"Subtlety" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... touch, and, in barbaric art most draughtsmen emphasize what they plainly see—the barbarism, and miss conditions of nobleness, which they must approach the monument in a different temper before they will discover and draw with great subtlety before ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... am," according to him, was not the identification of spirit with matter, but a product of the mutation of matter in this cloud-like, error-formed world. He believed in Substance (Sat) and scoffed at Unsubstance (Asat). He asserted the subtlety and globularity of atoms which are uncreate. He made mind and intellect a mere secretion of the brain, or rather words expressing not a thing, but a state of things. Reason was to him developed instinct, and ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... writing the foregoing, I feel afraid of what I have said; it is dangerous seeking comfort where the Scriptures are silent; yet while we plead with God to be preserved from error, and try to be still before him, he will save us from the subtlety of the serpent, as well as from the rage of the lion. I am, ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... perceived the subtlety of her punishment. Attempting to bind the Everlasting with her own personal limitations, her own desires, she had failed to see that at least half of a rightful prayer must deal with herself. She had asked only that her husband might love her; not that she ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... of Fire displays itself. When this disappears, the form that becomes perceivable is that of Wind as effulgent as a well-tempered weapon of high polish. Gradually, the form displayed by Wind becomes like that of the thinnest gossamer. Then having acquired whiteness, and also, the subtlety of air, the Brahman's soul is said to attain the supreme whiteness and subtlety of Ether. Listen to me as I tell thee the consequences of these diverse conditions when they occur. That Yogin who has been able to achieve ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... inform a man of sense that he is only a conceited fool. As to his political transactions, he has by his side, as a secretary, a man of the name of Petry, who has received a diplomatic education, and does not want either subtlety or parts; and on him, no doubt, is thrown the drudgery of business. During a European war, Turreaux's post is of little relative consequence; but should Napoleon live to dictate another general pacification, the United States will ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... with their destinies as if they were so many puppets. And the little drama shows how his accidental interference has created fates stronger and happier than his own—fates lying wholly outside his power. The play suffers from a tendency to exaggerated subtlety which is one of Schnitzler's principal dangers, though it rarely asserts itself to such an extent that the enjoyment of his work is ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... of India has approached so near to veritable divine revelation as that of Plato, but in variety and subtlety, and in their far-reaching influence upon human life, the Indian schools, especially the Vedanta, are scarcely excelled to this day. And they are applied philosophies; they constitute the religion of ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... know the bondage which men endure, the realty and the delusion in what they think and feel; and the subtlety and strength of those evil forces which color his disposition ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... he may become bewildered, losing his wisdom and being unable to find counsel or help even in the most trivial temptations. For the devil and reason, or human wisdom, can dispute and syllogize with extraordinary subtlety in these things until one imagines to be true wisdom that which is not. A wise man soon becomes a fool; men readily err and make false steps; a Christian likewise is prone to stumble; ay, even a ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... modern times, such as the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and the modern Chinese and Hindoos, have accepted the polytheistic explanation of the world, and as no reasonable man will deny the philosophical subtlety of the Greeks and the Hindoos, to say nothing of the rest, a theory of the universe which has commended itself to them deserves perhaps more consideration than it has commonly received from Western philosophers; certainly it cannot be ignored in an historical ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... to be so base when the movement of a finger would have sufficed? Why was any sign necessary to indicate one who was so well known? The supposition that the devil compelled him to superfluous villainy in order that he might be secured with greater certainty and tortured with greater subtlety is one that can hardly be entertained except by theologians. It is equally difficult to understand why Jesus submitted to such an insult, and why Peter should not have smitten down its perpetrator. Peter was able to draw his sword, and ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... presented to the common and passive eye, rather than to the eye of the imagination. Whether supporting or assailing, he makes his way either by argument or by appeals to the affections, unsurpassed even by the schoolmen in subtlety, 415 agility, and logic wit, and unrivalled by the most rhetorical of the fathers in the copiousness and vividness of his expressions and illustrations. Here words that convey feelings, and words that flash images, and words ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... pleasure which he took in conducting important inquiries and in personally pushing them to a conclusion before placing them in the magistrate's hands; and he also knew all the professional qualities of the chief detective, and all the subtlety, all the penetrating logic ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... grown harder and sharper; and, perhaps on this account, he had a distinctly older look than was warranted by his two-and-twenty years. There were worn lines about his eyes, and a decided increase of that subtlety of expression which gave something of an Oriental character to his appearance. He had lost the youthful, almost boyish, look which had characterised him two years ago; he was a man now, but hardly a man whom one would have found it ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... uncertain and ill at ease. Shakespeare seems to have risen from the writing of this play, certain that poetry is not given to the trained mind, nor to the untrained mind, but to the quick and noble nature, earnest with the passion which stands the touchstone of death. "Subtlety," so Cromwell wrote, "may deceive you, integrity never will." The mind is her own armour. She will not fail for the want of a little ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... of Fotheringay castle. Alone, "without one counsellor on her side among so many," Mary conducted the whole of her own defence with courage incomparable and unsurpassable ability. Pathos and indignation, subtlety and simplicity, personal appeal and political reasoning, were the alternate weapons with which she fought against all odds of evidence or inference, and disputed step by step every inch of debatable ground. She repeatedly insisted on the production of proof in her own handwriting ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... of yelling beggars, guides, and coachmen surrounded them with an importunity wherein was mingled the gracefulness which Italians never lose. Their subtlety made them divine that these were lovers, and they knew that lovers are prodigal. Dechartre threw coin to them, and they all returned to ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... divine wisdom. But he esteeming all kind of handicraft and invention to make engines, and generally all manner of sciences bringing common commodity by the use of them, to be but vile, beggarly, and mercenary dross: employed his wit and study only to write things, the beauty and subtlety whereof were not mingled anything at all with necessity. For all that he hath written, are geometrical propositions, which are without comparison of any other writings whatsoever: because the subject where of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... some difficulty, in obtaining a private interview with Mr Spivin's servant Martha, he proceeded with much politeness and subtlety to ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... first instrument of torture indicated subtlety. He bought from a Siwash Indian the most contemptible-looking cur ever beheld at the inlet, and he christened the unfortunate beast—Dennis. There was a resemblance between dog and man. Each, in the struggle for existence, had received more than his due share of kicks, and the sense of ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... think then, Faustus, that a man who so studiously endeavours to disguise himself has a breast that would bear the light? Never trust him in whom art and subtlety have so far overcome animal nature, that even the signs of his instinct and his sensations are extinguished. When that which works and ferments within you shows itself no more in your face, in your eyes, and in ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... marshalled and kept relentlessly to their work until he was satisfied; and woe betide the lubras who had neglected to wash hands, and pail and cow, before sitting down to their milking. The very fowls that laid out-bush gained nothing by their subtlety. At the faintest sound of a cackle, a dosing lubra was roused by the point of Cheon's toe, as he shouted excitedly above her: "Fowl sing out! That way! Catch 'im egg! Go on!" pointing out the direction with much pantomime; and as the egg-basket filled to overflowing, he either chuckled with ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... method of force, directly applied. The strong man disdains subtlety, persuasion, sweeps opposition aside. "Might is right" is his motto; he beats down opposition by fist, by sword, by thundering voice, or look. Men who use this method are little troubled by codes; they follow the primitive ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... enemy had by his subtlety gained such advantages over me, yet I went on notwithstanding, and firmly persisted in my godly resolution of ceasing from and denying those things which I was now convinced in my conscience were evil. And on this account a great ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... all that subtlety will laugh, Death will that foolish gardener mock Who does a slight and annual plant engraff, Upon a ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... harmonic notes of her nature stirring in the air about her, and what has social life to compare with one of those vital interchanges of thought and feeling with her that make an hour memorable? What can equal her tact, her delicacy, her subtlety of apprehension, her quickness to feel the changes of temperature as the warm and cool currents of talk blow by turns? At one moment she is microscopically intellectual, critical, scrupulous in judgment as an analyst's ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... went down on Christian, she had changed more than had Larry. It was as though that extra-worldly endowment of her childhood having ceased to manifest in external ways, had turned its light inwards. The power of hearing what others could not hear, had faded, but a subtlety of mind, a clarity, a sort of pondering, intellectual self-consciousness (that had no kinship with that other form of self-consciousness that is only inverted self-conceit) had taken the place of those voices that she had once refused to deny ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... personal to be completely shared; for the most part J—— and I read not together, but each by each, he sitting in his morris chair by the desk, I sprawled upon his couch, reading, very likely, different poems, but communicating, now and then, a sudden discovery. Probably I exaggerate the subtlety of our enjoyment, for it is hard to review the unself-scrutinizing moods of freshmanhood. It would be hard, too, to say which enthusiast had the greater enjoyment: he, because these glimpses through magic casements made him merry; I, because they made me sad. Outside, the snow sparkled ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... the Lock. How foolish it is to suppose that nature and truth are to be found in one school of poetry to the exclusion of another! The eternal virtues of literature are sincerity, clarity, breadth, force, and subtlety. They are to be found, in diverse combinations, now here and now there. While the late Latin Christian poets were bound over to Latin models—to elegant reminiscences of a faded mythology and the tricks of a professional rhetoric—there arose a new school, ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... and cheerful godliness. He knows more about human nature than many pretentious diagnosticians; and his gladness in living communicates itself to the reader. Occasionally, as in Spring Fantasies, there is a subtlety easy to miss on a first of careless reading. On the edge of sixty, this poet is doing his best singing ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... select at hazard, and immediately quaff one of these seven phials, in one of which only is contained the Elixir of Life. Far different are the contents of the others; they are the six most deadly poisons which the utmost subtlety of my skill has enabled me to prepare, and science knows no antidote to any of them. The first scorches up the entrails as with fire; the second slays by freezing every vein, and benumbing every nerve; the third by frantic convulsions. Happy in comparison ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... arbitrary, and that we might in the same way take any other number than ten as the base of a numerical scale,—that we might increase for instance by fives, or eights, or nines, or twelves, just as well as by tens—all this requires considerable maturity of intellect, and some subtlety of reasoning. Indeed I doubt whether many of the pretentious sciolists, who insist so much on young children giving the rationale of everything, have themselves ever yet made an ultimate analysis of the first step in arithmetical notation. Many ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... this side the border-line of the human. Our Old Home, a book of charming papers on England, was published in 1863. Manifold experience of life and contact with men, affording scope for his always keen observation, had added range, fullness, warmth to the imaginative subtlety which had manifested itself even in his earliest tales. Two admirable books for children, the Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, in which the classical mythologies were retold, should also be mentioned in the list of Hawthorne's writings, as well as the American, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... had learned in her married life, she had become gradually but surely aware that the face of that other man had been dishonest. She had learned the false meaning of every glance of his eyes, the subtlety of his mouth, the counterfeit manoeuvres of his body,—the deceit even of his dress. He had been all a lie from head to foot; and he had thrown her love aside as useless when she also would not be a liar. And here was this man,—spotless in her estimation, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... condemnation, struck root in his mind, which, however broad, always judged unjustly that for which it had no room. 'Those studies can make a man opinionated and contentious; can they make him wise? They exhaust the mind by a certain jejune and barren subtlety, without fertilizing or inspiring it. By their stammering and by the stains of their impure style they disfigure theology which had been enriched and adorned by the eloquence of the ancients. They involve everything whilst trying to resolve everything.' ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... time for self-control before answering, she thought her inquiry had deepened his resentment. "Not that I don't think you're right, maybe," she hastened to add, "though"—this wistfully, in a feminine and maternal subtlety of laying the first lines for sapping and mining his position—"I often think about our life, all work and no play, and wonder if we oughtn't to give the children ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... composition likely enough to puzzle, and consequently to mislead the Understanding.—The reader will perceive that I distinguish between mental Impressions and the Understanding.—I wish to avoid every thing that looks like subtlety and refinement; but this is a distinction which we all comprehend.—There are none of us unconscious of certain feelings or sensations of mind which do not seem to have passed thro' the Understanding; the effects, I suppose, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... the greatest care which, in the main, he exercised, he would have been likely to crowd into his definitions and postulates more than they naturally admitted, or to make them less than they naturally required; to mistake, for the basis of his fulcrum, a speculative subtlety instead of a practical reality; and, consequently, to make his inexorable logic draw too much, or to little, for legitimate practical effect. If, occasionally tempted by the excitement of our present types of speculative ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... a naivete well calculated to provoke a smile of pity, calls this a "brave" and subtle stratagem; on its subtlety we may be silent, but we leave alike its courage and its honesty to the judgment of our readers. Sully admits[263] that not only the two captors, but even Murat himself, who had an ancient grudge against ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... portrayed in "Bishop Blougram's Apology," with all his bland subtlety, complex culture, and ripened perceptions, distant as the nineteenth century from the sixteenth, very different at bottom from his Renaissance brother, in respect to his native hankering for the pleasure of estimation above his fellows? Gigadibs is ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... experience of our colonies. Yet a generation passed away while the abolitionists of Great Britain were trying to make ropes of sand—to give practical effect to an impracticable theory; pursuing a delusion, which this honored woman was the first to detect; and that less by force and subtlety of argument, than by the statement of self-evident truths, and by the enforcement of the simple and grand principle that Christianity admits of no compromise with sin. This was an easy lesson, yet it was one which ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... posted over, Because his purpose is not executed. No; let him die, in that he is a fox, By nature prov'd an enemy to the flock, Before his chaps be stain'd with crimson blood, As Humphrey, prov'd by reasons, to my liege. And do not stand on quillets how to slay him. Be it by gins, by snares, by subtlety, Sleeping or waking, 't is no matter how, So he be dead; for that is good deceit Which mates him first that first ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... inadequate to trap this organisation. The law has too wide a mesh to deal with the terror which this man exercises. Such men are the only justification of lynch law, the quick, sharp justice which is administered without subtlety and without quibble." ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... a part of his official training, is a part of his unofficial—his subtlety, if you please. Another passenger might be the "kunnel"; still another, the "jedge." But there can be no other guv'nor save you on this car and trip. And George, of the Pullmans, is going to watch over you this night ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... was not the first time that Mrs. Agar had charged some remark with that weight of significance which, in her vulgar-minded subtlety, she considered delicate and exceptionally clever. And each time that Dora heard it she was conscious of a vague discomfort, as at the approach of some danger, of some interference in her life which would be too strong for her to resist. It was one of those mean feminine ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... black ribbons tied in a bow around the ankle—such a charming little slipper peeping out from petticoats all bescalloped and belaced! Everything in fact about this dainty old maid, with her trim figure filling out her soft white fichu, still had that subtlety of charm which had played havoc with more than one heart in her day. Only Sallie Horn, who had all the dear woman's secrets, knew where those little feet had stepped and what hopes they had crushed. Only Sallie Horn, too, knew why the delicate finger was still bare of a plain ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... made a minute study of cats. Of all animals they interest me the most. They have less apparent intensity, less uttered passion, than dogs, but in my opinion more character. Their subtlety is extraordinary, their sensitiveness wonderful. Will you understand me when I say that all dogs are men, all cats women? That remark expresses the ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... sometimes seek rest from the brilliant audacities and complex passions of Wagner or Tschaikowsky in the tender simplicity of some ancient English air, so we occasionally turn with relief from the wit and insight and subtlety of our modern novelists to the old uncomplicated tales of faerie or romance, and find them after all more moving, more tender, even more real, than all the laboured realism of these photographic days. And here before us is of all pretty love-stories perhaps the prettiest. Idyllic as Daphnis ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous
... be very glad after to-day to leave the house I am living in," she said quietly, and the words struck him dumb. He had subtlety enough to understand her. The rooms would mock her with memories of vain dreams. Yet he kept silence. It was too late in any case to take back what he had said; and even if she would listen to him marriage wouldn't be fair. He would be hampered, ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... was that Concha liked the present arrangement no better than himself, and knowing that her own appeal against the proprieties would result in a deeper seclusion, she determined to goad him into using every resource of address and subtlety to bring about a more human state of affairs. And she accomplished her object. Rezanov, at the end of a week was not only infuriated but alarmed. He knew the imagination of woman, and guessed that Concha, in her brooding solitude, ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... anything from her by force. What she had to fear was his will at work upon hers, his persuasion, his ingenuity. She thought of the purple irises, and how he had drawn them toward him in the crook of his cane—and her dread was lest he meant to overcome her with some subtlety she could not combat. For that he was secret, that he was daring, that he was fearless beyond belief, he showed her all too plainly, since here he stood, condemned by his own evidence, alone, in the midst of her household, within call ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... suddenly Chris saw what he had with subtlety set about teaching her, that to attempt to fence with ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... there is a subtlety of sound rare even in the work of lyrists of acknowledged merit. Again, there is a fine ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... from shore to prairie. To make room for civilization, that forest must go. What were Indians, however deadly,—what starvation, however imminent,—what pestilence, however lurking,—to a solid obstacle like this? No mere courage could cope with it, no mere subtlety, no mere skill, no Yankee ingenuity, no labor-saving machine with head for hands; but only firm, unwearying, bodily muscle to every stroke. Tree by tree, in two centuries, that forest has been felled. What were the Pyramids to that? There does not exist ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... to insert your ideas in my book; they would destroy it. Everything in it is based on love, platonic and sensual. God forbid that I should end my book by such social blasphemies! I would rather try to return by some pantagruelian subtlety to my herd of celibates and honest women, with many an attempt to discover some social utility in their passions and follies. Oh! if conjugal peace leads us to arguments so disillusionizing and so gloomy as these, I know a great ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Schumann when, like an idiot, I wanted Beethoven. Schumann was right for this evening. Schumann was the thing. Do you know, mother, I shall have our children educated just like Lucy. Bring them up among honest country folks for freshness, send them to Italy for subtlety, and then—not till then—let them come to London. I don't believe in these London educations—" He broke off, remembering that he had had one himself, and concluded, "At all ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... feelings, there was in Hill a distinct aversion to falsity that the blasphemous Landport cobbler had inculcated by strap and tongue from his earliest years. Of one fact about professed atheists I am convinced; they may be—they usually are—fools, void of subtlety, revilers of holy institutions, brutal speakers, and mischievous knaves, but they lie with difficulty. If it were not so, if they had the faintest grasp of the idea of compromise, they would simply be liberal churchmen. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... upon her, she seeks to win from it a kind of satisfaction; the admiration of a hundred men she tries to receive without making a sour face. Still further she takes pleasure in the exercise of that feminine subtlety which holds them fast in the web, yet keeps them off; giving them always hope, but indefinitely extending it. Verily that web which she wove is the web of Fate for the Suitors. So much for Penelope at present, whom we ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... In a word, Control's not for this lady; but her wish To please me outstrips in its subtlety My power of being pleased: herself creates The want she means to satisfy. My heart Prefers your suit to her as 'twere its own. Can ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... person, wholly devoid of subtlety of intellect, so that I willingly admit that there may be depths of alternative meaning in these propositions out of all soundings attainable by my poor plummet. Still there are a good many people who suffer ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... about him, he had force. Yet she did not think him clever; she had met men whose mental powers were much more obvious, but when she tried to contrast them with him, he came out best. After all, character took one further than intellectual subtlety. ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... the proffered hand with his own, and as he had recoiled from Snap Naab so now he received another shock, different indeed but impelling in its power, instinctive of some great portent. Hare was impressed by an indefinable subtlety, a nameless distrust, as colorless as the clear penetrating amber lightness of the eyes ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... "No, I am a poor teacher of morality! If some schoolmaster or one of our legal fellows could peep into my brain at this moment he would call me a poor stick, and would very likely suspect me of unnecessary subtlety. . . . But in school and in court, of course, all these wretched questions are far more simply settled than at home; here one has to do with people whom one loves beyond everything, and love is exacting and complicates the ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... credible characters. Take, for instance, the two clergymen, Archdeacon Sparre and the Rev. Mr. Martens, and it is not necessary to have lived in Norway in order to recognize and enjoy the faithfulness and the artistic subtlety of these portraits. If they have a dash of satire (which I will not undertake to deny), it is such delicate and well-bred satire that no one, except the originals, would think of taking offence. ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... the stories of changelings, in fact, assume that, though the outward characteristics might justify vehement suspicion, yet they were not absolutely decisive, and that to arrive at certainty the elf must be brought to betray himself. No great subtlety, however, was needful; for the stratagem employed varies but little, as the following examples will show. The child of a married couple in Mecklenburg at two years of age was no longer than a shoe, but had a mighty big head, and, withal, was unable to learn to speak. Its parents were ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... subtlety of their long interview, the surprising turns of sentiment and contrasts of feeling. Throughout this scene Parsifal's instinct is absolutely true and sure. Everything Kundry says about his mother, Herzeleide, he feels; but every attempt to make him accept her instead he resists. Her desperate ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... have no names at all. Englishmen who know nothing of English history, but less than nothing of Irish history, have heard somehow or other of Brian Boru, though they spell it Boroo and seem to be under the impression that it is a joke. It is a joke the subtlety of which they would never have been able to enjoy, if King Brian had not broken the heathen in Ireland at the great Battle of Clontarf. The ordinary English reader would never have heard of Olaf of Norway if he had not "preached the Gospel with his sword"; or of the Cid if he ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... distinction between the classes who work and the classes who play. Of course we must agree upon a definition of these terms,—work and play,—before going farther. Now, roughly, not with vain subtlety of definition, but for plain use of the words, 'play' is an exertion of body or mind, made to please ourselves, and with no determined end; and work is a thing done because it ought to be done, and with a determined end. You play, as you call it, at ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... writer, indeed, Mr. Havelock Ellis, has realised that 'there are few more delightful books in the world,' and he has analysed them in an essay on Casanova, published in Affirmations, with extreme care and remarkable subtlety. But this essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt to take Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and in his relation to human problems. And yet these Memoirs are perhaps the most valuable document ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... is shown by other passages in the Acts of the Apostles; in Paphos the "false prophet," a Jew, whose surname was Bar-Jesus, otherwise known as "Elymas the sorcerer," opposed the teaching of St. Paul and brought on himself the imprecation: "O full of all subtlety and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... for names. He, being a chivalrous thief, was playing to hide names. They could only, among several likely confederates, guess Trampas and Shorty. So it had been a slip for him to curse the man who built the fire. At least, they so held it. For, they with subtlety reasoned, one curses the absent. And I agreed with them that Ed did not know how to lie well; he should have at once claimed the disgrace of having spoiled the expedition. If Shorty was the blunderer, then certainly Trampas was the other man; for the two were as inseparable as don and master. ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... art, and even then it did not get beyond being formal and magnificent. The two principal exponents were HYACINTHE RIGAUD and NICOLAS LARGILLIERE, both of whose works have a sort of grandeur but little subtlety or charm. ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... poisoning, their trust in English justice leads them to appeal to our courts of law." Dr. Robertson, in his "Historical Disquisitions concerning India,"[22] seems to have considered the litigious subtlety of the Hindus as a sign of high civilization rather than of barbarism, but he is sharply corrected by Mr. Mill, who tells him that "nowhere is this subtlety carried higher than among the wildest of the Irish." That courts ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... carries us to a different country and a different race. And he who has been called the father of German painting is thoroughly German, not only in his Saxon honesty, sedateness, and strength, but in the curious mixture of simplicity, subtlety, homeliness, and fantasticalness, which are still found side by side ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... for this gross tyrant's mentality came to me; it did not temper, it heightened, the hatred I felt for him. But now I recognized the subtlety of his attack; realized that unerringly he had taken the only means by which he could have gained a hearing; have temporized. Could he win ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... essence of his soul floated there, a variable and fluid quantity, forever changing form and colour beneath the shallow ripples of his personality. She had seen him in many moods, but never in this one. Did he possess a deeper subtlety than she had imagined or was it the sincerity of his nature ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... territory, that none but raw troops are needed for the contest? Can the broad and deep intrenchments of Paganism, Mohammedism, and Romanism be so easily taken, as not to need men of age, experience and skill, to direct the assault? Can the snares in which the heathen are held; which are laid with all the subtlety of the arch-fiend, be so easily divested of their specious character, and traced into their thousand windings, as not to require the wisdom and experience of age? A minister has age: he has then one great qualification for ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... like a taylor's, from the shreds of bread, [the] chippings and remnants of a broken crust; excepting his vails from the barrel, which poor folks buy for their hogs but drink themselves. He divides an halfpenny loaf with more subtlety than Keckerman[33], and sub-divides the a prima ortum so nicely, that a stomach of great capacity can hardly apprehend it. He is a very sober man, considering his manifold temptations of drink and strangers; ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. Of such modes of existence there are not a few: youth and the arts preoccupied with youth may serve as a model for us at one moment: at another we may like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness of impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... committing a perjury which would ruin an innocent man, or seeking gain by supplying bad preserved meats to our navy, feel themselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they should not do so, and are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety by their dissatisfaction with ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... if Philip Crane, playing with all his intense subtlety, had met his master in Fate; the grim arbiter of man's ways had pushed forward a chessman to occupy a certain square on the board ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... government for war, any disorder such as menaced the country would be little short of a calamity. It might turn out a fatality. This so-called labor union intended to take advantage of a crisis to further its own ends. Yet even so, that fact did not wholly explain Glidden and his subtlety. Some nameless force loomed dark and sinister back of Glidden's meaning, and it was not peril to the ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... Julian Hawthorne is endowed with a large share of his father's peculiar genius. We trace in 'Bressant' the same intense yearning after a high and spiritual life, the same passionate love of nature, the same subtlety and delicacy of remark, and also a little of the same tendency to indulge in the use of a half-weird, ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... notwithstanding, and particularly under a constitutional government, the least dangerous as well as the most efficacious method of meeting temporary and urgent necessities. It is better to suspend openly, and for a given time, a particular privilege, than to pervert, by encroachment and subtlety, the fixed laws, so as to adapt them to the emergency of the hour. The experience of history, in such cases, confirms the suggestions of reason. In countries where political liberty is finally established, as in England, it is precisely after it has ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Weithoff in the halls of Schonburg as master of that ancient stronghold? The circumstances in which identity was disclosed, although sufficient to convince every one else in the castle, appeared at times to the Count but the stronger evidence of the Outlaw's craft and subtlety. If the young man were actually the son of von Weithoff, then undoubtedly the Outlaw had run great risk of having him hanged forthwith, but on the other hand, the prize to be gained, comprising as it did two notable ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... Practical Accounting.—That this is no bit of mere theoretical subtlety is proved by the fact that the bookkeeping of nearly all establishments distinguishes between these two incomes by actually putting an appraisal on the work the employer does and paying a salary for it. A man may be a large owner of stock in a corporation and yet receive a salary ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... bewilderment of his misapprehension. At last, however, he had put her, as it were, tentatively aside, had relinquished his attempt to reduce her to a formula with the despairing admission that she was, take her as you would, a subtlety that compelled one to a mental effort. The effort which he had up to this time associated with the society of women had been of anything but a mental character. There was the effort of putting one's best physical ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... estate, his shape had taken on a degree of subtlety, his hair was growing long and straight and like leaves of the weeping willow. Estelle lifted the white fringe depending from his brow, and exposed to the light two great limpid brown eyes, incredibly sweet and intelligent. It was as wonderful, in its way, as if a blind beggar, insignificant ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... informing force of the living principle constitute an organ not only of motion and sense, but of consciousness. The organ plays on the organist. How is this conceivable? The solution requires a depth, stillness, and subtlety of spirit not only for its discovery, but even for the understanding of it when discovered, and in the most appropriate words enunciated. I can merely give a hint. The particles themselves must have an interior and gravitative being, and the multeity ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... men must keep their word. When America says something, America means it, whether a treaty or an agreement or a vow made on marble steps. We will always try to speak clearly, for candor is a compliment, but subtlety, too, is good and has its place. While keeping our alliances and friendships around the world strong, ever strong, we will continue the new closeness with the Soviet Union, consistent both with our security and with progress. One might say that our new relationship in part reflects ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... if that's your name, will you come with me?" the Englishman said lightly. He knew the tongue well that her brothers spoke, not in any of its refinement and subtlety, but in the ordinary distorted way an Englishman usually speaks ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... The very subtlety of the spell in the former cases holds aloof many an average mortal who grasps at once the home thrusts, the lightly veiled satire, the poor human foibles, fads, and weaknesses in the characters of Dickens. The ordinary soul, in whom ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... made to classify the emotions which are, in ordinary experience, infinitely subtle and complex. The subtlety and variety of emotion James explains as the result of the subtle and imperceptible differences in the complex of sensations which occur in any given situation. In general, it has been recognized that the emotions are very closely connected with the primary tendencies ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... debates in Burke's day to be so animating and interesting to those who heard, or perused them, amid the excitements of the hour. It is not to be denied that commanding eloquence, vast genius, political ardour, intellectual enthusiasm, together with indignant denunciation and argumentative subtlety, were thus summoned into exercise by the perils of the Nation, and the contentions of Party. Nevertheless, the local, the temporal, the conventional, and the individual, in all which relates to the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... consists in throwing off religious restraints, and following as much as may be "the devices and desires of our own hearts." But this is a terrible delusion, which only serves to show the depth and subtlety of him who, besides having "the power of death," is also "the father of lies," the great deceiver and ensnarer of mankind. History is full of analogous examples among men. In how many instances have the most cruel and ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... appeal to eternity. He knew "Emaux et Camees" as pious folk their Bible; he felt that naught endured but art. So he became a pagan, and sought for firmness and delicacy in the texture, while aiming to fill his verse with the fire of Swinburne, the subtlety of Rossetti and the great, clear day-flame of Gautier. A well-nigh impossible ideal; yet he cherished it for twice ten years, and at forty had ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... or skirmishing, but at first sight they both, like tried veterans, in good earnest addressed themselves to war. On one side, there was a manifestation of sound sense and cogent argument; on the other, a familiarity with all those arguments, combined with great subtlety in evading them; and this sustained by new and ingenious sophisms. My medical friend, for some time stood his ground manfully, till, at length, he began to quail, apparently from the verbal torrent with which he was so unexpectedly assailed. Encountered thus by so fearful ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... was a conspirator against him he could not believe. No! She was merely an instrument of Eve's subtlety. And his suspicion had not gone beyond the truth. Eve entertained the hope that Patty might take her place. Perchance the silly, good-natured girl would feel no objection; though it was not very likely that she foresaw or schemed for ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... was now omitted; it was left to every man's judgment to avail himself of it or not. At times they again sought out what had been disused in later ages: they recurred to Anglo-Saxon usages. The Common Prayer-book is a genuine monument of the religious feeling of this age, of its learning and subtlety, its forbearance and decision. In the Parliament of 1549 it was received with admiration: men even said it was drawn up under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The order went forth for its adoption in all churches of the land, no other liturgy was to be used; it has nourished ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... instrument of human freedom into one which might serve to perpetuate that system of passive obedience which had so long enabled modern Rome to dictate her laws to the universe. It was thought possible in the subtlety of Italian astuzia and Spanish monachism, to place a sentinel on the very thoughts as well as on the persons of authors; and in extreme cases, that books might be condemned to the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Mannering answered. "But I will do this. I will answer your question. There is another reason which makes my reappearance in public life impossible. Not even your subtlety, Borrowdean, could remove it. I do not even wish it removed. I mean to live my own life, and not to be pitchforked back into politics to suit the convenience of a few adventurous office-seekers, and the Duchess ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the immediate message is of the simplest. The Kaiser counts the head of British merchantmen sunk. Von Tirpitz counts the cost. But note the subtlety of the personation and environment. The Kaiser has those terrible haunted eyes that have marked the seer's presentment of him from quite an early stage of the war. There can be no ultimate escape from the dreadful ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... than of twenty. The artist, that is to say, dominates his subject, the tall overgrown youth of twenty-two, as grey as a badger. It is very different in "The Bible in Spain," where artist and subject are equally matched, and both mature. In "Lavengro" there is a roundabout method, a painful poring subtlety and minuteness, a marvellous combination of Sterne and Defoe, resulting in something very little like any book written by either man: in "The Bible in Spain" a straightforward, confident, unqualified revelation ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... themselves into with their own publics, to practise a little collusion in drafting the Treaty,—a supposition which in slightly different circumstances might have had a good deal of foundation. As matters actually were, this subtlety did not benefit them, and they would have done much better with a straightforward and candid estimate of what they believed to be the amount of their liabilities on the one hand, and their capacity to pay ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... purpose to follow the obscure labyrinth of legal procedure of that period, and to recite all the marches and countermarches which legal subtlety suggested to the litigants. At the end of three years, on the 9th of April 1661, the countess obtained a judgment by which the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of Judge Marshall. He has as much intrepidity of intellect as Mr. Pinkney, and great boldness; but no insolence, no exultation of manner. He wants only ambition to make him rival, nay, perhaps even to surpass the accomplished champion of the federal bar. His fault is subtlety, and a provoking minuteness of detail in his argument. He sometimes shows legal and rhetorical artifice where there is not the least occasion for either. These defects, however, have been acquired in the long habit of addressing subordinate tribunals, where his genius riots in its strength, ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... hope, you will marry. You will then have an opportunity of making an irremediable mistake, against the possibility of which no advice of mine or subtlety of yours can guard you. I think you will not easily find a man able to satisfy in you that desire to be relieved of the responsibility of thinking out and ordering our course of life that makes us each long for a guide whom we can thoroughly trust. If you fail, remember ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... the jointed bones of the limbs and extremities. The principle may be followed out in the structure of the muscles in their radiating fibres, which the delicate contours and flowing lines of the surface of the body only combine in a greater degree of subtlety ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... note, and I can assure you that I believe the promoters of the Affirmation Bill to be already on the side you wish me to take, and its opponents to be engaged in doing (unwittingly) serious injury to religious belief." It is strange to see how much intellectual subtlety combined with interested partisanship can be self-deceived, even in a man who believes himself and is thought by others ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and weep, but all in vain. All the neighbours hastened to her, and to them she related her misfortune, which served more to raise laughter and jeers at her expense than to excite pity; though the subtlety of the two she-thieves was universally praised. These latter, as soon as they had got out of the door, knew well how to conceal themselves, for having once reached the mountain it was not possible to find them. So much for their divination, their foreseeing ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... of a Divine Redeemer, of a Future World, and the glorious light or darkness which these and other Christian doctrines cast upon the Mystery of Man. If, however, Warburton, with all his scholastic subtlety, failed to make Pope a Christian, he made him a warm friend; Allen, Pope's acquaintance, a rich father-in-law; and himself, by and by, the Bishop of Gloucester. Sophistry has seldom, although sometimes, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... Germany politically impossible. The jealousies of Austria and Prussia were equally fatal to such a project. The houses of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern were competitors for the prize of German empire; and this, rather than the welfare or union of Germany, engaged their subtlety and energy. An Austrian archduke became vicar of the German unity, and, unless so far as there appeared any probability of his securing the supreme authority for the royal family of Austria, his object was to humour the German parliament ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... powerful virtue that it ought to have reformed everybody in the neighborhood. Three ladies being in love with the three fast men, and resolved to win them back to regular hours and the paths of sobriety by every device of the female heart, dress themselves in men's clothes,—such is the subtlety of the female heart in the bosoms of modern young ladies of fashion,—and follow their lovers about from one haunt of dissipation to another and become themselves exemplarily vicious,—drunkards, gamblers, and the like. The first lady, who was a star in her lowly orbit, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... success was locally possible, and, if locally attained, might have even compassed an ultimate victory. If to this idea be linked that which is closely akin to it—of attaining results, not by superior dexterity in the use of means, but by subtlety and ambush—and we have the explanation both of the numerous artful traps into which British detachments were led, like game into the snare of the hunter, and yet also of the sure failure to achieve success in war, for the craft of the hunter is not ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan |
