"Characteristically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads; and an abstract of the codes of nations would be a transcript of the common conscience. Governments have their origin in the moral identity of men. Reason for one is seen to be reason for another, and for every other. There is ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the metalwork of the late pagan period and that of early Christian times is chiefly exemplified by the penannular brooches, of which great numbers have been found in Ireland. Examples of this characteristically Celtic ornament may be seen in ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... on the heels of my indolent and rather annoying realization. Could I have gotten from the Navajo what Jim and Jones so characteristically called "'em"? I turned cold all over. And on the very instant I received another ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... his life is characteristically told in this brief autobiographical sketch, written at the request of ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... together admirably that afternoon on the arrangements for the corner-stone-laying. And—such was the interaction of their separate enthusiasms—it soon became apparent that all London (in the only right sense of the word "all") must and would be at the ceremony. Characteristically, Mr. Marrier happened to have a list or catalogue of all London in his pocket, and Edward Henry appreciated him more than ever. But towards four o'clock Mr. Marrier annoyed and even somewhat alarmed Edward Henry by a mysterious change of mien. His assured optimism slipped away from him. He grew ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... Western Union, and this caused more litigation. The electrician, on account of the testimony involved, lost his glory. The judge never decided the case, but went crazy a few months afterward." It was obviously a characteristically shrewd move on the part of Mr. Gould to secure an interest in the quadruplex, as a factor in his campaign against the Western Union, and as a decisive step toward his control of that system, by the subsequent merger that included not only the Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company, but the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Characteristically he took the blame. "I shouldn't have done that—You know how it is ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... back to Solange the details of De Launay's escape, making them characteristically brief and colorful. Then, with the effective aid of MacKay, he set out to prepare for the expedition in ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... concentrated in Florence during this century is most characteristically shown in the novels of Franco Sacchetti. These are, for the most part, not stories but answers, given under certain circumstances— shocking pieces of naivete,with which silly folks, court jesters, rogues, and profligate women make their ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... the least differentiated; nor does the class necessarily include all primitive communities which have no defined system of individual ownership. But it is to be noted that the class seems to include the most peaceable—perhaps all the characteristically peaceable—primitive groups of men. Indeed, the most notable trait common to members of such communities is a certain amiable inefficiency when confronted with force ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... a party gathering in his own county in 1843, Baker was preferred to him. A letter of his gives a shrewd account of the manoeuvres among members of various Churches which brought this about; it is curiously careful not to overstate the effect of these influences and characteristically denies that Baker had part in them. To make the thing harder, he was sent from this meeting to a convention, for the whole constituency, with which the nomination lay, and his duty, of course, was to work for Baker. Here ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... flamed out, bringing his clenched hand down upon the table as if he had been in a public house dicing with blackguards—"my view of it is that it was a characteristically dastardly assassination by that damned traitor, ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... cured as hurriedly as possible— took their adventure the instant that it came, and each with a complete assurance that it was unique. To no one else in the world could such a thing have happened, least of all to the other two. Each took it characteristically, according to his or her individual nature —Judy, with a sense of Romance called deathless; Tim, with a taste for Poetic Drama, a dash of the supernatural in it; and Maria, with a magnificent inactivity that ruled the world ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... rather closely at objects which he wished to see. His growing deafness, which in later years was a marked infirmity—he had no others—tended to intensify the stooping habit, as bringing him nearer to his companions voice. His features were characteristically those of the House of Cavendish, as may be seen by comparing his portrait with that of his mother. His expression was placid, benign, but very far from inert; for his half-closed eyes twinkled with quiet mirth. His voice was soft and harmonious, with just a trace of a lisp, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... garden withal, that he became at once the pet bird of old and young, and was called the robin; and well would it be if its English namesake possessed its sterling virtues; for, with all its pleasant traits and world-wide reputation, the English robin is a pretentious, arrogant busybody, characteristically pugilistic and troublesome in the winged society of England. In form, dress, deportment, disposition, and in voice and taste for vocal music, the American robin surpasses the English most decidedly. In this our grave forefathers did more than justice to the home-bird they missed on Plymouth ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... were camped around in the woods near the Park, and we visited them quite often. An Indian has as many angles in his makeup as a centipede has legs. Just about the time you think you have one characteristically placed, you put your finger down and he isn't there. Charge one with dishonesty, and the next week he will ride a hundred miles to deliver a bracelet you paid for months before. Decide he is cruel and inhuman, and he will spend the night in heart-breaking labor, carrying ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... the world through a film of yellow which the morning light seemed to have drawn across their photographs. Lady Otway sighed, it may be at the faded relics, and turned, with resignation, to her balls of wool, which, curiously and characteristically, were not an ivory-white, but rather a tarnished yellow-white. She had called her niece in for a little chat. She had always trusted her, and now more than ever, since her engagement to Rodney, which ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... great or small, and partly because the lower river people are so far removed from the turbulent elements of the upper river that they are not swayed by the cyclonic emotions of the Isisi, the cold and deliberate desire for slaughter which is characteristically Akasavian, or the electrical decisions ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... progression, it began by blushing for its hideous aspect and uttering feeble and deprecative apologies. Not that it was at bottom ashamed of its existence, for slavery, like despotism of all sorts, is characteristically self-confident and proud; but because it had been allowed to grow up under protest in the midst of free institutions, and among a people conscious of the incongruity of the relationship existing ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... entirely fails, the conclusions of expert criminologists must be accepted, viz., that criminals are characteristically unproductive, and that, among male criminals, the celibates are in a large majority. As, from these reasons, the vast majority of criminals cannot be the descendants of a criminal ancestry, obviously tubo-ligature ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... nothing subtle about him. He was transparently simple, straightforward and unselfish. His capacity for work was prodigious, and when his own work happened to take less than his full time he characteristically found activity in serving a scientist or exercising an animal. So he used to help to send up balloons with self-recording instruments attached to them, and track the threads which led to them when detached. ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... pragmatism echoes of various popular moral forces, like democracy, impressionism, love of the concrete, respect for success, trust in will and action, and the habit of relying on the future, rather than on the past, to justify one's methods and opinions. Most of these things are characteristically American; and Mr. Russell touches on some of them with more wit than sympathy. Thus he writes: "The influence of democracy in promoting pragmatism is visible in almost every page of William James's writing. There is an impatience of authority, an unwillingness to ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... poem by G.A. Buerger which contrasts the naked rights of labor with the historic rights of rank in so sharp a fashion that, if it should be published today, it would undoubtedly be confiscated as communist literature. This ancient specimen of modern social-democratic poetry, characteristically, for those times, takes its theme from the "War about the Forest;" it bears the title: The Peasant to His Most Serene Tyrants. Because the princely huntsman has driven the peasant through the latter's own down-trodden corn-field, followed by the halloo of the hunt, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... for her to go to Boston to attend to the settling of the estate. He requested me to meet her at the station and render her whatever services might be necessary. On examining the date indicated as that of her arrival I found it no later than tomorrow. He had characteristically delayed writing until, had I been away from home for a day, I must have ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... not the difference between the kinds of story they chose to tell. They approached a story from opposite sides, and thought of it, consequently, in images that had nothing in common: not always, I dare say, but on the whole and characteristically they did so. Maupassant's idea of a story (and not peculiarly Maupassant's, of course, but his name is convenient) would suggest an object that you fashioned and abandoned to the reader, turning away and leaving ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... I see genuine contentment in your gait and mien, your eye and face, when you are helping me and pleasing me—working for me, and with me, in, as you characteristically say, 'all that is right:' for if I bid you do what you thought wrong, there would be no light-footed running, no neat-handed alacrity, no lively glance and animated complexion. My friend would then turn to me, quiet ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... She replied characteristically. She began very soberly to say that she should be the last to advise a marriage between persons of different conditions in life. "But then," said she, "this Mercy is altogether an exception. If a flower grows on a dunghill, 't is still a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... week there is in some cases a steady rise in the fever each evening showing a degree or degree and one-half higher than the preceding evening, reaching 103 to 104, and each morning showing higher fever than the preceding morning. The pulse is characteristically low in proportion to the temperature, being about 100 to 110, full of low tension, often having double beat. The tongue is coated; there is constipation or diarrhea; the abdomen is somewhat distended and a ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Torcy was characteristically American; the Marines advanced yelling like Indians, using bayonet and rifle. From Torcy the Marines set forward and took strong ground on either side of Belleau Wood. They had reached all the objectives and ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... understood and shivered with terror. She was far from being her imperious self as her daughter presented the stranger and remarked that he was a cousin of Dr. Hamilton, characteristically refraining from apology ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... my fame." We do not suit, for we never gained a suit together. Well, what with reporting for the bar, writing for the Annuals and the Pocket-books, I shall be able to meet all demands, except those of my tailor; and, as his bill is most characteristically long, I think I shall be able to make it stretch over till next term, by which time I hope to fulfil my engagements with Mr C, who has given me an order for a fashionable novel, written by a "nobleman." ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... animals, flowers and birds, his fondness for the latter being shown nowhere more strongly than in his devotion to his ravens at Devonshire Terrace. He writes characteristically of the death of "Grip," the first raven: "You will be greatly shocked and grieved to hear that the raven is no more. He expired to-day at a few minutes after twelve o'clock, at noon. He had been ailing for a few days, but ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... arrogance of this utterance is characteristically English. It is, after all, but the journalistic echo of the Churchill Glasgow speech, and the fullest justification of the criticism of the Kreuz Zeitung already quoted. It does not stand alone; it could be paralleled in the columns of any English paper—Liberal as ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... told, and found myself looking at a dirty half-sheet of notepaper, marked by the Kaffir's thumbs. Some words were written on it in Wardlaw's hand; and, characteristically, in Latin, which was not a bad cipher. I read—'Henricus de Letaba transeunda apud Duprei ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... and honorable pontoon bridge, so characteristically Filipino, doing its best to be useful in spite of natural faults, and rising or falling with the caprices of the Pasig,—that brave bridge was no more. The new Spanish bridge drew Ibarra's attention. Carriages passed continuously, drawn by groups of dwarf horses, in splendid harness. ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... could have induced him to do such an unconventional and conspicuous thing. He remembered the exact phrase he had applied to it when told by the Scotchman of Bobby's previous adventure. "Characteristically American," he had ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... their 'ipics and their ipecacs,' that you might have knocked me down with a feather, sir. It was insupportable, and I fled away into France." As he went on, waxing drolly furious at the recollection of various editorial scenes, I could not help remembering Mr. Yellowplush's recommendation, thus characteristically expressed: "Take my advice, honrabble sir,—listen to a humble footmin: it's genrally best in poatry to understand puffickly what you mean yourself, and to igspress your meaning clearly afterwoods,—in the ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... scandalous situation, some low-class calling or disgraceful behaviour, and describe them in terms of the utmost "RESPECTABILITY," is generally comic. The English word is here purposely employed, as the practice itself is characteristically English. Many instances of it may be found in Dickens and Thackeray, and in English literature generally. Let us remark, in passing, that the intensity of the effect does not here depend on its length. A word is sometimes sufficient, provided it gives us a glimpse of an entire ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... have been more useful to the opposition than this characteristically candid avowal, twisted as it immediately was into an admission that the writer's views were contradicted by the facts of palaeontology. But, in fact, Mr. Darwin made no such admission. What he says in effect is, not that palaeontological evidence is against him, ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... at Salisbury,) to send away King James; and his few words, after long patience, to that foolish lord himself, who harangued him on the observance of his declaration. Such traits, and several of Queen Anne (not equally deep) in the same journal, paint those princes as characteristically as Lord Clarendon's able father would have drawn them. There are two letters in the "Nugae Antiquae," that exhibit as faithful pictures of Queen Elizabeth and James the First, by delineating them in their private life ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... unpleasant truth which the others had characteristically shirked, for Blake was often careless, and Benson had taken the risks of the journey with frank indifference. After nearly starving once or twice, they had succeeded in getting fresh supplies; but now their hearts sank: as they thought of the expanse of frozen wilderness that ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... neither side risking more than insignificant skirmishes. During this time Octavius had free use of the sea for his supplies, while the heavier fleet of Antony lay idle in harbor. Nevertheless, Octavius did not dare to risk all on a land battle, and conducted his campaign in a characteristically timid and vacillating manner which should have made it easy for Antony to take the aggressive and win. But the famous lieutenant of Julius Caesar was no longer the man who used to win the devotion of his soldiers by his courage and audacity. He was broken ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... discussion of the significance of the Mississippi Valley in American history is a corollary of this condition. Has the Mississippi Valley a permanent contribution to make to American society, or is it to be adjusted into a type characteristically Eastern and European? In other words, has the United States itself an original contribution to make to the history of society? This is what it comes to. The most significant fact in the Mississippi Valley is its ideals. Here has been developed, not by revolutionary theory, but by growth among free ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... and in what to others seem but caprices and conventionalisms, the "Traits" of a nation, yet never overlooks the practical and every-day wants of man, in a recent address at Concord, Mass., the place of his residence, thus characteristically alludes to ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... overcome by anguish of mind, and sank down on the stair, where she lay, unconscious of all that succeeded, until she found herself raised in the arms of a mob who had entered the house. And how came they to have entered? In a way characteristically dreadful. The night was starlit; the patrols had perambulated the street without noticing anything suspicious, when two foot passengers, who were following in their rear, observed a dark-colored stream traversing the causeway. One of them, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... given to Terence, that in case of the dogs giving the alarm at night, the occupants of the hut were to retire at once to the house; to which he replied characteristically: ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... the magnitude of the proposed undertaking at first rather staggered them. It was as though a small independent steel maker should suddenly be invited to take over the United States Steel Corporation. Mr. McClure, characteristically impetuous and daring, wished to accept the invitation outright; Mr. Doubleday, however, suggested a period of probation. The outcome was that the two men offered to take charge of Harper & Brothers for a few months, and then decide whether ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... if not thousands of black men in this country who in capacity are to be ranked with the superior persons of the dominant race; and it is hard to say that in any evident feature of mind they characteristically differ ...
— A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1 • Kelly Miller
... paid to the similar petrifaction, by other nations, of the rude forms and materials adopted in the haste of early settlement, or consecrated by the purity of rural life. The whole system of Swiss and German Gothic has thus been most characteristically affected by the structure of the intersecting timbers at the angles of the chalet. This was in some cases directly and without variation imitated in stone, as in the piers of the old bridge at Aarburg; and the practice obtained—partially ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... on the contrary, with your hands, you grasp as a bird with its feet. But you cannot hop on your hands. A cat, a leopard, and a monkey, leap or grasp with equal ease; but the action of their paws in leaping is, I imagine, from the fleshy ball of the foot; while in the bird, characteristically [Greek: gampsonux], this fleshy ball is reduced to a boss or series of bosses, and the nails are elongated into sickles or horns; nor does the springing power seem to depend on the development of the bosses. They are far more developed in an eagle than a robin; but you ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... Euplotes. Its outline is oval and regular except at the posterior end on the right side, where there is a considerable indentation. The frontal margin is characterized by a row of powerful membranelles, which become smaller at the peristome and at the mouth they are of characteristically small size. The ventral cirri are 7 in number. Five of them are in one row from the anterior end down the right side nearly to the anal cirri; 1 is on the frontal border between the first two; 1 lies just anterior to the second anal cirrus ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins
... Goncourts for positive information. "Our romances," as the brothers had noted forty years earlier, "will supply the greatest number of facts and absolute truths to the moral history of this century." And Edmond de Goncourt clung to the belief, ending, happily and characteristically enough, by conceiving himself and his brother to be "types," and the best of all types: le type de l'honnete homme litteraire, du perseverant dans ses convictions, et du contempteur de l'argent. The praise is deserved. It is a distinction of ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... less green and prickly, and had settled into a scheme of life that need not, ill-feeling apart, exclude Archelaus, to become better friends or at least more tolerant of each other. He suggested his idea to Phoebe, though characteristically he did not refer to her attack of faintness. She looked at him in a scared way and then murmured something about thinking it was best to wait till Archelaus made the first advance, and to this ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... of this?" said Miss Cheyne, alert, and rising, characteristically, to the emergency of ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... sooner than the reign of Edward IV. (about 1460). The public pageants of the reign of his predecessor were uncommonly splendid, and being then first enlivened by the introduction of speaking allegorical personages, properly and characteristically habited, naturally led the way to these personifications, by which Moralities were distinguished from the simple religious dramas ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... to glorify this as something characteristically American, or especially Californian. Californian education has, of course, made the thought of all possible recuperations easy. In an exhausted country, with no marginal resources, the outlook on the future would be much darker. But I like to think that what I ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... that the one existence becomes complementary to the other, and the two conjoined form one perfect human life. This life-communion, called by divines fides, or mutual faith, is then the second good fruit of marriage. Indeed it is the more characteristically human good, offspring being rather related to the animal side of our nature. But as animal and rational elements make one human being, so do offspring and mutual faith constitute the adequate good of that human union of the sexes, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... Moray, or Murray, is a large district in the north-east of Scotland, bounded by the Moray Frith on the north-east and north. The eastern half of the province is lower than the western; in which the mountains render the whole country characteristically highland. On the north is a long belt of lowlands, about 240 square miles in extent: this is greatly diversified with ridgy swells and low hilly ranges, lying parallel to the frith, and intersected by the rivers Ness, Nairn, Findhorn, Lossie, and Spey running across ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... vast faith in its efficacy. He is always attempting to incarnate in the flesh of his music law abstracted from classical works. Even Tchaikowsky, who was a good deal of an intellectualist himself, and dubbed "perfect," in a characteristically servile letter, every one of the thirty practice fugues that Rimsky composed in the course of a single month, complained that the latter "worshiped technique" and that his work was "Full of contrapuntal tricks and all the signs ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... that, having for some time held an Anglo-Catholic position, he joined the Roman Catholic Church. It is notable, in connection with the general argument, that while the deeper reasons for such a change do not concern such a sketch as this, he was again characteristically amused and annoyed with the sentimentalists, sympathetic or hostile, who supposed he was attracted by ritual, music, and emotional mysticism. He told such people, somewhat to their bewilderment, that he had been converted because Rome alone ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... characteristically fierce and aggressive, and in a wild state they live in troops, or even in herds of hundreds. Being armed with powerful canine teeth and wolf-like jaws, they are formidable antagonists, and other animals do not dare to attack them. It is because ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... The little Scotsman had a squabble with his landlord, and was obliged to take his guest to the Mitre. "There is nothing," Johnson said, "in this mighty misfortune; nay, we shall be better at the Mitre." And Boswell was characteristically oblivious of the slur on his gifts as a host. But that, perhaps, is a trifle compared with the complacency with which he records further snubbings administered to him at that tavern. For example, there was that rainy night when Boswell made some feeble complaints ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... due to their dislike of his 'moral character,' a 'moral' sanction; if by the immediate act of God or by distraction caused by dread of God's displeasure, it is a 'religious' sanction. Of these, as Bentham characteristically observes[367] in a later writing the political is much stronger than the 'moral' or 'religious.' Many men fear the loss of character or the 'wrath of Heaven,' but all men fear the scourge and the gallows.[368] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... I mean. Still, in their sportiveness and in the sportiveness of Roth's animals, they have a certain charm. And with the streams spouting, the work as a whole makes an impression of liveliness. But it's a nervous liveliness, characteristically American, not altogether healthy." ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... to a picture gallery at Antwerp or Brussels. Finally Hal, to conclude our list of minor places, has a grand fourteenth-century church, with a miracle-working Virgin, and a little red-brick town hall of characteristically ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... Sherringham repeated that it was all right—the place was familiar with mirth and passion, there was often wonderful talk there, and it was only the setting that was still and solemn. It happened that this evening—there was no knowing in advance—the scene was not characteristically brilliant; but to confirm his assertion, at the moment he spoke, Mademoiselle Dunoyer, who was also in the play, came into the room attended by ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies, and the so-called "leading motives" of the Frenchman, Hector Berlioz, had preceded his "typical motives." Moreover, the orchestration of Berlioz had been a precursor of his orchestral tone-coloring. Nevertheless, everything he touched was so characteristically applied by him as to produce new impressions, and to emphasize the idea of music as a language. So peculiarly were music and poetry blended in the delicate tissue of his genius that one seemed inseparable from the other. United, he believed it to be their mission to inculcate high moral ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... 152 is a marble copy of this, considerably restored. The god, conceived in the likeness of a beautiful boy, leans against a tree, preparing to stab a lizard with an arrow, which should be in the right hand. The graceful, leaning pose and the soft beauty of the youthful face and flesh are characteristically Praxitelean. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... whose larvae have wing-rudiments in the form of inpushed imaginal discs, and in all these insects there is, as we have seen, considerable divergence in form between larva and imago. In the pupa the wings and other characteristically adult structures are, for the first time, visible outwardly; it is the instar which marks the great crisis in transformation. The pupa rests, as a rule, in a quiescent condition, and during the early ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... entered the fly-haunted drawing-room. He sat down with his head in his hands. Mabel's letter had been characteristically unlike her. Her letters were never in the least bit like herself. That was perhaps their only attraction. It was only in the postscript that he seemed actually ...
— If Winter Don't - A B C D E F Notsomuchinson • Barry Pain
... see it anyhow. If it's going to come I can't stop it; but I can enjoy it," Alice remarked in her characteristically philosophical way. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound - Or, The Proof on the Film • Laura Lee Hope
... conscious was the soft touch of a hand on either side of her face—she was a prisoner. Faith's instant spring to one side brought her face to face with everybody. Mr. Simlins looked from one to the other, and his first remark was characteristically ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... forefathers brought with them to America was the result of centuries of exchange in ideas between Britain and the Continent, and though in the course of time it had become something characteristically Anglo-Saxon, its origins were Greek and Arabic and Roman and Jewish. But the interdependence of nations today is of an infinitely more vital and insistent kind, and despite superficial setbacks becomes more vital every day. As late as the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... be it observed, secures unity; diversity, contrariety, contention are of the surface. Numbers need not concern us, whether one hundred, or one hundred millions, provided all are imbedded in the central, commanding truths of the human consciousness. And if the Man of the New World be characteristically one who will attach himself to the eternal master-tides, that fact alone fits ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Professor Smith gave the two Houses of Parliament,—Jowett, the Clergy, coupling with it the name of your friend Mr. Rogers—on whom he showered every kind of praise, and Mr. Rogers returned thanks very characteristically and pleasantly. Lord Lansdowne drank to the Bar (Mr. Bowen), Lord Camperdown to—I really forget what: Mr. Green to Literature and Science delivering a most undeserved eulogium on myself, with a more rightly directed one ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... were still peering about the room when the door opened and closed again. There was something so characteristically guarded and secretive in the movement that Blake knew it was Copeland even before he let his gaze wheel around to the newcomer. About the entire figure, in fact, he could detect that familiar veiled wariness, that enigmatic and self-concealing cautiousness which had always had ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... The dispute with the captain arose from the wish of that functionary to intrude on his right to his cabin, for which he had paid thirty pounds. After recounting the circumstances of the apology, he characteristically adds:— ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... again, Le ffacase characteristically demanded the burden fall upon the employees of the paper, paying them off in scrip on the poor excuse that no money was available. I saw no future in staying with this sinking ship and eager to be back at the center of things—Fles wrote me that ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Slug, their clothes resemble those of their poor progenitors. In the middle Agsan (including the W-wa, Kasilaan, lower Argwan, lower Umaam, lower Ihawn, Hbung, and Simlau Rivers) the dress may be called characteristically Manbo. ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... of educated men and women who have visions—people who are characteristically looking beyond the present and trying to plan for the development of a great democratic state and for the welfare of a free people, I know of no line of thought more appropriate or suggestive. This is true because in such a state and with such a people, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... it was one of the moneylenders, Gruzin's creditors, who sometimes used to come to Orlov for small payments on account; but when he came into the hall and flung open his coat, I saw the thick brows and the characteristically compressed lips which I knew so well from the photographs, and two rows of stars on the uniform. I recognised him: it was Orlov's father, the ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 'Spanish Ballads' (in 1846), admirably illustrated by DOYLE, made their mark, as did later his 'Unprotected Female.' In Volume XVI. PERCIVAL LEIGH commenced his 'Mr. PIPS, his Diary, or, Manners and Customs of ye Englyshe in 1849,' characteristically illustrated by RICHARD DOYLE at his graphic best. The same year was remarkable for the appearance of LEECH's most delightful character, the simple-minded, sport-loving, philistine paterfamilias, Mr. BRIGGS, first met with in connection with 'The Pleasures ...
— Punch, Volume 101, Jubilee Issue, July 18, 1891 • Various
... waiting," she returned, sadly—"woman's life always is." Then with a characteristically quick change of mood, she added, laughingly: "I know a woman who says that all her life, before she was married, she was waiting for her husband, and that since her marriage, ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... mathematics, another for mechanical things, another for language, and so on. As any of these "natural gifts" is present in some degree in nearly all members of the human family, and not to anything like the same degree in animals, they are the characteristically human traits. It is on the basis of such native aptitudes that each individual proceeds, through the processes of learning, to build up his various acquired abilities, such as the ability to sing, to speak a certain language, to add, to work with tools, to perform ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... and corrupt press. MacLachan expressed the acidulous hope that thereafter Cyrus the Gaunt would be content with making a fool of himself without implicating innocent and confiding friends. The Bonnie Lassie was not present, but sent word (characteristically) that they must have done it all wrong; men had no sense, anyway. The party then sent out for turpentine and broke up to reassemble no more. Only Phil Stacey, inventor of the great idea, was still faithful to and hopeful of it. Each evening he conscientiously greened himself ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... all this out to my friend who remained silent for a while and then remarked in his characteristically casual and omniscient manner: "Oh, that fellow was half on idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards." These were absolutely the only words that passed between us; for extreme surprise at this ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... in the higher regions; though absent from the intervening plains it again appears in the north of Europe and in Scotland. Among the Insectivora, the alpine shrew (Sorex alpinus) is restricted to the Alps. Of the Cheiroptera (bats) only Vesperugo maurus is characteristically alpine. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... (used of boys as well as men) implies the possession of qualities worthy of a man, as strength, courage, sincerity, honesty, independence, or even tenderness. Manlike refers to qualities, attributes, or foibles characteristically masculine. Manful suggests the valor, prowess, or resolution properly belonging to men. Mannish (a derogatory word) indicates superficial or affected qualities of manhood, especially when inappropriately possessed ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... characteristically enough, it was to Tip that she turned in what was without any doubt the great decision of her life, and Tip that influenced her to it. She knew whom to go to well enough, and she knew that he was the one person qualified to give her absolutely unprejudiced counsel. Oh, yes! she knew. ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... need of a little soothing. Foster had been taking a farewell shot at Cope and had been rough and vindictive. He had heard something of the antics of "Annabella's" partner and had magnified characteristically the seriousness of the offense. "What hope for him"— meaning Cope—"so long as he goes on ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... Political intrigue to-day, if quite as vulgar, is less sordid. Bigotry and ambition in those days allowed few of the finer feelings to come to the surface, except with regard to the luxuriance of surroundings. Of this last there can be no question, and Blois is as characteristically luxurious as any of the magnificient edifices which lodged the royalty and nobility of other days throughout ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... receptive and inactive,—leaving out those among you who happen to be taking notes. But the very listening which you are carrying on is itself a determinate kind of conduct. All the muscular tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar way as you listen. Your head, your eyes, are fixed characteristically. And, when the lecture is over, it will inevitably eventuate in some stroke of behavior, as I said on the previous occasion: you may be guided differently in some special emergency in the schoolroom by words ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... roof of the boat; filthy ghats thronged with white- robed Moslems performing their scanty religious ablutions; great grain boats heavily thatched, containing not only families, but their sheep and poultry; and all the other sights of a crowded Srinagar waterway, the houses being characteristically distorted and out of repair. This canal gradually widens into the Anchar Lake, a reedy mere of indefinite boundaries, the breeding-ground of legions of mosquitos; and after the tawny twilight darkened into a stifling night ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... triumphantly strong, it is conspicuously weak at only one point,—the important point of poetry. In eloquence, in philosophy, even in theology; in history, in fiction, in criticism, in epistolary writing, in what may be called the pamphlet; in another species of composition, characteristically, peculiarly, almost uniquely, French,—the Thought and the Maxim; by eminence in comedy, and in all those related modes of written expression for which there is scarcely any name but a French name,—the jeu d'esprit, the bon mot, persiflage, the phrase; ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... in December 1866, Mushet's daughter called on Bessemer and asked his help to prevent the loss of their home: "They tell me you use my father's inventions and are indebted to him for your success." Bessemer replied characteristically: ...
— The Beginnings of Cheap Steel • Philip W. Bishop
... seem strange to the Western reader; but it is true to life. The whole of the scene is characteristically Japanese. (2) The invocation Namu Amida Butsu! ("Hail to the Buddha Amitabha!"),—repeated, as a prayer, for ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... consider her technique, in which she is characteristically original. This originality is noticeable especially in her use of words. There is a sense of fitness that often surprises the reader. Words at times in her hands reveal a new power and significance. In the choice of words Charlotte Bronte was scrupulous. She believed that there ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... love was interwoven with all our other interests; to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best as activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't want each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We wanted to do big things together, and for us to take each other openly and desperately would leave ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... dictae, quae in omnium firme populorum cultiorum linguas conversae, in deliciis omnium habentur, manibusque omnium terentur,"[FN211] the amiable Carlyle, in the gospel according to Saint Froude, characteristically termed them "downright lies" and forbade the house to such "unwholesome literature." What a sketch ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... a patient and characteristically undemonstrative crowd that assembled on the wharf, a crowd content to wait an hour or more without a murmur after the ship had dropped anchor in midstream for the captain's gig to be lowered from the davits. The shrill falsetto of the boatswain's whistle suddenly ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... part of the skeleton so characteristically human as the bones which form the pelvis, or bony girdle of the hips. The expanded haunch-bones form a basin-like structure which affords support to the soft internal viscera during the habitually upright position, and gives ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... of the episode were characteristically vague; they came back to her in pieces like disconnected sections of a wooden puzzle. She remembered that she had written an exquisitely pathetic letter to Fairholm "when the end came," as she expressed it; and ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... activity take the form of pitch of voice, skin texture, shape and weight of bones, etc. Some of the inter-grades are a little hard to define—the human species is such an inextricable mixture of races, etc.; but Dr Bell does not hesitate to describe the characteristically masculine woman of the extreme type, who "shuns both sexual relations and maternity...(She) is on the fringe of femininity. These women are usually flat-breasted and plain. Even though they menstruate, their metabolism is often for the most part masculine in character: ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... Pasha idle. He sent two companies of infantry with one gun by steamer to Abba to arrest the fanatic who disturbed the public peace. What followed is characteristically Egyptian. Each company was commanded by a captain. To encourage their efforts, whichever officer captured the Mahdi was promised promotion. At sunset on an August evening in 1881 the steamer arrived at Abba. The promise of the Governor-General ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... systematic accuracy. There is no chance for the most careless person to commit a blunder, or make a mistake. At the proper time the conductor marches every body into their places and locks them in, gives the word, "All right," and away we go. Somebody has remarked, very characteristically, that the starting word of the English is "all right," and that of the ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... and details requisite, as he says, to complete a character thus far chiefly known by a few heroic outlines. We propose taking a brief survey of his life-history of the great admiral and general at sea—the 'Puritan Sea-King,' as Mr Dixon more characteristically than accurately calls his hero. A sea-king he was, every inch of him; but to dub him Puritan, is like giving up to party what was meant for British mankind. To many, the term suggests primarily a habit of speaking through the nose; and Blake had thundered commands through too many a piping ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... habit of always using this entrance, and of glancing as she passed at the stick-rack, where a rough mountain-ash was wont to stand—a stick which Jem had cut, while she stood by, years before. There was, perhaps, something characteristically suggestive of Jem in this stick—something strong and simple. She was not the person to indulge in sentimental thoughts; she could not afford to do that, Indeed, she often looked into the stick-rack without thinking, but she never ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... the wonders and agonies of this day full of surprising failures coming at the end of a harassing month of scheming and insomnia. He was tired. A man isn't made of stone. Hang everything! Mr Verloc reposed characteristically, clad in his outdoor garments. One side of his open overcoat was lying partly on the ground. Mr Verloc wallowed on his back. But he longed for a more perfect rest—for sleep—for a few hours of delicious forgetfulness. That would come later. Provisionally he rested. ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... ahead of her future rival in wealth, and in mercantile and industrial activity; as a manufacturing country she had no equal, and in trade the rival she chiefly feared was still the German Hansa. Chaucer's "Merchant" characteristically wears a "Flandrish beaver hat;" and it is no accident that the scene of the "Pardoner's Tale," which begins with a description of "superfluity abominable," is laid in Flanders. In England, indeed the towns never came to domineer as they did in the Netherlands. Yet, since no trading ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... kindness of human nature,' said Tom, characteristically putting himself quite out of sight in the matter, 'that everybody who comes here, as you have done, is more considerate and affectionate to me than I should have any right to hope, if I were the most sanguine creature in ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... the Orvietans, who were pressing him to fulfil his contract, and threatening, if he delayed longer, to appoint another artist in his place. Cardinal Giuliano, the imperious patron later of Michelangelo, took the matter with a characteristically high hand. "We laboured under the impression"—thus he writes to the Council of Orvieto—"that you were to be compliant, as best suits the love we have ever borne to your community. And so we now again exhort and pray that you do reserve the place which is his due to Maestro ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... certificate, which Dr Mant had characteristically forgotten to date. After a week it came back with an official note drawing Nicky's attention to this, and requesting that ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... pickets shudderingly shrank away from the weird light that was streaming out to them and tinting their faces with a ghastly, greenish pallor, Farmer Burns' small boy, moved by some imp of perversity, did a characteristically childish thing. He picked up a good-sized stone and flung it straight ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... 1, he started, with his family, for Torquay, where he remained until August 27—a holiday which he characteristically enters in his diary as "eight weeks and a day." The house he occupied was in Hesketh Crescent, a pleasantly placed row of houses close above the sea, somewhat removed from what was then the main body of the town, and ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... old age his confidence in his own powers was never shaken. He persistently acted up to the sentiment—slightly paraphrased from Terence—which he had characteristically adopted as his family motto, Forti nihil difficile; neither could there be any question as to the genuine nature either of his strength or his courage, albeit hostile critics might seek to confound the latter quality ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... worker, but he characteristically treated his mental processes in a joking way, and wrote to a friend: "I like nine tenths of any matter I study, but I do not like to lick the plate. If I did, I suppose I should be more of a man of science and find my brain tired oftener than I do." Again he wrote, ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... the house realised that all immediate danger was over, they took the change of situations characteristically. The rancher went quietly to find his daughter. She showed no signs of any reaction, although perhaps she had a hard struggle to conquer her feelings. Jacques wanted to sally out and seek for Leopold St. Croix, so that they might settle ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... to Andre's monument is characteristically mischievous. He is reminding Southey of his early sympathy with rebels—his "Wat Tyler" and pantisocratic days. Major John Andre, Sir Henry Clinton's adjutant-general, was caught returning from an interview with an American traitor—a perfectly ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... anecdote about the child swallowing the necklace—pronounced in Jack Hopkins's abbreviated articulation of it, neck-luss—a word repeated by him a round dozen times at the least within a few seconds in the reading version of that same anecdote. How characteristically and comically the abbreviations were multiplied for the delivery of it, by the very voice and in the very person, as it were, of Jack Hopkins, who shall say! As, for example—"Sister, industrious ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... capacities, and exhibiting the identity of human nature under such various circumstances, novels supply a vehicle through which the force of public opinion may work, fusing differences, breaking down prejudices, and checking the "despotism of situations." The essay concludes characteristically with the refusal to believe that democracy is necessarily unpoetic. As "we hold fast to the faith that the 'cultivation of the masses,' which has for the present superseded the development of the individual, will in its maturity produce some higher type of individual manhood ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... Eline, and Teresita, who is one more of his many feminine embodiments of the passionate and changeable Northland nature. Any attempt to give a political tendency to the trilogy must be held wasted. Characteristically, Kareno is a sort of Nietzschean rebel against the victorious majority, and Hamsun's seemingly cynical conclusions stress man's capacity for action rather than the purposes toward which that ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... William G. Lee, who had served in many subordinate offices in local lodges before he had been chosen First Vice-Grand Master in 1895. For fifteen years he was a faithful understudy to Morrissey whose policy he has continued in a characteristically fearless and thoroughgoing manner. When he assumed the presidency of the order, he obtained a ten-hour day in the Eastern territory for all train and yard men, together with a slight increase in pay for ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... tales in the middle of the action, introduced, as in Partridge's visit to the theatre, the added piquancy of topical allusion; in fact he did anything he chose. And he laid down that free form of the novel which is characteristically English, and from which, in its essence, no one till the modern realists has made ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... because reason, in him, is not in conflict with passion, but passion's ally. His senses speak with unparalleled directness, as in those elegies which must remain the model in English of masculine sensual sobriety. He distinguishes the true end of such loving in a forcible, characteristically ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... characteristic distinctness: "If I die, you may inscribe on my tomb stone, Died of the Mahoning Railroad;" so great had been his devotion to the interests of the road, and so severe the personal exposures which its supervision had required of him, who was characteristically more thoughtful of every interest confided to his care, than of ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... to return to Shakespear. Though Mr Harris followed Tyler in identifying Mary Fitton as the Dark Lady, and the Earl of Pembroke as the addressee of the other sonnets and the man who made love successfully to Shakespear's mistress, he very characteristically refuses to follow Tyler on one point, though for the life of me I cannot remember whether it was one of the surmises which Tyler published, or only one which he submitted to me to see what I would say about it, just as he used to submit ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... included both the new admirers. It also as a matter of course included Mr. Flack, for though the party had been proposed in the first instance by Charles Waterlow, who wished to multiply opportunities for studying his future sitter, Mr. Dosson had characteristically constituted himself host and administrator, with the young journalist as his deputy. He liked to invite people and to pay for them, and disliked to be invited and paid for. He was never inwardly content on any occasion unless a great deal of money was spent, and he could ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... but one of the advocates of expiring paganism has confidently asserted that the walls of Athens were guarded by the goddess Minerva with her formidable aegis, and by the angry phantom of Achilles; and that the conqueror was dismayed by the presence of the hostile deities of Greece." But Gibbon characteristically adds, "The Christian faith which Alaric had devotedly embraced taught him to despise the imaginary deities of Rome and Athens."—Milman's "Gibbon's Rome," vol. ii., p. 215.] Hovering o'er Athens, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... literatures of other countries and the cultivating of an intimacy with the great classics of the past. In the following essay on the "Study of Poetry," one of the most famous of his utterances, there may be found exemplified his characteristically vivacious and memorable style, his delicate appreciations brilliantly and precisely expressed, his concrete and persuasive argument. Perhaps no single critical document of our time has contributed so many ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various |
