"Aptness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... preferred in the law; and Mr. Pool, at the latter end of his life, took such a pride in his company that he affected to furnish his chambers with their pictures." Amongst the benefits to be derived from such a club as that of which Mr. Pool was president, Roger North mentions "Aptness to speak;" adding: "for a man may be possessed of a book-case, and think he has it ad unguem throughout, and when he offers at it shall find himself at a loss, and his words will not be right and proper, or perhaps too many, and his expressions ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... grass was elastic and dry, he lightly rested his arm on her waist, and practised with her the new step of fascination. Instead of music he whispered numbers, and she, as may be supposed, showed no slight aptness in following his instructions. Thus they moved round together, the moon-shadows from the twigs racing over their ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... Liverpool return two members to Parliament. In fitting his tax to the capacity of Chester, he would be forced to allow Liverpool to escape unscathed. No skill in money matters on the part of the Treasury Secretary, and no aptness for finance on the part of the Committee of Ways and Means, can avail here. The Constitution must apparently be altered before any serviceable resort can be had to direct taxation. And yet, at such an emergency ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... stood in sun and rain unoccupied, with a watchman and his wife, named Hope, who lived close by. The aptness of his name was that of the little Barbadian mule-tram which creeps through the coral-white streets, striving forever to divorce motion from progress and bearing the name Alert. Hope had done his duty and watched the bungalow. It was undoubtedly still ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... pleased,' said he, 'you must be, with the aptness of my scholar. Julia has not studied dialectics in vain. Before I can feel myself able to contend with her, I must study the books she has commended so—from which, I must acknowledge, I have been repelled by a ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... eloquence, a splendid and full-flowing music, wealth of phrase, aptness of epithet, opulence of ideas— all these qualities characterise the prose style of Mr Ruskin. His similes are daring, but always true. Speaking of the countless statues that fill the innumerable niches of the cathedral of Milan, he says that "it is as though a flight ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... wit, a quickness and aptness at selecting and applying quotations, and a countenance that is as solemn and as blank as the back side of a tombstone when he is delivering a particularly exasperating joke. One night a negro woman was burned to death in a house ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The aptness of the simile is still more apparent when we confront the material constructions of a nation with the degree of the nation's development or decadence at the time when ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... barrows in Britain show the Low German race as pure barbarians, great at destruction, but incapable of constructive work. Professor Rolleston, who has opened several of these early heathen tombs of our Teutonic ancestors, finds in them everywhere abundant evidence of "their great aptness at destroying, and their great slowness in elaborating, material civilisation." Until the Anglo-Saxon received from the Continent the Christian religion and the Roman culture, he was a mere average Aryan barbarian, with a strong taste for war and plunder, ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... him who should trespass on the lawful rights of the owner of the land.[348] It is to such demons embodied in living form that epithets such as the 'seizer,' the 'one that lurks,' and the like apply with peculiar aptness. In a tablet belonging to a long series of incantations,[349] we find references to various animals—the serpent, the scorpion, monsters—that are regarded as the ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... presented to my imagination,—to do something and become somebody, which partly made amends for my coldness for letters. In fact, I have always thought that if I had been allowed to read history more constantly, instead of losing my time in studies for which I had no aptness, I might have made some figure ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... to that age when his disposition, ruined by indulgence, had led him so bitterly to oppress and injure his brother as to drive him from the home of their youth, and the recollection of those little more matured years, when jealousy at his superior aptness, strength, and success with "cousin Helen," had ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... it be supposed that Mary herself had any expectations or even any hopes. With juvenile aptness to make much of the little things which had interested her, and prone to think more than was reasonable of any intercourse with a man who seemed to her to be so superior to others as Reginald Morton, she was anxious for an opportunity to set herself right ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... beef, or labor. In a large majority of cases—especially in the dairy districts, at least, comprising the Eastern and Middle States—the farmer cares more for the milking qualities of his cows, especially for the quantity they give, than for their fitness for grazing, or aptness to fatten. These latter points become more important in the Western and some of the Southern States, where much greater attention is paid to breeding and to feeding, and where comparatively slight attention is given to the productions of the dairy. A ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... person can thus be beautifully exercised only in the actual erotic life; in part it is the natural instinct of dignity and temperance; in part it is the art of touching the things of sex with hands that remember their aptness for all the fine ends of life. Upon the doorway of entrance to the inmost sanctuary of love there is thus the same inscription as on the doorway to the Epidaurian Sanctuary of Aesculapius: "None but ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of feeling with an expansion uncommon even in an accepted lover, and we made our conclusions that however subject he might be to his indefinitely future mother-in-law, he would not be at all so to his wife, if she could help it. He took the lead, but because she gave it him; and she displayed an aptness for conjugal submissiveness which almost amounted to genius. Whenever she spoke to either of us, it was with one eye on him to see if he liked what she was saying. It was so perfect that I doubted if it could last; but my wife said a girl like that could keep it up till she dropped. I have never ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... she made her debut at the Tremont Theatre in January, 1842, in the play of "Old and Young," personating five characters, and introducing songs and dances. Although very youthful, she displayed great aptness and evinced remarkable musical talent. On the 25th of September, 1843, she first appeared on the boards of the Boston Museum, which then stood at the corner of Tremont and Bromfield Streets, where the Horticultural Hall now stands. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various |
