"Equivocal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Equivocal as the young girl knew her silence appeared, she was unable to utter the simplest polite evasion. Some unaccountable impulse kept her constrained and speechless. The stranger did not, however, wait ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... God, who fills the wide circle of heaven, is the object to whom they are addressed." Yet, at the same time, in the true spirit of a polytheist, he accuseth them of adoring Earth, Water, Fire, the Winds, and the Sun and Moon. But the Persians of every age have denied the charge, and explained the equivocal conduct, which might appear to give a color to it. The elements, and more particularly Fire, Light, and the Sun, whom they called Mithra, [1201] were the objects of their religious reverence, because they considered them ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... psychological, Semon proves that Hering's idea is more than an analogy, and that there is a fundamental identity in the mechanism of organic life. In order to avoid the terminology of psychology which tends to be equivocal, Semon employs some new terms to designate his new ideas, based on the fundamental conception of irritation in ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... turn from a recollection of the words to a consideration of the peculiarities of the style of Junius, I think it will be agreed that the most remarkable of all is that species of irony which consists in equivocal compliment. Walpole also excelled in this; and prided himself upon doing so. Are we not justified in saying, that of all who, in the eighteenth century, cast their thoughts on public occurrences into the form of letters, Junius ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... of Epilepsy. 27, On the Efficacy of Nitrate of Silver in the Treatment of Zona or Shingles. 28, On the Remedial Effects of Camphor in Acute and Chronic Rheumatism. 29, Examination of the Question, whether the Medical Use of Phosphorus internally, is useful, injurious, or equivocal. 30, Nitrous Acid and Opium in Dysentery, Cholera and Diarrhoea. 31, Tartar Emetic in Pneumonia Biliosa. 32, Bark of the Ampelopsis in Catarrhal Consumption. 33, Obstinate Vomiting cured with Extract of Marigold. 34, ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... drought, arms all nature against man, sets man against man, and finishes by causing him to expire in pain. Is this what you call preserving a universe? If we attempted to consider without prejudice the equivocal conduct of Providence relative to mankind and to all sentient beings, we should find that very far from resembling a tender and careful mother, it rather resembles those unnatural mothers who, forgetting the unfortunate fruits of their illicit amours, abandon their children ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... the lawyer sounded on. His eyes, turned toward her, had no equivocal look. He was a brother speaking to a younger sister. The tears fell down her cheeks, upon her folded hands. Her widely opened eyes seemed to look out ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... before the price of comfort and opulence is paid, one ought to be pretty sure it is real liberty which is purchased, and that she is to be purchased at no other price. I shall always, however, consider that liberty as very equivocal in her appearance, which has not wisdom and justice for her companions, and does not lead prosperity and plenty ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... dear man Luther had but told us here what he meant by the term, Gospel! That St. Paul had seen even St. Luke's, is but a conjecture, grounded on a conjectural interpretation of a single text, doubly equivocal; namely, that the Luke mentioned was the same with the Evangelist Luke; and that the 'evangelium' signified a book; the latter, of itself improbable, derives its probability from the undoubtedly very strong probability ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Here was another point, in regard to which they and the invading army must have felt sympathy with one another, and which must have materially altered their relative position, leading them to assume such an equivocal attitude, that it must have been difficult, even for themselves, to determine whether they were more the friends or the foes ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... various problematical rights of way, which, according to the town, were public, and, according to the Hall, had been private since the Conquest. It was true that the same path led also directly from the Squire's house, but it was not probable that the wearer of attire so equivocal had been visiting there. All things considered, Lenny had no doubt in his mind but that the stranger was a shopboy or 'prentice from the town of Thorndyke; and the notorious repute of that town, coupled with this presumption, made it probable that Lenny now saw before him one of the midnight ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... gentleman in a fur tippet. He sat with his legs crossed and his hands folded, and a cup of spiced wine stood by his elbow on a bracket on the wall. His countenance had a strong masculine cast; not properly human, but such as we see in the bull, the goat, or the domestic boar; something equivocal and wheedling, something greedy, brutal and dangerous. The upper lip was inordinately full, as though swollen by a blow or a toothache; and the smile, the peaked eyebrows, and the small, strong eyes were quaintly and almost comically evil in expression. Beautiful white hair ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... of a very old friend?" said he, with another smile, as that lady moved off to take a more particular view of what she had come to see. "To judge by the specimen before me, I should consider it very equivocal." ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... still more unwilling to enter into that correspondence under anything like an equivocal description, which to many, unacquainted with our usages, might make the address in which I joined appear as the act of persons in some sort of corporate capacity, acknowledged by the laws of this kingdom, and authorized to speak the sense of some ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... finishing Colombe's Birthday.