"Meagreness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would have for entitling himself to say—'I too have seen Kant.' This went on for many days—during which, from morning to night, the house was thronged with the public. Great was the astonishment of all people at the meagreness of Kant's appearance; and it was universally agreed that a corpse so wasted and fleshless had never been beheld. His head rested upon the same cushion on which once the gentlemen of the university had presented an address to him; and I thought that I could not apply it to ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... last, as he felt it, of all his accidents—that was surely proof enough of how his conscience had been encumbered. If any further proof were needed it would have been to be found in the fact that, as he perfectly now saw, he had ceased even to measure his meagreness, a meagreness that sprawled, in this retrospect, vague and comprehensive, stretching back like some unmapped Hinterland from a rough coast-settlement. His conscience had been amusing itself for the forty-eight hours by forbidding ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... expeditions of ancient times, such as the naval expedition of Persia against Greece, B. C. 480, and the despatch of the Spanish Armada in more recent days, may have been as difficult, considering the meagreness of the material and engineering ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... Mrs. Asquith assured me that "everything is going to the devil damned fast." Some conspicuous men who have always been sober have taken to drink. The very few public dinners that are held are served with ostentatious meagreness to escape criticism. I attended one last week at which there was no bread, no butter, no sugar served. All of which doesn't mean that the world here is going to the bad—only that it moves backward and forward by emotions; and this is normally a most ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... we are as a whole, because we know too much; because our knowledge is more than knowledge. It is an immediate consciousness of personality, any evaluation of which carries some emotion, joy or sorrow, shame or exaltation. But in a foreign land we try to find our compensation for the meagreness of our data by the compactness of the generalisation which our imperfect sympathy itself helps us to form. When a stranger from the West travels in the Eastern world he takes the facts that displease him and readily makes use of them for his rigid conclusions, fixed upon the unchallengeable ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... hair he possessed, carefully disposed to cover its meagreness, was grey, and its color permeated, suggested, the tone of his thin face. Surrounded by the cruel exuberance of the children, he seemed incalculably worn, permanently weary, although he was surprisingly sharp-eyed and adequate. It was, Lee thought ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... court; the chair on the extreme right was for the "prisoner's friend," that on the left awaited the Judge-Advocate. About five yards in front of the table, in the centre of an empty space, stood two more chairs turned towards it. Otherwise the room was as bare as a guard-room. And this austere meagreness gave it a certain dignity of its own as of a place where nothing was allowed to distract the mind from the serious business in hand. At the door stood an orderly with a red armlet bearing the imprint of the letters ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... is not merely a more common-sense treatment that we want; for here is sufficient simplicity, but a simplicity barren of all satisfaction. And singularly enough, it seems, with all its meagreness, to pass easily into an ostentatious display. In these houses there is no thought of "architecture"; that is considered as something quite apart, and not essential to the well-building of the house. But for this very reason matters are not much changed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... lower limbs thick-set, double-jointed, and slightly curved outward, in that formation which takes so much from beauty to give so largely to strength. But Lydon, except that he was slender even almost to meagreness, was beautifully and delicately proportioned; and the skillful might have perceived that with much less compass of muscle than his foe, that which he had was more seasoned—iron and compact. In proportion, too, as he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the tunes, only privately printed for local use, came, nevertheless, as a surprise to Messrs. Burns and Westlake, who made merry over the occasional simplicity, not to say meagreness of the harmonies. A quick movement, too, from a Beethoven Rasoumousky quartet, is rather awkward, albeit taken slow, for No. 74, "Death," and Leporello's song for Nos. 22 and 23, is possibly not over suitable, however ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... of every theatrical accessory;—of architecture, lighting, music, the illusion of decorations changing in a moment as if by enchantment, machinery and costume;—by all this, we are now so completely spoiled, that this earlier meagreness of stage decoration will in no wise satisfy us. Much, however, might be urged in favour of such a constitution of the theatre. Where the spectators are not allured by any splendid accessories, they will be the more difficult to please in the main thing, namely, the excellence of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... didn't understand it in the least, but we did, and that was enough. I forgot my coarse clothes, my well-nigh empty pockets, my inability to buy the many beautiful things that kept tantalizing me, and the meagreness of my salary. These were all swallowed up in the joy of seeing the boys, and I wanted to proclaim to all and sundry; "These are my jewels." Those boys are noble, clean, upstanding fellows, and no schoolmaster could help being proud ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... a flat chest is more desirable than a rounded one, they compress their busts into narrow compass, striving as far as possible to preserve vertical lines. At the waist a plethora of petticoats begins, spreading the skirts to inordinate width and emphasising the meagreness above. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... from the British lines, and those in the hollow could occasionally see and hear a shell as it screeched past them overhead; but they gave not one-tenth the heed to it that they gave to the breakfast they were despatching. Indeed, their sole grumblings were at the meagreness of the ration which had been dealt out to them the night before ere they had been marched forward into their present position; and as a field officer, coming from the American camp, descended into the ravine, these found ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... master, as a devout Catholic gazes upon the image of the Virgin Mother. Since they had entered the tent he had scarcely spoken more than a single sentence at a time. Only once had he given a glimpse of himself. Then he had apologised for the meagreness of the meal. "To-morrow," he had said, "we will have game, the country is full of it; but to-day—" he had looked down as he had spoken—"to-day I felt somehow as though I could not kill anything. Life is too good ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... are almost as much in the background as anatomy in the Hippocratic collection. As a formal discipline and part of medical education we find no trace of these studies among the pre-Alexandrian physicians. But the meagreness of the number of ascertained facts did not prevent much speculation among a people eager to seek the causes of things. Of that speculation we learn much from the fragments of contemporary medical writers and philosophers, from the medical works ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... these, the only one adequately known to the geologist is the gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures,—probably the richest, in at least individual plants, which the world has yet seen. The others are all but wholly unknown; and the Association may be the more disposed to tolerate the comparative meagreness of the few brief remarks which I purpose making on two of their number,—the floras of the Old Red Sandstone and the Oolite,—from the consideration that that meagreness is only too truly representative of the present state of our knowledge regarding ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... his country for good or evil. But what could he, Paulus, do? In Rome, in Athens, he was one of the little men. Was he not, then, justified in living his own life in the best possible way, atoning for the meagreness of his talent by ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... is speaking of a place from personal knowledge or only from hearsay. In truth, though there are delightful exceptions, and nearly every part of the book suggests interesting questions, a desperate meagreness and baldness does extend over considerable tracts of the story. In fact his book reminds us sometimes of his own description of Khorasan:—"On chevauche par beaus plains et belles costieres, la ou il ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... a thousandfold. Like the human body itself, social life must become as complex as it can without losing its centrality. Be it remembered that the truly simple life is not gained by meagreness of possessions and interests, but by singleness of aim controlling a seemingly infinite number of detailed means. But this unity dominating a multiplicity of interests is attainable only through the entire mechanism of ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends—in the clear, white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is their frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms, like all the other little humans, fluttering their May-fly life-dance of an hour. They are without freedom. They are puppets of chance. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... simmering for supper. His wife, Amarita by name, stood at the stove, piloting apple turnovers in a pool of fat. At a first glance she and her husband seemed an ill-matched pair, he with a thin face and precise patch of whisker at the ear, a noticeable and general meagreness of build, and she dark and small, with a face flashing vivid intelligence. Elihu's mother—a large, loosely made, blond old lady—sat by the window, out of range of the lamplight even, knitting by feeling, and doubling her pleasures ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... back, but high up in the shoulders. His head, without being large, was fine. His eyes were of a dark hazel, and possessed uncommon expression. His nose, mouth, and chin were symmetrically, if not elegantly formed, and came short of beauty only because of that meagreness which marked his whole person. His complexion, light without redness, inclined to sallow, and suggested a temperament somewhat bilious. His dark brown hair had become thin above the forehead, revealing to advantage that most striking feature of his countenance. Taken all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... at the ancient tents, the humble equipment, the ring of small shockheads, a great tenderness comes over him. The Die-Hards are so tiny, so poor, so pitifully handicapped, and yet so bold in their meagreness. Not one of them has had anything that might be called a chance. Their few years have been spent in kennels and closes, always hungry and hunted, with none to care for them; their childish ears have been habituated to every coarseness, their small minds filled with the desperate shifts ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... attempted to force the Western usage with respect to Easter on the Asiatic Christians. In this he uses the expression "he that leaned on the bosom of the Lord," which occurs in the fourth Gospel. Nothing could more forcibly show the meagreness of our information regarding the Gospels than that such a phrase is considered of value as evidence for one of them. In fact the slightness of our knowledge of these works is perfectly astounding when the importance which is attached to them is ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels |
