"Intrinsically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... business in the world. Prudence and circumspection are necessary even to the best of men. They are indeed, as it were, a guard to Virtue, without which she can never be safe. It is not enough that your designs, nay, that your actions, are intrinsically good; you must take care they shall appear so. If your inside be never so beautiful, you must preserve a fair outside also. This must be constantly looked to, or malice and envy will take care to blacken it so, that the ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... kinds of atoms, so as to "account for" their varying behaviors. And no matter how far we push such inquiries, this materialistic attitude of mind will control us so long as we think we are dealing with substances which are intrinsically different. If the differences are innate or inherent in the things themselves, we must naturally endeavor to find out why and how they are different; and no matter how far we go along this road we are always headed in the direction of stark materialism. On the other hand, to say ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... more troubled than Janice possibly could feel about the disappearance of the treasure-box and the keepsakes it contained. Intrinsically, the value of the articles that she named was not very great, although nothing could replace the diary or the miniature of his dead wife. But as he had intimated to Janice over the telephone there was something else. There was that lost with the so-called treasure-box ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... but is owing to the poverty of the people, and the injurious system which prevails of burning the upland soils for the purpose of raising crops without the aid of ordinary manure, or new lime, which is abundant in the country; hence the land, though intrinsically of equal value with similar land in the counties of Longford and Westmeath, on the east side of the Shannon, does not bring so high a rent, and yet the people, on an average, are not nearly so well off as those of Westmeath or Longford—their houses, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... maddest any human soul had, during that Century. I find in him, starting out from the Lethean quagmires where he had to grow, a certain rash greatness of idea; traces of veritable conviction, just resolution; veritable and just, though rash. That of admiration for King Friedrich was not intrinsically foolish, in the solitary thoughts of the poor young fellow; nay it was the reverse; though it was highly inopportune in the place where he stood. Nor was the Holstein notion bad; it was generous rather, noble and natural, though, again, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... man, unless he be intrinsically mean; it rather elevates him."—"If we could penetrate the judgments of God, we should find that frequently the objects most to be pitied were the conquerors, not the conquered; the joyous rather than the sorrowful; ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... first volume of "The History of the War in the Peninsula" I find that I am at this time minus L545 12s. At this loss I do by no means in the present instance repine, for I have derived much gratification from being the publisher of a work which is so intrinsically valuable, and which has been so generally admired, and it is some satisfaction to me to find by this result that my own proposal to you was perfectly just. I will not, however, venture to offer you a less sum ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... the beauty which exists in his compositions to the remains of a virtuous and diviner nature within him. Nay, further than this, our theory holds good even though it be shown that a bad man may write a poem. As motives short of the purest lead to actions intrinsically good, so frames of mind short of virtuous will produce a partial and limited poetry. But even where it is exhibited, the poetry of a vicious mind will be inconsistent and debased; i. e. so far only such, as the traces ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... aware as soon as he had said it, that she would have a way always of putting things prettily, and that not for the sake of any prettiness, but because it was so intrinsically she saw them. It would make everything much simpler that she was ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... least, I thought," he added, making a wry face. "I had reached the stage, you see, when I could imagine in a new dimension. I was able to conceive the shape of that new figure which is intrinsically different to all we know—the shape of the tessaract. I could perceive in four dimensions. When, therefore, I looked at a cube I could see all its sides at once. Its top was not foreshortened, nor its farther side and base invisible. I saw the whole thing out flat, so to ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... be disappointed. Sensible how large a portion of mankind receive opinions upon authority, I am apprehensive lest the doctrines which they will there find should derive a weight from your name to which they are by no means intrinsically entitled. I will therefore examine what you have advanced, from a hope of being able to do away any impression left on the minds of such as may be liable to confound with argument a strong prepossession for your Lordship's talents, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... crime was not new. It was high treason as defined by the Statute of Edward the Third. The punishment was not new. It was the punishment which had been inflicted on traitors of ten generations. All that was new was the procedure; and, if the new procedure had been intrinsically better than the old procedure, the new procedure might with perfect propriety have been employed. But the procedure employed in Fenwick's case was the worst possible, and would have been the worst possible if it ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... powerful machines that run in an oil bath. I do not say that she would not have been superior to her home environment without her fortunate associations down-town. I give the business small credit, for our superior jewels are intrinsically precious before the artisan gives the polish by which we more often make our comparisons. But there can be no question that she worked among associations which strengthened and emphasized all her admirable qualities and placed her above the petty things ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... After all, concurrently may it not, be said that this colour instinct aspect of cosmically conceived romanticism is never wilfully vulgarized. For its incomparable, iconographical purpose it exists, and is as intrinsically useful and serviceable to the scheme as the figures which admirably illustrate the pictures of Hogarth and Holman Hunt. When introduced, music is rarely intended to edge itself into the important place of "first study." ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... and order; but I believe, as a condition precedent, that law and order should be predicated upon right and justice, pure and simple. Law is, intrinsically, a written expression of justice; if, on the contrary, it becomes instead written injustice, men are not, strictly speaking, bound to yield it obedience. There is no law, on the statute books of any nation of the world, which bears unjustly ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... legislature in all these cases acts only, as was before observed, in subordination to the great lawgiver, transcribing and publishing his precepts. So that, upon the whole, the declaratory part of the municipal law has no force or operation at all, with regard to actions that are naturally and intrinsically right or wrong. ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... continues, as we shall see, with much assiduity. Rollin, Fontenelle, and other French lights of the then firmament,—his Letters to them exist; and could be given in some quantity: but it is better not. They are intrinsically the common Letters on such occasions: "O sublime demi-god of literature, how small are princely distinctions to such a glory as thine; thou who enterest within the veil of the temple, and issuest with thy face shining!"—To which the response is: "Hm, think you so, most happy, gracious, illustrious ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... notes of one of his conversations, on his departure from a supper party, and which I shall subjoin, because the confirmed general views, and individual opinions of so enlarged a mind must command attention; especially when exercised on subjects intrinsically important. I however observe, that my sketch of the conversation must be understood as being exceedingly far from doing justice ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... had occupied for more than forty years, presented a singular melange of incongruous odds and ends, the flotsam of a long term of service, where the rewards, if intrinsically incommensurate, were none the less invaluable, to the proud recipient. The floor was covered by a faded carpet, once the pride of the great drawing-room, but the velvet pile had disappeared beneath the arched insteps ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... less affected by his relations to others. But as conduct is ruled by a calculation of the balance of pains or pleasures dependent upon any course of action, it simplifies matters materially, if each man regards his neighbour's feelings simply as instrumental, not intrinsically interesting. And thus the coincidence between that conduct which maximises my happiness and that conduct which maximises happiness in general, must be regarded as more or less accidental or liable in special cases to disappear. If I am made happier by ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... with a bag of confetti slung on one side and another full of bouquets on the other; and they would plunge a warlike hand into the former and hurl ammunition at their rivals; or they would, pick out a bunch of flowers from the latter for a pretty girl—not that the flowers were worth anything intrinsically, nor was that their fault—but just to show the fitting sentiment. There was only one rule, the unwritten one that everybody was to take everything that came with a smile or a laugh, and never get angry at anything; and ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... normal female. Only incidentally, through thousands of years of domestic selection, has man evolved her into a draught beast breeding true to kind. But being a draught-beast is secondary. Primarily she is a female. Take them by and large, our own human females, above all else, love us men and are intrinsically maternal. There is no biological sanction for all the hurly burly of woman to-day for suffrage ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... farthings, but silver coins of these denominations were coined by Edward I. Edward VI. stopped the farthings, and the halfpence were stopped in the Commonwealth. Copper coinage was established in 1672. The present coins were issued first in 1860. They are half the size of their predecessors, and intrinsically worth one-seventh of their ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... ruled over the pliant Horace was a Swiss, named Colomb. This domestic tyrant was despotic; if Horace wanted a tree to be felled, Colomb opposed it, and the master yielded. Servants, in those days, were intrinsically the same as in ours, but they differed in manner. The old familiarity had not gone out, but existed as it still does among the French. Those who recollect Dr. Parr will remember how stern a rule his factotum Sam exercised over him. Sam put down ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... reduced our animalism, it has increased our fundamental immorality and put a substantial blot on woman's mission as a mission. Woman has had to learn to dissemble charmingly, but in the bottom of her heart she has never believed that her mission is intrinsically shameful. That's why every woman feels her special case of sinning is right—until she gets caught. ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... inner satellites to the planet makes it difficult to compare them photometrically with the outer ones, as actual feebleness of light cannot be distinguished from difficulty of seeing arising from the proximity of the planet. However, that Umbriel is intrinsically fainter than Titania is evinced by the fact that, although the least distance of the latter is somewhat less than the greatest distance of the former, there is never any difficulty in seeing it in that position. From their relative aspects in these respective positions I judge Umbriel to be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... were not all of that lawless breed. At his school (he had sampled several places of learning, and was now at Mr. Cross's on the Square) were a number of less adventurous, even if not intrinsically better playmates. There was George Robards, the Latin scholar, and John, his brother, a handsome boy, who rode away at last with his father into the sunset, to California, his golden curls flying in the wind. And ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... admirable. In the first place it presents a dramatic story which is rational; which strongly enlists the interest if not the sympathies of the observer; which is unhackneyed; which abounds with imposing spectacles with which the imagination of childhood already had made play, that are not only intrinsically brilliant and fascinating but occur as necessary adjuncts of the story. Viewed from its ethical side and considered with reference to the sources whence its elements sprang, it falls under a considerable measure of condemnation, ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... blood; ingenerate[obs3], ingenite|; indigenous; in the grain &c. n.; bred in the bone, instinctive; inward, internal &c. 221; to the manner born; virtual. characteristic &c. (special) 79, (indicative) 550; invariable, incurable, incorrigible, ineradicable, fixed. Adv. intrinsically &c. adj.; at bottom, in the main, in effect, practically, virtually, substantially, au fond; fairly. Phr. " character is higher than intellect " [Emerson]; "come give us a taste of your quality " magnos homines virtute metimur non fortuna [Lat][ ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... solid bodies by luminous rays and the possibility of photographic examination of bony tissues in living creatures—facts entirely incompatible with prevailing ideas and teachings. But these facts were not only intrinsically veracious but were capable of occular demonstration, beyond all possibility of doubt, and thus, as nothing could be changed or refuted, science found itself compelled, for once, to honour the truth in its initial stage—to receive them gracefully ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... four of my longer excursions into the surrounding country (long, not intrinsically, but by reason of the heat) were made with a view to possible ivory-billed woodpeckers. Just out of the town northward, beyond what appeared to be the court end of Marion Street, the principal business street of the city, I had accosted a gentleman in a dooryard ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... be definite and coherent in themselves. Therefore, before reason can allow the theory of automatism to pass, it must be told how this wonderful fact of parallelism is to be explained. There must be some connexion between the intrinsically coherent series A, B, C and the no less intrinsically coherent sequence a, b, c, which may be taken as an explanation why they coincide each to each. What is this connexion? We do not know; but we have now seen that, whatever it is, it cannot be an ordinary causal connexion—first, ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... ruined themselves through their mediaevalism. Scott's luckless attempt was to place his private and family life upon a feudal basis and to give it mediaeval colour and beauty; Newman undertook a much nobler and more heroic but more intrinsically hopeless task—that of re-creating the whole English Church in harmony with ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... valuable collection, belonging to the State, consisting of works of art, jewels, royal regalia, etc., classified in eight connected saloons. One sees here a certain green stone, a most brilliant gem, esteemed of great value. Whether it be really a diamond or an emerald, it is intrinsically of equal worth. The weight of this rare gem is forty carets. The Grosse Garten is the favorite public park of the city, containing about three hundred acres of land. It is very beautifully laid out in ornamental sections, ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... consolatory! Surely this is but fair towards the distinguished dead. It is but just towards the memory of the departed, to believe his conduct to have been principally influenced by such considerations. All men have many faults—most men have grave faults. Is parsimony intrinsically more culpable than prodigality? Have not most of mankind a tendency towards one or the other? for how few are ennobled by the ability to steer evenly between the two! And even granting that Sir William Follett ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... confess, moments of weakness, in which the loss of my wealth or rank would be missed greatly; but when on service, subjected to great privations, and surrounded by men superior to me in military rank, who say unto me—go, and I go—come, and I come—I find my enjoyments intrinsically ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... watch-tower, this man's incorrigible weakness presents itself as intrinsically more dangerous to the race than any unscrupulous strength. The voluptuous femininity of his insidious eloquence lends itself, as Nietzsche saw, to every sort ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... cluster of impressions, but which smudges that special sojourn as with the big thumb—mark of a slightly soiled and decidedly ensanguined hand. For really, after all, the great loud gaudy romp or heated frolic, simulating ferocity if not achieving it, that is the annual pride of the town, was not intrinsically, to my-view, extraordinarily impressive—in spite of its bristling with all due testimony to the passionate Italian clutch of any pretext for costume and attitude and utterance, for mumming and masquerading and raucously representing; the vast cheap vividness rather somehow refines ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... they have put it in every man's power not to fall into any calamity properly so called. Living and dying, honour and infamy, pleasure and pain, riches and poverty—all these are common to the virtuous and the depraved, and are therefore intrinsically neither good nor evil. We live but for a moment; our being is in a perpetual flux, our faculties are dim, our bodies tend ever to corruption; the soul is an eddy, fortune is not to be guessed at, and posthumous fame is oblivion. To what, then, may we trust? Why, to nothing but philosophy. This is, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... genius of the Dutch people. A recent French author thus describes the commercial and colonial conditions, at the accession of Louis XIV., of this people, which beyond any other in modern times, save only England, has shown how the harvest of the sea can lift up to wealth and power a country intrinsically weak and ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... its irreconcilableness with many of his most emphatic judgments, Mr. Carlyle's doctrine about Nature's registration of the penalties of injustice is intrinsically an anachronism. It is worse than the Catholic reaction, because while De Maistre only wanted Europe to return to the system of the twelfth century, Mr. Carlyle's theory of history takes us back to times prehistoric, when might ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... English readers have cause to be grateful, not only as a document on Smollett and his times, not only as being in a sense the raison d'etre of the Sentimental Journey, and the precursor in a very special sense of Humphry Clinker, but also as being intrinsically an uncommonly readable book, and even, I venture to assert, in many respects one of Smollett's best. Portions of the work exhibit literary quality of a high order: as a whole it represents a valuable because a rather uncommon view, and as a literary record of travel it is distinguished ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... in France were found at Sceaux, but the dominant spirit was the princess herself. It was amusement she wanted, and even men of talent were valued far less for what they were intrinsically than for what they could contribute to her vanity or to her diversion. "She is a predestined soul," wrote Voltaire. "She will love comedy to the last moment, and when she is ill I counsel you to administer some beautiful poem in the place of extreme unction. One ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... because it remained solitary and when the editor's check made its tardy appearance she longed to keep it as a glorious archive—glorious that is to say, in suggestion, if not particularly impressive intrinsically. In the end she fought the temptation of giving herself a dinner a day for a fortnight out of it, and bought a slender gold bangle with the money, which she slipped upon her wrist with a resolution to keep it there always. It must be believed that her personal decoration did not enter materially ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... situation in which knowledge already is, or easily can be found, not a special form of knowledge. So true is this, that it would be altogether impossible to establish whether a given order of knowledge were, intrinsically, pure or applied. All knowledge, however abstract and philosophical one may imagine it to be, can be a guide to practical acts; a theoretical error in the ultimate principles of morals can be reflected and always is reflected in some way, in practical ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... intrinsically wrong in that, I will admit, but the indications are that the schooling, which should have been getting more efficient over the years, has evidently been getting more lax. The death rate ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... that they were not offended because cousin Sandys did not invite them with any of the genteel parents of her pupils. They took this reserved hospitality as a complimentary admission of their kinsmanship. But they were not intrinsically more coarse-minded than many dukes and duchesses. Captain Berwick, it is true, was nautical in his tone, and talked shop, but that is permitted to sea captains in novels, nay, enjoined upon them. He was apt to be broad in his jokes, and to use unwarrantable expressions, for which he ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... dialogue; and the Brigadier had some frank conversation with his Majesty about the "Arbitration Commission" then sitting at Brunswick, and European affairs in general. Conversation which is carefully preserved for us in the Brigadier's Despatch of the morrow. It never was intrinsically of much moment; and is now fallen very obsolete, and altogether of none: but as a glance at first-hand into the dim old thoughts of Friedrich Wilhelm, the reader may take it ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... document, but it illustrates so well the manner in which maternal influence passes down from age to age, and throws so much light on the strange scenes which occurred at Charles's death, and is, moreover, so intrinsically excellent, that it well merits ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... immaturity as mere lack, and growth as something which fills up the gap between the immature and the mature is due to regarding childhood comparatively, instead of intrinsically. We treat it simply as a privation because we are measuring it by adulthood as a fixed standard. This fixes attention upon what the child has not, and will not have till he becomes a man. This comparative standpoint is legitimate ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... malevolent cartoonist? Mr. Brann attacked hypocritic preachers, snide politicians, shoddy society people, shyster lawyers. He did it in, to me, an exaggerated manner, but he felt that such manner was necessary to arouse the people. Were Brann's blasts against Baylor University intrinsically worse, more a license of the press than let us say the assaults of the New York World, the New York Journal or the Post Dispatch upon Pierpont Morgan and the trusts? And yet, if any trust magnate, crucified as a blood-sucker on the poor, were to shoot the editor of one of these sheets, he ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... power should be abused. Is it to be wondered at that in the works of one thus gifted and carried away we should find, without any design of corrupting on his side, evil too often invested with a grandeur which belongs intrinsically but to good? ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... noble and ignoble sentiment which makes patriotism such a difficult problem for the moralist. The patriot nearly always believes, or thinks he believes, that he desires the greatness of his country because his country stands for something intrinsically great and valuable. Where this conviction is absent we cannot speak of patriotism, but only of the cohesion of a wolf-pack. The Greeks, who at last perished because they could not combine, had nevertheless a consciousness ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... LOW et hoc genus omne, Cantabs confessed, in the prestidigitation of numerals and weird signs of values)—to those, then, few, but of many parts appreciative, who followed a certain foursome at Addington last week, my premiss should be intrinsically incontrovertible. Partner, whom I had "made" with a drive well and truly apportioned—ex carne ictum—partner, after much self-searching and mental recursion to the maxims of TOM MORRIS and LA ROUCHEFOUCAULD, took his ball ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... Town at the present moment is flooded with them. But these are only the mere froth of the South African Colonial breed. The real mass and body of them consists (besides tradesmen, &c., of towns) of the miners of the Rand, and, more intrinsically still, of the working men and the farmers of English breed all over the Colony. It is from these that the fighting men in this quarrel are drawn. It is from these that our corps, for instance, has been by the Major individually and carefully recruited; and I don't ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... Supernaturalism may remain on men's lips, but in practice they are Naturalists. The magistrate who listens with devout attention to the precept "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" on Sunday, on Monday dismisses, as intrinsically absurd, a charge of bewitching a cow brought against some old woman; the superintendent of a lunatic asylum who substituted exorcism for rational modes of treatment would have but a short tenure of office; even parish clerks doubt the utility of prayers ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... fashionable lady in any civilized country. After all, what is the difference between a finely-dressed savage and a finely-dressed Parisian? None at all that I can see, save in the color of the skin and the amount of labor performed by the manufacturer, the milliner, the tailor, or the schoolmaster. Intrinsically the constitution of the mind is identically the same. I speak now of men as well as women, for the most affected creatures I have seen in Europe are of the male sex. So pardon me, fair ladies, for any reflection upon your crinoline, and accept as my apology this candid avowal—that while you ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... sundry scattered and refractory forces, which are henceforth denominated bad. The unreflective conscience, forgetting the vicarious source of its own excellence, then assumes a solemn and incomprehensible immediacy, as if its decrees were absolute and intrinsically authoritative, not of to-day or yesterday, and no one could tell whence they had arisen. Instinct can all the more easily produce this mystification when it calls forth an imaginative activity full of interest and eager passion. ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... in the mould of Kantism, or at least clothed in its garments, these productions, to readers unacquainted with that system, are encumbered here and there with difficulties greater than belong intrinsically to the subject. In perusing them, the uninitiated student is mortified at seeing so much powerful thought distorted, as he thinks, into such fantastic forms: the principles of reasoning, on which they rest, are apparently not those of common logic; a dimness and doubt overhangs their ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... acts of a freely willing being cannot be foreknown, the ignorance of them does not detract from the perfectness of the Supreme Being. Omnipotence cannot make two and two five. Omnipotence cannot do what is intrinsically impossible. No more can Omniscience know what is ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... fact is not lifted up and redeemed by the solemn and far- reaching laws of maternity and paternity, through which the poet alone contemplates it, then it is irredeemable, and one side of our nature is intrinsically vulgar ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... excitement pleasurable when reached through the intrinsically agreeable but it can be obtained from small doses of the intrinsically disagreeable. This is the explanation of the pleasure obtained from the gruesome, from the risk of life or limb, or from watching others risk life or limb. Aside from the sense of power obtained by ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... have lost heavily by proposing them. Grant failed with Santo Domingo; Seward with St. Thomas; and it required all his skill and influence to accomplish the ratification of the Alaska purchase. There is no general desire among Americans for acquiring outlying territory, however intrinsically valuable it may be; their land-hunger is confined within the limits of that of a Western farmer once quoted by Mr. Lincoln, who used to say, "I am not greedy about land; I only want what jines mine." Whenever a region contiguous to the United States becomes filled with Americans, ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... matter in detail, not because it is intrinsically of any moment, but because the effort to depict Dreiser as a secret agent of the Wilhelmstrasse, told off to inject subtle doses of Kultur into a naive and pious people, has taken on the proportions of an organized movement. The same critical imbecility which detects naught save ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... unwarrantable. My answer, pointing out the embarrassment, gave you an opportunity to take a less exceptionable course. You have not chosen to do it; but, by your last letter, received this day, containing expressions indecorous and improper, you have increased the difficulties to explanation intrinsically incident to the ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... for that simple faith which thou speaks of as mastering mountains of difficulty, and that not by might or power, but by its intrinsically victorious nature! I have sometimes been struck by the way in which this is asserted in the text, "This is the victory which overcometh the world, even our faith." It is taken for granted that there will be a contest and a victory; but if there is true ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... fire across Europe, and those who saw in it a resurrection of the older gods and their secrets, unhesitatingly condemned it. The doctrine of immortality had entirely supplanted the old Greek ideal of a complete earthly life for man, and all that was sensuous had come to be regarded as intrinsically sinful. Thus we have for background a divided universe, in which there is a great gulf fixed between this world and the next, and a hopeless cleavage between the life of ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... literature, science, and theology of his time, and when perhaps touched with misfortune and sorrow, he came to see the depth of interest that resides in actual life,—that the rudest clown even, with his sordid humours and coarse speech, is intrinsically more valuable than a whole forest full of goddesses, or innumerable processions of cardinal virtues, however well mounted and splendidly attired. It was in some such mood of mind that Chaucer penned those unparalleled pictures of contemporary life that delight yet, after five ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... practically all left something that was life and death to them—land, labor, women, children. Each had established the beginnings at least of a personal connection in the world, and this relation had to be rubbed out. What had they been promised to take its place? Freedom, doubtless. But intrinsically they were free men. ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... not a presumptuous assurance, but a calm faith, springing from a clear view of the sources of power in a government constituted like ours. It is no paradox to say that although comparatively weak the new-born nation was intrinsically strong. Inconsiderable in population and apparent resources, it was upheld by a broad and intelligent comprehension of rights and an all-pervading purpose to maintain them, stronger than armaments. It came from ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... question that long has been looming upon the brow of a future now rapidly passing into the present. Of it the Hawaiian incident is a part—intrinsically, perhaps, a small part—but in its relations to the whole so vital that, as has been said before, a wrong decision does not stand by itself, but involves, not only in principle but in fact, recession along the whole line. In our natural, necessary, irrepressible expansion, we are come here ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... value breaks down. Eating-values may succumb to the pain values instead of the pain to the eating-values. This is the prototype of the concept bad when it gets overloaded with the emotional value of the intrinsically desirable. The law of recoil seems to be a mental analogue of the physical law that action and reaction are equal ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... immortal passions that clothe our lives with the joy of the angels. Then who? Each man of us here to-night stands at the bar to answer if chivalry or darkness inhabits his bosom. To judge us sits womankind in the form of one of its fairest flowers. In her hand she holds the prize, intrinsically insignificant, but worthy of our noblest efforts to win as a guerdon of approval from so worthy a representative of feminine ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... not enter on the insoluble question as to what stanzas or parts of stanzas were sung by the boys and girls respectively. That the hymn was so sung in double chorus is intrinsically probable, and stated in the oracle, lines 20, 21. Some of the schemes which have been propounded are given in Wickham's Horace. I imagine that the stanzas may have been sung alternately except in the case of the first two and the last, but the ninth looks as though it might ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... I can see this big hall—furnished in mahogany or even carved oak that was old enough. Thank heaven, we're no longer slaves to a period in our decorating; we can use anything that's beautiful and suitable and not intrinsically incongruous ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... authority derived from any strained construction; but it springs from the very heart of the Constitution. It is among those powers, latent in peace, which war and insurrection call into being, but which are as intrinsically constitutional as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... their inhabitants, with their present state; and its principal interest from the personal adventures of the author. To such works, as well as to minute biography, time gives a value and utility, which they do not intrinsically possess. ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... seemed to me that I saw him as I had never seen him before—saw him inside and out, in the intense sea-light, in his personal, his moral totality. It was a quick, vivid revelation; if it only lasted a moment it had a simplifying, certifying effect. He was intrinsically a pleasing apparition, with his handsome young face and a certain absence of compromise in his personal arrangements which, more than any one I have ever seen, he managed to exhibit on shipboard. He had none of the appearance of wearing out old clothes that usually prevails there, but dressed ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... of society, provided only you do not ask to have these disfranchised races represented in that Government, provided you wholly ignore them in the State. The moral teaching of the clause offends the free and just spirit of the age, violates the foundation principles of our own Government, and is intrinsically wrong. ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... commandment of the austere character, "Reverence thyself." We find it expressed in almost every one of his singular descriptions of himself,—of those striking passages which are scattered through all his works, and which add to whatever interest may intrinsically belong to them one of the rarest of artistic charms, that of magnanimous autobiography. They have been quoted a thousand times, but one of them may perhaps ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... example, though we should always judge it to be circular, will look oval unless we are straight in front of it. When we judge that it is circular, we are judging that it has a real shape which is not its apparent shape, but belongs to it intrinsically apart from its appearance. But this real shape, which is what concerns science, must be in a real space, not the same as anybody's apparent space. The real space is public, the apparent space is private to the percipient. In different people's private spaces ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... affected only by those accents with which he is familiar. In short, he must understand the language that is spoken to him." This reasoning seems to show that there are no principles or rules of art, by following which music would be produced of that inherent beauty which would intrinsically command universal admiration. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... known, belonged to the intrinsically inner circle of the elite. Without any of the ostentation of the fashionable ones who endeavor to attract notice by eccentric display of wealth and show he still was au fait in everything that gave deserved lustre to his high position ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... has achieved a popularity for his works, which has rarely been enjoyed by any one at so early a period of life; he being now only between thirty-five and forty years of age. Where all are so intrinsically valuable, it is difficult to determine which particular work has contributed most to his rapid and enviable advancement; yet, were an award indispensable, we should feel constrained to make it in favour of his 'Proverbial ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... contradicting them; for instance, a precious yarn spun lately to the effect that Mrs. Blaine, senior, looked down on her daughter-in-law as not aristocratic enough to have married a Blaine. How intrinsically absurd is such an idea in connection with a family as close to what Lincoln called "the plain people"—and as really proud of so being—as that of the famous Republican leader! Blaine is a man so thoroughly democratic that only a very stupid enemy of his could have invented such ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... towards enjoying your own dinner, and making yourself agreeable to the company. There is reason for everything in polite usage; thus the reason why one does not blow a thing to cool it, is not only that it is an inelegant and vulgar action intrinsically, but because it may be offensive to others—cannot help being so, indeed; and it, moreover implies, haste, which, whether from greediness or a desire to get away, is equally objectionable. Everything else may be as easily traced to its origin in the ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... thirst for self-government which seizes on all British communities when they approach maturity; and secondly because it habituates the colonists to the working of a political mechanism which is both intrinsically superior to that of the Americans, and more unlike it than our old colonial system." In short, he felt very strongly that "when a people have been once thoroughly accustomed to the working of such a parliamentary system as ours they never will consent to resort to ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... even while I blamed him most bitterly, and utterly abominated his deceitful deed, I could not but admit in my heart that the result was put of all proportion to the intent: he had never dreamt of doing me this injury, or indeed any injury at all. Intrinsically the deceit had been quite venial, the reason for it obviously the reason that Raffles had given me. It was quite true that he had spoken of this Lochmaben peerage as a new creation, and of the heir ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... intrinsically romantic than Uhland, but he is equally at home in other species of composition. Schwab (1792-1850) is distinguished among the lyric poets. An epic tendency, combined with great facility in depicting scenery and describing events, is the main ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... been brought out so distinctly, for it was frequently urged during the course of the discussion that all pastors stand upon a basis of equality, and that the bishop of a little African village had intrinsically as good a right to think and to act for himself as the bishop of the great ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... impulses. They need a guardian and guide. Discretion should be that guide. It is natural for us to love what is lovely; but as to what is lovely we often differ. What is lovely to one is not always lovely to another. But there are qualities of mind and heart that are intrinsically lovely, and about which there can be no difference of opinion. What is virtuous, good, amiable, high-minded, generous, self-sacrificing and pure, we all admire. What goes to make a perfect character, a moralist, a Christian, a wise man or woman, ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... power by which reason conducts men to happiness." Truth is a merely relative thing, a variable quantity; and therefore the pursuit of truth for its own sake is superfluous and useless. There is no such thing as absolute, unchangeable right: no action is intrinsically right or wrong. "We choose the virtues, not on their own account, but for the sake of pleasure, just as we seek the skill of the physician for the sake of health."[768] That which is nominally right in morals, that which is relatively good in human conduct, is, therefore, to be determined ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... is not in reality as beautiful as it always appears in my eyes and to my memory. But, comparing it now with scenery admired by the travelling taste of all Europe, I am satisfied that the American scenery I am so fond of is intrinsically lovely, and compares very favorably with everything I have seen hitherto ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... vital interest that he learned the more rapidly that he might know all they contained. He no longer wondered at her power and breadth of thought. As he progressed he found in them a complete system of ethics and religious faith. Their writer seemed to have drawn from all sources intrinsically vital truths, and separated them from their encumbering theologic verbiage and dogma, and had traced them simply through to the great "Sermon on the Mount." In a few pages this great man had comprised the deepest logic, and the sweetest and widest theology, enough for ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... wine needs no bush does not hold true in the case of the labourer; it would require a very large bush indeed to attract him to the best of beer offered for sale under legitimate conditions. In fact, he cares not a rap about good beer—that is, intrinsically good, a genuine product of malt and hops. He would rather grumble at it, unless, perchance, it was a gift; and even then would criticise it behind the donor's back, holding the quart cup aslant so as to see the bottom in one ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... extinction amongst fossil animals and plants, we know little or nothing. All we can say is, that the attributes which constitute a species do not seem to be intrinsically endowed with permanence, any more than the attributes which constitute an individual, though the former may endure whilst many successive generations of the latter have disappeared. Each species appears to have its own life-period, its commencement, its culmination, and its gradual decay; ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... one was similarly engaged in the effort to get the better of him, and equipped with the ready casuistry to justify any transgression of the moral code, Hajji Baba never strikes a really false chord, or does or says anything intrinsically improbable; but, whether in success or adversity, as a victim of the roguery of others, or as a rogue himself, is faithful to a type of human character which modern times and a European surrounding are incapable of producing, but which is natural to a state of society in which ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... the other hand there are very few which are of an intrinsically barbaric character, and where this character does appear, it is chiefly in short passages, intermingled with others of a different character.... It is very likely that if we had found it possible to ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... may be presumed, that that exercise was considered as having nothing intrinsically in it, contrary to purity of manners or chastity, since it made a considerable part of the worship paid to the presiding goddess of that virtue, Diana, in the festivals consecrated to her. Her altar was ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... character, it would be unwise to leave out of view the fact that they have been carefully educated in the faith that secession is not only their right, but the only safeguard of their freedom. While it is perfectly true that the great struggle now going on is intrinsically between right and privilege, between law and license, and while on the part of its leaders the Southern revolt was a conspiracy against popular government, and an attempt to make a great Republic into a mere convenient ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Artificial Control. The forces in modern life which make for birth control are so strong that only convincing reasons will make people desist from it. It is said to be unnatural and intrinsically immoral. This word 'unnatural' perplexes me. Why? Civilisation involves the chaining of natural forces and their conversion to man's will and uses. Much of medicine and surgery consists ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... and passive submission, I "tacitly confess the justice of an official condemnation by Harvard University of my 'philosophical pretensions.'" Except for that one phrase, "professional warning," in Dr. Royce's attack, this appeal would never have been written, or the least notice taken of his intrinsically puerile "criticisms." When Mr. Herbert Spencer, whom I have more than once publicly criticised, can yet magnanimously write to me of this very book, "I do not see any probability that it will change my beliefs, yet I rejoice that the subject should be so well discussed,"—and ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot |
