"Pre-eminently" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... banal here to recall the truism that first-class art never reproduces its surroundings; but such banality is often justified by our human proneness to shuffle over the fact that many truisms are true. And this one is pre-eminently indisputable: that what mankind has generally agreed to accept as first-class art in any of the varied forms of fictitious narrative has never been a truthful reproduction of the artist's era. Indeed, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... justified in saying that, when I first knew him in Boston, he did not know himself. He had entirely mistaken his vocation, and was about the last man in the world to enter into trade, though pre-eminently fitted for business, if he had been properly encouraged,—the business of law certainly, and the business of statesmanship. He saw nothing of what was before him,—nothing of the field he was to occupy till the Master came,—nothing of the influence, nothing of the authority, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... rests upon the idea that one man may be more favored by Heaven than another, so it also arises pre-eminently from the separation of classes. The first men appeared closely allied, but their employments soon divided them. The hunter was the freest of all: from him was developed the warrior and the ruler. Those who tilled the field bound themselves to the soil, erected dwellings and barns to preserve ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... open to her, she is a poet. Pre-eminently she is a poet—this must be always understood. She is the greater poet, I take it, in this dawning twentieth century, because she is a scientist; not in spite of being a scientist as some would hold. How shall I describe her? Perhaps as a George Eliot, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... honouring his adversary with a formal denial, he exhibited, as if by accident, that peculiarly Russian object—an enormous fist, clenched, muscular, and covered with red hairs! The sight of this pre-eminently national attribute was enough to convince anybody, without words, that it was a serious matter for those who should happen to come ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... interdependences of the sexes and the age groups, husband and wife, children and parents, most nearly realizes this description of society. In so far as the organization of society is predetermined by inherited or constitutional differences, as is the case pre-eminently in the so-called animal societies, competition ceases and the relations of its component individuals become, so to speak, internal, and a permanent part of the structure of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... devout, or more constant to the service of its gods, than were the Egyptians; and hence, being superstitious, they were pre-eminently under the control of priests, as the people were in India. We see, chiefly in India and Egypt, the power of caste,—tyrannical, exclusive, and pretentious,—and powerful in proportion to the belief in a future state. Take away the belief in future existence and future rewards ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... of praise peculiarly characteristic of their highly endowed nature. They say of such and such, Ha una phisonomia simpatica,—"He has a sympathetic expression"; and this is praise enough. This may be pre-eminently said of that of Pius IX. He looks, indeed, as if nothing human could be foreign to him. Such alone are the ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... free towns of the Netherlands and of Germany appear to have been full of this unfashionable literature: the Carolingian cycle had become democratic. And, inasmuch as it was literature no longer for knights and courtiers, but for artizans and shopkeepers, it went, of course, to the pre-eminently democratic country of the Middle Ages—Italy. This was at a time when Italian was not yet a recognized language, and when the men and women who talked in Tuscan, Lombard, or Venetian dialects, wrote in Latin and in French; and while Francesca and Paolo read the story ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... it feel to be a person considered pre-eminently suitable to minister to a mind diseased? Doesn't it give you a sense of being, as it were, rice pudding, or Brand's essence, or Maltine; something essentially safe and wholesome? You should have heard how Sir Deryck ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... not a success amid the toil and moil of business, he shines out pre-eminently on such occasions as these. His handsome face and fine society breeding render him not only a favorite, but a great attraction. Not a girl but is honored by his smile, and the elder ladies give him that charming indulgence which is incense to his vanity. Eugene Grandon is too thoroughly ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... may be seen that the ancient tithingman was pre-eminently a general snook, to use an old and expressive word,—an informer, both in and out of meeting,—a very necessary, but somewhat odious, and certainly at times very absurd officer. He was in a degree a ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... will excuse my abruptness; but I judge you from your appearance to be pre-eminently a man of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... modes of thought which we were in danger of overlooking. It has compelled us to consider the psychological bases of personality, and to lay more stress upon the power of the will and individual choice in the determining of character and destiny. It is pre-eminently {117} a philosophy of action, and it emphasises an aspect of life which intellectualism was prone to neglect—the function of personal endeavour and initiative in the making of the world. It postulates the reality of a living God who invites our co-operation, and it encourages ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Templars were not alchemists, they had no scientific pretensions, and their secret, so far as it can be ascertained, was a religious secret of an anti-Christian kind. The Rosicrucians, on the other hand, were pre-eminently a learned society and they were also a ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... human being, a cold, relentless egotist, it is true, using men for his own ends, terrible and even treacherous in his reprisals, swift as a panther and as cruel where his anger was aroused, yet with certain elements of greatness: a splendid soldier, an unrivalled administrator, a man pre-eminently just, if merciless ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... the actress now entered was that of the final catastrophe, wherein all her remarkable powers of voice and art were pre-eminently called forth. The house hung on every word with breathless worship; but the eyes of Viola sought only those of one calm and unmoved spectator; she exerted herself as if inspired. Zanoni listened, and observed ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... pre-eminently useful, which enables it rightly and fully to perform the functions appointed to it by its Creator. Therefore, that we may determine what is chiefly useful to man, it is necessary first to determine the ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... seems to us, is pre-eminently R.G. Latham, in his treatment of Ethnology. Happy the man who has any such philosophic interest in Human Races, that he can ever care to hear again of the subject, after perusing Mr. Latham's various volumes on "Descriptive Ethnology." We wonder that the whole English reading public; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... a more distinct philosophy of life than Browning. Indeed he has as much a right to a place among the philosophers, as Plato has to one among the poets. Browning is a seer, and pre-eminently a mystic; and it is especially interesting as in the case of Plato and St Paul, to encounter this latter quality as a dominating characteristic of the mind of so keen and logical a dialectician. We see at once that the main position of Browning's belief is identical ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... intimations of the care with which Dickens worked; and there is no instance in his novels, excepting this, of a deliberate and planned departure from the method of treatment which had been pre-eminently the source of his popularity as a novelist. To rely less upon character than upon incident, and to resolve that his actors should be expressed by the story more than they should express themselves by dialogue, was for him a hazardous, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... in relation to other professions and occupations. The university graduate has no practical accomplishments. He may be an ornamental, but he is certainly not ipso facto a useful, member of society. The only thing for which he is pre-eminently fitted is to assist others, by means of extension lectures and cramming, to be his companions in misfortune. But this can hardly be designated a beneficial sphere of activity, and he is handicapped in all he undertakes by the fact that thousands of others possess the same educational ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... Lord Jesus Christ as King, sets him forth pre-eminently as The Man, going among men, eating and drinking with them, and speaking in such plain and simple terms that the "common people heard ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... owing to the absence of a common idiom, was deprived of the pleasures of intimacy. He knew no English, and Mrs. Ruck and her daughter had, as it seemed, an incurable mistrust of the beautiful tongue which, as the old man endeavoured to impress upon them, was pre-eminently the ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... optimistic determinist is shown the sheer fatuity of pretending to rejoice in that everything is just as it is—a singular compliment to the "Master Workman"—he executes a volte-face and falls back upon the plea that his doctrine is at any rate a pre-eminently practical one. Instead of vainly deploring imaginary "sins," Determinism would simply have us recognise plain facts: it would arrange for healthy hereditary influences to cradle the coming generations; it would adopt the most enlightened educational, hygienic, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... instituted apart from the social life of the community and that it must seek a simple and natural expression in the social organism itself. The Settlement movement is only one manifestation of that wider humanitarian movement which throughout Christendom, but pre-eminently in England, is endeavoring to embody itself, not in a sect, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... past which would probably have been familiar to many readers, drawings by artists who are mentioned elsewhere in this Christmas Number have been specially designed to carry out the spirit of the theme. For Christmas is pre-eminently the time for children's books. Mr. Robert Halls' painting of a baby, here called "The Heir to Fairyland"—the critic for whom all this vast amount of effort is annually expended—is seen still in the early or destructive stage, a curious foreshadowing of his attitude ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... an end to posting, no relays existing in this part of Switzerland, and I had been compelled to confide in the honesty of an unknown voiturier; a class of men who are pre-eminently subject to the long-established frailty of all who deal in horses, wines, lamp-oil, and religion. Leaving this functionary to follow with the carriage, we walked along the banks of the river, by a common-place and dirty road, among ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the table. It is evident from what we have found, that there is no colour which pre-eminently appears to be the colour of the table, or even of any one particular part of the table—it appears to be of different colours from different points of view, and there is no reason for regarding some of these as more really its colour than others. And we know that even from a given point of view ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... dawn. If this great review was interesting from one point more than another, it was from the manner in which it displayed the wonderful organising faculty of the French mind. The most trifling details no more than the largest combinations can disconcert this pre-eminently ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... affirms and regulates itself, according to the type of true dignity. Such an ideal is closely akin to the Roman type of dignitas cum auctoritate. It is more moral than intellectual, and is particularly suited to England, which is pre-eminently the country of will. But from self-respect a thousand other things are derived—such as the care of a man's person, of his language, of his manners; watchfulness over his body and over his soul; dominion over his instincts and his passions; the effort to be self-sufficient; ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rule been made expressly for our farmer-soldier, it could not more exactly have exemplified the qualities he pre-eminently possessed. He was a born "partizan," and entered at once into his dangerous duties with ardor ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... were softened away in the light of genius that transmuted everything on which it fell; while all the silent intimations which nature gave there of her primal sympathies, in the hut as fine and forceful as in the hall, showed to his excited spirit pre-eminently lovely, and chained it to the hearth, around which was read the morning ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... French revolution thrust forward a being whose path was by rivers of blood, the horrors of Santo Domingo produced one who was pre-eminently a peacemaker—TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... it a form that commended itself to the scientific and public intelligence of the day, and he won wide-spread conviction by showing with consummate skill that it was an effective formula to work with, a key which no lock refused. In a scholarly, critical, and pre-eminently fair-minded way, admitting difficulties and removing them, foreseeing objections and forestalling them, he showed that the doctrine of descent supplied a modal interpretation of how our present-day fauna and ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... professed to do so. Having seen the triumph of his principles, he was gathered to his fathers, and no doubt entered at once into full communion with that unseen power whose favour he had already so pre-eminently enjoyed. ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... himself of the opportunity presented to him, from sources exclusively his own, of laying before his readers a copy of the original draft of the Speech decided upon at a late Cabinet Council. There is a novelty about it which pre-eminently distinguishes it from all preceding orations from the throne or the woolsack, for it has a purpose, and evinces much kind consideration on the part of the Sovereign, in rendering this monody on departed Whiggism as grateful as possible to its surviving ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... united to face a foreign foe, so did the American, North and South, unite beneath the banner of Washington and hurl down the gage of battle to Britain's mighty power, and no historian has yet presumed to say which was the better soldier. Washington belongs to no section. He was truly an American, pre-eminently a patriot. The nobility of his character was his very own; the dazzling splendor of his undying fame is the brightest jewel in Columbia's crown of glory, for it was born of the dauntless valor and nurtured with ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... was exclusive of 6,000 pounds previously paid off, and of heavy disbursements made to supply food and forage for the British soldiers who were quartered in Sungei Ujong for a considerable time. Apart from this harassing debt, the expenses are pre-eminently for "establishments," the construction of roads and bridges, and pensions to Rajahs whose former sources of revenue have been interfered with or abolished. The sources of revenue are to some extent remarkable, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... his poverty, unhappiness, and discontent. Socialism is revolutionary, and the Socialists know that people who are well off are not revolutionists. For tactical reasons, therefore, the Socialists oppose and denounce thrift, co-operation, and abstinence, qualities which are found pre-eminently ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... are desert-coloured. The lion is a typical example of this, and must be almost invisible when crouched upon the sand or among desert rocks and stones. Antelopes are all more or less sandy-coloured. The camel is pre-eminently so. The Egyptian cat and the Pampas cat are sandy or earth-coloured. The Australian kangaroos are of the same tints, and the original colour of the wild horse is supposed to have been a ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... fairy's wand; if she could entertain him this evening at supper; if she were familiar with all his tastes, there would, perhaps, be sufficient reason for you to tremble for your power. But Princes are, above all, pre-eminently the slaves of habit. The King's attachment to you is like that he bears to your apartment, your furniture. You have formed yourself to his manners and habits; you know how to listen and reply to his stories; he is under no constraint with you; he has no fear of boring you. How do ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 2 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... on the sister of an Ashbourne gentleman, Mr. P—— B——. But to his drolleries. He avowed on all occasions an utter horror of ugly women. He was heard, one evening, to observe to a lady, whose person was pre-eminently plain, but who, nevertheless, had been anxiously doing her little endeavours to attract his attention, "I cannot endure an ugly woman. I'm sure I could never live with one. A man that marries an ugly woman cannot be happy." The lady observed, that "such an observation she could not permit ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 356, Saturday, February 14, 1829 • Various
... power than most men of standing alone, and of arranging his observations on life and the world in ways of his own, he had pre-eminently above all men round him, in the highest and noblest form, the spirit of a disciple. Like most human things, discipleship has its good and its evil, its strong and its poor and dangerous side; but it really has, what is much forgotten now, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... of game undoubtedly adds to the pleasure of the guests at a dinner-table; for game seems pre-eminently to be composed of such delicate limbs and tender flesh that an inapt practitioner appears to more disadvantage when mauling these pretty and favourite dishes, than larger and more robust pieces de resistance. As described ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... the earliest times "till the close of the generation contemporary with Alexander the Great." It at once occupied, and still holds, the field as the classic work on the subject as a whole, though later research has modified many of his conclusions. His methods were pre-eminently thorough, dispassionate, and judicial; but he suffers from a lack of sympathetic imagination. He died on June 18, 1871, and was buried ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... child was ill-kept, and grew up anyhow in the garden, or in the large rooms left untidy in sheer despair, amidst broken toys, uncleanliness and destruction. And when matters became too bad altogether, Christine could only throw herself upon the neck of the man she loved. She was pre-eminently an amorosa and would have sacrificed her son for his father twenty ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... all associations that it floats uncertainly upon my mind, like a flowering isle of Delos, and I am unable to say from what place, from what time—perhaps, quite simply, from which of my dreams—it comes. But it is pre-eminently as the deepest layer of my mental soil, as firm sites on which I still may build, that I regard the Meseglise and Guermantes 'ways.' It is because I used to think of certain things, of certain people, while I was roaming along them, that the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Amendment, if a State should exclude the negro from suffrage, the next step would be for the Supreme Court to declare that the act was unconstitutional, and therefore null and void. The essential and inestimable value of the Fourteenth Amendment still remains in the three other sections, and pre-eminently in ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the understanding of children, it has never been our privilege to meet with before. We are disposed to envy those young friends who are fortunate enough to number them among their literary possessions, for although pre-eminently children's books, they are yet well able to impart instruction to children of ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... there to make herself an exception to this universal rule. This is how I came to marry your mother. There was not the slightest community of thought, sentiment, or interest between us. The things I liked did not interest her; what she liked bored me; yet she was pre-eminently a sensible woman, and when she learned the real state of affairs was the first to suggest a separation, which was effected. We parted with the kindliest feelings, and, as you know, remained fast friends ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... edit it, and, with the assistance of a thoroughly competent committee, has accomplished his task. I have carefully examined it in every part, and cannot see where any improvement can be made. It is pre-eminently a United Brethren Hymn-Book, providing as it does for every phase of our characteristic church life. It combines the solidity and stateliness of the standard hymns of the ages, with the life and sprightliness of the modern gospel song. The most ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... number were there. In those days, sheep were to be found on every ridge, and along the rough bad lands far from the mountains. Now, except a few in the "breaks" of the Missouri, they occur only on the highest and most inaccessible mountains, along with the white goats, which, although pre-eminently mountain animals, were in early days sometimes found far out on ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... a fair lady's refusal with a good-natured shrug, as merely the result of a bad venture, and hope for better luck next time; but to a greater number this is impossible, especially if they are played with and deceived. Walter Gregory pre-eminently belonged to the latter class. In early life he had breathed the very atmosphere of truth, and his tendency to sincerity ever remained the best element of his character. His was one of those fine-fibred natures most susceptible to injury. Up to this time his indiscretions had only been those ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... the poet of the vie des humbles. His talent is not pre-eminently lyric, and he ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... matter, if he could see his way without other impediments. But the other impediments were there in such strength and numbers as to make him feel that it could not have been intended by Fate that he should take to himself a wife. Although those letters of his to the Daily Record had been so pre-eminently successful, he had never yet been able to earn by writing above twenty-five or thirty pounds a month. If that might be continued to him he could live upon it himself; but, even with his moderate views, it would not suffice ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... learned. They were sure that their scriptures were historical; that Jesus Christ was truly the incarnate saviour who had died and rose again for the salvation of the elect, and that being the elect it would be pre-eminently just and proper that the old Pagan form of worship should be abrogated and theirs recognized as the state religion. Thus the conflict raged until the year 381, when, under the reign of the Emperor Theodosius the ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... of its breadth of scope and originality of method. The spirit of clear flaming patriotism, of undying hope that will not in the darkest day despair, the plangent appeal to Italy for its own great sake to rouse and live, all these are found pre-eminently in the History as they are found wherever Machiavelli speaks from the heart of his heart. Of the style a foreigner may not speak. But those who are proper judges maintain that in simplicity and lucidity, vigour, and power, softness, elevation, and eloquence, the style of Machiavelli ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... pre-eminently the poet of nature; not, be it understood, of inanimate nature only, but of nature also, as it exists in our thoughts, and words, and acts of nature as it is to be found living and moving in humanity. But we cannot paint him so well as he paints himself. We well remember how, in his little ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... said, "but some are more pre-eminently evil than others. I am not finding fault with Tarnowsy as a husband. He did just what was expected of him. He did what he set out to do. He isn't to be blamed for living up to his creed. There are bad husbands in America, and bad wives. But they went into the game ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... It is pre-eminently true that a mighty intellectual and moral force does plough the channel of its thought and character through many generations. It would be well for any doubter to study the records of thoroughbreds in the animal world. The highest record ...
— Jukes-Edwards - A Study in Education and Heredity • A. E. Winship
... separation from Rome should revolve, he had gone forward to show, that in some one of the Protestant churches, more than in others, these principles had been asserted with peculiar strength, or carried through with special consistency, or associated pre-eminently with the other graces of a Christian church, such as a ritual more impressive to the heart of man, or a polity more symmetrical with the structure of English society. Once having unfolded from philosophic ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... think him pre-eminently beautiful," answered Eudora; "or they would not so often copy his statue in the sacred images of Hermes. Socrates applied Anacreon's eloquent praise of Bathyllus to him, and said he saw in his ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... found in the peasants of Cumberland, and the painter Francois Millet in the peasants of Brittany, may well have had its prototype in early Greece. And so, even before the development, by the poets, of their aweful and passionate story, Demeter and Persephone seem to have been pre-eminently the venerable, or aweful, goddesses. Demeter haunts the fields in spring, when the young lambs are dropped; she visits the barns in autumn; she takes part in mowing and binding up the corn, and ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... frustrates them, it must of necessity bring something nobler, loftier, nearer to the nature of man, for it will bring us truth. To man, though all that he value go under, the intimate truth of the universe must be wholly, pre-eminently admirable. And though on the day it unveils, our meekest desires turn to ashes and float on the wind, still there shall linger within us all we have prepared; and the admirable will enter into our soul, the volume of its waters being as the depth of the channel that our expectation ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... where his talents met with universal recognition, including that of Prince Maurice of Orange, and where he married. In the year 1652, however, he removed to Amsterdam at the instance of one of his chief patrons, the Burgomaster Tulp. Of the masters who have striven pre-eminently after truth he is, beyond all question, one of the greatest that ever lived. In order to succeed in this aim, he acquired a correctness of drawing, a kind of modelling which imparts an almost plastic effect to his animals, an extraordinary execution of detail ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... present state of the controversy with the Church of Scotland, there is peculiar reason for taking the greatest care that every minister presented to a Crown Living should be not only above exception, but should, if possible, be pre-eminently distinguished for his fitness ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... always has its dress-clothes on. In keeping with the wretched pavements, the muddy crossings, and the dust, are the clothes of the people you meet in the streets. Nobody seems to care much how they dress, and without being exactly countrified in their apparel, the Sydneyites succeed in looking pre-eminently dowdy. ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... and critical discrimination, which gave large promise of future usefulness and eminence. Before his retirement from the State Department, he commended the youthful statesman to the favorable regard of President Washington, as one pre-eminently fitted for ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... is an old Roman road to the north, but, unused for centuries, it is now a road only in name, the very trace of it being lost in many places. In this strong country men fought of old, and the defenders not infrequently held their own against odds. It is pre-eminently suitable for defence, and if the warriors of the past found that flint-tipped shafts of wood would keep the invader at bay, how much more easily could a modern army equipped with rifles of precision and machine guns adapt Nature to its advantage? ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... errors of philosophers have arisen from considering the human being in a point of view too detailed and circumscribed He is not a moral, and an intellectual,—but also, and pre-eminently, an imaginative being. His own mind is his law; his own mind is all things to him. If we would arrive at any knowledge which should be serviceable from the practical conclusions to which it leads, we ought to consider the mind ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... partake more or less largely of these qualities, or that some of them have been more abundantly possessed, more profoundly applied, by others, we believe that it would be difficult to cite an instance in which they have been so entirely combined or so continuously exercised. M. Sainte-Beuve is pre-eminently an artist in criticism. He has exhibited that self-absorption which it is easy to imagine, easy to find examples of, in poetry, in painting, and in music, but which in criticism had hitherto been hardly conceivable. "There is in him," wrote Gustave ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... China is pre-eminently an agricultural country. The great majority of its inhabitants are cultivators of the soil. The holdings are in general very small, and the methods of farming primitive. Water is abundant and irrigation common over large areas. Stock-raising, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Independence, or Individuality. A change then took place, and the Tendency to Unity began to yield, as the major or chief tendency in society, to the opposite or divergent drift toward Disunity or Individuality, which gradually came to be pre-eminently active. The Spirit of Disintegration which thus arose, has exhibited and is still exhibiting itself in Religious affairs, by the destruction of the integrality of the Church, and its division into numerous ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... life.[285] By profession, Gerrit Smith was a philanthropist, and in his young enthusiasm he joined the American Colonisation Society, organised in 1817, for the purpose of settling the western coast of Africa with emancipated blacks. It was a pre-eminently respectable association. Henry Clay was its president, and prominent men North and South, in church and in state, approved its purpose and its methods. In 1820 it purchased Sherbro Island; but finding ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... effects, of distant as well as proximate causes, and of the large, slow and permanent evolution of things. It should include, as Buckle and Macaulay saw, the social, the industrial, the intellectual life of the nation as well as mere political changes, and it should be pre-eminently marked by a true perspective dealing with subjects at a length proportioned to their real importance. All this requires a powerful and original intellect quite different from that of a mere compiler. It requires too, in a high degree, the kind of imagination ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... in the kingdom ought to be a member of this Society, for it is pre-eminently useful, and no one can tell when he ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... public opinion, that wonder is excited at the serious notice which it took of some attempts made by a few factious demagogues of creating popular commotion, and of raising themselves into an unenviable celebrity. Among this class John Horne Tooke stood pre-eminently forward. Horne Tooke was first the supporter, and then the rival of John Wilkes, but he had now completely succeeded him in the favour of a certain dubious class of patriots. This was the natural consequence of tilings. John Wilkes having been raised ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... its general sense. Beginning with a long dialogue between Reason and the Lover, he was equally anxious to display his freedom of criticism and his universality of knowledge, both scientific and anecdotical. His vein was pre-eminently satirical and abundantly allusive; and among the chief objects of his satire are the two favourite themes of medieval satire in general, religious hypocrisy (personified in "Faux-Semblant," who has been described as one ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... or the image of a centaur, this stands out so clearly that it occupies the whole foreground of consciousness, while all other impressions hide themselves in the background. This single focal state of consciousness is, therefore, pre-eminently a state of attention while the former state of reverie, on account of its diffuse character, may be said to be relatively devoid ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... scene of a play should be in one place, its whole action deal with one single series of events, and the time it represented as elapsing be no greater than the time it took in playing. He was always pre-eminently an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather than a poet's temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was essential to the spirit of the time. As a craftsman he ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... seal on the Desk, and no key to it; neither must it, in time coming, seem to have been opened, even if we could now open it. A desperate pinch, and it must be solved. Female wit and Wilhelmina did solve it, by some pre-eminently acute device of their despair; [Wilhelmina, i. 253-257.] and contrived to get the Letters out: hundreds of Letters, enough to be our death if read, says Wilhelmina. These Letters they burnt; and set to writing fast ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... from scurvy; Mrs. Porter, Mrs. Bickerdyke, and several others are deserving of mention for their untiring zeal both in these and Sherman's Georgian campaigns. Mrs. Bickerdyke has won undying renown throughout the Western armies as pre-eminently the friend of ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... a much more uninteresting animal than the hard-hided, knock-kneed Hyaena, which is pre-eminently African, although he is found in the East; having, according to the opinion of some naturalists, migrated thither in the wake of caravans. He has a ferocious, ill-natured look, yet the first impression made by his appearance can only be expressed by the word "sneaking." He is of a tawny colour, more ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... considerably more money by trade than her father had done: and perhaps the greater profusion of surroundings at her command than she had heretofore been mistress of, was not without an effect upon her. One week, two weeks, three weeks passed; and, being pre-eminently a young woman who allowed things to drift, she did nothing whatever either to disclose or conceal traces of her first marriage; or to learn if there existed possibilities—which there undoubtedly did—by which that hasty contract might become revealed to ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... that we shall have to be separated from it by many centuries before we can really judge of it. It was the problem of the elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the most self-conscious of centuries. Morris at least saw the absurdity of the thing. He felt it was monstrous that the modern man, who was pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic and the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical bathos, ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... song of love for one's kind which makes Burns, Heine, and Goethe pre-eminently the singers of the human heart when it finds itself linked to one other heart. And it is this strain which gives everlasting life to the following ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... the commander, or captain, or skipper, of this suspicious-looking schooner—a man pre-eminently fitted for the accomplishment of much good or the perpetration ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... finger-tips, she was acting with the aggressive decision of a man. Sensitive and timid beyond most women, she would not lose her happiness when it might be won in paths not only hedged about by all the proprieties of her lot, but also by a reserve and pride with which her own fine nature was pre-eminently endowed. That she loved Graydon Muir was a truth for life. If he could learn to love her from what she had sought to be, from what she simply was, he should have the chance. Her own deep experience had taught her much and given her the clew to many things. She had studied life, not only ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... thee said when out of thy mind," she exclaimed apprehensively. "I hope thee is not becoming feverish?" "Oh, no, Mrs. Yocomb, I've nothing against him at all. He is pre-eminently respectable, as the world goes. He is shrewd, wonderfully shrewd, and always makes a ten-strike in Wall Street; but his securing Miss Warren was a masterstroke. There, I'm talking slang, and disgracing myself generally." ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... readiness to be kissed. If kissing went by favor he was pre-eminently a favored one. But Lucy clutched his arm with a pretty air of ownership and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... should say to me—"But what has this to do with science? Homer's Greeks knew no science;" I should rejoin—But they had, pre-eminently above all ancient races which we know, the scientific instinct; the teachableness and modesty; the clear eye and quick ear; the hearty reverence for fact and nature, and for the human body, and mind, and spirit; for human nature in a word, in its completeness, as the ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... enlightened men of the medical profession know it and esteem it as it deserves, though its use in rheumatic affections and cutaneous diseases has hitherto received more study than in the class of maladies where its employment is perhaps the most beneficial of all—the nervous. Pre-eminently valuable is it in the treatment of delirium tremens and in every stage ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... productions ushered into the Old Continent from the New World, there are two which stand pre-eminently conspicuous from their general adoption. Unlike in their nature, both have been received as extensive blessings—the one by its nutritive powers tends to support, the other by its narcotic virtues to soothe and comfort the human frame—the potato and tobacco; ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... suffering and woe. The two actions of this piece, the sacrifice of Polyxena, and the revenge on Polymestor, on account of the murder of Polydorus, have nothing in common with each other but their connexion with Hecuba. The first half possesses great beauties of that particular kind in which Euripides is pre-eminently successful: pictures of tender youth, female innocence, and noble resignation to an early and violent death. A human sacrifice, that triumph of barbarian superstition, is represented as executed, suffered, and looked upon, with that Hellenism of feeling which so ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... is practically a compendium of the salient incidents in the evolution of professional base ball. Mr. Spalding is pre-eminently fitted to perform this service, his connection with the game having been contemporaneous with its development, as player, club ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... imagine that the vernacular of the Hinchinbrook Islanders was not pre-eminently adapted for the noble intricacies of diplomatic intrigue. In the first place it contains but few words, and none representing any number higher than five, so that even the courtly nobleman now presiding ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... And that, too, Socialism pre-eminently demands. It applies to social and economic relationships the same high rule of frankness and veracity, the same subordination of purely personal considerations to a common end that Science demands in the field of thought and knowledge. ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... had certainly acquired great skill in the manufacture, as appears both from the accounts which have been preserved by ancient authors, and by the specimens which still exist—among which we may notice, as pre-eminently beautiful, that torment of antiquaries, the Portland vase, preserved in the British Museum. We have already adverted to another vase of the same kind, and of almost equal beauty, found in one of the tombs near the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... heart there was any levity or want of sincerity. What we are about to copy merits careful consideration: first, as evincing the depth and tenderness of his love for these black savages; next, as showing that it was pre-eminently Christian love, intensified by his vivid view of the eternal world, and belief in Christ as the only Saviour; and, lastly, as revealing the secret of the affection which these poor fellows bore to him in return. ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... efficient men. Surveys and examinations are progressing throughout the arid States and Territories, plans for reclaiming works being prepared and passed upon by boards of engineers before approval by the Secretary of the Interior. In Arizona and Nevada, in localities where such work is pre-eminently needed, construction has already been begun. In other parts of the arid West various projects are well advanced towards the drawing up of contracts, these being delayed in part by necessities of reaching agreements or understanding as regards rights of way or acquisition ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... calm, luminous and dispassionate discussion of the business questions of the canvass. It is pre-eminently an educational speech which any man can hear or read with pride. Senator Sherman excels in the faculty of lucid and logical statement. His personal participation in all our fiscal legislation gives him an unequaled ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... describe. At last came a conviction which was a complete reversal of all my former ideas. I was as a man converted; I was as one who had seen a great light. Henceforth I was a social radical; and religion, pre-eminently not a testimony to theological truth but a crusade for social change. Of course, my interest in theology has persisted; but its place in my life has tended to become ever more subordinate to other and more directly practical interests. ...
— A Statement: On the Future of This Church • John Haynes Holmes
... been pre-eminently an era of the development of rapid and easy communication between distant parts of the world, particularly between Europe and Asia. So long as these two continents remained far apart the condition of Asia was unchanged and ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... the first place that to different minds the name connoted different things. To Caesar it is the general name for the non-military professional class, whether priests, seers, teachers, lawyers, or judges. To others the Druids are pre-eminently the philosophers and teachers of the Gauls, and are distinguished from the seers designated vates. To others again, such as Pliny, they were the priests of the oak-ritual, whence their name was derived. ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... gradually sprang up between the northern counties, since become pre-eminently the manufacturing districts of England; and long lines of pack-horses laden with bales of wool and cotton traversed the hill ranges which divide Yorkshire from Lancashire. Whitaker says that as late as 1753 the roads near Leeds consisted of a narrow hollow way little wider than a ditch, barely ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... no great measure of administration, no large and definite policy. He was luminous in statement rather than sagacious in judgment, an advocate rather than a judge. On the platform or in the Senate he was still pre-eminently the lawyer, in that, like a lawyer, he was the representative and exponent of established interests,—not the projector of new social adjustments. Civil law represents a vast accumulated experience and ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Etruria, she came among a people who eventually learned from the representations of Greek art a very considerable amount of Greek mythology, and who, when they heard of Athena, saw her resemblance to Minerva and began thus to associate the two. But even in this association Minerva was still pre-eminently the goddess of the artisan and the labouring man, she was the patroness of the works of man's hands rather than of the works of his mind, and as such she was brought into Rome by Etruscan and Faliscan workmen. At first she was worshipped merely by these workmen in their own houses, but by degrees ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... heroine who is combating class-prejudices, and surely she is pre-eminently noteworthy. True, she fights only for her family, and is virtually the champion of the opposing institution misplaced. That does not matter: the Fates may have done it purposely: by conquering she establishes ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... our original title deed, (and God said, man will we make in our own image.) What?—shall Christianity exclude or alienate us from those powers, acquisitions, and attainments, which Christianity is so pre-eminently calculated to elevate and ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman |
