"Terseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... delay, and wrote the work in the inside of one month, attending to other business through the day, and lecturing on physiology sometimes in the evening. The reader will therefore not entertain an idea of elegance of language and terseness of style, such as should rule the sentences of every composition, by ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... the older "Spielmannsdichtung", or minstrel poetry, in the terseness and vigor of its language and in the lack of poetic imagery, but it is free from the coarseness and vulgar and grotesque humor of the latter. It approaches the courtly epic in its introduction of the pomp of courtly ceremonial, but this veneer of chivalry is very thin, and ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... from the Thames June 22, and made straight for Sluys. Sir Hugh Quiriel and other French officers, with over one hundred and twenty large vessels, were lying near Sluys for the purpose of disputing the English King's passage. Froissart, with his usual terseness, has graphically ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... praises, and compares to clever javelin-men, such as speak tersely, compressedly, and concisely. And Lycurgus by using his citizens from boyhood to silence taught them to perfection their brevity and terseness. For as the Celtiberians make steel of iron only after digging down deep in the soil, and carefully separating the iron ore, so Laconian oratory has no rind,[592] but by the removal of all superfluous ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... bits of almost Chaucerian vividness and terseness here and there, contrasting oddly with the chevilles—the stock phrases and epithets—elsewhere. When the tourney actually comes off and Partenopeus is supposed to be prisoner of a felon knight afar off, the two sisters and Persewis take ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... thought almost perfect) unworthy of this age of progress, then let us have his moral without his style, his matter without his form; or—that we may be sure of never falling for a moment into his besetting sins of terseness, grace, and completeness—without any form at all. If poetry, in order to be worthy of the nineteenth century, ought to be as unlike as possible to Homer or Sophocles, Virgil or Horace, Shakespeare or Spenser, Dante or Tasso, let those too-idolised names be erased henceforth from the calendar; ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... but a man of extraordinary genius would have thought of rearing in the desert such a structure as this, or creating such an oasis? The colouring of the building reminded me of Malta or Sicily, a rich mellow hue prevails; the ornaments of the Tower are so clean, so distinct, such terseness. The windows, small and few compared with modern buildings, give it the appearance of those early Florentine edifices reared when security and defence were as much an object as beauty. From every part of the ground the pile looks ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... in the Itineraries as containing rien de remarquable. The story of the Capuchin [On page 21. A Capuchin of the same stripe is in Pickle, ch. Ill. sq.] is very racy of Smollett, while the vignette of the shepherd at the beginning of Letter V. affords a first-rate illustration of his terseness. Appreciate the keen and minute observation concentrated into the pages that follow, [Especially on p. 34 to p. 40.] commencing with the shrewd and economic remarks upon smuggling, and ending with the lively description of a Boulonnais banquet, very amusing, very ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Cassidy who gave the place its name when he answered his employer's laconic telegram. Stirling, the great contractor, frequently expressed himself with forcible terseness; but when he flung the message across to his secretary as he sat one morning in his private room in an Ottawa hotel, the latter raised his eyebrows questioningly. He knew his employer in all his moods; and he was not in the least ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... Greatheart's most troublesome pilgrim was to him. In two well-chosen words John Livingstone tells us the deep impression that the laird of Knockbrex made on the men of his day. With a quite Scriptural insight and terseness of expression, Livingstone simply says that Robert Gordon was the most 'single-hearted and painful' of all the Christian men known to his widely- ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... progress, as recorded by history, or unfolded by biography, was Johnson's favourite study, and is still the main object of pursuit in the place whose system and institutions he so warmly praised, and to which he ever professed himself so deeply indebted. If the terseness of attic simplicity has been desiderated by some in the pages of Johnson, they undeniably display the depth of thought, the weight of argument, the insight into mind and morals, which are to be found in their native dignity only in the compositions of those ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... not debate," protested SHAW-LEFEVRE, sternly! "it is preaching; why cannot a man be concise? Concision, if I may coin a word, is the soul of argument. My old friend DIZZY used to say to me, 'SHAW, what I admire about LEFEVRE is his terseness. If you want a man to say in twenty minutes everything that, from his point of view, is to be spoken on a given subject, SHAW-LEFEVRE is the man.' That was, perhaps, a too flattering view to take; but there's something in it, and it makes me, perhaps naturally, impatient of a man who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various
... her father, is thrown upon her own resources. Talented and determined, she sets out to be an opera singer, but the way is long and rough and she is obliged to pay the full price before success crowns her efforts. "Little idea is conveyed in a brief outline of the terseness and vigor of the story. It is a very significant book for a variety of reasons."—Philadelphia Press. "It is a question whether among the dozens of flesh and blood people whom David Graham Phillips has created there ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... fell upon the first paragraph of the first clipping his body became suddenly tensed in the shock of unexpected discovery and amazed interest. There were six of the clippings, all from English papers, English in their terseness, brief as stock exchange reports, and equally to the point. He read ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... silence, but the Russian's terseness of speech did not last long. He felt the necessity of expressing his enthusiasm for the dreamer on the island rock of Patmos. The poet of great and mystic vision was exerting, across two thousand years, his influence over this mysterious revolutionary, ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez |
