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More "Ambiguous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mayde (quoth hee) why linger you in this ambiguous thought, Open thine eyes, no longer blinded bee, those wounding lookes, thy Louer, deere hath bought. Vnbolt thy harts strong gate of hardest steele, O let him nowe the warmth ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... Iconium is mentioned as a station by Xenophon, and by Strabo, with an ambiguous title of KwmopoliV, (Cellarius, tom. ii. p. 121.) Yet St. Paul found in that place a multitude (plhqoV) of Jews and Gentiles. under the corrupt name of Kunijah, it is described as a great city, with a river and garden, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... account to Philip (explanatory of what he, in advance of his brother's slower judgment, thought to be a necessary step), that the Fosters had for some time received anonymous letters, warning them, with distinct meaning, though in ambiguous terms, against a certain silk-manufacturer in Spitalfields, with whom they had had straightforward business dealings for many years; but to whom they had latterly advanced money. The letters hinted at the utter insolvency of this manufacturer. They had urged their correspondent to give them ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the sentences is compact, though they are too elaborately balanced and stuffed with superfluous antitheses. The language might be simpler, but it is not a mere sham aggregation of words. His written style, however faulty in other respects, is neither slipshod nor ambiguous, and passes into his conversational style by imperceptible degrees. The radical identity is intelligible, though the superficial contrast is certainly curious. We may perhaps say that his century, unfavourable to him as a writer, gave just ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... 12): "If ever I do return to England ... I will write a poem to which English Bards, etc., shall be New Milk, in comparison. Your present literary world of mountebanks stands in need of such an Avatar." Hence the somewhat ambiguous title. The word "Avatar" is not only applied ironically to George IV. as the "Messiah of Royalty," but metaphorically to the poem, which would descend in the "Capacity of Preserver" (see Sir W. Jones, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... who, when the siesta is over, pace the Calle Alcala, puffing their beloved Havanas, retailing the latest news, discussing the chances of a change of ministry, or the most recent and interesting scandalous anecdote current in that gallant metropolis. It would be wrong to infer, from his somewhat ambiguous appellation, that the student's skin had the copper hue of a Pawnee or an Osage, or his hair the ruddy tint usually deemed detrimental and unbecoming. The name implied no sneer—it was given and taken as a compliment; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... shown in the ambiguous trametes (Trametes ambigua), a white shelving fungus which occurs in the Southern States. It is shown in Fig. 16. At the upper right hand is shown the normal plant in the normal position. At the upper left hand is shown an abnormal one with the large and first formed cap also in the normal position ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... other side were engrauen, the curious Parents, ignorant of thys strange byrth, in the Temple of Apollo, before hys image, asking by Oracle the cause and ende heereof, hauing this darke aunswere. Vni gratum Mare. Alterum gratum Mari. And for thys ambiguous aunswere they were reserued ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
... his notice in Europe. Leslie did not allude to the episode of the "red woman," nor did he enter into the particulars of his previous meetings with Dexter Ralston, though he asserted his knowledge of him as a Virginian of peculiar influence and a very ambiguous position. The Superintendent showed few signs of interest in the narration, though his sharp eye occasionally glanced at the face of the principal narrator, and though he two or three times made motions with the pencil lying before him, which might have ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... is, I felt rather unaccountably towards the beautiful stranger. I did feel, as she said, "drawn towards her," but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction immensely prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the human faculties. They amount to a denial, not merely of its truth, but of its very possibility. They place it among the dreams of the past—with the fables of the Genii, or the follies of Alchemy, or the phantoms of Astrology. They intimate, in no ambiguous terms, not only that Catholicism is effete, and Christianity itself dead or dying, but that Theology of every kind, even the simplest and purest form of Theism, must speedily vanish from the earth. Admitting that the religious element was necessarily developed in the infancy ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... said the cardinal; "not the Church of Christ; it is never perplexed, never ambiguous, never contradictory. Why should it be? How could it be? The Divine persons are ever with it, strengthening and guiding it with perpetual miracles. Perplexed churches are churches made by Act of Parliament, ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... "Society" is an ambiguous term; it may mean much or nothing. Every human being—unless dwelling alone in a cave—is a member of society of one sort or another, and therefore it is well to define what is to be understood by the term "Best ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... a teaching religion, a religion which conveys to the inquiring spirit certain great and positive solutions of the problems of life. It is not silent, nor ambiguous, nor incomprehensible in its utterance. It replies to our questions with a knowledge which, though limited, is definite and sufficient. It tells us that this "order of nature, which constitutes the world's experience, is only one portion ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... his troops, or sent by him, but a band of desperate robbers, who had, for some time, infested those parts, and been a terror to the neighbouring country." To give a greater colour to his treachery, he then published an ambiguous proclamation seemingly favourable to ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... promise of God and the grace that is offered, and, on the other hand the Law, as far as the heavens are from the earth. In shaky matters many explanations are needed, but in a good matter one or two thoroughgoing explanations dissolve all objections which men think they can raise.] Ambiguous and dangerous cases produce many and various solutions. For the judgment of ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... myself an extreme Pacifist. I am against the man who first takes up the weapon. I carry my pacifism far beyond the ambiguous little group of British and foreign sentimentalists who pretend so amusingly to be socialists in the Labour Leader, whose conception of foreign policy is to give Germany now a peace that would be no more than a breathing time for a fresh outrage ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... "The savage here the settler slew," is ambiguous. Savage may be the subject, following the regular order of subject; or settler may be the subject, the order being inverted. In Latin, distinct forms would be used, and it would not matter which one ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... some conciliatory measures were adopted. The authorities at Laurel, Mississippi, were cautioned to treat negroes better, so as to prevent their leaving. There is cited the case of a negro arrested on an ambiguous charge. He was assigned to the county chain gang and put to work on the roads. At this time the treatment in the courts was being urged by negroes as a reason for leaving. This negro's case was discussed. He was sent back from the county roads alone for a shovel. He did not return; ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... temple at Heraclea, where he had her spirit called up and implored her pardon. She duly appeared, and told him that "he would soon be delivered from all his troubles after his return to Sparta"—an ambiguous way of prophesying his death, which occurred soon afterwards. She was certainly avenged in the manner ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... chariot with its slow motion of treble wheels advances obedient to the hand of the wimpled maid who from the rear directs its ambiguous progress, the dozing occupant may not always understand, but, hearing, cannot fail to be moved to tears by the simple tale of JOANNA crossed in all her depth and scope of free vigorous life by him that should have stood her friend. For the man had wedded her. Of that there can be no doubt, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 18, 1890 • Various
... under the weight of far greater issues in his determination to pass the river forts, in spite of remonstrances from his most able lieutenant, of cautious suggestions from other commanding officers, and with only the ambiguous instructions of the Navy Department to justify his action. It was not that the objections raised were trivial. They were of the most weighty and valid character, and in disregarding them Farragut showed not only the admirable insight which fastened upon the true military solution, but also the ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... council took up the thorny question of justification. Discussion was postponed for some months out of consideration for the emperor, who feared it might irritate the Protestants, and only gave his consent to it in the hope that some ambiguous form acceptable to that party, might be found. How deeply the solifidian doctrine had penetrated into the very bosom of the church was revealed by the storminess of the debate. The passions of the right reverend fathers were so excited by the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... now in all its violence and without restraint. She must conquer, or die in the attempt. Social considerations, the fixed habit of guarding and concealing the feelings, acquired in the great world, which serve as a restraint to the paroxysms of passion, and which veil in ambiguous phrases, and dilute in circumlocutions, the most violent explosion of undisciplined emotion, had no power with Pepita. She had had but little intercourse with the world, she knew no middle way; ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... was by no means over. The Duke of Longueville had during the troubles held a very ambiguous attitude, and it was evident that he and other nobles were not loyal to the court. The troops had shown signs of mutiny; the days of the League seemed likely to return. On August 29th Mazarin made certain suggestions to the Regent which testified to his foresight and determination. He was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... shoulders executed a resigned shrug. "You are always right in your calculations, my dear Harrison," he said; adding, with an ambiguous intonation, "And I suppose I am to salute in you the American scholar ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... facts—I mean, real facts—or at least grounds for suspicion, then they would certainly have tried to hide their game, in the hope of getting more (they would have made a search long ago besides). But they have no facts, not one. It is all mirage—all ambiguous. Simply a floating idea. So they try to throw me out by impudence. And perhaps, he was irritated at having no facts, and blurted it out in his vexation—or perhaps he has some plan... he seems an intelligent man. Perhaps he wanted to frighten me by pretending to know. ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... appointed them till their ears caught the clash of the steel in the distance. Unknown to the guests, he came and stood before the maiden, and, that he might not reveal his meaning to too many by bare and common speech, he composed a dark and ambiguous song ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... brethren. If we detest their system of slavery in our hearts, let us not play the hypocrite with our lips. Let us not pay so poor a compliment to their understandings as to suppose that we can deceive them into a compliance with our views of justice by ambiguous sophistry, and overcome their sinful practices and established prejudices by miserable stratagem. Let us not first do violence to our consciences by admitting their moral right to property in man, and then go to work like so many vagabond pedlers to cheat them out of it. They have a right ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... questions, he constantly speaks of Berkeley's theory as representing that "our visual sensations, or what we ultimately term visible objects, are originally mere internal feelings." The expression mere internal feelings, however, is ambiguous; for, as we have said, it might still imply that Mr Bailey viewed the theory as representing that there was an extension, or reciprocal outness of objects within the retina. But this doubt is entirely removed by a passage in the section alluded to, which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... and the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who took Him for their Messiah, were both Christians (which means Messianites): the Jews would never have invented the term to signify Jesuans, nor would the disciples have invented such an ambiguous term for themselves; had they done so, the Jews would have disputed it, as they would have done in later times if they had had fair play. The Jews of our day, I see by their newspapers, speak of Jesus ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... responsible to Commons and Senate for the management of their departments to the expenditure of a farthing. A Cabinet member who may be quizzed to-day, to-morrow, every day in the week except Sunday, on the management of affairs under him can never take refuge in ambiguous silence or behind the skirts of his chief, as secretaries delinquent have frequently taken refuge behind the spotless reputation of a too-confiding President. But the Canadian explained none of these things. He knew that these things were only ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... second act did Col. Webster Calhoun appear upon the stage. When he made his entry Major Talbot gave an audible sniff, glared at him, and seemed to freeze solid. Miss Lydia uttered a little, ambiguous squeak and crumpled her programme in her hand. For Colonel Calhoun was made up as nearly resembling Major Talbot as one pea does another. The long, thin white hair, curly at the ends, the aristocratic beak of a nose, the crumpled, wide, ravelling shirt front, ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... madness brushed me, the wild laugh Of naked nature crashed across my blood. So rank it was with earthy presences, Faun-shapes in goatish dance, young witches' eyes Slanting deep invitation, whinnying calls Ambiguous, shocks and whirlwinds of wild mirth,— They had undone me in the darkness there, But that within me, smiting through my lids Lowered to shut in the thick whirl of sense, The dumb light ached and rummaged, and with out, The soaring splendor summoned me aloud To leave the low dank ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... and considered, the more melancholy did she become. Stephen was displeased with her conduct and made no effort to conceal it, inflicting only the greater wound by his ambiguous and incisive remarks. His apparent unconcern and indifference of manner frightened her, and she saw, or she thought she saw a sudden deprivation of that esteem with which she was vain enough to presuppose he was wont to regard her. And yet he ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... and US systems that combine "continental" or "civil" code and case-precedent; constitution ambiguous on judicial review of legislative acts; has ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... this rather ambiguous answer, and recalled the uneasiness with which Egerton had first heard of his visit to Hazeldean, he thought that he was indeed near the secret which Egerton desired to conceal from him and from all,—namely, the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was no more cheerful than the front door, and, like it, partook somewhat of an ecclesiastical aspect. Arranged in a sort of frieze about the room were a series of framed scriptural texts, all of which served to remind one in no ambiguous terms of the wrath of God toward the froward-hearted and of the eternal punishment that awaits unrepentant sinners. And then, at intervals, the vindictive utterances were broken by pictures—these, too, of a ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... the door-way, which when he found, he removed the stone, and sat in the threshold, feeling if he could lay hold on any man going out with the sheep, which (the day now breaking) were beginning to issue forth to their accustomed pastures. But Ulysses, whose first artifice in giving himself that ambiguous name, had succeeded so well with the Cyclop, was not of a wit so gross to be caught by that palpable device. But casting about in his mind all the ways which he could contrive for escape (no less than all their lives depending ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the Pace; Encrease of Science, the Way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the End. And on the contrary, Metaphors, and senslesse and ambiguous words, are like Ignes Fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention, and sedition, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... danger of being wounded by sustained conflict. Who would have the courage to begin with such a one as Miss Petrie, and endeavour to prove to her that she is wrong from the beginning? A little word of half-dissent, a smile, a shrug, and an ambiguous compliment which is misunderstood, are all the forms of argument which can be used against her. Wallachia Petrie, in her heart of hearts, conceived that she had fairly discussed her great projects from year to year with indomitable ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... partisans of her present title and of her eventual succession, would soon bring matters to extremities against the present establishment. The queen, weighing all these inconveniences, which were great and urgent, was determined to keep both parties in awe, by maintaining still an ambiguous conduct; and she rather chose that the people should run the hazard of contingent events, than that she herself should visibly endanger her throne, by employing expedients, which, at best, would not bestow entire security on the nation. She gave, therefore, an evasive answer to the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... the innocent face, so innocent of anything false, he knew, or even of anything ambiguous; a face of pure womanly nature, childlike in its naturalness, although womanly in its gravity. Perhaps he drew a swift comparison between a man's chances with a face of that sort, and the counter ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... dare is both transitive and intransitive. We can say either I dare do such a thing, or I dare (challenge) such a man to do it. This, in the present tense, is unequivocally correct. In the past the double power of the word dare is ambiguous; still it is, to my mind at least, allowable. We can certainly say I dared him to accept my challenge; and we can, perhaps, say I dared venture on the expedition. In this last sentence, however, durst is ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... habitually used in a certain contrast with legal, and it is very easy to lapse into the idea that personal relations, because distinct from legal ones, are independent of law; but to say the least of it, that is an ambiguous and misleading way of describing the facts. The relations of God and man are not lawless, they are not capricious, incalculable, incapable of moral meaning; they are personal, but determined by something of universal import; in other words, they are not merely personal but ethical. ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... from the bowels of somewhere waving smeared bits of printed paper and triumphantly demanded explanation of ambiguous passages. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... and the colonel had inherited little; but his sister, Miss Agatha Musgrave, who lived with him, was a notable housekeeper. He increased his resources in a gentlemanly fashion by genealogical research, directed mostly toward the rehabilitation of ambiguous pedigrees; and for the rest, no other man could have fulfilled more gracefully the main duty of the Librarian, which was to exhibit the Association's collection of relics to hurried tourists ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... I no longer entertained any doubt of her innocence, I told her that I thought the behaviour of her friend very ambiguous. I said that, notwithstanding the pleasure I felt in seeing her, the trick played upon me by her friend was a very bad one, that it could not do otherwise than displease me greatly, because it was an insult ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Chinese, Turkish, and Western systems of law that combines aspects of a parliamentary and presidential system; constitution ambiguous on judicial review of legislative acts; has ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Massachusetts maintained her proud position with a firmness which almost perilled the stability of the confederation. A bitter altercation, between the representatives of the other colonies and the General Court, was terminated by an ambiguous concession which nevertheless ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... is set to all power by the laws of God; others from thinking that it excluded generally the influence of the secular power on what were properly spiritual matters. When the clause was laid before them, at the morning sitting of Feb. 11, it was received with an ambiguous silence; but on closer consideration, it was so evidently their only possible resource, that in the afternoon, first the Upper House of Convocation, and then the Lower, gave their consent. Then the King accepted the money-bill, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... for it at Boston, and shown itself at the due epoch in 1900, its individuality might have been considered assured; but the formidable vicegerent of the sun once more interposed, and, in 1897, swept it out of the terrestrial range of view. Hence the recognition remains ambiguous. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... Sabellianism; which authentic monument was published by Montfaucon, (t. 2, Collect Patr. p. 55.) If Patavius, Bull, and others, who censure Marcellus, had seen this confession, they would have cleared him of the imputation of Sabellianism, and expounded favorably certain ambiguous expressions which occurred in his book against the Arises, which is now lost, and was compiled against a work of Asterius the Sophist, surnamed the advocate ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... reign too that we first hear of Indian influence spreading northwards. His Empire included Nepal and Kashmir, he sent missionaries to the region of Himavanta, meaning apparently the southern slopes of the Himalayas, and to the Kambojas, an ambiguous race who were perhaps the inhabitants of Tibet or its border lands. The Hindu Kush seems to have been the limit of his dominions but tradition ascribes to this period the joint colonization of Khotan ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... at once more ambiguous in terms and more vitally important, was the determination of the boundary in the next stage westward from the St. Croix to the St. Lawrence. The British position was a difficult one to maintain. In the days of the struggle with France, ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... notes possessing all the characteristics described in the first and second sections, and that the Secretary of the Treasury would have no power to forbid their receipt. It must be confessed that the language is sufficiently ambiguous to give some plausibility to such a construction, and that it seems to derive some support from the refusal of the House of Representatives to consider an amendment reported by the Committee of Ways and Means of that House, which would substantially ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... and since it is essentially short, it should be concise, laconic, pregnant, and if possible express the contents in a word. Therefore a title that is prolix, or means nothing at all, or that is indirect or ambiguous, is bad; so is one that is false and misleading: this last may prepare for the book the same fate as that which awaits a wrongly addressed letter. The worst titles are those that are stolen, such titles that is to say that other books ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... had you for their centre. I was your slave. With you I could encounter tenfold calamity, and call it happiness. Banished from you, the world was a colourless and confused chaos. One moment of displeasure, one interval of ambiguous silence crouded my imagination with every frantic apprehension. One smile, one word of soft and soothing composition, fell upon my soul like odoriferous balm, was a dulcet and harmonious sound, that soothed my anguish into peace, that turned the tempest ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... returned in the autumn, she found that the character of her home had changed perceptibly during her absence. Brightness had followed gloom; the fog of suspense had dissolved, and the hazy sunshine of an ambiguous optimism flooded the house. What the change implied she could not immediately discover; but before the first day was over she surmised that the financial prospects of her father-in-law had improved since the spring. If she had had any doubt of ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... ambiguous words the Stadtholder moved forward, leaving the deputies covered with shame and swelling with indignation, while his countenance had speedily brightened. With more friendly gestures he now accepted the written petitions, and even listened patiently ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... this ambiguous compliment, and for a moment seemed at a loss how to take it, especially as he remarked a peculiar expression on the faces of ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... definitions can be instruments of investigation as well as of thought, but lest, as too often happens, we should waste time over trash. There are many books to which one may apply, in the sarcastic sense, the ambiguous remark said to have been made to an unfortunate author, "I will lose no time ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... thinking, from the recollection of several minute circumstances, that Clarence Hervey had endeavoured to gain an interest in her affections, and she felt that there would be great impropriety in receiving his ambiguous visits during Lady Delacour's confinement to her room. She therefore gave orders that Mr. Hervey should not in future be admitted, till her ladyship should again see company. This precaution proved totally superfluous, for Mr. Hervey never called again, during the whole course of Lady Delacour's ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... "Lucid, but ambiguous; pathetic, but amusing; poetical, but comprehensive; prosaical, but full of emphasis. That's my nature. Plain-dealing, too, is my nature, and I adore the same quality in others; most especially in those I ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... either, he thought of making what he looked upon as chance the umpire, and drew out of his pocket a piece of money, and tossing it into the air, it came down on its edge, and stuck in the clay. Though the determination answered not his wish, it was far from ambiguous, as it seemed to forbid both methods of destruction, and would have given unspeakable comfort to a mind less disordered than his was. Being thus interrupted in his purpose, he returned, and mounting his horse, rode on to London, and in a short time after shot himself. He dwelt in a house in St. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... three hundred colleges to the question whether economics was required for graduation, about 55 per cent were in the affirmative. Unfortunately the question was ambiguous, and the replies apparently were understood to mean generally that it was required in one or more curricula, not of all graduates (though in some cases the question was probably taken in the other sense). It is noteworthy that more frequently economics is required in the smaller ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... they could frame abstract notions of the powers and acts of the mind, and consider them prescinded as well from the mind or spirit itself, as from their respective objects and effects. Hence a great number of dark and ambiguous terms, presumed to stand for abstract notions, have been introduced into metaphysics and morality, and from these have grown infinite distractions and ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... recollection that she had lost a suitable husband owing to her adventure. Mr. Peter Magnus would have deposed to Mr. Pickwick's extraordinary interest in the matter of the proposal, and have added his suspicions on recalling Mr. Pickwick's ambiguous declaration that he had come down to expose a certain person—even one of his own sympathetic friends, who had witnessed the scene with Mrs. Bardell, and recalled the Boarding House incident, might murmur, "How odd that he is ever thus in pursuit of the ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... point, they certainly have done) although it is worded in a manner as little offensive to their feelings as the nature of things would admit of; and that having tried this measure, the mediators will next proceed to another, in which their sentiments in favor of the United States will be less ambiguous. ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... his sympathies, although greatly roused in her favour began to wane. She met the question with a cold stare followed by a few ambiguous words out of which he could make nothing. Had she said wretch? She did not remember. They must not be influenced by anything she might have uttered in her first grief. She was well-nigh insane at the time. ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... errors were repaired; these changes are listed at the end of the text. In ambiguous cases, the text has been left as it appears in the original book. In particular, many mismatched quotation ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... another doubtfully. The ambiguous words of the Spaniard, the something humorous and mocking which lay behind his courtly manner, put ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... to the form which belongs to abstractions but not to actual facts: abstractions, he says, are "spatial," but facts are not. This use of the word "space" is peculiar and perhaps unfortunate. Even as it is ordinarily used the word "space" is ambiguous, it may mean either the pure space with which higher mathematics is concerned, or the public space which contains the common sense things and objects and their qualities which make up the every day world, or the private space of sensible perception. When Bergson speaks ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... search for these principles in nature, or whether we must look for them in some other origin? I would reply, that our answer to this question depends upon the definition of the word, Nature, than which there is none more ambiguous and equivocal. If nature be opposed to miracles, not only the distinction betwixt vice and virtue is natural, but also every event, which has ever happened in the world, EXCEPTING THOSE MIRACLES, ON WHICH OUR RELIGION IS FOUNDED. ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... Norden was one from the south at 10.46 p.m. This looked promising. Emden, which I had inclined to on the spur of the moment, was out of court in comparison, for many reasons; not the least being that it was served by three trains between 9 p.m. and 1 a.m., so that the phrase 'night train' would be ambiguous and ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... alternative of a desperate duel. The occupations which he followed encroached, in their opinion, upon the article of Ellangowan's gentry, and he found it necessary gradually to estrange himself from their society, and sink into what was then a very ambiguous character, a gentleman farmer. In the midst of his schemes death claimed his tribute, and the scanty remains of a large property descended upon Godfrey Bertram, the ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Jews to the pig was as ambiguous as that of the heathen Syrians towards the same animal. The Greeks could not decide whether the Jews worshipped swine or abominated them. On the one hand they might not eat swine; but on the other hand they ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... out, for the wild man of Klondike had just come to town. Or, perchance, would Wall Street trim him? Wall Street had trimmed many wild men; would this be Burning Daylight's fate? Daylight grinned to himself, and gave out ambiguous interviews. It helped the game, and he grinned again, as he meditated that Wall Street would sure have to go some ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... F. L. Maitland. Napoleon took a fancy to him because he could speak Italian, and, as his own surgeon Mengeaud would not follow him into exile, requested that O'Meara might accompany him, in the Northumberland, to St. Helena. His position was an ambiguous one. He was to act as Napoleon's medical and, quoad hoc, confidential attendant, but he was not to be subservient to him or dependent on him. At St. Helena Lowe expected him to be something between an intermediary and a spy, and, for a time, O'Meara discharged both functions to the Governor's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... less ambiguous term has been applied to various diseases affecting the structures which make up the coffin joint. We consider this name to be applicable to inflammatory involvement of the third sesamoid (navicular bone), ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... specially designed to be as it is and to appear when it did, just as the clockmaker intends his clock to strike twelve at noon, though he can hardly be said to make it strike at that moment. Hence to place special creation in antagonism to evolution is really to use an ambiguous phraseology. No doubt it is not easy to find the proper phraseology. Some have employed the terms "immediate" and "mediate," to which also a certain amount of ambiguity is attached. Perhaps "direct" and ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... her hands crossed over her knees, Jacqueline seemed no longer a creature of indefinite or ambiguous purpose. On the contrary, her profile was rimmed in light, and very matter-of-fact and serious ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... members of both houses to wait upon her respecting this matter; when the lord-keeper explained their sentiments in a long speech, to which her majesty was pleased to reply after her darkest and most ambiguous manner. "As to her marriage," she said, "a silent thought might serve. She thought it had been so desired that none other trees blossom should have been minded or ever any hope of fruit had been denied them. But that if any doubted ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... The little lady and I were falling—or had just fallen—backward on the seat, and offered to the eye a somewhat ambiguous picture. The chaise was speeding at a furious pace, and with the most violent leaps and lurches, along the highway. Into this bounding receptacle Bellamy interjected his head, his pistol arm, and his pistol; and since his own horse was travelling still ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... love my enemy! what man, That had but so much spiritt as a mule, Could suffer this! Lay nice prescriptions, Ambiguous bookmen, on submissive slaves; Affright with terror of a wilfull death Those whom black murders of inhumane sin Has living damnd; Ime yet in my owne heart White as a babe, as Innocent as light From any mortall guilt; and were my soule Drawn fro this mew[119] ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... the information that begging for money on the main street is fair; number two, that the police will not bother hoboes; number three, that one can sleep in the round-house. Number four, however, is ambiguous. The north-bound trains may be no good to beat, and they may be no good to beg. Number five means that the residences are not good to beggars, and number six means that only hoboes that have been cooks can get grub from the restaurants. Number seven bothers ...
— The Road • Jack London
... for much of the ineffectiveness in business letters. Few men will take the time to decipher a proposition that is obscured by ambiguous words and involved phrases. Unless it is obviously to a man's advantage to read such a letter it is dropped into the waste basket, taking with it the message that might have found an interested prospect if it had been expressed clearly, ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... all the feuds, rivalries, managerial oppressions, intrigues, burlesque dignity, and solemn plausibilities, of that mimic world. Living thus in an atmosphere electrical, as it were, with excitement, it is no wonder that, by degrees, he became less and less sensitive with regard to that ambiguous difficulty which had hitherto impeded ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... reservation that, if Bulgaria continued to stand out, the Greek Army's sphere of action could not be placed outside European Turkey. In an explanatory Note added a few days later, at the instance of the General Staff, stress was laid upon the ambiguous attitude of Bulgaria, on account of which the opinion was expressed that the Allies should be prepared to contribute forces which, combined with the Greek, would equal the united Turkish and Bulgarian forces, ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... then, the sentence above quoted from the Parki's log, may be deemed somewhat ambiguous. At the time it struck me as singular; for the poor diver's grass bag could not have contained much of any thing valuable unless, peradventure, he had concealed therein some Cleopatra pearls, feloniously abstracted from the shells brought up ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Certain ambiguous phrases made use of in connection with eclipses of ancient date may perhaps in reality have been allusions to the Red Flames; otherwise the first account of them given with anything like scientific precision seems to be due to a Captain Stannyan, who observed them at Berne during the ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... It seems that a sacrament is a sign of one thing only. For that which signifies many things is an ambiguous sign, and consequently occasions deception: this is clearly seen in equivocal words. But all deception should be removed from the Christian religion, according to Col. 2:8: "Beware lest any man cheat you by philosophy and vain ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... religious revival but the optimism and the materialism of commercial prosperity. As time went on, a severer and more intelligent criticism was brought to bear on his handiwork as a poet. It was pointed out that his constructions were loose and ambiguous, that his grammar was faulty, that his rhythm was inharmonious, and it was argued that these defects and blemishes were outward and visible signs of a lack of fineness in the man's spiritual texture; that below the sentiment and behind the rhetoric the thoughts and ideas were mean and commonplace. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... his books, printed on vellum and suitably bound, to the libraries at Blois and Fontainebleau, and such others as the King should appoint. About eight hundred volumes in the national collection represent the immediate results of this copy-tax; they are all marked with the ambiguous cypher, which might either represent the initials of the King and Queen or might indicate the names of Henri and Diane. Queen Catherine de Medici was an enthusiastic collector. When she arrived in France as a girl she brought with ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... being so ambiguous," Whitlow protested in a small voice. "Just what is this project? How does it work? Will it help us win ...
— Minor Detail • John Michael Sharkey
... ruin. How could 'the kingdom to be destroyed' possibly mean mine, the mighty realm of the powerful Croesus, the friend of the gods, the hitherto unconquered leader? Had a friend hinted at this interpretation of the ambiguous oracle, I should have derided, nay, probably caused him to be punished. For a despotic ruler is like a fiery steed; the latter endeavors to kick him who touches his wounds with intent to heal; the former punishes him who lays a hand on the weak or failing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... doing? Some one's doing, it without doubt was; from some Idea, in some single Head, it did first of all take beginning: why not from some Idea in mine?' Does Teufelsdroeckh here glance at that 'SOCIETY FOR THE CONSERVATION OF PROPERTY (Eigenthums-conservirende Gesellschaft),' of which so many ambiguous notices glide spectre-like through these inexpressible Paper-bags? 'An Institution,' hints he, 'not unsuitable to the wants of the time; as indeed such sudden extension proves: for already can the Society number, among its office-bearers or corresponding members, the highest Names, if not the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... that such inequalities should give a group of men any special advantages which were inaccessible to their fellow-countrymen. The full meaning of their complaint against the Bank was left vague and ambiguous, because the Bank itself possessed special legal privileges; and the inference was that when these privileges were withdrawn, the "Money Power" would disappear with them. The Western Democrat devoutly believed ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... interested in his departure, and in Avery's quick suicide, was so large that she several times had to repeat her lively account of the last visit he paid her. He had come in, one afternoon, and settling himself on the sofa, refused to be dislodged. As he was in one of his most ambiguous moods, she left him to himself, and ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... in a similar manner, to denote genera of which the substances vulgarly so called are single species. And it often happens, as in those instances, that the term keeps its special signification in addition to its more general one, and becomes ambiguous, that is, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... passed some messages between Tilly and the duke, and he gave always such ambiguous answers as he thought might serve to gain time; but Tilly was not to be put off with words, and drawing his army towards Saxony, sends four propositions to him to sign, and demands an immediate ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... ad calcem Cedreni, tom. ii. p. 834, whose ambiguous construction shall not tempt me to suspect that he confounded the Nestorian and Monophysite heresies,) He familiarly talks of the qualities, as I should apprehend, very foreign to the perfect Being; but his bigotry is forced to confess that they were ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... daily of a girl, for the sake of walking back in winter weather with her father, struck her as ambiguous: either a jealous foolish mother's device, or that of a weak man beating about for protection. But the woman of the positive world soon read to the contrary; helped a little by the man, no doubt. She read rather ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in such sort as 'twas never before given to any man reviling him as a disloyal and perjured traitor. The gallant, who by his two previous lessons had been taught how to value the friar's censures, listened attentively, and sought to draw him out by ambiguous answers. "Wherefore this wrath, Sir?" he began. "Have I crucified Christ?" "Ay, mark the fellow's effrontery!" retorted the friar: "list to what he says! He talks, forsooth, as if 'twere a year or so since, and his villanies ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... consult that divinity. The priests who managed the temple kept themselves well informed in regard to occurrences in distant places. Their answers were often discreet and wholesome, but not unfrequently obscure and ambiguous, and thus misleading. In early times their moral influence in the nation promoted justice and fraternal feeling. In later times they lost their reputation for honesty and impartiality. In civil wars the priests were sometimes bribed to support one ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... myself that there had been a complete misunderstanding, which I think, as it was, might have been cleared up if there had been less precipitation and more openness and further endeavours to explain what was doubtful or ambiguous, I began to turn in my mind whether something could not be done to avert the impending danger, and renew the negotiation with Peel while it was still time. Labouchere had had a conversation with Graham, ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... has had its CHRIST, its FENELONS, its HOWARDS, as well as its CALIGULAS and NEROS. Love hath been at times a manifestation as well as a principle; and the train of its glory swept far below the stars, and its brightness has fallen in mitigated and mellowed rays from the faces of men. As the ambiguous stranger-star of Bethlehem had its interpreting angel-song to the herdsmen of the plains, so loving men in all ages have given glimpses and interpretations of the love of GOD, and of the pity that is felt for the miserable and the guilty in the palace and presence-chamber ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... a woman to read the unspoken thought! Courtenay and Christobal and Tollemache need not have striven to couch their warnings in ambiguous words. Elsie could have told them all that was left unsaid at breakfast. The ship had fought her own enemies; now the human beings she had saved must defend themselves from a foe against whom the ship ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... Zeno returned ambiguous answers, which seemed to leave the question as to the legitimacy of Odovacar's rule an open one. The Senate were sharply rebuked for having acquiesced in the dethronement of Nepos, and a previous Emperor who had been sent to them from the East.[50] Odovacar was recommended ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... was allowed to consult them. The Lord Privy Seal was at last sent to him with a tardy message from the king, but too late to avail him anything. Within half an hour of his death the Earl of Dorset came to condole with his son, now Sir Thomas Cotton, bearing the somewhat ambiguous assurance that, "as his Majesty loved his father, so he would continue his love to him." Sir Robert Cotton died on the 6th May 1631, and was buried at Connington. Long afterwards it was discovered ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... hustled, of course, but not visibly nor offensively. He had the appearance of a man who had all the time there was. He was moderate in voice and gentle in manner, and we hear of a London banker paying him the somewhat ambiguous compliment of saying, "Why, you know, he is a perfect gentleman—he does not seem like an American, at all, you know!" Peabody had the rare gift of never defeating his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... let me try to make plain to myself what is the essential quality that gives to Art the power of exciting this unconscious vibration, this impersonal emotion. It has been called Beauty! An awkward word—a perpetual begging of the question; too current in use, too ambiguous altogether; now too narrow, now too wide—a word, in fact, too glib to know at all what it means. And how dangerous a word—often misleading us into slabbing with extraneous floridities what would otherwise, on its own plane, be Art! To be decorative where decoration is not suitable, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... consider is Buddhism varying through slight degrees, as the centuries pass by, in almost every book. We may call it one, or we may call it many. What is quite certain is that it is not two. And the most useful distinction to emphasize is, not the ambiguous and misleading geographical one—derived from the places where the modern copies of the MSS. are found; nor even, though that would be better, the linguistic one—but the chronological one. The use, therefore, of the inaccurate and misleading terms northern and southern ought no longer to be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... paragraph with indented first line —unambiguous paragraph with non-indented first line —ambiguous paragraph: previous line ends with blank space, but the space is not large enough to contain the first syllable of the following line —sentence break corresponds to line break: this happens randomly in ...
— A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes • Richard Sherry
... way as a bug-bear. The genius of Irish oratory stands forth in the naked majesty of untutored nature, its eye glancing wildly round on all objects, its tongue darting forked fire: the genius of Scottish eloquence is armed in all the panoply of the schools; its drawling, ambiguous dialect seconds its circumspect dialectics; from behind the vizor that guards its mouth and shadows its pent-up brows, it sees no visions but its own set purpose, its own data, and its own dogmas. It "has no figures, nor no fantasies," but "those which busy care draws ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... influence could command, was put in motion to trace her in that region: but all to no purpose: and perhaps Sir Morgan would have been satisfied (as others were) that the rumor had no foundation, but for the hints and ambiguous expressions dropped ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... D'Orsay been married he would now have been free to marry Lady Blessington. As it was, he was bound fast to her stepdaughter; and since at that time there was no divorce court in England, and since he had no reason for seeking a divorce, he was obliged to live on through many years in a most ambiguous situation. He did, however, separate himself from his childish bride; and, having done so, he openly took up his residence with Lady Blessington at Gore House. By this time, however, the companionship of the ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... clerical notabilities seated in the stalls of a theatre complacently looking on at the representation of a 'society play' degrading in plot, repulsive in detail, and in nearly every case having to do with a married woman who indulges in a lover as a matter of course,—a play full of ambiguous side hits and equivocal jests, which, if the men of the Church were staunch to their vocation, they would be the first to condemn. Why, I saw the other day, in a fairly reliable journal, that some of these excellent 'divines' ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... religious color." The pair retired then to a room where they first made each other's acquaintance. Then two bridesmen led them to the nuptial chamber where they watched over them until after the first conjugal union. This last usage was not universal, and after some experience of its ambiguous character it was abolished. The purpose was that there might be witnesses to the consummation of the marriage, not merely to the wedding ceremony. The whole proceeding was a domestic and family affair, in which ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... loud-throated War! the mountain Stream Roars in thy hearing; but thy hour of rest Is come, and thou art silent in thy age; Save when the wind sweeps by and sounds are caught Ambiguous, neither wholly thine nor theirs. 5 Oh! there is life that breathes not; Powers there are That touch each other to the quick in modes Which the gross world no sense hath to perceive, No soul to dream of. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... she had anything against Miss Thatcher and the rest of them—they just didn't have the same tastes. She thought a person ought to spend some of the time improving their minds. Although the expression was ambiguous, it served as a sort of sedative to the aching vacuity of the hours which Peter spent away from Siegel Brothers. He found himself spending as many as possible of them with Miss Havens. She had a way of making the frivolling talk of the supper table appear a warrantable substitute ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... to bear upon a matter vital to the State one-half the intelligence, zeal and sense of responsibility you will throw this evening into some ambiguous question of fleeting policy of speculative finance. Here are one hundred and eighty souls to whose correction, cure and protection the State is pledged. No one of all these lives is safe a single day. In six weeks I have saved two lives that were gone but for me. I am now sick ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... account of the powers and operations of the human mind. By this plain statement of facts, it will not be difficult to decide many celebrated, though frivolous, and merely verbal controversies, which have long amused the leisure of the schools, and which owe both their fame and their existence to the ambiguous obscurity of scholastic language. It will, for example, only require an appeal to every man's experience, to prove that we often act purely from a regard to the happiness of others, and are therefore social beings; and it is not necessary to be a consummate ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... if I was old enough I wouldn't be gittin' married," said fourteen-year-old Hiram, in a somewhat ambiguous burst of patriotism. ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... accused, harshly tried and convicted without proof—were obliged to be continually on their guard, to observe a deep reserve, the very opposite to the promptings of their genial nature, to return ambiguous answers, full, by the way, of natural wit and marvellous acuteness? It was the only course left them in their forlorn situation. They pitted their native wit against a wonderfully devised legislation, and often came off the victors. Suppose it were true, was it not natural that, under ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... great gifts for leadership. But as a party chief he was also deficient in some of the qualities which make a successful one. His doctrine of the Church had the disadvantage of an apparently intermediate and ambiguous position, refusing the broad, intelligible watchwords and reasonings of popular religionism. It was not without clearness and strength; but such a position naturally often leads to what seem over-subtle modes of argument, seemingly over-subtle because deeper and more ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... wife. The struggle was brief, for the vehemence of his enmity, triumphant, the hope of immediate emolument was sacrificed, and the rooking of the young man postponed to some future occasion. Then, subtly concealing his purpose, he nodded an ambiguous acceptance. ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... title of an English novel, reprinted by A. Hart, Philadelphia, illustrative of German life and character, and in all respects of more interest than would be predicted from its ambiguous designation. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... The ambiguous "it" appears to annoy him, for he flushes painfully, replying, "Sometimes longer. It is, a—um—uncertain," in a confused and shame-faced manner, and is luckily relieved ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... not reply to this rather ambiguous statement, but pushed back his chair and signed to McClintock to follow. They found Ruth reading to Spurlock, whose shoulders and head ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... alike devoid of dignity and sense, is to be called a speech. He talked of his "brothers in arms" and the "frankness of a soldier." The questions of the President followed each other rapidly: they were clear; but it is impossible to conceive anything more confused or worse delivered than the ambiguous and perplexed replies of Bonaparte. He talked without end of "volcanoes; secret agitations, victories, a violated constitution! "He blamed the proceedings of the 18th Fructidor, of which he was the first promoter and the most powerful ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... the hyphenated word was a compound. Within these two groups, final decisions were based on more fluid criteria such as internal consistency within an entry, or hyphenization of other words from the same source. These ambiguous ...
— A Concise Dictionary of Middle English - From A.D. 1150 To 1580 • A. L. Mayhew and Walter W. Skeat
... so that by contrast his queer red hair looked almost scarlet. But he was smiling and altogether at ease. He had made up his mind, and he saw his best policy quite plain in front of him like a white road. His best chance was to make a softened and ambiguous speech, such as would leave on the detective's mind the impression that the anarchist brotherhood was a very mild affair after all. He believed in his own literary power, his capacity for suggesting fine shades and picking perfect words. He thought that with care he could succeed, in spite ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... upon them, and made them do service in her cause, and keep alive with their breath the fast expiring embers of faith and imaginative credulity, which she so much loves and commends. Like an equivocal and ambiguous nature, the old Mother Church, as she is called, is upward fair and Christian, but downward foul and ethnic. She attacks human nature on the side of the heart, the senses, and those old instincts which Coleridge says bring back the old names. Reason and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... the Platonic tradition rather than Dante's that has moulded Michelangelo's verse. In many ways no sentiment could have been less like Dante's love for Beatrice than Michelangelo's for Vittoria Colonna. Dante's comes in early youth: Beatrice [87] is a child, with the wistful, ambiguous vision of a child, with a character still unaccentuated by the influence of outward circumstances, almost expressionless. Vittoria, on the other hand, is a woman already weary, in advanced age, of grave intellectual qualities. Dante's story is ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... not been washed out of the world forever after centuries of persecution in torrents of blood. But whatever the present state of Christendom in these matters may be, there can be no doubt of the enormous pains taken in the past to give Christian beliefs the exactest, least ambiguous statement possible. Christianity knew itself clearly for what it was in its maturity, whatever the indecisions of its childhood or the confusions of its decay. The renascent religion that one finds now, a thing active and sufficient in ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... by a hypothetical instance connected with cotton, which has not yet occurred. Cotton is not specifically mentioned in your Excellency's note, but I have seen public statements made in the United States that the attitude of his Majesty's Government with regard to cotton has been ambiguous and thereby responsible for depression in the ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... discovered by his own family, how came the mulatto, at above thirty miles' distance, to know that he was hanging in the orchard, especially as he had left Kimballton before the unfortunate man was hanged at all? These ambiguous circumstances, with the stranger's surprise and terror, made Dominicus think of raising a hue-and-cry after him as an accomplice in the murder, since a murder, it seemed, had ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of my good gifts to her, she mixed me a sweet peace-draught; of her grace she tendered this to me, to make all offences forgotten!" No, Tristan can hardly entertain a doubt of the cup's contents which the princess holds toward him with her ambiguous smile. But her right, aside from any other consideration, is recognised as indubitable to the life which she saved. We have from his own lips later what his emotions were in this moment so pregnant with fate. What ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... his auditors involuntarily met; and, if the color that gathered over the face of Elizabeth was contradicted by the cold expression of her eye, the ambiguous smile that again played about the lips of the stranger seemed equally to deny the probability of his consenting to form one of this family group. The scene was one, however, which might easily warm a heart less given to philanthropy ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... impatient to pursue her, yet dreading to have them join in the pursuit. He offered to despatch messengers in quest of her, but the chief Knight, no longer keeping silence, reproached Manfred in bitter terms for his dark and ambiguous dealing, and demanded the cause of Isabella's first absence from the castle. Manfred, casting a stern look at Jerome, implying a command of silence, pretended that on Conrad's death he had placed ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole
... admitted because he presented a letter of introduction and had intimate relations with the French Emperor; his ridicule of the volunteer movement in England, with its cry of "Riflemen, form!" was grateful to Mrs Browning's political feelings. French troops were now in Rome; their purpose was somewhat ambiguous; but Pen had fraternised with the officers on the Pincio, had learnedly discussed Chopin and Stephen Heller with them, had been assured that they did not mean to fight for the Holy Father, and had invited "ever so many of them" to come and see mamma—an invitation ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... a specific name applied to a certain kind of very hard wood. Hence, it becomes a single word compounded but without a hyphen. Either of the other forms would be ambiguous or impossible in meaning. ...
— Compound Words - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #36 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... these secrets is significant, but at the same time ambiguous. The initiate is convinced that it would be a sin to tell what he knows and also that it would be sinful for the uninitiated to listen. Plutarch speaks of the terror of those about to be initiated, and compares their state of mind to preparation for death. A special mode of life had ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... has been truly said of the numerous representations of her in art, so in life, she had the air of one curious, restless, to enter into conversation with the first comer. She had certainly the power of stimulating a very ambiguous sort of curiosity about herself. And Marius found this enigmatic point in her expression, that even after seeing her many times he could never precisely recall her features in absence. The lad of six years, looking older, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... lack of details in deeds and important papers, the lack of little words which seemed like surplusage, and which involved his clients in litigation, and often great losses! How many wills are contested from the carelessness of lawyers in the omission or shading of words, or ambiguous use ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... else was heard in these her circumstances but her complaint of Caius, as if he had not regarded what she had often told him of beforehand; which words of hers were taken in a different sense even at that time, and are now esteemed equally ambiguous by those that hear of them, and are still interpreted according to the different inclinations of people. Now some said that the words denoted that she had advised him to leave off his mad behavior and his barbarous cruelty to the ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... is ambiguous. Common sense testifies that, in very many things, every Christian must, more or less, conform to the world. Many of the world's customs are not only harmless, but salutary, beautiful, ennobling, necessary to the very being of society. We need ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... dawn's ambiguous light, Quiet pause 'tween day and night, When afar the mellow horn Chides the tardy gaited morn, And asleep is yet the gale On sea-beat mount, and rivered vale. But the morn, though sweet and fair; Sweeter is when thou art there; Hymning stars successive fade, Fairies ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Which, while it polishes the manners, veils In showy clouds the soul.—E'en thus we find Glass, o'er whose surface clear the pencil steals, Grown less transparent, tho' with colours gay, Sheds but the darken'd and ambiguous ray. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... breathes with her life. But through the music of her life, so modern, so full of a sort of whining and despair in which no great resolution or heroic notes ever come, there winds an old-world melody, softly, softly, full of the sun, full of the sea, that is always the same, mysterious, ambiguous, full of promises, at ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... aristocracy or monarchy necessarily oppressive, it might seem, he admits, as it actually seemed to Hobbes and to the French economists, that the fewer the oppressors the better, and that therefore an absolute monarchy is the best. Experience, he thinks, is 'on the surface' ambiguous. Eastern despots and Roman emperors have been the worst scourges to mankind; yet the Danes preferred a despot to an aristocracy, and are as 'well governed as any people in Europe.' In Greece, democracy, in spite of its defects, produced the most brilliant ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... has an ambiguous and temporary knowledge of names and events. He has become acquainted with certain facts that he may possibly remember; such as that the name of the French King was Louis and that his Queen was Marie Antoinette, that they ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... been very much better for geology if so loose and ambiguous a word as "contemporaneous" had been excluded from her terminology, and if, in its stead, some term expressing similarity of serial relation, and excluding the notion of time altogether, had been employed to denote correspondence in position in two ...
— Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... of this sort are almost in all cases of ambiguous interpretation. From the context of this passage it is clear, that by "idle words" we are to understand vicious words, words tending to instil into the mind unauthorised impulses, that shew in the man who speaks "a will most rank, foul ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... dislike the use of the term fire, as a constituent principle of natural bodies, because, in consequence of the use that has generally been made of that term, it includes another thing or circumstance, viz. heat, and thereby becomes ambiguous, and is in danger of misleading us. When I use the term phlogiston, as a principle in the constitution of bodies, I cannot mislead myself or others, because I use one and the same term to denote only one and the same unknown cause of certain ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... Dashed with sun and splashed with tears, Wan with revel, red with wine, This Jack-o-lanthorn life of mine. Other wiser, happier men, Take the full three-score-and-ten, Climb slow, and seek the sun. Dancing down is soon done. Golden boys, beware, beware,— The ambiguous oracles declare Loving gods for those that die Young, as old men may; but I, Quick as was my pilgrimage, Wither in mine ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the things which are ten times more at war with real duty, than any vice known by its name and distinguished by its proper character. My Lords, far from us, I will add, be that false and affected candor that is eternally in treaty with crime,—that half virtue, which, like the ambiguous animal that flies about in the twilight of a compromise between day and night, is to a just man's eye an odious and disgusting thing! There is no middle point in which the Commons of Great Britain can meet tyranny and oppression. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... "understand" is ambiguous, in so far as it may relate to the ideal content (the meaning), and at the same time to the mere perception of the word spoken (or written or touched)—e. g., when any one speaks indistinctly so that we do not "understand" him—it is advisable ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... From this ambiguous expression of the reticent woodlander's, Dr. Fitzpiers inferred that Giles disliked Miss Melbury because of some haughtiness in her bearing towards him, and had, on that account, withheld her name. The supposition did not tend to ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... what was told me by his lawyer, who looked after the case with interest and zeal. Outside of some ambiguous lines which this youth wrote to a woman before he left for Europe, lines in which the government's attorney saw a plot and a threat against the government, and which he acknowledged to be his, there wasn't anything found to accuse ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... quite sure as to that," she replied, meditatively. "You have been somewhat ambiguous, and certainly quite enigmatical in your statement. Am I to gather from what you have told me that you ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... meant to fill in details verbally. It was possible in conversation to impart a jesting turn to an adventure which would be unconvincing and ambiguous in the bald ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... passage, in the English translation mentioned in the preceding note, is incorrectly rendered, "to cross the lake of Batu"—an error probably due to ignorance on the part of the translator, of the location of Polangui, although the language of the author is not at all ambiguous. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... matter of good usage, the verb or any other part of speech should be repeated wherever its omission either makes the sentence ambiguous or gives it an ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... too—well!—theatrical; like characters from the cast of what your American theatre calls a crook melodrama. And then, if their intentions were so blessed pure and praiseworthy, what right had they to make so many ambiguous gestures?" ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... speech was perhaps somewhat ambiguous, but the man, being once released, dived into a narrow passage and disappeared. The crowd of Jews had shrunk into their shops again. Gregorios hastily concluded a bargain with Abraham, and then returned to finish his conversation with Marchetto. He ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... intimate relations with the French Emperor; his ridicule of the volunteer movement in England, with its cry of "Riflemen, form!" was grateful to Mrs Browning's political feelings. French troops were now in Rome; their purpose was somewhat ambiguous; but Pen had fraternised with the officers on the Pincio, had learnedly discussed Chopin and Stephen Heller with them, had been assured that they did not mean to fight for the Holy Father, and had invited "ever so many of them" to come and see mamma—an invitation which they ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Oxenstiern, while he lived, and after his decease, by his son and successor in his office. The Queen of Sweden was equally favourable to Grotius; but she unadvisedly took an adventurer into her confidence, and sent him, in an ambiguous character, to Paris. This disgusted Grotius: and age and infirmities now thickened upon him. He applied to the Queen for his recall. She granted it in the most flattering terms, and desired him to repair immediately to Stockholm, to receive, from her, distinguished ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... of a desperate duel. The occupations which he followed encroached, in their opinion, upon the article of Ellangowan's gentry, and he found it necessary gradually to estrange himself from their society, and sink into what was then a very ambiguous character, a gentleman farmer. In the midst of his schemes death claimed his tribute, and the scanty remains of a large property descended upon Godfrey Bertram, the present possessor, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... from the northern frontier derived increased interest from the ambiguous conduct observed by the inhabitants of that tract of country which now constitutes the state of Vermont. They had settled lands within the chartered limits of New York, under grants from the governor ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... were often obscure and ambiguous. When Croesus asked if he should make war on the Persians, the reply was, "Croesus will destroy a great empire." In fact, a great empire was destroyed, but it was that ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... one other question which Madame Faragon longed to ask; but she was almost too much afraid of her young friend to put it into words. At last she plucked up courage, and did ask her question after an ambiguous way. ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... jealousy of our friends, so much unfairness to our enemies;—such readiness to attribute to others the basest objects,—such willingness to avail ourselves of the poorest stratagems! The ends may be great, but the means are very ambiguous." ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sort are almost in all cases of ambiguous interpretation. From the context of this passage it is clear, that by "idle words" we are to understand vicious words, words tending to instil into the mind unauthorised impulses, that shew in the man who speaks "a will most ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... she had crossed it, she might still have left him pretty much as she found him—unawakened to the deeps of his own nature—if she had remained in her present ambiguous mood, half-remorseful, half indifferent. But it was precisely at this particular juncture that it pleased Fate to give a fresh twist ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... a relation who combines the functions of a lady companion and a housekeeper; but she suffered from none of the humiliations which, for the most part, weigh upon the women who are so unhappy as to be obliged to fill these ambiguous situations. Lisbeth and Valerie offered the touching spectacle of one of those friendships between women, so cordial and so improbable, that men, always too keen-tongued in Paris, forthwith slander them. The contrast between Lisbeth's dry masculine nature and Valerie's creole prettiness ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the mountain Stream Roars in thy hearing; but thy hour of rest Is come, and thou art silent in thy age; Save when the wind sweeps by and sounds are caught Ambiguous, neither wholly thine nor theirs. 5 Oh! there is life that breathes not; Powers there are That touch each other to the quick in modes Which the gross world no sense hath to perceive, No soul to dream of. What art Thou, from care Cast off—abandoned by thy rugged Sire, 10 Nor by soft Peace ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... to the girl. I respected her brave departure—I rejoiced that it was needless. Willingly I would have quieted her distress with some hopeful, ambiguous word, but that would have been trenching, as no one ever ought to trench, on the lover's sole right. So I held my tongue, watching with an amused pleasure the colour hovering to and fro over that usually impassive face. At last, at the opening of the study-door—we stood in the hall still—those ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... however, be supposed that in popular use the connotation of any word is invariable. Logicians have attempted to classify terms into Univocal (having only one meaning) and AEquivocal (or ambiguous); and no doubt some words (like 'civil,' 'natural,' 'proud,' 'liberal,' 'humorous') are more manifestly liable to ambiguous use than some others. But in truth all general terms are popularly and classically used in somewhat ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... the sentence above quoted from the Parki's log, may be deemed somewhat ambiguous. At the time it struck me as singular; for the poor diver's grass bag could not have contained much of any thing valuable unless, peradventure, he had concealed therein some Cleopatra pearls, feloniously abstracted from the shells brought ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... ceased speaking and Violetta returned his bows, she fixed her eyes, filled with apprehension, on the sorrowful features of her companions. The ambiguous language of those employed in such missions was too well known to leave much hope for the future. They all anticipated their separation on the morrow, though neither could penetrate the reason of this sudden change in the policy of the state. Interrogation was useless, for ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... deuce was she so provokingly ambiguous? And she had no intention of explaining. She simply waited ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... The Spanish Tragedy, which, though far inferior to Shakespeare's Hamlet, resembled it in many ways. This likeness has caused scholars to suspect that Kyd wrote the early Hamlet; and their suspicions are strengthened by an ambiguous and apparently punning allusion to AEsop's Kidde in the passage by Nash mentioned above. A crude and brutal German play on the subject has been discovered, which is believed by many to be a translation of Kyd's original tragedy. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... silent. He listens while he speaks, and is a hearer along with his audience. Who has not hearkened to Her infinite din? She is Truth's speaking-trumpet, the sole oracle, the true Delphi and Dodona, which kings and courtiers would do well to consult, nor will they be balked by an ambiguous answer. For through Her all revelations have been made, and just in proportion as men have consulted her oracle within, they have obtained a clear insight, and their age has been marked as an enlightened one. But as often as they ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... getting Mr. Harper to sing. After the song had been given, she came up with a smiling face to her guest, and made the ambiguous remark: ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... of its fly-blown window-panes. Here the consumption of tough macaroni or of an ambiguous frittura sufficed to transport me to the Cappello d'Oro in Venice, while my cup of coffee and a wasp-waisted cigar with a straw in it turned my greasy table-cloth into the marble top of one of the little round tables under ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... expenditure of purchase-money that I neither feel nor pretend to. He doesn't want—by what I spell out—the picture he refused at Dedborough; he may possibly want—if one reads it so—the picture on view in Bond Street; and he yet appears to make, with great emphasis, the stupid ambiguous point that these two 'articles' (the greatest of Morettos an 'article'!) haven't been 'by now' proved different: as if I engaged with him that I myself would ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... is both transitive and intransitive. We can say either I dare do such a thing, or I dare (challenge) such a man to do it. This, in the present tense, is unequivocally correct. In the past the double power of the word dare is ambiguous; still it is, to my mind at least, allowable. We can certainly say I dared him to accept my challenge; and we can, perhaps, say I dared venture on the expedition. In this last sentence, however, durst ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... which at first seemed nothing, but afterward was found an enormous privilege, as almost every matter of dispute came before them in this latter capacity. Besides, it is said that he was obscure and ambiguous in the wording of his laws, on purpose to increase the honor of his courts; for since their differences could not be adjusted by the letter, they would have to bring all their causes to the judges, who thus were in a manner masters of the laws. Of this equalization he himself ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... going to the House of God, he left all worry about the world on the outside of it, the moment he entered the porch; the drudgery of every-day life did not go with him into the pew; the prejudices of an ambiguous man troubled him not, while the disposition to "take things easy," while others bore the burden, was never ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... quite altered by the effect of his melancholy thoughts; and his resolution was now finally and irrevocably taken, of which the following ambiguous letter, which he addressed to his friend, may appear ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... Sagan Country; and strides forward direct upon Berlin: Lacy, with 15,000, has started from Silesia, we saw how, above a week later (September 29th), but at a still more furious rate of speed. Soltikof,—theoretically Soltikof, but practically Fermor, should the dim German Books be ambiguous to any studious creature,—with the Main Army (which by itself is still a 20,000 odd), moves to Frankfurt, to support the swift Expedition, and be within two marches of it. Here surely is a feasibility! Berlin, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... process by which information is acquired, converted into intelligence, and made available to policymakers. Information is raw data from any source, data that may be fragmentary, contradictory, unreliable, ambiguous, deceptive, or wrong. Intelligence is information that has been collected, integrated, evaluated, analyzed, and interpreted. Finished intelligence is the final product of the Intelligence Cycle ready to be delivered ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... on experiment to be really inconvenient, the federal government may then forbear the use of it, and have recourse to requisitions in its stead. By way of answer to this, it has been triumphantly asked, Why not in the first instance omit that ambiguous power, and rely upon the latter resource? Two solid answers may be given. The first is, that the exercise of that power, if convenient, will be preferable, because it will be more effectual; and it is impossible to prove in theory, or otherwise than by the experiment, ...
— The Federalist Papers
... the queen's expectations: the sentence against Mary was unanimously ratified by both houses, and an application was voted to obtain Elizabeth's consent to its publication and execution.[**] She gave an answer ambiguous, embarrassed; full of real artifice, and seeming irresolution. She mentioned the extreme danger to which her life was continually exposed; she declared her willingness to die, did she not foresee the great calamities ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... think not," replied Peggy, and it was not her fault if Rosetta Muriel thought the remark ambiguous. "Good night," she added hastily and turned away, fearful that a longer interview would bring her to the point of speaking her mind with a plainness hardly allowable on slight acquaintance. Like many people noted for tact and consideration, Peggy, ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... which authentic monument was published by Montfaucon, (t. 2, Collect Patr. p. 55.) If Patavius, Bull, and others, who censure Marcellus, had seen this confession, they would have cleared him of the imputation of Sabellianism, and expounded favorably certain ambiguous expressions which occurred in his book against the Arises, which is now lost, and was compiled against a work of Asterius the Sophist, surnamed the advocate of ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... speak of my creation of mankind. And here the terms of your accusation are ambiguous. I have to choose between two distinct possibilities. Do you maintain that I had no right to create men at all, that I ought to have left the senseless clay alone? Or do you only complain of the form in which I designed them? However, I shall have something ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... and had been going through the pleasing entertainment of frightening the more timid pupils by the vaguest and most ambiguous questions delivered in an impressive funereal tone; and Mliss had soared into astronomy, and was tracking the course of our spotted ball through space, and keeping time with the music of the spheres, and defining the tethered orbits ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... very much better for geology if so loose and ambiguous a word as "contemporaneous" had been excluded from her terminology, and if, in its stead, some term expressing similarity of serial relation, and excluding the notion of time altogether, had been employed to denote correspondence ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... was not even ambiguous; Pole was desired to wait till an answer could be received from England; and the emperor wrote to Renard (August 3), desiring him to lay the circumstances before the queen and his son. He could believe, he said, that the legate himself meant well, but he had not the same confidence ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... cause of my ruin. How could 'the kingdom to be destroyed' possibly mean mine, the mighty realm of the powerful Croesus, the friend of the gods, the hitherto unconquered leader? Had a friend hinted at this interpretation of the ambiguous oracle, I should have derided, nay, probably caused him to be punished. For a despotic ruler is like a fiery steed; the latter endeavors to kick him who touches his wounds with intent to heal; the former punishes him who lays a hand on the weak or failing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... reserves, but also the erection of "parsonages and rectories according to the establishment of the Church of England," to be endowed out of the lands so allotted. (Sec. 38). But, in Lord Glenelg's opinion, the subject was never submitted for the signification of the King's pleasure thereon. Certain ambiguous words, in Lord Ripon's reply to a private communication from Sir John Colborne, was the authority relied upon for the hasty and unpopular act of the retiring Governor. The legality of the act was frequently questioned, but ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... mindful of the nymph whose wanton eye Transfixed his soul and kindled amorous flames, Chloe, or Phillis, he each circling glass Wisheth her health, and joy, and equal love. Meanwhile, he smokes, and laughs at merry tale, Or pun ambiguous, or conundrum quaint. But I, whom griping Penury surrounds, And Hunger, sure attendant upon Want, With scanty offals, and small acid tiff, (Wretched repast!) my meagre corpse sustain: Then solitary walk, or doze ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... earnest and sincere in the wish for an immediate close of the war. With the hope of soon reducing Gibraltar, or of otherwise depressing England, they put forward at this time either inadmissible pretensions, or vague and ambiguous words. It therefore became an object of great importance to negotiate, if possible, a separate pacification with America. At first sight there appeared almost insuperable difficulties in the way of such a scheme. The treaty of alliance ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... kinds, but have all the same nature; the distinctive qualities of earth, and so on, are due to a modification (parinma) of the atoms. The Jainas further hold that the whole complex of things is of an ambiguous nature in so far as being existent and non-existent, permanent and non-permanent, separate and non-separate. To prove this they apply their so-called sapta-bhang-nyya ('the system of the seven paralogisms')—'May ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... the first to express it thus whole-heartedly. There had been, of course, from all time the hymning of maiden purity and innocence, but beneath such celebrations had lurked that predatory instinct which a still more modern poet has epitomised in a haunting and ambiguous phrase— ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... ebullitions of natural anger. They pledged each other in silence, and the baron, having completed a copious draught, continued working his lips and his throat, as if trying to swallow his wrath as he had done his wine. Sir Ralph, not knowing well what to make of these ambiguous signs, looked for instructions to the friar, who by significant looks and gestures seemed to advise him to follow his example and partake of the good cheer before him, without speaking till the baron should be more intelligible in his demeanour. The knight and the ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... even when presented to them, and that as a further consequence they are not to be criticised for their hesitancy in accepting the doctrine of the "Personality of God." It must be admitted that if "personality" is to be defined in the various ambiguous and contradictory ways in which we have seen it defined by advocates of Oriental "impersonality" much can be said in defense of their hesitancy. Indeed, no thinking Christian of the Occident for a moment accepts it. But if "personality" ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... to surmise what would have been the result if the action of the Federal Government in reference to the question of secession at the beginning of the rebellion, had been less ambiguous. It is enough to know, what was for many weeks so painfully realized by every Northerner in the South, that had the Southern people, by any means, been brought to understand that Federal laws were protected by sanctions, and that an attempt ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... but the Duke of York beginning his attentions at the point where his majesty discontinued them, she was soon consoled for loss of the monarch's affection by the ardour of his brother's love. But a short time after, probably foreseeing the ambiguous position in which she stood, she forsook her lover, and accepted a husband in the ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... own safety. He had a wonderful skill in grazing the edge of treason. No man understood better how to instigate others to desperate enterprises by words which, when repeated to a jury, might seem innocent, or, at worst, ambiguous. Such was his cunning that, though always plotting, though always known to be plotting, and though long malignantly watched by a vindictive government, he eluded every danger, and died in his bed, after having seen two generations ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... enough to enquire in what way I proposed to employ the treasure when I had secured it; but that question I refused to answer, hinting that, in the present position of affairs, the less they knew about my plans the better it would be for everybody concerned; and with that rather ambiguous assertion they have been obliged to remain content. The outcome of the whole affair, however, is that to-morrow we start for the Sacred Island, accompanied by a gang of thirty labourers provided with the necessary tools; so now I think I may say that, ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... disappeared. It must be acknowledged that the prodigies attributed to this period are very indifferently authenticated as compared with those reported by the pen of inspiration. [278:3] In some cases they are described in ambiguous or general terms, such as the narrators might have been expected to employ when detailing vague and uncertain rumours; and not a few of the cures now dignified with the title of miracles are of a commonplace character, such as could have been accomplished without any supernatural ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... {but} half a man, and that he may suddenly become effeminate in the waters when touched." Both parents, moved, give their assent to the words of their two-shaped son, and taint the fountain with drugs of ambiguous quality. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... told me by his lawyer, who looked after the case with interest and zeal. Outside of some ambiguous lines which this youth wrote to a woman before he left for Europe, lines in which the government's attorney saw a plot and a threat against the government, and which he acknowledged to be his, there wasn't anything found to ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... in this picture is the fair adornment of the bride. The language is in part ambiguous; and if this were the place for commenting would require a good deal of comment. But we take it as it stands in our Bible, 'The King's daughter is all glorious within'—not within her nature, but within the innermost recesses of the palace—'her clothing is of wrought gold. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... in an ambiguous expression, as he threw the sheet aside. He mused before opening the next letter. This proved to be of startling contents: a few lines scribbled informally, undated, without signature. A glance at the ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... sense of a single unitary invention, is a synonym of process, method, and operation. The term "art" is ambiguous in popular usage. In the phrase "useful arts" in the Constitution, it denotes the area of endeavor to which the patent laws apply. When the word "art" is used to specify some fragment of the useful arts, it commonly raises different notions in different ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office
... no Remedy endeavoured. She reads you, and there is a Phrase or two in this Letter which she will know came from me. If we enter into an Explanation which may tend to our future Quiet by your Means, you shall have our joint Thanks: In the mean time I am (as much as I can in this ambiguous Condition be ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... you see, my German oracle; and I consult you with so much faith, that you need not, like the oracles of old, return ambiguous answers; especially as you have this advantage over them, too, that I only consult you about past end present, but not about what ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... may be taken to task for rendering lisiere "fringes," but the actual English equivalent "list" is not only ambiguous, not only too homely in its specific connotation, but wrong in rhythm. And "selvage," escaping the first and last objections, may be thought to incur the middle one. Moreover, while both words signify a well-defined edge, lisiere has a sense—special ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... gods, I tremble to unfold 630 What you intend! great Jove is now displeas'd; And in the breast of this slain bull are crept Th' infernal powers. My fear transcends my words; Yet more will happen than I can unfold: Turn all to good, be augury vain, and Tages, Th' art's master, false!" Thus, in ambiguous terms Involving all, did Arruns darkly sing. But Figulus, more seen in heavenly mysteries, Whose like AEgyptian Memphis never had For skill in stars and tuneful planeting,[645] 640 In this sort spake: "The world's swift course ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... The elements which may become prepotent in the process, the parts of each successive field round which the associations shall chiefly turn, the possible bifurcations of suggestion, are so numerous and ambiguous as to be indeterminable before the fact. But, although we cannot work the laws of association forward, we can always work them backwards. We cannot say now what we shall find ourselves thinking of five minutes hence; but, whatever it may be, we shall then be able to trace it through ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... these vivid pictures, her eyes filled with tears; she thought she could not love him enough, and was tempted to regard her ambiguous position as a sort of tax levied by Fate on her love. Finally, invincible curiosity led her to wonder for the thousandth time what events they could be that led so tender a heart as Roger's to find his pleasure in clandestine and illicit happiness. She invented ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... from your lead, and be yourselves alive! Back to the ball-room speed your spectred host; Fools' Paradise is dull to that you lost. No treacherous powder bids conjecture quake; No stiff-starch'd stays make meddling fingers ache (Transferr'd to those ambiguous things that ape Goats in their visage, women in their shape): No damsel faints when rather closely press'd, But more caressing seems when most caress'd; Superfluous hartshorn and reviving salts; Both banished, by the ...
— English Satires • Various
... Vinci, mingling with his own fantasies the perfect words of that essay which, so wonderful was his memory, he seemed to know by heart. He found exotic fancies in the likeness between Saint John the Baptist, with his soft flesh and waving hair, and Bacchus, with his ambiguous smile. Seen through his eyes, the seashore in the Saint Anne had the airless lethargy of some damasked chapel in a Spanish nunnery, and over the landscapes brooded a wan spirit of evil that was very troubling. He loved the mysterious pictures in which the painter had sought ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... great room which Mr. Juxon had lined with well-filled shelves, they remained for hours absorbed in literary and scholastic talk. But whenever the vicar approached the subject of the squire's past life, the latter became vague and gave ambiguous answers to any direct questions addressed to him. He evidently disliked talking of himself, though he would talk about anything else that occurred to him with a fluency which Mrs. Ambrose declared ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... some members of both houses to wait upon her respecting this matter; when the lord-keeper explained their sentiments in a long speech, to which her majesty was pleased to reply after her darkest and most ambiguous manner. "As to her marriage," she said, "a silent thought might serve. She thought it had been so desired that none other trees blossom should have been minded or ever any hope of fruit had been denied them. But that if any doubted that she ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the presence of such abnormalities. They were almost afraid to pursue the ambiguous adventure. They received the impression of a heavy, stifling, breathless atmosphere, which dimmed the eyes and ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... walks of life, as canon, tradesman, partisan and public teacher, had tried his fortune, and proved himself useful in all; and who, besides dexterity and boldness, was also possessed of a thorough knowledge of the Italian language. Provided with credentials, somewhat ambiguous in their form,[6] he set out from Zurich alone; on the 11th of December, put to flight luckily two robbers, who attacked him on the plain of Brescia, and was introduced to the Doge and Council in ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... was too sincere by nature, and too strongly averse to experimenting in new fields of poetry, to attempt the affected or unique. He purposely avoided all subjects which he feared he could not treat with simplicity and clearness. So, in his shorter poems, there are few obscure or ambiguous passages, little that is not easy of comprehension. His subjects themselves tend to prevent ambiguity or obscurity. For he wrote of men and women as he saw them about him, of their joys and sorrows, their trials, their ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... full of abortive, ambiguous beings, fit for nothing. The average woman always seem to me to ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... penances, these self-denying ordinances, I could never learn;[2] they certainly argue no defect of the conscientious principle. A little excess in that article is not undesirable in youth, to make allowance for the inevitable waste which comes in maturer years. But in the less ambiguous line of duty, in those directions of the moral feelings which cannot be mistaken or depreciated, I will relate what took place in the year 1785, when Mr. Perry, the steward, died. I must be pardoned for taking my instances from my own times. Indeed, the vividness of my recollections, while I ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... that Marx and Engels, in this early pronunciamento, were purposely ambiguous in their language. For example, they demand "the extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state." This is plainly a conservatively capitalistic or a revolutionary Socialist measure entirely according ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... is wont to rise, he who was noonday Sayer and midnight Snorer should couch below, while the Hearer should circle above,—plainly a wise provision, that the good things of Providence might not be wasted. Both Damon and Pythias agreed, that, for once at least, the oracle was not ambiguous. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the Pace; Encrease of Science, the Way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the End. And on the contrary, Metaphors, and senslesse and ambiguous words, are like Ignes Fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... to be imputed to him, or the weakenesse of the Art, but their owne negligence or ignorance, who haue not exactly obserued such directions, and in that manner they were deliuered: or mistooke his meaning, which is commonly deliuered in[l] ambiguous tearmes, such as will admit a double construction: and herein appeareth the lamentable and woefull blindnesse of man, who is contented to swallow vp, and excuse many of his lies by one truth fore-told; which hath casually come to passe, whereas ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... its previous recognition even by Protestant states. Saxony had actually acknowledged this right of the Emperor; and it now became evident how deeply this court had injured the Protestant cause by its dependence on the House of Austria. But though the meaning of the religious treaty was really ambiguous, as a century of religious disputes sufficiently proved, yet for the Emperor, who must be either a Protestant or a Roman Catholic, and therefore an interested party, to assume the right of deciding between the disputants, was clearly a violation of an essential article of the pacification. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... wasn't that she had anything against Miss Thatcher and the rest of them—they just didn't have the same tastes. She thought a person ought to spend some of the time improving their minds. Although the expression was ambiguous, it served as a sort of sedative to the aching vacuity of the hours which Peter spent away from Siegel Brothers. He found himself spending as many as possible of them with Miss Havens. She had a way of making the frivolling talk of the supper table appear a warrantable ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... of Julian Avenel, engaged in a variety of feuds, and a party to almost every dark and mysterious transaction which was on foot in that wild and military frontier, required all these precautions for his security. His own ambiguous and doubtful course of policy had increased these dangers; for as he made professions to both parties in the state, and occasionally united more actively with either the one or the other, as chanced best to serve his immediate purpose, he could not be said to have either firm allies ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... thing one day and forgot it the next, and instead of that clearness of intellect for which he had credit, nothing could be more puzzled and confused than he was; that nothing could absolve him from the suspicion of duplicity and insincerity but the conviction that his ambiguous conduct on various occasions arose from a confusion of ideas. On the other hand, Lord Bathurst told my father that he thought they (Huskisson and his friends) were too much disposed to act together as a party in the Cabinet; and it is clear that the Duke thought ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... distress, and had pity upon her beyond speech. Pity, and at the same time a bewildered fear of this explosive engine in his arms, whose works he did not understand, and yet had been tampering with. There arose from before him the curtains of boyhood, and he saw for the first time the ambiguous face of woman as she is. In vain he looked back over the interview; he saw not where he had offended. It seemed unprovoked, a wilful convulsion of brute nature. . ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mole Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw In hillocks; the swift stag from underground Bore up his branching head; scarce from his mould Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheaved His vastness; fleeced the flocks and bleating rose As plants; ambiguous between sea and land, The river-horse and scaly crocodile. At once came forth whatever creeps the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... What then was the best way to induce reluctant or wavering minds, and these, I supposed, were the majority, to give in their adhesion to the new symbol? how had the Arians drawn up their creeds? Was it not on the principle of using vague ambiguous language, which to the subscribers would seem to bear a Catholic sense, but which, when worked out in the long run, would prove to be heterodox? Accordingly, there was great antecedent probability, that, fierce as the Articles might look ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... David, or of Moses, as for instance that "God will circumcise the heart," enables us to judge of their spirit. If all their other expressions were ambiguous, and left us in doubt whether they were philosophers or Christians, one saying of this kind would in fact determine all the rest, as one sentence of Epictetus decides the meaning of all the rest to be the opposite. So far ambiguity exists, ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... was solemnly burnt in the presence of the king, the queen, the court, and the mob. "What if 'twas my tale to Frei Jose that led to Dom Diego's arrest! But no, that were surely evidence too trivial, and ambiguous at the best." And he put the painful suspicion aside and hastened to shut himself up in his study, sending down an excuse to his mother and brother by Pedro, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... indebted to J.B. for a complete solution of the question respecting this ambiguous book. Bewildered by the frequent reference to it by nearly cotemporaneous writers, I had apprehended it certain, that it had been a printed, if not a published work; and that even a second edition had altered the title of the first. It is now ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... put an antic disposition on,— That you, at such times seeing me, never shall, With arms encumber'd thus, or this head-shake, Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase, As 'Well, well, we know'; or 'We could, an if we would';— Or 'If we list to speak'; or 'There be, an if they might';— Or such ambiguous giving out, to note That you know aught of me:—this is not to do, So grace and mercy at your most need help ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... was that his sympathies, although greatly roused in her favour began to wane. She met the question with a cold stare followed by a few ambiguous words out of which he could make nothing. Had she said wretch? She did not remember. They must not be influenced by anything she might have uttered in her first grief. She was well-nigh insane at the time. But of one thing they might ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... before him in so terribly clear a light! Now that the day for his final demolishment had arrived, the necessity that he should be demolished—finished away at once, out of sight and out of mind—had not been softened, or, as it were, half hidden, by any ambiguous phrase. "You have had your cake, and eaten it—eaten it greedily. Is not that sufficient for you? Would you eat your cake twice? Would you have a succession of cakes? No, my friend; there is no succession ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... in this connection, that the higher the rank of the groups the more definite their limitation, or, in other terms, the fewer the ambiguous or doubtful forms, that genera are more strictly limited than species tribes than genera, orders than tribes, etc. We are not convinced of this Often where it has appeared to be so, advancing discovery has brought intermediate forms to light, perplexing ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... just so; oh, just so, of course." His tone was not in the least ironical, but a little hurried, as though, having put the thing in a way that might sound ambiguous, he hastened to prevent any possible misapprehension. May had looked for a twinkle in his eye, but his eye was guilty of no ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... revealed—a piece of conduct she had once felt to be indefensible. The ingenious Ethelberta, much more prone than the majority of women to theorize on conduct, felt the need of some soothing defence of the actions involved in any ambiguous course before finally ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Province of Quebec, in 1892, the Municipal and School Franchise was conferred on widows and spinsters on the same terms as on men. The law relating to the right of women to sit on the School Board was ambiguous, so a petition was presented that they be declared eligible. The response to this was an amendment excluding women. In Montreal, under the old charter, only widows and spinsters who owned property had ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... unknown to me. "I may be a stranger to the grounds of your belief. Pleyel loaded me with indecent and virulent invectives, but he withheld from me the facts that generated his suspicions. Events took place last night of which some of the circumstances were of an ambiguous nature. I conceived that these might possibly have fallen under his cognizance, and that, viewed through the mists of prejudice and passion, they supplied a pretense for his conduct, but believed that your more unbiased judgment would estimate them at their just value. Perhaps ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... your duty requires you to do in executing the latter clause of the Seventh Section of "An Act in relation to the payment of the principal and interest of the State debt," approved Feb'y 22, 1859, we reply that said last clause of said section is certainly indefinite, general, and ambiguous in its description of the bonds to be issued by you; giving no time at which the bonds are to be made payable, no place at which either principal or interest are to be paid, and no rate of interest which the bonds are to bear; nor any other description except that they are to be coupon bonds, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... dint of helping one another, of pushing and crowding in, will, in the end, be master of all. You may say that I am not in the crowd. Very true. I willingly shake hands with the workmen who work for me, and who earn their living worthily; but I do not shake hands with these ambiguous personages in yellow kids, who have no title but their impudence, and no means of living but their ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... any qualms about my qualifications to judge, apart from any dread of the consequences to myself, of absolving you, there is my sense of duty to Rome. Here are these cursed ambiguous oracles hinting some harm to Rome, mentioning fire and the Temple of Vesta and the Palladium. Perhaps what they mean is just the possible wrath of Vesta at an unworthy ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... the revolt of Eyville or Vescy was the ambiguous attitude of Earl Gilbert of Gloucester. Roger Mortimer was once more intriguing against him, and striving to upset the Kenilworth compromise. After a violent scene between the two enemies in the parliament at Bury, Gloucester withdrew to the march of Wales, where he ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... spectacles, while her father was trying, in ambiguous phrases, to explain to her too-practical brother-in-law that it might be as well not to say anything about Bold before her, and then retreated. Nothing had been explained to her about Bold and the hospital; but, with a ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... a sleepless dragon, was to the Greeks the natural apple. Hence we find Aristotle maintaining that the State is a natural product, because it is evolved out of social relations which exist by nature. Nature indeed was a highly ambiguous term to the Greeks no less than to ourselves, but in the sense with which we are now concerned, the nature of anything was defined by the Peripatetics as 'the end of its becoming.' Another definition of theirs puts the matter still more clearly. 'What each thing is when its ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... wouldn't have been restrained from the endeavour to sound him personally by those superior reflections, more conceivable on a man's part than on a woman's, which in my case had served as a deterrent. It wasn't however, I hasten to add, that my case, in spite of this invidious comparison, wasn't ambiguous enough. At the thought that Vereker was perhaps at that moment dying there rolled over me a wave of anguish—a poignant sense of how inconsistently I still depended on him. A delicacy that it was my one compensation to suffer to rule me had left the Alps and the Apennines between ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... are widely different from each other in almost everything else. It is important, therefore, to mark the radical difference between their respective systems, since it is apt to be concealed or disguised by the ambiguous use of the same phraseology by both. The one party may be described as the disciples of a Faith-Philosophy of Reason, the other of a Faith-Philosophy of Revelation: the former resolving all our knowledge ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... stool, her hands crossed over her knees, Jacqueline seemed no longer a creature of indefinite or ambiguous purpose. On the contrary, her profile was rimmed in light, and very matter-of-fact and serious ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... sense is so far from being identical with equality, that many of those who have been foremost in its defense have been members of aristocracies and holders of slaves. To accuse them of inconsistency is to be misled by the ambiguous meaning of a word. They fought for rights which they believed to be their own; they denied that the rights of all men were identical. During the eighteenth century in France, certain bodies, such as the clergy and the Parliament ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... there is no trusting to leagues, even though they were made with all the pomp of the most sacred ceremonies; on the contrary, they are on this account the sooner broken, some slight pretence being found in the words of the treaties, which are purposely couched in such ambiguous terms that they can never be so strictly bound but they will always find some loophole to escape at, and thus they break both their leagues and their faith; and this is done with such impudence, that those very men who value themselves on having suggested these expedients to ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... of exiling the Acadians,] it was agreed that a proclamation should be issued at the different settlements, requiring the attendance of the people at the respective posts on the same day; which proclamation should be so ambiguous in its nature that the object for which they were to assemble could not be discerned, and so peremptory in its terms as to ensure implicit obedience. This instrument, having been drafted and approved, was distributed according to the original plan. That which was addressed to the people ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... course, to certain inequalities in the distribution of wealth; but they fiercely resented the idea that such inequalities should give a group of men any special advantages which were inaccessible to their fellow-countrymen. The full meaning of their complaint against the Bank was left vague and ambiguous, because the Bank itself possessed special legal privileges; and the inference was that when these privileges were withdrawn, the "Money Power" would disappear with them. The Western Democrat devoutly believed that an approximately equal ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... her, to read what he might say, and to answer him. He then gave her various reasons why she should see him, pleading, among other things, in language which she could understand, though the words were purposely as ambiguous as they could be made, that he had possessed and did possess the power of doing her a grievous injury, and that he had abstained, and—hoped that he might be able to abstain for the future. She knew that the words contained no threat—that taken literally ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... of Virginia, and when she returned in the autumn, she found that the character of her home had changed perceptibly during her absence. Brightness had followed gloom; the fog of suspense had dissolved, and the hazy sunshine of an ambiguous optimism flooded the house. What the change implied she could not immediately discover; but before the first day was over she surmised that the financial prospects of her father-in-law had improved since the spring. If she had had any doubt of his rising fortunes, the sight of the diminished ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... have I had what I should call an inside acquaintance with that dusty but attractive class of people who go about on the high-roads drunk but enfamille (so redeeming the minor lapse), in the summertime, with a perambulator, lavender to sell, sun-brown children, a smell, and ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination. Navvies, farm-labourers, sailormen and stokers, all such as sit in 1834 beer-houses, are beyond me also, and I suppose must remain so now for ever. My intercourse with the ducal rank too has been negligible; I ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... was still undiminished, I was none the nearer to a meal. At no great distance my cabman's eating-house stood, at the tail of a muddy cab-rank, on the shores of a wide thoroughfare of mud, offering (to fancy) a lace of ambiguous invitation. I might be received, I might once more fill my belly there; on the other hand, it was perhaps this day the bolt was destined to fall, and I might be expelled instead, with vulgar hubbub. It was policy to make the attempt, and I knew it was policy; but I had already, in the course of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... compiling such a list would at once drag in The Odyssey and The Psalms, and run hastily on to Sir Thomas Browne and Charles Lamb, we are instinctively conscious that when it reaches, with its arbitrary divining rod, our own unlucky age, it will skip quite lightly over Thackeray; wave an ambiguous hand in the direction of Meredith, and sit solemnly down to make elaborate mention of all the published works of Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy and ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... laws also need revision. Those sections relating to persons residing within the limits of the United States in 1795 and 1798 have now only a historical interest. Section 2172, recognizing the citizenship of the children of naturalized parents, is ambiguous in its terms and partly obsolete. There are special provisions of law favoring the naturalization of those who serve in the Army or in merchant vessels, while no similar privileges are granted those who serve in the Navy or the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... This ambiguous position which Erasmus still occupied, also in things of the mind, appears still more clearly from the report which he sent to his new friend, the Frisian John Sixtin, a Latin poet like himself, of another disputation with Colet, at a repast, probably in the hall of Magdalen College, ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... principally to this, that when a new Law is agreed to pass, the great Council generally appoint such amongst them as are Lawyers by Profession, to word it, or (as we say) to draw it up, who always, in Order to promote the Business of their own Profession, contrive it in ambiguous Terms; so that there is a double Meaning runs thro' every Sentence. This furnishes eternal Matter of Dispute betwixt Party and Party, and at the same time gives the Caja (for so they call a Judge) a Power of putting what Construction he pleases upon the ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... up, endeavoring to discover through the mysterious mask, and this ambiguous language, the name of her companion, who expressed herself with such familiarity and freedom; then, suddenly, wearied by a curiosity which wounded every feeling of pride in her nature, she said, "You are ignorant, perhaps, that royal personages are never spoken ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... up a handful of the soil and called attention to its goodness; and they also directly connected themselves in a positive manner with the Hochelagans by the dates and circumstances indicated in their remarks as above interpreted. The use of the term "Algonquin" concerning them is very ambiguous and as they were merged among Algonquin tribes they were no doubt accustomed to use that language. Their Huron-Iroquois name, the fact that they were put forward to interpret to the Iroquois in Champlain's first excursion; and that a portion of them had joined ...
— Hochelagans and Mohawks • W. D. Lighthall
... hundreds and hundreds of yards long and entirely paved with stone, were a number of Chinese dead—men of some resolution, who had met the charge in the open and died like soldiers. That, indeed, had been our own experience. Even with the ambiguous orders which must have been given in every command ranged against us, there were always men who could not be restrained, but charged right up to our bayonets.... Now as I ran forward firing was going on just as heavily, and the ugly rush and swish of bullets filled the air ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... profound disappointment? Sympathy such as John Benham had never awakened overflowed from her heart, and she was conscious suddenly of some deep intuitive understanding of Vetch's nature. All that had been alien or ambiguous became as close and true and simple as the thoughts in her own mind. What she saw in Vetch, she perceived now, was that resemblance to herself which the Judge had once turned into a jest. She discerned his point of view not ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... was ambiguous, as Madison indicated. Notably, while neutral vessels having on board merchandise neutral in property, but British in origin, were to be seized when voluntarily entering a French port, it was not clear whether they were for the same reason to be arrested when found on the high seas; and there was ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... which the woman suffragist really places confidence in are those which are provided by undefined general principles, apothegms set out in the form of axioms, formulae which are vehicles for fallacies, ambiguous abstract terms, and "question-begging" epithets. Your ordinary unsophisticated man and woman stand almost helpless against arguments ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... shoal. The student may learn what manner of fish it was (the great Eagle-ray) with whose barbed fin-spine—most primitive of spear-heads—Ulysses was slain; and again, he may learn not a little about that ναρκη {narkê}, or torpedo, to which Meno compared his master Socrates, in a somewhat ambiguous compliment. ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... pride and lust prepare." He is said to have visited a temple at Heraclea, where he had her spirit called up and implored her pardon. She duly appeared, and told him that "he would soon be delivered from all his troubles after his return to Sparta"—an ambiguous way of prophesying his death, which occurred soon afterwards. She was certainly avenged ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... Klondike had just come to town. Or, perchance, would Wall Street trim him? Wall Street had trimmed many wild men; would this be Burning Daylight's fate? Daylight grinned to himself, and gave out ambiguous interviews. It helped the game, and he grinned again, as he meditated that Wall Street would sure have to go some before it ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... the Witch's hut is given in advance of the actual descent of the personally conducted gentleman for the somewhat ambiguous reason that he was to find it not at ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
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