"Define" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... word my heart almost stopped beating. I've never seen any one so lovely as she was at that moment. Never, I repeat. Her hair, blown by the kind November winds, strayed—but no! I cannot begin to define the loveliness of her. There was a warm, rich glow in her cheeks and a light in her eyes that actually bewildered me, and more than that I ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... between France and England; but the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 brought the game of war again to a pause and restored Hudson Bay to England. The Company received back all its forts on the Bay; but the treaty did not define the boundaries to be observed between the fur traders of Quebec pressing north and the fur traders of the Bay pressing south, and this unsettled point proved a source of friction ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... be answered, we must define, it is discovered, what we mean by Christianity, the ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... till, by its mere excess, it seemed to be changed into its opposite. But this is not his spirit, only the dead ultimate result of an imperfect logic that confuses an abstract with a concrete unity." In truth, the moment man tries to define his conception of God's essence in words, he either impairs and perverts his idea, or he must use words that do not really make the idea any clearer than it was unexpressed. Thus in the Hymn of [Hebrew: ygdl] ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed. It does not define the limits of sense, or analyze the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling. The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... scantiness and defect: for the subject is not barren, but yieldeth much and pleasant variety, and doth also appear to be of great importance."—From Dr. GREW'S Anat. of Plants, fol. 1682, p. 286. The Dr. enumerates sixteen simple tastes: however, it is difficult to define more than six.—1st. Bitter as wormwood. 2d. Sweet as sugar. 3d. Sour as vinegar. 4th. Salt as brine. 5th. Cold as ice. 6th. Hot as brandy. "Compound tastes, innumerable, may be formed by the combination of these simple tastes—as words are of letters."—See also ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... would be most pleasant to tarry once more in description of this gathering of nobility and beauty; to recount the points of Creole loveliness in midsummer dress; to tell in particular of one and another eye-kindling face, form, manner, wit; to define the subtle qualities of Creole air and sky and scene, or the yet more delicate graces that characterize the music of Creole voice and speech and the light of Creole eyes; to set forth the gracious, unaccentuated dignity of the matrons ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... even the "dhobies," or washer-men, in the stream adjoining the puddle trench, hastened into town before dusk. Similar so called "head scares" have occurred in Singapore up to even the present time. It is not easy to define what has led to this superstition in the native mind, and it is made more complicated from the fact that it is shared alike by Chinese and natives of India. In many of the Polynesian Islands the practice of human sacrifices we know exists even in ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... this treatise we may, perhaps, define it as the power to see what is hidden from ordinary physical sight. It will be as well to premise that it is very frequently (though by no means always) accompanied by what is called clairaudience, or the power to hear what would be inaudible to the ordinary physical ear; and ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... I have promised you to drop. All I allude to now is, the shocking murder of Miss Ray(353) by a divine. In my own opinion we are growing more fit for Bedlam, than for Mahomet's paradise. The poor criminal in question, I am persuaded, is mad—and the misfortune is, the law does not know how to define the shades of madness; and thus there -are twenty outpensioners of Bedlam, for the one that is confined. You, dear Sir, have chosen a wiser path to happiness by depending on yourself for amusement. Books and past ages draw one into no scrapes, and perhaps it is best not to know much of men till ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... therefore, you have to learn in landscape, is to outline; and therefore we must now know precisely what an outline is, how it ought to be represented; and this it will be right to define in quite general terms ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... gradients, nor about the view, which nevertheless expanded. The great estates that throttle the south of Hertfordshire were less obtrusive here, and the appearance of the land was neither aristocratic nor suburban. To define it was difficult, but Margaret knew what it was not: it was not snobbish. Though its contours were slight, there was a touch of freedom in their sweep to which Surrey will never attain, and the distant brow of the ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... now blighted yellow and bright green in February, define the embouchures of the three grim black ravines radiating from the upper heights, and broadening out as they approach the bay. The rounded grassy hill-heads setting off the horizontal curtains of dry stone, 'horticultural fortifications' which guard the slopes, and ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... been made to define the racial characteristics of the Negro, but they have not been attended ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... harder to define, is moral. There are a thousand different humours in the mind, and about each of them, when it is uppermost, some literature tends to be deposited. Is this to be allowed? Not certainly in every case, and yet perhaps in more than rigorists would fancy. It were to be desired that all literary ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... impossible for the dullest reader to mistake the peculiar presence, the original tone or accent, of John Webster. If the epithet unique had not such a tang of German affectation in it, it would be perhaps the aptest of all adjectives to denote the genius or define the manner of this great poet. But in this tragedy, though whatever is said is well said and whatever is done well done, we miss that sense of positive and inevitable conviction, that instant and profound perception or impression as of immediate and indisputable truth, which ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Holmes, even in your exuberance. That 'old party,' as you so unfeelingly define her, cannot own to more than two or three years seniority over my respectable self—four at the ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... a tall fair woman, whose height just saved her from redundancy. Her rosy blondness had survived some forty years of futile activity without showing much trace of ill-usage except in a diminished play of feature. It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a crowd. The collective nature of her interests exempted her from the ordinary rivalries ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... situation at the commencement of the eighteenth century was remarkably similar to that of the Gold Coast in Africa at the end of the nineteenth. The French persistently attempted to encroach upon the English sphere of influence, and it was in attempting to define the two spheres that George Washington learned his first lesson in diplomacy and strategy. The French and English American colonies were almost perpetually at war with one another, the objective being ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... Apamea, in Phrygia, from the circumstance that in Genesis xi. 2, the sons of the patriarch are represented as journeying westward from the place of descent, and Mount Ararat in Armenia being west of this country. The language of the sacred writer does not particularly define the question. Mount Ararat, according to Morier, is at once awful in its elevation, and beautiful in its form. Sir Robert Ker Porter describes this celebrated mountain as divided, by a chasm of about seven miles wide, into two distinct peaks, called The Great ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... not incompatible with the most licentious scepticism. [12] Instead of an indivisible and regular system, which occupies the whole extent of the believing mind, the mythology of the Greeks was composed of a thousand loose and flexible parts, and the servant of the gods was at liberty to define the degree and measure of his religious faith. The creed which Julian adopted for his own use was of the largest dimensions; and, by strange contradiction, he disdained the salutary yoke of the gospel, whilst he made a voluntary offering of his reason on the altars of Jupiter and Apollo. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... almost traitorously evasive—a more significant reason. It is that the distances, the greatness, the winds and the waves of the world, coloured plains, and the flight of a sky, are all certainly alien to the perceptions of a people intent upon little deformities. Does it seem harsh to define by that phrase the curious Japanese search for accidents? Upon such search these people are avowedly intent, even though they show themselves capable of exquisite appreciation of the form of a normal bird and of the habit of ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... my writings, and through many years of endeavour to define the laws of art, I have insisted on this Tightness in work, and on its connection with virtue of character, in so many partial ways, that the impression left on the reader's mind—if, indeed, it was ever impressed at all—has been confused and uncertain. ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... construction—whether a steel-framed skyscraper or a wooden shanty. A line system, represented by columns and girders in the one case, and by studs and rafters in the other, becomes, by overlay or interposition, a system of planes, so assembled and correlated as to define a solid. ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... visions, whether the forms that support them appear to us in muslin or in deerskin. The only requisite needful to constitute a face a vision to any particular person, is that it should have in it that peculiar something which everybody wants, but which nobody can define; which is ineffably charming, though utterly incomprehensible; and which, when once seen by any one, constitutes the countenance that possesses ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... fulness of joy leaves me powerless to speak, Emotions which language can never define, When her sweet tears of transport drop warm on my cheek, And I feel her fond heart ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... State I have named. If things continue as they are, I do not know how I can serve one party without falling out with the other, and at the same time I do not wish to offend. I ask that your Holiness may be pleased to define my position so that I may not become an enemy of my own blood, and not act contrary to the obligations into which I have entered by virtue of my agreement with your Holiness and the illustrious State of Milan." He replied, saying that I took too much interest in his affairs, ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... the exact kinship of all its various branches and ramifications was a hard thing to define. Old Uncle Julius Penhallow was looked upon as a veritable wonder because he carried it all in his head and could tell on sight just what relation any one Penhallow was to any other Penhallow. The rest made a blind guess at it, for the most part, and the younger Penhallows let ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... attempt to define this word fact. Fact expresses for me something in its nature primary and unanalyzable. I start from that. I take as a typical statement of fact that I sit here at my desk writing with a fountain pen on a pad of ruled scribbling paper, that the sunlight falls ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... be on the safe side of things and I had not the remotest idea what the position and functions of an adjutant are. I know now that he is something like an archdeacon, a man of enormous importance whose duties it is a little difficult to define exactly. He expected me. With the help of the sergeant-major he had found a servant for me and assigned ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... a when or where clause as a predicate noun. Do not define a word by saying it is a "when" or a "where". Define a noun by another noun, a ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... is more natural to brighten with pleasant words, and a morning compliment of good looks will often set one up for the day. Indeed, we fancy that most persons, knowing their disease, in their own minds, prefer that it should chiefly rest there. To discuss seems only to define it more sharply, and to be greatly condoled is only debilitating. Montaigne, to avoid death-bed sympathies, desired to die on horseback; while against the eternal repeating of these ills for pity, he says that "the man who makes himself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... Samuel, or the twofold authorship of Isaiah, or that all after the ninth verse of the last chapter of St. Mark's Gospel is spurious; and, as regards the whole encyclical, the distinguished Jesuit dwelt significantly on the power of the papacy at any time to define out of existence any previous decisions which may be found inconvenient. More than that, Father Clarke himself, while standing as the champion of the most thorough orthodoxy, acknowledged that, in the Old Testament, "numbers must ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... but in one point she had been disappointed—namely, in the power of these things to give her what she longed for, and what she could define only under ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... as to the evolution of mind and the way mind and matter are related force the investigator to consider the problem of immortality. But these and similar subjects in the field of extra-science are beyond its sphere for the very good reason that scientific method, which we are to define shortly, cannot be employed for their solution. Evolution is a science; it is a description of nature's order, and its materials are facts only. In method and content it is the very science of sciences, describing all and holding true throughout ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... the Public Attorney is in the presence of a difficulty which he cannot ignore. It cannot be put even in the nature of a condemnation, since offenses to public morals and to religion are somewhat vague and elastic expressions which it would be necessary to define precisely. Nevertheless, when we speak to right-minded, practical men we are sure of being sufficiently understood to distinguish whether a certain page of a book carries an attack against religion ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... controlling, governing force is equally well understood. Therefore, inasmuch as the aim of all voice building is to produce beautiful tone we must start with the right idea of tone. This is where the first and greatest difficulty appears. To most people a tone is intangible and difficult to define. One will rarely find a student that can formulate anything approaching a definition of a musical tone and I fancy many teachers would find it far from easy. Unless one has a grasp of the psychology of voice, and a great many have not, he will begin to work with what he can ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... we explain imperialism by "Realpolitik"? Even if it be thus explicable, it must be no less energetically condemned. "I am inclined to define the 'real politicians' as persons who are marching along with their eyes closed to the essential realities of the world and of mankind.... 'Real politics' may often seem to be right for a season; but in the long run it always proves to have been wrong.... The war ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "This is the real me!" And afterwards, ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... among them, however, there was a difference of opinion, Garrison, H.C. Wright and others, non-resistants, encouraging the agitation of Woman's Rights. A few lines from one of Angelina's letters will best define the position taken ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... according to the rule of method, which teacheth that universal or generall remedies ought ever to precede and goe before particulars. Now what these are in speciall, to fit every ones case in particular, it is impossible for me here, or any else to define precisely. Ars non versatur circa individua. We may see it true in mechanicall trades. No one shoemaker can fit all by one Last; nor any one taylor can suite all by one, ...
— Spadacrene Anglica - The English Spa Fountain • Edmund Deane
... 12 nm exclusive economic zone: geographic coordinates define outer limit continental shelf: median ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... to bloody graves than fire, sword and wave together. And then why I believe as I believe demands time in excess of what we have; and I am the bolder in this because in limiting me Your Majesty limits yourself. So I will now no more than define my Faith. But first, it does not follow from my disclaimer that I can only be a Jew or a Christian; for as air is a vehicle for a multitude of subtleties in light, faith in like manner accommodates ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... entirely in seizing the salient points, and to offer little profit (which should be the principal aim of every writer) for the trouble of its perusal. There are two things essential to a technical treatise: the first is to define the subject; the second (I mean second in order, as it is by much the first in importance) to point out how and by what methods we may become masters of it ourselves. And yet Caecilius, while wasting his efforts in a thousand ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... Beautiful." This pathetic absurdity shows what we are driven to if we try to graft Indian nihilism upon the Platonic doctrine of ideas. Plotinus tried hard to show that his First Person was very different from his lowest category—non-existent "matter"; but if we once allow ourselves to define the Infinite as the Indefinite, the conclusion which he deprecated ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... acquainted with supersensual research will, on reading this book, be able to see that the author has sought to define the boundary line sharply between what can be communicated now from the sphere of supersensible cognition, and that which will be given out, at a later time, or at least, in ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... sometimes I would read to them out of Milton—I read the whole of Comus to them by degrees in this way; and although there was much I could not at all understand, I am perfectly certain it had an ennobling effect upon every one of us. It is not necessary that the intellect should define and separate before the heart and soul derive nourishment. As well say that a bee can get nothing out of a flower, because she does not understand botany. The very music of the stately words of such a poem is enough to generate ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... wishes to preserve the blessings of health, competence, and virtue. In the year 1682 he published in London his Introductio ad Latinam Blasoniam, an original attempt, which Camden had desiderated, to define, in a Roman idiom, the terms and attributes of a Gothic institution. It is not two years since I acquired, in a foreign land, some domestic intelligence of my own family; and this intelligence was conveyed to Switzerland from the heart of Germany. I had formed an acquaintance with Mr. Langer, ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... to persons in positions of dignity. For according to Augustine (De Civ. Dei x), we are said to worship those persons whom we hold in honor, so that worship and honor would seem to be the same. Therefore it is unfitting to define observance as paying worship and honor to persons in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." In these two commandments the whole law is summed up, the whole duty of man is made known. It is well to emphasize this two-fold aspect of the truth at a time when we are often tempted to define religion wholly in the terms of morality, and, while insisting on the duties which we owe to each other, to forget those which we owe to God. If there be a God righteousness must surely have a meaning in relation to Him; it cannot be simply another name ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... post by which he passes. Suppose all the accessories were away, could not one swear that the man was stone-deaf, beyond the reach of trumpet? What is the peculiar character in a deaf man's physiognomy?—can any person define it satisfactorily in words?—not in pages; and Mr. Cruikshank has expressed it on a piece of paper not so big as the tenth part of your thumb-nail. The horses of John Gilpin are much more of the equestrian order; ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "Memoires," I. 24. "The sentiment I entertained for the person of the King is difficult to define. . . (It was) a sentiment of devotion of an almost religious character, a profound respect as if due to a being of a superior order. At this time the word king possessed a magic power in all pure and upright hearts which nothing had changed. This delicate sentiment. . . still existed in the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... area is the only part of the finger impression with which we are concerned in regard to interpretation and classification. It is present in all patterns, of course, but in many arches and tented arches it is impossible to define. This is not important, however, as the only patterns in which we need to define the pattern area for classification purposes are loops and whorls. In these two pattern types the pattern area may be ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... that the expected peace between the mother countries would render it important to define the boundaries of their colonial possessions, the active governor of Canada dispatched M. de Celeron de Bienville, with 300 men, to traverse the vast wilderness lying from Detroit southeast to the Apalachian Mountains. ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... I have remarked in all maps of Scotland that have fallen in my way is, a want of a coloured line, or stroke, that shall exactly define the just limits of that district called the Highlands. Moreover, all the great avenues to that mountainous and romantic country want to be well distinguished. The military roads formed by General Wade are so great and Roman-like an undertaking that they well merit attention. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... must bind him hand and foot, as respects all effort, such as he had trained himself for,—such as his own country offered. It was not any value for these,—as it seemed to Redclyffe,—but a witchcraft, an indefinable spell, a something that he could not define, that enthralled him, and was now doing a work on him analogous to, though different from, that which was wrought on Omskirk and all the other inhabitants, high and low, of this ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... AND POSITION OF THE TEETH, physiologists are enabled to define the nature and functions of the animal; and from those of the Sus, or hog, it is evident that he is as much a grinder as a biter, or can live as well on vegetable as on animal food; though a mixture of both is ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... to define the northern boundary line between their possessions and those of the English, it was quite easy to do so, because they had already made treaties with the rulers of the various provinces and their rights in the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 53, November 11, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... and consequently obscured. If an animal, for example, is the suctorial member of a circle of species, forming the natatorial type of genera, forming a family or sub-family which in its turn is rasorial, its qualities must evidently be greatly mingled and ill to define. But, on the other hand, if we take the rapacious or sub- typical group of birds, and look in it for the tribe which is again the rapacious or sub-typical group of its order, we may expect to find the qualities of that group exalted or intensified, ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... should think. But if I must define them, I would say bad. They are to the effect that a two days' battle had been fought near Sta. Marta, and that the Ribierists are defeated. It must have happened a few days ago—perhaps a week. The rumour has just ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... attempt to portray the history or weigh the merits of the two parties which came into existence at the close of the last century, and which, under varying names, have divided the people of the United States ever since. But it is essential here to define the relation of Washington toward them because one hears it constantly said and sees it as constantly written down, that Washington belonged to no party, which is perhaps a natural, but is certainly a complete misconception. Washington came to the presidency by a unanimous vote. He had in ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... [331]. About thirteen years after the brief prohibition of comedy appeared that wonderful genius, the elements and attributes of whose works it will be a pleasing, if arduous task, in due season, to analyze and define; matchless alike in delicacy and strength, in powers the most gigantic, in purpose the most daring—with the invention of Shakspeare—the playfulness of Rabelais—the malignity of Swift—need I add the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... generation national predilections and pious emotions towards the God of Creation. That mythology should so generally be interpreted Theism, and that forms or ceremonials of worship should be held to limit and define belief in creed, may, in my apprehension, be partly traceable to the school-book Lampriere's Classical Dictionary. You or your correspondents may attribute it ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... science permits me to postulate (a concession by science which I much doubt if it could make) that matter, as we know it, has the semblance of being what we call a substance, charged with a something which we define as energy, but which at all events simulates a vital principle resembling heat, seeking to escape into space, where it cools. Thus the stars, having blazed until their vital principle is absorbed in space, sink into ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything except ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... particular account of Browning's family, which was probably a typical middle-class family, which is to say that they were, like many thousands of their kind, lovers of the normal—a very good reason why later Browning should have acquired a love for the grotesque, which many people quite wrongly define as the abnormal. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... paleography &c. (philology) 560; oneirology acception[obs3], acceptation, acceptance; light, reading, lection, construction, version. equivalent, equivalent meaning &c. 516; synonym; paraphrase, metaphrase[obs3]; convertible terms, apposition; dictionary &c. 562; polyglot. V. interpret, explain, define, construe, translate, render; do into, turn into; transfuse the sense of. find out &c. 480a the meaning &c. 516 of; read; spell out, make out; decipher, unravel, disentangle; find the key of, enucleate, resolve, solve; read between the lines. account for; find the cause, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... feel, even in winter in Montreal, when you had skating-rinks, toboggan-slides, snow-shoe meets, and sleigh-rides to keep you amused, that it was all growing tiresome and very stale? Haven't you felt that you wanted something—something you hadn't got and couldn't define—though you might recognize it when ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... the vulgar persecution, was not able to get rid of the principles upon which the creed was based.[138] Sir Edward Coke, his contemporary, the most acute lawyer of the age, or (as it is said) of any time, ventured even to define the devil's agents in witchcraft. Sir Thomas Browne (author of 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica' or 'Vulgar Errors!'), a physician and writer of considerable merit, and Sir Matthew Hale, in 1664, proved their faith, the one by his solemn testimony in open ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... am, of course, much pleased and gratified that you like my article. I wrote it chiefly because I thought there was something a little fresh still to say on the subject, and also because I wished to define precisely my present position, which people continually misunderstand. The main part of the article forms part of a chapter of a book I have now almost finished on my favourite subject of "Geographical Distribution." ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... that await us in the next century. It is our great good fortune that time and chance have put us not only at the edge of a new century, in a new millennium, but on the edge of a bright new prospect in human affairs—a moment that will define our course, and our character, for decades to come. We must keep our old democracy forever young. Guided by the ancient vision of a promised land, let us set our sights upon a ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... eat, drink, sleep, and do all kinds of works for the nourishment of the body or for the common welfare, and whether they believe that God takes pleasure in them because of such works, you will find that they say, "No"; and they define good works so narrowly that they are made to consist only of praying in church, fasting, and almsgiving. Other works they consider to be in vain, and think that God cares nothing for them. So through their damnable unbelief they curtail and lessen the service of God, Who is served by all things ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it, we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the center of interest, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... define service before one could dispute that," Carr returned casually. "What I mean is that the people who send you here have not the slightest conception of what they send you to. When you get here you find yourself rather at sea. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the Standard; and in 1174 it defeated and captured William the Lion at Alnwick. So valuable, indeed, did it prove to be that Henry II resolved to place it upon a permanent footing and clearly to define its position. With that view he issued in 1181 his ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... Phoenicians. Arim in the middle, with the pillars of Hercules and Alexander, and the north and south poles at equal distance from it—the centre and the four corners of the world as neatly fixed as geometry could define—this was the map, first of the Arabs, and then ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... the things which he had most admired, his thought, his remembrance, his will, descended into his fingers, where—without his knowing how—they communicated to the clay that mysterious principle of life which the wisest man is unable to define. The humble works of Jean the potter had marvellous graces. In such a curve, in such a tint, he put some memory of youth, or of an opening blossom, or the very color of the weather, and of joy ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... is not wanted in the place where it is growing." "You would call groundsel a weed in the garden of a man who does not keep a canary, but not a weed in the garden of a man who does?" "I would." Socrates would burst out laughing at this, and say: "It seems to me that a weed is more difficult to define even than justice. I think we had better change the subject and talk about the immortality of the soul." The only part of the definition of a weed, indeed, that bears a moment's investigation is contained in the three ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... difficult to define love; all we can say is, that in the soul it is a desire to rule, in the mind it is a sympathy, and in the body it is a hidden and delicate wish to possess what we love—Plus ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... manner of his riding. Your California "vaquero" from the Coast Ranges is as unlike as possible to your Texas cowman, and both differ from the Wyoming or South Dakota article. I should be puzzled to define exactly the habitat of the "typical" cowboy. No matter where you go, you will find your individual acquaintance varying from the type in respect to ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... comprehensive to define this motive power of woman's nature is the feminine spirit. That spirit manifests itself most frequently in motherhood, but it is greater than maternity. Woman herself, all that she is, all that she has ever been, all that she may be, is but the ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... me, but significant, and I will use it)—the poetry of the future aims at the free expression of emotion, (which means far, far more than appears at first,) and to arouse and initiate, more than to define or finish. Like all modern tendencies, it has direct or indirect reference continually to the reader, to you or me, to the central identity of everything, the mighty Ego. (Byron's was a vehement dash, with plenty of impatient democracy, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... establishment of facts, both in national undertakings like the Domesday Book and very probably in local cases arising in the courts. We know also that he desired to leave the old laws undisturbed so far as possible, and the year 1070 is one in which an effort to define and settle the future legal code of the state would naturally fall. But the story must be rejected as unhistorical. An event of such importance as this inquisition must have been, if it took place, ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... whose character is A prince whose character is thus marked by every act thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free. free people. Future ages will scarcely believe that the hardiness of one man adventured, within ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... you, if you don't know," she said, almost reproachfully. "Many words are supposed to define it—love and sympathy are those in commonest use, but I am not even sure that they are the right ones, and so few people really know what ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... June does not define it, nor September. It has no synonym, for there is nothing like it. I am glad that I have lived to see hedges of heliotrope, of geraniums and calla-lilies. I remember, in contrast, solitary calla plants that I have nursed ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... persecuting faction, with a relation of some sort of theological hostility to others, but without any sort of ascertained tenets of its own upon the ground of which it persecutes other men: for the patrons of this Protestant ascendency neither do nor can, by anything positive, define or describe what they mean by the word Protestant. It is defined, as Cowley defines wit, not by what it is, but by what it is not. It is not the Christian religion as professed in the churches holding communion with Rome, the majority of Christians: that is all which, in the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of its vast palaces and public buildings, its belt of turreted walls and gardens with their green lawns and shade-giving trees; but stranger still was the city itself, with its thousands of coloured cupolas, turrets, domes, spires, roofs, and walls. To define this strangeness more clearly, there were domes of bright-blue, with golden stars and golden chains hanging from the golden crosses which surmounted them. There were some domes of size so vast that they looked like huge mountains of gold; some were of dark blue, and others ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... far as he himself admitted, the one consolation that his life contained. As for his feeling toward Will Fletcher as an individual, it was the outcome of so curious a mixture of attraction and repulsion that he had long ceased from any attempt to define it as pure emotion. For the last four years the boy had been, as Tom Spade put it, "the very shadow on the man's footsteps," and yet at the end of that time it was almost impossible for Christopher to acknowledge either his ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... is something highly poetical about a forge I am not singular in this opinion: various individuals have assured me that they can never pass by one, even in the midst of a crowded town, without experiencing sensations which they can scarcely define, but which are highly pleasurable. I have a decided penchant for forges, especially rural ones, placed in some quaint, quiet spot—a dingle for example, which is a poetical place, or at a meeting of four roads, which is still more so, for how many a superstition—and superstition is the soul of ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... demands—like the word "jingo"—preciseness of definition; and this, in general acceptance, it has not yet attained. It remains, therefore, somewhat vague, and so occasions misunderstandings between men whose opinions perhaps do not materially differ. The writer will not attempt to define, but a brief explanation of the term and its origin may not be amiss. It was first used, in 1690, by the British admiral Lord Torrington, when defending his course in declining to engage decisively, with an inferior force, a French ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... him. He had a large nodding acquaintance. It will be remembered that he claimed for his hands a cleanliness which their appearance seemed to define as purely moral. In his way he was a proud man, and stand-offish at that. He looked slowly round, and found no other face to recognize. But he looked a second time at a small, dark man with gentle eyes, whose individuality must have had something magnetic in it. Captain Cable was accustomed ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... earth, and more afraid, then hurt, are forced to abandon their enterprise, and seeke shelter of the next house they could get into. Whether this proceeded from a naturall accident, or a working of the diuell, I will not vndertake to define. It may bee, God giueth him such power ouer those, who begin a matter, vpon couetousnesse to gaine by extraordinarie meanes, and prosecute it with a wrong, in entring and breaking another mans land, without his leaue, and direct the end thereof, to the princes defrauding, ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... majority were still wandering in search of this provisional refuge. It was by this wandering population that I had been invaded when I lay down at the foot of the bank. It was impossible that all these larvae, the tale of whose alarming thousands I would not venture to define, should form one family and recognize a common mother; despite what Newport has told us of the Oil-beetles' astonishing fecundity, I could not believe this, ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... chooses to write novels, and bring grave charges against others by insinuation and innuendo, in order to evade the responsibility of defining her position clearly and openly, she will not, I hope, take offense if I define it ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... I then proceeded to define the difference between the only two parties with definite principles. The real contest was, not between Lincoln and Douglas, or between Cox and me, but between Breckenridge and Lincoln, between free institutions and slave institutions, between union and disunion. I refer to this ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... laughing resignation; it was too bad, he said, to talk of him to his face so dismally. Bessie Fairfax was looking at him, her eyebrows raised, and fancying she saw a change; he was certainly not so brown as he used to be, nor so buoyant, nor so animated. But it would have perplexed her to define what the change she fancied was. Conscious of her observation, Harry dissembled a minute, then pushed back his chair, and invited her to come away to the old sitting-room, where the evening sun shone. No one offered to follow them; they ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... of the cup, the only one to be seen, the seer would predict that a trifling vexation or a tiresome little delay must be expected; but not for the present, as it is at the bottom of the cup. An alphabetical list of symbols is given later on, so it is not necessary to define them here. The various points of a more general character, however, must be studied before it is possible ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... also—which is a new phase of activity—to be able to move it.... The chair is hard or soft; the seat is smooth; the corner is pointed; the edge is sharp." The business of the adult, Froebel goes on to say, is to supply these names, "not primarily to develop the child's power of speech," but "to define his sense impressions." ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... several others, with a similar result. Everyone loved to listen to him, for his graceful diction was like music in their ears, but when called upon to express their own opinions they were all, with a few exceptions, literally tongue-tied. Two or three of the more thoughtful ones made an attempt to define Deity, but their definitions, for the most part, were the ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... or is a revelation of truth, or is an appeal to sensibilities, or is an imitation of Nature, or the realization of ideal excellence, it is difficult to settle and almost useless to inquire. "Metaphysics, mathematics, music, and philosophy have been called in to analyze, define, demonstrate, and generalize." [Footnote: Cleghorn, Ancient and Modern Art, vol. i. p. 67.] Great writers have written ingenious treatises, like Burke, Alison, and Stewart. Beauty, according to Plato, is the contemplation ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord |
