"Facile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Washington (D.C.) Republic: "Mr. Lanman is well known both in England and America as the writer of some of the most delightful descriptive books in the English language. To the facile wielding of his pen he adds an equally adroit and skilful use of the pencil, and his admirable results in these combined pursuits won for him from his friend and brother of the quill, Washington Irving, the apt and deserved soubriquet of 'the picturesque explorer of America.' To the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... an insult to her soul. And ever and again would come the draw of him, till she thought he must be evil to have such power over her. All that was most firmly established in her mind was rocking. His romance and adventure were battering at the conventions. Before his facile perils and ready laugh, life was no longer an affair of serious effort and restraint, but a toy, to be played with and turned topsy-turvy, carelessly to be lived and pleasured in, and carelessly to be flung aside. "Therefore, play!" was ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... you how to be victorious. However, perseverance granted, the hour will come when an article of yours finds its way to the composing room. A day of ecstasy, upon which every disappointment is forgotten and the way forward seems straight and facile! ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... was secular. Mrs. S. was deeply distressed about the boot business. She consoled me by saying that many would be glad to have such feet whatever shoes they had on. Unfortunately, fishers and seafaring men are too facile to be compared with! This looks like enjoyment: better speck ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... United States. As the Hawaiian diplomatic correspondence about this was conducted with more asperity than tact, if peace were the purpose, it was a good sore place for the Japanese statesmen to rub, and they resent in the newspapers the facile and cheap pacification resulting from the influence of the United States. In addition the Japanese inhabitants, though they have a larger meal than they can speedily digest in Formosa, are not touched with unqualified pleasurable feeling because we have the Philippines ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... his school-days, from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away. Perhaps his needs turned out to be exceptional, but his existence was exceptional. Between 1850 and 1900 nearly every one's existence was exceptional. For success in the life imposed on him he needed, as afterwards appeared, the facile use of only four tools: Mathematics, French, German, and Spanish. With these, he could master in very short time any special branch of inquiry, and feel at home in any society. Latin and Greek, he could, with the ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... sage,—a Power, nevertheless, that watches over him, that hears him, that sees him, that will carry him across the grave, that will enable him to live on forever,—this double mystery of a Divinity and of a Soul, the infant learns with the most facile readiness, at the first glimpse of his reasoning faculty. Before you can teach him a rule in addition, before you can venture to drill him into his horn-book, he leaps, with one intuitive spring of all his ideas, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the general electric influence is the main remedial agency, there is no reason why the possible—or, I should say, probable—good to be obtained from its local influence should not be realized—the less so that it is so facile to obtain this in the bath, by means of the surface board. While individual cases will undoubtedly call for modifications, I have found the following plan to answer best in certainly more than half the cases that have come under my observation: The first five minutes of the bath ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... hard, artificial sound the rhyme too often has: the clink that falls at regular intervals as of a stone-breaker's hammer! In the freer kinds of Spanish poetry there are numberless verses that make the smoothest lines and lyrics of our sweetest and most facile singers, from Herrick to Swinburne, seem hard and mechanical by comparison. But there is something more. I doubt, for one thing, if we are justified in the boast we sometimes make that the feeling for ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... apparent, that one saw I know not what of majesty which compelled every one to revere and dread her. In seeing her kindly receive every one, refuse no one, and patiently listen to all, you would have promised yourself easy and facile access to her; but if she cast eyes upon you, there was in her face I know not what of gravity, which made you so astounded that you no longer had power, I do not say to walk a step, but even to stir a foot to approach her."— ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... how largely the difficulties of suppressing the rebellion would be enhanced, if the rebels should be allowed to plant themselves firmly, with strong fortifications, at commanding points on the Ohio River. It would be facile for them to carry the war thence into the loyal States north of ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... He is a Frenchman of Frenchmen beyond question or cavil, and with that he is simple enough to be universally comprehensible. What is wanting to his universal success is the mediocrity of an obvious and appealing tenderness. He neglects to qualify his truth with the drop of facile sweetness; he forgets to strew paper roses over the tombs. The disregard of these common decencies lays him open to the charges of cruelty, cynicism, hardness. And yet it can be safely affirmed that this man wrote from the fulness of a compassionate heart. He ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... It is facile for people of the twentieth century, and particularly so for non-Slavs, to say that this Serbian Empire of Du[vs]an, Lord of the Serbs and Bulgars and Greeks, whom the Venetian Senate addressed as "Graecorum Imperator semper Augustus," resembled the earlier Bulgarian Empire ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... unexcelled by Webster or by Ford. "But the moon, and the dew, and the night-wind, they are just like a caller kail-blade laid on my brow; and whiles I think the moon just shines on purpose to pleasure me, when naebody sees her but mysell." Scott did not deal much in the facile pathos of the death-bed, but that of Madge Wildfire has a grace of poetry, and her latest song is the sweetest and wildest of his lyrics, the most appropriate in its setting. When we think of the contrasts to her—the honest, dull good-nature of Dumbiedikes; the common-sense and humour of Mrs. ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... loyal Suffragist and wanted to bring an end to the subjection of woman, yet all the time that the other woman was speaking her beautiful body practised fluid poses as if she were trying to draw the audience's attention to herself and give them facile romantic dreams in which the traditional relations of the sexes were rejoiced in rather than disturbed. And she wore a preposterous dress. There were two ways that women could dress. If they had work to do they could dress curtly and sensibly like men ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... wrote about him, and all make him out a profound scholar, a deep philosopher, a facile writer. Boswell by his innocent quoting and recounting makes his conversation outstrip all of his other accomplishments. He reveals the man by the most skilful indirection, and by leaving his guard down, often allows the reader to score a point. And of all devices of writing folk, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... these German instruments. As to Stein's escapement, his hopper was fixed behind the key; the axis of the hammer rising on a principle which I think is older than Stein, but have not been able to trace to its source, and the position of his hammer is reversed. Stein's light and facile movement with shallow key-fall, resembling Cristofori's in bearing little weight, was gratefully accepted by the German clavichord players, and, reacting, became one of the determining agents of the piano music and style of playing of the Vienna school. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... anteponendum;" nay, Dr B—— hath pronounced, "Citius Maevii Aeneadem quam Scribleri istrus tragoediam hanc crediderium, cujus autorem Senecam ipsum tradidisse haud dubitarim:" and the great professor Burman hath styled Tom Thumb "Heroum omnium tragicorum facile principem:" nay, though it hath, among other languages, been translated into Dutch, and celebrated with great applause at Amsterdam (where burlesque never came) by the title of Mynheer Vander Thumb, the burgomasters receiving it with that reverent ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... not in one of his earlier stories that somebody quite seriously questions whether a good actor can also be a good man? On the whole, as you may have gathered, while I should call Proud Peter a comfortable tale of the eupeptic type, I enjoyed it rather less than other stories from the same facile pen. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... mournful head, sadly envisaging the loveliness of the world through a mist of facile tears; that was too exquisitely, too poignantly true of her own plight; for, wholly as it was, her life could never ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... five auditors only Piotr was not captivated. He was tormented by a feeling of hostility to Trirodov. He glanced at Trirodov with suspicion and hate. He was exasperated by Trirodov's confident tone and facile speech. Piotr's remarks addressed to the visitor were often caustic, even coarse. Rameyev looked vexed at Piotr now and then, but Trirodov appeared not to notice his sallies, and was simple, tranquil, ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... in words; the thing which, once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. Compared with this, all other purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical or the purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with a legend. It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has struck out no new field for itself; it still remains where the romantic revolution of 1798 placed it; its aims are not other than were those of Coleridge and of Keats. But within that defined sphere it has developed a surprising activity. It has occupied the attention and become the facile instrument of men of the greatest genius, writers of whom any age and any language might be proud. It has been tender and fiery, severe and voluminous, gorgeous and marmoreal, in turns. It has translated ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... his work had seemed to clog up in details and slow down. The early days of broad, rapid outlines and facile sketching in of details were gone. Now the endless indignities, invasion of personal rights and freedom, the hamstringing of his work, the feeling of being cut off from the main currents of his field, filled him ...
— Security • Ernest M. Kenyon
... Donaldus Insulanus OEbudarum dominus cum Rossiam iuris calumnia per Gubernatorem sibi ablatam, velut proximus haeres (uti erat) repeteret, ac nihil aequi impetraret, collectis insulanorum decem millibus in continentem descendit; ac Rossiam facile occupavit, cunctis libenter ad iusti domini imperium redeuntibus. Sed ea Rossianorum parendi facilitas animum praedae avidum ad maiora audenda impulit. In Moraviam transgressus eam praesidio destitutam statim in suam potestatem redegit. Deinde Bogiam praedabundus transivit; et ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... Tell a man passionately in love, that he is jilted; bring a score of witnesses of the falsehood of his mistress, it is ten to one but three kind words of hers shall invalidate all their testimonies. QUOD VOLUMUS, FACILE CREDIMUS; what suits our wishes, is forwardly believed, is, I suppose, what every one hath more than once experimented: and though men cannot always openly gainsay or resist the force of manifest probabilities that make against them, yet yield they not to the ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... for him the identity of the author, he glowered. The Beaubien was still standing between him and this budding genius. And though he might, and would, ultimately ruin the Beaubien financially, yet this girl, despite her social ostracism, bade fair to earn with her facile pen enough to maintain them both in luxury. So he bent anew to his vengeful schemes, for he would make them come to him. As Trustee, he would learn what courses the girl was pursuing in the University—for ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... other," he said. "When the picture is nearly finished I will invite Bernardo Dovizio and his niece to see it. They will understand the relations of this artist and model. He is cutting his own throat with every stroke of his facile brush, for Maria Dovizio will brook no ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... he would have liked it better had the truth come to him by slower degrees. When his aunt had told him to marry Clara Amedroz, he had been at once reconciled to the order by a feeling on his own part that the conquest of Clara would not be too facile. She was a woman of value, not to be snapped up easily or by any one. So he had thought then; but he began to fancy now that he had been ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... intensely than any other member of the sylvan household. His blue eyes shone, and his face was vivid as he talked to her. He was a common man, blunted in the finer nature by a life of hardship, yet his shrewd spirit seized on much that less facile people like Puttany learned slowly or not ...
— The Cursed Patois - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... aliquid. Melius est enim peccare in hanc partem, ex qua tantum lucrum fieri posset, quam esse omnino incredulus. Itaque volui hoc ad te scribere, ut loquaris cum Cosmo, desque solicite operam, ut haec volumina quaerantur; nam facile erit vobis. Libri sunt in Monasterio de Sora, ordinis Cisterciensium, prope Roschild ad duo milliaria theutonica, hoc est, prope Lubich paulo amplius quam est iter diei unius. Arrige aures, Pamphile. Duo sunt ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... and his co-religionists they extended a cordial welcome. Bringing, as did the missionaries, a similar but more imposing ritual, with dogmas in many points analogous, but accompanied with the sublime teachings of the gospel, the propagation of the new faith was so facile, that a single generation might have witnessed the nominal christianization of the entire empire, had not fatal dissensions arisen among the different orders of the Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian missionaries. In consequence ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Gallatin began to find a relief and pleasure he had not yet experienced in America. At this period the Virginia capital was the gayest city in the Union, and famous for its abundant hospitality, rather facile manners, and the liberal tendency of its religious thought. Gallatin brought no prudishness and no orthodoxy in his Genevese baggage. One of the last acts of his life was to recognize in graceful and touching words the kindness he ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... ordinary life, was one of the strongest links between the Wordsworth-Browning era and the latest apostles of vigor, beginning with Masefield. There are occasional and serious defects in Kipling's work—particularly in his more facile poetry; he falls into a journalistic ease that tends to turn into jingle; he is fond of a militaristic drum-banging that is as blatant as the insularity he condemns. But a burning, if sometimes too simple faith, shines through his achievements. His best ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... did Robespierre, who also passed as a man of order and humanity, not continue to support Danton after the suppression of the Hebertists, as he had supported him before? The common and facile answer is that he was moved by a malignant desire to put a rival out of the way. On the whole, the evidence seems to support Napoleon's opinion that Robespierre was incapable of voting for the death of anybody in the world on grounds of personal enmity. And his acquiescence in the ruin of Danton ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... be crystallized in words. The ready association of thoughts with definite words connotes a relatively high degree of intellectual advancement. Language forms are the short-hand of thought; without facile command of language, thinking is vague, clumsy, and ineffective. Conversely, vague ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... motto, "Two heads are better than one." By wearing his neighbors' cast-off clothes and feeding his family on cornbread and "sow-belly," he was able to lay the foundation of that fortune which has made his daughter facile princeps of New York's patricians. John Jacob Astor, who acted as royal consort to the cooper's regal daughter in the quadrille d'honneur, is likewise descended from noble Knights (of Labor) and dames of high degree. He traces his lineage in unbroken line to that haughty ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... continuity and unity); Swallows—From the Strand (The diagonal: line of action; speed) Aesthetics of Line, Continued, Where Line is the motive and Decoration is the Impulse; Winter Landscape—After Photograph (Line of grace, variety, facile sequence); Line Versus Space (The same impulse with angular energy, The line more attractive than the plane); Reconciliation—Glackens (Composition governed by the decorative exterior line); December—After Photograph ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... book than the Essay on Population has ever been, or ever will be, written. It was aimed at the facile Liberalism of the Deists and Atheists of the eighteenth century; it made as clear as daylight that all forms of social reconstruction, all dreams of earthly golden ages must be either futile or insincere or both, until the problems of human increase ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... closed the entrance of the vault had been removed. But the descent of Avernus was not facile, the steps being steep and broken, and the roof so low. Young Mervyn had gone down the steps to see it duly placed; a murky, fiery light; came up, against which the descending ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... it in each pathetic strenuous slow endeavour, When in mothering she unwittingly sets wounds on what she loves; Yet her primal doom pursues her, faultful, fatal is she ever; Though so deft and nigh to vision is her facile finger-touch That the seers ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... he was not a man of facile or boastful speech—by the eyes of Rachel Henderson, and those slight gestures or movements by which from time to time when the talk flagged she would set it ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to reign? But mark what I arreed thee now, Avant; Fly neither whence thou fledst! If from this hour Within these hallowed limits thou appear, Back to the infernal pit I drag thee chained, And seal thee so, as henceforth not to scorn The facile gates of Hell too slightly barred. So threatened he; but Satan to no threats Gave heed, but waxing more in rage replied. Then when I am thy captive talk of chains, Proud limitary Cherub! but ere then Far heavier load thyself expect to feel From my prevailing arm, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... littered with the debris of much consulting, had grown accustomed to having her trivial gossip interrupted by the advent of fresh letters and a new supply of specimen ores. She had grown glib in reading off the unfamiliar phrasing of the letters, facile in writing down the totally unspellable words of Opdyke's dictated replies. In all of this, however, she had been made to feel aware that she herself stood first to Reed, his work ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... blind doctor" of the story is the Marie Zakrzewska that we know. The early anecdotes give us the poetic impressibility and the enduring muscular fibre, that make themselves felt through the lively, facile nature. The voice that ordered the fetters taken off of crazy Jacob is the voice we still hear in the wards of the hospital. But that poetic impressibility did not run wild with crazy fancies when she was left to ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... of facts, however, is always valuable. Dr. Woods' investigation will be found useful even by those who are by no means anxious to throw cold water over the too facile optimism of some pacifists, and this little book suggests lines of thought which may prove fruitful in various directions, not always foreseen ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... far Kitty would have succeeded in her good purposes: these things, so easily conceived, are not of such facile execution; she passed a sleepless night of good resolutions and schemes of reparation; but, fortunately for her, Mr. Arbuton's foibles and prejudices seemed to have fallen into a strange abeyance. The change that had come ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... father, and is now about fifty years of age, or probably a little more. M. Bertin is a man of esprit, and of literary tastes, with the habits, feelings, and demeanor of a well-bred gentleman. Of an agreeable and facile commerce, the editor of the Debats is a man of elegant and Epicurean habits; but does not allow his luxurious tastes to interfere with the business of this nether world. According to M. Texier, he reads with his own proprietary and editorial eyes all the voluminous correspondence of the office ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... heart, and a purse that was never closed. He was a facile speaker whose eloquence was of a forensic type. His friendships were passionate. While in prison he received news of the death of one of his friends, Gilbert, who had been guillotined at Evreux, and when some one congratulated him on his approaching release he ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... her own facile adjectives said to a casual acquaintance: "How can you go about with that moth-eaten, squint-eyed, bag of a girl!" "Because," answered the youth whom she had intended to dazzle, "the lady of your flattering epithets happens ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... be courteous, facile, sweet, Free from that solemn vice of greatness, pride; I meant each softed virtue there should meet, Fit in that softer bosom to abide. Only a learned and a manly soul, I purposed her, that should with even powers, The rock, the spindle, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... poem upon the Creation of the World, called Le Sette Giornate. Written in blank verse, it religiously but tamely narrates the operation of the Divine Artificer, following the first chapter of Genesis and expanding the motive of each of the seven days with facile rhetoric. Of action and of human interest the poem has none; of artistic beauty little. The sustained descriptive style wearies; and were not this the last work of Tasso, it would not be mentioned ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... large extent arbiters of our fortunes, for we can by an indomitable will dispel many, many seeming mountains that encumber our way. But we have much to unlearn, and especially that the road to financial prosperity is not chiefly the dictum of the facile mouth, but through the manifestation of skilled hands and routine of business methods, however much the mouth may attempt to compete, conscious of its wealth of assertion and extent of capacity. While it is eminently proper we should ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... in dosso haveano, et l'elmo in testa, Due di questi guerrier, de' quali io canto; Ne notte o di, d' appoi ch' entraro in questa Stanza, gl'haveano mai messi da canto; Che facile a portar come la vesta Era lor, perche in uso ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... by Xanthus, or rather by the pseudo-Xanthus, has possibly a more solid foundation. "The Magi," this writer said, "hold their wives in common: at least they often marry the wives of others with the free consent of their husbands." This is really to say that among the Magians divorce was over-facile; that wives were often put away, merely with a view to their forming a fresh marriage, by husbands who understood and approved of the transaction. Judging by the existing practice of the Persians, we must admit that such laxity is in ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... Polish lad sported familiarly with his talents, for he is related to have sent to sleep and awakened a party of unruly boys at his father's school. Another story is his fooling of a Jew merchant. He had high spirits, perhaps too high, for his slender physique. He was a facile mimic, and Liszt, Balzac, Bocage, Sand and others believed that he would have made an actor of ability. With his sister Emilia he wrote a little comedy. Altogether he was a clever, if not a brilliant lad. His letters show ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... the greatness of his aim gives him a certain claim on respectful consideration. That his talent achieved itself, or ever could have achieved itself, he himself would have been the last to affirm. But he is a monumental failure, more interesting than many facile triumphs. ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... not in any such spirit of facile and reckless reassurance that we should approach the really difficult problem of the delicate virtues and the deep dangers of our two historic seats of learning. A good son does not easily admit that his sick mother is dying; but ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... St. Louis, had made matters worse. Such wealth!—such careless, vulgar, easily gotten wealth!—heaped up by means that seemed to the outsider so facile, and were, in truth, for all but a small minority, so difficult. A commonplace man and a frivolous woman; yet possessed, through their mere money, of a power over life and its experiences, such as he, Faversham, might ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... accompanied by corresponding manifestations. The texture of the skin is close grained, delicate and soft. The hair is fine; the eye is clear and bright, the features smooth and very harmonious. The mental processes are brilliant, facile, rapid; their depth and power, however, depending upon the combination of the element of strength with delicacy. Persons possessing delicate ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... because far more extensive and facile abuses, arising out of the unparalleled contraband traffic of which Spain is, and long has been, the theatre, and the attempted repression of which requires the constant employment of entire armies of regular troops, are elsewhere to be found in action and guarded against; they concern ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... respect—and a queer element of reluctant dislike all played their part in that complex eddy. The grey dress made her a stranger to him, made her stiff and commonplace, she was not even the rather drooping form that had caught his facile sense of beauty when he had proposed to her in the Recreation Ground. There was something too that did not please him in the angle of her hat, it was indeed an ill-conceived hat with large aimless rosettes ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... gentleman. He lies, of course, like all of us, and perhaps more often than most of us on the other side, but he does it, not to protect sinners from the moral law, but to make their punishment under the moral law more certain, swift, facile ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... probability or an improbability concerning the existence of a God; or else to incline in thought towards an affirmation or a negation of God, according as his previous habits of thought have rendered such an inclination more facile in the one direction than in the other. And although, under such circumstances, I should consider that man the more rational who carefully suspended his judgment, I conclude that if this course is departed from, neither the metaphysical teleologist nor the scientific atheist has ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... The clerk's facile pen ran here and there, and the license was delivered at length on the payment of a dollar. For one almighty dollar the State gave the two souls permission to ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... We are told that Kali was "the most hopeful man" or man of promise, "of middle stature, fine of limb, with light brown hair"; how he "had many friends, and was a more proper man both in body and mind than most of the other men of his time, a good player at draughts, a facile writer of runes, and a reader of books, good at smith's work, ski-ing, shooting, and rowing, and as skilful at ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... unexpected quarters to meet emergencies, and she occasionally transfers such events to her pages, thereby enlivening them without sacrificing the reality of her pictures. But the triumph of her art consists in her facile handling of simple incidents and everyday men and women and her power to carry them without a hint of sentimentality to a natural, artistic, effective climax, heightened usually by a touch of ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Continental correspondents have kept me for many years well informed on reform and kindred subjects; and the letters I have received, and the replies they have drawn from me, go far to make me doubt the accuracy of the accepted belief that "letter writing has become a lost art." A full mind with a facile pen makes letter writing a joy, and both of these attributes I think I may fairly claim. My correspondence with Alfred Cridge was kept up till his death a few years ago, and his son, following worthily in the footsteps of a ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... there lived in London a famous Queen's Counsel, Edwin James. Fame and fortune were his. A born orator, a talented scholar, he rapidly pushed his way from the very bottom of the legal profession to all but its topmost height. At 40 he found himself facile princeps of the English Bar, and public opinion, that potent factor in popular government, had already singled him out for the high position of Attorney-General. That secured, only one step remained ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... Percy, with his usual facile disposition, quickly fell into the ways of the trio, and rather enjoyed the luxury of now and then getting a rise out of the undergrads by showing that "he knew ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... soothing customers. To this day he can surpass his own shop-walkers in the admirable and tender solicitude with which, forsaking dialect, he drops into a lady's ear his famous stereotyped phrase: 'Are you receiving proper attention, madam?' From the first he eschewed the facile trickeries and ostentations which allure the populace. He sought a high-class trade, and by waiting he found it. He would never advertise on hoardings; for many years he had no signboard over his shop-front; ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... favor and preferment for the Negro writer is to be made by himself. The epic of his race awaits a writer. The drama of an unwritten history covering about four centuries will welcome the facile pen of some gifted son or daughter. The well nigh inexhaustible field of folk-lore of his own people is ready to be told to the world, whether in the crude dialect of the race, or in Americanized English, it matters little. It will make no difference. The English speaking people of both continents ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... so slow as it used to be when our merchants had not learned the art of tempting any and every kind of human nature, but still far from rapid. A piece of money reminds them vividly and painfully of the toil put into acquiring it; and they shy away from the pitfall of the facile check. With those born and bred as Dorothy was and elevated into what seems to them affluence by no effort of their own, the spreading ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... source of what was most delightful in his personality, and perhaps most beautiful in his talent. It enabled him to do such things as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not do, and indeed could not. His talent was not a facile gift; he owned that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... voices were low and lulling, as if quieter than silence. Then we talked of my calm paintings, shadowing deeper lonelinesses in them. But it was my highest rapture to sit in stillness for hours while Heraine, cushioned at my feet, made cunning embroideries, like some facile poet whose fingers were ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... say that 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, James, Jude, Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Apocalypse "have been received into the canon on evidence less complete" than that belonging to the others. The very general admission of the fourth gospel as the apostle John's, is a curious example of facile traditionalism. Biblical criticism, however, scarcely existed in the first three centuries. It is for us to set the subject in another light, because our means of judging are superior. If the resources of the early fathers were ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... in a life of dissipation. Mariana, as the older woman, might have checked this impulsive nature; but she aided rather than hindered the downfall of the little queen, looked with but feigned disapproval upon the men who sought her facile favors, and, after a swift decade, saw her die, without a murmur of regret. Again there were whispers of poison, but Mariana was still in power, and she lost no time in planning again for Austrian ascendency and an Austrian succession. Once more the puppet king was accepted as a husband, and ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... rulers, who had brought them out of a state of anarchy and constant warfare and misery, and had established peace and prosperity in their country. Their ignorance and gross superstition made them the facile tools of their ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... was omitted; but we do know that the Pro Milone exists for us, and that it lives among the glories of language as a published oration. I find, on looking through the Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, that in his estimation the Pro Milone was the first in favor of all our author's orations—"facile princeps," if we may collect the critic's ideas on the subject from the number of references made and examples taken. Quintilian's work consists of lessons on oratory, which he supports by quotations from the great orators, both Greek and Latin, with whose speeches he has ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... so often soars, for he wrote not idealistic, but character, comedies; which is, perhaps, the reason that some of his would-be admirers consider him rather commonplace. His claim to distinction is based only on strong common-sense, good manners, sound morality, real wit, true humor, a great, facile, and accurate command of language, and a photographic ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... in the community of individuals, especially girls, who are to some degree mentally defective or morally imbecile. The Committee were given several individual instances in which such girls had acted as foci of infection; they are easily approached, and facile victims for men. In spite of a degree of mental or moral defect they ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... chosen President of the ladies' committee, and subsequently second Vice-President of the General Fair organization, General Rosecrans being President, and the Mayor of the city, first Vice-President. To the furtherance of this work, Mrs. Mendenhall devoted all her energies. Eloquent appeals from her facile pen were addressed to loyal and patriotic men and women all over the country, and a special circular and appeal to the patriotic young ladies of Cincinnati and the Ohio valley for their hearty co-operation in the good work. The correspondence and supervision of that portion of the fair ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... gives poetic value to elegy, and any other origin for this description of poetical effusion is entirely beneath the dignity of poetry. The elegiac poet seeks after nature, but he strives to find her in her beauty, and not only in her mirth; in her agreement with conception, and not merely in her facile disposition towards the requirements and demands of sense. Melancholy at the privation of joys, complaints at the disappearance of the world's golden age, or at the vanished happiness of youth, affection, etc., can only become ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... argument as to the nature and conduct of princes; at others he clarifies his own conception of poetry and poets by recourse to Aristotle. He finds a choice paragraph on eloquence in Seneca the elder and applies it to his own recollection of Bacon's power as an orator; and another on facile and ready genius, and translates it, adapting it to his recollection of his fellow-playwright, Shakespeare. To call such passages—which Jonson never intended for publication—plagiarism, is to obscure ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... Magnus, who, among other things, particularly recommends "the brains of a partridge calcined into powder and swallowed in red wine," a remedy which is also much insisted upon by Platina, who, in praising the flesh of the partridge, says, "Perdicis caro bene ac facile concoquitur, multum in se nutrimenti habet, cerebri vim auget, genituram ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... another, in stately procession; we, all the while rapt in wonder, are straining in hope and fear to catch the coming word, and to comprehend its import. Never was speculation so rife, never was the field of human observation so unobstructed and expanded, nor the ascertainment and sifting of facts so facile. Never were opinions more diverse, nor was it ever so obviously important to detect and assert the philosophical principle, in recognition and obedience to which the laws of human government may be preserved and kept in view, and ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... replied truly. "Yet," I continued, matching his idiom with another equally facile, "wherein was this person's screw loose? Are they not openly referred to—those of the Line of Tripe and ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... "Facile mind—quick to grasp the essentials." She smiled again. "Seems to me I remember a few years back when a young lieutenant successfully put down a mutiny in space, and at his promotion to captain, the citation included the fact that he was quick to ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... the goddess of Comana. The original name of this goddess seems to have been Ma, but the Greeks, who also knew her, had likened her to Enyo, their goddess of strife and warfare; hence in these days of facile identification the Romans' course was clear, and she became straightway Bellona, called by the name of their old goddess of war. Of all the chapters of the history of such identifications none is more curious than this. The old Bellona had borne to Mars the same relation that Fides, the goddess ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... feelings which have ever actuated the inhabitants of the Highlands and the Hebrides. The plant of loyalty is there in full vigour, and the Brunswick graft now flourishes like a native shoot. To that spirited race of people I may with propriety apply the elegant lines of a modern poet, on the 'facile temper of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... oculis, senioque hebetem, morboque gravatum, Dulcis here, antiquo me quod amore foves, Suave habet et carum Zephyrus tuus, et leviore Se sentit mortis conditione premi. Interiere quidem, tibi quae placuisse solebant, Et formae dotes, et facile ingenium: Deficiunt sensus, tremulae scintillula vitae Vix micat, in cinerem mox abitura brevem. Sola manet, vetuli tibi nec despecta ministri, Mens grata, ipsaque in morte memor domini. Hanc tu igitur, pro blanditiis mollique lepore, ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... the scene of practical operations, and he remembered that the man he had promoted had been Helen's protege. James Gillow was a fair draughtsman, also, and, if not remarkable otherwise for mental capacity, wielded a facile pen, and Geoffrey found it a relief to turn his rapidly-increasing correspondence over to him. It was for this reason Gillow accompanied him on a ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... the gold-camp in the summers and winters of 1851 and 1852, with its tremendous and varied incidents and experiences, was a compelling call to Shirley's facile pen. Here was her mine. Out of her brain, out of her soul, out of her heart of gold, out of her wealth of understanding of and love for her fellow-men, gratefully sprang those SHIRLEY LETTERS that have enriched the field of letters, and, reaching beyond the grasp of worldly gain, have set ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... Grangerfords and Shepherdsons (as in Mark Twain's immortal romance) may still be shooting each other at sight. But these things are relics of the past; they do not belong to the normal, typical life of our time. It is useless to say that human nature is the same in all ages. That is one of the facile axioms of psychological incompetence. Far be it from me to deny that malice, hatred, spite, and the spirit of retaliation are, and will be until the millennium, among the most active forces in human nature. But most people are coming to recognize ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... let us try to get on better together in future. There's no reason why we shouldn't," he added, trying to convince himself. The girl's vain and facile temperament required but little encouragement to abandon itself in utter confidence. In her heart of hearts she was sure that every man must admire her, and as her companion's manner and words gave her hope, ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... tears, though, perhaps, his facile transition from the condition presented in the foregoing allusion, into a positively lachrymose state, will be readily conceived of, without proclaiming specially, the fact. He will maintain a mien, ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... with a vigorous and pleasing style, and his facile pen has obviously been made expert by much use. In dealing with some of the more threadbare problems, such as the drink question and the sporting mania, he brings considerable novelty and freshness to their treatment, and when fairly roused he hits out at social abuses ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... may illustrate another thing too—viz. how simple, facile weakness of character may be the parent of all enormities. Herod did not want to kill John. He very much wanted to keep him alive. But he was not man enough to put his foot down, and say, 'There! I have said it; and there is to be no more talk about slaying this prophet of God.' So the continual ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... nothing more, on the part of those who coveted Indian Territory because of its geographical position, its strategic and economic importance. For a little while longer, Pike contended with his enemies by means of the best weapon he had, his facile pen. His acrimonious correspondence with the chief of those enemies, Hindman and Holmes, reached its highest point of criticism in a letter of December 30 to the latter. That letter summed up his ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... out the eighth dance in fitful silence, he began to experience the strangest antipathy for Miss Dolly Travers, who but an hour before had been the rapturous ending of all his day dreams. Let no cynic here exclaim, with facile wit, that romance ends thus in the compulsory quality of marriage. We make no such allusions. We only state that Skippy, in his inexperience, began morally to disintegrate. The more he was forced to sit, ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... masterpieces, even if the pressure of housekeeping had never driven him to seek bread where he could find it. Indeed it is hardly a question. His genius was spacious and original, but it was too dispersive, too facile of diversion, too little disciplined, for the prolonged effort of combination which is indispensable to the greater constructions whether of philosophy or art. The excellent talent of economy and administration had been denied him; that thrift of faculty, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... called to see us, and sat down to talk in a friendly and familiar way. I do not know a man of more facile intercourse, nor with whom one so easily gets rid of ceremony. His conversation, too, is interesting. He talked, to begin with, about Italian food, as poultry, mutton, beef, and their lack of savoriness as compared with our own; ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
