"Exactitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... witnesses who had seen and spoken to them on the road, and in the inns and cafs. The description of the traveller, who, under the name of Laborde, had taken the seat beside the courier, was furnished with equal exactitude by the clerks, from whom he had retained the place, and by those who saw him mount. Couriol, recognized as having with Bernard conducted back the horses to Muiron, after the crime, had left Paris for Chteau-Thierry, where he was lodged in the house of Citoyen Bruer, where also ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... displacements it occasioned, the facility with which it effaced the boundaries of the fields, and in one summer modified the whole face of a nome, had forced them from early times to measure with the greatest exactitude the ground to which they owed their sustenance. The territory belonging to each town and nome was subjected to repeated surveys made and co-ordinated by the Royal Administration, thus enabling Pharaoh to know ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... hardly be believed, as the patient had not the appearance of being drugged, and the possession of such a secret would be almost as valuable as the art in question itself. The doctrine of animal magnetism we cannot receive, on account of the want of uniformity and exactitude in the experiments; and I think, we are fairly driven to take refuge in the force of the imagination. Before doing this, however, we ought to make considerable allowances for exaggerations, colouring, and the different manner in ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... European (Julian) dates. As regards the year, Oppolzer's dates are the "astronomical" dates, that is, the astronomical year—x is the same as the year (x 1) B.C.; or, in other words, the year of Christ's birth is, for certain astronomical exactitude purposes, interpolated between the years 1 B.C. and A.D. 1, as we vulgarly compute them: that is to say, the eclipses of the sun recorded 2,400 years ago by Confucius, from notes and annals preserved in his native state's archives as far back as 700 B.C., are found to be almost without exception ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... in his little rocker and gave himself up to the moment's bliss, first applying his lips with careful exactitude to the dividing-line between ...
— The Very Small Person • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... what is nominally described as a "lull." But, as a young Officer writes, "you must not imagine that life here is all honey. Even here we do a bit for our eight-and-sixpence." Once upon a time billets were billets. They now very often admit of being shelled with equal exactitude from due in front and due in rear, and water is laid on throughout. "It is a fact well known to all our most widely circulated photographic dailies that the German gunners waste a power of ammunition. The only criticism I have to make is that I wish they would waste it more carefully. ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... antecedents would not stand a close scrutiny; and thus a mighty respect was engendered in them for those who had nothing to fear. Moreover, directly you got away from the vastly rich, class distinctions were observed with an exactitude such as can only obtain in an exceedingly mixed society. The three professions alone were sacrosanct. The calling of architect, for example, or of civil engineer, was, if a fortune had not been accumulated, utterly without prestige; trade, any connection with trade—the merest ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... during the bombardment. The first commenced on August 14th at 4.15 p.m. The shell fire, directed with great exactitude, lasted two hours without interruption. After a break of half-an-hour, some 21-centimetre guns opened fire. All night, at intervals of ten minutes, they rained shells upon the fort, causing it considerable damage. The escarpment was damaged, the protecting walls of the left flank battery ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... foot-soldiers but also for the wagons of the artillery, with the result that, before daybreak, the corps of Marshals Lannes and Soult, the first division of Augereau's, as well as the foot guards, were massed on the Landgrafenberg. Never has the term massed been used with more exactitude, for the chest of each man was almost touching the back of the man in front of him; but the troops were so well disciplined that, in spite of the darkness and the crowding together of more than forty thousand men, there was not the least disorder; and although the enemy ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... dexterity with the window of a railway carriage, offered him a situation on the spot. "The only fruit of much living," he observes, "is the ability to do some slight thing better." But such was the exactitude of his senses, so alive was he in every fibre, that it seems as if the maxim should be changed in his case, for he could do most things with unusual perfection. And perhaps he had an approving eye to himself when ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the steadiness and exactitude of his hand? You might swear that rule, square, or compasses had been employed to draw lines, which he, in fact, drew with the brush, or very often with pencil or pen, unaided by artificial means, to the great marvel of those who watched him. Why ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... beliefs of the North are not mirrored with any exactitude in the Elder Edda. Indeed only a travesty of the faith of our ancestors has been preserved in Norse literature. The early poet loved allegory, and his imagination rioted among the conceptions of his fertile muse. "His eye was fixed on the mountains till the snowy peaks assumed human features and ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... that account, I say, we ought not to reject the ancient Art, as if it were not, and had not been properly founded, because it did not attain accuracy in all things, but rather, since it is capable of reaching to the greatest exactitude by reasoning, to receive it and admire its discoveries, made from a state of great ignorance, and as having been well and properly made, and not from chance. (Hippocrates, On Ancient Medicine, Adams edition, Vol. ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... Dissenting ministers have no more notion of exactitude in their affairs than a child! The idea of forgetting that he has sold his shares, and applying for the bonus, when it seems he has transferred them ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a delicate matter to investigate with exactitude the means by which Mazarin obtained entire sway over the Queen-Regent, and one which La Rochefoucauld scarcely touches upon; but it is too interesting a point in history to be left in the dark, and thereby to altogether disregard that which first constituted ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... return with exactitude, and, going straight upstairs to the chamber known indifferently as "Maisie's room" or "nurse's room," sure enough he found the three children there alone! They were fed, washed, night-gowned and even dressing-gowned; and this was the hour when, while ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... of my days and nights, my thoughts and dreams, in the mystic isles of the South Seas, written without authority of science or exactitude of knowledge. These are merely the vivid impressions of my life in Tahiti and Moorea, the merriest, most fascinating world of all the cosmos; of the songs I sang, the dances I danced, the men and women, white and tawny, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... the events fall within the period of the South African war, a fact that will, of course, much increase their appeal for those whose Oxford memories belong to the same epoch. But it is naturally a book difficult for the male reviewer to appraise with exactitude. All I can say, being unconversant with the domestic politics of a ladies' college, is that I should imagine Miss WINIFRED TAYLOR to have given a remarkably true picture of existence therein; its mixture of academic ambition, sentiment, religious fervour and party spirit seems ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... lived thus, filling all the duties of my calling with the most scrupulous exactitude, praying and fasting, exhorting and lending ghostly aid to the sick, and bestowing alms even to the extent of frequently depriving myself of the very necessaries of life. But I felt a great aridness within me, and the sources of grace seemed closed against me. I never found that happiness which ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... Anderson, who came to me as an assistant in the glass experiments, and has remained ever since in the laboratory of the Royal Institution. He assisted me in all the researches into which I have entered since that time; and to his care, steadiness, exactitude, and faithfulness in the performance of all that has been committed to his charge, I am much indebted.—M. F.' (Exp. Researches, ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... minute difference of form depends the clearness of the image, and, as a consequence, the entire efficiency of the instrument. "Almost infinite," indeed (in the phrase of the late Dr. Robinson), must be the exactitude of the operation adapted to bring about so ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... expect any historical exactitude or critical spirit from our author. For his purpose a narrative was just as useful whether true or false, but it probably never occurred to him to question the exact truth of any statement that he found written in a book. The ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... Germany, whither that Lady was on the point of following her new-married Husband, Baron Lindenberg. On her arrival at that Estate, the young Agnes was put into a Convent, situated but a few miles from the Castle. The Nuns to whom her education was confided performed their charge with exactitude: They made her a perfect Mistress of many talents, and strove to infuse into her mind a taste for the retirement and tranquil pleasures of a Convent. But a secret instinct made the young Recluse sensible that She was not born for solitude: In ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... view. Night had for some while now hooded the marvelous city. They had planned it to be symmetrical, its maps were orderly, near; in two dimensions, that is length and breadth, its streets met and crossed each other with regular exactitude, with all the dullness of the science of man. The city had laughed as it were and shaken itself free and in the third dimension had soared away to consort with all the careless, irregular things that know ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... substantial proof of the exactitude of your remark that maidens get drunk at dances, all you have to do is to send someone, unobtrusively, to [I am not going to give the name of the place] to obtain from the waiters and waitresses ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... jeter les yeux sur une carte pour reconnaitre l'exactitude topographique de cette derniere expression. En effet, dans toute la partie superieure de son cours, le Po recoit une foule d'affluents qui convergent vers son lit; ce sont le Tesin, l'Adda, l'Olio, le Mincio, la Trebbia, la Bormida, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... sur une copie manuscrite, qu'on en a recue de Paris: et on les a fait imprimer avec le plus d'exactitude qu'il ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various
... Africa. The American system of making by machinery all the parts of an article—say, of a watch—of a given grade by means of gauges and templets, so that the parts may be "assembled," and of such singular exactitude in their making that any part may be replaced by the corresponding piece of any other watch of the same grade, has in this manufactory attained its highest results, greatest precision and most perfect illustration. The whole collection of watches was sold within a few weeks after the opening. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... were weak when examined critically, but nobody worried as long as a light bright pastel effect was obtained. Jackson's vigorous drawing and woodcutting were out of place in this field. They were, like his tonal exactitude that made holes in the wall, a distraction and an offense against ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... truthfulness need not be bald, and that real power lies more in exact accuracy than in luxuriance of diction. Years after, no less an authority than Spedding, in a letter upon the influence of Bacon on his own style in the matter of exactitude, the pruning of fine epithets and sweeping statements, the reduction of numberless superlatives to positives, asserted that, if as a young man he had fallen in with Huxley's writings before Bacon's, they would have produced ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... she had no dinner. She made it ready, with a scrupulous exactitude, but she could not eat. She went back to her post at the window. Nobody went by. Of all the neighbors who might have driven to market, not one appeared. Life itself seemed to be stricken from her world. At four o'clock she caught ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... has so skilfully represented on canvas. Seen in the various phases of his daily life, he gave the idea of being perfectly well-balanced, as exactly regulated as a Leroy chronometer. Phileas Fogg was, indeed, exactitude personified, and this was betrayed even in the expression of his very hands and feet; for in men, as well as in animals, the limbs themselves are ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... want of ready money; she could scarcely obtain the servants' wages; and the bill for the spring seeds was a heavy weight on her conscience. For Miss Monro's methodical habits had taught her pupil great exactitude as to all ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... ways are all fallen dark to us.] "The King of Poland arrived upon us at Berlin on the 29th of May," says Wilhelmina; had been at Potsdam, under Friedrich Wilhelm's care, for three days past: Saturday afternoon, 29th May, 1728; that is with exactitude ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... say that they would be detained two days on their route. Tregear, whom hitherto Dobbes had never seen, had left his arrival uncertain. This carelessness on such matters was very offensive to Mr. Dobbes, who loved discipline and exactitude. He ought to have received the two young men with open arms because they were punctual; but he had been somewhat angered by what he considered the extreme youth of Lord Gerald. Boys who could not shoot were, he thought, putting themselves forward ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... leaving the door open at the foot of the stairs. She had embroidery in hand: a cap. And while Miss Insull and Samuel combined pounds, shillings, and pence, whispering at great speed, she bent over the delicate, intimate, wasteful handiwork, drawing the needle with slow exactitude. Then she would raise her ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... jays," said Uncle Ben, laying down the pen with scrupulous exactitude beside the book and gazing at his fingers as if he had achieved a miracle of delicate manipulation. "They don't seem to be ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... ready, the available number of plates, bowls, glasses, bark platters, and leaves are set out and the boiled meat is apportioned in small pieces, with great exactitude as to size and quality, to the several plates. The same thing is done for the broiled meat after it has been hacked into suitable sizes. No one is forgotten, not even the children of the guests, nor the slaves. The rice is then brought along in bamboo joints, ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... dispute by tests made in the two cases with a Bertillon dynamometer, an instrument of the nicest exactitude, which proved that the same individual operated in both cases; that is one point made good. And next, the man who robbed Mme. Van den Rosen and Princess Sonia is Gurn. That is proved to equal demonstration by the fact that the burglar burned his hand while engaged upon ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... the authenticity of this chronicle, edited with great exactitude by the Brahminic, and more especially the Buddhistic historians of India and Nepaul, I desired, upon my return to Europe, to publish ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... end must be judged according to their fittingness to the end. Now the payment of tithes is due not for its own sake, but for the sake of the ministers, to whose dignity it is unbecoming that they should demand minute things with careful exactitude, for this is reckoned sinful according to the Philosopher (Ethic. iv, 2). Hence the Old Law did not order the payment of tithes on such like minute things, but left it to the judgment of those who are willing to pay, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... much greater than in Lima. This favored country, which extends from the 3d to the 22d degree of south latitude, and which contained at the time of its conquest by the Spaniards an immense population, though its amount is not known with numerical exactitude, ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... the seas,—the insect and animal tribes of field and forest would enjoy their existence unmolested, and the great sun would shine on ever the same, rising at dawn, sinking at even, with unbroken exactitude and regularity if Man no longer lived. Why have the monstrous forces of Evolution thundered their way through cycles of creation to produce so ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... toutes nos forces cette bonne nouvelle d'abord, parcequ'elle affirme une fois de plus la scrupuleuse exactitude qu'on apporte au paiement des coupons, ensuite elle prouve le vif intrt qu' inspire au gouvernement la situation de ses nombreux employs, enfin elle nous fait esprer qu'aprs avoir song eux, on s'occupera aussi payer ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... like Gray's "Elegy," or Goldsmith's "Traveller" or "Deserted Village," of substituting other words for those the poet has chosen, and he will readily perceive how much of the charm of the lines depends upon their fine exactitude of expression. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... represented the somewhat rugged, long-nosed, and beetle-browed profile of a man, crowned by a huge Kalmuck cap; the flesh part was of a heavenly pink, the cap, the moustache, the eyebrows were of a bluish grey; to see this with its childish exactitude of design and colour, and hugeness of scale—it covered at least 25 deg.—held me spell-bound. As I continued to gaze, the expression began to change; he had the exact air of closing one eye, dropping his jaw, and drawing down his nose; had the thing not been so imposing, I could have smiled; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... eccentricity of conversation, wishes for a more intense knowledge of remorse than murder itself could give. There is, however, a wide and wild difference between the curiosity that prompts the wish to know the exactitude of any feeling or idea, and the direful passions that ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... good eyes when it exerts itself. The great and strange variety of cometary aspects is described with exactitude by Father Souciet in his Latin poem on comets. "Most of them," says he, "shine with fires interlaced like thick hair, and from this they have taken the name of comets. One draws after it the twisted folds of a long tail; another appears to have a white ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... this wiliest of fences lived almost within the shadow of Newgate, though she was as familiar in the prison yard as at the Globe Tavern, her nightly resort, she obeyed the rules of life and law with so precise an exactitude that suspicion could never fasten upon her. Her kingdom was midway between robbery and justice. And as she controlled the mystery of thieving so, in reality, she meted out punishment to the evildoer. Honest citizens were robbed with small risk to life or property. For Moll always ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... virtue, in whatever sense you take the word, dispenses with justice; and I think no more of the people who do great things—as you say—at the expense of justice, than of poets who fancy they produce great beauties of imagination without regularity. I know that excessive exactitude tends slightly to deaden the fire alike of composition and of action; but there is a mean in everything. It has never been a question in our controversy of a capuchin who throws away his time in quenching the darts of the flesh (though by ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... find a writer who does not contradict himself at times, and Borrow was so much a man of "moods" that it would be uncharitable to set him down as a hypocrite, as Caroline Fox does, because all his sayings and doings do not tally with a superhuman exactitude. ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... in where judgment fails [as to the distance] in objects which diminish. The eye can never be a true judge for determining with exactitude how near one object is to another which is equal to it [in size], if the top of that other is on the level of the eye which sees them on that side, excepting by means of the vertical plane which is the standard and guide of perspective. Let n be the eye, e f the vertical plane above ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... latter, at last, came to the end of what had, at first, seemed an inexhaustible stock of invectives, Hamar stated his proposals with mathematical exactitude. ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... of the solar system the sun could not appear to it larger than the blaze of a tallow candle. To us it was wholly incredible how, in that dim remoteness, it could still hold true to the central force and follow at a snail-pace, yet with unvarying exactitude, its stupendous orbit. Clemens said that heretofore Neptune, the planetary outpost of our system, had been called the tortoise of the skies, but that comparatively it was rapid in its motion, and had become a near neighbor. He was a good deal excited at first, having somehow ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... belongs the credit of having discovered that the personnel of the poem corresponds with extraordinary exactitude to the Figures of the Spring and Summer 'Fertility-exciting' processions, described with such fulness of detail by Mannhardt. Especially is this the case with the Whitsuntide procession at Vardegotzen, in Hanover, where we find ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... high seas, strong gales from the southward, and the ship driven to refuge in Kirkwall or Deer Sound. I have many a passage before me to transcribe, in which my grandfather draws himself as a man of minute and anxious exactitude about details. It must not be forgotten that these voyages in the tender were the particular pleasure and reward of his existence; that he had in him a reserve of romance which carried him delightedly over these hardships and perils; that to him it was "great gain" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... indistinguishable ruins of the formerly superb all-dominant Assyrian city that had been "as a golden cup in the Lord's hand," and was now no more in very truth than a "broken and an empty vessel." For the words, "And Babylon shall become heaps," have certainly been verified with startling exactitude—"heaps" indeed it has become,—nothing BUT heaps,— heaps of dull earth with here and there a few faded green tufts of wild tamarisk, which while faintly relieveing the blankness of the ground, at the same time ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... pampered menial of High-Dutch extraction, and, indeed, as yet only partially extracted, lays before him a cup of coffee, a roll, and a pat of butter, all, to quote the deity, very good. A while ago, and R. L. Stevenson used to find the supply of butter insufficient; but he has now learned the art to exactitude, and butter and roll expire at the same moment. For this rejection he pays ten cents, or fivepence sterling (0 pounds ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... has carved a chalcedony into a head of Dejanira, with the skin of the lion about it. He says, "In the stone there was a vein of red colour, and here the artist has made the skin turn over... and he has represented this skin with such exactitude that the spectator imagines himself to behold it newly torn from the animal! Of another mark he has availed himself, for the hair, and the white parts he has taken for the face and breast." Matteo was an independent spirit: when a baron once ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... preserve, at least exteriorly, the decorum of their profession. The rules and regulations are tolerably well observed; the grades of hierarchy are maintained with scrupulous exactitude. The life of the religious is one of restraint and perpetual control. He is denied all sorts of pleasures and diversions. How could such a system of self-denial ever be maintained, were it not for the belief which the Rahans have in the merits that they amass by following a course ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... like a child tearing up the petals of flowers in order to make a mosaic on the garden path; and the results of this murderous diligence you mistook for a knowledge of the world. When the bits fitted with unusual exactitude, you called it science. Now at last you have perceived the greater truth and loveliness of the living plant from which you broke them: have, in fact, entered into direct communion with it, "united" with its reality. But ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... by nearly a quarter, in the second by nearly half, the estimated 600,000 tons, and for the present month also we may fairly cherish the best expectations. The technical success guarantees the economic success with almost mathematical exactitude. True, the economic results cannot be so easily expressed numerically and set down in a few big figures as the technical result in the amount of tonnage sunk. The economic effects of the submarine warfare are expressed in many different spheres covering a wide area, where the enemy seeks ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... had the honour to be appointed lieutenant, and was much pleased when I saw the spirit of emulation which reigned in every heart. I cannot sufficiently praise the spirit of exactitude with which every one was animated, and the progress which all made in so short a time in the management of their arms. I lay stress on the fact that it was an occupation entirely novel to them, and one of which the commencement always appears ...
— Three Frenchmen in Bengal - The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757 • S.C. Hill
... shilling, but he was ready to believe all things of their clumsiness. In vain did Grantly and Mary protest that they had never been near his desk; the squire might have been Sherlock Holmes himself, so certain was he as to the exactitude ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... of nature an omen, or prognostic, of some future evil. But this is not its proper and original meaning. Superstition is from the Latin superstitio, which means a superabundance of religion,[99] an extreme exactitude in religious observance. And this is precisely the sense in which the corresponding Greek term is used by the Apostle Paul. Deisidaimonia properly means "reverence for the gods." "It is used," says Barnes, "in the classic ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... more fascinating, more delightful than that of a catalogue. The one which I was reading—edited in 1824 by Mr. Thompson, librarian to Sir Thomas Raleigh—sins, it is true, by excess of brevity, and does not offer that character of exactitude which the archivists of my own generation were the first to introduce into works upon diplomatics and paleography. It leaves a good deal to be desired and to be divined. This is perhaps why I find myself aware, while reading it, of a state of mind which in nature more imaginative ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... air of respectability? No, there was the seal of simple honesty stamped upon her whole person; a care in the details of her simple toilet, which separated her from that venturous class. A wandering princess would not show such exactitude in her dress; she would betray herself by a ragged shawl worn over a new dress, by silk stockings with boots down at heel, by something ripped and out of order. Besides, the old woman did not take snuff nor ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... have noticed in them only a life altogether barbarous. All their care is to seek for food and drink. They have a great deference for their king and the chiefs of their villages, and they obey them with the greatest exactitude. They do not have regular hours for their meals. They drink and eat at any time and wherever they may be, when they are hungry and thirsty, and when they find wherewith to satisfy themselves. But they eat little at a time, and one of their meals is not enough to ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... contention is that we can arrange the fields of human thought and interest about the world of fact in a sort of scale. At one end the number of units is infinite and the methods exact, at the other we have the human subjects in which there is no exactitude. The science of society stands at the extreme end of the scale from the molecular sciences. In these latter there is an infinitude of units; in sociology, as Comte perceived, there is only one unit. It is ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... attention was paid to dates; his story was of the dire shock of conflicting nations, and was not to be hampered by the minute exactitude of the historian. Successively or together English, Austrians, Prussians, Russians appeared upon the scene, according to the then prevailing condition of the ever-changing alliances, and it was not always an ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... them to be regarded by British Ministers, and to a less extent by the British people, as sources of annoyance, as so many diplomatic "pin-pricks." The manners of German diplomacy are not suave. Suavity is no more part of the Bismarckian tradition than exactitude. But after all, the manners of the diplomatists of any country are a matter rather for the nation whose honour they concern than for the nations to which they have given offence. They only partially account for the deep ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... noticed a painted clock on several of the wooden tombstones, evidently intended to indicate the exact hour at which the person lying under the sod had died. For instance, it would stand at twenty-two minutes to four o'clock, which was the precise moment the dead man expired, carefully noted by the exactitude of the Finns, who are very particular about such matters. In the newspapers, for example, it is stated, "Johanson died, aged 46 years 11 months and 4 days," and this record of the number of days is by no means uncommon. They are ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... deposed by the term Aryan. It is made up of the names of two mountain chains which seem to mark out the space over which its tribes were spread. Like the word Indo-Germanic, it made pretensions to exactitude which ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... the extraordinary veracity, of the Memoirs. F. W. Barthold, in 'Die Geschichtlichen Personlichkeiten in J. Casanova's Memoiren,' 2 vols., 1846, had already examined about a hundred of Casanova's allusions to well known people, showing the perfect exactitude of all but six or seven, and out of these six or seven inexactitudes ascribing only a single one to the author's intention. Baschet and d'Ancona both carry on what Barthold had begun; other investigators, in France, Italy and Germany, have followed them; and two things are now certain, first, that ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... voice. Then the door opened and he stopped wondering. Dr. Rives wasn't a him; she was a her. Very attractive looking her, too—dark hair and eyes, rather long-oval features, clear, lightly tanned complexion, bright red lipstick put on with a micrometric exactitude that any engineer could appreciate. She was tall, within four inches of his own six-foot mark, and she wore a black tailored outfit, perfectly plain, which had probably cost around five hundred dollars and would have looked severe and mannish except that the figure under ...
— Day of the Moron • Henry Beam Piper
... penny-pieces, could satisfy himself; and the consequence was, the discovery was instantly admitted. Let mesmerists put the same power of self-satisfaction into the hands of the world, and doubt will be at once removed; if, as they say, their science is not of equal exactitude, they must bide their time ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... fat ruffian Arguello. "I must compliment you upon your exactitude of your arrangements. I trust that we shall be as successful here as we were at Nukulaelae.{*} Captain Hennessy," and here he bowed to a man who sat at the other end of the table, "will, I am sure, see that none of these people ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... judged the mouth, with its delicate, humorous quirk at the corners, too large; the chin too broad, for all its adorable baby dimple; the line of the nose too abrupt, the wider contours lacking something of classic exactitude. But the chillest analysis must have warmed to enthusiasm at the eyes; wide-set, level, and of a tawny hazel, with strange, wine-brown lights in their depths, to match the brownish-golden sheen of the hair, where the sun glinted ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... is justice only the inevitable working out of an equation. Humanity, as Mr. Shaw sees it, moves like clockwork; and must be regulated as a watch is, and praised or blamed simply in proportion to its exactitude in keeping time. Humanity, as Mr. Shaw knows, does not move by clockwork, and the ultimate justice will have to take count of more exceptions and irregularities than Mr. Shaw takes count of. There is a great living writer who has ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... bits together, and submits the result to a rather severe test; and if the string is too thin, or he has to use thread, he doubles it. Then he worries round to find out who has got the ink, or whether anyone has seen anything of the pen; and when he gets them, he writes the address with painful exactitude on the margin of the paper, sometimes in two or three places. He has to think a moment before he writes; and perhaps he'll scratch the back of his head afterwards with an inky finger, and regard the address with a sort of mild, passive ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... I had dined alone, and had afterwards submitted to the customary examination at the hands of Dr. Gonzales. Why he should deem it necessary to take my pulse and temperature and then ascertain my weight and power of grip with such scrupulous exactitude I never troubled to inquire. Indeed, it seemed such a puerile proceeding that I have hitherto refrained from even mentioning it. To-night he seemed ill-pleased with the results of his investigation. "You are losing weight," he said, severely, "and you don't begin to grip within ten pounds of what ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... in connection with that autumn was partly, I think, a pedestrian one, to Amiens and Beauvais, made in company with the W—— A——, of whom my brother speaks in his autobiography; which I mention chiefly for the sake of recording my testimony to the exactitude of his description of that very singular individual. If it had not been for the continual carefulness necessitated by the difficulty of avoiding all cause of quarrel, I should say that he was about the pleasantest travelling companion I ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... wish to study the electrical charge contained in any body, we obtain exactitude only when we succeed in transferring this charge to another body; we may then study the nature of the charge under varying circumstances, and establish the influence of the two charges upon one another. It is only in this way that experimentation ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... ears; his eyes discover in them a reflecting retina which, obedient to his command, resuscitates former contacts, a world buried and now found again. When attempting the historical novel, in which his persons are typical rather than individual, he still preserves this exactitude of local colouring. His descriptions of places, in fact, in all his books are almost photographs, and, where change has been slow, still serve to ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... historian you are! You have JOHN RICHARD GREEN beaten to his knees, FROUDE and GARDINER out of sight, and even the authoress of the immortal Little Arthur could not have placed EDDY I. with greater chronological exactitude. In fact there seems to be no subject on which you cannot write informatively, which makes me sorry that you will not join in the literary fray in the local paper, as it deprives the natives of a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... far from affecting harmfully what lay deeper, produced a more complete sincerity and transparency extending even to the finest verbal distinctions. Over and over again have I heard him preach to his wife, almost with pathos, the duty of perfect exactitude in speech in describing the commonest occurrences. "Now, my dear, IS that so?" was a perpetual remonstrance with him; and he always insisted upon it that there is no training more necessary for children than that of teaching them not merely to speak the truth in the ordinary, vulgar ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... the steamers out of sight than he sat down at his writing-table and began that daily record of his circumstances, his reflections, and his feelings, which reveals to us, with such an authentic exactitude, the final period of his extraordinary destiny. His Journals, sent down the river in batches to await the coming of the relief expedition, and addressed, first to Colonel Stewart, and later to the 'Chief of Staff, ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... I am not quoting incorrectly, but it is nearly fifty years since I saw the poem and at the moment I have not got a Waller handy. With the exactitude of youth I verified Mr. Gosse's quotation the moment I got home. I took my poetry very seriously in those days. I rushed to the Great Parlour, and though then quite indifferent to such a material thing as fine printing, I actually found ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... an unhung and travelling basket, heavy, iron-ribbed, anciently mossy, oozy of slime, fell with neat exactitude upon the bald, bare cranium of Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith, head gardener, and dour, irascible ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... with as much exactitude as I could, what is known of the maternal family in the American continents. There are many tribes in which descent is reckoned through the father, and it would be bold to assert that these have all passed through the maternal stage. ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... you like to have it with perfect exactitude, recollect that Bellini died at true ninety,—Tintoret at eighty-two; that Bellini's death was four years before Raphael's, and that Tintoret was born four ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... and mathematical exactitude, the preposterous peace of that backwater, he thought suddenly: 'During coverture! Why can't they exclude fellows like Profond, instead of a lot of hard-working Germans?' and was surprised at the depth of uneasiness which could provoke so unpatriotic a thought. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... comes very clearly out of these considerations: that whatever we are to expect at the hands of children, it should not be any peddling exactitude about matters of fact. They walk in a vain show, and among mists and rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and unconcerned about realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly learned; and there is nothing in their own tastes or purposes to teach them what we mean by abstract ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whom they trained, acquired that practical and social habit of mind which made the world and its daily interests so real to them. It was perhaps also his Jesuit preceptors whom the man of letters had to blame for a certain want of rigour and exactitude ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... declaratory act the legal existence of these common institutions, they also determined the method by which they should be administered. In doing so they carried out with great exactitude the principle of dualism, establishing in form a complete parity between Hungary on one side and the other territories of the king on the other. They made it a condition [v.03 p.0018] that there should be constitutional government in the rest of the monarchy as well ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... propositions are: First, that in all chemical changes, those kinds of matter which we commonly call elementary, do not suffer decomposition. Second, That the atomic weights of the elements as received are correct, i.e., that they do really express with great exactitude the relative weights of the atoms of the individual elements. If we accept these two propositions, it follows that hydrogen can be replaced atom for atom by other elements not only by the hydrogens but by alkali metals, etc. Hydrogen is, it may here be remarked, an element of unique ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... of the journalistic aspirant is to supply a demand. But in order successfully to supply a demand, it is necessary to know with some exactitude the nature of that demand. Of what use to send stuff to editors until you have determined what sort of stuff they lack? To obtain this valuable information (since editors do not often issue circulars defining their wants) the only ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... higher order. They arranged themselves very carefully on the pedometer to be measured; when any modification was necessary in the position of the body, it sufficed to murmur a word in their ears and the almost imperceptible movement required was made with the utmost exactitude; they could control their voluntary movements and direct them; they were able to translate the words they heard into actions: this enabled them to obey, and this constituted for them a fascinating internal conquest. When the measuring ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... my lord, for your exactitude," he said, louting very low. "Will it please your lordship to set foot ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and tail low, and had a villanous sour look. To the eye of a casual observer, there was not one redeeming quality that would warrant his keep; to those who knew him well, there were a thousand reasons why he should be hanged. He followed his master with the greatest precision and exactitude, walking aft as he walked aft, and walking forward with the same regular motion, turning when his master turned, and moreover, turning in the same direction; and, like his master, he appeared to be not a little nipped with the cold, and, ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... There are scientific ways of selecting cattle, horses, and even hogs for particular purposes. Purchasing departments of great commercial and industrial institutions maintain laboratories for the determination, with mathematical exactitude, of the qualifications and fitness to requirements of all kinds of materials, tools and equipment. And yet, when it comes to the choice of his own life work, the guidance of his children in their vocations, or the selection of employees and co-workers, the average man decides ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... truly that he loved Truth; that he paid every debt with a scrupulous exactitude: money, of course; and prompt apologies for a short brush of his temper. Nay, he had such a conscience for the smallest eruptions of a transient irritability, that the wish to say a friendly mending word to the Punctilio donkey of London ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... any more than Marguerite's was hers; that is why I give you all these details on the very spot where they occurred, in the fear, if a long time elapsed between them and your return, that I might not be able to give them to you with all their melancholy exactitude. ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils |
