"Deceptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wind silverishly blew through the rice-field. All of this, a thousand-fold and colourful, had always been there, always the sun and the moon had shone, always rivers had roared and bees had buzzed, but in former times all of this had been nothing more to Siddhartha than a fleeting, deceptive veil before his eyes, looked upon in distrust, destined to be penetrated and destroyed by thought, since it was not the essential existence, since this essence lay beyond, on the other side of, the visible. ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... alternative, there is no pause: my daughter shall not see its deceptive mother die; your father shall not know that his daughter fell disgraced, despised by ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... so much indeed, that, in point of population, the city of San Antonio de Bejar, with its bishopric and wealthy missions, has fallen to the rank of a small English village. It still carries on a considerable trade, but its appearance of prosperity is deceptive; and I would caution emigrants not to be deceived by the Texan accounts of the place. Immense profits have been made, to be sure; but now even the Mexican smugglers and banditti are beginning to be disgusted with the universal want of ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... whiskers and moustache, very dark brown; and, in strange contrast, grey-blue eyes. Over these eyes, too light in colour to match the hair, the eyelids drooped a little, giving to them that partially- closed sleepy appearance which is often deceptive. Just now they were studying the girl standing before him with very keen interest. A slender girl, not quite sixteen years old, in a loose and broad-sleeved olive- green dress, and yellow scarf at ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... deal of illusion, prepossession, and imagination in all that is termed magic and sorcery; and sometimes the devil by false appearances combines with them to deceive the simple; but oftener, without the evil spirit being any otherwise a party to it, wicked, corrupt, and interested men, artful and deceptive, abuse the simplicity both of men and women, so far as to persuade them that they possess supernatural secrets for interpreting dreams and foretelling things to come, for curing maladies, and discovering secrets unknown to any one. I can easily agree to all that. All kinds of histories ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... mental agility as he grows older, though in the actual range and profundity of his intelligence he may keep on improving until he collapses into senility. Obviously, it is mere agility of mind, and not profundity, that is of most value and effect in so tricky and deceptive a combat as the duel of sex. The aging man, with his agility gradually withering, is thus confronted by women in whom it still luxuriates as a function of their relative youth. Not only do women ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... not like it, but she can't refuse," was her final summing up. She went out to the kitchen with a deceptive air of composure. ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... Appearances are deceptive, and Bruin was less domesticated than Lola imagined. One day, pining perhaps for fresh diet, he grappled with his mistress and bit her hand. The incident attracted a laureate on the staff of the California Chronicle, who, in Silas Wegg ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... discussion. To begin with, if we suppose our popular disbeliever to assert that animals and plants are always to be distinguished by shape and form, it is easy enough to show him that here, as elsewhere, appearances are deceptive. What are we to say of a sponge, or a sea anemone, of corals, of zoophytes growing rooted from oyster shells, of sea squirts, and of sea mats? These, each and all of them, are true animals, but they are so plant-like ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... basis of the proposed additions to taxation, without taking into account any revenue from the suggested luxury tax. But, as I have already pointed out, the comparison of war pounds with pre-war pounds is in itself deceptive. The pounds that we are paying to-day in taxation are by no means the pounds that we paid before the war; their value in effective buying power has been diminished by something like one half. So that even with the proposed additions to ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... manned" in the navy. So his frequent praise of others in his despatches and letters has none of the formal, perfunctory ring of an official paper; it springs evidently from the warmest appreciation and admiration, is heartfelt, showing no deceptive exterior, but the true native fibre of the man, full of the charity which is kind and thinketh no evil. It was not always so toward those above him. Under the timid and dilatory action of Hotham and Hyde Parker, under the somewhat commonplace although exact ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... plop of liquid in a pitcher. So if I spill my milk, I have not the excuse of ignorance. I am also familiar with the pop of a cork, the sputter of a flame, the tick-tack of the clock, the metallic swing of the windmill, the laboured rise and fall of the pump, the voluminous spurt of the hose, the deceptive tap of the breeze at door and window, and many other vibrations ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... crouching into the nearest thicket. He no longer sprawled and straddled, and already he was developing the gait of his mother, slinking and furtive, apparently without exertion, yet sliding along with a swiftness that was as deceptive ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... gloom of those dark woods, the play of some freakish and deceptive shadow conjuring itself into a human presence, that he had seen.... Who would be out in that lonely wood ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... this question, it should also be mentioned that nothing perhaps is more deceptive than the size which objects in the sky appear to present. The full moon looks so like a huge plate, that it astonishes one to find that a threepenny bit held at arm's length will a long way ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... innocence was in his eyes, and a gay smile of springtide abode upon his lips. His iron-gray hair, falling naturally like that of the Christ in art, added to his ecstatic air a certain solemnity which was absolutely deceptive as to his real nature; for he was capable of committing any silliness with the most exemplary gravity. His clothes were a necessary envelope, to which he paid not the slightest attention, for his eyes looked too high among ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... her? That's the solitary thought which echoes through my soul like a remorse. Ah! dear mamma, have all women to struggle against memories as I do? None but innocent young men should be married to pure young girls. But that's a deceptive Utopia; better have one's rival in the past ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... a sure token that suspicion of some kind was busy in her brain. From some aperture or summit of observation, through parted bough or open window, she had doubtless caught a glimpse, remote or near, deceptive or instructive, of that night's transactions. Finely accomplished as she was in the art of surveillance, it was next to impossible that a casket could be thrown into her garden, or an interloper could ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... unwarranted, not following; inconsequent, inconsequential; inconsistent; absonous|, absonant[obs3]; unscientific; untenable, inconclusive, incorrect; fallacious, fallible; groundless, unproved; non sequitur[Latin: it does not follow]. deceptive, sophistical, jesuitical; illusive, illusory; specious, hollow, plausible, ad captandum[Lat], evasive; irrelevant &c. 10. weak, feeble, poor, flimsy, loose, vague. irrational; nonsensical &c. (absurd) 497. foolish &c. (imbecile) 499; frivolous, pettifogging, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... deep was this glen, so surrounded on all sides by steep acclivities, and so vividly green its verdure, and deceptive the shadows that played there; that, from above, it seemed more like a lake of cool, balmy air, than a glen: its woodlands and grasses gleaming shadowy all, like sea groves and mosses beneath the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Doctor Swinnerton's legacy, though one or two had fallen near the heap, and lay merely scorched beside it. It seemed as if he had thrown them into the fire, under a sudden impulse, in a great hurry and passion. It may be that he had come to the perception of something fatally false and deceptive in the successes which he had appeared to win, and was too proud and too conscientious to survive it. Doctors were called in, but had no power to revive him. An inquest was held, at which the jury, under the instruction, perhaps, of those same revengeful doctors, expressed the opinion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... "you had better make all haste to the police station beyond the town. My friend, whom I seconded under somewhat deceptive circumstances, seems to me to exaggerate very much the possibilities of a general rising; but even he would hardly maintain, I suppose, that you were not ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... may have altered in character, during all the after years. For the suddenness of revulsion from horror to happiness, there has never been a minute in my existence comparable to the minute when I realized the idea that she had come. At first it seemed only a deceptive dream. Such happiness was incredible, and I did not even know she had been sent for; but the sweet reality entered into my heart like sunshine, and throwing my arms about her neck I burst into a passion ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... on in the background, to advance and tell themselves in time. Yet the truths are none the less terrible. I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... nomenclature: choux may mean either a sort of root (choux-carabe), or the top of the cabbage-palm; Jacquot may mean a fish; cabane never means a cabin, but a bed; crickett means not a cricket, but a frog; and at least fifty other words have equally deceptive uses. If one desires to speak of real figs—dried figs—he must say figues-Fouanc (French figs); otherwise nobody will understand him. There are many kinds of bananas here called figues,—the four most popular are the ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... sure I do," said Lieutenant Raystoke, sheltering his eyes in a very deceptive fashion, for he was trying to make out the old grove of trees amidst ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... Monarch well and faithfully served. Yet the outward show and glamour of his reign were very deceptive of the true internal conditions. Colbert tried to do too many things, with the result that his plans repeatedly miscarried. The nobles became more indolent, wasteful, and pleasure-loving, and the middle ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... bestowed the smallest attention upon her. She was twenty-five years old, while I was but fourteen. Also, she was very beautiful. But I hesitate to give a further description of her lest my imagination should once more picture the bewitching, though deceptive, conception of her which filled my mind during the period of my passion. To be frank, I will only say that she was extraordinarily handsome, magnificently developed, and a woman—as also that I ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... is not, except incidentally, the result of human skill. Another kind of reproduction of outward aspect, however, virtually exact, which does show the evidence of human skill, is yet not entitled to rank as art,—the imitative or deceptive picture. Photograph and picture are ruled out equally on the one ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... bravely west of this line, the whole of Mississippi and a large part of Alabama were beyond aid from Richmond. But the average man did not grasp the situation. When a region is dominated by mobile armies the appearance of things to the civilian is deceptive. Because the powerful Federal armies of the Southwest, at the opening of 1864, were massed at strategic points from Tennessee to the Gulf, and were not extended along an obvious trench line, every brave civilian would still keep up his hope and would still insist that the ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... closely to its walls, permitting it to display none of its exterior beauties, beyond what could be seen from the narrow streets that closed it in on every side. Gabriel, who was acquainted with its interior magnificence, thought of the deceptive oriental houses, outwardly squalid and miserable, but inwardly rich in alabasters and traceries. Jews and Moors had not lived in Toledo for centuries in vain, their aversion to outward show seemed to have influenced the building of the Cathedral, now ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... much improved. But it was a temporary improvement only, due in part, perhaps, to change in environment, and in part to the exhilaration arising from our reunion, heart and mind for a time dominating the body and stimulating it to an activity which produced this fair but deceptive semblance of health. His letters to me breathed the spirit of hope till almost the last. We never met again. The intention I had cherished of going to see him was never fulfilled. The illness of my wife ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... agree the other prophets who treat of this subject. No other limits the term of Christ's reign; or mentions Satan's being enlarged and permitted any measure of deceptive influence, after the restraints laid upon him at the beginning Christ's reign. But others foretell the happy day, and several seem to dwell delightfully upon it, and represent it as continuing to the end of time; and none give the remotest hint that it is to terminate, and iniquity ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... as rapidly as possible toward the ancestral home of their enemies. It was a night perfectly suited to what they had to do, for the moon was full, the fleeting clouds hiding it from time to time and casting deceptive shadows. ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... even though he sat beside her, seemed distant and strange and estranged, for his language was not hers; and still he was happy. For happiness, he told himself, is not being loved; that is satisfied vanity mingled with repugnance. Happiness consists in loving and snatching up perhaps tiny, deceptive approaches to the loved object. And he noted down this idea inwardly, thought it out in its entirety, and tasted it ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... substance which gives to tea and coffee their stimulating properties, but not their agreeable flavors. Less injurious, on the whole, than either alcohol or tobacco, caffeine has come into general use in much the same way as these substances. In a sense, however, caffeine is more deceptive than either alcohol or nicotine, because the usual mode of preparing tea and coffee gives them the appearance of real foods. The housewife who would feel condemned in purchasing caffeine put up as a drug somehow feels justified when she extracts it from plant products in ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... apparently, castigating myself in this cruel manner. When they opened the door, I threw myself on the bed, and cried still more vociferously. This certainly was the only part of my conduct which was not deceptive, for I was in the most acute agony. To their inquiries, I told them that I had been guilty of great enormities; that the superior had reproved me, and ordered me penance; and that I had scourged myself with nettles; requesting them to ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... have said, who spend their lives in painting the works, or perhaps one single work, of one illustrious painter over and over again: thus they convert themselves into Guido machines, or Raphaelic machines. Their performances, it is true, are often wonderfully deceptive to a careless eye; but working entirely from the outside, and seeking only to reproduce the surface, these men are sure to leave out that indefinable nothing, that inestimable something, that constitutes the life and soul through which the picture gets its immortality. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... no exaggeration to characterize these transactions as direct frauds upon the public. They may not be such in a sense recognized by the law, for legislation has strangely neglected to provide against their perpetration; but morally they are nothing less, for they are essentially deceptive and unjust, and involve an oppressive taxation of the public at large for the benefit of a few individuals who have given no equivalent for what they get. The result of this system is that, on the average, the railroads of the country are capitalized at probably fully ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... parkgates at three in the afternoon, telling his flyman to wait. As he advanced by short cuts over the grass, he studied the look of the rows of windows. She was within, and strangely to his clouded senses she was no longer Tony, no longer the deceptive woman he could in justice abuse. He and she, so close to union, were divided. A hand resembling the palpable interposition of Fate had swept them asunder. Having the poorest right—not any—to reproach her, he was disarmed, he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... maid, but the round little eyes darting behind thick glasses were cold and shrewd and missed nothing. He would be Verdam's Special Envoy Sonig. Hunter appraised him as a man very dangerous in his own deceptive way. ...
— —And Devious the Line of Duty • Tom Godwin
... there. Far away stood other barren hills with deep canyons between. He knew now that the black-capped butte was less a butte than the uptilted nose of a high plateau not half so barren as the lower country. From the pointing Joshua tree it had seemed a peak, but contours are never so deceptive as in the high, ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... though she might go to pieces at any moment. She was flying the Japanese mercantile flag, a white flag with a red ball in the centre— which is also the Japanese "Jack," and I soon learned that in her case, as in many others, appearances were deceptive, for I was assured that she was as staunch as staunch could be. She was officered and manned by a Chinese crew, and she was ostensibly loaded with bricks; but surrounded by these bricks, which were only a blind, was a sturdy little closed-in engine and boiler, the smoke ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... see a horse there, unless he got high enough to be silhouetted against that line of fire now flaring to the sky. But he heard the beat of hoofs, swift, sharp, louder—louder. The night shadows were deceptive. That wonderful light confused him, made the place unreal. Was he dreaming? Or had the long chase and his privations unhinged his mind? He reached for Nagger. No! The big black was real, alive, quivering, pounding the sand. He scented ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... will be led to Jesus; whoever neglects it must wander in the wilderness of error and perplexity. It sheds the clearest radiance on the path of the traveller, who is pressing to the "Prince of Peace." Let us not pay attention to those deceptive lights which the world holds out to allure and destroy. This only is from heaven, and will guide the inquirer thither, where the illumination it has diffused over the path of life, will be lost amidst the splendours of ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... a clothes horse to dry. Then you knew that there would be Nudeln for your dinner, either narrow ones in soup, or wider ones boiled in water and sprinkled with others cut as fine as vermicelli and fried brown in butter. The paste is troublesome to make. It begins with a deceptive simplicity. Take four whole eggs and four tablespoonsful of milk if you want enough for ten people, says the cookery book, and make a light dough of it with a knife in a basin. Anyone can do that, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... of the Boiscoran family, No. 216 University Street, is a house of modest appearance. The yard in front is small; and the few square yards of damp soil in the rear hardly deserve the name of a garden. But appearances are deceptive. The inside is marvellously comfortable; careful and painstaking hands have made every provision for ease; and the rooms display that solid splendor for which our age has lost the taste. The vestibule contains a superb mosaic, brought home from Venice, in 1798, by one of the Boiscorans, who had ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... explorer, who has left his name on the most important island of the North Pacific coast, baffled by the deceptive appearances of the two capes that guard the way to a noble stream (Cape Disappointment and Cape Deception), passed them without a thought. But Captain Gray, sailing the good ship "Columbia," of Boston, who coasted those shores for more than two years, fully convinced ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... those of the old. (4) These books to which he applies the formula "Gospel" ([Greek: to euangelion]) and "Apostles" ([Greek: hoi apostoloi]) are likewise viewed by him as inspired, but he does not consider them as forming a fixed collection. (5) Unless all appearances are deceptive, it was, strictly speaking, only the four Gospels that he considered and treated as completely on a level with the Old Testament. The formula: [Greek: ho nomos kai hoi prophetai kai to euangelion] ("the Law and the Prophets and the Gospel") is ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... Alla. I doubt if she'd do a deceptive thing. But all the same, Patty, she's no friend for you. You don't care for her, ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... only perhaps a few of the elder folk fondly nurse a memory and a belief in the powers of St. Cubert's Well. Yet the spring flows on, heedless of its neglect as it was heedless of its worship; it is only the false, the fantastic, the deceptive that have passed—the truth, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... the same cause (that which produces the deceptive appearance of a progressive motion in the waves of the sea) which makes a revolving cork-screw, held in a fixed position, seem to be advancing in that direction in which it would actually advance if the worm were passing through a cork. That point which is nearest to the eye, and which corresponds ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... mind, and that the brain, the body, and their environment, which is continually acting upon the entire man, are of no importance whatever, would not be worthy even of mere mention if it were not for the fact that this form of delusion has of late become so common, under the deceptive names of metaphysics, Christian science, and mind-cure, when the theory is simply an attempt to get rid ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... his course was steadily downward, his methods steadily farther and farther from the line of the law. Dumont came just in time to save him, came to build him up from the most shunned of coyotes into a deceptive imitation of a wolf with aspirations toward the ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... that the deepest bond uniting men is that which binds them to Jesus Christ? I would press the question, Do we feel that nothing draws us so close to men as common love to Jesus, and that if we are not alike on that cardinal point there is a deep gulf of separation beneath a deceptive surface of union, an unfathomable gorge marked by a quaking ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... five minutes the grey curtain of mist dropped slowly down again over the magnificent picture, and it faded gradually from sight, leaving us almost in doubt whether it had been a reality, or only a bright deceptive vision. We are enveloped now, as we have been nearly all day, in a thick ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... pleading for her; but she now believed it was all in vain. The feeling grew upon her that belief or unbelief was a matter of education and temperament, and that the feelings of which Dennis spoke were but the deceptive emotions of our agitated hearts. To that degree that the Divine love seemed visionary and hopeless, she longed for him to speak of his own, if in truth it still existed, that she could understand and believe ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... the 16th, the Dauphin was worse. He felt himself devoured by a consuming fire, which the external fever did not seem to justify; but the pulse was very extraordinary and exceedingly menacing. This was a deceptive day. The marks on the Dauphin's face extended over all the body. They were regarded as the marks of measles. Hope arose thereon, but the doctors and the most clear-sighted of the Court could not forget that these same marks ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... about to offer you an admirable opportunity of applying your—what shall we call it? your theory? no: nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? your system? your principle? but you dislike doctrines, you abhor systems, and as for principles, you deny that there are any in social economy. We shall say, then, your practice, your practice ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... before Lawler and Red King had traveled half the distance to the line camp. A dull, gray haze was sweeping southward. It mingled with the southern light and threw a ghostly glare into the valley, making distance deceptive, giving a strange appearance to the landmarks with which Lawler and ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... series of tests are much more likely to lead to reliable diagnosis than the series of Binet, which demands so much of the rather specialized capacity of abstract formulation. Healy's tests, on the other hand, deal fairly with the primitive, untaught mind and that which has an unequal and deceptive development of language ability. In connection with these tests, it is interesting to note, by the way, that he finds irregularity in results (or cooperation) to be so often associated with epilepsy and depletion from sex over-indulgence ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... gallant charge her husband's men had made only two weeks before; how they had broken through the wall of the enemy, and, cheering, had rushed to meet the besieged garrison. That had been a moment of rejoicing, transitory and deceptive. Then the wall closed in about them again, and they knew ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... belonging to different branches of the tree of life, there are no instances of any real or anatomical resemblance. So far as their structures are adapted to perform a common function, there is in all such cases what may be termed a deceptive appearance of some unity of ideal; but, when carefully examined, it is always found that two apparently identical structures occurring on different branches of the classificatory tree are in fact fundamentally different in ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... attitude of the mind, injurious to tranquillity and the public order, he instantly concluded that, however plausible they might seem when tested by logic and demonstration, they were fundamentally untrue and deceptive. What is logic compared with eternal salvation in the next world, and the practice of virtue in this? The recommendation of such a mind as De Maistre's is the intensity of its appreciation of order and social happiness. The obvious weakness of such a mind, and the curse inherent ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... herself for us. She lets us overlook her, with a supreme unconsciousness, a supreme affectation of unconsciousness, which is of course very conscious art, an art so perfect as to be almost literally deceptive. I do not know if she plays with exactly the same gestures night after night, but I can quite imagine it. She has certain little caresses, the half awkward caresses of real people, not the elegant ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Mr. Fentolin replied, "until we come to a clear understanding, you and I. You seem to be a harmless enough person, Mr. Hamel but appearances are sometimes deceptive. It has been suggested to me that ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... part of it, however he blind himself to the fact and build up for himself a phantasmal outer form of horror. In that sense it is that I say to you—All those beings among whom you struggle on are fragments of the Divine. And so deceptive is the illusion in which you live, that it is hard to guess where you will first detect the sweet voice in ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... furtive, shed alteration upon his fair beauty. He himself noticed it, as he looked in a mirror one night, and silently cursed the inevitable effect which mind produces upon matter. No man's face can forever remain an entirely deceptive mask. The saintly expression of Valentine's was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. He wondered whether Julian noticed it. But Julian was too much preoccupied with his own energies of dreary action and lacerating fatigues ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and dismal ages the Roman Church exhibited to perfection the evil, the folly and fatality of that false and deceptive proposition that the Church is the ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... dreary street of small houses, each with a small yard at the back, each built of brick and stuccoed, all as like as peas, all inhabited by dockyardsmen or the families of gunners, artificers, and petty officers in the navy. Prospect Place was its deceptive name, and it ran parallel with three precisely similar thoroughfares—Grafton Place, Alderney Place, and Belvedere Avenue. These four—with a cross-street, where the Mission Room stood facing a pawnbroker's—comprised Gilbart's field ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to grumble deep in his throat and to shake his antlers threateningly. Then he advanced a few steps. Perspiration stood out upon the face of the Hermit, but he made no movement. The moonlight was deceptive and the beast did not see the man until he was uncomfortably close. Then a great bellow of rage burst from him. At the same moment the Hermit took the one chance that presented itself and dropped on the opposite side of the fence. The charge of the big moose smashed the slight barrier as if ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... and buffoonery, as they made unmerciful use of the short sticks with which they were armed, would have provoked a smile. Now our party gazed on these things as they move the wise. They felt calm and happy; and deceptive hope whispered they might yet remain so. Acme took up her guitar, and throwing her fingers over it, as she gave a soft prelude, warbled that sweet although common song, "Buona notte, amato bene." She sung with great feeling, and feeling is ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... of his relief at having evaded the ordeal of the cutlery, Hickey discoursed variously and at length upon the engrossing subject of Anisty, gentleman-cracksman, while the genial counterpart of Daniel Maitland listened with apparent but deceptive apathy, and had much ado to keep from laughing in his guest's face as the latter, perspiringly earnest, unfolded his plans for laying the burglar ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... deliverance from death, through faith alone. This is the first element of Christian doctrine. Granting that faith does justify, the next question is whether the faith is real or simulated, being merely a deceptive show and unsupported claim. The clear information imparted by the apostles is, that love, indeed, does not deliver from death, but that deliverance from death and the presence of life becomes a matter of sight and knowledge in that love has been wrought. With true faith we must ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... the deceptive character of these Acts, with measures to neutralize or prevent them from being carried intoeffect—such as the Navigation Act, Oath of Allegiance, the Franchise, Liberty of Worship, and Persecution of ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... be the artist he is if he were less deceptive. He has his problems no less than Ibsen had, and he is much preoccupied with them even when he appears lost in ribald laughter. They are different from Ibsen's, however, and in that difference lies one of the chief explanations ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... carefully poured the grains into the bowl of his pipe, stoppered it, glanced slowly about the brightness of the river mouth, and shook his head. This was a great surprise, and anybody who did not know Yeo would have questioned him. But it was certain he knew his business. There is not a more deceptive and difficult stretch of coast round these islands, and Yeo was born to it. He stood up, and his long black hair stirred in the breeze under the broad brim of a grey hat he insists on wearing. The soft hat ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... walk again. But around the corner at my heels came that persistent Mongolian. It was the old story of the hare and the tortoise. He could not run so fast as I, but he stayed with it, plodding along at a shambling and deceptive trot, and wasting much good breath in noisy imprecations. He called all Sacramento to witness the dishonor that had been done him, and a goodly portion of Sacramento heard and flocked at his heels. And I ran on like the hare, and ever ...
— The Road • Jack London
... picture of it; or, better still, to represent a certain character or quality by exhibiting, not the object itself, but an analagous one whose peculiar character that property is; for examples: the quiet, peaceful, gentle disposition of a child, by a lamb; a man of cunning, artful, deceptive disposition, by a fox; or a cruel, bloodthirsty, vindictive tyrant, by a tiger, etc. This is hieroglyphical or symbolic language. This language takes precedence over every other for naturalness and simplicity, being common to a greater or less ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... those warm Indian-summer days that resemble early spring. There is the same suggestion of warmer sunshine yet to come; the air has a scent as of growing things, the kind of muffled hopes and suppressed excitement of April is in the deceptive air. This sort of day is dangerous to charming people not in their ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... the right end, then the right over and under the left. If you once learn the simple formula of "Left over," "Right over," you will never make a mistake and form the despised "Granny," a most useless, bothersome, and deceptive makeshift for any purpose (Fig. 13). The true "Reef Knot" is merely the square knot with the bight of the left or right end used instead of the end itself. This enables the knot to be "cast off" more readily than the regular square ...
— Knots, Splices and Rope Work • A. Hyatt Verrill
... Clementine Homilies shows conspicuously the extremely deceptive character of the argument from silence. All the quotations from the Old Testament found in them are taken from five Homilies (iii, xi, xvi, xvii, xviii) out of nineteen, although the Homilies are lengthy ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... now, if you listen to the talk of this place. Believe me, I hold no brief for wrongdoers. They must take their chances. If they are discovered and captured they must pay the penalty. But I know how deceptive appearances may be in this valley, and—and it would break my heart if—a great wrong ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... understanding, indeed. There was, I say, something bracing in the very look of this silvery-haired giant as he strode along with a kind of easy sloping movement, like that of a St. Bernard dog (the most deceptive of all movements as regards pace), his beardless face (quite matchless for symmetrical beauty) beaded with the healthy perspiration drops of strong exercise, and glowing ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... her that she had walked for an hour when she heard a dog barking somewhere on the left of the road. Presently, she saw a blurred patch of radiance apparently on the ground in front of her. So deceptive are lights seen through a fog that she was quite taken aback suddenly to come upon a long low house with a great beam of light streaming out ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... might be death itself to any one who got off the trail, and became bewildered. The mud is deceptive, and once one gets fast in it an hour or two is apt to see him swallowed up; nor will his fate ever be known, for the bottomless mire of the bog never discloses ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... Artificial silk bears a deceptive resemblance to the natural article, and has nearly the same luster. It lacks the tensile strength and elasticity, and is of higher specific ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... immortal turned his face away, She, the compassionate, alone Took up her dwelling in that house of clay, With the deserted, banished one. With drooping wing she hovers here Around her darling, near the senses' land, And on his prison-walls so drear Elysium paints with fond deceptive hand. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... houses had two stories. As we rode on, however, the appearance of the place improved; and in and near the principal square I observed some fine buildings, with handsomely ornamented facades, and many fine churches and convents; but altogether I had to own that the outside beauty was sadly deceptive. ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Having it in their power, they would rob even their nearest friends, thus overleaping that common law of "honour among thieves." They would do this with the utmost impunity, whenever they saw proper. There was no redress. The very officers were, many of them, under fictitious names and would assume deceptive titles, for the more successful perpetration of ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... as regards size, colour, and marking, invariably resemble those of the birds in whose nests she lays. Sylvia ruja, for example, lays a white egg with violet spots; Sylvia hippolais, a red one with black spots; Regulus ignicapellus, a cloudy red; but the cuckoo's egg is in each case so deceptive an imitation of its model, that it can hardly be distinguished except by the ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... of such works as this, there is introduced a problem, an extra perplexity, which does not exist in other cases. I mean the problem of the things commonly called blinds. Some of the points which we pick out as suggestive may have been put in as deceptive. Thus the whole conflict between a critic with one theory, like Mr. Lang, and a critic with another theory, like Mr. Cumming Walters, becomes eternal and a trifle farcical. Mr. Walters says that all Mr. Lang's clues were blinds; Mr. Lang says that ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... been utterly wrong in supposing that they had met with any naval reverses during the war of 1812. The falsity of this assumption he (p. 206) satisfactorily established by explaining that the Americans were the most inveterate liars upon the face of the earth. By their deceptive and fraudulent accounts they had beguiled the English, a self-distrustful and self-depreciating people, into believing that they had been defeated, where they had really been victorious. Heroes, indeed, can be overcome by sufficient odds; and James was always prepared with ample ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... is retained to allow readers to browse the subjects mentioned in this book. The bracketed numbers indicate how many mentions are made. A brief mention or 10 pages worth can both count as a single mention, so the numbers are sometimes deceptive.) ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... from first impressions; they're often deceptive," spluttered Hamilton, pausing in his ablutions to look at his friend through a mass of soap-suds—an act which afterwards caused him a good deal of pain and a copious flow ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... withal, quite countryfied; but I am bound to say, Mrs. Gloverson, that there was nothing about them that ever reminded me, in the remotest degree, of daisies or new-mown hay. Thus, with sarcasm, do I smash the deceptive Gloverson. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... sheets out with carefully written amounts. The expert was as good as his word. He altered them almost as fast as they were written. Some, to be sure, were crude and would have betrayed the fact of alteration to the eye of any careful banker. But many were almost perfect, and all were wonderfully deceptive and showed what could be done by a crook who had plenty ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... every day of a fairly long life; as a clerk would check off the boxes or parcels carried past him by the porters. M. Fille could hardly bear to see him in this mood, and the New Cure hovered round him with a mournful and harmlessly deceptive kindness. But the end had to come, and practically all the parish was present when it came. That was on the day when the contents of the Manor were sold at auction by order of the Court. One thing Jean ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... on Wednesday afternoon, Abbott stared moodily at the weather-tarnished group by Dalou in the Luxembourg gardens—the Triumph of Silenus. His gaze was deceptive, for the rollicking old bibulous scoundrel had not stirred his critical sense nor impressed the delicate films of thought. He was looking through the bronze, into the far-away things. He sat on his own folding stool, which he had brought along from his winter studio hard by in the ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... with us, but it was only a deceptive gleam of sunshine before the coming storm of adversity. I built an addition to my dwelling; and when it was completed I employed a paperhanger from London named Taylor, to beautify the old rooms. He was of a talkative disposition; when he ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... haven't missed it?" said Antony. The park lay quietly in the moonlight on either side of the drive, wearing a little way ahead of them a deceptive air of smoothness which retreated always ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne |
