"Intangible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of nature are a vacuum, and a plenum. The plenum is body, or tangible nature; the vacuum is space, or intangible nature. "We know by the evidences of the senses (which are our only rule of reasoning) that bodies have a real existence, and we infer from the evidence of the senses that the vacuum has a real existence; ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... weakness, but of clearness and obscurity. It is inexplicably uneven, as if the writer were perpetually playing on the boundary line that divides sanity of thought from intellectual chaos. There is method in the madness, but it is a method of intangible ideas. Nevertheless, there is genius written over a large portion of it, and to a musician the wealth of musical imagination is a living spring of thought"—Harold E. Gorst, in London Saturday Review (Dec. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... that the simplest expressions of nerve response— the reflexes—are motor in character, but it is difficult to understand how such intangible reactions as love, hate, poetic fancy, or moral inhibition can be also the result of the adaptation to environment of a distinctively motor mechanism. We expect, however, to prove that so-called "psychic" states as well as the reflexes are products ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... it is the intangible value, the unconscious purpose, the desire to realize empires that are only in part material, the desire for glory and prestige and opportunity that seem to be the guiding motives. There is a general ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... Hand, however, who entered Miss Redmond's room a moment later. His half impudent manner changed to distant respect, tinged with a sort of personal adoration. Agatha felt it, though it was too intangible to be taken notice of, either for rebuke or reward. Agatha was sitting in a rocking-chair by the window, sipping her tea out of the best tea-cup, her tray on a stand in front of her. She looked excited and flushed, but her ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... old, like Luther or Mazzini, he lacked the capacity for carrying to practical success the ideal which he preached. But to assume that he must accordingly be adjudged a failure is to ignore the significance of the ideals to which he awakened the world. Much there was that was unattainable and intangible, but its value to mankind in the development of ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... he saw the green-patched farm, the little gray cabin where his mother and Lucy slept, no doubt dreaming of the hopes he had fostered in them. Some doubt, some fear, intangible and inexplicable, passed over him as he looked. Would all be well with Lucy? There was indeed much to be feared, and he could never give happiness full rein until he had her safe away ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... generally have active minds, but their minds never present anything clearly. To their mental vision all is ill-defined, chaotic. They see everything in a haze. Whether such men talk or write, they are verbose, illogical, intangible, will-o'-the-wispish. Their thoughts are phantomlike; like shadows, they continually escape their grasp. In their talk they will, after long dissertations, tell you that they have not said just what they would like to say; there is always a subtle, lurking something ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... interests, can become a constant accompaniment to the shifting preoccupations of existence, like the remembered songs which sing themselves silently in our mind and the remembered landscapes becoming an intangible background to our ever-varying thoughts. And, secondly, it explains how art can fulfil the behests of our changing and discursive interest in things while satisfying the imperious unchanging demands of the contemplated preference for beautiful aspects. And thus we return to my starting-point ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... caress. There are voices which so move and stir the hearer that they arouse an emotion which for the moment may override reason; voices which appeal to the senses like beguiling music, and which conquer by a persuasive sweetness as irresistible as it is intangible. The tones of the Persian swayed Ashe so deeply that the young man felt as if swimming on a billow of melody. Philip regarded as if fascinated the slender, dusky fingers of the reader as they handled the splendidly illuminated parchment on which glowed ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... Some intangible feeling of uneasiness made me leave my tent about 11 p.m. that night and glance around the quiet camp. The stars between the snow-flurries showed that the floe had swung round and was end on to the swell, a position exposing it to sudden strains. ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... with the same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed for ever in immutable grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavouring it, falls ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... ready ever to absorb the fresh advance of waves. It is indeed striking to observe how authors and men of talent have increased, so vastly out of all proportion with other classes of men. Observing it, the political economist may well shout 'Io triumphe!' for that even in so delicate and intangible a matter as intellectual gifts, the famous doctrine of supply and demand is so thoroughly carried out. We raise, however, no hue and cry after 'poor trash.' Neither have we the blood-thirsty wish to run to ground the panting ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... vague fluttering and interchange of images; an elusive, intangible influx of suggestions, and an equally dreamy ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... forward daily, hourly, to the anguish of her departure. She would vanish out of his life, intangible as a melted snow-flake, and only memory would stay behind to tell him he had known and loved her. Why should this be so hard to bear? If she stayed, he dared not tell her she was dear to him; he dared not stretch ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... examine himself. "In fact I do not at all know how I stand," he thought; "this flux and reflux of different wishes alarms me, but how have I come to this point, and what is the matter with me?" What he felt, since he became more lucid, was so intangible, so indefinite, and yet so continuous that he was obliged to give up understanding it. Indeed every time he tried to examine his soul, a curtain of mist arose, and hid from him the unseen and silent approach of he knew not what. The ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... buttresses, dark amid the long sweeps of radiant snow, their shattered peaks reared high into the very heavens. A great silence reigned. There was no wind with us, and yet, even as we watched, a white cloud flitted past the virgin peak of Kolahoi—ghostly, intangible; and immediately, even as vultures assemble suddenly, no one knows whence, so did the clouds appear, surging over the gleaming shoulders of the mountain ridges, and up and round the grim precipices. We turned and hurried ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... Whether at my desk, or in the courts; among men in the crowded mart, or in places simply where the idle and the thoughtless congregate, it was still my companion. It was, however, still a shadow only; a dull, intangible, half-formed image of the mind; the crude creature of a fear rather than a desire; for, of a truth, nothing could be more really terrible to me than the apparent necessity of taking the life of one so dear to me once, and still so dear to the only friends I had ever known. ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... bear on their young shoulders the burdens of the world. Evidence is hard to collect, for the witnesses disagree among themselves. Then there are other complications. Abundance stole things which you can see and touch, while Lotus's theft was only one of intangible thoughts. Furthermore, Abundance comes from a no-account family, quite "down and out," while Lotus is a pastor's daughter and as such entitled to due respect and deference. And still further, nobody ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... who only see, in the formation of the Yugoslav State, a sympathetic or antipathetic episode of the War, or a subsidiary effect of it, have failed to detect its inner meaning." As for the Treaty of London which was concluded against the enemy, it was not to be regarded as intangible against a friendly people. By special grants of autonomy, as at Zadar, or by arrangements between the two States, he would see the language and culture of all the trans-Adriatic sons of Italy assured. He warned his countrymen lest, in order to meet the peril of a German-Slav alliance against them, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... smiling eyes, from her innocently-sloping shoulders and faintly-rosy hands, from her light and, at the same time, rather languid gait, from the very sound of her voice, which was low and sweet,—there breathed forth an insinuating charm, as intangible as a delicate perfume, a soft and as yet modest intoxication, something which it is difficult to express in words, but which touched and excited,—and, of course, excited something which was not timidity. Lavretzky turned the conversation ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... draw from his ground that which he has not himself, and who, by the spiritual essence claimed for him, is incapable of making anything, and of putting anything in motion? Nothing is plainer than that they would have us believe that an intangible spirit ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... impression is, that the majority of people take no more than a tepid interest in these forlorn adventures, and are but imperfectly convinced of the sanity of the adventurers; and this is the more particularly noticeable when the quest is for something so intangible and unmarketable as a North Pole. Why need they go so far afield for their excitement? Every discoverer is a detective. He traces missing places, and there are cartloads of Poles in their ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... pervades and transcends the universe. I do not understand how Indian seekers after truth can hurry and strive about sublunary matters. Surely they ought to feel 'that this tangible world, with its chatter of right and wrong, subserves the intangible.' ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... questions. He looked at Jan from his cot, and watched the boy silently as he undressed and went to bed; and in the morning the whole incident passed from his mind. The intangible holds but little fascination for the simple folk who live under the Arctic Circle. Their struggle is with life, their joys are in its achievement, in their constant struggle to keep life running strong and red within them. Such an existence of solitude and of strife with nature ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... Wigwam, could hardly believe he saw aright, when the train pulled in and she flew down the steps to throw her arms around Joyce. It was the same, lovable, eager little face that looked up into his, the same impetuous unspoiled child, yet a second glance left him puzzled. There was some intangible change he could not label, and it interested him ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... if we were waking from a dream,—which is the only possible ending to all of Keats's Greek and mediaeval fancies. We are to remember, however, that no beautiful thing, though it be intangible as a dream, can enter a man's life and leave him quite the same afterwards. Keats's own word is here suggestive. "The imagination," he said, "may be likened to Adam's dream; he awoke ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... owe for a kindness received. One says he owes the money which he got, another a consulship, another a province. These, however, are but the outward tokens of good services, not the services themselves. A benefit is to the hand something intangible; it is a process in the mind. There is a world of difference between the material of a benefit and the benefit itself. Hence the reality of a benefit lies not in gold, nor silver, but in the good will of the giver. The things which we hold in our hands, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... things, he found himself irresistibly facing toward the past, and irresistibly convinced that in that past, as in the swiftly marching present, there might be some lesson, not ignoble and not uncomforting. Horrified that he could not rest in the way that he had chosen, distracted at these intangible desires, he doubted at times his perfect sanity; for though it seemed there was within him the impulse to teach and to create, he could not say to himself what or how was to be the form, whether mental or material, of the thing created, ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... action made her conscious that there was a change in his feelings. It checked her rising emotions and made her curious. What was he embarrassed about? The girl stole a look at him, which left him still more disturbed and uneasy. It was an intangible thing upon which she could not remark and yet could not fail to recognize. Luther had never been awkward in her presence before. Their association had been of the most offhand and informal character. As a boy of fifteen he had carried her, a girl of eleven, over many a snowbank ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... another chance of drawing nearer. 'Henrietta, wait a minute.' She moved to her dressing-table, smiling at what she was about to do. It seemed as though she were going to bribe the girl to love her, but she was only yielding to the pathetic human desire to give something tangible since the intangible was ignored. 'When I was twenty-one,' she said, 'your father gave ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... in his household. The rice and fish are boiled in a pot and then allowed to cool in the same vessel or poured out to cool in a large earthen or wooden bowl. Then Mr. Tao together with Mrs. Tao and all the young Taos squat on their heels around the mixture and satisfy that intangible thing called the appetite. They do not use chop sticks as the Chinese do, but the rice and fish are caught in a hollow formed by the first three fingers of the right hand. The thumb is then placed behind the mass. It is raised up and poised before the mouth, with a skill coming ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... and of brilliant imagination; that it is pervaded by a tremendous mental excitement, though one does not know what the stir is all about; and that the impression produced by this nervous, impassioned style is usually spoiled by digressions, by hairsplitting, and by something elusive, intangible, to which we can give no name, but which blurs the author's vision as a drifting ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... young man understood, as clearly as if she had told him in so many words, that she was not a widow and that her husband was the cause of her sorrow. His quickened instinct marvelously divined (or else it was conveyed to him by some intangible method of hers) that the Count de Vaurigard was a very bad case, but that she would ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... business as a stepping-stone merely to the study of the law. The old merchant eyed him askance, but made no response. Occasionally the veteran of the market evinced a glimmer of enthusiasm over a prime article of butter, but anything so intangible as a young man's ambitious dreams was looked upon with a very cynical eye. Still he could not be a part of New York life and remain wholly sceptical in regard to the possibilities it offered to a young fellow of talent and large capacity for work. He was a childless man, and if Roger ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... she had succeeded in doing what she wished, while often the results and effects were so subtile and remote as to be imperceptible to others. Life was to her a toy with which she amused herself, and she found her chief enjoyment in trying experiments upon it of which the results were intangible to all ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... his name to offer her. It relieved somewhat the present situation. Yet her avoidance of him he could construe only as contempt for a man who had played with her while bound by other ties. Sometimes he felt that he must explain to her how intangible were those bonds. Yet he was sufficiently conscious of their actual existence to feel that the difficulties of explanation were almost insurmountable. And Hilda, poor child, took his ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... the philistines of his time, has remained puzzling to the present day.... As no other man bore his name, so the artist, too, is something unique, mocks every historical analysis, and remains what he was, a puzzling, intangible, Hamlet nature—Rembrandt." The author's theory of the psychological document is hardly a solution of the admitted puzzle, though it is interesting to follow him in tracing it out in Rembrandt's religious ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... in the direction of the house. Her husband looked after her with mute sorrow at his own incapacity to melt from vision in that intangible manner—from ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... Brookfield, Amesbury, Marlborough, were all more or less infested, usually by small scalping-parties, hiding in the outskirts, waylaying stragglers, or shooting men at work in the fields, and disappearing as soon as their blow was struck. These swift and intangible persecutors were found a far surer and more effectual means of annoyance than larger bodies. As all the warriors were converts of the Canadian missions, and as prisoners were an article of value, ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... appeal was then made to him because of recent foolish statements by members of Mr. Seymour's family, which Dickens thus contradicted: "It is with great unwillingness that I notice some intangible and incoherent assertions which have been made, professedly on behalf of Mr. Seymour, to the effect that he had some share in the invention of this book, or of anything in it, not faithfully described in the foregoing paragraph. With the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... when, in magnetic disturbances, there is an unusual amount of immortal food. Should we try to resist it, there would eventually be a greater pressure without than within, and we should assimilate involuntarily. We are part of the intangible universe, and can feel no hunger that is not instantly appeased, neither can we ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... wreck on this reef of musk and bear's-grease came over Nattie with a rush, and for a moment so affected her that she could hardly restrain her tears. And yet, after all, was not "C," her "C," the "C" whom she knew by his conversation only—"picked out of books!"—an unreal, intangible being, and not this so different ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... understand faith. What is faith, anyway? I try to believe; sometimes I feel that my faith is strong, but at other times I feel that my faith is giving way. Can you help me in this matter? Faith seems such a hazy, intangible, elusive thing; now I think I have it, now it seems certain I have it not. I feel at times that my faith is so strong I could believe anything, then again I feel that every bit of faith I had is gone. Can you give me any instructions that ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry
... studying the latter, and is not yet sure that it understands him; yet Shakespeare is to Carlyle what a graded turnpike is to a tortuous mountain path. The former deals chiefly with the visible; the latter with the intangible. The first tells us what men did; the last seeks to learn why they did it. Carlyle is the prince of critics. He is often lenient to a fault, but seldom deceived—"looks quite through the shows of things into the things themselves." Uriel, keenest of vision 'mid all the host of heaven, is his ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... until on June 29th, 1852, he died. In him intellect, reason, eloquence, and courage united to form a character fit to command. It was the remark of a distinguished senator that Mr. Clay's eloquence was absolutely intangible to delineation; that the most labored description could not embrace it, and that to be understood it must be seen and felt. He was an orator by nature, and by his indomitable assiduity he at once rose to prominence. His eagle eye burned with patriotic ardor or ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... mighty sinews against the force he could not understand. Here was an intangible thing, yet it was a power that challenged his own brute strength, and he exerted himself to the limit in accepting the challenge. With legs spread wide and with sweat oozing from every pore, he heaved himself erect, straightening knees and spine ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... say, and how can I describe to you, all you skeptical men sitting there with pipes in your mouths, the amazing sensation I experienced of holding an intangible, impalpable thing so closely to my heart that it touched my body with equal pressure all the way down, and then melted away somewhere into my very being? For it was like seizing a rush of cool wind and feeling a ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... villainy. Moreover, now that her decision had been made, Plutina was surprised to find her alarm over such confession greatly lessened from what she had supposed possible. She began to realize that some intangible change in her grandfather himself was responsible for this. She became convinced that the new gentleness had had its origin in the unselfish abandonment of his marital hopes. It was as if that renunciation had vitally softened him. Perhaps, in this strange mood, he ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... to himself at her evident pleasure in his words, and, with much the same feeling with which he might have cuddled a purring, affectionate kitten, he went a step farther and made love—a very shadowy, intangible sort of love, in a very indefinite ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... their bounteous, beauteous yield of daintiness and comfort, and paying for themselves many times over by the atmosphere of nicety and refinement which they create. For it is these touches, unobtrusive by their very delicacy, which introduce that intangible but very essential quality known as tone ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... to see that education must enable the individual to meet the real problems of actual experience as they are confronted in the day's life. Nor can the help rendered be indefinite, intangible, or in any degree uncertain. It must definitely adjust one to his place, and cause him to grow in it, accomplishing the most for himself and for society; it must add to the largeness of his personal life, and at the same ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... the domain of quite simple material things the dislike of having fixed habits of thought disturbed, leads gentlemen to resent innovations in that way, it is not astonishing that innovations of a more intangible and elusive kind should be subject to a like unconscious misrepresentation, especially by newspapers and public men pushed by commercial or political necessity to say the popular thing rather than the true thing: that contained in the speech of Mr. Churchill, ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... be the mourning voice of the Eagle Rapids; but far as we could see, the river was quiet as a lake. We jogged on for a mile, with the invisible moaning presence about us. It was somewhat like the intangible something you feel about a powerful but sinister personality. The golden morning was saturated ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... intangible indications Andrew and I felt impelled to leave, he proceeding to harness the horse and ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... to help her and could find not one. The only thing was to let her talk freely, to encourage her by a gentle friendly interest, such as a girl friend might have shown, and to give her the relief of expression for these vague troubles and perplexities which, when uttered, seemed intangible and entirely inexplicable to her. Not once did she so much as imply any reproach to her husband, and it was plain that she felt unconscious of any ground for complaint. She alluded to him frequently and always most kindly, and ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... to the apothecary's eyes as anything intangible could be, a load of suffering was lifted from the quadroon's mind, as this explanation was concluded. Yet he only sat in meditation before his tenant, who regarded him long and sadly. Then, seized with one of his energetic impulses, he ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... in hand now. Each had given the other a false impression at the start, and when two people are living at cross-purposes it is easier to move mountains than to remove that most intangible of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... the schoolmaster I have got a bit ahead of my history. Soon after the opening of the new year—ten days or so later it may have been—I had begun to feel myself encompassed by a new and subtle force. It was a thing as intangible as heat but as real as fire and more terrible, it seemed to me. I felt it first in the attitude of my play fellows. They denied me the confidence and intimacy which I had enjoyed before. They whispered ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... of hunger or the instinct of preservation? For if it be said that the former creations are only the creations of our imagination, without objective value, may it not equally be said of the latter that they are only the creations of our senses? Who can assert that there is not an invisible and intangible world, perceived by the inward sense that lives in the service ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... indications of life. Experience of dreams led men to believe that the "soul" could also leave the body temporarily and enjoy varied experiences. But the concrete-minded Egyptian demanded some physical evidence to buttress these intangible ideas of the wandering abroad of his vital essence. He made a statue for it to dwell in after his death, because he was not able to make an adequately life-like reproduction of the dead man's features upon the mummy itself or its ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... entirely harmless disposition, we will now turn to those more elaborate pictures in which the dead are represented under an altogether terrific aspect. It is not as an incorporeal being that the visitor from the other world is represented in the Skazkas. He comes not as a mere phantom, intangible, impalpable, incapable of physical exertion, haunting the dwelling which once was his home, or the spot to which he is drawn by the memory of some unexpiated crime. It is as a vitalized corpse that ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... God, the origin of all things, manifests himself to men, in lesser forms, according to this mythology, more and more human and less and less intangible. These forms are generally triads, and resolve themselves into a male deity, a female deity, and their child. Triad after triad brings the original Divinity into forms more and more earthly, till at last we find "that we have no longer to ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... generally respected, even by those who most hated his economic teachings. The mere thought that such a Radical should be proposed for Mayor scared, not merely the Big Interests, but the owners of real estate and intangible property. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... and enthusiasm of the graduates is expressed in many less spectacular ways, the amount of alumni gifts is the most available standard by which the effectiveness of this support can be shown. Judged by this rough and ready approximation for a force which is in reality intangible and based on something finer and more spiritual than material gifts, particularly since it represents obviously only the sentiment of the few rather than that of the thousands who would do likewise if they were able, it shows nevertheless how responsively the University's alumni regard ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... his Paradiso are not, as we are already aware, fantastic images such as he employed for the first two parts of the Divina Commedia, but are things of the spirit, viz., knowledge, beauty, faith, love, joy; and he is aided in making visible those invisible entities of the spiritual life by such intangible things as sound, motion ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... there is something—the sixth hiding-place! This one was intangible. Not one of them dared touch it. It was the very last resource, the nest-egg, the something put by for a rainy ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... their castle to the ground. Shortly after, on approaching the sea-shore, Sir Artegall perceives a charlatan provided with scales in which he pretends to weigh all things anew. Thereupon Sir Artegall, by weighing such intangible things as truth and falsehood, right and wrong, demonstrates that the charlatan's scales are false, and, after convicting him of trickery, drowns ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... experienced, something that unknowingly she had been waiting for; something that must come to her at last. . . . She wondered if the young man sitting so close to her were ever stirred by such rapturous, intangible thoughts. With quickened interest she turned to look at him, and met his deep eyes intent ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... he should say that the intangible part is the priceless part—the life, the beauty, the very essence of the whole matter—isn't it strange that we women are slower than men to see that— tell him I saw it, saw it and confessed it when for his sake I was slipping away from him by stealth out ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... carrying her ashes in an urn: and I own it appears to me to be a little incongruous—or, at least, a little defective in that pure classical taste which the sculptor unquestionably possesses,—to put, what may be considered visible and invisible—or tangible and intangible—representations of the same person before you at the same time. If a representation of the figure of the duchess be necessary, it should not be in the form of a medallion. The pyramidal back-ground would doubtless have had ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... trembling, which made all my bones to shake," says Job in one of his most dismal moments; and now to Dysart this strange, unaccountable chill feeling comes. Insensibly, born of the hour and the silence only, and with no smallest dread of things intangible. ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... to the distraught man. In the evening when he went out to walk the sense of distance that lay all about him did not tempt him to walk and walk, going half insanely forward for hours, trying to break through an intangible wall. ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... in that strange element in human nature which dreads whatsoever is weird and uncanny in common experiences, and sees strange portents and dire chimeras in all that is unexplainable to the senses. It is made most virile in the desire for knowledge of the invisible and intangible, that must ever elude the keenest inquiry, a phase of thought always to be reckoned with when imagination runs riot, and potent in its effect, though evanescent as a vision the brain sometimes retains of a dream, and as senseless in the cold light of ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... around the haunches by a string; she had a rag tied about her head and jaws to keep her from mewing; as she slowly descended she curved upward and clawed at the string, she swung downward and clawed at the intangible air. The tittering rose higher and higher—the cat was within six inches of the absorbed teacher's head—down, down, a little lower, and she grabbed his wig with her desperate claws, clung to it, and was snatched up into the garret in an instant with her trophy ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... which signally distinguish Captain King's pen.... He occupies a position in American literature entirely his own.... His is the literature of honest sentiment, pure and tender.... His heroes and his charming heroines are the product of the army, and it is pleasant to meet, even in this intangible way, women who can break their hearts and men who would die rather than sacrifice ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... on the subject, and as they rode along in silence, each was thinking of the curious web of emotions that was moulding their lives and making definite objects grow from intangible impulses. He was hardly conscious yet what a motive force in his plans Liddy was destined to be; and she was filled with a new and sweet consciousness of a woman's power to shape a man's plans in life. When her ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... a woman has this element of mystery to puzzle the ordinary observer, that the difference between frankness and duplicity, the genius for intrigue and the genius of the heart, is there inscrutable. A man gifted with the penetrating eye can read the intangible shade of difference produced by a more or less curved line, a more or less deep dimple, a more or less prominent feature. The appreciation of these indications lies entirely in the domain of intuition; this alone can lead to the discovery of ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... stayed here?" I asked. She had now taken the chair fronting me. We were stiffly seated as if for a business interview. I had a desire to take the poor figure in my arms, but I felt as if she were as intangible as a spirit. When mental pain has devoured the body, as physical pain so often does, there is something thrice as ethereal ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... was the real danger. That pale ghost conjured from the grave by Stampa was intangible, powerless, a dreamlike wraith evoked by a madman's fancy. Already the fear engendered myopia of the morning was passing from Bower's eyes. The passage of arms with Millicent had done him good. He saw now that if he meant to win Helen he ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... like a cloud fallen from above. He tacked for the land and made for the pier, scudding before the wind and followed by the flying fog, which gained upon them. When it reached the Pearl, wrapping her in its intangible density, a cold shudder ran over Pierre's limbs, and a smell of smoke and mold, the peculiar smell of a sea fog, made him close his mouth that he might not taste the cold, wet vapor. By the time the boat was at her usual moorings in the harbor the whole town was buried in this ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... toward him, carrying on their conversations in a strange tongue, and allowing him little part in their common life. Dave's spirit, which had always been accustomed to receive and be received on a basis of absolute equality, rebelled violently against the intangible wall of exclusion which his fellow workers built about themselves, and as they had shown no desire for his company, he retaliated by showing still less for theirs, with the result that he found himself very much alone and apart from the life of ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... with a thrill which passed all up my body, and next all feeling save the consciousness of the loud beating of my heart ceased. Then it seemed that boy's eyes were inside my head and not outside, while along with them an intangible something pervaded my brain. The sensation at first was like the application of ether to the skin—a cool, numbing emotion. It was followed by a curious tingling feeling, as some dormant cells in my mind ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... smoothly enough, and the work upon the great story progressed to the author's satisfaction; but as Easter approached something queer seemed to develop in the Dampmere cottage. It was undefinable, intangible, invisible, but it was there. Dawson's hair would not stay down. When he rose up in the morning he would find every single hair on his head standing erect, and plaster it as he would with his brushes dipped in water, it could not be induced to ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... aroma that filled the air sweetly at the time, and is still faintly present with one that remains; the actual 'bon-mots' have unhappily passed away. It is consoling to find that Mr Edmund Gosse, who in Kit-Cats writes delightfully of his friend Louis Stevenson, notes the same intangible character of his talk. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... emphatically; "collecting the premiums is another matter... If your fire-insurance premiums aren't paid up inside of two months, the policies are canceled. But they let the others drag on until the cows come home. There's nothing so intangible in this world as insurance. And people hate to ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... only reckless of her health; she was also reckless—perhaps uncaring would be the truer word—of something which John Coxeter supposed every nice woman to value even more than her health or appearance, that is the curiously intangible, and yet so easily ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... divinity whose only office was the guidance of a troubadour toward asceticism. His frail comeliness was radiant from his poetical ecstasy—of a sudden too flushed, one would think, for a youth whose aspirations were all toward the intangible. Then each emerged with a start from that delicious spell, to ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... cried. "But it's such a joke! Can't you see that it's nothing in the world except a perfectly delicious, perfectly intangible joke?" ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... silence. Gaunt felt the intangible calm that hung about this man: this woman saw beneath it flashes of some depth of passion, shown reluctant even to her, the slow heat of the gloomy soul below. It frightened her, but she yielded: her will, her purpose slept, died ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... From dramatic events and intangible qualities of the spirit, his consciousness shifted to material things—his immediate surroundings. Not till this blessed moment of relaxation did he become aware of the discomforts of this suite—nor did Genevieve fully appreciate the flamboyantly flowered maroon wall-paper ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... complicated desires which have been accumulating in us for centuries, but which have been turned aside from their primitive and divine object, and which have wandered after a mystic, imperfectly seen and intangible beauty. There are some women like that, who blossom only for our dreams, adorned with every poetical attribute of civilization, with that ideal luxury, coquetry and aesthetic charm which surrounds woman, that ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... handsomer face, one that was more immediately pleasing. But she did not like the mouth. It was made for kissing, and she abhorred kisses. This was not a deliberately achieved concept; it came to her in the form of a faint and vaguely intangible repulsion. For the moment she knew a fleeting doubt of the man. Perhaps Sheldon was right in his judgment of the other. She did not know, and it concerned her little; for boats, and the sea, and the things and happenings of the sea were of far more vital interest to her than ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... I am intangible; can't be seen, yet can be felt; am apparent to the taste—certainly to the touch, for I am pocketed daily, and there is no one who would not gladly grasp me at any time when offered; at the same time, I am almost always disagreeable, and very rarely desired. ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... she guessed the authorship of those articles in the Mirror? He supposed he must have talked the same kind of stuff to her. At any rate, she had made him feel in some intangible way that it seemed to her a dishonourable thing to be writing anonymous attacks upon a body from whom you were asking, or intending to ask, exhibition space for your pictures and the chance of selling your work. His authorship was never avowed between them. Nevertheless this criticism annoyed ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... spheres carries them round and they behold the world beyond. Now of the heaven which is above the heavens, no earthly poet has sung or ever will sing in a worthy manner. But I must tell, for I am bound to speak truly when speaking of the truth. The colourless and formless and intangible essence is visible to the mind, which is the only lord of the soul. Circling around this in the region above the heavens is the place of ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... as a clerk, while the rich one is taken into the firm. The old adage says that "Kissing goes by favor"; and favors, financial and otherwise, are given only to those who can offer something in return. The tendency to concentrate power and wealth extends even to the outer rim of the circle. It is an intangible conspiracy to corner the good things and send the poor away empty. As I see it going on round me, ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... of a vigorous constructive foreign policy. The Democratic party has generally accepted the lukewarm international policy of Jefferson and the exaltation of the locality and the plain individual as championed by Jackson. Thus, though in a somewhat intangible and variable form, the doctrinal distinctions between Hamilton and ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... feelings. The start of fear, the suppressed, controlled tensity of pain, the beat of happy muscles in others, had to be perceived and compared with my own experiences before I could trace them back to the intangible soul of another. Groping, uncertain, I at last found my identity, and after seeing my thoughts and feelings repeated in others, I gradually constructed my world of men and of God. As I read and study, I find that this is what ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... hands grasping the foolscap paper as though with a desire to tear through the shield which the written words had formed about a mysterious past and disclose that which was so effectively hidden. So much had the letter told—and yet so little! Dark had been the hints of some mysterious, intangible thing, great enough in its horror and its far-reaching consequences to cause death for one who had known of it and a living panic for him who had perpetrated it. As for the man who stood now with the letter clenched before him, there ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... which directs men and nations has always been and is the unseen, intangible, underlying force, the resultant of all the spiritual forces of a certain people, or of all humanity, which finds its outward expression ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... the reality of the vision, by recalling the sprig of the same flower which Reine was twisting round her fingers at their last interview. This sweet breath of flowers in the night seemed like an emanation from the young girl herself, and was as fleeting and intangible as the remembrance of vanished happiness. Again and again did his morbid nature return to past events, and make his present position ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... adverbs do not vary in degree?— Absolutely, brave, cloudless, cold, conclusively, continually, entirely, essentially, extreme, faultless, French, fundamental, golden, happy, impregnable, inaudible, incessant, incredible, indispensable, insatiate, inseparable, intangible, intolerable, invariable, long, masterly, round, sharp, square, sufficient, unanimous, unbearable, unbounded, ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... being destined to perpetuate the race, but the strange and mysterious product of all our complicated desires which have been accumulating in us for centuries but which have been turned aside from their primitive and divine object and have wandered after a mystic, imperfectly perceived and intangible beauty. There are some women like that, who blossom only for our dreams, adorned with every poetical attribute of civilization, with that ideal luxury, coquetry and esthetic charm which surround woman, a living statue ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... spiritual power, reveals to all men, believers or unbelievers, that the pontificate, whose seat is locally in the city, has a life not derived from the city. Rome's temporal fall exhibits in full the intangible spiritual character of the pontificate. If St. Peter had to any seemed to rule because he was seated on the pedestal of the Caesarean empire, when that empire fell the Apostle alone remained to whom Christ gave ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... mother, they went one evening to the county seat and were married. For a few months they lived in the Hardy house and then took a house of their own. All during the first year Louise tried to make her husband understand the vague and intangible hunger that had led to the writing of the note and that was still unsatisfied. Again and again she crept into his arms and tried to talk of it, but always without success. Filled with his own notions of love between ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... on awe, until fairly dragged away by the prosaic Englishman. This feeling of his childhood recurred to him now with irresistible force. The throb of the motor of human life was pulsating in his ears; but added to it was something more, something elusive, intangible, but all-powerful. The moment he had arrived within the city limits he had felt the first trace of its presence. As he approached the centre of congestion it had deepened, had become more and more a guiding influence. Since then, by day or by night, wherever he went, augmenting or diminishing, ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... an intangible instrument, the singer needs regular guidance and criticism, no matter how advanced she may be. As you say, it is difficult for the singer to determine the full effect of her work; she often thinks it much better than it really is. That is human nature, isn't it?" she added with one ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... himself was feeling extremely triumphant and as strong as a lion. He was rather sorry no one had seen the affair, but that of course was sub-conscious. And he was more cheerful than he had been for some days. He had been up against so many purely intangible obstacles lately that it was a relief to find one he could use ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... felt everywhere in the republic. It is known by no particular name, and has assumed no definite shape; but its branches reach far and wide in the church and in the state. This shapeless and nameless party is not intangible in other and more important respects. That party, sir, has determined upon a fixed, definite, and comprehensive policy toward the whole colored population of the United States. What that policy is, it becomes us as abolitionists, and especially does it become the colored people themselves, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... can decimate a population, may carry away with him in the shroud that he drags at his heels, the whole of an accursed race; but even he must respect the life of that great intangible body, which does not perish with the death of its members—for the spirit of the Society of ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... revisit the body in the tomb ... and could reincarnate it and hold converse with it.' Again there was the 'Khu', the 'spiritual intelligence', or spirit. It took the form of 'a shining, luminous, intangible shape of the body.'... Then, again, there was the 'Sekhem', or 'power' of a man, his strength or vital force personified. These were the 'Khaibit', or 'shadow', the 'Ren', or 'name', the 'Khat', or 'physical body', and 'Ab', the 'heart', ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... how much happier I am than I was last night! He came at eight punctually. I trembled all over when I shook hands with him: I think he must have seen it, but he said nothing. What a wonderful thing this thing they call high breeding is! One feels it in a moment, and yet it seems intangible, indescribable. He has it, I should think, in perfection, and he is the only person I have ever known who possessed it, except, perhaps that young girl, his cousin, whom he presented to me at the party. For a while we talked—at least he did—easily and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... society in Paris, and to rise to the height of this lofty climax. And what in truth could be more tragic? How much must pass in the souls of these two lovers, brought together in a place of strangers, on a ledge of granite in the sea; yet held apart by an intangible, unsurmountable barrier! Try to imagine the man saying within himself, "Shall I triumph over God in her heart?" when a faint rustling sound made him quiver, and the curtain ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... finds himself in communion with the Infinite. Perhaps it is this quality which seems so mysterious that made the Klamath Indians fear and shun Crater Lake, just as the Indians of the great plateau feared and shunned the Grand Canyon. It is this intangible, seemingly spiritual quality which makes the lake impossible either ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth—often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you can not get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... with sudden vehemence. There was almost an appeal in her voice now, as if she were trying not to convince Jeanne only, but also herself, of something that was quite simple, quite straightforward, and yet which appeared to be receding from her, an intangible something, a spirit that was gradually yielding to a force as yet unborn, to a phantom that had not yet ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... believe that in a vague intangible way there was an ideal in front of and behind this work. It is really not desirable for men who do not believe that knowledge is of value for its own sake to take up this kind of life. The question constantly put to us in civilization ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard |
