"Comprehensiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all, what we care chiefly to know of men and women is not so much their special bias or tastes as the general depths and mass of the human nature that is in them—the breadth and power of their life, its comprehensiveness of grasp, its tenacity of instinct, its capacity for love and its ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... and the affections of the citizens towards it, will be strengthened, rather than weakened, by its extension to what are called matters of internal concern; and will have less occasion to recur to force, in proportion to the familiarity and comprehensiveness of its agency. The more it circulates through those channels and currents in which the passions of mankind naturally flow, the less will it require the aid of the violent and perilous ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... Seelye is not engaged conspicuously in public charities, few hands are so frequently open as his to the wants of the poor. Great comprehensiveness of intellect, an indomitable energy, a rare penetration and control over other minds, combined with an unblemished integrity of character, have given him a high reputation among physicians in ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... to be gotten from studying, in comparison, the course of these opinions in the established churches of Great Britain and among the unestablished churches of America. Under the enforced comprehensiveness or tolerance of a national church, it is easier for strange doctrines to spread within the pale. Under the American plan of the organization of Christianity by voluntary mutual association according to elective affinity, with freedom to receive or exclude, the flock within the fold may ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... I have learnt," he said, "in all my experiments on poor humanity—never to see a man do a wrong thing without feeling I could do the same in his place. I used to pride myself on that once, fool that I was, and call it comprehensiveness. I used to make it an excuse for sitting by and seeing the devil have it all his own way, and call that toleration. I will see now whether I cannot turn the said knowledge to a better account, as common sense, patience, and ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... his ever wakeful humanity, his inflexible integrity, his uncompromising truthfulness, his lofty magnanimity, his unbounded patriotism, and his unfaltering loyalty to duty. His mind was of an original and solid cast, admirably balanced, and combining the comprehensiveness of reason with the penetration of instinct. Its controlling element was a strong, sterling sense, that of itself rendered him a wise counselor and a safe leader. All of his personal attributes and antecedents made him pre-eminently a man of the people, and remarkably ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Society a few years ago Judge Webb declared—"Their University was founded by Protestants, for Protestants, and in the Protestant interest. A Protestant spirit had from the first animated every member of its body corporate. At the present moment, with all its toleration, all its liberality, all its comprehensiveness, and all its scrupulous honour, the genius loci, the guardian spirit of the place, was Protestant. And as a Protestant he said, and said it boldly, Protestant might it evermore remain." To this exposition of the spirit of the College ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... ineffaceable from the human heart, its wonderful fusion of the supernatural into the natural life, its vast resources for a powerful hold upon the conscience. We doubt whether any single reformed church can present a theory of religion comparable with it in comprehensiveness, in logical coherence, in the well-guarded disposition of its parts. Into this interior view, however, the popular polemics neither give nor have the slightest insight: and hence it is a common error both to underrate the natural power of the Romish scheme, and to mistake ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... conveyed the ugliest possible idea of the state of society to which they could have been adapted. One exception there was, however, in a very antique elbow-chair, with a high back, carved elaborately in oak, and a roomy depth within its arms, that made up, by its spacious comprehensiveness, for the lack of any of those artistic curves which abound in ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... parodies of Swift's writings are those of A Tale of a Tub, Against Abolishing Christianity, and Gulliver's Travels. The comprehensiveness of abuse is demonstrated in the nasty Gulliverian allegory, in which Swift is accused of being an ignorant, hypocritical, atheistical Irishman, high-flying Tory, and Jacobite Papist. Even Swift's sex life—his relationship with Stella and Vanessa—is made ugly (pp. 1-10). Indeed, ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... revolution effected by bronze in the early world, indeed, with the revolution effected by railways in our own time; only the neolithic world had been so very simple a one that the change was perhaps even more marvellous in its suddenness and its comprehensiveness. Metal itself implied metal-working; and metal-working brought about, not only the arts of smelting and casting, but also endless incidental arts of design and decoration. The bronze hatchets, for example, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... of these Orders, that of October 9, is memorable, not only for the sagacity and comprehensiveness of its general dispositions, but even more for the magnanimous confidence with which the details of execution were freely intrusted to those upon whom they had to fall. It was evidently drawn up in the first instance for Collingwood only; ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... man who makes things is the artist. He has bowed down and worshipped and he has arisen and stood before God and created before Him, and the spirit of the Creator is in him. To take the artist's point of view, is to take the point of view that absorbs and sums up the others. The supremacy and comprehensiveness of this point of view is a matter of fact rather than argument. The artist is the man who makes the things that Science and Practical Affairs and Philosophy are merely about. The artist of the higher order is more scientific than the scientist, more practical than the man of affairs, and more ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... with rude and boisterous rejoicings the restoration of the Monarchy which they felt, with a true instinct, involved the restoration of the old Church of England, the church of their fathers and of the older among themselves, with its larger indulgence for the instincts of humanity, its wider comprehensiveness, and its more ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... BOOK OF THE HOUSEHOLD is another book, of a class of which many have been issued, and good books too; but this one, by the thoroughness and comprehensiveness of its arrangement, will go far to render the housewife who possesses it independent of all the rest.... Many a housewife will find the articles interesting enough to be taken ...
— Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery - A Manual Of Cheap And Wholesome Diet • A. G. Payne
... chemistry. His language, coming to us as it does through the medium of interpreters of a bygone age, and through the simple symbols of less sophisticated minds, has poetic beauty, but lacks our modern comprehensiveness. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... simple and impossible, the exact opposite of the real world. Such an opposition would constitute the liberation of the divine mind from nature, and its existence as a self-conscious individual. The effort after comprehensiveness of view reduces things to unity, but this unity stands out in opposition to the manifold phenomena which it transcends, and rejects ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Ecbatana, he quitted Lydia for the interior, taking Croesus with him, and proceeded towards the Median capital. He was bent on prosecuting without delay his schemes of conquest in other quarters—schemes of a grandeur and a comprehensiveness ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... of narrative, with comprehensiveness of detail, admirably adapted for the use of the School-room.—Douglas Jerrald's ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... a work altogether, which, for comprehensiveness of design, strength, clearness, and simplicity, has no parallel. We do not even except or overlook Montesquieu and Aristotle among the writings of ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... but in the brain, and that it must be considered a nervous disease.[258] So revolutionary a doctrine could not fail to meet with violent opposition, but it was confirmed by Willis, and in 1681, we owe to the genius of Sydenham a picture of hysteria which for lucidity, precision, and comprehensiveness has only been ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... are scarcely bound together by a more necessary and delicate union than that which binds men's affections, imagination, wit and humor with the subtle ramifications of historical language. Language must be left to grow in precision, completeness and unity, as minds grow in clearness, comprehensiveness and sympathy. And there is an analogous relation between the moral tendencies of men and the social conditions they have inherited. The nature of European men has its roots intertwined with the past, and can only be developed ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... prefer to give a perfect exposition of their subject, rather than blindly respect a law never very essential in itself. The pieces of Shakspeare violate in the highest degree the unity of time and of place; but they are full of comprehensiveness; nothing is easier to grasp, and for that reason they would have found favor with the Greeks. The French poets tried to obey exactly the law of the three unities; but they violate the law of comprehensiveness, as they do not expound dramatic subjects by dramas ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... allowed, under the penalty of the pillory. This provision, the captain protested, was the best rule of them all, and saved a vast deal of trouble; for, as he knew by experience, a man might be a perfect adept in the language of Stunin'tun, and then be laughed at in New York for his pains. The comprehensiveness of the tongue was also another great advantage; though, like all other eminent advantages or excessive good, it was the next-door neighbor to as great an evil. Thus, as my Lord Chatterino obligingly explained, "we-witch-it-me-cum" ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the pamphlet attacks on Pope for a full understanding of his satiric art is universally admitted, but the pamphlets themselves were cheap and ephemeral, and copies are now rare and not easily come by. Both in the comprehensiveness of their charges and in the slashing hatred which informs them (however feeble the verse), One Epistle and The Blatant Beast offer as fair a sample as any two such pamphlets can of the calumny, detraction, and critical misunderstanding Pope endured, for the most part patiently, from the publication ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... there. First that the men of Montelimart do federate with the already federated men of Etoile. Second, that, implying not expressing the circulation of grain, they 'swear in the face of God and their Country' with much more emphasis and comprehensiveness, 'to obey all decrees of the National Assembly, and see them obeyed, till death, jusqu'a la mort.' Third, and most important, that official record of all this be solemnly delivered in to the National Assembly, to ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... is repeated to Abraham in Gen. xviii. 18. Instead of the [Hebrew: mwpHvt hadmh] (the families of the earth), the [Hebrew: gvii harC] (the nations of the earth) are there mentioned; the family-connection is lost sight of, and the comprehensiveness only—the catholic character of the blessing—is prominently brought out. This promise is a third time repeated to Abraham in chap. xxii. 18, on a very appropriate occasion, even that on which, by his endurance of the greatest trial, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... activities with as distorted a half-memory of what we have seen as that of the African who visited England, and afterwards said he had been in a huge hill which carried him over great waters. The comprehensiveness of our thought, whether we are asleep or awake, no doubt depends largely upon our idiosyncrasies, constitution, habits, and mental capacity. But whatever may be the nature of our dreams, the mental processes that characterize ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... ideas, or things, are definable, and therefore capable of being taught, and what must be left to the teaching of nature: these are the essential qualifications for him who would form good definitions; these are the elements of that accuracy and comprehensiveness of thought, to which allusion has been made, and which are characteristic of "the first and ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... places became Sullan colonies. To repeople Samnium was, as we have said, no part of the regent's design. A great part of these assignations took place after the Gracchan mode, so that the settlers were attached to an already-existing urban community. The comprehensiveness of this settlement is shown by the number of land-allotments distributed, which is stated at 120,000; while yet some portions of land withal were otherwise applied, as in the case of the lands bestowed on ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... reading of St. George Mivart's book "The Genesis of Species" later convinced me of the accuracy of my uncle's judgment. But the fascination of the subject persisted, and for a time Herbert Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy," by the comprehensiveness of its induction and its vast array of data, exercised its thrall. Alfred Russel Wallace's "Darwinism," Huxley's "Lectures on Evolution," Tyndall's "The Beginning of Things," Grant Allen's "The Evolutionist ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... much accuracy and with as wide a range as their instruments allowed, and they scattered over the world a set of ideas which at once entered into energetic rivalry with the ancient scheme of authority. The great symbol of this new comprehensiveness in the insurrection was ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... most enlightened of other nations will not bear comparison with it in the depth and certainty of its foundation principles, or in the comprehensiveness and moral grandeur of its conceptions of human duty and responsibility." [Footnote: Smith's Bible Dictionary, iii. ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... that for a while the great unity of all tends perhaps to be obscured. Such a caste system in scholarship, undoubtedly helps at first, in the gathering and classification of new material. But if followed too exclusively, it ends by limiting the comprehensiveness of truth. The search is endless. ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... which is designed to be painted, is of a thick and strong texture, several folds being beat and incorporated together; after which it is cut in breadths, about two or three feet wide, and is painted in a variety of patterns, with a comprehensiveness and regularity of design that bespeaks infinite taste and fancy. The exactness with which the most intricate patterns are continued is the more surprising, when we consider that they have no stamps, and that the whole is done by the eye, with pieces of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... of the subject, only, after quoting thus much at present from the Letter of Mr. SWAN, to add, that I entirely agree with him, I believe, as to the force, clearness, and comprehensiveness of intellect manifested by this ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... concealed sceptres in their old umbrellas. Exquisitely nice in his personal habits, he had the practical democracy of a good-natured young prince; he had never yet seen a human being who awed him, nor one whom he had the slightest wish to awe. His courtesy, had, therefore, that comprehensiveness which we call republican, though it was really the least republican thing about him. All felt its attraction; there was really no one who disliked him, except Aunt Jane; and even she admitted that he was the only person who knew ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... is harder to find brains than to find hands. The average mental endowment may be no higher in college than out; but granting it to be as high, the culture which it receives gives it immense advantage. The fruits of that culture, readiness, resources, comprehensiveness, should all be held in the service of the State. Military knowledge and practice should be imparted and enforced to utilize ability, and make it the instrument, not only of personal, but of national welfare. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... historical fiction. In the freshness of literary success, she did not hesitate to sacrifice all her newly won popularity, for years, by the publication of her remarkable "Appeal for the Class of Americans called Africans," a book unsurpassed in ability and comprehensiveness by any of the innumerable later works on the same subject,—works which would not even now supersede it, except that its facts and statistics have become obsolete. Time and the progress of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... of years until in the nineteenth century modern research in the Pyramids and elsewhere, brought it to light; but the Hebrew literature was passed down to the Christian era, and thence to our own times, intact. It excels in beauty, comprehensiveness, and a true religious spirit, any other writing prior to the advent of Christ. Its poetry, which ranges from the most extreme simplicity and clearness, to the loftiest majesty of expression, depicts ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those hopes; ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... treated in this book. But the whole nature of his genius was so closely related to the Romantic spirit, as shown in the intimate connection between literature and music, in his descriptive powers and his development of the orchestra, that for the sake of comprehensiveness some familiarity should be gained with the essential features of his style. Of Weber it may be said with conviction that there is hardly a composer of acknowledged rank in whom style, i.e., the way and the medium by which musical thought is presented, so prevails over the substance ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... that infinite space cannot be understood, is itself a proof that the mind unconsciously realises the precise nature of such infinity, in attributing to it at once the all-comprehensiveness from which there is no escape, in which all dimensions exist, and by virtue of which all other conceptions become possible; since this infinite space contains in itself all dimensions of existence—transitory, ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... Johannes Mueller (1833), and the enormous progress of palaeontology and comparative anatomy between 1820 and 1860—provided this necessary foundation. Darwin was the first to coordinate the ample results of these lines of research. With no less comprehensiveness than discrimination he consolidated them as a basis of a modified theory of descent, and associated with them his own theory of natural selection, which we take to be distinctive of "Darwinism" in the stricter ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... vividly Life representative in its many phases of love, joy, sorrow, and death? It must be conceded that he House of Life touches many passions and depicts life in most of its changeful aspects. It would afford an adequate test of its comprehensiveness to note how rarely a mind in general sympathy with the author could come to its perusal without alighting upon something that would be in harmony with its mood. To traverse the work through its aspiration and foreboding, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... in the open door her quick glance went over the big room with a comprehensiveness which catalogued its inmates accurately and instinctively. Courtrey was not there, though his great bay, Bolt, stood outside. However, Wylackie Bob was there. This man, sitting at a canvas covered table in a corner, idly fingering ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... last phrase gives a good insight into the working of Gordon's mind. Romish Catholicism, as a religious system, was about as opposed as anything could be to his own views, which were all in favour of comprehensiveness, and a large display of individuality. But though he had no sympathy with the narrow exclusiveness of that ecclesiastical survival of the dark middle ages—the Roman system—he had the greatest sympathy with earnest individuals, who ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... The comprehensiveness and vital nature of the subject, biology, present at once an inspiration and an element of fear to the conscientious teacher. They cause him to regard in utter amazement, the applicant for a position who in answer ...
— Adequate Preparation for the Teacher of Biological Sciences in Secondary Schools • James Daley McDonald
... of unknown supermen. No doubt there is confusion because of the complexity of motives depicted and the multiplicity of impressions created, but there is also a final message of the greatness and comprehensiveness of human souls. In this world of sin and weakness and death, it is human beings, however mocked or maltreated by circumstance or by themselves, that are still triumphant and interesting. Out of his strifes and failures, the individual man yet emerges, the ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... up-to-date facts and opinions on modern agricultural methods. It is safe to say that many years must pass before it can be surpassed in comprehensiveness, accuracy, practical value, and mechanical excellence. It ought to be in every library in ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... Singh found his tongue and cursed her with a force and comprehensiveness that only Asia can command; he gave her to understand that the next fire she dropped on him should be allowed to work God's will and burn her—her, her rats, her cobras, and her cutthroats. Two honest Sikhs, he swore, would die ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... of separating the essential from the accidental, as well as his success in grasping the main features of a subject divested of frivolous and subordinate details. That he possesses a thinking faculty of rare comprehensiveness, as well as acuteness, will be allowed by all who will study his other works now in course of republication ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... into seven books, and the general classification of diseases is from head to foot—the usual method of that day. The modern reader will probably be surprised at the comprehensiveness of the work, which, besides general diseases, includes considerable portions of physiology, physiognomy, ophthalmology, laryngology, otology, gynecology, neurology, dermatology, embryology, obstetrics, dietetics, urinary and venereal diseases, therapeutics, toxicology, operative surgery, cosmetics ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... apart from the form observed in healthy children, occurs in varied conditions, and for comprehensiveness we divide them into ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... discussion, agreement and understanding. In all the arrangements of social life, e.g. for news, communications, supplies, discussion and entertainment, and demands will be made and complied with for greater convenience and comprehensiveness, for popular aesthetics and popular representation. In these arrangements and in these alone Art will have to find its functions and its home. Public buildings, gardens, sanatoriums, means of transit and exhibitions will be established at great cost. All the demands of the spirit and ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... very convenient subdivision of topics, the most striking merit of the new cyclopaedia is, perhaps, comprehensiveness. Among its faults, very few faults of omission can fairly be charged; and, indeed, it seems to us rather to err in giving too many articles, especially on American second-rate preachers, politicians, and literary men, all of whom are no doubt ticketed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... sense in which the word is used in the constitution. The whole turn of the clause containing it indicates an intent to give by it a liberal latitude to the exercise of the specified powers. The expressions have peculiar comprehensiveness. They are "to make all laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by the constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or office thereof." To give the word "necessary" the restrictive operation contended ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall |
