"Verbosity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... No. 2, so that, although you will not get it for a few days, I may add to it occasionally and despatch it to you when it reaches a decent length, and before it reaches the colossal and iniquitous verbosity of my former screed—a monologue on ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... pen in hand to address an unknown body of hearers, no less than when he stands up to deliver himself to a sea of expectant faces. This is the true panic fear, that walks at mid- day, and unmans those whom it visits. Hence come reservations, qualifications, verbosity, and the see-saw of a wavering courage, which apes progress and purpose, as soldiers mark time with their feet. The writing produced under these auspices is of no greater moment than the incoherent loquacity of a nervous patient. All self-expression is ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... word here and there could have been intelligible, but their effect upon the pleasant gentleman was instantaneous. He broke into a torrent of foreign exclamations and verbosity, showing his teeth ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... impossibility of snow in Egypt. Palestine is wilder, less wealthy and modernised, more religious and therefore more realistic. The issue between the things only a European can do, and the things no European has the right to do, is much sharper and clearer than the confusions of verbosity. On the one hand the things the English can do are more real things, like clearing away the snow; for the very reason that the English are not here, so to speak, building on a French pavement but on the bare rocks of the Eastern wilds, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... the Canadian insurgents. Mr. Warburton advocated the separation of the colony from the empire. Mr. Gladstone maintained a just view of the dispute between the colony and the mother country, but so mystified his arguments by useless subtleties and verbosity, that the speech failed to produce an effect corresponding to its substantial merits. Mr. Leader boldly expressed his complacency in the dismemberment of the empire, and the speech of the hon. member was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... N. diffuseness &c. adj.; amplification &c. v.; dilating &c. v.; verbosity, verbiage, cloud of words, copia verborum[Lat]; flow of words &c. (loquacity) 584; looseness. Polylogy[obs3], tautology, battology[obs3], perissology|; pleonasm, exuberance, redundancy; thrice-told tale; prolixity; circumlocution, ambages [obs3]; periphrase[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... that the Constituent Assembly had in mind in framing its declaration. The sharp, pointed style and the practical character of the American document are cited by many as in praiseworthy contrast to the confusing verbosity and dogmatic theory of the French Declaration.[22] Others bring forward, as a more fitting object of comparison, the first amendments to the constitution of the United States,[23] and even imagine that the latter exerted some influence ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... were now easy to bear. It would almost appear that even Gladstone's transcendent eloquence had lost in a measure its charm when Disraeli, in one of his popular addresses, was applauded for saying that he was "a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign his opponents and to glorify himself,"—one of the most exaggerated and ridiculous charges that was ever made against ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... and Ohio. He provided for starting supplies to Knoxville by all practicable routes as soon as the siege should be raised. He cut trenchantly through pretences where he thought a lack of vigorous performance was covered up by verbosity of reports. [Footnote: Id., pt. iii. p. 233.] He was quietly but easily master, and showed no symptom of being overweighted by his task or flurried by the excitements of a critical juncture in affairs. He does not impress one as brilliant in genius, but as eminently sound and sensible. His quality ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... King Philip. "Do you suppose that any rambling Don is going to take up my time when by a sheer accident his verbosity has started me on a true scent? Out, Aristotle, out! Or, stay, take this note with you to the Captain of the Guard"—and King Philip hastily scribbled upon a parchment an order for the immediate execution of the whole of the inhabitants of Euboea, saving such as could redeem themselves ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... This speech, or verbosity rather—for it has none of the logic or continuity of mortal utterances—does not continue uninterruptedly during the day, but observes special hours, when the guards are paying even less than their usual attention to the vagaries of their charges. Of these periods, the hours ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... tanquam te. His humor is lofty, his discourse peremptory. He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... and sober judgment! By my faith! ... I would as soon listen to the gabble of geese in a farmyard as to the silly glibness of such inflated twaddle, such mawkish sentiment, such turgid garrulity, such ranting verbosity..." ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... "Talkative, my child, excessive verbosity—Mr. Vereker will doubtless remember our conversation on music," said he, with a whimsical ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... for his verbosity and heaviness, was once assigned to do some campaigning in a mining camp in the mountains. There were about fifty miners present when he began; but when, at the end of a couple of hours, he gave no sign of finishing, his listeners ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... the real torrent of his premeditated verbosity, he continued to relieve himself of all that he had learned by cramming during the past few days. "In vain does su senoria fatigue his wits. Spain is and will remain a profoundly religious country. Her history is the history of Catholicism: ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... involved in obscurity; he went to the book of Nature for instruction, and commenced, like Descartes, with doubting everything. He condemns the Roman husbandry as fettered by superstitions, and gives a piquant sneer at the absurd rhetoric and verbosity of Varro.[G] Nor is he any more tolerant of Scotch superstitions. He declares against wasteful and careless farming in a way that reminds us of our good friend Judge ——, at the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... of pagan literature, where we often find one and the same argument embellished and polished by a variety of colors. We find by experience that no human power of description can do justice to inward emotions. In consequence, verbosity, as a rule, comes short of expressing emotion. Moses employs the opposite method, and clothes a great variety of ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... know it because we talk of it, or because we repeat what other people say of it, or what books tell us about it. So that there are ignorances of different degrees, and degrees of knowledge which are quite deceptive. One of the worst plagues of society is this thoughtless inexhaustible verbosity, this careless use of words, this pretense of knowing a thing because we talk about it—these counterfeits of belief, thought, love, or earnestness, which all the while are mere babble. The worst of it is, that as self-love is behind the babble, these ignorances of society are in general ferociously ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... contradict it, the pulse of dialectic commences to beat and the famous triads begin to grind out the cosmos. If any one finds the process here to be a luminous one, he must be left to the illumination, he must remain an undisturbed hegelian. What others feel as the intolerable ambiguity, verbosity, and unscrupulousness of the master's way of deducing things, he will probably ascribe—since divine oracles are notoriously hard to interpret—to the 'difficulty' that habitually accompanies profundity. For my own part, there ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... lowest vales of society, but he has to endure the red-hot sun of the universe, on the heights of nobility and feudal eminence. He has a beautiful wife of horticultural propensities, that hen-pecks the remainder of his days with soothing and bewitching verbosity that makes the nectar of his pandemonium as cool ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... author to get it translated into Arabic.'" [I have since heard that some of it has been.] Let this be enough as to those first fruits of criticism, which might be extended to satiety; but I decline to become "inebriated with the exuberance of my own verbosity," as Beaconsfield has ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Omnium had notified to Mr. Fothergill his wish that some arrangement should be made about the Chaldicotes mortgages, and Mr. Fothergill had understood what the duke meant as well as though his instructions had been written down with all a lawyer's verbosity. The duke's meaning was this, that Chaldicotes was to be swept up and garnered, and made part and parcel of the Gatherum property. It had seemed to the duke that that affair between his friend and Miss Dunstable was hanging fire, and, therefore, it would ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... sipping it, and smoking our cigarettes, in an unwonted pause of my friend's fanciful verbosity, I almost jumped in my chair at the sound of a voice indoors. It was instantly followed by a light and rapid tread, and the sound of a woman's dress. Then a tall beautiful young woman ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... gondola. When the great day arrived the Canalazzo swarmed with boats of every kind. "All the trades and callings," says Giustina Renier- Michiel, [Footnote: Feste Veneziane] with that pride in the Venetian past which does not always pass from verbosity to eloquence, "had each its boats appropriately mounted and adorned; and private societies filled an hundred more. The chief families among the nobility appeared in their boats, on which they had lavished their taste and wealth." The rowers were dressed with the most profuse ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... and incoherence, with drunken tears and blows on the table. The letter was written on a dirty piece of ordinary paper of the cheapest kind. It had been provided by the tavern and there were figures scrawled on the back of it. There was evidently not space enough for his drunken verbosity and Mitya not only filled the margins but had written the last line right across the rest. The letter ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... became one of my ideals; still another was Buskin's "Seven Lamps of Architecture''; and to such a degree that this art has given to my life some of its greatest pleasures. Ruskin was then at his best. He had not yet been swept from his bearings by popular applause, or intoxicated by his own verbosity. In later years he lost all influence over me, for, in spite of his wonderful style, he became trivial, whimsical, peevish, goody-goody;—talking to grown men and women as a dyspeptic Sunday-school teacher might lay down the law to classes of little girls. ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... diminution, but never the entire disappearance, of the excessive "deportment" which is the best known feature of Johnson's style. Of another feature often found in it by hostile critics less need be said because it is not really there at all. Johnson is frequently accused of verbosity. If that word means merely pomposity it has already been discussed. If it means, as it should mean, the use of superfluous words adding nothing to the sense, few authors are so seldom guilty of it as Johnson. There are many good writers, Scott, for instance, ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... virulence of a disappointed place-hunter, attacked Sir Robert Peel with bitter personalities and barbed sarcasm. On this occasion, throwing decency and good taste to the winds, and, to borrow a phrase of his own, 'intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity,' and with no lack of tawdry rhetoric and melodramatic emphasis, he did his best to cover with ridicule and to reduce to confusion one of the most chivalrous and lofty-minded statesmen of ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... phrases. All the traditional artistry of French poetic speech was condemned as both inadequate and insincere. 'Take eloquence and wring her neck! Nothing but music and the nuance—all the rest is "Literature", mere writing—futile verbosity!' that was the famous ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... the Bar Dr. ADDISON is one of the pleasantest examples. We Englishmen surely owe as much to our great physicians as to our great lawyers, and in some cases indeed the fees are even higher. After the Demosthenic periods and Ciceronian verbosity of some of our previous rulers Dr. ADDISON'S bright bedside manner with an ailing or moribund Bill is a refreshing spectacle. The shrewd face under the shock of white hair is too well known to need description. The small black bag and the slight ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... always easy. Browning's errors of style are in part attributable to his unhappy application of a passage in a letter of Caroline Fox which a friend had shown him. She stated that her acquaintance John Sterling had been repelled by the "verbosity" of Paracelsus: "Doth Mr Browning know," she asked, "that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of a single word that is the one fit for his sonnet?"[17] Browning was determined to avoid "verbosity"; but the method which seems to ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... lightly—as scarcely worth careful investigation. But no well-known man whose lack of success has left unimpaired his fluency of speech need despair. So long as new foreign companies continue to establish American branches and appoint managers, any amiable detrimental with sufficient verbosity may secure for himself a comfortable berth. Mr. Gunterson had now for almost two years been in charge of the United States business of the Elsass-Lothringen on a loss ratio so surprisingly satisfactory that he ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... vol. ii. p. 284. BOSWELL. In a second letter (ib. p. 347) he says:—'Cator has a rough, manly independent understanding, and does not spoil it by complaisance.' Miss Burney accuses him of emptiness, verbosity and pomposity, all of which she describes in an amusing manner. Mme. D'Arblay's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... sort at table in the dining-room of the restaurant. There were four who looked up from their plates and bowed in the grave Spanish way when he entered the room. Then all fell to their fish again in silence; for Spain is a silent country, and only babbles in that home of fervid eloquence and fatal verbosity, the Cortes. It is always dangerous to enter into conversation with a stranger in Spain, for there is practically no subject upon which the various nationalities are unable to quarrel. A Frenchman is a Frenchman all the ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... Are not you ashamed, O Florentines, [Renewed yells, but also some symptoms of manly shame.] That hearken'd to Lorenzo and now reel Inebriate with the exuberance Of his verbosity? [The crowd makes an obvious effort to pull itself together.] A man can fool Some of the people all the time, and can Fool all the people sometimes, but he cannot Fool ALL the people ALL the time. [Loud cheers. ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... displayed Byron's capacity for vigorous concision and swift movement; it is eminently suited for strength and speed; whereas in the slow processional couplet he becomes diffuse, often tedious; he has room for more rhetoric and verbosity; he falls more into the error of describing at length the character and sentiments of his gloomy heroes, instead of letting them act and speak for themselves. At moments when inspiration is running low, and a gap has to be filled up, the shorter line needs less padding, and can be more rapidly ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... risen (or descended) to anything like the minuteness and fullness of Richardson. As was before pointed out in regard to the letter-system generally, this method of treatment is exposed to special dangers, particularly those of verbosity and "overdoing"—not to mention the greater one of missing the mark. Richardson can hardly be charged with error, though he may be with excess, in regard to Pamela herself in the earlier part of the book—perhaps even not in ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... I went through that phase. We all do. But we emerge. I mean, of course, when we have anything to express. Metaphysical verbosity is a friendly refuge. But as a rule years and hard knocks drive us to directness of expression. . . . But poets must begin young. And New York is not exactly a ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... prolixity, surplusage, verbiage, periphrasis, redundance, tautology, verbosity, pleonasm, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... obvious. His phrases had the well-known ring which distinguishes the true orator. Mr. Jackson was recognised everywhere to be a fine platform speaker, but his varied excellence could not be appreciated in a summary, and he had a fine verbosity. It is sufficient to say that he concluded by asking for more cheers, which were ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham |
