"Inaccurate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were transferred here from the choir, though there is no record of such transference. This tomb was opened and restored in 1862, when some bones and remains of ecclesiastical vestments were found in it. The restoration appears to have been arbitrary and inaccurate. ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... as the medium of thought may be compared to air as the medium of the sun's influence, in other respects it is like the skin of the body; a scurvy skin shows bad blood within, and a scurvy language shows inaccurate thought and a confused mind. And as a disease once fixed on the skin reacts and poisons the blood in turn as it has first been poisoned by the blood, so careless use of language if indulged reacts on the mind to make ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... are some people who, while thinking that the author of Westward Ho! has not, at least recently, been given his due rank in critical estimation, admit certain explanations of this. As a historian and in almost all his writings Kingsley was inaccurate,—almost (as his friend and brother-in-law Froude was once said to be) "congenitally inaccurate"; in his novels and elsewhere he went out of his way to tread on the corns of all sorts of people; he constantly ventured out ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... foreigner then in England believed the queen innocent, and that she defended herself with an eloquence which deeply touched her hearers. His further assertion, that "Smeton's confession was all which was alleged" against her, is certainly inaccurate; and his complaint, which has been so often echoed, of the absence of witnesses, implies only a want of knowledge of the forms which were observed in trials for high treason. The witnesses were not brought into court and confronted with the prisoner: their ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... versions of his new records Sargon states that "5,400 men daily eat bread before him" (see Poebel, op. cit., p. 178); though the figure may be intended to convey an idea of the size of Sargon's court, we may perhaps see in it a not inaccurate estimate of the total strength ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... found the man who had fired upon them. He was dead. Papers found upon him disclosed his identity as an I.W.W. leader. He had evidently rented the room across from the court-house that he might watch the movements of "The Hundred." A cheap, inaccurate revolver was found beside him. Possibly he had fired, thinking to momentarily disorganize the posse; that they would not know from where the shot had come until he had had time to make his escape ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... not like the word 'seems,'" answered Keyork. "It is the refuge of inaccurate persons, unable to distinguish between facts ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... there be a regular and correct supply of information to the public respecting the debates of Parliament or other important matters, but there would be only such an amount and such a description of information as could be furnished upon the inaccurate data of a man who would not go to any expense in the use of the means at present employed." These were the views of the newspaper proprietors of 1836, as expounded by that respectable but distinctly ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Though the thing is by no means common, claims have been jumped in that country—that is, occupied by men who surreptitiously or forcibly oust the rightful owner on the ground that he has not done the work required by law, or has been inaccurate in his record. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... letters do not show him to be either careless or inaccurate. On the contrary, they bear witness to his watchfulness, to his methodical habits, and to his attention to details; although at the same time they are full of speculations, and of the thoughts which followed each ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... and then had caused them to write sumptuous cheques on their banks, payable to bearer. These he had cashed in the very teeth of the law, and actually paused in the street to read a description of himself posted on a telegraph-pole. "Inaccurate, quite inaccurate," he said to a by-stander as he drew his riding-whip slowly along it, and then, mounting his horse, rode leisurely away into the plains. Had he been followed it would have been seen that he directed his course to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... for dates was accompanied by a vivid imagination, an inaccurate memory, and a constitutional inability to deal with hard facts. Hence, her biographers have found it no easy task to grapple with the details of her career, her own picturesque, high-coloured narrative being not ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Dr. John Campbell a very inaccurate man in his narrative, Sir? He once told me, that he drank thirteen bottles of port at a sitting.' JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, I do not know that Campbell ever lied with pen and ink; but you could not entirely depend on any thing he told you in conversation: if there ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... narrative by one of his Chinese ministers, named Yu Min Tchoung, a translation of which was sent to Paris by the Jesuit missionary, P. Amiot, together with the translation of the imperial narrative itself. The transcript is again by the French translator of Bergmann, and is again rather inaccurate."—MASSON. ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... weave itself around the history and ideals of the people, and suddenly one comes across a sage reflection or a philosophical utterance. With Philo it is otherwise. Compared with the Greeks he is unsystematic, inaccurate, wanting in logic, exuberant in imagination. Compared with the rabbis he is a formal and accurate philosopher, an exact and scholarly theologian. The floating poetical ideas of the Haggadah are woven by him into the fabric of a Jewish philosophy and a Jewish theology, and knit together with the ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... "Many inaccurate stories have been told of my brief married life, and I have never contradicted them—they were so manifestly absurd. Those who can imagine the surroundings into which I, a raw girl, undeveloped in all except my training as an actress, was thrown, can imagine ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... view of the matter, be an inaccurate mode of expression to say, that obtaining appropriate conceptions is a condition precedent to generalization. Throughout the whole process of comparing phenomena with one another for the purpose of generalization, the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... the information about the country is as sketchy and inaccurate as can be," I protested. "No one knows anything about it really. Here's the file of the United Services ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... made a face as one that drinketh verjuice suddenly. "For pity's sake, doctor, don't be so inaccurate. Say a spot on the brilliancy, or a crevice in the armour; but not a crevice in the brilliancy. My good friend here, gentlemen, deals in conjectural certificates and broken metaphors. He dislocates more tropes, to my sorrow, than even his friend Shakespeare, whom he thinks ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... at times with other facts which he recalled after the lapse of seventy years, and which he had learned from his father or from Mr. Wythe. On the other hand, when his earlier recollections were clearly proved to be inaccurate as to matter of fact, as in the case of what he thought had happened at the session of the House of Burgesses of 1765, when Henry's resolutions against the stamp act were passed, and I placed under his ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... the aid of the improved sights of modern guns, could by means of a rifle-ball, with marvelous precision, drive a nail "home" that had been placed partly in a board. The experts who shoot at glass balls rarely miss, and when we consider the number used each year, the proportion of inaccurate shots is surprisingly small. Ira Paine, Doctor Carver, and others have been seen in their marvelous performances by many people of the present generation. The records made by many of the competitors of the modern army-shooting ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the choir, in the easternmost arch, is the Monument of Richard Humble, erected by his son Peter in 1616. He quotes his father in the inscription as "Alderman of London," which is supposed to be inaccurate, as the prospective alderman, though represented in the official gown, is said to have declined office for political reasons. The monument is a good specimen of the Jacobean style. Under an arched canopy, supported by Ionic ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... 65; a highly colored, partisan, and consequently inaccurate account is given by Claude Haton, i. 214-221. T. Shakerley, in his letter of Dec. 16th, relates the friar's interview with Catharine, who, on seeing the fellow's boldness and the strength of his popularity among the merchants of Paris ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... whose face, when he settled it in his collar, made the lines of a perfect lyre, and of whom it would presently become inaccurate to say that he was getting bald. He was insisting that "too many houses spoil the home," and that, with six establishments, he was without a place to lay his head, that ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... probably appropriate as well as complimentary.[10] Appropriate in the respect referred to only, for the old type of management varied so widely in its manifestations that the comparison to the procedure of the Army was most inaccurate. "Military" has always been a synonym for "systematized", "orderly," "definite," while the old type of management was more often quite the opposite of the meaning of all these terms. The term "Military Management" though ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... objection most urged is that which relates to style. It is said, the expression will be poor, inelegant, inaccurate, and offensive ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... that he had republished this tract, somewhat inaccurately, but with rather a long introduction and notes, in the third volume of his edition of the Somers Tracts, which appeared in 1810. He mentions Potts's Discoverie, in the amusing but very inaccurate and imperfect historical sketch referred to,[37] as a curious and rare book, which he had then for the first time obtained a sight of. What could have been his meaning in referring his readers, for an account of Mother Demdike and a description of Malking Tower, ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... Island and Melville Island, which together stretch for over one hundred miles across the entrance to Van Diemen's Gulf. Instead of definiteness of outline, the French charts presented the world with a bristling array of names affixed to contours which were cloudy and ill-defined, incomplete and inaccurate. ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... lagged, and was not in her usual trim. It was Miriam Nesbit, whose actions were dispirited and showed no enthusiasm. Her shooting was so inaccurate that a wave of criticism spread over the audience, and the members of her own class watched her with deep anxiety. When the first half ended, however the sophomores were ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... copy of this edict in Ventura del Arco MSS., iii, pp. 517-521. The statement in our text regarding penalties is inaccurate. The edict required that all confessions made to members of the cabildo be made anew; all persons married by them must appear before the archbishop within three days (or ten days for those without the jurisdiction of the city), under penalty of excommunication ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... know how you are. I shall shortly send a cheque for thirteen pounds, which I believe will settle the interest account up to Michaelmas. If you see anything inaccurate pray inform me. I am at present tolerably well, but of late have been very much troubled with respect to my people. Since I saw you I have been three times over to Mattishall, but with very little profit. The last time I was there I got ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... definite news concerning Ramblethorne, otherwise von Hauptwald. The local police had taken up the case, and, assisted by the military, were still scouring the country. As usual, there were inaccurate and misleading reports from various parts of the country. It was generally accepted that the spy was being hidden by some of his compatriots who, by indulgence of the British Government, were still at large in the country, or else that he had succeeded in getting ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... exaggerations have been left largely unremarked in this text, the disservice done to those militia who fought bravely at Cowpens compels me to note that this description is inaccurate. ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... errors in admitting testimony which should have been affirmed. As time goes on, however, the rule against hearsay evidence, instead of losing its force, is demonstrating its usefulness. The error and injustice that are committed in the public press by inaccurate, garbled and sometimes false statements of facts are increased in their injurious effect by the wider publication that newspapers have today, and the requirement that when a fact is to be proven in court it should be proven ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... A.D. 23 to 79, dying during the eruption of Vesuvius when Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed. He was not a scientific man, but was a prodigious recorder of information on all subjects. Much of this information is inaccurate, for he was not able to discriminate between the true and the false, or to assign to ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... attention, he began by despatching a courier to Robespierre at Chartres—where he knew the Incorruptible to be. That done, he resorted to measures for La Boulaye's detention. But this proved a grave matter. What if, after all, that half-hysterical girl's story should be inaccurate? In what case would he find himself if, acting upon it in the meantime, he should order Caron's arrest? The person of a Deputy was not one to be so lightly treated, and he might find himself constrained to answer a serious charge in ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... general speculation. The opposite vice is that which most easily besets them. The times and tides of business and debate tarry for no man. A politician must often talk and act before he has thought and read. He may be very ill informed respecting a question; all his notions about it may be vague and inaccurate; but speak he must; and if he is a man of ability, of tact, and of intrepidity, he soon finds that, even under such circumstances, it is possible to speak successfully. He finds that there is a great difference ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... an inaccurate impression, but when I had listened to various brisk people telling me about the fires—the devastating one of 1877, and the minor ones of a variety of dates—and the improvements St. John has been able to accomplish after them; and when I had seen the city itself, I must confess I had a sneaking ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... which the great Cuvier was induced by his researches to form as to the outward appearance of Paloeotherium magnum. Recent discoveries, however, have rendered it probable that this restoration is in some important respects inaccurate. Instead of being bulky, massive, and more or less resembling the living Tapirs in form, it would rather appear that Paloeotherium magnum was in reality a slender, graceful, and long-necked animal, more closely ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... Joyce himself. The narrative, though by a man stiff at the pen and rather elated by the importance of his act, appears perfectly trustworthy, and supplies, many particulars. Clarendon's version of the incident is very loose and inaccurate. He huddles into one day what was really an affair of ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... is inaccurate. He ascribes to Phips acts which took place weeks after his return, such as ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... to this edition are explanatory rather than critical; but as this image has been objected to—as inaccurate, and out of all analogy with Wordsworth's use and wont—it may be mentioned that the noise of the breaking up of the ice, after a severe winter in these lakes, when it cracks and splits in all directions, is exactly ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... into the Gardens at Twickenham is a silly little book, of which a few little copies were printed some years ago for presents, and which now sets up for itself as a vendible book. It is a most inaccurate, superficial, blundering account of Twickenham and other places, drawn up by a Jewess, who has married twice, and turned Christian, poetess, and authoress. She has printed her poems, too, and one complimentary copy of mine, which, in good breeding, I could not ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... is important. I don't think the girl was in her mistress's confidence, but I leave it to you to find out. If circumstances point to my surmise being inaccurate—you know how to act." ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... sort of thing. Things that must be done and quickly. Perhaps it sounds nothing much—a mere bit of a map. But maps are like lamps to men in the dark. And they must be accurate. To me, therefore, the most inaccurate, absent-minded mortal before the war that ever breathed, it is all a source ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... the domain of government distinguishes the modern from the ancient world, the ideas which prevail as to the part it has played, is playing, and is destined to play on the world's stage are not merely hazy, but extremely inaccurate. The intimate connection of representation with the progress which has followed its introduction is so little recognized that the most advanced democracies are now willing to listen to any proposal to return to direct ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... evidence laid before the Venetian Inquisitors that the prior of the monastery judged him to be a man of genius and doctrine, devoid of definite religion, addicted to fantastic studies, and bent on the elaboration of a philosophy that should supersede existing creeds.[100] This was a not inaccurate portrait of Bruno as he then appeared to conservatives of commonplace capacity. Yet nothing occurred to irritate him in the shape of persecution or disturbance. Bruno worked in quiet at Frankfort, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the French movements appeared to them to be inaccurate in view of the formal assurances which had been given by France, and were still quite recent; that Belgium, which since the establishment of her kingdom, has taken every care to assure the protection of her dignity and of her interests, and has devoted all her efforts to peaceful development of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... personal recollections of Jackson and his career in France. The book is valuable as the first technical treatise on the woodcut, but the historical section is notoriously inaccurate and heavily weighted ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... author of this singularly uninformed work is to be admired without necessarily being imitated. Two months' residence in a land which offered many opportunities for acquiring inaccurate data, has resulted in a work which must stand for all time as a ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... him and the world. I say it with all respect, for he was well worthy translation, and it is out of Hebrew that the version is made. Pope says he makes God the Father reason "like a school divine." The criticism is witty, but inaccurate. He makes Deity a mouthpiece for his present theology, and had the poem been written a few years later, the Almighty would have become more heterodox. Since Dante, no one had stood on these ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... the preachment of Fra Cipolla (an amusing specimen of the patter-sermon of the mendicant friar of the middle ages, that ecclesiastical Cheap Jack of his day) are all names of streets or places of Florence, a statement which, it is evident to the most cursory reader, is altogether inaccurate.] ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... been engaged in unbroken civil war for a quarter of a century. It is, however, inaccurate to designate this great struggle with tyranny as a civil war. It was a war for independence, maintained by almost the whole population of the United Provinces against a foreigner, a despot, alien to their blood, ignorant of their language, a hater of their race, a scorner of their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... less gigantic. I do not wish, and I shall not try, to deface Borrow's portrait of himself; I can only hope that I shall not do it by accident. There may be a sense in which that portrait can be called inaccurate. It may even be true that "lies—damned lies" {1} helped to make it. But nobody else knows anything like as much about the truth, and a peddling biographer's mouldy fragment of plain fact may be far more dangerous than the manly lying of one who ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... several inaccurate aims at the doorway, to plunge into the adjacent bedroom, he presently reappeared from thence, veering hard-aport, with a lighted lantern in his right hand. Then, circuitously approaching the neglected dining-table, he grasped with his disengaged digits ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... we can imagine many curious, quietly- inquisitive people asking; and we can further imagine numbers of the same class coming to various solemn and inaccurate conclusions as to what the belief of the Presbyterians is. Shortly and sweetly, we may say that they believe in Calvinism, and profess to be the last sound link in the chain of olden Puritanism. They do not believe in knocking down May poles, nor in breaking off the ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... day I called at the studio unexpectedly to ask for something I'd forgotten, and found Harry improvising at the piano—you know that way he has of improvising from memory—an inaccurate memory—of some well-known composer. I've never known him do it except when he wanted to—please some woman. Well, Lady Walmer was there, leaning over the piano and listening. Should you think from that he's keen, as ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... Coleridge, the volume of Lyrical Ballads containing the latter's immortal tale of the Ancient Mariner. In the following year he settled in the English lake-country, where Coleridge established himself for a while, and Southey for life. Hence the popular but very inaccurate title of the "Lake School," applied to a trio of poets who, except as friends, had little in common with each other. Indeed, after Wordsworth had developed his theory of poetical realism in the preface to a volume published in 1800, Coleridge rejected and criticised it as wholly untenable. All ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... Rathburn thought he might be a cow-puncher, for he wore riding boots, and had something of the air and bearing of a cowman; but he finally decided that this classification was inaccurate. An officer at one of the mines, perhaps; a forest ranger—no, he didn't wear the regalia of a ranger—Rathburn gave it up as his dinner was put before him ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... elsewhere as the grand scourge or second untruss [that is, satirist], of the time (Joseph Hall being by his own boast the first, and Marston's work being entitled "The Scourge of Villainy"). Apparently we must now prefer for Carlo a notorious character named Charles Chester, of whom gossipy and inaccurate Aubrey relates that he was "a bold impertinent fellow...a perpetual talker and made a noise like a drum in a room. So one time at a tavern Sir Walter Raleigh beats him and seals up his mouth (that is his upper and ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... are not lost. The five personal senses, that grasp neither the meaning nor the magnitude of self-abnegation, may lose sight thereof; but Science voices unselfish love, unfolds infinite good, leads on irresistible forces, and will finally show the fruits [15] of Love. Human reason is inaccurate; and the scope of the senses is inadequate to grasp the word of Truth, and teach ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... during the period of Reconstruction. I detected so many statements and representations which to my own knowledge were absolutely groundless that I decided to read carefully the entire work. I regret to say that, so far as the Reconstruction period is concerned, it is not only inaccurate and unreliable but it is the most biased, partisan and prejudiced historical work I have ever read. In his preface to volume six, the author was frank enough to use the following language: "Nineteen years' almost exclusive devotion ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... the case of a quarto dictionary, we suppose an honest reviewer may confess that he has not read through the subject of his criticism. We have opened Dr. Webster's volume at random, and have found some of his definitions as extraordinarily inaccurate as many of his etymologies. They quite justify a double-entendre of Daniel Webster's, which we heard him utter many years ago in court. He had forced such a meaning upon some word in a paper connected ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... favor addressed to the late Mr. Stanton, and in which you ask information with reference to the proposed issue of stamps to commemorate the centenary of Sir George Etienne Cartier. The information which you have received from outside sources is not only premature, but inaccurate in several details, and I can only say that although it is possible that these stamps may be issued during the course of the next few months the whole question is still under the ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... progress since team members occasionally meet on trips back here to the Pedagogue to consult the library. I am afraid, my dear Leonid, that your theories on industrialization are rapidly being proven inaccurate." ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... was a lady in this town, loved and respected by all who knew her." Thus he began, and then gave a not altogether inaccurate statement of the whole affair, dropping, of course, his own share in the concern, and accusing the vile, wicked, hideous, loathsome human heart of the devouring lion, who lived some miles to the west end of London, of a brutal desire and a hellish scheme to ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... Arthur had himself driven. His Jehu, known through all the country round as "Old Sam," was an ancient ostler, who had been in the service of the Rewtham "King's Head," man and boy, for over fifty years, and from him Arthur collected a good deal of inaccurate information about the Caresfoot family, including a garbled version of all the death of Angela's ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... significance of various I Q's holds only for the I Q's secured by the use of the Stanford revision. As we have shown elsewhere (p. 62 ff.) the I Q yielded by other versions of the Binet tests are often so inaccurate as to be misleading. ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... and the seasons would have been obliterated, astronomical calculations would have become inaccurate, ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... inaccurate with respect to Mr. Garrick, of whom he says, 'he trusted that the least intimation of a desire to come among us, would procure him a ready admission; but in this he was mistaken. Johnson consulted me upon it; and when ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... capacity. Such centers are considerate enough to transmit at the rate of not more than five or ten words to the minute. It is persistence and a willingness to go slowly and carefully that win out in the end. A moderately delivered message that is without errors is worth a dozen fast, inaccurate ones; for when you blunder and have to go back and repeat, you not only waste your time and that of the man at the other end of the line but you annoy and usually confuse him. You will never gain anything if you are content ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... with tissue paper; the drums were tabourets and the sewing-table. Loren Wheeler, editor of the Dauntless, led the orchestra, with a ruler and a totally inaccurate sense of rhythm. The music was a reminiscence of tom-toms heard at circus fortune-telling tents or at the Minnesota State Fair, but the whole company pounded and puffed and whined in a sing-song, and ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... excitement. He was the strangest mixture of exactitude and passion. He had complete mastery over every detail of the business, and he never blundered. All his work was thorough, down to the very bottom, and he had the most intolerant hatred of everything which was loose and inaccurate. He never passed a day without flaming out into oaths and curses against his subordinates, and they could not say in his wildest fury that his ravings were beside the mark. He was wrong in his treatment of men—utterly ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... verbatim, or nearly so. This too belongs to the same tradition regarding Demosthenes, and is probably as inaccurate as the other. Certainly the eight copyings would not suffice for having the whole by heart. Excepting a professional rhapsodist, or some one gifted with extraordinary powers of memory that would hardly be compatible with a great understanding, nobody would think of committing Thucydides to memory. ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... must know her own language well—how to spell it, how to pronounce it, and, still more, how to use it simply, honestly, and effectively in the expression of her thought. Her over-mastering devotion to truth would not let her rest content with any loose or inaccurate expression. "No," she would say, "that isn't the word I want. It doesn't say just what I mean," and she would never be satisfied until she found the word ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... detailed account of how the aeroplane and the dirigible of to-day came to being, but each author who has treated the subject has devoted his attention to some special phase or section. The principal exception to this rule—Hildebrandt—wrote in 1906, and a good many of his statements are inaccurate, especially with ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... obstacle in his round of activity. He was everywhere at once—heaving in chain, hooking on halyards, hauling ropes; while my part became that of the clown who does things after they are already done, for my knowledge of a yacht was of that floating and inaccurate kind which is useless in practice. Soon the anchor was up (a great rusty monster it was!), the sails set, and Davies was darting swiftly to and fro between the tiller and jib-sheets, while the Dulcibella bowed a lingering farewell ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... miserably defective in their nomenclature. None of our surveyors or geographers have been oriental scholars. It may be doubted if any of them have been conversant with the spoken language of the country. They have, consequently, put down names at random, according to their own inaccurate appreciation of sounds carelessly, vulgarly, and corruptly uttered; and their maps of India are crowded with appellations which bear no similitude whatever either to past or present denominations. We need not wonder that we cannot discover Sanskrit names ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... longitudes. If the question be, for instance, to select one or another point, in some one or other ocean, astronomy has nothing to do with it, and when it wishes to impose upon us one of its observatories to fulfil such a function it tends to give an inaccurate solution. ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... and the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk, and with a memory full of ships and seas and perilous headlands and shining pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the pretty niceties of drawing or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... of self-consciousness is that it hinders all this and makes action inaccurate, slow, and fatiguing. Inaccuracy is almost certain. When we study how something is to be done, we are apt to lay stress on certain features of the situation, and not to bring others into due prominence. It is difficult separately to correlate the many elements which go to make up a desired ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... near to the theistic conception as this modified polytheism, for they usually conduct us, as we have already indicated, to nothing more than a (sometimes) personified force of nature, principle of order, or abstract conception—not a God. Take away the inaccurate and misleading terms by which the original Greek is rendered in most of the English versions, in which the enthusiasm of the student of comparative religions has taken the place of the careful and accurate translator, and, aside from frequent apostrophes, such as are continually addressed ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... Knight, nor even Craik, had sufficient means of testing the accuracy of Rutherford's story. Unfortunately there are many points on which the narrative is not only inaccurate but misleading. Craik concludes that Poverty Bay, where Cook first landed in New Zealand, is the scene of the capture of the "Agnes." Rutherford, however, gives the name as "Tokomardo." This corresponds with a bay some miles further north, and about forty ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... same idea again when, under the teaching of Julius March, he began reading history, and when his little skill in Greek and Latin carried him as far as the easier passages of the classic poets. Dick was a very apt, if somewhat erratic and inaccurate, scholar. His insatiable curiosity drove him forward. He scurried, in childish fashion by all shortcuts available, to get at the heart of the matter—a habit of mind detestable to pedants, since to them the letter is the main object, not the spirit. Happily Julius was ceasing to be a ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the study of brain development in men and animals guided by a correct system without being delighted with the uniform accuracy of the science; for even the incomplete and inaccurate science of Gall and Spurzheim, marred in its application by misconceptions of anatomy, has proved sufficiently correct and instructive to maintain its hold upon the minds of all students of nature, by giving them more truth than error, and sometimes giving ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... the broad facts of human experience. The only rule of thumb that can be hazarded on the strength of actual practice is that wars to maintain or upset the Balance of Power between States, called by inaccurate people Balance of Power wars, and by accurate people Jealousy of Power wars, never establish the desired peaceful and secure equilibrium. They may exercise pugnacity, gratify spite, assuage a wound to national pride, or ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... imprisonment in successive bodies. There is no reason to suppose that Pythagoras displayed any particular originality in this part of his teaching. It all depends on the doctrine of transmigration or rebirth (παλιγγενεσια {palingenesia}), which is often incorrectly designated by the late and inaccurate term 'metempsychosis'. There is no doubt that Pythagoras taught this, and also the rule of abstinence from animal flesh which is its natural corollary, but such ideas had been well known in many parts of Greece before his time. ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... authorities during the Saxon period, when stripped of the bombast and inaccurate style of the monkish historians, is, that the Scots had sometimes been defeated by the English, had received peace on disadvantageous terms, had made submissions to the English monarch, and had even perhaps fallen into some dependence on a power which was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... beings are spiteful and inaccurate and all those things you said; but that isn't all they are. The women I see, the wives of my poor drunkards are so wonderful, so patient. They are mothers and wage-earners and sick nurses, too; they're ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... never had any sort of agriculture, nor until the English taught him the use of dogs did he ever domesticate any kind of animal or bird, nor did he teach himself to turn turtle or to use hook and line in fishing. He cannot count, and all his ideas are hazy, inaccurate, and ill-defined. He has never developed unaided any idea of drawing or making a tally or record for any purpose, but he readily understands a sketch or plan when shown him. He soon becomes mentally tired, and is apt to break ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... novelist, the successful dramatist, and the witty essayist," wrote a popular history of Greece, in two volumes, 8vo, 1774, embracing a period from the earliest date down to the death of Alexander the Great. It is an attractive work, elegantly written, but is superficial and inaccurate. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... always a terribly fascinating thing, for it is always the inaccurate portrait of a stranger curiously akin to one and curiously alien. But to see one's portrait move and breathe and feel ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... revenue amount to 573,922 pesos; and the Filipinas produce that sum in revenue for your Majesty. [49] [In the margin of Extracto-historial reprint: "Note—This sum seems to be inaccurate, because it should amount ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... inquire by what motives he was determined on these important occasions, will find them such as his pride will scarcely suffer him to confess; some sudden ardour of desire, some uncertain glimpse of advantage, some petty competition, some inaccurate conclusion, or some example implicitly reverenced. Such are often the first causes of our resolves; for it is necessary to act, but impossible to know the consequences of action, or to discuss all the reasons ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... inaccurate," the Prince objected, with a sudden flash of his white teeth. "The beauty which is not for him has been many a man's undoing. But seriously, my quarrel with Naida is one of prejudice only. She is the confidante and the inspiration of Matinsky, and though one realises, of course, ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... obnoxious white man, received his hospitality, and given acquiescent ear to his advice. These two gentlemen looked upon the half-breeds as savages. They sent letters to the newspapers, describing Red River and its people in terms grossly unjust, and inaccurate. M. Riel got the communications and read them ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... men regarding the damage done by the social diseases are inaccurate chiefly when they attempt to state percentages of the whole population. They are reliable when they state observed facts, such as the following: It is now established in medical science that (1) gonorrheal ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... about the circumstances of Spenser's life than about the lives of many men of letters of that time; yet our knowledge is often imperfect and inaccurate. The year 1552 is now generally accepted as the year of his birth. The date is inferred from a passage in one of his Sonnets,[4:1] and this probably is near the truth. That is to say that Spenser was born in one of the last two years of Edward ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... from time immemorial in the manufacture of soap and glass, two chemical productions which employ and keep in circulation an immense amount of capital. The quantity of soap consumed by a nation would be no inaccurate measure whereby to estimate its wealth and civilisation. Of two countries, with an equal amount of population, the wealthiest and most highly civilised will consume the greatest weight of soap. This consumption does not subserve sensual ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... which gave much discussion, but few people, even in the army, thought that the aeroplane would be of great service except for scouting. At the airdrome where I learned to fly we used to practice dropping bombs—-imaginary ones, of course—-but we were so inaccurate at it that none of us imagined we would be of much use in that direction in actual warfare. I have heard it said that the Germans directed their artillery by signals dropped from aircraft at the very beginning. They did so before they had fought many weeks, anyway. Boche fliers, ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... density when compared with that of our earth. M. Schroeter has observed a small twilight in the moon, such as would arise from an atmosphere capable of reflecting the rays at the height of about one mile." [446] Dr. Brinkley is inaccurate in saying that astronomers are agreed as to the lunar atmosphere. Like students in every other department of inquiry, spiritual as well as physical, they fail at present to see "eye to eye"; which is not surprising, seeing that the eye is so restricted, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... English, and is the medium by which English messages and letters are translated into Chinese for the information of the officials. His name is Chueh. His method of translation is to glean the sense of a sentence by the probable meaning, derived from an inaccurate Anglo-Chinese dictionary, of the separate words of the sentence. He is a broken reed to trust to as an interpreter. Chueh is not an offensively truthful man. When he speaks to you, you find yourself wondering if you have ever met a greater liar than he. "Three men's strength," he says, "cannot ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... Lillias Scott, daughter of John Scott Esq. of Harden, and celebrated for her beauty in the pastoral song of Tweedside,—I mean that set of modern words which begins 'What beauty does Flora disclose.' This lady I myself remember very well, and I mention her to you least you should receive any inaccurate information owing to her being called like her predecessor the 'Flower of Yarrow.' There was a portrait of this latter lady in the collection at Hamilton which the present Duke transferred through my hands to Lady Diana Scott relict of the late Walter Scott Esq. of Harden, which picture was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... while it is feasible to count the stamens even when converted into pistils, it is not possible when groups of them are more or less intimately united into single bodies. This combination makes all enumeration difficult and inaccurate and often wholly unreliable. In such cases the observation is limited to a computation of the degree of the change, rather than to a strict numerical inquiry. Happily the responses to the experimental influences are so marked ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... exactness of this report has secured it, in general, against close analysis. English historians, almost without exception, quote it as it stands, while there are American writers who respect it so far as to pronounce Washington's report clearly, and even purposely, inaccurate. Thus the most recent English history of this period says: "The Americans fled in confusion, leaving upwards of three thousand killed, wounded, and prisoners, including their three generals of division;" and in a note the writer adds: "Washington's estimate of ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... slumbering fire of romance in the deep-fringed eyes, and suggestions of poetry lurked in the shadows of her hair; and at once my breast was full of stirrings to write for her—only for her—a book full of beauty and happiness and sunshine, and, oh! such false views of life, such inaccurate pictures of the pleasures of a society she would never know. The hero should be handsome and brave and good, with a curling moustache; and the heroine should be beautiful and true, with an extensive wardrobe; and the clouds would come only to roll by, and the story should die away in an ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... a constant grind at obligatory subjects less disagreeable than the consequences of idleness. These are the simple arts by means of which unwilling boys are driven, like cattle, along the highway of what is termed, by an inaccurate application of the ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... taken a two-point bearing or a cross bearing, which would have occupied less time, but if, under all the conditions which appealed to his judgment as a mariner, he had taken a different method of ascertaining his exact distance and the result would have been inaccurate, or while engaged in taking a two-point bearing the ship had been torpedoed, then somebody would have said he should have taken a four-point bearing. The point of the matter is that an experienced Captain took the bearing he thought proper for his purposes, and to predicate negligence ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... at the watchmaker examining my watch. I should have walked the streets erect if there had been one thing which I could do better than anybody I met. There was nothing: I stood for nothing: no purpose was intended by God through me. I was also constitutionally inaccurate—this was another of my troubles—and nothing short of the daily use of a fact made me sure of it. No matter how zealously I went over and over again a particular historical period, I always broke down the moment my supposed acquisitions were tested ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... of this kind never comes with absolute simplicity of application into the life of man; growth in particular is a complex thing, and all generalisations must needs be a little inaccurate. But the general law of the Food would seem to be this, that when it could be taken into the system in any way it stimulated it in very nearly the same degree in all cases. It increased the amount of growth from six to seven times, and it did not go beyond that, whatever amount of ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... ring of Macaulay in it, and is a form of poetry which cannot possibly harm anybody, even if translated into French. Any inaccurate ideas of the laws of nature which the children might get from the passage in question could easily be corrected afterwards by a lecture on Hydrostatics. The poem, however, which gives us most pleasure is the one called The Dear Old Knocker on the Door. It is appropriately ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... regret, and which, moreover, I have never been able to explain. My own branch of medicine is not mental; and I should be glad to have the view of a mental specialist on my singular momentary and indeed almost automatic action. To say that I 'pulled Dr. Warner's nose,' is, however, inaccurate in a respect that strikes me as important. That I punched his nose I must cheerfully admit (I need not say with what regret); but pulling seems to me to imply a precision of objective with which I cannot reproach myself. In comparison with this, the act ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... of, or objective to, our individual consciousness, but which are uniformly translated into consciousness as Force and Matter. Now it does not signify one iota for the purposes of Materialism whether these our symbolical representations of Force and Matter are accurate or inaccurate representations of their corresponding realities,—unless, of course, some independent reason could be shown for supposing that in their reality they resemble Mind. Call Force x and Matter y, and so long as we are agreed ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... co-operation, not antagonism; by making constructive legislation, not destructive prosecution, the immediate object of its inquiries; by conservative investigation of law and fact, and by refusal to issue incomplete and hence necessarily inaccurate reports. Its policy being thus one of open inquiry into, and not attack upon, business, the Bureau has been able to gain not only the confidence, but, better still, the cooperation of men engaged in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... Committee is quite right in remarking that the language of this important rubric, as set forth by the Convention of 1883, is "inelegant and inaccurate," but another diocese has called attention to the fact that the substitute which Maryland offers would, if adopted, enable any rector who might be so minded to withhold entirely from the non-communicating portion of his flock all opportunity for public confession and absolution from ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... over for me now and vanished. That opportunity will come no more. Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate version of our story and why I did not take office, and have formed your partial judgement on me. And so it is I sit now at my stone table, half out of life already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure, splashed with sunlight and hung with vine tendrils, with ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... but without the peculiar treatment of the middle of each side, and with something simpler and plainer than the pairs of dormer windows in the plate by King. Some reasons may, however, be given for thinking the latter's version of the spire correct, though his engraving is elsewhere so inaccurate. Such are: (1) its abundant detail, perhaps too abundant, as others do not support his dormer windows, for instance; (2) the fact that Browne Willis, in his "Mitred Abbies," refers to this "draught" (when used to illustrate Dugdale's ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer |
