"Vagueness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the book lay there between her knees, all its technical vagueness menacing her with unknown terrors; and she felt that she could endure ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... Jack is an independent boy, and has no taste for being dominated. So that I fear that dear Maud's most touching efforts hardly fell on very responsive soil. She felt, I think, the failure of her efforts; and kind as Cousin Anne is, there is, I think, a certain vagueness of outline about her mind. I would not call her a fatalist, but she has little conception of the possibility of moulding character;—it's a rich mind, but perhaps an indecisive mind? Maud needed a vocation—she needed ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ghostly character—all my fears had been of malicious natives and tigers; they now, however, changed, and I was confronted with a dread of what I could not understand and could not analyse—of something that suggested an appearance, alarming on account of its very vagueness. ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... the day the west wind held its breath. The flames crawled, ate their way instead of leaping hungrily. The smoke rose in dun clouds above the burning area and settled in gray vagueness all through the woods, drifting in wisps, in streamers, in fantastic curlings, pungent, acrid, choking the men. The heat of the fire and the heat of the summer sun in a windless sky made the valley floor a sweat-bath in which the loggers worked stripped to undershirts and overalls, ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... at the time thought highly of this performance. I remember one fellow saying that Number 2 seemed to have caught the spirit of Mr Browning without his vagueness, which ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... The grace is gone out of it; modern painters have not the lightness of touch necessary; they are used to masses of colour, and they use the palette knife as a mason the trowel. The art, too, like the literature of our time, is all detail; the grand suggestive vagueness of the Greek drama and of the Umbrian frescoes are lost to us under a crowd of elaborated trivialities; perhaps it is because art has ceased to be spiritual or tragic, and is merely domestic or melodramatic; the Greeks knew neither domesticity nor melodrama, and the early Italian ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... question, it is proposed that he shall study arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and dialectic. Thus in each case mathematics is the first advance in knowledge, and dialectic the nearest to perfection. Most of Plato's examples are drawn from mathematics. This science replaces the variety and vagueness of the forms of experience with clear, unitary, definite, and eternal natures, such as the number and the geometrical figure. Thus certain individual things are approximately triangular, but subject to alteration, and indefinitely many. On the other hand the triangle as ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... peculiar characteristic of French democracy, that there is always mixed up with it the principle, more or less distinctly avowed, of the community of goods. Perhaps the vagueness we complain of in M. Louis Blanc, is dictated by mere prudence; perhaps there is no vagueness to the eye of a propagandist. One sentiment of French democracy he certainly expresses with sufficient hardihood. It is not often we meet with the principle of intervention between state and state, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... art, and leads to vagueness of meaning, to the perpetuation of personal idiosyncrasies; and while a larger consciousness may be induced from the mind side, positive and overwhelming inspiration will be needed to overcome habitual limitations. A musician must love music itself, as well as its meanings, and a voice ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... not formulate it in words, or even enumerate its phases by any system of analysis, but there were moments when her mind surged with feelings which she knew that she had never felt before, and she caught herself framing visions whose very vagueness of outline swelled before her like the shadows of a portent. At times, too, through these mists there flashed illuminations which startled her, and made her innocent heart shrink as if they were ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... could discover, the Author is compelled to report as his unbiassed and deliberate judgment, that the character with which Henry of Monmouth's name has been stamped for profligacy and dissipation, is founded, not on the evidence of facts, but on the vagueness of tradition. Still such is the tradition, and it must stand for its due value. And if we allow tradition to tell us of his faults, we must in common fairness receive from the same tradition the fullness of his reformation; if we give credence to one who reports both his guilt and his penitence, ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... nourished on anatomical study is of course permeated with the suggestion of the vagueness and instability of biological species. A biological species is quite obviously a great number of unique individuals which is separable from other biological species only by the fact that an enormous number of other linking individuals are inaccessible in ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... blue eyes looked out of his pink face through his glasses at Mr. Direck, anxious for any light he could offer upon the atmospheric vagueness of this England. ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... scrutiny and care the vagueness and uncertainty of the symptoms will contribute to perplex and discredit the diagnosis and embarrass the surgeon, and sometimes the expedient is tried of aggravating the symptoms by way of intensifying their significance, and ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... character as accountable beings. When it is inferred from the fact that the slave is called the property of his master, that he is thereby degraded from his rank as a human being, the argument rests on the vagueness of the term property. Property is the right of possession and use, and must of necessity vary according to the nature of the objects to which it attaches. A man has property in his wife, in his children, in his ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness. Carol had hidden in none of these refuges from reality, but she, who was tender and merry, had been made timorous by Gopher Prairie. Even her flight had been but the temporary courage of panic. The thing she gained in Washington was not information about office-systems and ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... make up for vagueness and cloudiness here—no technical skill, no apt dialogue nor concentration, any more than "fine speeches," as Mr Pinero calls them. Now the dramatic demand and the ethical demand here meet and take each other's hands, and will not be separated. This is why Mr Stevenson ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... had the vagueness born of concentration. I could see that this was no time to press for information. Besides, in the field of mechanics, as Jonathan has occasionally pointed out to me, I am rather like a traveler who has learned ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... heard in the twilight vagueness of their morning slumbers the same sonorous clarionet, and ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... a way, their profound confidence in each other, introduced at the same time a certain element of vagueness into their intimacy. No system of conjugal relations is perfect. Mr Verloc presumed that his wife had understood him, but he would have been glad to hear her say what she thought at the moment. It ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... buzzing sound as of many low voices, and, one portion after another, the assembly began to be shiftingly illuminated, as by a ray that went travelling from spot to spot. Group after group would shine out for a space, then sink back into the general vagueness, while another part of the vast company ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... the fatal weakness of the Congress as an organ of government, and the Articles merely embodied the vagueness of the American people in regard to any real regime. The Congress has been much derided for its shortcomings and its blunders, although in truth not so much the Congress, as those who made it, was to blame. They had refused, in their timidity, to give it power to exercise control. ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... eye can cover them at a glance, and the process of reading be as rapid as that of thought The mind, instead of wearying of slow perusal, would have to spur its lightning to keep pace with the eye. Many books are born of mere vagueness and cloudiness of thought. All such, when thus compressed into their reality, would go out in eternal night. There is something overpowering in the conception of the high pressure to which life in all its departments may ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... had liked "The T Room" well enough—some of them had complimented Mrs. Appleby on the crispness of her doughnuts, the generousness of her chicken sandwiches. Those who had quarreled about the thickness of the bread or the vagueness of flavor in the tea Father had considered insulting, and he had been perky as a fighting-sparrow in answering them. A good many must have been pleased, for on their trip back from Provincetown they returned, exclaimed that they remembered ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... injustice and delight on account of the source from which I conceived it to spring. For a long time they would allow admission to no other thoughts. Surprise is an emotion that enfeebles, not invigorates. All my meditations were accompanied with wonder. I rambled with vagueness, or clung to one image with an obstinacy which sufficiently testified the maddening ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... fleeting hours. Ignorant of the direction in which they had been traveling, she realized that the driver had been unsparing and the distance covered not inconsiderable. The mystery of the assault, the obscurity of the purpose and the vagueness of their destination were unknown quantities which, added to the declining of the day and the brewing terrors of the night, were well calculated to terrify and ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... Western race, if any, he has not yet explained. Professor Mueller and his contemporaries used to talk about the Indo-Germanic race, and Professor Sergi came forward with a more plausible Mediterranean race, and all sorts of people talk with the utmost possible vagueness about the Celtic race, that rubbish-heap of ethnological science or pretence. Whatever name he may give to this race, or however ethnologically he may justify his conception of it, Mr. Belloc believes that it exists and that Rome first discovered ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... if to herself, "But I do think God might have made me remember before!" which remark Eleanor judged it best to ignore. Then she kissed Maggie, and the child clung to her affectionately. But still Eleanor could not feel satisfied; there was a dreamy vagueness about the little girl, a want, it seemed to Eleanor, of realising her fault to the full, which puzzled and perplexed her. Still Maggie was restored to favour, and in a day or two seemed much the same as usual, even flying into a passion ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... practice to strengthen and augment the remaining senses. For this reason the blind often hear with greater ease and distinctness than other people. The sense of smell becomes almost a new faculty to penetrate the tangle and vagueness of things. Thus, according to an immutable law, the senses assist and ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... woman had gazed vacantly about her with an air of indifference. She seemed scarcely to realize that through the yellow vagueness the eyes of a hundred persons were centered ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... further explanations. Bhik@su's interpretation fits in well with all that is known of the gu@nas, though it is quite possible that this view might not have been known before, and when the original Sa@mkhya doctrine was formulated there was a real vagueness as to the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... the Gospel shall have merged into the act of judgment. I do not mean to dwell, brethren, upon that thought; it seems to me far too awful a one to be handled by my hands, at any rate. Let us leave it in the vagueness and dreadfulness of the words of Him who never spoke exaggerated words, and who, when He said, 'It shall grind him to powder,' meant (as it seems to me) nothing less than a destruction which, contrasted with the former remediable wounding and breaking, was a destruction utter, and hopeless, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... at once. Striding across the square on the following morning, he had bearded Barrett on his own doorstep. Coming back again a few minutes later, he had been strongly of opinion that he had only made matters worse. The man had been vagueness itself. He had not been to be either challenged or browbeaten into anything more definite than a muttered farrago in which the words "Certain things ... Mrs. Barrett ... respectable house ... if the cap fits ... proceedings that shall be nameless," had ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... full consciousness of the ordeal. It meant to lean over the desks of bank presidents, to intrude upon the meetings of railway directors, to penetrate to the retiring-rooms of judges, to approach more than one of the magnates whom, with an imposing vagueness, we call "capitalists." But Brower, carrying the thought of Jane with him into all these presences, accomplished his task with modesty, tact, and discretion, and finally, from the few simple types of greatness that the town possesses, evolved a list which the pride of the ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... demerits ... and if he be not himself the age transfigured ... and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of to-day, and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour and this one of the sixty beautiful ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... 1864, reports came to Virginia of mines on the Yellowstone. The reports were founded on some strange tales of old trappers, and were clothed with a vagueness and mystery as uncertain as dreams. Yet on such unsubstantial bases every miner built a pet theory, and a large "stampede" took place in consequence. I started with a party for the new mines, early in October. A ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... express strong feelings in different tones— anger and impatience by low,—fear and pain by high notes. (38. Rengger, 'Saugethiere von Paraguay,' s. 49.) The sensations and ideas thus excited in us by music, or expressed by the cadences of oratory, appear from their vagueness, yet depth, like mental reversions to the emotions and thoughts of ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... metaphysics who wish to exalt their own pursuit at the expense of the 'special' sciences, and students of natural science who are accustomed to pride themselves on the contrast between the finality and definiteness of their own results and the vagueness and dubiousness of the conclusion of the metaphysicians. But I must avow my own conviction that the only distinction we can make is one of convenience, and it may help to make my peace with both parties if I explain where I ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... as the cloud that floats in radiant space," murmured the poet. "The very vagueness of form permits the eye to clothe it in the loveliest tints ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... old, grounds his opinion mainly on a false inference from John viii. 57. At the same time he adduces the testimony of the Gospel and 'all the elders,' not for this particular view of our Lord's age, but for the more general statement that He was past middle life; and this vagueness of language suggests that, though their testimony was distinctly on his side as against the Valentinians, it did not go beyond this. It is very far from improbable indeed, that he borrowed this very interpretation of ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... nose. In short, he ascribed the highest form of existence to ideals and abstractions. This was a new and sophisticated republication of savage animism. It invited lesser minds than his to indulge in all sorts of noble vagueness and impertinent jargon which continue to curse our popular discussions of human affairs. He consecrated one of the chief foibles of the human mind and elevated it ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... pleasant, exceedingly alert brown eyes. As soon as she met those eyes Claire felt assured that the kindness of which she had heard was a real thing, and that this woman could be counted upon as a friend. There was, it is true, a slight vagueness in the manner in which she made her greeting, but a murmur of "Mrs ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... prefers to see few shades employed, and those chosen with judgment and placed with deliberate intention. If they mean something, there is no harm in letting it be seen where they meet: broad masses give breadth: vagueness generally means ignorance. That is, perhaps, why one dislikes it, and why ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... own visit to Detroit illustrated this vagueness of the average Englishman. I was anxious to see Mr. James A. Herne's famous play, Shore Acres, and learned from Mr. Herne that it would be played by a travelling company at Buffalo on a certain date. I carefully noted the place and ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... into the "Morte d'Arthur" is a curious illustration of the vagueness of the historical groundwork of the romances of chivalry. The memory of Roman power was still too great to permit a warrior to achieve greatness without having matched his strength against that of Rome, and thus we have ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... to become the medium of thought and emotion as well as to convey merely allegorical meaning he gradually discovered; and doubtless he especially valued its function to afford by its crude definiteness a balance to the tenuous and impalpable, the vagueness, refinement, and mystery, to which it is the complement, in his art; he gains reality by its presence for what else, as a whole, might seem too insubstantial, too much a part of that shadow world in which ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... tingled through every nerve of his frame, all conspired with the delicious emotion which he now experienced at her presence and her contact to intoxicate and inflame him. Oh, those burning moments in love, when romance has just mellowed into passion, and without losing anything of its luxurious vagueness mingles the enthusiasm of its dreams with the ardent desires of reality and earth! That is the exact time when love has reached its highest point,—when all feelings, all thoughts, the whole soul, and the whole mind, are seized and engrossed,—when ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and one other things concerning Camilla, Tudor, and Ravengar, and the permutations and combinations of these three, which offered apparently insoluble problems to his brain. Nevertheless, there was one assurance which seemed to him to emerge clearly from the note, and to atone for its vagueness—a vagueness, however, perfectly excusable, he reflected, having regard to the conditions in which it was written—namely, that Camilla intended to arrive, as usual, in Department 42 that morning. What significance could be attached to the phrase, 'When next I see you, if there is opportunity,' ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... factual record is set is complex, implicating a number of constitutional doctrines, including the constitutional limitations on Congress's spending clause power, the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, and subsidiary to these issues, the First Amendment doctrines of prior restraint, vagueness, and overbreadth. There are a number of potential entry points into the analysis, but the most logical is the spending clause jurisprudence in which the seminal case is South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987). ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... in order to dream a man must be asleep, I was pleased at the idea and nodded happily, smiling and blinking in self-congratulation. But that pleasant minute of illusion was my last; for the voice cried in tones too full of animation, too void of dreamy vagueness, too real and actual to let me longer set them down as ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... to state this in general terms, we must also apply it to particular instances, because in treatises on moral conduct general statements have an air of vagueness, but those which go into detail one of greater reality: for the actions after all must be in detail, and the general statements, to be worth ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... usual vagueness that he supposed in the hut where the late Teacher had died after the mission-house was burnt down. So they trekked on a little way, passing beneath the shelf of rock that has been mentioned as projecting from that side of the koppie ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... Paradise Lost than the way in which it has survived hostile criticism. It has been criticised for the lengthy conversations and "arguments" of its characters; for its materialization of the Divine Being; because of its subject; because of Milton's vagueness of description of things awesome and terrible, in comparison with Dante's minute descriptions. But the earnest spirit in which it was conceived and written; the subject, giving it a "higher argument" than any ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... danse mauresque, the same adjective is used with something of the vagueness to be noticed in connection with India and Turkey (p. 52). Shakespeare ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... be understood by intelligences of all grades would soon come to grief, for religious teachers, like philosophers and metaphysicians, seem to be esteemed and admired largely in proportion to the vagueness of their doctrines. The works of Madame Blavatsky are worthy of being classed among the most obscure, and for that very reason have ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... history, including biography, politics and geography, is the great defect of Indian literature. Not only are there few historical treatises[107] but even historical allusions are rare and this curious vagueness is not peculiar to any age or district. It is as noticeable among the Dravidians of the south as among the speakers of Aryan languages in the north. It prevails from Vedic times until the Mohammedan conquest, which produced chronicles though ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... jewelled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else: it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words. Charles Lamb, with his infinite ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... evening dress; though, as a concession to Continental custom, she had a wide black scarf over her bare shoulders. She sat, leaning forward, her elbows on the table, and once, when she glanced round and found Althea's eyes fixed on her, she looked back for a moment, but with something of the same vagueness and unseeingness with which she looked out of ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... so that our Florence party is breaking up, you see. He has printed a few copies of his poems, and is likely to publish them if he meets with encouragement in England, I suppose. They are full of imagery, encompassed with poetical atmosphere, and very melodious. On the other hand, there is vagueness and too much personification. It's the smell of a rose rather than a rose—very sweet, notwithstanding. His poems are far superior to Charles Tennyson's, bear in mind. As for the poet, we quite love him, Robert and I do. What Swedenborg calls 'selfhood,' the proprium, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... which can be prompted by nature, without going to the length of "vision," still less of ecstasy. But the stress now lies on the words—"a grade between the symbolical type and the mystic type." Kingsley evidently realised the insufficiency of symbolism to meet his demands, while he shrank from the vagueness of what was called Mysticism. Objects for him had a meaning in their own right, and he was casting about for a fitting term to express this fact. He also distinctly states that to him, "Everything seems to be full of God's reflex." Once grant that Nature Mysticism, as denned and ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... to have been carefully concealed," I said. "I recollect having detected in her a strange vagueness of manner, but it never occurred to me that she was mentally weak. In the days immediately preceding the tragedy I certainly saw but little of her. She was ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... of course, expect to be confronted with many difficulties. But if these are to be overcome, they, like others, must be faced, and their investigation patiently pursued, without the postulation of special forces whose convenient property it is to meet all emergencies in virtue of their vagueness. If, at least, we are ever to understand the intricate mechanism of the animal machine, it will be granted that we must cease to evade the problems it presents by the use of mere ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... hers, seeming to say: "I'm vague. But I was vague when I told you I'd see what could be done about your mother—and look at what I did, and how quickly and easily I did it! When I'm vague, it means a lot." And she entirely understood that his vagueness ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... earth. His thickset frame had no longer the sturdy vigour which belonged to it when he first appeared with the rope round him in the Duomo; and under the transient tremor caused by the exertion of walking up the hill, his eyes seemed to have a more helpless vagueness. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... the look of a delicate boy. There were wonderful possibilities in the girl, Corinna mused, looking her over. She had not a single beautiful feature, except her remarkable eyes; and yet the softness and vagueness of her face lent a poetic and impressionistic charm to her appearance. "In that dress she looks as if she had stepped out of the Middle Ages, and might step back again at any minute," thought Corinna. "I wonder if I can be mistaken ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... was not what the times required and what Erasmus could give. It is quite clear why Erasmus could only write in Latin. Moreover, in the vernacular everything would have appeared too direct, too personal, too real, for his taste. He could not do without that thin veil of vagueness, of remoteness, in which everything is wrapped when expressed in Latin. His fastidious mind would have shrunk from the pithy coarseness of a Rabelais, or the rustic violence of ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... shrewd grey eyes are crackling with curiosity and, you want to know what it's all about, whether to scold me or mother me, and will I please omit the entrees and get to the roast mutton. But you dear, dear old aunt, you, there is more vagueness than detail, and I know I'll strain your patience before I've done. But, to relieve your mind, nothing at all has really happened. After all, it's mostly a troublesome state of mind, that I shall doubtless find gone when ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... the figures in a melodic sentence. While they are unquestionably analogous to the words in speech, they are by no means as concrete, nor are they separated as distinctly, as the words upon a written or printed sheet. This is in keeping with the intangible quality of music, and the peculiar vagueness of its medium of expression; the quality which veils its intrinsic purport from the mass of music admirers, and lends it such exquisite and inexplicable charm to all ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... which may be introduced. Of course, much depends upon the selection of a spot with capabilities. What is said in respect to the 'detecting and bringing into practice those nice relations of size, proportion and color,' is a mere vagueness of speech, which may mean much, or little, or nothing, and which guides in no degree. That the true 'result of the natural style of gardening is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities, than in the creation of any ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... large tracts of truth which lie between the extreme vagueness of the first estimate and the pedantic accuracy of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... obtrusiveness of Detail and a preference for the Familiar, under the misleading notion of adherence to Nature. If the words Nature and Natural could be entirely banished from language about Art there would be some chance of coming to a rational philosophy of the subject; at present the excessive vagueness and shiftiness of these terms cover any amount of sophism. The pots and pans of Teniers and Van Mieris are natural; the passions and humours of Shakspeare and Moliere are natural; the angels of Fra Angelico and Luini are natural; the Sleeping Fawn and Fates of Phidias are natural; ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... at that moment before the jesuit house in Gardiner Street and wondered vaguely which window would be his if he ever joined the order. Then he wondered at the vagueness of his wonder, at the remoteness of his own soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary, at the frail hold which so many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... find a horse for you to ride. We'll sleep at the Double Diamond, and start from there in the morning. And if I catch you letting a word outa you about this deal, I'll just about have to arrest you for—" He did not quite know what, but the very vagueness of the threat had ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... the first applied with a good deal of vagueness. It was probably originally given to the region opposite Cyprus, from Gabala in the north—now Jebili—to Antaradus (Tortosa) and Marathus (Amrith) towards the south, where the palm-tree was first seen ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... probable that, now the first excitement of setting out was over, and the two women-folk left to themselves in the solitude of a compartment, Natalie might have begun to reflect with some tremor of the heart on the very vagueness of the task she had undertaken. But she was not permitted to do so. The necessity of driving away her mother's forebodings prevented her indulging in any of her own. She was forced to be careless, ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... fulfilment, and the price of flour and the cheaper barley are stated. Man's promises are vague; God's are specific. Mark, too, the entire silence of the promise as to the mode of its fulfilment. Probably Elisha knew as little as any one, how it was going to be accomplished. The particularity and vagueness combined are remarkable. A hint as to how the thing was to be done would have made the belief in the fact so much easier. Yes, and just because it would have smoothed the road for worthless belief, it was not given, but the apparently impossible ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the result of a peculiar form of egotism, which leads the thoughts to fasten upon one's own evils so entirely that the mind ceases to recognize, or even to remember, the long-suffering patience and mercy of the Heavenly Father. A more common, but less painful form of this fear is the result of vagueness in one's ideas of the Divine character and attributes. The clear and rational views which Swedenborg has given of the Divine Providence is undoubtedly the reason why religious melancholy is almost never found among the members of the New Church. The peace in believing, which ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... brightness (gleam), warmth (Sk.gharma, heat), joy (chairein), love (charis), of the colors of green (Sk. hari), yellow (gilvus, flavus), and red (Sk.harit, fulvus), and of the conception of growing (ger-men). In the Semitic languages this vagueness of meaning in the radical elements forms one of the principal difficulties of the student, for according as a root is used in its different conjugations, it may convey the most startling variety of conception. It is also ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically, after exploring all that makes such questions puzzling, and after realizing all the vagueness and confusion ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... said, his thought gaining precision in opposition to her vagueness, "his Helen is pure Vere de Vere. You might read ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... are at all times and everywhere a very bad sign. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they arise from vagueness of thought, which, in its turn, is almost always fundamentally discordant, inconsistent, and therefore wrong. When a right thought springs up in the mind it strives after clearness of expression, and it soon attains it, for clear thought easily ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... applied to objects soaring upwards, or floating aloft, or at an aerial altitude, and because the word does sometimes correspond to our idea of the sublime (in which the notion of height is united with the notion of moral grandeur), and because, in the excessive vagueness and lawless latitudinarianism of our common Greek Lexicons, the word [Greek: hypsos] is translated, inter alia, by [Greek: to] sublime, sublimitas, &c. Hence it has happened that the title of the little essay ascribed to Longinus, [Greek: ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... place now taken by the stereopticon; and though its crude pictures lacked the photographic truth of lantern slides, they were by no means devoid of interest. In fact, their gorgeousness of color, and the vagueness of detail that allowed each to represent several scenes, according to the pleasure of the lecturer, rendered them quite as popular, if not so ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... moral indolence in Hawthorne's nature. Hollingsworth, in "The Blithedale Romance," is his picture of the one-ideaed reformer, sacrificing all to his hobby. Hollingsworth's hobby is prison reform, and characteristically Hawthorne gives us no details of his plan. It is vagueness itself, and its advocate is little better than a type. Holgrave again, in "The House of the Seven Gables," is the scornful young radical; and both he and Hollingsworth are guilty of the mistake of supposing that they can do anything directly to improve the condition of things. God will ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... defined, the food, clothing, and other articles set aside for the consumption of the labourer, together with the materials and instruments of production. This definition appears to us peculiarly liable to misapprehension; and much vagueness and some narrow views have, we conceive, occasionally resulted from its being interpreted with too mechanical an adherence to the literal meaning ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... summits, Olivet, and Ebal, and Gerizim, and Gilboa, and Tabor, rolling away to the northward, growing ever fairer with the promise of fertile valleys between them and rich plains beyond them, and fading at last into the azure vagueness of the highlands round ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... impression (I cannot say the strongest, for strong impressions are incompatible with such work as this) left by the masterpiece of Wolfram von Eschenbach, is that of the most astonishing vagueness, fluidity, haziness, vaporousness. In reading it one looks back to that rudely hewn and extremely obliterated Nibelungenlied, as to something quite astonishingly clear, detailed and strongly marked as to something distinctly artistic. Indeed by the side of "Parzifal" ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... said the duchess to her old friend, who complained of the vagueness of the promise. "They cannot oblige the king to do as they wish; they ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... And who more worthy of patronage than William Shakespear? Also she said that men of such enormous wealth as his owed something to their national tradition. "You have to pay your footing, Sir Isaac," she said with impressive vagueness. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... was an event of importance, and the circumstances are simple historic facts, it is strange that there should be any uncertainty regarding the details of its solemnisation. But there is a certain vagueness about the narratives. One version is so amusing that it deserves a slight consideration.[14] The chronicler relates how Charles VII. felt some uneasiness at the delay in the negotiations. Conscious of the sentiments ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... had been dreaming faded into vagueness. He couldn't have said what he had been dreaming about. He was neither asleep nor awake, but in the shadowland somewhere between. Something as yet undefined had brought him halfway toward awakening, but the influence was not powerful enough to ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... reed, so with raffia before constructing with it, pass a piece to each child and give the life history of the plant. Madagascar may be a name only to the small child, but the very vagueness of his knowledge concerning it may cause him to realize the distance of the island from us and appreciate that this simple material with which he is working has traveled thousands of miles to bring him a story ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... effort, how easy life might be! I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted a woman to save me. I forced myself to see her as I wished to see her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh precisions of the Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her fineness into relief and made a grace of ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the slave trade, while the United States, with memories of the vicious English practice of impressment before the War of 1812, distrusted the motives of Great Britain in asking for this right. Nearly every mile of the joint boundary in North America was in dispute, owing to the vagueness of treaty descriptions or to the errors of surveyors. Twelve thousand square miles and a costly American fort were involved; arbitration had failed; rival camps of lumberjacks daily imperiled peace; and both the Maine Legislature and the National Congress had voted money for defense. In a New ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... because of the comicality, the grotesque surprise, the possibility of quicker victory, which caught hold of the imagination of people who heard for the first time of those new engines of war, so beast-like in appearance and performance. The vagueness of our descriptions was due to the censorship, which forbade, wisely enough, any technical and exact definition, so that we had to compare them to giant toads, mammoths, and prehistoric animals of all kinds. Our accounts did, however, reproduce the psychological ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... also, to take this into account, we will not remain within the vagueness of the concept, but will take a particular example to argue upon, viz. that of an external perception. I open my window on a fine day, and I see before me a sunny plain, with, as far as the eye can reach, houses amongst the trees, and again more houses, the ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... beside Mrs. Chetwinde, who looked unusually alive, and whose vagueness had been swept away by something—anxiety for her friend, perhaps, or the excitement of following day after day an unusually emotional ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... was undergoing a tremendous experience, and she was being equal to it. While she stood looking after him, her mother came out through one of the long windows onto the veranda, with a catlike softness and vagueness. ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... brings up a new visualization, a V2, in the "dust of a small town." The second sentence is V1, until the close when it becomes V2 through the quickening of memories that have been emotional. The vagueness of a village hidden in the mist has appealed to our imagination in the assurance of a something unknown. The next sentence is V1, and so also is the next until in "the shrewd bite as of night air" we get an S2. The V2 of the ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... one save myself, but I know that I had rather have my present definite, positive belief based on this evidence, than to be floundering on doubts and uncertainties. There is no doubt that the profession believe that intermittents have a cause; but this belief has a vagueness which cannot be represented by drawings or photograph. Since I have photographed the Gemiasma, and studied their biology, I feel like holding on to your dicta until upset by something ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... pitched down the newspaper and walked across to his own house, with his hands in his pockets, and thought again of Dangerfield, and who the deuce he could be, or whether he had really ever, anywhere—in the body or in the spirit—encountered him, as he used to feel with a boding vagueness he had done. And then those accursed dreams: he was not relieved as he expected by disclosing them. The sense of an ominous meaning pointing at him in all their grotesque images ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... myself, however strange it may appear. I don't pretend to be able to analyze my own motives; I don't pretend even to guess how other women might have acted in my place. It is true of me, that my husband's terrible warning—all the more terrible in its mystery and its vagueness—produced no deterrent effect on my mind: it only stimulated my resolution to discover what he was hiding from me. He had not been gone two minutes before I rang the bell and ordered the carriage, to take me to Major Fitz-David's ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... Stanley pressed on his way, his general course being in a northwesterly direction, signs, rumors, and perhaps instincts, leading him to believe that Livingstone, if found alive, would be discovered somewhere in the region of Lake Tanganyika. It would be impossible to describe the vagueness and mysteriousness of the rumors which float to and fro in an untravelled and savage country, but as the intrepid adventurer pressed on he heard more and more credible reports of the lost white man. His first convincing intimation of his being near Livingstone was when a black met him, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... observation, subject to the limitation just mentioned, that we see in Dante and Shakespeare, in Chaucer and Tennyson. But the great poets do not as a rule accumulate detail. Balzac does, and from this very accumulation he manages to derive that singular gigantesque vagueness—differing from the poetic vague, but ranking next to it—which I have here ventured to note as his distinguishing quality. He bewilders us a very little by it, and he gives us the impression that he has slightly bewildered himself. But the compensations ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... England so well as she, or who has the peculiar genius so to profit by the knowledge. Already there have been scenes in 'The Minister's Wooing' that, in their lowness of tone and quiet truth, contrast as charmingly with the humid vagueness of the modern school of novel-writers as 'The Vicar of Wakefield' itself, and we are greatly mistaken if it do not prove to be the most characteristic of Mrs. Stowe's works, and therefore that on which her fame ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... sails that had been invisible began to show white against a rising cloud. This cloud had not the definition of sudden conquering storms, proper to the summer, and leaving a blessing behind their fury. The edge of it against the misty and brooding sky had all the vagueness of smoke, and as it rose up out of the sea its growth was so methodical and regular as to disconnect it wholly in one's mind from the little fainting breeze that still blew, from rain, or from any daily thing. It advanced with the fall of the evening till it held half the sky. There ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... on strictly British principles. He could have obtained little assistance from British statesmen had he been desirous of mastering and applying the principles of responsible government to the dependency. Their opinions and instructions were still distinguished by a perplexing vagueness. They would not believe that a governor of a dependency could occupy exactly the same relation with respect to his responsible advisers and to political parties as is occupied with such admirable results by the sovereign of England. It was considered ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... at the vagueness and fanciful incomprehensibleness of my description of the expression in a young girl's face. You forget what a miserable surface-matter this language is in which we try to reproduce our interior state of being. Articulation is a shallow trick. From the light Poh! which ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of vagueness. Such questions as, Should a practical man read poetry, Are lawyers a useful class in the community, Are the American people deteriorating, furnish excellent material for lively and witty talk, ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... realized the night before that he would be immediately dismissed and sent home in disgrace; but her dream, and the glimpse she had caught of her uncle and the observant stranger, who, as she saw, still maintained his position, suggested worse consequences, whose very vagueness made them ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... so much of vagueness in theory and practice as to the sovereignty, there was nothing criminal on the part of Maurice if he was ambitious of obtaining the sovereignty himself. He was not seeking to compass it by base artifice or by intrigue of any kind. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... most of the colours and pigments of this class have been assigned to other denominations—puce, murrey, morelle, chocolate, columbine, pavonazzo, &c., being variously ranked among reds, browns, and purples. This vagueness also accounts for pigments having been ranged under heads not suited to the names they bear, and explains why Brown Ochre has been classed among the yellows, Italian Pink among the same, Brown Pink among ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... and stood a moment looking out. Rose did not interrupt her. She knew that the house from which the light was shining sheltered a tragedy; she guessed with the vagueness of nineteen that it was a tragedy of passion and sin; but Catherine had not been communicative on the subject, and Rose had for some time past set up a dumb resistance to her sister's most characteristic ways of life ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... watched her and waylaid her; that she was suspicious of failures and of intermissions; that she wondered; that she peered and pried. Milly would, if she could, have stuck her fingers into what she called the machinery of the thing. Its vagueness baffled and even annoyed her, for her mind was limited; it loved and was at home with limits; it desired above all things precise ideas, names, phrases, ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... his labor to survey the sea of green from which he had wrested his garden. His eye traveled slowly, for he loved it, and had grown to regard it as his own. Leaning on his hoe he looked upward over its tufted density and suddenly his glance lost its complacent vagueness and became sharp and fixed. Through the close-packed vegetation a zigzag movement descended as if a fissure of earth disturbance was stirring along the roots. After a moment's scrutiny he turned ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... anyone but you," he broke out, roughly and abruptly, able neither to repel nor to plead guilty to the charge she made, but miserably conscious that his one false step might cost him all that he held most dear. To Nan, the very vagueness and—as she deemed it—the irrelevance of his answer constituted an acknowledgment ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... study of the stage. But though the performance was not on the very highest level, there was a great deal in it that thrilled this young man and woman sitting next to each other, and already vaguely inclined towards each other in that first chapter of mutual attraction which is, perhaps, in its vagueness and irresponsibility, the most delightful of all. Dick would have laughed at the idea of feeling himself somehow mixed up with the lover on the stage, who was not only a good actor, but a much handsomer fellow than he was; but Chatty had no such feeling, and with a blush and quiver felt ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... the absence of mention of the Esk, and says "it is AFTER they are in England that the false reports are spread." {139a} But the ballad does not say so—read it! All passes with judicious vagueness. ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... that was in itself a rose-bower partly disclosed itself. The other gentlemen had lagged behind. "I will amuse MYSELF, and console your other guardian, dear," said the vivacious Milly, with a rapid exchange of glances with Yerba, "until this horrid business is over. Besides," she added with cheerful vagueness, "after so long a separation you must have a great deal to say to ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte |
