"Definable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... venerablest of the European nationalities, I should find a race more simple, youthful, and less sophisticated than the one I had left behind me. Yet this was my impression. We have lost immensely in some things, and what we have gained is not yet so obvious or so definable. We have lost in reverence, in homeliness, in heart and conscience,—in virtue, using the word in its proper sense. To some, the difference which I note may appear a difference in favor of the great cuteness, wideawakeness, and enterprise of the American, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... arbitrary, but it followed the plain indications written on every particle of matter. What we call brute matter is whatever is means only, not showing any individuality, or end within itself. A handful of earth is definable only by its chemical or physical properties, which do not distinguish it, but confound it with other things. By itself it is only so much phosphate or silicate, and can come to be something only in a foreign organism, a plant or an animal. In form is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated the modern; but all this explains but little; art is not a metaphysical figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the Renaissance of elements of civilization necessary for its perfection, but not existing in the mediaeval civilization of the fifteenth century; of elements of civilization which gave what the civilization ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... it is "a cross between the song of the chewink and that of dickcissel," and I shall stand by that assertion until I find good reason to disown it—should that time ever come. The opening syllabication is like dickcissel's; then follows a trill of no specially definable character. There are times when he sings with more than his wonted force, and it is then that his tune bears the strongest likeness to the eastern towhee's. But his alarm-call! It is no "chewink" at all, but almost as close a reproduction ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... colder air sighing up through narrow defiles and dark crevices touched my face as with airy fingers. A certain feeling of anxiety and insecurity began to take possession of me, though there was no definable cause for it, unless that I might be belated in getting home. With the perverse instinct of those who are lost I hastened my steps, but was impelled now and then to glance back over my shoulder, with a sensation of being pursued. But no living creature ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
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