to say. But signs were not wanting that a serious ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... Society might possibly be filled with the subtle speculations of the schoolmen; not improbably, the obtaining a mastery over the products of mediaeval thought might necessitate an even greater expenditure of time and of energy than the acquirement of the "New Philosophy;" but though such work engrossed the best intellects of Europe for a longer time than has elapsed since the great fire, its effects were "writ in water," so far as ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... elementary or minor species must have originated from their common ancestor must be quite different from the mode of origin of the varieties. We have assumed that the first come into existence by the production of something new, by the acquirement of a character hitherto unnoticed in the line of their ancestors. On the contrary, varieties, in most cases, evidently owe their origin to the loss of an already existing character, or in other less frequent cases, to the re-assumption of a quality [248] formerly ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... the actual want of cultivation," said Mrs. Evelyn, warming "time taken up with other things, you know usefully and properly, but still taken up so as to make much intellectual acquirement and accomplishments impossible; it can't be otherwise, you know neither opportunity nor instructors; and I don't think anything can supply the want in after life. It isn't the mere things themselves which may be acquired ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... acquaint the dull and witless, that he has established a class for the acquirement of an elegant and ready style of punning, on the pure Joe-millerian principle. The very worst hands are improved in six short and mirthful lessons. As a specimen of his capability, he begs to subjoin two ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... something here which Mynie Boltwood could not understand. He was not ambitious in the acquirement of knowledge, however, and merely did as he was told—and let it go ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... lesson we called your attention to the fact that the Yogis devote considerable time and practice to the acquirement of Concentration. And we also had something to say regarding the relation of Attention to the subject of Concentration. In this lesson we shall have more to say on the subject of Attention, for it ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka |
