"Predicate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a tragic side to this question. I mean that, after all, a sublime simplicity of mind is a necessary predicate to the acceptance of this "cheap" fiction. "A penn'orth o' loove," George the Fourth calls a novelette, and there's something very grim to me in ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... moment that petty wars were being waged in East and West, and that bulletins sometimes brought news of a general's defeat. Rome was accustomed to these things; and her efforts were still marked by their usual characteristics of steady expansion and decorous success. To predicate failure of her foreign activity for this period is to predicate it for all her history, for never was an empire more slowly won or more painfully preserved. It is true that at the commencement of this epoch an imperialist might have been justified in taking a gloomy view of the situation. ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... below are used as predicate adjectives, not to form the pluperfect passive with erant. Translate, therefore, 'were covered.' ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... Radiates lowest, how do the Articulates and Mollusks stand to these and to each other? To me it seems, that, while both are decidedly superior to the Radiates and inferior to the Vertebrates, we cannot predicate absolute superiority or inferiority of organization of either of these groups as compared with each other; they stand on one structural level, though with different tendencies,—the body in Mollusks ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... with the hot flush of mingled pride and shame with which she had spoken, and never had it looked more lovely. The father considered it for a moment, less with admiration than with curiosity: this daughter of his was an unknown quantity: he never could predicate what she would do or say. Certainly she surprised him once more when she lifted ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... government. In this case there is no danger of getting into a split argument; but even here it is safer to reduce the proposition to one which is grammatically single, "Municipal government by commission has proved itself superior to municipal government with a mayor and two chambers." A predicate wholly single is a ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... Being, or of a something towards which the human mind tends, in which it is absorbed or even annihilated. Awful as such a mysticism may appear, yet it leaves still something that exists, it acknowledges a feeling of dependence in man. It knows of a first cause, though it may have nothing to predicate of it except that it is [Greek: to kinoun akineton]. A return is possible from that desert. The first cause may be called to life again. It may take the names of Creator, Preserver, Ruler; and when the simplicity ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... up at the very beginning. As the reader will perhaps see, from the tenor of my discourse, I would find it difficult to say whether I should give them a good name or a bad—to speak more scientifically, and of course more clearly, whether I should characterise them by a predicate eulogistic, or a predicate dyslogistic. On the whole, I am content with my first idea, and continue to stick to the title of "The Book-Hunter," with all the more assurance that it has been tolerated, and even liked, by readers of the kind I am most ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... being could grasp nothing higher; his limited understanding could not frame an idea involving a spiritual element such as animism undoubtedly presents. Apropos of the dream birth of the soul, all terrestrial mammals dream, and in some of them, notably the dog and monkey, an observer can almost predicate the subject of their dreams by watching their actions while they are under dream influence; yet no animal save man, as far as we know, has ever evolved any idea of ghost or soul.[B] It may be said, on the other hand, that since animals show, unmistakably, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... are to be mortified that the soul may, unhampered by its own entanglement, reach that consummation which is supposed to be final. And what is it? Who can tell? The Aryan philosopher himself stands mute in its presence. All that we can predicate of it is not life and happiness, according to any standard of human experience known or imagined. The idea that the individual soul will finally sink into and blend with the Absolute Being as a drop of water returns to and mingles with its mother ocean may seem plausible to the ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... life," said he, in his most didactic manner, "none of us can predicate what opportunities of observation one may have from what we may call the spirit plane to the plane of matter. It surely must be evident to the most obtuse person" (here he glared a Summerlee) "that it is ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Liberty is the entire absence of all limitation, and to have no limitation in Being is to be co-extensive with All-Being. We are all grammarians enough to know that the use of a predicate is to lead the mind to contemplate the subject as represented by that predicate; in other words, it limits our conception for the time being to that particular aspect of the subject. Hence every predicate, however extensive, implies some limitation of the subject. But the ideal ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... of anything that you could safely predicate of all the inhabitants of India, and I confess to a little nervous tremor whenever I see a sentence beginning with "The people of India," or even with "All the Brahmans," or "All the Buddhists." What follows is almost invariably wrong. There is a greater difference between an Afghan, ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... and Predicate, Inflection, Number, Nominative Subject, Possessive Genitive, Agreement of Verb, Direct Object, ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... value of such an explanation for scientific purposes depends altogether on how consistent and exact it is. Every "thing" must be interpreted as a "configuration," every "event" as a change of configuration, every predicate ascribed must be of a geometrical sort. Measured by these requirements of mechanics Spencer's attempt has lamentably failed. His terms are vagueness and ambiguity incarnate, and he seems incapable of keeping the mechanical point of view in mind ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... the human individual an immortality of the soul and a coming resurrection of the body; but we do not to the human embryo at the beginning of its development in the womb. Now we know that the development of man from that embryo to perfect man is wholly gradual; that we cannot observe and predicate of any organ, of any quality, of any activity of body, soul, or mind, exactly the moment when it comes into existence; and that therefore we cannot give the moment when we could assume that something so decidedly great and new as the immortality ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... Apart sits his great father—Priam, the first of existences, father of many sons, the Absolute Reason; unseen, tremendous, immovable, in distant glory; yet himself amenable to that abysmal unity which Homer calls Fate, the source of all which is, yet in Itself Nothing, without predicate, unnameable. ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... only, "formal logic," or because it deals with names and not things, "the logic of names." It dates its rise as an independent science from the discovery of what is known as "the quantification of the predicate," claimed by Sir William Hamilton. Of writers upon it may be mentioned Professor De Morgan, W. Stanley Jevons, and especially Professor George Boole of Belfast. The latter, one of the subtlest thinkers of this age, and eminent as a mathematician, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... damaging accusation. There was no public denial from Mr. Clay. The press in his support had from the first treated the story as too ridiculous to be noticed other than by a flat denial; but the circumstances were sufficiently plausible to predicate such a slander, and the effect upon Mr. Clay was beginning to be felt seriously by his friends. In the mean time, rumors reached the popular ear that the proofs of its veracity were in the hands of General Jackson, whose popularity was running ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... following sentence or idea for its object. "If a pound of sugar cost ten cents, what will ten pounds cost?" Give, grant, allow, suppose, (the fact,) one pound cost, etc. In this case the supposition which stands as a predicate—one pound of sugar cost ten cents, is the object of if—the thing to be allowed, supposed, or granted, and from which the conclusion as to the cost of ten pounds is ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... certainly had not the worst of the joke, and may, therefore, with better grace tell the story, which, happily for my readers, is a very brief one. A custom prevailed in Mrs. Clanfrizzle's household, which from my unhappy ignorance of boarding-houses, I am unable to predicate if it belong to the genera at large, or this one specimen in particular, however, it is a sufficiently curious fact, even though thereby hang no tale, for my stating it here. The decanters on the dinner-table were never labelled, with their more appropriate designation of contents, whether claret, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... sweet intellectualism outstrips itself and becomes openly a sort of verbalism. Sugar is just sugar and sweet is just sweet; neither is the other; nor can the word 'is' ever be understood to join any subject to its predicate rationally. Nothing 'between' things can connect them, for 'between' is just that third thing, 'between,' and would need itself to be connected to the first and second things by two still finer betweens, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... scarcely done more than recognize the possibility of molecular disease of the brain. Hereafter science will, probably, succeed in unveiling the obscure facts of molecular brain pathology, and enable the medical psychologist to predicate disease of recognized classes of brain elements from the special phenomena of mind disturbance. This is the line of inquiry, and the result, to which the progress already made distinctly tends. For the present, the inferences ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... know not to be the case).—In conclusion we remark that in defining right knowledge as 'that which has for its antecedent another entity, different from its own antecedent non-existence,' you do not give proof of very eminent logical acuteness; for what sense has it to predicate of an entity that it is different from nonentity?—For all these reasons Inference also does not prove an ajna which is a positive entity. And that it is not proved by Scripture and arthpatti, will be shown later on. And the reasoning under ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... averment, solemn avowal, solemn declaration. remark, observation; position &c (proposition) 514, saying, dictum, sentence, ipse dixit [Lat.]. emphasis; weight; dogmatism &c (certainty) 474; dogmatics &c 887. V. assert; make an assertion &c n.; have one's say; say, affirm, predicate, declare, state; protest, profess. put forth, put forward; advance, allege, propose, propound, enunciate, broach, set forth, hold out, maintain, contend, pronounce, pretend. depose, depone, aver, avow, avouch, asseverate, swear; make oath, take one's oath; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... example, the unorganized myriads that one can cover by the phrase "mechanics and engineers," if one uses it in its widest possible sense. At present it would be almost impossible to describe such a thing as a typical engineer, to predicate any universally applicable characteristic of the engineer and mechanic. The black-faced, oily man one figures emerging from the engine-room serves well enough, until one recalls the sanitary engineer with his ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... business, and the people brisk and gay, though not indecorously so. I suppose there was hardly a man or woman who had not heard mass, confessed, and said their prayers; a thing which—the prayers, I mean—it would be absurd to predicate of London, New York, or any Protestant city. In however adulterated a guise, the Catholics do get a draught of devotion to slake the thirst of their souls, and methinks it must needs do them good, even if not quite so pure as if it came from better ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... then, if it is ever passing out below, predicate about it; first, that it is that; next, that it has this or that quality; or must it not be that, even as we speak, it should straightway become some other thing, and go out under on its way, and be no longer as it is? Now, how could ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... that, according to Hume, all our knowledge of things must be. There, for example, are all the truths of mathematics. When we enunciate a truth regarding the relations of the lines and angles of a triangle, we are not merely unfolding in the predicate of our proposition what was implicitly contained in the subject. There are propositions that do no more than this; they are analytical, i.e. they merely analyze the subject. Thus, when we say: Man is a rational animal, we may merely be defining the word "man"—unpacking ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... the human race it is not rationally possible to predicate a typical generic characteristic of mind. A physical trait will endure down the generations, as witness the Hapsburg lip and the swarthy complexion of the Finch-Hattons, in the face of alliances from outside the races; but, ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... mutes, we may predicate a) that one half of them is flat, and the other half sharp, and b) that some are continuous, ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... this doctrine, that there is not, and cannot be any such thing as sin. If man be not a free agent—if he be incapable of acting otherwise than as predetermined by Jehovah—he is incapable of either virtue or vice. It would be as reasonable to predicate virtue or vice of the flux and reflux of the tides, or the circulation of the blood, as of man ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example: A good name helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated is involved in the term of the subject, and so necessarily involved that by no possible conception they can be separated, then it becomes a truism; as to say, A good name is a proof of a man's estimation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... purpose, followed by a child-like docility and a womanly softness; the grave, the gay, the resolute, the fickle; the firm, the yielding, the unsparing, and the tender-hearted,—blending their contrarieties into one nature, of whose capabilities one cannot predicate the bounds, but to whom, by some luckless fatality of fortune, the great rewards of life have been generally withheld until one begins to feel that the curse of Swift was less the sarcasm wrung from indignant failures than the cold and stern ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... down very definite rules as to what is allowable and what not. It is best not to deviate from the usual order of words unless one can find a precedent in one of the Dramas. Some inversions, however, are quite allowable. Thus one may put the complement of a predicate, e.g. an infinitive, an accusative, or a participle, at the beginning of ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... and somewhat self-congratulatory that I was not more scared. No man can predicate how efficient he is going to be in the presence of really dangerous game. Only the actual trial will show. This is not a question of courage at all, but of purely involuntary reaction of the nerves. Very few men are physical cowards. They will and do face anything. But a ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... and, in fact, a supersubstantial quality.[20] For God is not one thing because He is, and another thing because He is just; with Him to be just and to be God are one and the same. So when we say, "He is great or the greatest," we seem to predicate quantity, but it is a quantity similar to this substance which we have declared to be supersubstantial; for with Him to be great and to be God are all one. Again, concerning His Form, we have already shown that He is Form, and truly One without ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... direct intimate continent digest levity finance indivisible defensible hilarious reticent imitate equidistant predicate maritime reticule piazza nobility ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... It was simply a question of Honor herself. She was not the woman lightly to withdraw her love, once given. And yet—in a year—who could tell? Love, like the spirit, bloweth where it listeth; and Paul's failure did not of necessity predicate his own. For all her sudden bewildering reserves, she had drawn very near to him in those last terrible weeks at Kohat; and now—now—if he could believe there was the veriest ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... light of these larger analogies," my father would continue, "why are we not further permitted to conclude that there is a more intimate and minute correlation. Why can not we predicate that under similar climatic and atmospheric vicissitudes, with a very probably similar or identical origin with our globe, this planet Mars, now burning red in the evening skies, possesses life, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... to be shifted from Mrs. Ormond to her convert, whom he followed with his tolerant eyes. "Nothing in all this sort of inquiry is so impossible to predicate as the effect of any given instance upon a given mind. It would ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... by itself: it can never become the object of knowledge and language is inadequate to describe it. All that can be said of it is neti, neti, that is no, no: it is not anything which we try to predicate of it. But he who knows that the individual soul is the Atman, becomes Atman; being it, he knows it and knows all the world: he perceives that in all the world there is no plurality. Here the later doctrine of Maya is adumbrated, ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... and polished. Men whose undegenerate spirit, &c. In prose, this would run, "(Ye) men whose spirit has been proved (to be) undegenerate," &c. The word "undegenerate," which is introduced only as an epithet, is the real predicate of ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... gives a WHAT; and if other feelings should succeed which remember the first, its WHAT may stand as subject or predicate of some piece of knowledge-about, of some judgment, perceiving relations between it and other WHATS which the other feelings may know. The hitherto dumb Q will then receive a name and be no longer speechless. But every name, as students of logic know, has its 'denotation'; and the denotation ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... is predicated accidentally, predicates, not substance, but quantity, or quality, or some other mode of being. If therefore the human nature accrues accidentally, when we say Christ is man, we do not predicate substance, but quality or quantity, or some other mode of being, which is contrary to the Decretal of Pope Alexander III, who says (Conc. Later. iii): "Since Christ is perfect God and perfect man, what foolhardiness ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... hath existence; or, who hath a soul, hath a soul. What is this more than trifling with words? It is but like a monkey shifting his oyster from one hand to the other: and had he but words, might no doubt have said, 'Oyster in right hand is subject, and oyster in left hand is predicate:' and so might have made a self-evident proposition of oyster, i.e. oyster is oyster; and yet, with all this, not have been one whit the wiser or more knowing: and that way of handling the matter would much ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... surprise him [Malfatti], persuaded the Misses Emmering and Lutzer, and the Messrs. Wild, Cicimara, and your Frederick to perform some music at the honoured man's house; almost from beginning to end the performance was deserving of the predicate "parfait." I never heard the quartet from Moses better sung; but Miss Gladkowska sang "O quante lagrime" at my farewell concert at Warsaw with much more expression. Wild was in excellent voice, and I acted in a ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... to me, is the immortality we so glibly predicate of departed artists. If they survive at all, it is but a shadowy life they live, moving on through the gradations of slow decay to distant but inevitable death. They can no longer, as heretofore, speak directly to the hearts of their fellow-men, evoking their tears or laughter, and all ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... is often called an "individual," the sun is called "the candle of God." A book just bought is "my late literary acquisition." Facts such as "I returned to Llangollen by nearly the same way by which I had come," abound. Sentences straight from his note book, lacking either in subject or predicate, occur here and there. At times a clause with no sort of value is admitted, as when, forgetting the name of Kilvey Hill, he says that Swansea town and harbour "are overhung on the side of the east by a lofty green mountain with a Welsh name, no doubt ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." ONE thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one thinks"—even the "one" contains an INTERPRETATION of ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... general results of a revision of an order to which a full tenth of all higher plants belong, furnish apt examples both of cautious criticism, conditional assent (as becomes the inaugurator of the quantification of the predicate), and of fruitful application of the new views to various problems concerning the classification and geographical distribution of plants. In his hands the hypothesis is turned at once to practical use as an instrument of investigation, as a ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... confess that each particular passage is best interpreted on its own merits, by the logic of the context and the application of common sense. There is no reason why Chinese sentences should not be dissected, by those who take pleasure in such operations, into subject, copula and predicate, but it should be early impressed upon the beginner that the profit likely to accrue to him therefrom is infinitesimal. As for fixed rules of grammatical construction, so far from being a help, he will find them a positive hindrance. It should rather be his aim to free his mind from such trammels, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... lunar atmosphere, it may be said, in a word, that even those who advocate the existence of vegetation and of clouds of dust or ice crystals on the moon do not predicate any greater amount, or greater density, of atmosphere than do those who consider the moon to be wholly dead and inert. Professor Pickering himself showed, from his observations, that the horizontal refraction of the lunar atmosphere, instead of being less than ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss |
