"Tacit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ravis some two years before. For a time the two had been sincerely in love with each other, and though there was never any talk of marriage between them, they seemed to have some sort of tacit understanding. But by this time Vandover had somehow outgrown the idea of marrying Turner. He still kept up the fiction, persuaded that Turner must understand the way things had come to be. However, he was still very fond of her; she was a frank, sweet-tempered ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... and point. No regular assistant was appointed or seemed likely to be, for the summer, at least. Seth and his friend, the superintendent, held another lengthy conversation over the wire, and, while Brown's uncertain status remained the same, there was a tacit understanding that, by the first of September, if the young man was sufficiently "broken in," the position vacated by Ezra Payne should be his—if he ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... morning, Fanny Mere had asked for leave to go out. For some time past this request had been so frequently granted, with such poor results so far as the maid's own designs were concerned, that Lady Harry decided on administering a tacit reproof, by means of a refusal. Fanny made no attempt at remonstrance; she ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... second time and are called out for the following rite. A vessel of beer is brought and the bride carries a cupful of it to the bridegroom's brother, but instead of giving it into his hand she deposits it on the ground in front of him. This is to seal a kind of tacit agreement that from that time the bridegroom's brother will not touch his sister-in-law, and was probably instituted to mark the abolition of the former system of fraternal polyandry, customs of an analogous nature being found among ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... persons on earth, make your choice," she accepted the implied terms and rejected her suitor, though otherwise not unacceptable to her. She would wait. It is true that Swift had not absolutely committed himself, but she had committed him by dismissing Tisdall. Without assuming some such tacit understanding, his letters to her are unintelligible. He repeatedly alludes to his absence from her as only tolerable because it was for her sake no less than his own, and the details of his petty economies would be merely vulgar except to her for whom their motive gave ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... having ever made love to an English married woman, or a French unmarried one. Marriages in France being made by the parents, and therefore generally without inclination on either side, gallantry seems to be a tacit condition, though not ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... to me, that in all cases of real love, it is at one moment that it takes place. That moment may have been prepared by previous esteem, admiration, or even affection,—yet love seems to require a momentary act of volition, by which a tacit bond of devotion is imposed,—a bond not to be thereafter broken without violating what should be sacred in our nature. How finely is the true Shakspearian scene contrasted with Dryden's vulgar alteration of it, in which a mere ludicrous psychological experiment, as it were, is tried—displaying ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... in the cushions, and for a moment closed her eyes, half in weariness, half in tacit obedience to him. "Oh, I have such horrible dreams," she said at length, "full of anxiety and fear for Morton and little Morton. I can't explain it. But ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... the first medical circles. The value of any approximate decision of the vegetarian question can hardly be overestimated. There are thousands of families of very moderate means who strain every nerve to feed their children upon beef and mutton,—and this with the tacit approval, or by the positive advice, of physicians in good repute. Can our children be brought up equally well upon potatoes and hasty-pudding? May the two or three hundred dollars thus annually saved be better spent in a trip to the country or a visit to the sea-side? He would be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... interesting her in their cases, these English governesses, tutors, clerks, tailors' assistants and cutters, music-hall singers, grooms appealed to Vivie to support their petitions. They paid her or her mother a kind of base court, on the tacit assumption that she—Vivie—had placed Colonel von Giesselin under special obligations. If in rare instances, out of sheer pity, she took up a case and von Giesselin granted the petition or had it done in a higher quarter, his action ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... had, with the tacit consent of his guards, appointed himself as a sort of nurse to the stranger. He lit a smudge fire to the windward side of him, fed him small quantities of food at intervals, and arranged a sleeping-place for him with mosquito netting ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... most sacred duties of the people of that state, and enjoined upon them and their children as a part of their duty to God. "The voices of your forefathers, founders of your social compact, calling from their graves, command you to this duty; and I deem it, as your representative, a tacit and standing instruction from you to perform, as far as may be my ability, that part of your constitutional duty for you. It is in this sense that, in accepting the earnest invitation from a respectable and learned society, ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... The tacit, common-sense distinction to-day is, in effect, that any effort is to be accounted industrial only so far as its ultimate purpose is the utilisation of non-human things. The coercive utilisation of man by man is not felt to be an industrial ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... sunshine had left, till we found places squashy and squeezy enough to please the most particular and coolest of cranberry minds; and then each of us choosing a little special bed of bog, the tufts were deeply put in with every manner of tacit benediction, such as might befit a bog and a berry, and many an expressed thanksgiving to Susie and to the kind sender of the luxuriant plants. I have never had gift from you, dear Susie, more truly interesting and gladdening to me, and many a day I shall climb the moor to see the ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... dimpled cheek, her soft blue eye, Her voice so fraught with music's thrill, The shrewd observer might espy The traces therein of a will That scorned restraint, the soul of fire That slumbered in her tacit sire." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... to this objection rested on the tacit assumption that the people in their industrial relations had under private capitalism been free and unconstrained and subject to no form of authority. But what assumption could have been more regardless of facts than this? Under private capitalism the entire scheme ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... the little enclosed space where the fountain basin was; and by tacit consent they seated themselves upon it. Miriam gave an exclamation of surprise. "The water is ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... listlessly from town to town. Though young and rich, he was neither fast nor ambitious: the Members' entrance to the House of Commons, the stage-doors of the music halls, were equally without glamour for him; and if he was a Justice of the Peace and a Deputy Lieutenant, he had become so through the tacit operation of his stake in the country. He had chambers in St. James's Street, was a member of the Travellers Club, and played the violin—for an amateur rather well. His brother, Mortimer Maistre, was in diplomacy—at Rio Janeiro or somewhere. His sister had married an Australian, ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... many ringing tokens of that lady's own suppressions. One of these bore upon the extraordinary hour—it was three in the morning if she really wanted to know—at which Mrs. Beale had re-entered the house; another, in accents as to which Maisie's criticism was still intensely tacit, characterised her appeal as such a "gime," such a "shime," as one had never had to put up with; a third treated with some vigour the question of the enormous sums due belowstairs, in every department, for gratuitous labour and wasted zeal. ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... physical sensations of blurred vision and clinging chill, he became aware of a growing embarrassment and constraint between himself and his companion. So far, his and her intercourse had been easy and spontaneous, because superficial. Since that first interview on the terrace a tacit agreement had existed to avoid the personal note. Now, for cause unknown, that intercourse threatened entering upon a new phase. It was as though the concentration, the tension, which he observed in her, and of which he was sensible ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... thoughts have been inspired in the mind of the young man by her unguarded conduct. She may feel indignant at the suggestion, because she has meant no harm, but in reality she should blush that her own familiar conduct has given him a tacit right to think of ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... languidly, seated on one of two chairs partially concealed by a great mass of exotic shrubbery, in pots, which formed almost an alcove. She removed her long soft skirt, which she had thrown over the vacant seat, as he approached; and at this tacit invitation ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... by their volition. True, we may judge of external actions according as their origin is in the will or otherwise, without considering how its volitions come to pass; but then this is because we proceed on the tacit assumption that the will is free, and not under the dominion of necessitating causes. But the question relates, not to external actions or movements of the body, but to the volitions of the mind itself. And this being the case, it does make a vast ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... peculiar importance in great industrial states like England, the United States, and Germany, because in such states a tacit conspiracy tends to grow up to subordinate national ends to individual ends, and practically to work for the deterioration of the race. In England, for instance, this tendency has become peculiarly well marked with ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a drowning man and this the straw. And the child, somehow, was different from the average child, he felt; though he was not certain what the average child would unfold day after day. What would Elizabeth think? Eunice he could count on. Though she yielded on many points in that tacit sort of way, she was by no means ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... I consented to her doing it, on the express condition of its not being printed in France, on which we had along dispute; I affirming that it was impossible to obtain, and even imprudent to solicit, a tacit permission; and being unwilling to permit the impression upon any other terms in the kingdom; she, that the censor could not make the least difficulty, according to the system government had adopted. She found means to make M. de Malesherbes ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... were not slow in availing themselves of his tacit acquiescence. Fifty soldiers, at a signal from their general, sprang up the great stairway of the temple, entered the building on the summit, the walls of which were black with human gore, and dragged the huge wooden idols to the edge of the terrace. Their fantastic forms and features, ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... deem you my personal friends, and feel in honor bound to discourage any movement looking toward an unjust appropriation of the funds of your bank. The autographs of yourselves in my possession, and my own in your hands, would be regarded as a tacit agreement on my part never to rob your bank. I would even be willing to enter into a contract with you not to break into your vaults, if you insist upon it. I would thus be compelled to confine myself to the ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... unopened, the packet that was proffered, and assured him that no harm should befall Gideon Ward through complaint or report for which he was responsible, Parker still felt that somehow there was a balance due old Joshua Ward on their books of tacit partnership in well-doing;—such was the honest faith, and patient self-abnegation of the good old man, who had endured ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... there but the acceptance of prescribed canons of human belief? Still, the falsities which he believed he had found within the Church were not greater than those against which she herself fought in the world. And if she accepted him, did it not indicate on her part a tacit recognition of the need of just what he had to offer, a searching spirit of inquiry and consecration to the unfoldment of truth? Alas! the incident of the Greek translation threw its shadow of doubt ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... you think that, sir?' demanded the collector, who seemed, by a tacit understanding, to have been chosen and elected mouthpiece to the company. 'You have no reason to suppose that they have run away from anywhere without paying the rates and taxes due, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... in our purchase of tickets of admission there was a tacit agreement that we should have the benefit of all cases which the medical and surgical staff of that hospital should deem ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the woods out of sight of the sea. It seemed almost like going again into exile. Johnny, in particular, felt greatly humiliated, at being obliged to abandon the house which had cost us so much toil, to take refuge in one constructed by others. He seemed to look upon this as a kind of tacit admission of our own utter incapacity to provide for ourselves in ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... Villemot exclaimed, very imprudently; but there was no one to hear the tacit confession ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... his masterful strength, in the confidence of his careless dominance. She liked to see that look of power in his gray-blue eyes softened to the droll, half-tender, expression with which he played the game of make-believe. There were no to-morrows; to-day marked the limit of time for them. By tacit consent they lived only in the present, shutting out deliberately from their knowledge of each other, that past which was not common to both. Even their names were unknown to each other, and both of them were glad that it ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... that in the prolonged negotiations and discussions which have taken place upon this question manhood suffrage has been demanded by one party and the voters' basis by the other, and there has been a tacit, though quite informal agreement that the one principle should balance the other. But that is not the position of his Majesty's Government in regard to either of these propositions. We defend both on their merits. We defend "one vote, one value," and we defend manhood suffrage, ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... very little firing between the pickets. There was a sort of tacit understanding that they were not to molest each other. Indeed, officers could ride along the line without fear of being shot at. When on inspection duty, they at times rode down to the bank and conversed with the enemy on ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... alone can lay a fair basis for the argument. I believe on this point there is a shrinking consciousness of not being ready for the battle, on the part of some of the stronger sex, as they call themselves; a tacit confession of risk to this imagined superiority, if they consent to meet their sisters in the lecture halls, or the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... slight knowledge the elder female had of her partner in mystery. Then, more than a year afterwards, the acquaintanceship of her own father with this his first love; the awakening of the passion, his acts of devotion, the unreasoning heat of his rapture, her tacit acceptance of it, and yet her uneasiness under the delight. Then his declaration amid the evergreens: the utter change produced in her manner thereby, seemingly the result of a rigid determination: and the total concealment ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... pains to instruct them in the art of walking with me properly; never allowing them to tell me how to proceed, but to give me a tacit understanding of their movements in order to direct my own, and this system in my own experience has ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... continued. His deep pride in his family was more evident to him, at that moment, than ever before, and the idea of living alone in a cottage was ridiculous. All that brotherhood and sisterhood, and a common childhood in a common past mean, all the stability, the unambitious comradeship, and tacit understanding of family life at its best, came to his mind, and he thought of them as a company, of which he was the leader, bound on a difficult, dreary, but glorious voyage. And it was Katharine who had opened his eyes to this, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... "Of course not" put an end to this sensitive topic. It was dangerous ground and could lead to mischief. So we all thought, I fancy, for by tacit consent it was dropped for the ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... modest nest egg with which she had started; and to lose her place, she knew, would mean either starvation or beggary. There was no one, with the exception of Cousin Jimmy, of whom she could beg, and to beg of him would be a tacit confession that she had failed as a breadwinner. In Mrs. Carr's last letter Charley had appeared in a new light as a reformed character, a devoted attendant at church, and an enthusiastic convert to the prohibition party; and Gabriella had gathered from her mother's pious rambling that, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... puzzled. Why had his uncle, who was openly engaged to Phyllis Harriman, married her surreptitiously and kept that marriage a secret? It was not in character, and he could see no reason for it. Foster had sent him to Golden on the tacit hint that there was some clue in the license register to the mystery of James Cunningham's death. What bearing had this marriage ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... of this love is cold; see n. 235. In the place of conjugial love succeeds heat derived from pre-eminence; but this heat is utterly discordant with conjugial heat, yet it can exteriorly resemble it by means of lust. After a tacit agreement between the parties, it appears as if conjugial love was made friendship; but the difference between conjugial and servile friendship in marriages, is like that between light and shade, between a living fire and an ignis fatuus, ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... light a handful of money, mostly gold. Monk's eye gleamed approval, and he stretched forth an itching palm. Danvers began to think that it would be rash to let a chance like this slip. Ordinarily the tacit agreement between the pair was that only one should borrow at a time, lest confidence should be destroyed in the victim. But here was surely an exception, a special case. With a young gentleman so obviously a man of coin as Farnie, the rule might ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... and she implicitly followed Mrs. Easterfield's directions in making preparations for him, and was just as earnest in making her own; and her friend was certainly justified in thinking all this was a tacit consent. ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... and remarkable for extraordinary strength. There was in his air and motion something rough and artless, but so majestick and great at the same time, that no man ever looked upon him without veneration, and a kind of tacit submission to the superiority of his genius.... He was never soured by calumny and detraction, nor ever thought it necessary to confute them; "for they are sparks," said he, "which, if you do not ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... period of her tacit engagement rather puzzling. Her people puzzled her. Even Dick did, at times. And nobody seemed anxious to make plans for the future, or even to discuss the wedding. She was a little hurt about that, remembering the excitement ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... cattle war. One third the public so far as it stands about the 'doby where Silver Phil is hived that time is 'Three-D' adherents, mebby another third is 'K-in-a-box' folks, while the last third is mighty likely nootral. Whichever way it breaks, however, thar's a tacit stand-off, an' never a sport of 'em lifts a finger or voice to ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... other. Night and darkness at last put an end to the fight, before the fury of the combatants was exhausted; and the contest only ceased, when no one could any longer find an antagonist. Both armies separated, as if by tacit agreement; the trumpets sounded, and each party claiming ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... at Geshur. All Judah rallied around him, and the excitement at Jerusalem was so great that David judged it prudent to retire, with his Philistine and Cherethite guards, to the other side of the Jordan. Absalom, in the mean while, took up his abode in Jerusalem, where, having received the tacit adherence of the family of Saul and of a number of the notables, he made himself king. To show that the rupture between him and David was complete, he had tents erected on the top of the house, and there, in ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... how readily they can be made use of—stepping stones to the accomplishment of selfish desires. But she does not fool mamma. They both use one another to advantage. There is always between them a tacit little arrangement. Mrs. Babbington Brooks never stops short of a positive sensation. Her methods are bold, startling, successful. Her husband, an insignificant looking man, invented something, an air-brake for railway trains, an improvement on the Westinghouse air-brake, ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... with myrrh; when suddenly a flame Spired from the fragrant smoke, nor sooner spired Down sank the brazen fabric at his feet. He started back, gazed, nor could aught but gaze, And cold dread stiffened up his hair flower-twined; Then with a long and tacit step, one arm Behind, and every finger wide outspread, He looked and tottered on a black abyss. He thought he sometimes heard a distant voice Breathe through the cavern's mouth, and further on Faint murmurs now, now hollow groans reply. Therefore ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... extirpate Popery and Superstition without respect of persons (as is exprest in the Covenant) there is in the late Declaration of the Committee of Estates a desire of the Queens return, without any condition tending to the restraint of her Masse or exercise of Popery; We do also conceive there is a tacit condescending to the toleration of Superstition and the Book of Common prayer in His Majesties family, because as it was reserved by himself in his concession, brought home by the Commissioners of ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... years he had thought of Nancy Lammeter, and wooed her with a tacit patient worship, as the woman who made him think of the future with joy: she would be his wife, and would make home lovely to him, as his father's home had never been; and it would be easy, when she was always near, to shake off those foolish habits that were no pleasures, but ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... all the suffering, she was to have "been through" things he couldn't even guess at; and, since he was bargaining away his right ever again to allude to the unforgettable, so much there was of it, what her tacit proposition came to was that they were ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... By a sort of tacit agreement it was thought best not to say anything to Miss Lou except as Mrs. Whately broached the subject, it being believed that a quiet ignoring of her will and a manifest purpose to carry out their own would have the most weight in breaking down her opposition. Indeed it was a shrewd ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... seemed the bitterest memories of all. It was the thought of that first too fragile happiness which slowly but implacably merged into discontent, still hidden and tacit, but none the less evident. That interregnum of peace had been a Tantalus-like taste of a draught which he all along knew was to be denied him. Yet, point by point, he recalled their first quiet and hopeful weeks in England, when their old ways of life seemed ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... my tacit consent, you went to work in your own way, I sent my messenger to Rome bearing to the Holy Father a full account of all, petitioning a dispensation from vows taken owing to deception, and asking leave to unite in the holy sacrament of marriage these long-sundered lovers, undertaking that no scandal ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... a little, each attracted by some object of interest, or following the lead, it might have been, of wayward fancy. But they never lost sight of each other, and, after a couple of hours, converged, as if by tacit consent, until they met and sat down to rest on a ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... with Prince Albert, in order to show that this was not a bridegroom come to plead his suit in person; this was a mere cousinly visit of which nothing need come. Indeed, the good king rather overdid his caution, for it seems he led the Prince to believe that the earlier tacit understanding between him and his cousin had come to an end, so that Prince Albert arrived more resolved to relinquish his claims than to urge his rights. In his honest pride there was hardly room for the thought of binding ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... raised, face unsmiling, it was a glance that clearly supplemented her spoken "How do you do?" by a tacit (perhaps self-addressed?) "What can bring ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... the name," explained Ingerman, in his suave voice, "that was a mere stage pseudonym, an adopted name. My wife was a famous actress, and there is a sort of tacit agreement that a lady in the theatrical profession shall be known to the public ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... she resumed. "I owe you a declaration which will remove every possibility of a misunderstanding between us. A few days ago, when on the terrace of your house my hands rested in yours, I fully realized that, so far as you were concerned, a tacit engagement from that ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... in their investigations was simply this: they were exactly twenty-four hours behindhand in their attempt to unravel the mystery. The conclusion they had come to with regard to the meaning of the note was correct: a tacit understanding had existed for some time among the inner circle of the Thurstonian party that this should be the signal for a gathering of the clan; but the note, when Diggory had found it, had been lying in the ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... fulfilled. But, what is far worse than there being no humorous writers amongst us, the faculty of appreciating even the old ones is dying out. There is no such thing as high spirits anywhere. It is observable, too, how very much public entertainments have increased of late—a tacit acknowledgment of dulness at home—while, instead of the lively, if somewhat boisterous, talk of our fathers, we have drawing-room dissertations on art, and dandy ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... Lastly, treason can only be committed by subjects, who by compact, either tacit or expressed, have transferred all their rights to the state: a subject is said to have committed this crime when he has attempted, for whatever reason, to seize the sovereign power, or to place it in different hands. ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza
... seeming to act unfairly, in refusing to return an equivalent for the support which each of them received from Sparta in regard to their own several claims. {18} My own view is that, even without the tacit surrender of some of the Arcadians to Sparta, we can recover Oropus, aided not only by the Spartans, if they are ready to act honourably, but by all who disapprove of allowing Thebes to retain what is not her own. ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... that Mabel was suffering. It was unpleasant to see pain or grief. Smiles were prettier than glum looks. She hoped she had enough humanity about her to enable her to recognize these facts. But, in her soul, she despised the girl for her tacit acquiescence in her brother's decree; contemned her yet more for her partial credence of the rumor of her lover's unworthiness. It was as well, taking these things into account, that Mabel was not communicative with regard to the great change that had befallen her since ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... delirious girl, who never breathed his name, or gave token that she knew of his existence. Every morning, regularly he rung the Collingwood bell, which was always answered by Victor, between whom and himself there was a tacit understanding, perceptible in the fervent manner with which the faithful valet's hand was pressed whenever the news was favorable. He did not venture into her presence, though repeatedly urged to do so by Grace, who mentally accused him of indifference toward Edith. Alas, she knew not ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... understanding of the author's meaning. The fact is, that as yet the time has hardly come for fully adequate translations of comprehensive works of the type of the Srbhshya, the authors of which wrote with reference—in many cases tacit—to an immense and highly technical philosophical literature which is only just beginning to be studied, and comprehended in part, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... acknowledgment of her tacit confession. 'But oh! if I am satisfied, what need you care for others? Listen: I have some money—more than enough to keep us for some years. We will go to Australia, where they have not heard of us; or, if they have, ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... when kings reigned in virtue of right divine is far removed from us: their rights are no longer founded on any thing but the formal or tacit consent of nations: the moment nations reject them, the contract is broken; the conditional oaths taken to them are annulled in law and in fact, without their intervention or consent being necessary; for, as the proclamations ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... man talks about "spiritual discernment," he makes a tacit assertion which ought not to be allowed to pass unchallenged. What is that assertion or implication? It is the implication that there is a spiritual discernment which is distinct from mental discernment. What does that mean? It means that man has ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... Vain-glorious Panegyrick. Let Poets | and Oratours praise those women, | which Poppaea-like[e], are graced | [Note e: Poppaea cuncta alia fuere with all other things sauing a | praeter Honestum animum. Tacit. Gracious Heart: Let them commend | Annal. l. 13.] their Wit, Wealth, Beautie, | Nobilitie, and other Gifts of | Fortune (as they call them) in | stead of Vertues[f]. Wee the | [Note f: Laudauit ipse Nero apud Ministers of Christ, and Stewards | rostra formam eius ...
— The Praise of a Godly Woman • Hannibal Gamon
... adopted as a concession to Yorkist prejudice. (p. 019) It was a practical reminder of the fact which the Tudor laureate, Skelton, celebrated in song: "The rose both red and white, in one rose now doth grow". It was also a tacit assertion of the death of the last Duke of York in the Tower and of the imposture of Perkin Warbeck, ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... the wording of it, no," said Linda, "but there was everything in the intention back of it. Because you did not live up to your tacit agreement, and because I had been on high tension for two or three days, I lost my temper completely. I brought John Gilman up here and showed him the suite of rooms in which you have done for yourself, for four years. I gave him rather a thorough inventory of your dressing table ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... married a month. The honeymoon—a short one—had been passed in the house of a friend, indeed a relation of Etta's own, a Scotch peer who was not above lending a shooting-lodge in Scotland on the tacit understanding that there should be some quid ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... reminded Lady Deyncourt of herself in her own brilliant youth, and inclined her to be lenient, when in her daughters' cases she would have been sarcastic. The old woman and the young one had been great friends, and not the less so, perhaps, because of a tacit understanding which existed between them that certain subjects should be avoided, upon which, each instinctively felt, they were not likely to agree. And if the shrewd old woman of the world ever suspected the existence of a strength of will and depth of character in Ruth such as had, ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... Jerry avoided the issue that might spring from such a situation. They met on the high-road with a full seeming of their old accord, but perhaps the semblance was an empty shell—or fast becoming one. There was a tacit understanding between them that certain evenings at Alexander's house ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... of Syene and Elephantina divided Egypt from Ethiopia; and in the days of Augustus were the boundaries of the Roman empire: Claustra olim Romani Imperii, Tacit. Annal. Lib. ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... room without giving the astonished Bill any opportunity to do more than respond to his "good night." Anyway, the latter had nothing else to say. He was too taken aback, too painfully startled at the tacit admission to all the charges he had been warned the people and police of Leaping Creek were making against his brother. What could he say? What could he do? ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... councils of the town. This walk along the street was notice to the pure democracy of that land that all might now leave cards at the cabin across the arroyo. One need hardly doubt that the populace of Heart's Desire was lined up along the street to say good morning and to receive befittingly this tacit pledge of its newest citizen. Moreover, as to the Littlest Girl, all Heart's Desire puffed out its chest. Once more, indeed, the camp was entitled to hold up its head. There were Women in the town! Ergo Home; ergo Civilization; ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... its reservations, was a tacit question. He was still a little puzzled by her surrender. He knew she did not regard him as the great man that he was, that his public career had made ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... intuitive tact and poetry, she had, as she spoke, slowly shifted her position so as to bring the mute figure of the ruined man between her and her audience, hiding in the shadow behind it, as if she offered it as a tacit apology for her actions. Silent and expressionless, it yet spoke for her; helpless, crushed, and smitten with the Divine thunderbolt, it still stretched an invisible ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... minute pebbles, a darkly clad, tastefully picturesque form would approach,—a form to which I bowed down in spirit as, fortunately for me, my father. He would look askance at my utterly useless, time-frittering amusement, which I already knew was withering my brain and soul. In his tacit reproach my small intellect delighted, and loftier thoughts than those of the counter would refresh me for the rest of the day; and I thankfully returned to the heights and lengths of wide nature, full of color ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... five languages—such silent gifts as brought me beside myself. That child-mouth could smile enchantingly with encouraging calmness, could proudly despise, could pout with displeasure, could offer tacit requests, could muse in silent melancholy, could indulge in enthusiastic ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... comes a time when no responsible organ of public opinion can keep silence without sacrificing the tacit obligation under which it lies ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... in itself suffice to insure right doing? Socrates and Plato, with their indentification of knowledge and virtue, would appear to think so; the church has gone a long way, under humanistic pressure, in tacit acquiescence with their doctrine. Yet most of us, judging alike from internal and personal evidence and from external and social observation, would say that there was no sadder or more universal experience than that of the failure of right knowledge to secure right performance. Right knowledge ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... uncontradicted would be unjust not more to ourselves than to you. The mere denial will not and ought not to change your opinion. It may even tend to raise higher the acrimony of your aversion to me. It must ever be irksome to a generous spirit to deny, without the power of disproving; but a tacit admission of the charge would be unworthy of those who ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... and very different noises, did not appear to pay the least attention to the present one. Besides, an enormous cart, laden with stones passing from La Rue Saint-Mederie, absorbed, in the noise of its wheels, the noise of Planchet's fall. And yet Planchet fancied that, in token of tacit approval, he saw him imperceptibly smile at the word "stupid." This emboldened him to say, "Are you asleep, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... Miss Charlecote proposed a few turns in the garden; dingy enough, but a marvel for the situation: and here the tacit object of herself and Phoebe was to afford Robert an opportunity for the interview on which so much depended. But it was like trying to catch a butterfly; Lucilla was here, there, everywhere; and an excuse was hardly made for leaving her beside ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... smiling very proudly just then, but beginning to suspect that he had tortured her cruelly by the tacit imposture to which he had assented, his eyes dimmed at the thought ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... would, perhaps, be useless; for a fragment of my work relating to the administration, stolen and misused, has gone the rounds of the offices and is misinterpreted by hatred; in consequence, I find myself compelled to resign, under the tacit ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... first meeting, when she might have been excused for showing defensiveness, she had treated him with unaffected ease. When that meeting had ended there was a tacit understanding between them that all the preliminary awkwardnesses of the first stages of acquaintanceship were to be considered as having been passed; and that when they met again, if they ever did, it would be as friends. And here she ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Lord Bute told me, that Mr. Wedderburne, now Lord Loughborough, was the person who first mentioned this subject to him. Lord Loughborough told me, that the pension was granted to Johnson solely as the reward of his literary merit, without any stipulation whatever, or even tacit understanding that he should write for administration. His Lordship added, that he was confident the political tracts which Johnson afterwards did write, as they were entirely consonant with his own opinions, would have been written by him though no ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... lap. To her gray hair some lace of Chantilly was pinned with a little diamond brooch, and hung behind her delicate but rather long ears. And from her shoulders was depended a silvery garment, of stuff that looked like the mail shirt of a fairy, reaching the ground on either side. A tacit agreement had evidently been come to, that she was incapable of discussing 'the Land' or those other subjects such as the French murder, the Russian opera, the Chinese pictures, and the doings of one, L——, whose fate was just then in the air, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and which, while it made noise enough and to spare, utterly precluded individual punishment. One could not flog a hundred and eighty men, and it was impossible to distinguish any particular offender. So, in virtue of this last appeal, convictism had established a tacit right to converse in whispers, and to move about inside ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... to avoid the subject for the present, since she could offer no advice for which she might not, hereafter, be suspected of selfish motives; but yet, from a real regard to the tender-hearted girl, to give all the tacit discouragement that was in her power, to a passion which she firmly believed would be ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... government, or any joint concern, be carried on in a tolerable manner by people so envious that, if one among them seems likely to succeed in any thing, those who ought to cooperate with him form a tacit combination to make him fail? Whenever the general disposition of the people is such that each individual regards those only of his interests which are selfish, and does not dwell on, or concern himself for, his share of the general interest, in such a state of things good government ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... his wife by the hands and kissed her brow; that answer always conveyed her tacit assent to her ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... had been constantly with her mother—and when she was even a short while away the elder woman anxiously called for her. Sometimes she and Hamilton had met, but at these times there was no syllable of surrender from the lips of either; only a tacit sort of truce such as might have existed where two armies drawn tensely in confronting battle-lines pause to care for the wounded in which both have interest. But when the mandate came that Elizabeth Burton must go abroad Mary ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the praepostors, though he never rose into the upper half of them. He did little, and I think the Doctor rather gave him up as a boy whom he had better leave to himself, for he rarely made him construe, and he used to send in his exercises or not, pretty much as he liked. His tacit, unconscious obstinacy had in time effected more even than a few bold sallies in the first instance would have done. To the end of his career his position inter pares was what it had been at the ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... up. All these lovely little experiments recoil on the District-Officer in the end,' said the Knight of the Drawn Sword with a truthful brutality that made the Head of the Red Provinces shudder. And on a tacit understanding of this kind the transfer was accomplished, as quietly as might ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... must, as the wisest will, to time. The passion which, in her simple, shallow way, she had confided to the woods and waters reflected their outward variations; she thought of her lover less, and with less positive pleasure. The golden sands had run out. Perfect rest was over. Mrs. Ford's tacit protest began to be annoying. In a rather resentful spirit, Lizzie forbore to read any more letters aloud. These were as regular as ever. One of them contained a rough camp-photograph of Jack's newly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... familiar in every ear, yet Lincoln referred to these things only twice or thrice, and incidentally, while Douglas ignored them. This fact is fraught with meaning. American writers and American readers have always met upon the tacit understanding that the Union was the chief cause of, and the best justification for, the war. An age may come when historians, treating our history as we treat that of Greece, stirred by no emotion at the sight of the "Stars and Stripes," ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... time from your work," answered Douglas. "That it changes the nature of your work. That if you let the leaders of a party secure you a nomination, and the party elect you, you are bound to their principles, at least there is a tacit understanding that you are, and if you should happen to be afflicted with principles of your own, then you have got to ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... examination, informing him that should he be inclined to bring them before the public, I had materials enough on hand for a second volume. Several days having elapsed without any communication from Mr. Murray, I addressed a note to him, in which I construed his silence into a tacit rejection of my work, and begged that the numbers I had left with him might be returned to me. The following ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... given ten times as much to please Aniela. I said it on purpose, as words like these said to a woman carry a deep meaning. It is almost the same as if I told her, "I would do anything for you, because you are everything to me." And, moreover, no woman can defend herself against a tacit confession such as this, or has any right to be offended. I had disguised the meaning, treating it as the most natural thing in the world; but Aniela perceived the drift, and lowering her eyes in evident confusion, said: "I must go back now to ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... political advantages to grasp yet more and more wealth. At last the party organisations of two hemispheres were in its hands; it became an inner council of political control. Its last struggle was with the tacit alliance of the great Jewish families. But these families were linked only by a feeble sentiment, at any time inheritance might fling a huge fragment of their resources to a minor, a woman or a fool, ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... the bon-vivants on earth, were they to meet at one table, could hardly produce such a variety of fine old Madeira, as the clerks of Funchal then sip and descant upon. In no place do mercantile clerks hold so respectable a position in society as here; owing to the tacit understanding between their principals and themselves, that, at some future day, they are to be admitted as partners in the houses. This is so general a rule, that the clerk seems to hold a social position scarcely inferior to ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... By tacit consent the doctors did not even mention the strange fact that this very planet had been explored by a Confederation ship eight hundred years before and no sign of intelligent life had been found. The little creature before them seemed ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... respectful. But she betrays no resentment. She smiles back at him indeed in that little slow, seductive way of hers, and makes him an answer in a tone too low for even those nearest to her to hear. It is a sort of challenge, a tacit acknowledgment that they two are alone even in the midst ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... small and simple circle of hers, with its tennis court in a vacant lot, its one or two inexpensive cars, its picnics and porch parties, there was none of the usual give and take of more sophisticated circles. Boys and girls paired off rather early, and remained paired by tacit agreement; there was comparatively little shifting. There were few free lances among the men, and none among the girls. When she was seventeen Harvey had made it known unmistakably that Sara Lee was his, and no trespassing. ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and the Treaty of Bucharest, cannot help regarding her neighbors as the robbers of what she considers her national patrimony, and at the same time she does not forget that in all their proceedings against her, Greek, Servian, Rumanian, and Montenegrin acted with the tacit ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... the darkness, their swollen lids dropped across the little watery bulbs rolling loose in the orbits, and the puff of fat flesh making a muddy shadow underneath—and as their filmy stare moved with my movements, there came over me a sense of their tacit complicity, of a deep hidden understanding between us that was worse than the first shock of their strangeness. Not that I understood them; but that they made it so clear that some day I should ... ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... eyes, heedless of the risk of blinding, while their mothers were engrossed in that grave gossip which marks the dwellers in villages. These gatherings occurred daily before the fisherman's house; they formed a tacit and almost involuntary homage, consecrated by custom, and of which no one had ever taken special account; the envy that rules in small communities would soon have suppressed them. The influence which old Solomon had over his equals had grown so simply and naturally, that ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... were looking into one another's eyes, and yet they did not speak of that which was nearest to their hearts. It was a topic to be avoided as long as possible. They only enjoyed these blissful opportunities—they had only been permitted to thus stroll out together alone and unsuspected—upon the tacit understanding that no such thing as love could exist between them. If Harry had not plighted faith to Solomon, her engagement to him tacitly existed nevertheless, and it was under its aegis alone that they had been protected and ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... grieved her to see 'one lamb among so many kids'. But 'kid' is a word of varied significance and the symbol did not seem to us effectively applied. As a matter of fact, we made what I still feel was an excellent tacit compromise. My young companions never jeered at me for being 'in communion with the saints', and I, on my part, never urged the Atonement upon them. I began, in fact, more and more to keep my own religion for use ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... the flash of his eyes and his proud smile as he assured her relatives that he would guard her from harm and want so long as he lived, or as she remained under his care. She knew he regarded this as a tacit sealing of the old compact, and she had no inclination to ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... should have exercised over the present generation, among whom polemical ardour and bitterness may be thought to have perceptibly cooled down, and to have become much less aggressive, in science, philosophy, and literature, than among the preceding generation. An age of tacit indifference, content with rationalistic explanations, with the slow working of disillusion, dislikes and discountenances outrageous scorn poured upon things that are traditionally sacred; and to the English character extremes are ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Cynthia, nor had there ever been any talk of one. He simply had been thrown constantly into her society and had drifted, at first thoughtlessly and afterward indifferently, until there had been created not only in the mind of the girl but also in the minds of all her family a tacit expectation that ultimately their ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... presents to their companions, still there are difficulties. These presents are usually baubles, which at the best can encourage only a frivolous taste. But we must further consider, that even generous children are apt to expect generosity equal to their own from their companions; then come tacit or explicit comparisons of the value or elegance of their respective gifts; the difficult rules of exchange and barter are to be learned; and nice calculations of Tare and Tret are entered into ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... my own cheeks somehow set us both at ease, for it was a tacit answer to her own. I got her luggage, which included a typewriter, and we took the Underground to Fenchurch Street, after I had sent a wire to my housekeeper to have a sitting room and a bedroom prepared ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... at the strange idea, but is there not in it a tacit admission that New England's men and women of letters are her best characteristics? Is it not to her glory that hers is not a country of ruins but one of noble, earnest, living men and women?—men like Dr. Hale, instilling by the quiet weapon of the pen strong, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... about it? The wonder is that a man and wife ever fail of knowing each what the other is thinking. They pervade each other's minds, if they are really married, and they are so present with each other that the tacit wish should be the same as a call. Marion and I are only an intensified instance of what may be done by living together. There is something, though, that is rather queer, but it belongs to psychomancy rather than psychology, ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... their statesmen sought to compass the judicial murder of scores of Slavs; they raised no voice when, at the grave risk of a European war, Austria dishonestly annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina; they gave their tacit or open consent when Austria, refusing mediation, declared war on Serbia and inaugurated the titanic struggle; and they have passed no condemnation on the infamies which the Magyar troops ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... nature, which are observed by all nations alike, are established, as it were, by divine providence, and remain ever fixed and immutable: but the municipal laws of each individual state are subject to frequent change, either by the tacit consent of the people, or by the subsequent ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... long been established between Sasha and her uncle a tacit compact, to take turns in sitting with the patient. On this occasion Sasha closed her reading-book, and without uttering a word, went softly out of the room. Laptev took an historical novel from the chest of drawers, and looking for the right ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... give tacit acknowledgment to the fact that poor little, unintellectual Flossy was much more interested than herself. She gave herself up to an old and favorite employment of hers, that of looking at faces and studying them, when a sudden hush that seemed to be settling over the hither ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy |
