"Intangible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... canvas like a holy spirit of beauty and blessing. Shadow and Substance—dead mother and living child—these twain gazed on each other through cloud-veils of impenetrable mystery,—nor is it impossible to conceive that some intangible contact between them might, through the transference of a thought, a longing, a prayer, have been realised at that mystic moment. With a sudden cry of irresistible emotion Maryllia stretched out her arms, and dropping on her knees, broke out ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... toil. As a matter of fact they did not make a special effort to get him through on time; the team needed him, the squad needed him, L. A. needed him. It was more like a college than a High School in those days, with its numbers and its spirit, that strong, intangible evidence of things not seen. There was something about it, a concentrated essence of Jimsy King and hundreds of lesser Jimsy Kings, which made it practically unconquerable. In the year before his final one the team reached ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... of her save as his more or less useful secretary, but after all, she could not be expected to reason out this thing too closely. Its very vagueness, indeed, lent it charm. Her love was veiled, as it were, in a most delicate, most diaphanous mist, which took from it all earthliness, and left it intangible, magical as some gift from fairyland. So far, no hint of desire had entered into it. It was all unselfish, girlish adoration, an almost childish reverence for one immeasurably her superior; and though ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... his principles of Love and Hate, nor the homoeomeriae of Anaxagoras. He also denied that the primary elements had any sensible qualities whatever. He conceived of all things as being composed of invisible, intangible, and indivisible particles or atoms, which, by reason of variation in their configuration, combination, or position, give rise to the varieties of forms: to the atom he imputed self-existence and eternal duration. His doctrine, therefore, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... say, and realized that they were still talking about Mina Raff. She wouldn't attract him, Lee Randon, in the least, he was sure of that ... no wistful April moon. What, then, did engage him? He was unable to say, he didn't know. It was something intangible, a charm without definite form; and his thoughts returned to Cytherea—if he could grasp the secret of her fascination he would be able to settle a great many disturbing feelings and needs. Yes, what she mutely expressed was what, beneath his ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... opinion was borne out by the betting market; Lucretia stood a long way down in the list. Even Diablo, bad horse as he was supposed to be, was at a shorter price; the heavy outlay of his owner, and some intangible rumors having caused the bookmakers to feel inclined to hold him close up against their chests. His work since his trial with The Dutchman had been quite satisfactory. He looked upon Westley, the jockey, as a friend, and strode along in his ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... he has never shown more originality and audacity than in the fashion in which he handled it. De la Rey's force was scattered over a long tract of country, capable of rapidly concentrating for a blow, but otherwise as intangible and elusive as a phantom army. Were Lord Kitchener simply to launch ten thousand horsemen at him, the result would be a weary ride over illimitable plains without sight of a Boer, unless it were a distant scout upon the extreme horizon. De la Rey and his men would have slipped ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... while there was yet so much to see and hear and feel in the sun-steeped ways of the wonderful Japanese city. Still, even could I revive all the lost sensations of those first experiences, I doubt if I could express and fix them in words. The first charm of Japan is intangible ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... in a vague intangible way there was an ideal in front of and behind this work. It is really not desirable for men who do not believe that knowledge is of value for its own sake to take up this kind of life. The question constantly ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... heat, of electricity or magnetism; without it there would probably be no such thing as gravitation; nay, they even hint that without this strange something, ether, there would be no such thing as matter in the universe. If these contentions of the modern physicist are justified, then this intangible ether is incomparably the most important as well as the "largest and most uniform substance or body" in the universe. Its discovery may well be looked upon as one of the most important feats of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... thou too feel this strange divorce Of will from power? The spell of night and wind, Baffling desire and dream, dost thou too find? Not distance parts us, Dear; but this dim force, Intangible, holds us helpless, hushed with pain, Dumb with the dark, blind ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... his handicap; Circumstance he had met and thought to bend to his will; and yet Circumstance had beaten him; in the end Custom was laughing in his face. Beside those intangible antagonists which had been his this personal enemy was only puny, only braggard and swaggering and cheap. But it was a bone and muscle antagonist; it was an entity—a thing upon which one might hurl oneself ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... like a crown over her brow; her eyes, of a very golden brown, held mine with a look; and her face, which was perfectly shaped, was yet marred by a cruel, sullen, and sensual expression. Something in both face and figure, something exquisitely intangible, like the echo of an echo, suggested the features and bearing of my guide; and I stood awhile, unpleasantly attracted and wondering at the oddity of the resemblance. The common, carnal stock of that race, which had ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from many tribes, who adore material things, the Pawnees simply regarded certain localities as sacred—they became so only because they were blessed by the Divine presence. Ti-ra-wa was not personified; he was as intangible as the God of the Christian. The sacred nature of the Pawnee deity extended to all animal nature —the fish that swim in the rivers, the birds that fly in the air, and all the beasts which roam over the prairie ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... in me and in her, and in my love for her and hers for me. I can't fight it in this blind, aloof way—this thing that is my rival—that stands with its claw embedded in her body warning me back! The horror of it is in the blind, intangible, abstract force that is against me. I can't fight it aloof from her; I can't take her away from it unless I have her in my arms to guard, to inspire, to comfort, to watch. Can't you see, Kathleen, that I must have her every second ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... ancestral experience are stored so that almost nothing that was ever essential in the development of the phylum is ever entirely lost. Hence suggestive as are many physical traits of our racial history, the intangible psychophysic traits must be assumed to be both far more ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the road which leads to mind. The greater size is correlated with longer life. The lessons of experience come to it over and over again, and it can and must learn them. It is the intelligent, remembering, thinking type. The insect had begun to peer into the world of invisible and intangible relations, the vertebrate will some day see them. This much is prophecied in his very structure. He must be heir ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... untutored reason, little more, as yet, than the playfellow of the imagination, led them to believe that this tangible, commonplace, orderly world of Nature was surrounded and interpenetrated by another intangible and mysterious world, no more bound by fixed rules than, as they fancied, were the thoughts and passions which coursed through their minds and seemed to exercise an intermittent and capricious rule over their bodies. They attributed to the entities, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... strange and mysterious product of all our complicated desires which have been accumulating in us for centuries but which have been turned aside from their primitive and divine object and have wandered after a mystic, imperfectly perceived and intangible beauty. There are some women like that, who blossom only for our dreams, adorned with every poetical attribute of civilization, with that ideal luxury, coquetry and esthetic charm which surround woman, a living statue that ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... lain thus a whole morning, hardly speaking a word, I began to feel growing palpable the truth which day by day I had thrust behind me as some intangible, impossible dread—that ere now people had died of mere soul-sickness, without any bodily disease. I took up his poor hand that lay on the counterpane;—once, at Enderley, he had regretted its somewhat coarse strength: now Ursula's own ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... been stricken down during the taking of a scene and on the very stage, had served to bring the tragedy home to the people. More, it was a second murder in four days, apparently by the same hand as the first. A sense of dread, a nameless, intangible fear, had taken form and found its way under the big blackened glass roofs and around and through the corridors, into the dressing rooms, and back even to the manufacturing and purely technical departments. The gateman eyed us with undisguised uneasiness ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... heedlessly along beside him, stopping now and then to gather a spray of goldenrod, or to gaze absently at the river through some open space in the trees. For Miss Guinevere Gusty lived in a world of her own—a world of vague possibilities, of half-defined longings, and intangible dreams. Love was still an abstract sentiment, something radiant and breathless that might envelop her at any moment and bear ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... class foreigners eat it on bread, making a meal of dark bread, garlic and red wine. It is offensive to sensitive nostrils and vitiates the taste when thus used, but when properly added to certain foods it gives an intangible flavor which never fails to elicit praise. What is true of garlic is also true of the many herbs that are used. It is easy to pass from a rare flavor that makes a most savory dish to a taste of medicine that spoils ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... this irreligious tendency confined to literary publications; it finds numerous and powerful advocates in men of scientific pursuits, who strive to make the worse appear the better cause. The chemist has never found in his crucible that intangible something which men call spirit; so, in the name of science, he pronounces it a myth. The anatomist has dissected the human frame; but, failing to meet the immaterial substance—the soul—he denies its ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... dropped to my sides I felt resistance. I looked down upon myself and could behold the changing surfaces of my body. Under this completing stroke of volition the work begun upon the Hill of the Phosphori and the Chorus Hall in reducing the intangible spirit fluid to corporeal expression was now hastening to an end. I do not stop here to consider the reflections this suggests as to the nature of matter, those abstruse speculations we indulged in so often over the pages of Muir and ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Maconochie about as usual. A bottle of red wine and a medley of tinned things from home deputized in their absence. The day had been entirely free from shelling, and somehow we all felt that the Boches, too, wanted to be quiet. There was a kind of an invisible, intangible feeling extending across the frozen swamp between the two lines, which said "This is Christmas Eve for both ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... region, from which, it was said, no man ever returned the same as he entered it. Beneath its torn and rifted surface, thousands of Canadians lie, mute testimony to the fact that love of liberty is still one of the most powerful, yet most intangible, things that ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... his ground that which he has not himself, and who, by the spiritual essence claimed for him, is incapable of making anything, and of putting anything in motion? Nothing is plainer than that they would have us believe that an intangible ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... "It's intangible, Julie. It has been weighed and measured by nearly all the great philosophers, but I don't think any two of them have ever agreed about ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... bonds, giving forth daily their bounteous, beauteous yield of daintiness and comfort, and paying for themselves many times over by the atmosphere of nicety and refinement which they create. For it is these touches, unobtrusive by their very delicacy, which introduce that intangible but very essential quality known as tone into the ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... slowly, her handiwork became what would now be termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow, on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... influence of all this. Light and air and labor—these are the medicines not of the body only, but of the soul. It is not ponderable things alone that are found in gardens, but the great wonder of life, the peace of nature, the influences of sunsets and seasons and of all the intangible things to which we can give no name, not because they are small, but because they are outside the compass of our speech. The God that dwells in gardens is sufficient for all our needs—let the theologians ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... much light-hearted chatter on the parts of Violet and Max Wyndham. Colonel Campion sat in heavy silence, and Olga instinctively held aloof. There was something in Max's attitude that puzzled her, but it was something so intangible that she could not even vaguely define it to herself. All his careless banter notwithstanding, she was fully convinced in her own mind that he was not in the smallest degree dazzled or so much as attracted ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... and how he might guard her, keep her for himself, became a daily inquisition. Nothing had happened to lead him to think that his possession was endangered, his fear proceeded from an instinct, which he could not subdue, that she was gliding from him; he wrestled with the intangible, and, striving to subordinate instinct to reason, he often refrained from kissing her; he imitated the indifference which in other times he could not dissimulate when the women who had really loved him besought him with tears. But there was no long gain-saying of the ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... hiding-place. It had for years been left unopened. It was like opening a grave now to raise its cover. The man almost shuddered as he bent over and looked in, curious as though these things had never before met his gaze. There was a dull odor of dead flowers long boxed up. A faint rustling as of intangible things became half audible, as though spirits passed out at this contact ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... relationship to this man of whom she saw so little, and yet with whom she felt on close, intangible terms of intimacy! His work tied him to London, and of late years she had not been much in London. He knew very little of her movements. Why, this very letter had been sent to her, care of her London club, the club which had its uses—principally—when she wanted ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... ethereal atmosphere which bathed the storied city her beams fell, plashing noiselessly upon the grim memorials of a stirring past. With a mantle of peace they gently covered the former scenes of violence and strife. With magic, intangible substance they filled out the rents in the grassy walls and smoothed away the scars of battle. The pale luster, streaming through narrow barbican and mildewed arch, touched the decaying ruin of San Felipe with the wand of enchantment, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... what we owe for a kindness received. One says he owes the money which he got, another a consulship, another a province. These, however, are but the outward tokens of good services, not the services themselves. A benefit is to the hand something intangible; it is a process in the mind. There is a world of difference between the material of a benefit and the benefit itself. Hence the reality of a benefit lies not in gold, nor silver, but in the good will of the giver. The things which we ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... and Jessie, who had become inordinately fond of him, his thoughts continually reverted to Salome, and that subtle sympathy which springs from the "fellow-being," that makes us "wondrous kind" to those whose pangs are fierce as ours, began faintly and shyly, but surely, to assert itself. A shadowy, intangible self-reproach brooded like a phantom over his generous heart, when, amidst the uncertainty that seemed to overhang the orphan's fate, he remembered the numberless manifestations of almost idolatrous affection which he had ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... to his gentle insistence, but her shyness went with her. She was aware of something intangible in the atmosphere that startled, that almost ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... attention, mouth open and eyes bulging with horror. One of those unbelievably white arms stretched forth, threateningly tense, and a jeweled finger leveled itself at the rash Ionian. From it there flashed an intangible something that leaped to bridge the distance with the speed of light, something that screeched as it flew and crashed like breaking glass when it struck Antazzo's horrified face. In an instant he was on the floor, screaming ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... of drawing nearer. 'Henrietta, wait a minute.' She moved to her dressing-table, smiling at what she was about to do. It seemed as though she were going to bribe the girl to love her, but she was only yielding to the pathetic human desire to give something tangible since the intangible was ignored. 'When I was twenty-one,' she said, 'your father gave me ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... instinct of preservation? For if it be said that the former creations are only the creations of our imagination, without objective value, may it not equally be said of the latter that they are only the creations of our senses? Who can assert that there is not an invisible and intangible world, perceived by the inward sense that lives in the service of the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... only practicable means for diminishing the force of a custom which is the disgrace of civilization, seems to be the establishment of a court of honour, which should take cognizance of all those delicate and almost intangible offences which yet wound so deeply. The court established by Louis XIV might be taken as a model. No man now fights a duel when a fit apology has been offered, and it should be the duty of this court to weigh dispassionately the complaint of every man ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... face, one that was more immediately pleasing. But she did not like the mouth. It was made for kissing, and she abhorred kisses. This was not a deliberately achieved concept; it came to her in the form of a faint and vaguely intangible repulsion. For the moment she knew a fleeting doubt of the man. Perhaps Sheldon was right in his judgment of the other. She did not know, and it concerned her little; for boats, and the sea, and the things and happenings ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... amiable young man. Perhaps she was a bit tired of amiable young men. His face was thin, and refined, and strong—the strength of level brows, straight nose and square chin, with a pair of paradoxical lips, which were curved and womanish in their sensitiveness; the refinement was an intangible expression which belonged to no particular feature but pervaded the whole face. As to his eyes, she was left to speculate upon their color, since she had not seen them, but she reflected that many a girl would give a good deal to own ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... happened, felt this too, and something more. It was eight years since he had stood before an English lady, and he surmised that there could not be many to compare with this one, while after his grim lonely life an intangible something that seemed to emanate from her gracious serenity compelled his homage. Then as she smiled at him and held out her hand, he was for a moment sensible of an almost overwhelming confusion. It passed as suddenly, for this was ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... was said on the subject, and as they rode along in silence, each was thinking of the curious web of emotions that was moulding their lives and making definite objects grow from intangible impulses. He was hardly conscious yet what a motive force in his plans Liddy was destined to be; and she was filled with a new and sweet consciousness of a woman's power to shape a man's plans in life. When her ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... the interposition of Christ. Ordinary miracles, indeed, could be tested by the senses, but the essence of transubstantiation was that it eluded the senses. Thus nothing could be more convenient to the government than to make this invisible and intangible necromancy a test in capital cases for heresy-Hence Wycliffe had no alternative but to deny transubstantiation, for nothing could be more insulting to the intelligence than to adore a morsel of bread which a priest held in his hand. The pretension of the priests to make the flesh of ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... upon her to track down this intangible racial distinction, but she saw Runnion, whom she could not bear, coming towards them, so thanked Stark hurriedly and went on ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... tangible bodies, subordinate on every side to the touch, and moreover of those only that have something to support them. For the painter it is necessary to know the forms not only of all the bodies supported and not supported, but also of all those transparent and intangible; and besides this they must know the colours that are suitable for the said bodies, whereof the multitude and the variety, so absolute and admitting of such infinite extension, are demonstrated better by the flowers, the fruits, and the minerals ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... thus coming to see that education must enable the individual to meet the real problems of actual experience as they are confronted in the day's life. Nor can the help rendered be indefinite, intangible, or in any degree uncertain. It must definitely adjust one to his place, and cause him to grow in it, accomplishing the most for himself and for society; it must add to the largeness of his personal life, and at the same ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... the most irrational hodgepodge of contradictory conclusions the thinking mind can conceive. This pre-cognition that enables one to arrive at the tenuous statement, 'I think, therefore I am,' is nicely thrown out by tagging it with another metaphysical intangible called illusion—as if the mind can separate illusion from reality ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... up, and what that interloper has done, or has not done, in the course of his life. There may be no court of assizes for the upper classes of society; but at any rate they have the most cruel of public prosecutors, an intangible moral being, both judge and executioner, who accuses and brands. Do not hope to hide anything from him; tell him all yourself; he wants to know all and he will know all. Do not ask what mysterious telegraph it was which conveyed to him ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... most exquisite tact, and herein, in all probability, lay the secret of her ascendency over du Bruel; at any rate, he loved her with the love which use and wont at length makes indispensable to life. Every day adds another thread to the strong, irresistible, intangible web, which enmeshes the most delicate fancies, takes captive every most transient mood, and binding them together, holds a man captive hand and foot, ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... figure as Agni or Fire—if one can call him a figure—illustrates the fluid and intangible character of Vedic divinities. He is one of the greatest in the Pantheon, and in some ways his godhead is strongly marked. He blesses, protects, preserves, and inspires: he is a divine priest and messenger between gods and men: he "knows all generations." Yet we cannot give any definite ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... not, as we are already aware, fantastic images such as he employed for the first two parts of the Divina Commedia, but are things of the spirit, viz., knowledge, beauty, faith, love, joy; and he is aided in making visible those invisible entities of the spiritual life by such intangible things as sound, ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... of a man was called KHU, and it seems to have taken form as a shining, luminous, intangible shape of the body; the KHUs formed a class of celestial beings who lived with the gods, but their functions are not clear. The KHU, like the KA, could be imprisoned in the tomb, and to obviate this catastrophe special formulae were composed and duly recited. Besides the KHU another ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... thing itself was the one thing that Audrey could not see. In that world she was a pilgrim and a stranger; it was peopled with shadowy fantastic rivals, who left her with no field and no favour; flesh and blood were powerless to contend against them. They excited no jealousy—they were too intangible for that; but in their half-seen presence she had a sense of helpless irritation and bewilderment—it baffled, overpowered, and humiliated her. To a woman thirsting for a great experience, it was hard ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... pocket—seemed to affect Zack far more than that other blow at the intangible essence, his family honour. He could see his son Nim set off for the back settlements of Iowa without a pang; for it is in vulgar Yankee nature to fling abroad the sons and daughters of a house far and wide into the waters of the world, to make their own way, to sink ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... him. There was no doubt about it in Jethro's mind. She would not have bade Bob write to his father if she had not loved him. Still Jethro did not speak, but by some intangible force compelled ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the actual fear of death—it was the moral dread of something intangible. He feared at that moment not that which was to come. It was the presence of the dusky-visaged raider and—the girl. He feared mostly the icy look on Jacky's face. However, his mind was quite clear. He was watching for a loophole of escape. And he lost no detail ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... general conflagration will be at hand. In the mean time, it remains, like the top of Mount Meru, covered with clouds, or, like the inside of a Chinese puzzle, a work of unrivaled art, conceivable but intangible by man. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... had not changed in the slightest detail. The crystal sphere still softly glowed, with intangible shadows flitting across its surface; the adept still sat cross-legged staring into its depths; opposite him, the cobra, its hood distended, swayed ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... of my return, at any rate, was unfulfilled; the tie with our mother, though deep, was uninspiring; while that other more subtle and intangible link I had fondly dreamed might be strengthened, if not wholly proved, was met with a flat denial that seemed to classify it as nonexistent. Hope, in this particular connection, returned upon me, blank and unrewarded.... The familiar scenes woke no hint of pain, ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... formulas to control spirits and their actions—in the centuries immediately after this, shows how ingrained magic ideas were, and how ready to sprout up when the counterbalancing interests of the old mythology were gone, and their place taken by the intangible spirituality of Platonism and the ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... of those intangible but effective aids of Medicine, which exert their healthful influence through the nervous system. It is in fact a mental tonic. A writer in the London "Lancet" remarks that "a pleasing and lively melody can awake in a faded brain ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... Ivery was like a poison gas that hung in the air and got into unexpected crannies and that you couldn't fight in an upstanding way. Till then, in spite of Blenkiron's solemnity, I had regarded him simply as a problem. But now he seemed an intimate and omnipresent enemy, intangible, too, as the horror of a haunted house. Up on that sunny hillside, with the sea winds round me and the whaups calling, I got a chill in my spine ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... was not outside; he was stifling in the dark room. The light had gone entirely, and he was struggling to free himself from an intangible enemy or friend; a thing that had, unknown to himself, evolved during those isolated years among the pines, and was restraining his lower ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... under his feet, and his eyes, snapping open, saw an alien land. It was a land of somber color, with great gray moors, and beetling black cliffs. There was something queer about it, an intangible quality that baffled him. ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... the air, as you feel the spring coming, or a storm in summer. I didn't SEE anything. Simply, when I was with those two young things, I felt my blood go quicker, I felt—how shall I say it?—an acceleration of life. After I got away, it was all too delicate, too intangible, to ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... think, A plague-germ still unsatisfied. It is not. That is the Earth. See, I will stretch my hand Between it and the sun; the passing shadow Gives its poor dwellers a glacial period. Let it but stand an hour, it would dissolve, Intangible as the color of the wine. There, throw it away now! Lift it from the sweet Enveloping flood it has enjoyed so well;" (He smiled as only those who live can smile) "Its time is done, its revelry complete, Its being accomplished. ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... the fish-oil and old-fur odors are inescapable in any peasant community and cling for a long time to the clothing of any traveler who sojourns there, be it ever so briefly. American soldiers in 1918-1919 became so accustomed to it that they felt something intangible was missing when they left the country and it was some time before a clever Yank thought of ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... men, sturdy and dark-browed, steps forward, clears his throat, and with a half-surly inclination of the head begins, "Mr. Grandon," and then something intangible awes him a trifle. They may grumble among themselves, and lately they have found it easy to complain to Mr. Wilmarth, but the unconscious air of authority, the superior breeding, and fine, questioning eyes ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... destined not to be undisturbed. Something awoke me. What! Was this night given over to ghosts and spirits intangible? Again the forms of men were gliding noiselessly about me. Above were the twinkling stars, around were busy men, and silence everywhere. With instinctive cautiousness I lay motionless, furtively noting the curious scene. A moment's careful attention explained ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... inward feelings. The start of fear, the suppressed, controlled tensity of pain, the beat of happy muscles in others, had to be perceived and compared with my own experiences before I could trace them back to the intangible soul of another. Groping, uncertain, I at last found my identity, and after seeing my thoughts and feelings repeated in others, I gradually constructed my world of men and of God. As I read and study, I find that this is what the rest of the race has done. Man looks within ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... was all so humiliating, so unlike the position which she had imagined herself to have attained in the eyes of her neighbors. Furthermore, she was going away without a trunk, with only one small bag for herself and Berrie—running away like a criminal from an intangible foe. However, she was somewhat comforted by the gaiety of the young people before her. They were indeed jocund as jaybirds. With the resiliency of youth they had accepted the situation, and were making ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... woman has this element of mystery to puzzle the ordinary observer, that the difference between frankness and duplicity, the genius for intrigue and the genius of the heart, is there inscrutable. A man gifted with the penetrating eye can read the intangible shade of difference produced by a more or less curved line, a more or less deep dimple, a more or less prominent feature. The appreciation of these indications lies entirely in the domain of intuition; this alone ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... it. This power of three men to get together, steal the privilege from the people, and by their joint action to produce a fourth body (corpus), behind which they hide and push their schemes—an intangible something which outlives them all—that is the power that is undermining this government. It's against the Constitution. Old Chief Justice Marshall in his verdict (which ushered in the reign of corporations, in this country) distinctly said that it was ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... a home wedding, and a very simple one—according to Billy, and according to what Marie had said it was to be. Billy still serenely spoke of it as a "simple affair," but Marie was beginning to be fearful. As the days passed, bringing with them more and more frequent evidences either tangible or intangible of orders to stationers, caterers, and florists, her fears found voice ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... that the defectives and delinquents of the community be properly cared for. The financial burden is becoming a heavy one; it will become a crushing one unless steps are taken to make the feeble-minded productive (as described in the next chapter) and an intangible "sinking fund" at the same time created to reduce the burden gradually by preventing the production of those who make it up. The burden can never be wholly obliterated, but it can be largely reduced by a restriction of the ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... visitors, and she never noticed that Emmanuel was hunchbacked. Emmanuel, who was afraid and mortified in the presence of girls, made an exception in favor of Rainette. The little invalid, who was half petrified, was to him something intangible and far removed, something almost outside existence. Only on the evening when the fair Berthe kissed him on the lips, and the next day too, he avoided Rainette with an instinctive feeling of repulsion: he passed the house without stopping and hung ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... child-mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth—often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you can not get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... with brilliants of the first water." A more temperate judgment is that of another, who says that he "took part without discredit in the choir of singers who were men of action too." Licia is what a typical sonnet-cycle ought to be, a delicate and almost intangible thread of story on which are strung the separate sonnet-pearls. In this case the jewels have a particular finish. Fletcher has adopted the idea of a series of quatrains, often extending the number to four, and a concluding couplet, which he seems fond of utilising to give ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... swept away, would her coming bring joy to him. Firmly though his feet were planted upon the ladder, it seemed to him then in that gloomy mood that every step must take him further away from any chance of that wonderful happiness, so intangible, yet so sweet an adjunct to life. For he was following like a doomed creature in the wake of Drexley, and Rice, and those others. Too late had come his warning. The woman of whom he never dared to think was surely a sorceress. She was only a woman—scarcely even beautiful, yet the world ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... Surely it ought to be the matter of only a few weeks to undo a single day. Let him get the tang of the salt air, let him go to bed every night dog-tired physically, let him get out of sight of her eyes and lips, and that something—intangible as a perfume—that emanated from her, and doubtless he would be laughing at himself as heartily as he ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... of man's spirit, and they have asked that scientific progress should stop short at the brink of these systems of philosophy and accept their dictates as final. Yet there is not to-day in existence, and there never has been, one jot of scientific evidence for the existence of these intangible anthropomorphic powers back of nature that is not susceptible of scientific challenge and of more logical interpretation. In despite of which the superstitious beliefs are still as firmly fixed in the minds of a large majority of our race as they were in the mind of our prehistoric ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the case of Flora, as in the case of Antonia and Nina and Lena and Aissa, Conrad has been enabled to convey, by means of an art far subtler than appears on the surface, a strange revival, in the case of every person who reads the book, of the intangible memories of the sweetness and mystery of such a ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... wary reader will object, there must be some relation between language and culture, and between language and at least that intangible aspect of race that we call "temperament". Is it not inconceivable that the particular collective qualities of mind that have fashioned a culture are not precisely the same as were responsible for the growth of a particular linguistic morphology? ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... reasoned consistently, but something warm within her gave the lie to this cold disposition of their friendship. She did not want to let him go his way. She had no intention of letting him go. She could not express it, but in some intangible way he belonged to her. As a brother might, she told herself; not because Blister Haines had married them when they had gone to him in their hurry to solve a difficulty. Not for that reason at all, but because from the first hour of meeting, their spirits had gone out to each other ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... which, with the intensity of observation rendered necessary and inevitable by its narrow field, had noted, as he stepped out in the street, the intangible shifting of relations in his surroundings incident to the mere passage of time in the few days of his obliteration, now felt, as a blind man feels the mountain in his approach, or as the steersman in a Newfoundland fog apprehends the nearing of ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... is a tangible and measurable cause, sufficient to account for all losses heretofore ascribed to an intangible, immeasurable, and wholly imaginary cause, viz., "internal ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... to the memory of the Dead.—Religion seems to have very little place in the Athenian funeral: there are no priests present, no prayers, no religious hymns. But the dead man is now conceived as being, in a very humble and intangible way, a deity himself: his good will is worth propitiating; his memory is not to be forgotten. On the third, ninth, and thirtieth days after the funeral there are simple religious ceremonies with offerings of garlands, fruits, libations and the like, at the new tomb; and later at ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected—this human, ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... entered into direct communion with it, "united" with its reality. But this very recognition of the living growing plant does and must entail for you a consciousness of deeper realities, which, as yet, you have not touched: of the intangible things and forces which feed and support it; of the whole universe that touches you through its life. A mere cataloguing of all the plants— though this were far better than your old game of indexing your own poor ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... conceal her delight. He smiled to himself at her evident pleasure in his words, and, with much the same feeling with which he might have cuddled a purring, affectionate kitten, he went a step farther and made love—a very shadowy, intangible sort of love, in a ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... almost as if Nissr were the center of a vast sphere that moved with her—a sphere through which no enemy could pass—a sphere against the intangible surface of which even the most powerful engines of the air dashed ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... to fight it; a large and specially fitted Crookes tube operated by powerful storage batteries and provided with peculiar screens and reflectors, in case it proved intangible and opposable only by vigorously destructive ether radiations, and a pair of military flame-throwers of the sort used in the World War, in case it proved partly material and susceptible of mechanical destruction—for like the superstitious Exeter rustics, we were prepared to burn the thing's ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... together at their sewing in what had been known, since his accident, as Bressant's room. There was no stove; but a rustling, tapering fire was living its ardent, yellow, wavering life upon the brick hearth, and four or five logs of birch and elm were reddening and crackling into embers beneath its intangible intensity. It made a grateful contrast to the soft, cold bank of snow that lay, light and round, upon the outside sill and the slighter ridges that sloped and clung along the narrow foothold of the window-pane frames. Presently Cornelia got up from ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... Slowly the hope that Obadiah might speak to him died away and he returned to the door. It still lacked an hour of midnight, when Marion, had promised to come to him. He was wildly impatient and to his impatience was added the fear that had filled him as he hovered over Obadiah, a nameless, intangible fear—something which he could not have analyzed and which clutched at his heart and urged him to follow the path that led to Marion's. For a time he resisted the impulse. What if she should come by another path while he was gone? ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... up, and fear descended upon the village. Of all misfortune, witchcraft was the most appalling. With the intangible and unseen things only the shamans could cope, and neither man, woman, nor child could know, until the moment of ordeal, whether devils possessed their souls or not. And of all shamans, Klok-No-Ton, who dwelt in the next village, was the most terrible. None found more evil spirits ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... subtle and searching than his own, and, being disinclined to accredit this greater sagacity to a more competent intelligence, he takes refuge behind the doctrine that it is due to some impenetrable and intangible talent for guessing correctly, some half mystical super sense, some vague (and, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... religion has an important bearing on all the relations and conditions of life. The connexion between religions faith and political practice is, in truth, far closer than is generally thought. Public opinion has not ripened into a knowledge that religious error is the intangible but real substratum of all political injustice. Though the 'schoolmaster' has done much, there still remain and hold some away among us, many honest and energetic assertors of 'the rights of man,' who have to learn that a people in the fetters of superstition, can ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... will undertake to grapple with them, but enthusiasm will be rewarded. In place of the truthful summary of the earlier editions, we have now the truth itself—the truth in all its subtle gradations, all its long-drawn-out suspensions, all its intangible and irremediable obscurities: it is the difference between a clear-cut drawing in black-and-white and a finished painting in oils. Probably Miss Berry's edition will still be preferred by the ordinary reader who wishes to become acquainted with a celebrated figure in French literature; but Mrs. ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... of the crystalline March morning, the memory of the Winter sorrow still lay. The bare, brown earth was not wholly hidden by the mantle of sleet and snow, yet there was some intangible Easter close at hand. Miss Evelina felt it, stricken ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... past recognition or identification, except by guesswork, or the locality where they were found. Articles of domestic use scattered through the rubbish helped to tell who some of the bodies were. Part of a set of dinner plates told one man where in the intangible mass his house was. In one place was a photograph album with one picture recognizable. From this the body of a child near by was identified. A man who had spent a day and all night looking for the body of his wife, was directed to her remains ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... shadowy room, her dread seemed to take shape and sound, to be there audibly breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her short-sighted eyes strained through them, half-discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the recoil from that intangible propinquity she threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope and gave ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... abominations of the world. If the farmers are to manage their own affairs, they must confine affairs to those they are accustomed to managing. Jefferson drew all these logical conclusions. He disapproved of manufacture, of foreign commerce, and a navy, of intangible forms of property, and in theory of any form of government that was not centered in the small self-governing group. He had critics in his day: one of them remarked that "wrapt up in the fullness of self-consequence and strong enough, in reality, to defend ourselves against ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... physical conditions, have suffered martyrdom at its hands. Years upon years have been found necessary to induce the masses to consider, much less adopt, schemes for their own advantage. A government of numbers, then, is not one of virtue or intelligence, but of force, intangible, irresistible, irresponsible—resembling that of Caesar depicted by the great historian, which, covering the earth as a pall, reduced all to a common level of abject servitude. For many years scarce a descendant of the colonial gentry in the Eastern States has been elected to public office. To-day ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... having the brains, it might be understood. Thus five thousand pounds invested would speedily bring five thousand pounds per annum. Diana had often dreamed of the City of London as the seat of magic; and taking the City's contempt for authorcraft and the intangible as, from its point of view, justly founded, she had mixed her dream strangely with an ancient notion of the City's probity. Her broker's shaking head did not damp her ardour for shares to the full amount of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which she slipped inside of her glove, and dropping the remainder into her pocket, left the building, and walked on toward Union Square. Absorbed in grave reflections, and oppressed by some vague foreboding of impending ill, dim, intangible and unlocalized—she moved slowly along the crowded sidewalk—unconscious of the curious glances directed toward her superb form, and stately graceful carriage, which more than one person turned and looked back to ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... a little intangible, sir," Thomson confessed, "but exceedingly important. Without any direct evidence, I have come to the conclusion that Captain Granet is a mysterious person and needs watching. As usual, we are in trouble with the civil authorities, and, to be frank with you, I am trying ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sensation; experience shews us, that it is possible the same object may be felt with the same sensation of motion, along with the interposed impression of solid and tangible objects, attending the sensation. That is, in other words, an invisible and intangible distance may be converted into a visible and tangible one, without any ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... The intangible and shapeless suspicions which Ethel had caught from Leonora took a misty form and substance, only to be immediately dispelled in that inconstant mind by the sudden refreshing sound of Milly's voice: 'We've called to take Ethel home, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... window-shutters with a crowbar, we feel, it is true, a certain sympathetic suspense; but compare this crude onslaught on the nerves with the profound and delicious terror that we experience when, in "La Mort de Tintagiles" of Maeterlinck, an invisible force pushes the door softly open, a force intangible and irresistible as death. In his acting Mr. Charles Warner was powerful, thrilling; it would be difficult to say, under the circumstances, that he was extravagant, for what extravagance, under the circumstances, would be improbable? He had not, no doubt, what I ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... refined, proud, and reserved. They loved each other to the point of idolatry; and yet they parted ten days after marriage with these words of wroth and madness. Something had come between them. What was it? Another man? No. Another woman? Still no. What then? A ghost, an intangible, almost an invisible but very real and divorce-making co-respondent. They call ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... see, in a painting done on a flat surface, objects which appear in relief, and in the mirror—also a flat surface—they look the same. The picture has one plane surface and the same with the mirror. The picture is intangible, in so far as that which appears round and prominent cannot be grasped in the hands; and it is the same with the mirror. And since you can see that the mirror, by means of outlines, shadows and lights, makes objects ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... tightened. "I am a woman, and I'll show him what a woman can do. He has lived among the Indians until he thinks he owns them. He is hard, and domineering, and uncompromising, and skeptical. And yet—" What gave her pause was so intangible, so chaotic, in her own mind as to form ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... as likely as not had lain there on the dewy grass, looking up at the sky, as he had come on her sometimes. Poor Alicia! And once he had been within an ace of marrying her! A life spoiled! By what, if not by love of beauty! But who would have ever thought that the intangible could wreck a woman, deprive her of love, marriage, motherhood, of fame, of wealth, of health! And yet—by ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... that give life its colour and its poetry. They are the garnerings of the journey, and unlike material gains they are no burden to our backs and no anxiety to our mind. "The true harvest of my life," said Thoreau, "is something as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning and evening." It was the summary, the essence, of all his experience. We are like bees foraging in the garden of the world, and hoarding the honey in the hive of memory. And ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... from every touch, and from every effort to grasp a solid object. Brought to its logical conclusion, such a physiological habitus becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into the "intangible," into the "incomprehensible"; a distaste for all formulae, for all conceptions of time and space, for everything established—customs, institutions, the church—; a feeling of being at home in a world ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... with high ideals. For what a man has, he may be dependent on others; what he is, rests with him alone. What he obtains in life is but acquisition; what he attains, is growth. Happiness is the soul's joy in the possession of the intangible. Absolute, perfect, continuous happiness in life, is impossible for the human. It would mean the consummation of attainments, the individual consciousness of a perfectly fulfilled destiny. Happiness is paradoxic because it may coexist with ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... came down the attic stairway. He was not a man of quick fancies; but to one of even slower imagination and of calmer mood, she might very well have seemed unreal, the creature of a dream, fantastic, intangible, insensible, arch, not wholly without some touch of the malign. In his heart he groaned over her beauty as if she were lost to him forever ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... anything apart from her. There were other reliefs, consolations, and hopes than those she held. He was slipping away into a silent region—man's peculiar world—of thought and dream and speculation, an intangible, ideal, remote, unloving world. Some day she would knock at his heart ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... carried himself more boldly, with a touch of defiance that was new in him. He was no longer afraid of minor things, and much of his timidity had vanished, though the unknown never ceased to press upon him with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and ever-menacing. ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... something of themselves behind in places where they have experienced emotion? If so, churches ought to be very full of ghosts. I dare say that they are, only then no one could know it except those who had shared the emotion, and therefore they remain intangible. Still, I could have sworn that Isobel was here. Indeed, I seem to feel her now, and I hope that the dream will ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... head, and it wouldn't leave off. Fancies, or memories—which?—and my mind reverted with a flash to the fearful thoughts which had haunted it the day before in Dame Alice's tower. It was dark now. Those ghastly intangible shapes must have taken full form and color, peopling the old ruin with their ageless hideousness. And the storm had found them there and borne them along with it as it blew through the creviced walls. That was why the wind's sound struck so strangely ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... ear as the gates of Milton's other place. It was my gold that helped to make those hinges. And this I endured merely for the sake of enjoying the society, not of my dear newly-found cousins, but of two phantoms, intangible, unsatisfactory, unreal that hovered over their heads,—the phantom of wealth and the still more empty phantom of social position. But all this, understand, was before I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... action, if I was to save his life, came to me with an intense relief. No matter what animated him for the moment, Shorthouse was only a man; it was flesh and blood I had to contend with and not the intangible powers. Only a few hours before I had seen him cleaning his gun, smoking his pipe, knocking the billiard balls about with very human clumsiness, and the picture flashed across my mind ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... intended, or the forms, positions, qualities, and motions of other objects which are suggested, and signs for moral and intellectual ideas, founded on analogies, are common all over the world as well as among deaf-mutes. Concepts of the intangible and invisible are only learned through percepts of tangible and visible objects, whether finally expressed to the eye or to the ear, in terms ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... forming an immense nosegay of living flowers, above which gleamed bare white shoulders, hair studded with diamonds, drops of water on the brunettes, glistening reflections on the blondes, and the same intoxicating perfume, the same confused, pleasant buzzing, made by waves of heat and intangible wings, that caresses all the flowers in the garden in summer. At times a little laugh, ascending in that luminous atmosphere, a quicker breath, made plumes and curls tremble, and attracted attention to a lovely profile. Such was the aspect of ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... possible that humor ought not to be defined. It may be one of those intangible substances, like love and beauty, that are indefinable. It is quite probable that humor should not be explained. It would be distressing, as some one pointed out, to discover that American humor is based on American ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... pervasive as an atmospheric influence, and, in its way, nothing is so important. It is significant that foreign students rarely speak of Oxford without commenting on its atmosphere; something in the air of the old town which, although intangible in its operation, is a positive factor in the educational result. Specific courses of instruction are less numerous than in many other places, and such instruction as is offered is often defective in methods and spirit; but the life of the place is adjusted to intellectual ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... the word, the knowledge, which the Romans of that early city-state had of the Divine; (2) the chief forms and methods of their worship. We saw that they did not think of the divine beings as existing in human form with human weaknesses, but as invisible and intangible functional powers, numina. Each had its special limited sphere of action; and some were now localised within the pomoerium, or just outside it within the ager Romanus, and worshipped under a particular name. I suggested that this very settlement had probably ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... delicious sensation swept through her heart, a sensation elusive and intangible. She surrendered without question. At this moment the Eve in her evaded all questions. Here was a man. The mood which seized her was as novel as this love which asked nothing but love, and the willingness to pay any price; and the desire to test both mood and ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... is thus emulsified with body as a matter of cold literal fact. The soul was once a subtlety of metaphysics. Now when mind appears soaked in matter saturated with chemicals like the hormones, therefore woven out of material threads, the independent entity created out of intangible spirit flies like ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... as though to follow, but reconsidered. The word of a Chinaman; he had given it, so he must abide. There was now no honest way of warning Taber that the net had been drawn. Of course, it was ridiculous, this inclination to assist the fugitive, based as it was upon an intangible university idea. And yet, mulling it over, he began to understand why the white man was so powerful in the world: he was taught loyalty and fair play in his schools, and he carried this spirit the world which his forebears ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... peculiar, childish wistfulness at times, and with this an intangible aloofness that pierced his heart. It seemed to him he should never know her. There was a remoteness about her, an estrangement between her and all natural daily things, as if she were of an unknown race that never ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... the ills that have been infesting a people. If any link were wanting to connect the two kinds of expulsion, it would be furnished by such a practice as that of sending the evils away in a litter or a boat. For here, on the one hand, the evils are invisible and intangible; and, on the other hand, there is a visible and tangible vehicle to convey them away. And a scapegoat is nothing more than ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... a population, may carry away with him in the shroud that he drags at his heels, the whole of an accursed race; but even he must respect the life of that great intangible body, which does not perish with the death of its members—for the spirit of the Society of ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... harmony there was something at once more intangible and yet more vital and positive that made the man a piece with the natural world about him. Perhaps it was that he had lived so many months of so many years in the open that he had grown to be true brother of the wild; that he had shed ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... origin of all things, manifests himself to men, in lesser forms, according to this mythology, more and more human and less and less intangible. These forms are generally triads, and resolve themselves into a male deity, a female deity, and their child. Triad after triad brings the original Divinity into forms more and more earthly, till at last we find "that we have no longer to do with the infinite and intangible ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... they seemed to reflect the spirit of those who dwelt there. No room had given him this sense of companionship since he had spent his boyish holidays in the old Count Benedetto's apartments; but it was of another, intangible world that his present surroundings spoke. Vivaldi received him kindly and asked him to repeat his visit; and Odo returned as often as he ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... harvests changed hands ten times in the hour, and bills on Rome, scrawled over with endorsements, outsped currency as well as outwitted the revenue men. No tax-farmer's slave could keep track of the flow of intangible wealth when the bills for a million sesterces passed to and fro like cards in an Egyptian game. Men richer than the fabled Croesus carried all their wealth in leather wallets in the form of mortgages on gangs of slaves, certificates of ownership of cargoes, promises to pay ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... spirit, brought from their own humble households many tokens of their loving thoughtfulness. And never did one visit that little log house by the river without the consciousness of something received from the silvery-haired old teacher—a something intangible, perhaps, which they could not have expressed in words, but which, nevertheless, enriched the lives of those simple mountain people with a very real joy ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed for ever in immutable grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavouring it, falls more below himself, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... a great strategic change in the world during the past year. That precious intangible, the initiative, is becoming ours. Our policy, not limited to mere reaction against crises provoked by others, is free to develop along lines of our choice not only abroad, but also at home. As a major theme for American policy during the coming year, let our joint determination be to hold ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of Church or State, but the individual conscience, justified by faith in God's purpose, determines a man's merit. St. Augustine's ideal City of God was thus once more set over against the visible secular world of man. Into this intangible community, a house not made with hands, the elect and the select withdrew themselves, abiding there as in a refuge, untouched by the corruptions of a spotted world, seeking with humility the will of God and submitting with all the pride ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... ducal palace to humble fisherman's dwelling on an obscure "back street" canal, in Basra there abounds a great deal of rickety rubbish that never had any interest in itself and which depends for its effect on the flattering gilding of the sun and the intangible glamour of Eastern twilight. In fact Basra might be described from an architectural point of view as a great heap of insanitary and ill-built rubbish which can look collectively extraordinarily picturesque. I have seen bits on Ashar Creek ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... steady-eyed seriousness in which, too, she recognized the intangible quality that made him seem to her different from all the other men ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... needed by the expanding manufacturing interests of the United States. The United States is a country with an investible surplus. Latin America offers ample opportunity for the investment of that surplus. Surrounding the entire territory is a Chinese wall in the form of the Monroe Doctrine—intangible ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's vested ideas,—blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible private truth. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist) |
