"Attenuate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that the pleasures which result from the exercise of the higher faculties are to be preferred. "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied, than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." Whether it is possible to stretch, and qualify, and attenuate the conception of pleasure so as to make it cover the ideal of human life, without having it, like a soap-bubble, burst in the process, is a question foreign to the practical purpose of this book. That pleasure, as ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... and yet incomplete analysis will permit us the better to comprehend what emotions agitated the young man as he reascended the staircase of his house—of their house, Lincoln's and his—after his unexpected dispute with Boleslas Gorka. It will attenuate, at least with respect to him, the severity of simple minds. All passion, when developed in the heart, has the effect of etiolating around it the vigor of other instincts. Chapron was too fanatical a friend to be a very equitable brother. It seemed ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... innocent. Even in the present advanced state of knowledge and civilization, do we occasionally hear ranted from the pulpit denunciations of dancing, as a sinful and God-offending amusement. Such men should not be permitted to teach or preach—it is to attenuate folly and fanaticism, to circumscribe the happiness of youth, and ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... of my desire complaining sore, shall I * Bewail my parting from my fere compelld thus to fly? Flames rage within what underlies my ribs, yet hide them I * In deepest secret dreading aye the jealous hostile spy: I am grown as lean, attenuate as any pick of tooth,[FN54] * By sore estrangement, absence, ardour, ceaseless sob and sigh. Where is the eye of my beloved to see how I'm become * Like tree stripped bare of leafage left to linger and to die. They ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... sence, seeme to be Simple, are notwithstanding naturally Compounded, containing in themselves contrary qualities; and that is to say, a quality to expell, and to retaine; to incrassate, and attenuate; to rarifie, and to condense. Neither are we to wonder at it, it being understood, that in every fore-said Medicine, there is a quality to heat, and to coole; to moisten and to dry. And whatsoever Medicine ...
— Chocolate: or, An Indian Drinke • Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma |
