"Tenuity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... name is the good of all this ceaseless talk? To what purpose are you wearied, exhausted, dragged out and out to the very extreme of tenuity? A sprightly badinage,—a running fire of nonsense for half an hour,—a tramp over unfamiliar ground with a familiar guide,—a discussion of something with somebody who knows all about it, or who, not knowing, wants to learn from ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... with Narcissus,—he saw a very thin, very pale, and strangely haggard-looking woman of perhaps thirty-two talking to Esme Darlington. At first sight she did not seem beautiful to Dion. He was accustomed to the radiant physical bloom of his Rosamund. This woman, with her tenuity, her pallor, her haunted cheeks and temples, her large, distressed and observant eyes—dark hazel in color under brown eyebrows drawn with a precise straightness till they neared the bridge of the nose and there turning abruptly downwards, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... "vacuum" tubes, he has found that the discharge is also invariably disruptive. This is an important point, as many physicists speak and write of the phenomenon as one of conduction. Air, in every degree of tenuity, refuses to act as a conductor of electricity. These experiments show that the resistance of gaseous media diminishes with the pressure only up to a certain point, beyond which it rapidly increases. Thus, in the case of hydrogen, it diminishes ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... left I gave an entertainment to my friends at Catherinhoff, winding up with a fine display of fireworks, a present from my friend Melissino. My supper for thirty was exquisite, and my ball a brilliant one. In spite of the tenuity of my purse I felt obliged to give my friends this mark of my gratitude for the kindness they had ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... with it, and says that it is superior to the paper of the first edition of St. Matthew by at least ten roubles per ream; and that it is calculated to endure for 200 years. It certainly does possess uncommon strength and consistency, notwithstanding its tenuity, and the difficulty of tearing it is remarkable. By my direction it received a slight tinge of yellow, as no books are printed in China upon paper entirely colourless. I must be permitted to say that the manner in which ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... of these bodies had been well established. They had been observed to pass among the satellites of Jupiter without bringing about any sensible alteration either in the masses or in the orbits of these secondary planets. We had long regarded the wanderers as vapory creations of inconceivable tenuity, and as altogether incapable of doing injury to our substantial globe, even in the event of contact. But contact was not in any degree dreaded; for the elements of all the comets were accurately known. That among them we should look for the agency of the threatened fiery destruction ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... appear to exert himself to quite the pitch needful for victory. The duel already had been long contested and the day was drawing to a close. Presently the sudden transition from daylight to darkness which, owing to the tenuity of the air upon Barsoom, occurs almost without the warning twilight of Earth, would occur. Would the fight never end? Would the game be called a draw after all? What ailed the ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... it was recognized that there were two main kinds of wit. Both fancy and judgment, said Hobbes (Human Nature, X, sect. 4), are usually understood in the term wit; and wit seems to be "a tenuity and agility of spirits," opposed to the sluggishness of spirits assumed to be characteristic of dull people. Sometimes wit was used in this sense to translate the words ingenium or l'esprit. But Hobbes's disciple ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... The grey-trunked trees sprang up straight to a great height and then interwove their pale-grey branches in a long tunnel through which the autumn light fell faintly. I know most trees by name, but I haven't to this day been able to decide what those trees were. They had the tall curve of elms, the tenuity of poplars, the ashen colour of olives under a rainy sky; and they stretched ahead of me for half a mile or more without a break in their arch. If ever I saw an avenue that unmistakably led to something, it was ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... hand, the self-same chemical act which rendered a body competent to intercept the waves of aether, rendering it competent, in the same degree, to generate them. Perfumes were next subjected to examination, and, notwithstanding their extraordinary tenuity, they were found vastly superior, in point of absorptive power, to the body of the air in which they were diffused. We were led thus slowly up to the examination of the most widely diffused and most important of all vapours—the aqueous vapour of our atmosphere, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... appears to be founded upon the extreme tenuity of the particles of fine dust, so minutely divided as to seem ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... la charmante Lucile more distinguish'd than all, He so gayly goes off with the belle of the ball." "Is it true," asked a lady aggressively fat, Who, fierce as a female Leviathan, sat By another that look'd like a needle, all steel And tenuity—"Luvois will marry Lucile?" The needle seem'd jerk'd by a virulent twitch, As though it were bent upon driving a stitch Through somebody's character. "Madam," replied, Interposing, a young man who sat by their side, And was languidly ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... narrow off, we took some of the deposit from the bottom by means of a long straight piece of tubing, in order to bring it under microscopical examination. We found it to consist of a host of long filaments of extreme tenuity, their diameter being about 1/1000th of a millimetre (0.000039 in.); their length varied, in some cases being as much as 1/20th of a millimetre (0.0019 in.). A crowd of these long vibrios were to be seen ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... planets with their secondaries, were all moulded into one mass, and then dilated so as to fill the vast sphere of which the orbit of Uranus forms a circumference, the substance would evidently be in a state of extreme tenuity and diffusion. Immense as the mass of the sun now is, it is but a mere nut at the centre of the grand globe which we are now considering. Expanded to such vast dimensions, we cannot conceive of it as a solid spheroid turning ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... bed, like a man who clings to life, and wishes to economize, as much as possible, that slender tissue of existence, of which the shocks and frictions of this world so quickly wear out the tenuity. D'Artagnan appeared at the door of this chamber, and was saluted by the superintendent with ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... having made a submissive leg [made a submissive bow] and a little admired [gazed at] the number, and understanding countenances of his auditors: let the subject be what it will, he falls presently into a most lamentable complaint of his insufficiency and tenuity [slenderness] that he, poor thing! "hath no acquaintance with above a Muse and a half!" and "that he never drank above six quarts of Helicon!" and you "have put him here upon such a task" (perhaps the business is ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... had his day as well as his way. The so-called Gothic architecture had expressed its uttermost of aspiration and tenuity; and painting had fulfilled its utmost accommodation to the ever more slender wall-spaces and forms which this architecture necessitated. And once again, in the fifteenth century, the time was ripe for a new transition. Art was now ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... progeny to have existed in miniature in the animal originally created; and that these infinitely minute forms are only evolved or distended, as the embryon increases in the womb. This idea, besides its being unsupported by any analogy we are acquainted with, ascribes a greater tenuity to organized matter than we can readily admit; as these included embryons are supposed each of them to consist of the various and complicate parts of animal bodies, they must possess a much greater degree of ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... save where it lay in immediate contact with the snow, charred and shrivelled and sent up a quivering thread of smoke. There was no doubt left to me; the atmosphere of the moon was either pure oxygen or air, and capable therefore—unless its tenuity was excessive—of supporting our alien life. ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... blood. How this happens, our knowledge of the theory of sanguification does not enable us to determine. Perhaps, as the imperfect respiration must cause a deficiency of air, and consequently of oxygen, in the lungs; and as the absorption of oxygen is a cause of solidity in many bodies, this tenuity of the blood may proceed from a deficient absorption of oxygen. However this may be, it is certain that the blood is very much attenuated, though with considerable variations in degree, as it is sometimes found thin on opening a vein, and at a subsequent period is thicker; varying perhaps ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren |
