"Practical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sex life of women has been clouded in darkness, restrictive, repressive and morbid. Women have not had the opportunity to know themselves, nor have they been permitted to give play to their inner natures, that they might create a morality practical, idealistic and high ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... agree with Judge Lindsey that the Boy Scout Movement is of peculiar importance to the whole country. It has already done much good, and it will do far more, for it is in its essence a practical scheme through which to impart a proper standard of ethical conduct, proper standards of fair play and consideration for others, and courage and decency, to boys who have never been reached and never will be reached by the ordinary type of ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... It is to stimulate thought: to arouse hope, courage and impatience; to offer practical suggestions and solutions, to voice the strong assurance of better living, here, now, in our ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... terrible epithet of Domesday-book, 'wasta'—wasted by war. A knowledge of that fact would lead them to guess that there were almost certainly uses for the abbey which had nothing to do with superstition; which were as thoroughly practical as those of a company for draining the bog of Allen, or running a railroad through an American forest. Such, at least, was the case, at least for the first seven centuries after the fall of Rome; and to these missionary colonizers Europe owes, I verily believe, among a hundred ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... excitement, competition, danger, despair and persistence figure. This merely suggests the circumstances which draw the daring Boy Inventors into strange experiences and startling adventures, and which demonstrate the practical use of their ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... no petunias but the white frilled kind,—she's an artist—and has the wash done at home," she enumerated, "and runs her automobile herself, I am sure, for she's a practical person as well; if she were just a sentimental flower-lover, she'd have had something or other climbing up the house, and it ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... bank at Coketown. He is educated at M'Choakumchild's "practical school," and becomes a general spy and informer. Bitzer finds out the robbery of the bank, and discovers the perpetrator to be Tom Gradgrind (son of Thomas Gradgrind, Esq., M.P.), informs against him, and gets promoted to his place.—C. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... reader, more interested in marking the progress of civilisation and the advance of the people in the path of development and true liberty, the spectacle of the young stadholder's triumphs has an interest of another kind. At the moment when a thorough practical soldier was most needed by the struggling little commonwealth, to enable it to preserve liberties partially secured by its unparalleled sacrifices of blood and treasure during a quarter of a century, and to expel the foreign invader from the soil which he had so long profaned, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... There are many prayers in her diaries and many religious reflections in her letters, and in all two emotions predominate; a trust in God and an earnest conviction that a life of love—love to God and man—is the heart of religion. Her religion was contemplative as well as practical; but it was a religion of the conscience rather than one of ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... government be permitted to judge of the treason. The government itself never admits the injustice of its laws, as a legal defence for those who have attempted a revolution, and failed. The right of revolution, therefore, is right of no practical value, except for those who are stronger than the government. So long, therefore, as the oppressions of a government are kept within such limits as simply not to exasperate against it a power greater than its own, the right ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... The hue and cry alarms the county, but it preserves all the property of the province. All these clamours aim at redress. But a clamour made merely for the purpose of rendering the people discontented with their situation, without an endeavour to give them a practical remedy, is indeed one of the worst acts ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... soil in the open sun; if a wall or hedge protects it from the north, so much the better. I do not know why people preach dense shade for this flower; possibly because they prefer leaves to flowers, or else that they are of the sheeplike followers of tradition instead of practical gardeners of personal experience. One thing grows to perfection in the garden of this commuter's wife, and that is lilies-of-the-valley, and shade knows them not between eight in the morning and five at night, and we pick and pick steadily ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... a common sense in which Mr. Peaslee took comfort, "the practical effect is mighty different. Gentlemen," he added to the jurors, "I can't see that we've got any call to go any further with this. Peaslee was just shooting at a cat. I don't see the sense of taking up the time of the court and makin' expense for ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... of the country, who for years had been taught to believe, that the accession of Conservatives to power would commence a new era of warfare, oppression, profusion, and corruption. Let us look fairly at some of the practical and palpable facts of the case—at some of the most conspicuous features of public affairs, during their administration. AGRICULTURE has flourished, and agricultural improvement has advanced in an unprecedented ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Master Key of the world's greatest natural forces, and finding himself possessed of three such wonderful and useful gifts. But a boy takes everything as a matter of course. As the tree of knowledge sprouts and expands within him, shooting out leaf after leaf of practical experience, the succession of surprises dulls his faculty of wonderment. It takes a great deal to startle ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... innumerable, though possessing such sound knowledge and judgment, such a superabundance of political contrivance, diplomatic coolness, and mathematical calculation, the result of deep thought aided by great practical experience. ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... the satisfaction bestowed by print. The titled man affected the philosopher in that manner; or rather, the crude philosopher's relish of brilliant appreciation stripped him of his robe. For he was with Owain Wythan at heart to scorn titles which did not distinguish practical offices. A nation bowing to them has gone to pith, for him; he had to shake himself, that he might not similarly stick; he had to do it often. Objects elevated even by a decayed world have their magnetism for us unless we nerve ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Doctor laughed and said: "Here goes, once and for ever, my reputation for practical common-sense; henceforth, I suppose, you will class me with musicians generally, who I know bear a character for eccentricity. I will tell the tale, however, and you shall see I possess proofs of its being no delusion, and can contradict your assertion that ghosts never leave behind them ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... lightly the chief summits, here and there, of that intricate, most empty, mournful Business,—which was really once a Fact in practical Europe, not the mere nightmare of an Attorney's Dream;—and indicate, so far as indispensable, how the young Friedrich, Friedrich's Sister, Father, Mother, were tribulated, almost heart-broken and done to death, by means ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... practical joke had reckoned without his host. The cry had hardly escaped the victim, when Ziffak bounded to the rear like a cyclone. The fellow who was a full grown warrior was still grinning with delight, when he found himself ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... That practical young lady, realizing that Skippy's earning capacity was still woefully limited, permitted no allusions to the distant holy bonds of matrimony, but she did allow him to mortgage his future to the extent of the promenade and dances which ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... world, it should be recognized that there have been those among them who have grasped such essential, vital truths and have kept them alive in the practices of their day. And so we find it recorded in history as far back as 1686 that Judge Samuel Lewell copied upon the cover of his journal a practical man's recipe for making saltpeter beds, in which it was directed, among other things, that there should be added to it "mother of petre", meaning, in Judge Lewell's understanding, simply soil from an old niter bed, but in the mind of the man who applied ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... Hawkins as Rear-Admiral, there was no danger of inefficient command. The naval appointments were in every way admirable; and even the noblemen and gentlemen who were captains of so many of the ships knew better than to overrule the practical command of their mariner-subordinates. On May 20th the Armada sailed from Lisbon, but was scattered by a storm in the second week of June, reassembling at Corunna—when Medina Sidonia vainly urged that the expedition should be given up. Some of the ships had ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... shoulders. "You have always been the object of our most tender solicitude," he went on. "And if I have been determined, it has been for your own ultimate good. I admit that there is not much romance about Mr. Sawyer. He is a keen, open-eyed, practical business man, with money out at interest, and with money lying in my bank. His family is excellent. His father was, for many years, the Clerk of the Court of Appeals, and his grandfather was a judge. And I believe ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... that fellow," said our peasant to himself. "He would find plenty of grass by our palings, and in the winter we could keep him in the room with us. Perhaps it would be more practical to have a sheep instead of a ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... myself," she wrote, "you know, Dick, that no one feels more keenly for you at this time, and wishes more sincerely that she could put her sympathy to some practical use. The hall must necessarily be but a sad and lonely dwelling for you now, and we want you to recollect that Fairacre is now, as at all times, a second home, where an ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... whose efforts in behalf of sane typography have had practical results is Professor Koopman, librarian of Brown University, whose plea has been addressed chiefly to printers. Professor Koopman dwells particularly on the influence of short lines on legibility. The eye must jump from the end of each line back to the beginning of the ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... eventful day was wholly occupied with practical details. Before long, two adjacent huts were found for them, near the shore of the lagoon; and Felix noticed with pleasure, not only that the huts themselves were new and clean, but also that the chief took great care to place round both of them a single circular line of ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... and we turn to the West, where some of the most practical and suggestive forms of investigation are ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... long while in a district where a young man not unfrequently leaves his betrothed for another girl who is richer by three or four acres of land. The fate of Le Fosseur and his wife was scarcely happy enough to induce our Dauphinois to forsake their calculating habits and practical way of regarding things. La Fosseuse, who was a very pretty woman, died when her daughter was born, and her husband's grief for his loss was so great that he followed her within the year, leaving nothing in the world to this little one except an existence whose continuance was ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... Dr. Strong, in some unpublished MS. notes in Dr. Seligmann's possession, to which I have had access, says as regards the Mafulu and Korona languages that "there is nothing to show that the two languages may not be for all practical purposes identical," and Mr. Ray in his concluding notes classes Mafulu and Korona together as dialects of Fuyuge. The village of Sikube, mentioned by Mr. Ray, is, I believe, on the Upper Vanapa river and north of Mt. Lilley, and so is well within the Fuyuge-speaking area ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... with the journal, "The Contemporary," published by the poet Nekrasoff, and I. I. Panaeff, to which the best writers of the day contributed. Here, during the brief period when his health permitted him to work, he expressed even bolder and more practical ideas, and became the advocate of the "natural school," of which he regarded Gogol as the founder, wherein poetry was treated as an integral part of every-day life. Turgeneff has declared, that Byelinsky ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... the sunset fell nightly on his despairing face. The life in the wilderness, and then in the dominance and masterdom of enterprise, had hardened and strengthened him into more self-reliant manhood, giving him greater forbearance and a more practical view of things. ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... between taking snuff and jeering at and teasing the unfortunate captives. These, crouching on the ground, relieved during the halt of their heavy forked yokes, endure it all with the stoicism of the most practical phase of humanity—the savage. No good is to be got out of bewailing their lot, therefore they do not bewail it; moreover, belonging to a savage race, and far from the highest type of the same, they have no thought of the future, and are thus spared the discomfort ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... fact and the bitterness of "Timon" some German critics have drawn the inference that Shakespeare was incapable of comprehending Greek life, and that indeed he only realized his Romans so perfectly because the Roman was very like the Briton in his mastery of practical affairs, of the details of administration and of government. This is an excellent instance of German prejudice. No one could have been better fitted than Shakespeare to understand Greek civilization and Greek art with its supreme ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... unfortunate king: and it is that when doubt confronts us which in itself is noble and great, it is our duty to march bravely onwards, turning neither to right nor to left of us, going infinitely further than seems to be reasonable, practical, just. The idea that we hold to-day of duty, and justice, and truth, may seem clear to us now, and advanced and unfettered; but how different will it appear a few years, a few centuries later! Had Louis XVI. done what we should have done—we ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... "He delighted in practical jokes, and seems to have enjoyed a sheer piece of mischief, with all the gusto of a school-boy. At this kind of sport, Tickell and Sheridan were often play-fellows: and the tricks which they inflicted on each other, were frequently attended with rather unpleasant consequences. One night, he induced ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... and Luke Robbins started for California, they had no very definite plans as to the future. But they found among their fellow passengers a man who was just returning from the East, where he had been to visit his family. He was a practical and successful miner, and was by no means reluctant to ...
— A Cousin's Conspiracy - A Boy's Struggle for an Inheritance • Horatio Alger
... its development, and its final success or failure, with the circumstances to which either event was attributable. The book, in truth, was both the history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet practical and laborious life. He handled physical details as if there were nothing beyond them; yet spiritualized them all, and redeemed himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the infinite. In his grasp the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul. Georgiana, as she read, reverenced ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... just what they said from the start. Young was as determined to be the head of the civil government of the territory as he was to be the head of the church. He had founded a practical dictatorship, with power over life and property, and had discovered that such a dictatorship was necessary to the regulation of the flock that he had gathered around him and to the schemes that he had in mind. To permit a federal governor to take charge of the territory, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... still present in the habits of thought of unreflecting persons, and it still profoundly affects the prevalent theory of human life and of natural processes; but it does not pervade our daily life to the extent or with the far-reaching practical consequences that are apparent at earlier stages of ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... day, no matter in what mood of merry jesting or practical modernity we set out, an hour of riding in the open air brings us back to the mystical charm of the Holy Land and beneath the spell of its memories and dreams. The wild hillsides, the flowers of the field, the ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... about policy. I use this term to mean any and all practical exploitation of the results of science. Sometimes, indeed, it is hard to say where science ends and policy begins, as we saw in the case of those gentlemen who would doctor their history, because practically it pays to have a good conceit ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... the story of my story, and to the question in your publisher's practical mind, I'm sorry to have to say I don't know. I have no way of finding out, since children are not accustomed to write to authors to tell them what they think of their books. And after all these excuses it just occurs to me that children ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... being a practical one, though. I'll tell you how it occurred. After the battle of Vimeira, the brigade to which I was attached had their headquarters at San Pietro, a large convent where all the church plate for miles around was stored up for safety. A sergeant's guard was accordingly ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the physician, too, that the father must look for practical guidance and encouragement in those unforeseeable cases when the mother perishes in connection with childbirth. It is he who is in the best position to prevent the father from unconsciously attaching blame to the unoffending child and harboring an undefined resentment ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... Sebastian Bach, Handel, and Schubert were Violin-players; Haydn and Mendelssohn could take their Tenor part in a Quartette; and lastly, Beethoven used to amuse himself with the Double-Bass. Their compositions evidence a practical knowledge of stringed instruments, as distinct from theory. The glorious compositions of Beethoven for the Violin need no comment here; their beauties have formed the theme of the ablest critics; and I have no desire to contribute ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... domestic restraint, they are prevented from appearing, as they "really are, the best good-natured things alive." So much innocent hypocrisy, so much mauvaise honte, so many of "the whispered no, so little meant," that they are practical antitheses to themselves. "Can danger lurk within a kiss." But all fathers are not Coleridges, nor ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... rather more than the first which decided me to give my gracious consent. Mrs. Ess Kay telegraphed to a costumier, who was also an artist. He came, made a few practical alterations in Potter's design, and arranged costumes for Mrs. Ess Kay and Sally. Afterwards, when my bill came in, which it didn't do till I asked for it, it certainly was ridiculously small, a mere nothing even for ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the best authority it is a simple substance and therefore incorruptible. It would be immortal, I understand, but for the possibility of its annihilation by its First Cause Who, from all I can hear, is quite capable of adding that to the number of His other practical jokes, corruptio per se and corruptio per accidens both being excluded by ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... silent and to think while cow men talked long about the campfire and the chuck wagon. And, by virtue of name and place, he sought and obtained interviews with professors and college presidents and practical men of affairs; and he listened to their talk through many hours, scarcely speaking, rarely asking a question, merely listening to the best they had to offer, content to receive from several such hours one idea, one fact, that would help ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... burial place, is provided at intervals along its top with upright pieces of stone set into the joints of a regular coping course that caps the wall. This feature may have some connection with the idea of vertical grave stones, noted at K'iakima. It is difficult to surmise what practical purpose could have been subserved by ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... form a starting-point for mediation.[163] On July 29th he tried to get over Germany's objection to the idea of a 'Conference' by suggesting adherence to the idea of an exchange of views in London.[164] Next day he added to this the practical suggestion that ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... to Beaumont. He held out his hand to show me that he had his pistol and I nodded, but whispered to him not to be too quick to shoot, as there might be some silly practical joking at work, after all. He had got a lamp from a bracket in the upper hall which he was holding in the crook of his damaged arm, so that we had a good light. Then we went down the passage toward the billiard room and you can imagine that we were ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... in Philip proceeds from nothing admirable, and may therefore provoke the gibes of the cynical. But angels and other practical people will accept it reverently, and write ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... in the hands of the peddlers. A cart goes by, a gorgeous symphony of hues. Roses, chrysanthemums, dahlias, daisies, tufts of unfamiliar species, leaves that are as transparent lace, blushing wild roses, and what not. Ivy is used for practical purposes. On the steam-yacht Carsjens at Leyden a wind screen is composed of ivy; you feel enclosed in a floating garden. Along the Vivjer berg, fronting the house of Baron Steengracht, is a huge boat-shaped enclosure of stone. It is full of ivy growing ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... good luck to find for chronicler one who is not only a distinguished soldier but a practical and experienced man of letters. This fortune is enjoyed by The Gold Coast Regiment (MURRAY) in securing for its historian Sir HUGH CLIFFORD, K.C.M.G., from whose book you may obtain a vivid picture ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... much in that history he could afford to be proud of, modern though he was. A man who believes in the results of blood in cattle is not likely to ignore the possibility of similar results in human beings; and I think he regarded the matter in some such practical light. He was a man, it seemed, who was disposed to look lightly on trouble, once it was over with; and I found he was not so much impressed with his struggle against the positive scorn and contempt of Mrs. Tomlinson—a ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... have to speak of it, not in a commercial point of view, but as a line of communication between two distant colonies, and the important part it has acted in the advancement of the province of South Australia. As a commercial river, I fear it will not be of practical utility. To prove this, it may be necessary for me to observe that the Murray runs for more than five degrees of latitude through a desert. That it is tortuous in its course, and is in many places encumbered with ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... Vienna to regard the tender principle of nationalism is a good enough joke, as we say. Her persistence in considering Italy's demands as either greed or sentiment is proof of Teutonic lack of imagination. The Italians are sentimental, but they are even more practical. It was not the woes of the "unredeemed" that led the Salandra Government to reject the final offering of Austria, and to accept the risks of war instead. It was rather the very practical consideration of that indefensible frontier, which Austria stubbornly refused to make safe for ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... unwonted sylvan recreations of the young drudge. He noticed that the mule was off duty too, grazing among the bushes just beyond the fence, and hobbled so that he could not run away. This precaution might have seemed a practical joke on the mule, for the poor old animal was only too glad to ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... you very much. I laughed also; but now I seriously repeat my proposition, because I am convinced that although at first sight it may appear extremely humourous, on a closer inspection it will be found exceedingly practical. In union ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... demonstrations which must stand or fall by their own strength, and which ought to involve no more reference to authority or character than a demonstration in Euclid. Yet it is proper for the public to know, that the writer is no mere theorist, but has been devoted from his youth to the laborious study of practical art. ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... preserved, so it is in matters concerning the soul. Because, in speculative matters, it is impossible to convince one who errs in the principles, whereas one who errs, but retains the principles, can be brought back to the truth by means of the principles. Likewise in practical matters, he who, by sinning, turns away from his last end, if we consider the nature of his sin, falls irreparably, and therefore is said to sin mortally and to deserve eternal punishment: whereas when a man sins without turning ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... whatever dignity it may obtain either by its dramatic force of imagination, or by the aid of its mythology, will keep its hold upon such common matters, simply because it cannot do without the essential practical interests, and has nothing to put in their place, if kings and chiefs are to be represented at all. The heroic age cannot dress up ideas or sentiments to play the part of characters. If its characters are not men they are nothing, not even thoughts or allegories; they cannot go on talking ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... simply stating a fact in terms which all students of religious education understand. The remaining nineteen had received courses in scientific religious education, either theoretical and laboratory exercises, or laboratory courses in practical social service and philanthropy. 57 of these teachers ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... for her capture and she several times was on the point of being taken, but always escaped by her quick wit, or by 'warnings' from Heaven—for it is time to notice one singular trait in her character. She is the most shrewd and practical person in the world, yet she is a firm believer in omens, dreams, and warnings. She declares that before her escape from slavery, she used to dream of flying over fields and towns, and rivers and mountains, looking down upon them 'like a bird,' and reaching ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford
... people of England made a most practical and terrible answer. From the highest noble to the lowest peasant, arose one simultaneous plebiscitum: "We are tired of these seventeen years of chicanery and terror. This woman must die: or ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... chronometer to be normal when not running. The highest happiness is the feeling of wellbeing which comes to one who is actively employed doing what he was made to do, carrying out the great life-purpose patterned in his individual bent. The practical fulfilling of the life-purpose is to man what the actual running and keeping time are to the watch. Without action ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... laid tightly against each other in order to keep out the wild pigs which infest the country. The construction of the fences is a laborious task, yet after one or two years they require extensive repairs, and when the repairs are such as to amount to a practical rebuilding, the "conuco" is commonly abandoned, and a new one located elsewhere. This method is wasteful of fence-material and land. The planting is done in the most primitive way, commonly by making a hole in the ground with ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... he said, now that matters were arranged he was calm, practical, and unloverlike, and for all that she would he had been less self-possessed, her faith in him caused her, upon reflection, even to admire this which she conceived to be restraint. Yet, when at parting he did no more than courteously bend before her, and kiss ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... man!" went on Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp. "What practical joker ever lured you into appearing in public ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... will in a measure be artificial, because, as we shall attempt to show in the chapter which follows on the "Latin of the Common People," Latin survives in the Romance languages, and has had a continuous life up to the present day. But on practical grounds it is convenient to have such a line of demarcation in mind, and two attempts have been made to fix it. One attempt has been based on linguistic grounds, the other follows political changes more closely. Up to 700 A.D. certain common sound-changes ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... management of his property had awakened in him the sleeping instincts of parsimony. But as his capital accumulated, and problems of investment and considerations of interest began to encroach upon his visionary hours, we saw a gradual arrest in the practical development ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... The practical man sees the truths of these statements. He sees steam used with small, medium and large engines for canal purposes, and sees them all fail to meet the economy of transportation established by horses; but he would ...
— History of Steam on the Erie Canal • Anonymous
... Yoga['s]astra, III, 98—112 and Upasakada['s]a Sutra, pp. 29-30, may be compared with Manu, X, 83-89, XI, 64 and 65, and the parallel passages quoted in the synopsis to my translation (S.B.E. Vol. XXV).] In practical life Jainism makes of its laity earnest men who exhibit a stronger trait of resignation than other Indians and excel in an exceptional willingness to sacrifice anything for their religion. It makes them also fanatics for the protection of animal life. Wherever they gain influence, there is an end ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... she thought; and immediately she recalled his perfect assurance when he told her of sending thought messages to his mother. She had heard of such things, she had even read a little on the subject, but it had never seemed to her a practical means of communicating. Calling a doctor, for instance, seemed to Lorraine rather far-fetched an application of what was at best but ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... a typewriter fairly satisfactorily," Val offered. "But as you are the world's worst speller and I am apt to become entangled in my commas, I can't see us the shining lights of any efficient office. And while we've had expensive educations, we haven't had practical ones. So what ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... keen, piercing blue eyes, the monocle, like a masked battery of the mind, levelled at her—all appealed to that life she lived apart from the people with whom she had daily commerce. Her world was a world of books and dreams, and simple, practical duties of life. Most books were romance to her, for most were of a life to which she had not been educated. Even one or two purely Protestant books of missionary enterprise, found in a box in her dead mother's room, had had all the charms of poetry and adventure. It was all new, therefore all ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 10 faculties of the sciences, of the 9 faculties of law, and of the 3 faculties of medicine. Add to these, the savants of the College de France and Ecole Polytechnique, every establishment devoted to high, speculative or practical instruction: these are highest in repute and the most influential; here the heads of science and of literature are found. Through them and their seconds or followers of every degree, in the faculties, lycees, colleges, minor seminaries, institutions, boarding schools, and small schools, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... intensify political and military cooperation throughout Europe, increase stability, diminish threats to peace, and build relationships by promoting the spirit of practical cooperation and commitment to democratic principles that underpin NATO; program ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... seemed to me a particular duty of the psychologist from time to time to leave his laboratory and with his little contribution to serve the outside interests of the community. Our practical life is filled with psychological problems which have to be solved somehow, and if everything is left to commonsense and to unscientific fancies about the mind, confusion must result, and the psychologist who stands aloof will be ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... her education had newly begun. The fixed aim, and the union with a practical man, had opened her faculties, not deficient in themselves, but contracted and nipped by the circumstances which she had not known how to turn to good account. Such a fresh stage in middle life comes to some few, like the midsummer shoot to repair ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the humors of the camp—a practical manifestation of the facetious spirit that had found literary expression in the topsy-turvy obituary notice from the pen of Hurdy-Gurdy's great humorist. Perhaps it had some occult personal signification impenetrable to understandings uninstructed in local traditions. A more charitable hypothesis ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... champions sought to make everything rational or reasonable. Its foremost representatives were to be found in Great Britain between 1675 and 1725. They wrote many books discussing abstruse problems of philosophy, which can have slight interest for us; but certain ideas they had of very practical importance, ideas which probably found their most notable expression in the writings of John Locke (1632-1704). Locke argued (1) that all government exists, or should exist, by consent of the governed—by a "social" contract, as ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... easy to the merchant and workmen as well as to the mathematical expert. The glimpses that we have been able to obtain up to the present of Chaldaean scientific methods indicate that they were on a low level, but they were sufficiently advanced to furnish practical rules for application in everyday affairs: helps to memory of different kinds, lists of figures with their names phonetically rendered in Sumerian and Semitic speech, tables of squares and cubes, and rudimentary formulas and figures for land-surveying, furnished sufficient instructions to ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... hypocritical, it would be unworthy in us to demand it. Certain it is that penitence, in the sense of voluntary humiliation, will never be displayed. Nor does this afford just ground for unreserved condemnation. It is enough, for all practical purposes, if the South have been taught by the terrors of civil war to feel that Secession, like Slavery, is against Destiny; that both now lie buried in one grave; that her fate is linked with ours; and that together we ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... Fabyan's, one glides rapidly up the steepest practical grade to the Base station, where he leaves the ordinary passenger coach and takes his seat in a car designed to be pushed up the Mount Washington Railroad. After the warning whistle the train starts slowly on its journey—the grandest sensation of the whole trip to the ordinary ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... of the fortunes, or misfortunes, of war that a position gained one day, even at great human sacrifice, may be of no real or practical value whatever the next. So it was with the advance post of communication located by Lieutenant Mackinson and his party under such dangerous conditions during the ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... the scheme of Jethro Juggens may seem, it was not wholly lacking in merit. At any rate, he took but a brief while to turn it over in his mind, when he set to work to put it to a practical test. ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... improbable tale of Hero and Leander is exposed by M. Mahudel, but is defended on the authority of poets and medals by M. de la Nauze. See the Academie des Inscriptions, tom. vii. Hist. p. 74. elem. p. 240. Note: The practical illustration of the possibility of Leander's feat by Lord Byron and other English swimmers is too well known to need ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... is which," confessed the unfortunate Emmeline, who was an absolute failure at everything practical: who could neither row nor fish, nor throw a stone, and who, though they had now been on the island twenty-eight months or so, ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... as a practical consequence for eugenics, that in the light of present knowledge any campaign against alcoholic liquors would be better based on the very adequate ground of physiology and economics, than on genetics. From the narrowest point of view of genetics, ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... it or not," said the practical Sol, "it's time for us to git out o' here, an' go back to ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... it did not impose respect; and there were even times when that dark and subtle spirit expanded itself, so as almost to conciliate affection. The turn for humour, which displayed itself by fits, was broad, and of a low, and sometimes practical character. Something there was in his disposition congenial to that of his countrymen; a contempt of folly, a hatred of affectation, and a dislike of ceremony, which, joined to the strong intrinsic qualities of sense and ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... respects, among the Britons as the Sophi among the Greeks, or the Magi among the Persians. Having been chosen from the best families in the land, the Bardi were held in the highest esteem by the common people; and the children of the chiefs were instructed by them. Their practical verses were never written, but given to their pupils viva voce, that they might assist in conveying them orally to the people. The Bardi dealt in particular charms, such as serpents' eggs, gathered in a particular way, and ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... woes, consoling her heart. Still, there was one office that he had failed to perform; he was not obsequious. Not that he was ever wanting in attention and deferential courtesy, or that he ever failed to betray a warmth of feeling or a generous devotion; but his manner was prosaic, thoroughly practical both in action and in expression. He spoke his thoughts directly and forcibly. He was never enthusiastic, never demonstrative, never warm or impulsive, but definite, well-ordered, positive. It was quite true that he was capable of bestowing service to the point of heroism when the ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... indifferent brother. He was warm-hearted, sharp-witted, and, though perhaps a little self-opinionated, considered throughout the county to be one of the most prudent in it. Indeed no one ever ventured to doubt his wisdom on all practical matters,—save his mother, who seeing him almost every day, had a stronger bias towards her younger son. "Arthur has been hit hard about that girl," he said to ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... O'BRIEN for the office of Mayor of the City of New York. But it cannot be called a practical joke. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... assert that Heine never set himself a high artistic task, and remained true to his purpose until the task was accomplished. In other words, Heine betrays a lack of will-energy along artistic lines, which in the case of Hoelderlin and Lenau was more evident in their attitude toward the practical ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun |
