"Originality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... She had still her nymph-like form, so that when her back was turned she still was not unlike the girl who had jumped, with Anne of Austria, over the moat of the Tuileries in 1563. In all other respects she was the same mad creature who threw over her amours such an air of originality as to make them proverbial for eccentricity ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a very fair idea of Harry's essay. There was nothing remarkable about it, and no striking originality in the ideas, but it was very creditably expressed for a boy of his years, and did even more credit to his good judgment, since it was an unfolding of the principles by which he meant ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... did not confine himself to questions of constitutional reform and internal government. He often spoke on the foreign policy of the Government, and it is in these speeches that he shews most originality. ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... not quote myself with any intention of making a claim to originality in putting forth this view; for I have since discovered that the same conception is virtually contained in the great "Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle" of Bossuet, now more than two ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Minnie and Aunt Aggie.' 'Lucy, with love from Aggie and Minnie.' And Clarence! What hearts you have got! Well, I always say there never were such thoughtful girls, and you always show such taste and such originality. I long to get at the things." She keeps fingering the large bundle marked with her husband's ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... were over, and a Hellenizing civilization came in its room. It is true that Italy had been subject to the influence of Greece, ever since it had a history at all. We have formerly shown how the youthful Greece and the youthful Italy—both of them with a certain measure of simplicity and originality—gave and received intellectual impulses; and how at a later period Rome endeavoured after a more external manner to appropriate to practical use the language and inventions of the Greeks. But the Hellenism of the Romans of the present period was, in its causes as well ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... principle: for my part, I am at enmity with the whole corps, from the bishop of Salisbury down to the bell-man: nay, I hate their writings as much as I do themselves: there is nothing so pernicious as reading; it destroys all originality of sentiment. My lord Devonshire has more than ten thousand volumes in his house; I entreated his lordship to lodge me as far as possible from that pestilential corner: I have but one book, and that is Euclid, but I begin to be tired of him; I believe he has done ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... subject on which (as he perhaps knew) the German never could resist enlarging, for in common with most German masters, he was giving birth to a new Grammar, which, from the daring originality of its plan, and its extreme simplicity, was destined to supersede all other ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... vile," cried another voice indignantly. "Toujours wall-paper! They might have a little originality, and think of something else. I longed ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... story: full of vivid fancy and quaint originality. In its most fantastic imaginings it carries with it a sense of reality, and derives a singular attraction from that combination of simplicity, originality, and subtle humour, which is so much appreciated by lively and thoughtful children. Children of a larger ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... brilliantly, and now the power and originality of Priscilla's acting divided the attention of the house. Surely there never was a ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... higher position or a larger salary. Enlarge the position you already occupy; put originality of method into it. Fill it as it never was filled before. Be more prompt, more energetic, more thorough, more polite than your predecessor or fellow workmen. Study your business, devise new modes of operation, be able to give your employer points. The art ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... you for having sent me, through my son, your lectures, and for the very honourable manner in which you allude to my works. The lectures seem to me to be written with much force, clearness, and originality. You show also a truly extraordinary amount of knowledge of all that has been published on the subject. The type in many parts is so small that, except to young eyes, it is very difficult to read. Therefore I wish that you would reflect on their ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... present work, it is well known, stands at the head of those physiologists who have investigated the mechanism of animal dynamics—indeed, we may almost say that he has made the subject his own. By the originality of his conceptions, the ingenuity of his constructions, the skill of his analysis, and the perseverance of his investigations, he has surpassed all others in the power of unveiling the complex and intricate movements ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... his?" Elizabeth, who was regarded in her set as a wit, a reputation acquired by reason of the fact that she possessed a certain knack for adapting slang humorously (for there was no originality to her alleged wit), now bent her head and looked at her brother incredulously. "My ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... is not less heterogeneous. O wise Solomon!" cried the Doctor, with his mouth full of kidney-pie; "had I but the authority you enjoyed in a like dispute, I would resign to you all the credit of originality!" ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... people, if they're good and true, And treated well, and let alone, Will kindly take to what's their own, And always be original, Like children. Honor's just like all The rest of us! But, thinking so, 'Tis well she miss'd Lord Clitheroe, Who hates originality, Though he puts up with it in me. Poor Mrs. Graham has never been To the Opera! You should have seen The innocent way she told the Earl She thought Plays sinful when a girl, And now she never had a chance! Frederick's complacent smile and glance ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... had no good opinion of 'the light of nature.' "They say," said he, "that everybody knows about God naturally. A lie. All such ideas are by teaching." If Harriet had taken the other side of her question and argued as every believer tries to to-day, she would have deserved some credit for originality. Nevertheless the form of her argument is remarkable for her years, and would not have dishonored Dr. Beecher's next sermon. This amazing achievement of a girl of twelve can be read in the Life of Mrs. Stowe by ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... magic touch of the deft workman, and he was soon so enticed by the perfect appliances as to take tool in hand and prove himself not unadroit in the craft. Friedel however excelled in delicacy of touch and grace and originality of conception, and produced such workmanship that Master Gottfried could not help stroking his hair and telling him it was a pity he was not born to belong to ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... intercourse with the learned, and by the friendships which he formed, he soon became thoroughly German, which he proved by his poems, which were distinguished above the crowd of such compositions by the originality of their style, and peculiar vigour. From 1804 to 1806 he published the "Almanack of the Muses," in conjunction with Varnhagen von Ense. At the peace of Tilsit he left the army, and visited France, when his family obtained back part of their ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... intoxicated by a first success, and had been perforce resold almost as soon as it was habitable. It was in the palatial Renaissance manner and had fantastic interior arrangements which consisted of modern conveniences framed in a setting of somewhat artificial originality. Count Muffat had bought the house ready furnished and full of hosts of beautiful objects—lovely Eastern hangings, old credences, huge chairs of the Louis XIII epoch. And thus Nana had come into artistic surroundings of the choicest kind and of the most extravagantly ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... once Mrs. Fisher lacked originality. "Do you mean, like Gerty Farish, to recommend the unfailing panacea of 'a ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... probably be unable even with this military tax which oppresses the country to put his regiments in condition to undertake a fresh war in Italy. It is money, that cursed money! which has killed the finest part of soldiering—personal bravery, initiative, originality—just as it has crushed the workman, making ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... not, Mr. Lindsay,—I never imitate. Originality is, if I may be allowed to say so much for myself, my peculiar forte. Why, the critics allow as much as that. See ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... an exclamation. And, strange as it may seem, it was not entirely of chagrin, for the striking originality and ingenuity of the plan immediately appealed to his own peculiar genius for getting ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... given to no man to be absolutely original in the sense of creating ideas of which no germs existed before his day. But short of such an impossible independence of the past, Benedict de Spinoza had perhaps as much originality as any man who ever lived. Yet with a modesty ever characteristic of moral greatness, he himself was disposed, at any rate during his earlier philosophical development, to exaggerate his indebtedness to the philosopher Descartes, whose system he laboriously abridged in the inappropriate ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... looked out from her clear hazel eye, and won the interest and the affection of all who knew her. Gentle and affectionate in disposition, but at the same time, firm, enduring, and fall of energy, she combined the characteristic qualities of both her parents, and added to them an originality all her own. Her education, in the common acceptation of the term, had necessarily been both desultory and imperfect; and yet, under its influence, the mind and character of Edith had strengthened and matured in no common degree. The very circumstances by which ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... Victor Hugo as much as M. Zola, have insistently claimed the absolute and incontrovertible right to compose—that is to say, to imagine or observe—in accordance with their individual conception of originality, and that is a special manner of thinking, seeing, understanding, and judging. Now the critic who assumes that "the novel" can be defined in conformity with the ideas he has based on the novels he prefers, and that certain immutable rules of construction can be laid down, will always ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... us from the "prologue;" the first words in which stamp the entire production with originality. Assassins, who let themselves out by the job, have long been pleasantly employed in melodramas, being mostly enacted by performers in the heavy line; but the author of "Die Hexen am Rhein" introduces ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... with want of foresight; for, just as a child can neither feed nor develop without the milk of a nurse, so a city cannot increase without fertile fields, have a large population without plenty of food, and allow its inhabitants to subsist without rich harvests; so, while giving the originality of your plan my approval, I have to say to you that I disapprove of the place that you have selected for putting it into execution. But I want you to stay near me, because I shall ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... creative originality in Russian literature. There is not a single form of literary development that is native to the Russian soil, not a single contribution to philosophy, to art, to letters, the form of which can be said to have been born on Russian ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... treasure Darnley had. The government will be too rejoiced at his death to care whether he had money at the time he was killed, or not. Keep what you have got—say not a word about it to any one, for if you do, you will be the laughing-stock of all Australia. The originality of the act would surprise our good people, and you would be looked upon as fit ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... Social conditions, desire, fatigue, monotony, purpose, intelligence, inhibition, all enter into habit and habit formation. Youth experiments with habit; old age clings to it. Efficiency is the result of good habits but originality is the reward of some who discard habits. A nation forms habits which seem to be part of its nature, until emigration to another land shows the falsity of this belief. So with individuals: a man feels he must eat or ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... educational, etc. They eventually established a periodical as their organ called The Dial, a publication which immediately attracted wide attention by the admirable literary style of its articles as well as by their originality and commanding interest. The Dial had the effect of imparting greater cohesion to the company of editors, contributors and others interested in its publication, and these presently became known to the world as the Transcendentalists; a word borrowed from Germany ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... finds them, and they turn out only clever imitations after all. In these days there is a mania for shamming originality of some kind. I am always imagining people I meet are real, and not shadows, until one day I unintentionally put my hand through them, and find out my mistake. I am getting tired of being ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... Mrs Montague, the least but the most influential of them all. There must have been a good deal of what is called fortune in this successful introduction to the higher orders of London society; for many a work of superior intelligence and more important originality has been produced, without making its author known beyond the counter of the publisher. But what chance began his merits completed. The work was unquestionably fit for the hands of blue-stockingism; the topic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... the bronzed column of the throat rose in austere dignity. A pair of Mr. Yellett's trousers, stuffed into high, cow-puncher's boots, that met the hem of a skirt coming barely to the knees, contributed to the originality ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... abnormal mental condition. It does not even consist of an extraordinary memory, vivid imagination, quickness of judgment, or of a combination of all of these. Kant defines genius as the talent of invention. Originality and productiveness are the fundamental elements of genius. And it is an almost instinctive force which urges the author on in his creative work. In the main his activity is due less to free will than ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... me add," continued the lawyer, consulting a little sheet of notes, "that although these volumes are very valuable to the practical builder, you must be careful not to lose originality. He tells you also not to be 'hadden doun'—his own expression—by the theory of strains, and that Portland cement, properly sanded, will go ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... the cake-walk, but I think they ought to be proud of it. It is my opinion that the colored people of this country have done four things which refute the oft-advanced theory that they are an absolutely inferior race, which demonstrate that they have originality and artistic conception, and, what is more, the power of creating that which can influence and appeal universally. The first two of these are the Uncle Remus stories, collected by Joel Chandler Harris, and the Jubilee songs, to which ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... enough, did not hail from Morocco, and who lived, not in the West End proper, but only on the borders of it, in a street where one could not get so much as a side peep at the lake. It was not a pretty house either where she lived. It was square and clumsy and without any originality, and, moreover, faced plump on the street, so that one could look right into its parlor and sitting-room windows as one strolled along the wooden sidewalks. And people were in the habit of looking in that way a good deal. Nothing was ever going on in there ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... too absolutely to fear him much, reposed in him a confidence so unlimited that topics of conversation could no more be wanting with him than subjects for communion with her own heart. In those moments, happy as a bird with its mate, she would show me what she had of vivacity, of mirth, of originality in her well-dowered nature. She would show, too, some stores of raillery, of "malice," and would vex, tease, pique me sometimes about what she called my "bizarreries anglaises," my "caprices insulaires," with a wild and witty wickedness that ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... example, does not imply profundity or originality of thought. Homer and Chaucer are not deep thinkers, nor is Herodotus or Virgil, Burns, Keats, or Tennyson. There need be nothing philosophically epoch-making about a literary creation which is destined to be immortal. Nor yet does the supreme literary gift necessarily imply ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... the sea; always the sea, either as rigid as a mirror under hard, blue skies or shuddering symphonically up some exotic beach. Conrad is a painter doubled by a psychologist; he is the psychologist of the sea—and that is his chief claim to originality, his Peak of Darien. He knows and records its every pulse-beat. His genius has the rich, salty tang of an Elizabethan adventurer and the spaciousness of those times. Imagine a Polish sailor who read Flaubert and the English Bible, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... bethought himself of philology, and he set himself to spring fragments of philological instruction (often far from sound) upon his reader in the most unexpected places, that his ingenuity could devise. He then began to base hopes upon the book in proportion to its originality. At the last moment, however, the Author grew querulous about his work, distrustful of the reception that would be given to it, and even as to the advisability of producing it at all. Much yet remained to be done, but for a long time he refused, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... good talents and indomitable energy. He wrote respectable verses, though not marked by any decided originality. In 1822, he published, at Forfar, a small volume of poems, entitled, "Poetical Trifles," of which a second and enlarged edition appeared five years afterwards. The whole of his poems, with an account of his life, in a duodecimo ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... too," offered the reckless youth. "I'm crazy about art. It's the only solace of my declining years. And," he added cunningly and with evil intent to flatter and cajole, "I can tone down that design of yours without affecting its beauty and originality at all." ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... guest chambers at Compiegne; mignons of Agrippa's day, who called one another: "My heart," or "My dear love." Scandal and wickedness in every form, consciences sold or for sale, the vice of an epoch devoid of grandeur or originality, attempting to copy the freaks of all other epochs, and contributing to the Jardin Bullier that duchess, the wife of a minister of state, who rivalled the most shameless dancers of that resort. And they were the people who turned their ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... is the most sure. The translators had the handling of matter of the gravest dignity and momentousness, and their sense of reverence kept them right in their treatment of it. They cared passionately for the truth; they were virtually anonymous and not ambitious of originality or literary fame; they had no desire to stand between the book and its readers. It followed that they cultivated that naked plainness and spareness which makes their work supreme. The Authorized Version is the last and greatest of those English translations which were the fruit of Renaissance ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... however, not in the gorgeous mosaics alone that we find the delight and originality of S. Vitale. The whole church is amazingly different from anything else to be seen in Italy, for it is altogether outside the Roman tradition, an absolutely Byzantine building as well in its construction as in its decoration. It must be compared with the ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... all-conquering panorama, a panorama of unlimited ambition, whose infinite ought to set in the hearts of the young men dwelling there a determination to subjugate the world. Pierre, who came thither opposed to the principle of the "Prix de Rome," that traditional, uniform education so dangerous for originality, was for a moment charmed by the warm peacefulness, the limpid solitude of the garden, and the sublime horizon where the wings of genius seemed to flutter. Ah! how delightful, to be only twenty and to live for three years amidst ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... gleaned from the lodges with no little pains-taking, as mere materials to be worked up by the literary loom, although the work should be done by one of the most popular and fascinating American pens. I feared that the roughness, which gave them their characteristic originality and Doric truthfulness, would be smoothed and polished off to assume the shape of a sort of Indo-American series of tales; a cross between the Anglo-Saxon and ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... woman, and her every word and gesture, her every expression of face and tone of voice, were worth noting and watching. By no means finished work—as how should it be, in a young teacher but few years out of school herself—it yet had an originality and freshness of interpretation all its own, and the applause which praised it was very spontaneous and genuine. Roberta had been the joy of her class in college dramatics, and several of her former classmates, in her audience to-night, gleefully told one another that she was surpassing ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch, and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him." And yet it is but fair to say that Jonson prided himself, and justly, on his originality. In "Catiline," he not only uses Sallust's account of the conspiracy, but he models some of the speeches of Cicero on the Roman orator's actual words. In "Poetaster," he lifts a whole satire out of Horace and dramatises it effectively for his purposes. The sophist Libanius suggests the ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... course the '15 or '45; the hero a Jacobite, and connected with one or other of the enterprises of those periods; and the author, to show how unprejudiced he is, and what original views he takes of subjects, must needs speak up for Popery, whenever he has occasion to mention it; though, with all his originality, when he brings his hero and the vagabonds with which he is concerned before a barricadoed house, belonging to the Whigs, he can make them get into it by no other method than that which Scott makes his rioters employ to get into the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... rules inconsistently urged or discordantly interpreted. Such indeed is the state of every deep philosophy in its first stages, and therefore of theological knowledge. What we need at present for our Church's well-being, is not invention, nor originality, nor sagacity, nor even learning in our divines, at least in the first place, though all gifts of God are in a measure needed, and never can be unseasonable when used religiously, but we need peculiarly a sound judgment, ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... exceptional) of harmonising the ideas of mediaeval mysticism with some of the most characteristic features of modern religious thought. A man of deep and somewhat ascetic piety, and gifted with much originality and with a cultured and progressive mind, he had many readers and a few earnest and admiring adherents, yet was never greatly in sympathy with the age in which he lived. Three or four generations earlier, or three or four generations later, he would have found ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... have another try, Colonel," inquired General Murger silkily. "Any amount of real initiative and originality about this Corps. But I am old-fashioned enough to prefer drill-book evolutions on the barrack-square, I confess. Er—let the Major carry on as ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... the best informed, but learning and wisdom are by no means equivalent terms. Isolation and entire dependence upon himself; give independence of character and favor that self-inquiry which best enables man to comprehend and measure the motives of his fellow. Crowded together in cities originality is lost, mind becomes as it were acadamized; and though the intercourse is favorable to the acquisition of knowledge, it is most unfriendly to that individuality, independence, and purity, without which ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... only to add, that while correcting the foreign idiom of his Author, and making numerous alterations in the structure of the language, he has been as careful as posible not to injure the originality of the composition, stamped as it is with the simplicity, good sense, and candour, inseparable from the Author's character. In the Editor's wish, however, to preserve this originality, he cannot flatter himself that incorrect expressions may not sometimes ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... planned garments with a freedom and bravery which astonished while it delighted her daughter. She combined twenty styles into one style of terrifying originality. She conceived dresses of a complexity beyond the labor of any but a divinely inspired needle, and others again whose simplicity was almost too tenuous for human speech. She discussed robes whose trailing and voluminous richness could with difficulty be supported by ten strong attendants, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... unite those which he praises in M. Brunet: his work and the public would be considerable gainers by it: his books would not be so costly, and would be more profitable. The English Author describes nothing in a sang-froid manner: he is for ever charging: and, as he does not want originality in his vivacity, he should seem to wish to be the CALLOT of Bibliography." CRAPELET. Ibid. I accept the title with ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... gorges of the Himalayas. But it is not true that the Cairngorm range of mountains is a distant place to tourists. It is in the very centre of their haunts. They swarm in the valleys of the Spey and the Tay, at Laggan, Blair Athol, and Braemar, and want but enterprise or originality enough to direct their steps out of the beaten paths which have formed, since Scottish touring became fashionable forty years ago, the regular circles in which these creatures revolve. They care not in general to imbibe the glories ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... studied the novel, it may be that Mr. Moore had conquered it, too, though I doubt it, for the concentration necessary to drama is alien to his method as a novelist. As it is, his best plays are but the good journeyman work of one who is a skilled literary craftsman. Mr. Martyn has more originality of theme, more intimacy with Irish character, a surer instinct for effective situation, and more nobility of intention, though Mr. Moore's greater power over words gives his plays a dignity as art that the plays of Mr. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... of what limitless wealth could accomplish for a single night's entertainment. In these descriptions there was much eulogy of my father as "the uncrowned king of Ellan," as well as praise of Alma, who was "displaying such daring originality," but little or no mention ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... Originality is not the proper characteristic of an anthologist, and in the choice of extracts I have rarely indulged my personal likings when they conflicted with time-honored preferences; yet this anthology,—the first published in a projected series of four or five volumes comprising the English poets from ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... is selected for its originality. A set of seventy-five maps will be supplied to any reader free for seventy-five cents. This offer is only open ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... paid so well. Every one saw suddenly, and with a faint breath of astonishment, how honesty worked. But the main point about the magazine in distinction from its competitors seems to have been that it not merely saw how honesty worked, but it saw it first and it had the originality, the moral shrewdness and courage, to put up money on it. It believed in honesty so hard that suddenly one morning, before all the world, it risked its entire fortune on it. Now that it has been done once, the new level or standard of ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... girls were in their tenth. She was comely and knew it, but a constitutional indolence had preserved her from becoming a woman of fashion, and had nurtured in her a reflective mood, which, if it led to no marked originality of thought, at all events contributed to an appearance of culture. At the time of her husband's death she was at the point where graceful inactivity so often degenerates into slovenliness. Mrs. Rossall's homekeeping tendencies and the growing childhood of her twins tended ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... you need not give authorities, if it be only clear that you are not pretending originality. Do not say, as dear Pemberton used to, "I have a book at home, which I bought at the sale of Byles's books, in which there is an account of Parry's first voyage, and an explanation of the red snow, which shows that the red snow is," &c., &c., &c. Instead of this say, "Red snow is," &c., &c., ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... He maintained that character with the utmost nicety; and as there is a strong feeling of friendship, almost equal to that which exists in Scotland, amongst all those who are born in the departments of France bordering on the Rhine, and who maintain their Teutonic originality, he always found friends and supporters in every regiment in the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... another in casting metals, another in chiselling, and they were certainly the draughtsmen of an age in which the art of drawing was practically lost among painters; and it was because they learned how to draw that so many of them became great painters when the originality of two or three men of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... to a wider future were already opening. The professors at the Sorbonne appreciated his great intellect and originality. "You have a true vocation," said one. "Follow it. But go to the bar, where your voice, which is one in a thousand, will carry you on, study and intelligence aiding. The lecture room is a narrow theater. If you like, I will write to your father to tell him what my opinion of you is." ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... fluent writer, but his resources of expression ever correspond to his richness of thought. And if his style cannot be said to bend gracefully to the variations of his subject, it still bends and does not break. In felicity and originality of epithet, the usual sign of a writer's genuineness of perception, he is excelled by no theologian of the time. He also has that power of pithy and pointed language which so condenses a statement of a fact or principle that it gives forth the diamond sparkle of epigram. The effect ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... Indian courts might certainly be relied upon to prove that swindlers as a class in the East come very close to, if they do not surpass, in brilliancy of execution and originality of design the most expert of their fraternity in Europe and America. India in especial is the home of forgery. There are some particular districts which are noted as marts for the finest specimens ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... continued Beresynth, "who are dunces in many things. What philosophical tolerance! and yet among them many a fellow is all snout, and confronts the learned physiognomists of the ocean with a countenance, grave, cold, calm in the consciousness of its originality: nay, the whole deep brims and swims with one can't count how many eccentric faces, and gills, and teeth, and eyes astart from their sockets, and every other kind of striking contour: but every monster there floats his own ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... so delight the natives of India and Africa. The name is taken from the way in which they are prepared, namely, by means of a jet of intense flame, and great skill and dexterity is required on the part of the workman, who can display his talent and originality by ornamenting them with flowers and arabesques. The combined effects of light and colour are often very beautiful, and seem a fit adornment for all those eastern and southern nations over whom a halo of ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... journal published in Paris in the English language, "Galignani's Messenger." It is old, and in its way is very useful, but it is principally made up of extracts from the English journals. It has no editorial ability or originality, and of course never advances any opinion upon a ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... and the String. One of the best illustrations I know of the keenness and originality of a wild bear's mind and senses, is found in Mr. W. H. Wright's account of the grizzly bear he did not catch with an elk bait and two set guns, in the Bitter Root Mountains. This story is related ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... permanently the reading public. Based upon an intuition of the public mind, changing with the wind,—always after, never before it,—such editorial judgment, indeed, must be of doubtful validity; must lead in many instances to unwise and unprofitable restrictions upon originality in fiction. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Yet Another Bloody Acronym. Whenever some program is being named, someone invariably suggests that it be given a name that is acronymic. The response from those with a trace of originality is to remark ironically that the proposed name would then be 'YABA-compatible'. Also used in response to questions like "What is WYSIWYG?" See ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... confirms this opinion. Woman is here on the average much inferior as regards creation or production, properly so called, and even her best results are wanting in originality and do not open up new paths. On the contrary, as virtuosos, women compare well with men in simply reproductive art. There are, however, exceptional women whose productions are original, creative and independent. The philosopher Stuart ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the sea of imagination without such a powerful bark; but there are many points in the book very admirably done. There is a certain St. Clair, a New Orleans gentleman, who seems to me to be conceived with great power and originality. If he had not "a Grecian outline of face," which I began to be a little tired of in my earliest infancy, I should think him unexceptionable. He has a sister too, a maiden lady from New England, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... Chinese system, at any rate after it assumed its final form, was harmful through the fact that it was based solely on the classics, that it was purely literary, and that it allowed no scope whatever for originality. The system was established in its final form by the Emperor Hung Wu (1368-1398), and remained unchanged until 1905. One of the first objects of modern Chinese reformers was to get it swept away. ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... unconventional. And yet, though his mother sighs now and then over his repugnance to young ladies, and tries to badger him into looking a little more spruce, I can perceive that she is thoroughly proud of his originality and independence, and believes that he is even more likely than his conventional brother to distinguish himself and immortalize the family name. Josephine used to say, when the boys were little, that she hoped one of them ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... curate had never asked himself; but it came upon him at this moment with disconcerting force that she was right. Luckily for his self-esteem, it did not occur to him at the same time that it was this very lack of the conventional virtues, a certain freshness and originality born of her defiant neglect of them, which formed the stronger part of ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... the house, and many queer old portraits, afforded me matter of Speculation, and would have filled up more time than I had to bestow. There are portraits of Jane Shore and Fair Rosamond, which have some marks of originality, being miserable daubs, yet from evidently beautiful subjects. Arabella Stuart is also at full length, and King Charleses and Jameses in abundance, with their queens, brethren, and cousins. There are galleries in this house of the dimensions of ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... upon the situation of the community at the time he writes, and of the class of readers for which he takes his pen. Now at the present time, it is undoubtedly true, that, while among the great mass of teachers there may be too little originality and enterprise, there is still among many a spirit of innovation and change, to which a caution ought to be addressed. But before I proceed, let me protect myself from misconception by one or ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... our fellow-passengers, Mr. Ruby, is the type of a vulgar tradesman. Without any originality or magnanimity in his composition, he has spent twenty years of his life in mere buying and selling, and as he has gener- ally contrived to do business at a profit, he has realized a considerable fortune. What he is going to do with the money, he does not seem able to say: his ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... of the season. The characters are few, | | but remarkably well drawn; the dialogue fresh, crisp, and | | sparkling, and the incidents thoroughly natural." | | | | From the Cincinnati Chronicle. | | | | "There is a singular freshness about this novel, often a | | quaint originality of expression, always a smooth rippling | | of words not without ideas, of seed thoughts, many of which | | are well worth cherishing, and which may germinate and grow | | in the reader's mind long after he has forgotten that ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 1, Saturday, April 2, 1870 • Various
... same thing in Paris before the war,' the squire explained. 'Renan gave me a card to her. An extraordinary woman. No particular originality; but one of the best persons "to consult about ideas," like Joubert's Madame de Beaumont, I ever saw. Receptiveness itself. A beauty, too, or was one, and a bit of a sphinx, which adds to the attraction. Mystery becomes a woman vastly. One ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "I have a class," she says, "of seventeen pupils, between the ages of 16 and 22. They come to me for fifty minutes every day. I allow them great freedom in questioning, and I am puzzled by them daily. They show more mathematical ability and more originality of thought than I had expected. I doubt whether young men would show as deep an interest. Are there seventeen students in Harvard College who take mathematical astronomy, do you think?" So Mr. Vassar's magnificent donation ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... was careful to use a traditional manner and matter; yet did something altogether different, changed by that toil, impelled by my share in Cain's curse, by all that sterile modern complication, by my 'originality' as the newspapers call it. Morris set out to make a revolution that the persons of his 'Well at the World's End' or his 'Waters of the Wondrous Isles,' always, to my mind, in the likeness of Artemisia and her man, might walk his native scenery; and I, that my native scenery ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... ii, and iii of the Monist (1890-1893) contain a number of articles by Mr. Charles S. Peirce, articles the originality of which has apparently prevented their making an immediate impression, but which, if I mistake not, will prove a gold-mine of ideas for thinkers of the coming generation. Mr. Peirce's views, tho reached so differently, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... are usually selfish, always garrulous, with a love of romancing, while a ready wit combined with fertile imagination often gains them a bubble reputation for learning they do not possess. Invention, poetry, music, artistic taste and originality are occasionally of a high order, and the memory is sometimes phenomenal; but desultory, half-finished work, and ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... left me father, an' this is the way I'm goin' back to him!" replied Peg sturdily. "Goodbye, Cousin Alaric," and she laughed good-naturedly at the odd little man. In spite of everything he did, he had a spice of originality about him that compelled Peg to overlook what might have seemed ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... of this "gentleman of acknowledged genius and sovereign popularity," we have never been able to discover. If oddity were always originality, if quaintness and beauty were synonymous, if paradox were necessarily wisdom, we should be ready to grant that Mr. Tupper is a wise, beautiful and original thinker. But thought, after all, is an affair of mind, and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... unlike; the generative ferments of the ductless glands work to different ends.[3] Masculine qualities and feminine qualities are fundamentally and eternally distinct and incommensurate. Energy, struggle, daring, initiative, originality, and independence, even though sometimes combined with rashness, extravagance, and defect, seem likely to remain qualities in which men—on the average, it must be remembered—will be more conspicuous than women. Their manifestation will resist the efforts put forth to constrain ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... by Mr. Bigge; but he endeavoured to render it suitable, by suggesting a code of regulations, in which may be discovered the outline of several schemes, since claiming originality. It was intended for those convicted of serious crimes, or such as committed offences in the colonies. The prisoners, two together, were to build their own huts; their sole implement the hatchet, and their material wood and nails: ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... St. Maclou's staircase was finished, but the main lines of the structure are so suggestive of the earlier work that I cannot but imagine this fine piece of French Renaissance to be a deliberate copy, by a master strong enough to retain his own originality of treatment, of the main design that appears in ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... obtaining the active principles from indigenous plants, has opened the way to the use of a few of the most important of these remedial agents, hitherto almost wholly unknown to the medical profession, and the encouraging results attending our practice have amply repaid us for the investigation and originality in our ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... it?" she demanded; then she smiled at him and added: "Thank you, for introducing me to the wonderful originality of being natural. On the whole I ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the time. But a full-length portrait of a man's domestic life with enough picturesque detail to enable us to see him through the eyes of private friendship did not exist in the language. Boswell's originality and merit may be tested by comparing his book to the ponderous performance of Sir John Hawkins, or to the dreary dissertations, falsely called lives, of which Dugald Stewart's Life of Robertson may be taken for a type. The writer is so anxious to be dignified and philosophical ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... of you, my dear fellow. Of course your name goes with a certain public—and I rather like the originality of our bringing out a work so out of our line. I daresay it may boom us both." His creases deepened at the thought, and he shone ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... is Gothic, but the general treatment has much of that Byzantine-Romanesque which produced some very remarkable buildings in Southern France. The portal is very wide and deeply recessed, and the tympan is crowded with bas-reliefs, the sculpture of which, rude yet expressive, is of a striking originality. There is a broad arabesque moulding in the doorway suggesting Eastern influence, and the closed arcade of the facade, with corbel-table above and its row of uncouth monstrous heads, presents a highly curious effect of struggling motives ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... verse, in which nascent excellence struggles with dim obscurities, like a young moon with heavy clouds. But his 'Silex Scintillans,' or 'Sacred Poems,' produced in later life, attests at once the depth of his devotion, and the truth and originality of his genius. He died ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the world, and for a fortnight no soul looked into it, concluding its name was its true name. No such thing. It is a set of letters in verse, in all kind of verses, describing the life at Bath, and incidentally everything else; but so much wit, so much humour, fun, and poetry, so much originality, never met together before. Then the man has a better ear than Dryden or Handel. Apropos to Dryden, he has burlesqued his St. Cecilia, that you will never read it again without laughing. There is a description of a milliner's box ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... conclusion," said Bones, thoughtfully, "not without originality—when it first occurred to you, but as a conclusion, if you will pardon my criticism, sir, if you will forgive me for suggestin' as much—in callin' me an ass, sir: apart from its bein' contrary to the spirit an' letter ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... of 'Northanger Abbey' in 1798, and the commencement of 'Mansfield Park' in 1811, may sufficiently account for any difference of style which may be perceived between her three earlier and her three later productions. If the former showed quite as much originality and genius, they may perhaps be thought to have less of the faultless finish and high polish which distinguish the latter. The characters of the John Dashwoods, Mr. Collins, and the Thorpes stand out from the canvas with a vigour and originality which ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... been used in the inauguration of colonial governors and in the opening of colonial assemblies. They furnish a further proof that the American nation has been a thing of growth, an imitation of existing conditions until such time as originality could be developed or imitations transformed to meet the new conditions. Local forms furnished the models. They would be changed only as national ideals were developed. The fact that most of these European ceremonials ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... with diminished claims to our love and honour to the full extent of his differences from them?—Or are these very differences additional proofs of poetic wisdom, at once results and symbols of living power as contrasted with lifeless mechanism—of free and rival originality as contradistinguished from servile imitation, or, more accurately, a blind copying of effects, instead of a true imitation of the essential principles?—Imagine not that I am about to oppose genius to rules. No! the comparative value of these rules is the very cause ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... in love with a suit of clothes as with a future class orator. We took in one man once because he bought a pair of patent-leather tan shoes in his Junior year. We argued that, if he had the nerve to wear the things to his Y. M. C. A. meetings, there must be some originality in him after all—and we took a chance. We won. But it's a risky business. Once five frats rushed a fellow for a month because of the beautiful clothes he wore—and just after the victorious bunch had initiated ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... who in their own day had a like supremacy. Such do not in fact form a class, because, though a certain community of ideas and principles may be traced in their actions, their personalities and methods bear each the stamp of originality in performance; and where originality is found, classification ceases to apply. There is a company, it may be, ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... things that I address myself to you, fellow-men. Society has not changed during my absence, and yet, to be saved, it needs to be changed. It needs, above all, real men, men and women of originality and individuality; men and women, not afraid to brave the scornful contempt of the conventional mob, men and women brave enough to break from the ranks of custom and lead into new paths, men and women strong enough to smash the fatal social ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... the writing as it is entertaining in the reading. It is actual comedy of the most artistic sort, and it is handled with a freshness and originality that is unquestionably novel."—Boston Transcript. "A feast of humor and good cheer, yet subtly pervaded by special shades of feeling, fancy, tenderness, or whimsicality. A merry thing in prose."—St. ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... artificial. For the artificial, no doubt, has a wide place in Sanskrit literature. Everywhere we find systems, rules and models, castes and schools, but nowhere individuality, no natural growth, and but few signs of strong originality and genius. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... to be a mere fish, and to differ but little in sentiments and ethical culture from all the rest of his remote cousins. But when one comes to look closer at their character and antecedents, it becomes evident at once that there is a deal of unsuspected originality and caprice about sharks and flat-fish. Instead of conforming throughout to a single plan, as the young, the gay, the giddy, and the thoughtless are too prone to conclude, fish are in reality as various and variable in their mode of life as any other great group in the animal ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... genius shown by the great Scotch philosopher, and equally by the brilliant exposition of those views by Playfair in his Illustrations. To the former he gave unstinted praise for the breadth and originality of his views, and to the latter for the eloquence of his writings—adopting quotations chosen from these last, indeed, as mottoes ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... the ideal: first, general principles; secondly, personages; thirdly, their character and their passions. Hegel winds up by considering the qualities necessary in an artist: imagination, genius, inspiration, originality, etc. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... late sixteenth century may have also had much to account for the secular reaction of the succeeding period. But Rembrandt had no need to seek new ground to escape from a formal rendering of well-known themes. Like most masters of supreme genius, his originality consisted in the realisation of his own deepest and most personal emotion in his treatment of the old stories. They appealed to him as the vehicle of the noblest thoughts of man in relation to himself ...
— Rembrandt, With a Complete List of His Etchings • Arthur Mayger Hind
... thought and originality, this stanza certainly deserves credit," Li Wan asserted; "but as regards pregnancy and simplicity of language, it, after all, yields ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... rend and harass one. Thus an everyday use of the term today was once wrenched and immoderate speech. Possibly the first man who heard of rough weather was puzzled for a moment, then amused or delighted as he caught the figure. It did not require great originality to think of a crowd as rough in its movements. But our poet applied the idea to an individual. To him a rude, uncivil, impolite, ungracious, uncourteous, unpolished, uncouth, boorish, blunt, bluff, gruff, brusk, or burly person was as the unplaned lumber or the unpolished gem; and we imitative ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor |
