"Actuality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... outlook of the mind, as of the eye, morning dispels some shadows; into the most depressing atmosphere daylight brings hope, brings actuality, brings at least the need to be doing. Claude's heart, as he slipped from his couch on the settle next morning, and admitted the light and turned the log and stirred the embers, was sad and full of foreboding. But as the room, its disorder abated, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... conditions. He conceived himself as a phenomenon to be explained. That he called his memoir Poetry and Truth was perhaps an error of judgment, since the title has been widely misunderstood. For Goethe poetry was not the antithesis of truth, but a higher species of truth—the actuality as seen by the selecting, combining, and harmonizing imagination. In themselves, he would have said, the facts of a man's life are meaningless, chaotic, discordant: it is the poet's office to put them into the crucible of his spirit and give them forth as a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... conception, not even in the instrumentation; which seems the more remarkable when we reflect that he was the originator of many new orchestral combinations, the beauty of which presented itself to his imagination before his ears had ever heard them in actuality. These new tone-colors, as Jahn remarks, existed intrinsically in the orchestra as a statue does in the marble; but it remained for the artist to bring them out; and that Mozart was bound to have them is shown by the anecdote of a musician who complained to him of the difficulty of a certain ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... which this intellectual idiosyncrasy we have been describing gradually affected Amiel's life supplies abundant proof of its actuality and sincerity. It is a pitiful story. Amiel might have been saved from despair by love and marriage, by paternity, by strenuous and successful literary production; and this mental habit of his—this tyranny of ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... actuality being vague in her mind; perhaps some hidden suffering—but she learned that he had never been wounded in battle and ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... threatens the individual in his individual freedom. This fatalite, we, too, do not believe in it, but we do believe in the forces which bring forth the eternal in human will, that these both are one, will and forces, one with necessity, with actuality, with creative, moral power, of which all great ideas are the children, the idea of freedom, the idea of the beautiful, the idea of tragic fidelity, and that these, reaching far above being and passing away, are nevertheless real, life entire, fact entire. ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... of Pleasure. Aristotle now goes back to his starting point—the nature of the Good, and Happiness. He re-states his positions: That Happiness is an exercise or actuality [Greek: energeia], and not an acquirement or state (hexis), That it belongs to such exercises as are worthy of choice for their own sake, and not to such as are worthy of choice for the sake of something else; That it is perfect and self-sufficing, seeking nothing beyond ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... passionate, warm-hearted, imaginative son. Perhaps, unknown to himself, he harbored a secret resentment that Bruce had not been the little girl whose picture had been as fixed and clear in his mind before Bruce came as though she were already an actuality. She was to have had flaxen hair, with blue ribbons in it, and teeth like tiny, sharp pearls. She was to have come dancing to meet him on her toes, and to have snuggled contentedly on his lap when he returned from long rides on the range. Boys were all right, but he ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... love and post-nuptial love. The former, which is the real sexual love, the love of which the poets sing and which "makes the world go round," I have called romantic love. The latter, which in actuality is sex comradeship, I call conjugal affection or friendship. To be more definite, I shall call the one "love," the other "affection" or "friendship." Now love is not affection or friendship, yet they are ofttimes mistaken, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... mood; so much so, that even when the poet is depicting an actual person or scene, he must see it with the imaginative eye, the inward eye, as well as with the outward. Unless he does, there is no poetry in the result. A poem is twofold, presenting an actuality, and at the same time a tender lucent image thereof, like the reflection of a castle, standing on the edge of a lake, in the calm deep mirror before it: at one view we see the castle and its glistening counterpart. In the best ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... past the current notion to the Fact: that the claim of such a saint as Teresa is bound up with her declaration that she has achieved union with the Divine Essence itself. The visionary is a mystic when his vision mediates to him an actuality beyond the reach of the senses. The philosopher is a mystic when he passes beyond thought to the pure apprehension of truth. The active man is a mystic when he knows his actions to be a part of a greater ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... themselves to the phenomena of life, they choose death in preference to the compromise—life. A leaning towards the tragic characterizes the German of to-day; an inclination not to compromise, not to admit defeat, thereby admitting the "will" to be incapable of transformance into actuality. ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... unexpectedness of things, and indulged himself in a satirical comment of greeting, far from what he had intended. Poor Dick! he was always making sage resolutions on the chance of finding Raven and Nan together, but the actuality as inevitably overthrew him. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Minor. The Head Master pointed out in his discourse that one might think at first sight that boys at a school might not have the opportunity to violate the tremendous Commandments; but, he said, this was not so. The Commandments were as much a living actuality in school life as they were in the larger world. Coming events cast their shadows before them; the child was the father of the man; what a boy was at school, such would he be in after life. Theft, the boys perhaps thought, was ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... mental habit must be included also the doubting folly (folie du doute). The victim of this disorder is so querulously anxious to make no mistake that he is forever returning to see if he has turned out the gas, locked the door, and the like; in extreme cases he finally doubts the actuality of his own sensations, and so far succumbs to chronic indecision as seriously to handicap his efforts. This condition has been aptly termed ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... retorted. "There are now, and that is the important matter. I am coming to the very instant of actuality, to the show which I saw yesterday, and which I should have brought my paper down to mention if it had been accepted." He drew a long breath, and said, with a dreamy air of retrospect: "It is all of a ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... well. He had, in an unusual degree, the art of putting things vividly and crisply, and he possessed an extraordinary memory for those little details which give actuality to the picture. When he described the shooting of a presidential candidate, Dodgson could see the man with his grimy hands and torn collar, crumpling up as the volley from the firing party caught him. The editor himself had never come in contact with crude ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... appeals to many different "publics" or classes of readers—in proportion to the many-sidedness of the reader's human interests and the catholicity of his tastes. Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a boy to the power of the great human book, warm with the actuality of experience and the life-blood of the heart. By humorous inversion, he points the sound moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real psychological ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... principle by the Congress Commission of Actuality, with the proviso that some words should be left ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... to have gone as far as publicly to undertake to eat the first engine which ever crossed that formidable gulf. But engineers and craftsmen set to work with a will, and before long what had appeared an impossibility was rapidly taking shape as an actuality. Eight hundred yards in length, the greater portion was constructed on timber piles, over 500 in number, in 113 spans, driven into the sand. The navigable channel, at the Barmouth end, was crossed by an iron-work construction, of seven ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... the fact that the sand in the upper bulb was not diminishing as fast as it should. This knowledge was fully in my mind for some time before I realised its fearful significance. Suddenly the dim knowledge took on actuality. I sprang ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... help feeling that this account of the baronetage, though admirable in tone and spirit, and actually pathetic in its closing touch of regretful melancholy, is a little wanting in what the French would call "actuality." It leaves out of sight the most endearing, because the most human, trait of the baronetage—its pecuniary origin. On this point let us hear the historian Hume—"The title of Baronet was sold and two hundred patents ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... less, than other people. They do all their work three times over: once in anticipation, once in actuality, once in rumination. I do mine in actuality alone, doing it once ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... seemed delighted when they found it—swelled up, as it were, when they scented it, and as there was a good deal about, were never quite of normal size. Men who lived for ideas were, in fact, to one for whom facts sufficed always a little worrying! A movement from Barbara brought him back to actuality. Was the possessor of that crown of hair and those divine young shoulders the little Babs who had ridden with him in the Row? Time was certainly the Devil! Her eyes were searching for something; and following the direction of that glance, Lord Dennis found himself ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... an enchanter who has but to conjure up in actuality the wildest fancies, Monsieur Fouquet. I could not say so ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Contents, XVIII-XXV, the page numbers were off by one. (i.e. Chapter XVIII which was printed in the Table of Contents as beginning on page 175, in actuality began on page 174. These numbers where changed to ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Uncle Fred's • Laura Lee Hope
... has arisen in response to actual material needs, it is now a very great and material actuality. The workingmen of the world are, as we have seen, uniting at a pace so rapid as to be almost unbelievable. There are to-day not only great national organizations of labor in nearly every country, but these national movements are bound closely together into ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... sinner might feel to whom his confessor had given absolution. For about twenty-four hours this mood lasted. Then he confronted the fact that the beloved Master's advice had been largely, though not altogether, futile, because it had not dealt with actuality. And Ian Stewart saw himself to be moving in the plain, ordinary world of men as solitary as a ghost which vainly endeavors to make its presence ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... a little beyond the literal evidence, is an essential function. Any mode of conceiving the universe which makes an appeal to this generous power, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping to create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he is willing to assume, will be sure to be responded ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... necessary to bring this reversal of conditions to outward recognition to give it legal sanction. This is always the case in all revolutions. You can never make a revolution. You can only give external legal recognition and logical embodiment in practice to a revolution which has already become an actuality in the essential relations of society. Trying to make a revolution is the folly of immature men who have no conception of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... like everything which came from Coleridge's hand, this immature and unpractical production has an interest of its own. Amid the curious mixture of actuality and abstract disquisition of which each number of the Watchman is made up, we are arrested again and again by some striking metaphor or some weighty sentence which tells us that the writer is no mere wordy wielder of a facile pen. ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... very nearly perfect; it only wants the verse of which its author was such an absolute master, instead of the prose, where he alternately triumphed and bungled, to make it so. And one need not be a common paradoxer to take either side on the question whether on the whole the omen, if not the actuality, of L'Homme Qui Rit or that of Les Travailleurs de la Mer was the happier. For, while the earlier and better book showed how faults were hardening and might grow worse still, the later showed how ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... the many and exact observations which have been carefully collected and critically discussed for instance by Poulton[47] were thoroughly studied the arguments which are still frequently urged against mimicry would be found untenable; we can hardly hope to find more convincing proof of the actuality of the processes of selection than these cases put into our hands. The preliminary postulates of the theory of mimicry have been disputed, for instance, that diurnal butterflies are persecuted and eaten by birds, but observations specially directed towards this ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... (4) the creation of the world out of nothing, (5) the unity of the human race, (6) the origin of evil from freedom, and the inalienable nature of freedom, (7) the two Testaments, (8) Christ as God and Man, the unity of his personality, the truth of his divinity, the actuality of his humanity, the reality of his fate, (9) the redemption and conclusion of a covenant through Christ as the new and crowning manifestation of God's grace to all men, (10) the resurrection of man in soul and body. But the transmission and interpretation ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... year! No, no, Monsieur Troplong! you do not understand the words of the law; for I prefer to call in question your intelligence rather than the justice of the legislator. You are mistaken in your application of the principle, In pari causa possessor potior habetur: the actuality of possession here refers to him who possessed at the time when the difficulty arose, not to him who possesses at the time of the complaint. And when the code prohibits the reception of actions possessoires, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... and nearer to the pole; since its revolution is less, and it must of necessity be in one self-same time with the greater. I say again, that in proportion as the Heaven is nearer to the equatorial circle, so much the more noble is it in comparison to its poles; since it has more motion and more actuality and more life and more form and more touch from that which is above itself, and consequently has more virtue. Hence the stars in the Heaven of the fixed stars are more full of power amongst themselves in proportion as they ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... force it was soon felt that a new power had arisen. The Commissioner was not only a name but an actuality. Nothing was so trivial as to escape his attention; nothing too wide for him to grasp. He knew his men—it is said that he knows every man in the force, an exaggeration with a great deal of truth in it—and ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... Munster requires to be told how strong is the cult of St. Declan throughout Decies and the adjacent territory. It is hardly too much to say that the Declan tradition in Waterford and Cork is a spiritual actuality, extraordinary and unique, even in a land which till recently paid special popular honour to its local saints. In traditional popular regard Declan in the Decies has ever stood first, foremost, and pioneer. Carthage, founder of the tribal see, has held ...
— The Life of St. Declan of Ardmore • Anonymous
... note and they fell silent. Upon the silver sheet there took shape and actuality the moving barge with its banners and streamers and costumed actors. Then a flash was given of the Indians gathering on the wild shore—wondering, excited, not a little fearful of the strange appearance of the white men. The pageant ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... of busy typewriters working on death's manuscript. After that had come bayonet charges against dummies, rifle-ranges and trench-digging—all the industrious pretence at slaughter which prefaces the astounding actuality. We were far away from all that now; the brown figures had melted into the brownness of the hills. There might have been no war. Perhaps there wasn't. Never was there a world more grey and quiet. I grew sleepy. My head nodded. I opened my eyes, pulled myself together ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... parts where experience is deserted, and the supposed requirements of fiction have been listened to; whatever has really affected the public mind is, we are equally, certain, the transcript of some actual incident, character or emotion. Note, moreover, that beyond this basis of actuality these writers have the further advantage of deep feeling united to ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Truedale discovered that life in his little apartment was not only possible, but also his salvation. All the spiritual essence left in him survived best in those rooms. As time went by and Nella-Rose as an actuality receded, her memory remained unembittered. Truedale never cast blame upon her, though sometimes he tried to view her from the outsider's position. No; always she eluded the ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... had passed through the gates of dream, which swung wide to a key of sound, he wandered on, fancy led, until some actuality broke the spell, bringing him back with a shock and an inward ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... suicide, and Mathilda's consequent withdrawal from society to a lonely heath, is not in any real sense autobiographical, many elements in it are drawn from reality. The three main characters are clearly Mary herself, Godwin, and Shelley, and their relations can easily be reassorted to correspond with actuality. ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... ages of the world. We must admit this hypothetical element, which we cannot get rid of by an assumption that we have already discovered the method to which all philosophy must conform. Hegel is right in preferring the concrete to the abstract, in setting actuality before possibility, in excluding from the philosopher's vocabulary the word 'inconceivable.' But he is too well satisfied with his own system ever to consider the effect of what is unknown on the element which is known. To the Hegelian all things ...
— Sophist • Plato
... relaxation, he may be found poring over the plans which are to be the basis of this fairy edifice. Moat and parapet, tower, dungeon, and drawbridge, are all there, only awaiting the Mason of the future to translate them into actuality. But the success of Mr. Selfridge lies in his frugality, and not in his dreams. One can afford to have a castle in Spain when one possesses the money ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... The picture floats in space, seemingly compelled by its frame into limits. Gustave Geffroy once wrote that, in common with the great masters, Carriere, on his canvas, gives a sense of volume and weight. Whatever he sacrificed, it was not actuality. His draughtsmanship never falters, his touch ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... be found the most earnest appreciation of the joyousness and loveliness of a beautiful landscape, but as he would share it intellectually with his readers so it was a necessity that he could not seek it alone as an actuality. In his boyhood, in the full glory of a perfect day, he loved to ramble through the woods and meadows, and delighted in the azure tints of the far-away Berkshire hills; and later in life he was keen to notice and admire the soft harmonies of landscape, but with a change in weather or with the approach ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... scene was rather a matter of visual illusion than actuality. For Wild Bill, in his right of proprietorship, was lounging on his blanketed bunk, while Toby's inanimate form robbed him of the extreme foot of it. Sunny Oak was hugging to himself what comfort there was to be obtained from the broken ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... over the globe, and all was securely shut in from the inclemencies of that inhospitable season. All winter the hundreds of hammers, busily riveted the sheets of aluminum and zinc into place, and by spring the globe, the splendid creation that had existed in the brain of Dr. Jones, was an actuality. Language is inadequate to describe the sensations of the little company of promoters. They said but little, but would often stand in a group, gaze upon it, then into each other's eyes, and smile ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... executor has divided the estate, so an idea may practically be credited with truth before the verification process has been exhaustively carried out—the existence of the mass of verifying circumstance is enough. Where potentiality counts for actuality in so many other cases, one does not see why it may not so count here. We call a man benevolent not only for his kind acts paid in, but for his readiness to perform others; we treat an idea as 'luminous' not only for the light it has shed, but ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... Besides, I loved to hear him. The way he reared such fabulous superstructures upon slight incidents, interpreting thus his complex being to himself, was uncommonly interesting. It was observing the creative imagination actually at work, and the process in a sense seemed sacred. Only the truth and actuality with which he clothed it all made me a ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... him as she had left her father. She would go away. There was no place for her to go to, but what did that matter so long as she might escape from this horrible place and this infernal tormentor? She did not look about to see the actuality of Pierre's silence. She thought that he had dropped the brand and was sitting near the table with his face hidden. How long the stillness of pain and fury and horror lasted there was no one to reckon. It was most startlingly broken ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... 'Queen Daughter.' My people, who know nothing as a rule, of course—but they tell me the woman is in actuality the daughter of a queen. But what is a Kanaka queen? After all, Signet, my dear sir, down there, what is ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... This diminishing actuality of our political life is a matter of almost universal comment to-day. But it is extraordinary how much of that comment is made in a tone of hopeless dissatisfaction, how rarely it is associated with any will to change a state of affairs that so largely stultifies ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... and yet, when these sufferings are over and mind and body are at ease for a while, they are completely forgotten. The only mark they leave is the disinclination to undergo them again. But on those who do not realize them in their actuality, they cause a far ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... losing the deep-lying truth which constitutes the real nature of the poetical. He would fain imitate an actual occurrence, and does not consider that a poetic representation can never coincide with actuality, because ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... but a great tree was gone from the garden. An actuality had been converted into thought and emotion, and thought and emotion may be all that endure, and an actuality be unreal ... but an actuality is so ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... be sin in Deity, and this would be the end of infinite moral unity. "If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!" On the contrary, evil is only a delusive deception, without any actuality which ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... monstrosity, its inconceivable abominations—by what blighting of eye and soul did a nation come to accept it as their world-shown pride, their supreme City? She was lost in a truth-perceiving dream. Habit and association dropped away; things declared themselves in their actuality; her mind whirled under the sense ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... mind, lately," he said, more directly to Abner, "to do a large, serious thing based on local actualities; The City's Maw—something like that. My things so far, I know (none better) are slight, flimsy, exotic, factitious. The first-hand study of actuality, thought I——But no, no, no! It was a place fit only for a reporter in search of a—of a—I don't know what. I shall never drink coffee again; while as for ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... air, I read. Read, inhaling the pungent, sour smell of the Scotch I had consumed during the long, sleepless night. Read, and then doubted that I had read at all—but the blue ink on the white paper forced me to acknowledge its actuality. It had been written by Hunter, in ...
— Each Man Kills • Victoria Glad
... of mere compilation, and it is pervaded by such a tone of earnestness, and contains so many original observations, that the reader is inducted by it out of the usual book-land of idealism into the substantial region of actuality ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... I speak of forms I mean nothing more than those laws and determinations of absolute actuality which govern and constitute any simple nature, as heat, light, weight, in every kind of matter and subject that is susceptible of them. Thus the form of heat or the form of light is the same thing as the law of heat or the law of light."[64] "Matter rather than forms ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... stand to-day civilisation can make no further progress until this is done. Solitary thinkers, like the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, and even great practical statesmen like Sully and Penn, have from time to time realised this fact during the past four centuries, and attempted to convert it into actuality. But it cannot be done until the great democracies are won over to a conviction of its inevitable necessity. We need an international organisation of law courts which shall dispense justice as between nation ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... present in an earnest desire for the future." It is the pathetic confession of a dreamer. Yet this dreamer was also a keen analyzer, a tireless creator of beautiful things. In them he sought and found a refuge from actuality. The marvel of his career is, as I have said elsewhere, that this solitary, embittered craftsman, out of such hopeless material as negations and abstractions, shadows and superstitions, out of disordered fancies and dreams of physical horror and strange crime, should ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... this time on, when I needed help and encouragement the most, I felt a vague assurance that my wife was by my side; and I verily believe, that if it had not been for this,—hallucination, delusion, actuality, reality, or whatever it may have been,—I should now be in a land where the truth about these things ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... particularly as each of the Hunchberg's developed a character entirely his own to the last peculiarity, such as the aged Aunt Cooley Hunchberg's deafness, on which account Beasley never once forgot to raise his voice when he addressed her. Indeed, the details of actuality in all this appeared to bring as great a delight to the man as to the child. Certainly he built them up with infinite care. On one occasion when Mr. Hunchberg and I happened to be calling, Hamilton remarked with surprise that Simpledoria had come into the room without licking his hand as he ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... individual, compounded of several bodies, certain bodies be separated, and if, at the same time, an equal number of other bodies of the same nature take their place, the individual will preserve its nature as before, without any change in its actuality (forma). ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... bickering of Outposts; much hitching and counter-hitching, along that Bohemian-Silesian Frontier,—Daun gradually hitching up, leftwards, northwards, to be nearer his Russians; Friedrich counter-hitching, and, in the end, detaching against the Russians, as they approached in actuality. The details of all which would break the toughest patience. Not till July came, had both parties got into the Lausitz; Daun into an impregnable Camp near Mark-Lissa (in Gorlitz Country); Friedrich, opposite and eastward of him, into another at Schmottseifen:—still ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... is not real, Aristotle erects the distinction between the real and the actual, claiming a reality for poetic which is not the actuality of science or of practical affairs. It is thus that he distinguishes the poet from the historian: although the historian also uses images, he is restricted to relating what has happened—that is, to fact; while the poet relates what should happen—what is possible according to the ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... wish to point out, and to emphasise the fact, that I am not prepared to positively affirm what portion of my adventures in that extraordinary, and horrible place, was actuality, and what the product of a feverish imagination. Had I been persuaded that all I thought I saw, I really did see, I should have opened my lips long ago, let the consequences to myself have been what they might. But there is the crux. The happenings were of such an incredible ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... murderer owed more than that to Fate. It was to that grim goddess he was indebted for the last wonderful touch of actuality which lifted the whole contrivance so superbly above the realm of artifice. Suspicion was in the last degree unlikely in any case, but Hazel Rath's entry and loud scream, just before the moment fixed for the explosion, ensured complete success by adding a natural verisimilitude which might ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... Genesis. It towers above the rest as Mount Washington does above the New-England hills; and, as travellers delight to climb the loftiest peaks, I suppose that many would be pleased to examine this lofty story, and see how the world of truth and actuality looks from its summit. ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... potentially all the rich variety of the natural and spiritual life. The reality of a growing thing lies in its highest form of being. In the light of the last we explain the first. If the universe is, as science pronounces, an organic totality which is ever converting its promise into actuality, then 'the ultimate interpretation even of the lowest existence of the world, cannot be given except on principles which are adequate to explain the highest.'[13] Christian morality is therefore nothing ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... turned to right, not until every storm has been stilled into peace, not until the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man have been incarnated in institutions, will conflict cease and smooth living toward all men become an actuality. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the general stream of the community's vitality into a corner where little is learnt and much is concocted, into a specialized Assembly which is at once inattentive to and monstrously influential in our affairs?" Further on Wells remarks that "this diminishing actuality of our political life is a matter of almost universal comment to-day.... In Great Britain we do not have Elections any more; we have Rejections. What really happens at a general election is that the ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... of God is FACT, and Spinoza denies any reserve in Him of something unexpressed. "The omnipotence of God has been actual from eternity, and in the same actuality will remain to eternity," {38} not of course in the sense that everything which exists has always existed as we now know it, or that nothing will exist hereafter which does not exist now, but that in God everything that has been, and ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... preconceived supplement. The real, the fact, what is attained or accomplished in and by us, prescribes and facilitates, or rather supplies, its own missing complement of perfection. The process carries itself on, the progress realizes itself, the ideal translates itself into the fact or actuality: it accomplishes itself and yet it is the doing of our very self, of the spirit within us. All this is not merely our doing, it is our being, it is the process by which we make our minds, our souls, our ...
— Progress and History • Various
... hope offered by poetry. By the way of intuition poets promise to carry us beyond the boundary of the vicious circle. When the ceaseless round of the real world has come to nauseate us, they assure us that by simply relaxing our hold upon actuality we may escape from the squirrel-cage. By consenting to the prohibition, "Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss!" we may enter the realm of ideality, where our dizzy brains grow steady, and our pulses are calmed, as we gaze upon the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... that they are fully as trustworthy as similar witnesses have been in any age. The very keenness of their rivalry is some guarantee for truth. Doubtless competition for good "copy" occasionally leads to artful embroidering on humdrum actuality; but, after spending much time in scanning similar embroidery in the literature of the Napoleonic Era, I unhesitatingly place the work of Archibald Forbes, and that of several knights of the pen still ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... reseating himself on the carven bench; Galatea skipped through the arched entrance, and Dan, after an irresolute moment, dropped to the remaining bench. Once more his thoughts were whirling in perplexed turbulence. Was all this indeed but illusion? Was he sitting, in actuality, in a prosaic hotel room, peering through magic spectacles that pictured this world about him, or was he, transported by some miracle, really sitting here in this land of loveliness? He touched the bench; stone, hard and unyielding, met ...
— Pygmalion's Spectacles • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... statesmen and the proceedings of the Commission on the League of Nations, his secret negotiations caused the majority of the delegates to the Conference and the public at large to lose in a large measure their confidence in the actuality of his devotion to "open diplomacy," which he had so unconditionally proclaimed in the first of his Fourteen Points. If the policy of secrecy had ceased with the discussions preliminary to the organization of the Conference, or even with those preceding the meetings of the ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... the real touch of originality is the final reward of this kind gentleman. For my own part I certainly expected—but to tell you that would be to betray what doesn't happen. The whole affair is a pleasant respite from actuality: more, I fear, it would be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... poet. The nature of men living together in societies, as of the individual man, seems to have its periodic ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the ideal and the matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful boundary line of shore between them is in one generation a hard sandy actuality strewn only with such remembrances of beauty as a dead sea-moss here and there, and in the next is whelmed with those lacelike curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding foam, and that dance of joyous spray which for a moment ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... after as well as during the War, but also that a better and brighter future is in store. Plans must be framed and action taken under the inspiration of a firm trust that the ideals we aim at are to be realised, that the "things hoped for" have a potential actuality. Fatalism in politics—we use the term in the original sense including ethics—is deadly, whether it is the fatalism due to a sloppy optimism which is satisfied that somehow things will come right whatever we do or leave undone, or to a paralysing pessimism which in ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... an instinctive and therefore an honest passion for the ideals of democracy, you should find a great literature expressing and interpreting the democracy. I have given already some reasons why in practice this has not yet become an actuality in America. Let me add, in discussing the bearing of this argument upon the third category of American literature, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... revealed directly to himself, while Wiseman's consciousness of God comes to him primarily through the authority of the Church, that is through generations of authoritative believers the first of whom experienced the actuality of Revelation. Hundreds and thousands of people have minds of this caliber. They cannot see a truth direct for themselves, they must be told by some person clothed in authority that this or that is true or false. To Wiseman the beauty of his own form ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... wasn't quick to take offence, wasn't irritable; she could be trusted to wait. So when he said to her, "Ah don't talk of anything I've done, don't talk of it here; there's another man in the house who's the actuality!"—when he uttered this short sincere protest it was with the sense that she would see in the words neither mock humility nor the impatience of a successful ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... been at the moment, fixed for ever it is terrible, and most unlifelike. As we have already said, a few lines scribbled on a piece of paper by a consummate artist would give a greater sense of life than this fixed actuality. It is not ultimately by the pursuit of the actual realisation that expression and life are conveyed in a portrait. Every face has expression of a far more interesting and enduring kind than these momentary disturbances of its form occasioned by laughter or some passing thought, ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... character of a "person" is that he combines perfect separateness with the possibility and more or less of the actuality of perfect universality. A "person" is in a true sense a universal, an infinite being. He is thus through the constitution of his psychic nature a thinking, feeling, and willing being. Through his intellect and in proportion to his knowledge he becomes united with ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... suggestion; but, at the hour I speak of, the old Parisian quay, the belittered print-shop, the pleasant afternoon, the glimpse of the great Louvre on the other side of the Seine, in the interstices of the sallow estampes suspended in window and doorway—all these elements of a rich actuality availed only to mitigate, without transmuting, that general vision of a high, cruel pillory which pieced itself together as I drew specimen after specimen from musty portfolios. I had been passing the shop when I noticed in a small vitrine, let into the embrasure of the doorway, half a dozen ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... the absolute justice of the American contention, demonstrated both by the faulty character of the method and the outrageous injustice in results, let us not be blind to the actuality of the loss Great Britain was undergoing, nor to her estimate of the compensation offered for the relinquishment of the practice. The New England States, which furnished a large proportion of the maritime ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... no such thing. The parallel is close enough between this impudence and the attitude—implied, if not expressed—of too much modern criticism towards the sort of qualities—the easy, indolent power, the searching sense of actuality, the combined command of sanity and paradox, the immovable independence of thought—which went to the making of the Lives of the Poets. There is only, perhaps, one flaw in the analogy: that, in this particular instance, the mountain ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... of the events of that evening, which he went over again and again as the midnight car carried him eastward, in spite of a new-born happiness the actuality of which was still difficult to grasp, Hodder was vaguely troubled when he thought of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... opera in New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and one or two other of the large cities of the country. Another was to call into new life an agitation in favor of the establishment of another German company. The first project died of inanition; the second developed in another year into an actuality, which created more stir than the close of the opera house had done. The Metropolitan Opera Company reached a decision some time in January, 1893. The directors had neglected to insure the building against fire, and provision had to be made for funds to rebuild, as well as to pay off existing liabilities. ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... stumble on in human society, and, moulded at our will, take what shape we choose to give them; the trees follow our footsteps, though our lips be mute, and we may have left at home our fiddle—more potent we in our actuality than the fabled Orpheus. Be hushed, ye streams, and listen unto Christopher! Be chained, ye clouds, and attentive unto North! And at our bidding silent the cataract on the cliff—the thunder on the sky. The sea beholds us on the shore—and his one huge ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... any relation, be it ever so intimate, because that which is common to the two is perhaps never common only to them but belongs to a general conception, which includes much else, many possibilities of similarities. As little actuality as they may have, often as we may forget them, yet here and there they crowd in like shadows between men, like a mist gliding before every word's meaning, which must actually congeal into solid corporeality in order to be called rivalry. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... is a notable book. Thoughtful people will be fascinated by its actuality, its fearlessness, and the insight it gives into the influence of modern thought and literature upon the mind and morals of our most promising ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... so clear—the borders so fresh and even—the arbors so cool and inviting. There was not a spot upon which the eye could rest, that did not show the hand of taste. When I now came opposite to this house, I was not longer in doubt as to the actuality of a change. There were no marked evidences of neglect; but the high cultivation and nice regard for the small details were lacking. The walks were cleanly swept; but the box-borders were not so carefully trimmed. The vines and bushes that in former times were ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... telling these stories may seem at first glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary speech or even oral narration. What Anderson employs here is ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... liable. And, indeed, my experience confirms the truth of my physician's theory. It were hard for me to tell what delight I have had upon a hot and gusty day in a perusal of the history of Robin Hood, for there is such actuality in those simple rhymes as to dispel the troublesome environments of the present and transport me to better times ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... it modify orthodox opinions? Chiefly in humanizing them, in making the gospel story "palpitate with actuality" to quote the French phrase which Matthew Arnold loved to use. These people on the stage at Ober-Ammergau are not lay figures, mere abstract representations of the virtues or the opposite. They live, breathe ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... expected it, but one of the limitations of an idealist is an insufficient knowledge of realities. To men of his temperament there is always a distinct shock envolved in coming face to face with an actuality. Truth is the element of the idealist, but an abstract truth into which concrete realities seldom fit. Terry did not, or tried not to, mind, at this time, this continued sexual freedom, or rather vagaries, of Marie's life; for that fitted into his scheme of personal freedom: he zealously ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... parties contain a group of outlaws who wait only for a leader to hoist the black flag. The group consists mainly of boys too shy to be at ease with the girls, but who wish to distinguish themselves in some way; and there are others, ordinarily well behaved, whom the mere actuality of a party makes drunken. The effect of music, too, upon children is incalculable, especially when they do not hear it often—and both a snare-drum and a bass drum were in the expensive orchestra ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... This army of servants—which might be an army of slaves without a single manly right, so mute, impassive, and highly trained it is—the breeding of a tyrannous temper in the men, of a certain contempt for facts and actuality even in the best of the women. Mrs. Wellesdon poured out her social aspirations to me. How naive and fanciful they were! They do her credit, but they will hardly do anyone else much good. And it is evident that they mark her out in her own circle, that they ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... feelings of intense emotion, of horror or grief, or of both. Failing in this, it fails altogether. To this end Seneca introduced his Ghost, and his disciples filled their speeches with passionate outcry and lurid pictures of horrible events unfit to be presented in actuality. Gorboduc rained death upon a whole nation, Tancred and Gismunda invoked every awful epithet and gruesome description of dungeon and murder, for the same purpose. But the purpose remained unfulfilled—at ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... and companionship of the young Englishman the image of Korak became less real. Where before it had been an actuality to her she now realized that Korak was but a memory. To that memory she still was loyal; but what weight has a memory in the ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a feather-bed to break the frightful fall before me. You think I tumbled down the Waldoborough stairs? Worse than that: I dropped headlong, precipitately, from the heights of fairy dreams to low actuality; all the way down, down, down, from the Waldoborough barouche to a hired coach, a voiture de remise, that stood in its place at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Dieu; or, as he would put it, he is "one with" his god. Religion has this in common with art, that it discredits the actual practical world; but only because it creates a new world and insists on its actuality ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... know women; he could employ women for that purpose. He perceived clearly that the editor of a magazine was largely an executive: his was principally the work of direction; of studying currents and movements, watching their formation, their tendency, their efficacy if advocated or translated into actuality; and then selecting from the horizon those that were for the best interests of the home. For a home was something Edward Bok did understand. He had always lived in one; had struggled to keep it together, ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... that brilliant October. She sat in the sunshine beside her yellow river like the little treasure-city she has always seemed, without commerce, without other industry than the manufacture of mosaic paper-weights and alabaster Cupids, without actuality or energy or earnestness or any of those rugged virtues which in most cases are deemed indispensable for civic cohesion; with nothing but the little unaugmented stock of her mediaeval memories, her tender-coloured mountains, her churches and palaces, pictures and statues. There ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... we are on other ground; on the ground of bald actuality. He expired in 1812, and the contemporaries who have attested his miraculous deeds are not misty phantoms of the Thebais; they were creatures of flesh and blood, human, historical personages, who ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... labored for an hour to show all the intricate details, until I was compelled to admit the practicability and novelty of the idea. Then he explained that instantaneous photography, as it was then called, was to be applied at such close range that the picture would appear life size. The actuality of the occurrence would do ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... ancient city, famous for the edict of Nantes, and more famous still, perhaps, because of the revocation of that edict by Louis XIV, which led to disastrous religious wars. Nantes is also famous as the birthplace of Jules Verne, whose "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," became an actuality during the world war. It is a city of about 150,000 and is an important industrial center, having extensive shipyards, factories, wharves, etc. It is on the right bank of the Loire River, about thirty-five miles from its mouth and is one of the chief ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... building, a great and beautiful enterprise, which, also, is still in its proper stage. The drawing of plans so large and detailed has occupied many months. We are looking to America for the generous gift which shall bring these plans into actuality, but help from other sources is welcome, too, and particularly help from the students. They have made many efforts and reached a sum of more than Rs. 500. Their most important undertaking was a performance of "Everyman" most solemnly and beautifully carried out before ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... for him to do so. Wordsworth saw in Endymion merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth's message, being repelled by its form, and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden from him. The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles. ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... the leaders of the Unemployed regaled us derived a pleasing actuality from the fact that on the 24th of January simultaneous explosions had occurred at the Tower and in the House of Commons. I did not see the destruction at the Tower, but I went straight across from my office to the House ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... the vestibule, as if to leave her words behind her, and the next moment he had opened the house-door and was standing with her on the steps. He closed the door and, while he re-pocketed his key, looking up and down, they took in the comparatively harsh actuality of the Avenue, which reminded him of the assault of the outer light of the Desert on the traveller emerging from an Egyptian tomb. But he risked before they stepped into the street his gathered answer to her speech. "For me it is lived in. For me it is furnished." At which ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... standards were the prevailing ones; in actuality the ethics and methods of the propertied class were all powerful. The Church might preach equality, humility and the list of virtues; but nevertheless that did not give the propertyless man a vote. Thus it was, that ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... crimson in their own blood, yet still able to writhe upward and deal death to any other that might approach. They were at a deadlock, yet each feared to make the first overtures for peace. There was, in actuality, no longer even an English or a German nation. It was an orgy of homicide, in which the best of mankind were wantonly destroyed, leaving only the puny, the feeble-minded, the deformed, and the ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... was bringing down her vague ideas of money that came from somewhere, through her father's pocket, as water comes from Lake Kinsittewink by the turning of a faucet, to the narrow point of actuality. ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... various couples who, lovingly entwined, promenaded the green lanes, suddenly appearing and as suddenly disappearing behind the thick hedges, would recall him to actuality. He would then bethink him how odd it seemed that he himself cared so little about womenfolk, Now and then a pretty fresh girl would take his fancy, and he might have liked well enough to take her face between his hands and ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... opened the newspaper I receive from London, and glancing down the correspondence from Russia—not the telegrams but the correspondence—the first thing that caught my eye was the name of Haldin. Mr. de P—-'s death was no longer an actuality, but the enterprising correspondent was proud of having ferreted out some unofficial information about that fact of modern history. He had got hold of Haldin's name, and had picked up the story of the midnight arrest in the ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... justice to myself, and to allay the fears of prospective readers, I beg to point out that the few historical allusions are never dragged in for the sake of parading my unique erudition, but that each of them is closely related to actuality; either throwing a light on the nature of current events or affecting directly the fortunes of the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... died down by the time the troopers entered the brilliantly lighted parking area. The temperature seemed warmer with the lessening winds but in actuality, the mercury was dropping. The snow clouds to the west were much nearer and the overcast ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... realities and met the various demands of each day's relations capably and coolly. Inside his private office behind the bank, at his desk, he lived in another world, a world where shadow became substance, possibility became actuality and fear made facts out ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... acknowledging two kinds of conscious existence, the terrestrial and the spiritual, point only to the latter as an undoubted actuality. As to the terrestrial life, owing to its changeability and shortness, it is nothing but an illusion of our senses. Our life in the spiritual spheres must be thought an actuality because it is there that lives our endless, never-changing immortal I, the Sutratma. Whereas ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... engineering acquaintance talking to a Prussian general. The idea had seized me of writing a line to Hohenfels at Marly, actually dated from the grand duchy of Baden. Undoubtedly I should reach Marly before my letter, but the postal mark would be a good proof of the actuality of my wanderings. Clinging, then, to my childishness, as we do to most of our follies, with a fidelity which it would be well to imitate in our grave affairs, and feeling pressed for time, I looked eagerly around for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... obstinate constipation a half ounce of crude mercury was administered and repeated in twelve hours. Scores of globules of mercury soon appeared over a vesicated surface, the result of a previous blister applied to the epigastric region. Blundel, not satisfied with the actuality of the phenomena, submitted his case to Dr. Lister, who, after careful ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... land"? Have you never read the terms of this convention, have you never glanced through the sixty-odd articles which today, in the presence of the nameless horrors in which we lend a hand, offer a prodigious interest to actuality? ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... the barriers of time and space and claims all worlds as eminent domain, so that literature, which he has the power to create, as he cannot create his material surroundings, possesses a dramatic intensity, an epic sweep, unknown in actuality. In the last analysis, man is as great as ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... and told us truly, of that typical American who, in Dr. Talmage's mind's eye, was coming, but who, in Abraham Lincoln's actuality, had already come. In some recent studies into the career of that man, I have encountered many startling confirmations of this judgment; and from that rugged trunk, drawing its sustenance from gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... longer terrified, and had recovered her nerve, but she still found it difficult to believe she was not dreaming. It seemed more like a nightmare than actuality that she should be sitting in a pitch-dark car, talking of love and Don Carlos to a Spanish outlaw who had captured her, and whose arm encircled her waist. She was not conscious of fear now, but Cojuelo's reply to her question scared her ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... Saranac when the woods were all aflame with autumn glory, and to Mr. Stevenson's mother it all seemed unreal and "more like a painted scene in a theatre" than actuality. ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... head like balls at a cocoanut; if they fail to register a hit it is the fault of the shier, not of the nut. My aim throughout has been to throw hard and true, so that even the thickest nut is left in no doubt as to the actuality of the impact. Shoo, Charlotte! makes no high-sounding attempt at improving the public taste. As the dramatic critic of The Sabbath Scoop pithily remarked, it is just "one long feast of laughter and lingerie," and its nightly triumph is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... Conversation after the first few amenities speedily became almost a monologue. One man talked whilst the others listened, and the man who talked was Oliver Hilditch. He possessed the rare gift of imparting colour and actuality in a few phrases to the strange places of which he spoke, of bringing the very thrill of strange happenings into the shadowy room. It seemed that there was scarcely a country of the world which he had not visited, a ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Complacent optimisms, so widely current recently, are put out of court by it. The pleasant interpretations mediocrity formulates of the universe are torn to tatters. There is at least the refreshment of standing face to face with brute actuality, though it crash all our "little systems" to the ground. Philosophy must wait. The interpretations cannot be hastened, while the facts are multiplying with such bewildering rapidity. The one certainty is that an entirely new world is being born—what it ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... vital relations. There was no cheering—the cheering days came later—no ebullient emotion, but the tightening of lip and jaw in their stern, set faces was a sufficient index of the tensity of feeling. Canadians were thinking things out, thinking keenly and swiftly, for in the atmosphere and actuality of war mental processes are carried on ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... restored—the ensuing moments were so much more sweet and sharp and poignant. They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression—yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... to take any risk rather than allow the Princess Petrovska to escape him again. There was nothing against her but suspicion. It was for him to find evidence that might link her with the crime. It is in such things that the detective of actuality differs from the detective of fiction. The detective of fiction acts on moral certainties which would get the detective of real life into bad trouble. To arrest the Princess was out of the question; even to detain her might make matters awkward. Yet the superintendent had made up ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... guess," said McGuire grimly. It was staggering what all this might mean; there was time needed for fuller comprehension. But the lean bronzed face of the flyer flushed with animation, and in spite of the terrors that must surely lie ahead he felt strangely elated at the actuality ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... of all is the fact that the composer of the four letters, who signs herself J.B., refers en passant to Belinda's inconstancy to Sir Thomas Worthly, an allusion to the story of the second part of "The British Recluse." This reference would indicate either that there was some basis of actuality in the earlier fiction, or that Mrs. Haywood was using imaginary scandal to pad her collection. However that may be, this second chronique scandaleuse was apparently no less successful, though less renowned, than the first, for a ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... this struggle against the narrow-minded actuality of the German status quo cannot be without interest, for the German status quo represents the frank completion of the ancien regime, and the ancien regime is the concealed defect of the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... of Manila Bay will to the future appear one of the decisive events of history, for there the visions of the few, which had quickened unconsciously the conceptions of the many, materialised as suddenly as unexpectedly into an actuality that could be neither obviated nor undone. What Dewey's victory was to the over-sea expansion of the United States, what the bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861 was to the sentiment of Union in the Northern States, that Paul Kruger's ultimatum, summarizing in itself the antecedent disintegrating ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... feel how he began to loom up, the embodiment of a powerful force—the Ranger Service—the fame of which, long known to this lawless Pecos gang, but scouted as a vague and distant thing, now became an actuality, a Ranger in the flesh, whose surprising attributes included both the law and the enforcement ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... are many ways by which even a near translation of the economic pact into actuality may work hardship—even disaster—to American commercial interests. No matter which way we turn when peace comes we shall face the proverbial millstones in the shape of two great alliances. One is the Allied Group, jealous of our new wealth and world power, ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... young man's cerebrum and cerebellum for an anatomical examination, proceeding strictly according to the rules of dissection, as he had so frequently done in actuality. He hunted for the centre of stupidity, which undoubtedly composed the American's whole soul, though his impudence, which he possessed in a rare degree, may also have had its seat in the brain. Frederick had to laugh. In his amusement he realised that little Ingigerd Hahlstroem ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... and one perhaps slightly lacking in prosaic actuality. Whatever may be the value of the above speculations, the phrase about the moon and green cheese remains a good example of this imagery of eating and drinking on a large scale. The same huge fancy is in the phrase "if all the trees were bread and cheese," ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... adventures. The woman is always a different one. The story is of the kind always accompanying such circumstances—one of waxing or waning attraction, of suspicion and jealousy, of incrimination and recrimination, of intrigue and counter-intrigue. The atmosphere is realistic, but the actuality implied is sharply limited and largely superficial. There is little attempt at getting down to the roots of things. There is absolutely no tendency or thesis. The story is told for the sake of the story, and its chief redeeming quality lies in the grace and charm and verve with which ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler |