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. A Soul's Tragedy exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial savoir faire in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the Wild Duck. Chiappino is Browning's ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... question of equivocal generation, I have been compelled, more conspicuously and frequently than I could wish, during the last ten years, to enunciate exactly the same views as those put forward by Professor Virchow; so that, to my mind, at any rate, the denial that any ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... there is never a Grant or Glenelg who crossed the Tay and Tweed to exchange high-born Highland poverty for substantial Lowland wealth, who would dare to insult Upper Canada with the official presence, as its ruler, of such an equivocal character as this Mr. What-do-they-call-him—Francis Bond Head." Ever and anon the Tory press retorted on him in a spirit by no means calculated to soften the asperity of his heart. The most contemptuous epithets were freely bestowed ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... through the narrow channels among the islands. The skipper got up a nice dinner of beefsteak, green corn, and tomatoes, which Mr. Hines declared was equal to the table at the Bay View; and this was no equivocal compliment. ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... Hippolytus as a trimmer prepared, as occasion served, to conciliate different parties in the Church by appearing to adopt their views. Sometimes he sided with Hippolytus, and sometimes with those opposed to him; hence it is that the theology taught in these letters is of a very equivocal character. Dr. Lightfoot has seized upon this fact as a reason that they are never quoted by Irenaeus. "The language approaching dangerously near to heresy might," says he, "have led him to avoid directly quoting the doctrinal teaching." [76:1] A much better reason was that he ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... boulevard, near the deserted wall skirting the Rue De la Barriere-des-Gobelins, Jondrette, wrapped in the "philanthropist's" great-coat, engaged in conversation with one of those men of disquieting aspect who have been dubbed by common consent, prowlers of the barriers; people of equivocal face, of suspicious monologues, who present the air of having evil minds, and who generally sleep in the daytime, which suggests the supposition that they ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... that the translator felt free to interchange words indiscriminately. Of his treatment of the original Purvey writes: "But in translating of words equivocal, that is, that hath many significations under one letter, may lightly be peril, for Austin saith in the 2nd. book of Christian Teaching, that if equivocal words be not translated into the sense, either understanding, of the author, it is error; as in that place of the Psalm, the ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... stood in the Rue des Augustines, diagonally opposite the historic pile once occupied by Henri II and Diane de Poitiers, the beautiful and fascinating Duchesse de Valentinois of equivocal yet enduring fame. It was constructed in the severe beauty of Roman straight lines, and the stains of nearly two centuries had discolored the blue-veined Italian marble. A high wall inclosed it, and on the top of this wall ran a miniature cheval-de-frise of iron. Nighttime or daytime, in mean ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... of novelty had worn off, they bored one intensely—those large wines and suppers where, night by night, a score of Nephelegeretae sat shrouded in smoke, chanting the same equivocal ditties, drinking the same fiery liquors miscalled the juice of the grape, villainous enough to make the patriarch that planted the vine stir remorsefully in his grave under Ararat—each man all the while talking "shop," a l'outrance. The skeleton of ennui sat at ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... the fire, luxuriously enjoying its grateful warmth, and the ease and comfort of his slippers and red nightcap, which he had drawn well down over his ears, he was suddenly startled by a sharp, loud rap at the door. Mrs. Callender hastened to open it, when two papers were thrust into her hands by an equivocal-looking personage, who, without saying a word, wheeled round on his heel the instant he had placed the mysterious documents in ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... are direct and positive. They admit of no equivocal construction. That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true, or the Scripture is false. And a man hath good reason to believe that there is as much of kingcraft as priestcraft ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... I sought out my comrades, to whom I told the story of my escape. Their response was a hearty laugh, and certain equivocal words which might imply doubt—not as to my fright, for that was too plain—but concerning the identity of the 'grizzly.' I observed, however, that, as they rowed nearer to the scene of my disaster, their display of levity lessened; and as we came ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... LANGUAGE—no, LANG!—who the classics is pat in, Suggests to our writers, as test of their "style," Just to turn their equivocal prose into Latin, As DRYDEN did. Truly the plan makes one smile! Reviewers find Novelists' nonsense much weary 'em. Writers of twaddle Take DRYDEN a model— Turn your books into some great "dead language"—and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 20, 1891 • Various
... (sayes Eleutherius) I have, in the reading of Paracelsus and other Chymical Authors, been troubled to find, that such hard Words and Equivocal Expressions, as You justly complain of, do even when they treat of Principles, seem to be studiously affected by those Writers; whether to make themselves to be admir'd by their Readers, and their Art appear more Venerable ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... observation may be set aside; first, because the so-called facts are in their own nature equivocal; secondly, because they stand on insufficient authority; thirdly, because they are not sufficiently numerous. But, in this case, the disease is one of striking and well-marked character; the witnesses are experts, interested in denying and disbelieving the facts; the number of consecutive cases ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... example to experiments that are less striking and more equivocal; you see fevers, ills of all kinds which are cured, without it being well proved if it be nature or the doctor who has cured them; you see diseases of which the result cannot be guessed; twenty doctors are deceived; the one that has the most intelligence, ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... from real feelings of delicacy, even to Mrs. Huntington, whom he felt he could trust, partly because he had reason to know that the mother had favored the suit of his brother whom Helen had rejected in India, and partly because at present of his own equivocal situation. But to Helen herself he felt that he might, indeed that he must reveal the important truth, and that very evening as they sat together in one of the spacious apartments of the mission house, he took her hand within his own, and asked her if he might confide in her as he would ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... cried the upright man; and this exclamation, however equivocal it may sound, was intended, on his part, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... aberration, eccentricity, and "devil-may-careism" as prime badges of genius, and he proceeded accordingly to astonish the natives, many of whom, in their turn, set themselves to copy his faults. But when we subtract some half-dozen pieces, either coarse in language or equivocal in purpose, the influence of his poetry may be considered good. (We of course say nothing here of the volume called the "Merry Muses," still extant to disgrace his memory.) It is doubtful if his ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Joseph Taylor, instructed by SHAKSPEARE to play the character! What a delightful association—to see Hamlet represented in the true vein in which the sublime author conceived it! Kynaston's celebrity was of a more equivocal description. He played Juliet to Betterton's Romeo, and was the Siddons of his day; for women did not generally appear on the stage till after the Restoration. The anecdote of Charles II. waiting ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... persons among our "fellow-creatures," with express reference to their different duties and different qualifications for performing them? The duties of a father are not the same as those of a son; is the word therefore wholly equivocal when we speak of one person as a good father, and another as a good son? Nay, when we speak generally of a man as good, has not the epithet a tacit reference to human nature and human duties? ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... by reading occasionally a volume to a brother, she may bind him to the fireside. Does he desire to pass the evening abroad? Better join him, even at some cost of personal ease, or of taste, than leave him exposed to seek places of equivocal character. Be his confidant, his adviser, constant in demonstrations of kindness. Perhaps he is aiding your progress in the walks of intellect. How can you so well requite his care, as by a steady emanation of moral and spiritual ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... flesh.' They sometimes succeed so well, that cases are known of boys of fifteen or so resorting to self-mutilation, to save themselves from the temptations of early manhood. These apostles of purity do not always scruple to have recourse to violence or deceit. They ensnare their victims by equivocal forms of speech, and having thus obtained their consent virtually upon false pretences, they reveal to the confiding dupes the real meaning of the engagement they have entered into only at the last moment, when it is too late for them to escape the murderous knife. One evening, two ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... infusion will be destroyed by its pernicious qualities. Nothing is more prejudicial to the health, or the intellectual faculties of mankind, than adulterated liquors. Articles which in their purest state are of an equivocal character, and never to be trusted without caution, are thus converted into decided poisons.—Another way of making wormwood ale. Take a quantity of the herb, according to the intended strength of the liquor, and infuse it for ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... critics of life, is just the difference between those who have refused to let themselves be thus carried away, on the stream of their fatality, and those who have not refused. That is why in all the really arresting writers and artists there is something equivocal and disturbing when ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... brought back to Paris by an insolent and ferocious crowd, and looked back with gratitude to the equivocal civilities of Sauce. The journey occupied four days, during which the queen's hair turned grey. Three deputies, sent by the Assembly, met the dolorous procession half way, and took charge of the royal family. The king at once assured them that he had intended to remain at Montmedy, ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... her for the last ten minutes, forgot the depressing certainty that he would have a great deal more that he wanted to say in the immediate future, over and above the thirty-five minutes or so of discourse that she would contract to listen to next Sunday. And Cicely listened with the wistful equivocal triumph of one whose goose has turned out to be a swan and who realises with secret concern that she has only planned the role ...
— When William Came • Saki
... and pressed forward at once. He led the way along a dark passage and down a flight of stone steps into a cellar fitted up as a drinking room. There was another low-toned consultation before we were admitted. I surmised that Balmerino stood sponsor for me, and though I was a little disturbed at my equivocal position, yet I was strangely glad to be where I was. For here was a promise of adventure to stimulate a jaded appetite. I assured myself that at least I ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... love-letter was brought to him. It purported to come from the lady at whom he had flung the comfits;[27] offered him her heart, and begged an interview with him. The bearer was a masked woman, who owned to an equivocal position in Count Guido's household. Caponsacchi saw through the trick, declined the proposed interview on the ground of his priesthood, and completed his answer with an allusion to the husband, which would punish him in the probable case of its passing directly into his hands. The next day the ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... had indeed painted Miss Saunt more than once and that if he were interested in my work I should be happy to show him what I had done. Mr. Geoffrey Dawling, the person thus introduced to me, stumbled into my room with awkward movements and equivocal sounds—a long, lean, confused, confusing young man, with a bad complexion and large, protrusive teeth. He bore in its most indelible pressure the postmark, as it were, of Oxford, and as soon as he opened his mouth I perceived, in addition to a remarkable revelation of gums, that the text of the ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... (1) vocal, vocation, advocate, irrevocable, vociferous, provoke, revoke, evoke, convoke; (2) vocable, vocabulary, avocation, equivocal, invoke, avouch, vouchsafe. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... occasionally find expression in its pages, and he even introduces himself under the imperfect anagram of Philisides, and shadows forth his friendship with the French humanist Languet. More than this it would be rash to assert, and Greville did his friend an equivocal service when he sought to find a deep philosophy underlying the rather formal characters of the romance[148]. These characters, as we have seen, are for the most part essentially courtly; the pastoral guise ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... will be tainted by immorality throughout. Men will play the same game in their private affairs, which they have learned to play in public matters. The guile, the crafty vigilance, the dishonest advantage, the cunning sharpness;—the tricks and traps and sly evasions; the equivocal promises, and unequivocal neglect of them, which characterize political action, will equally characterize private action. The mind has no kitchen to do its dirty work in, while the parlor remains clean. Dishonesty is an atmosphere; if it comes into one apartment, it penetrates into ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... grocer's daughter would think she made a misalliance by marrying a painter, and where a literary man (in spite of all we can say against it) ranks below that class of gentry composed of the apothecary, the attorney, the wine-merchant, whose positions, in country towns at least, are so equivocal. As, for instance, my friend the Rev. James Asterisk, who has an undeniable pedigree, a paternal estate, and a living to boot, once dined in Warwickshire, in company with several squires and parsons of that enlightened county. Asterisk, as usual, made himself extraordinarily agreeable at dinner, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... whom this equivocal compliment was paid, was now coming down from the ladder amid the cheers of the spectators, when a new admirer was added to them in the person of a man who, mounted on a fine English horse, seemed inclined to ride ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... which consisted mainly of Hindustanis enlisted by English officers, over whom he could not be expected to exercise much control, Lord Canning gave him the benefit of the doubt, and was willing to attribute his equivocal behaviour to want of ability and timidity, rather than to disloyalty, and therefore allowed him to ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... the better suited to describe the relation, which is certainly most equivocal!" Claudia, in spite of all her resolutions, could not for the life of her ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... resonant, canorous, audible, piercing; pure, unmixed, unadulterated, unalloyed; in full, net; passable, unimpeded, unobstructed, open; acquitted; unburdened, exempt; clarified. Antonyms: opaque, obscure, indecipherable, ambiguous, equivocal, vague, cryptic, abstruse, inexplicable, roily, turbid, enigmatical, inexplicit, inaudible, adulterated, cloudy, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Never did any one avow more loftily this contempt for the "world," which is the essential condition of great things and of great originality. He pardoned a rich man, but only when the rich man, in consequence of some prejudice, was disliked by society.[1] He greatly preferred men of equivocal life and of small consideration in the eyes of the orthodox leaders. "The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came unto you and ye believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him."[2] We can understand ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... death about vigorously. Life indeed was loved, and the beauty and pathos of it were felt exquisitely; but its beauty and pathos lay in the divineness of its model and in its own fragility. No one paid it the equivocal compliment of thinking it a substance or a material force. Nobility was not then impossible in sentiment, because there were ideals in life higher and more indestructible than life itself, which life might illustrate and to which ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... countenancing the cigar so much as their neighbors the Belgians, nor the meerschaum so largely as their German neighbors on the Rhine frontier. A notable bit of sharp practice is on record in connexion with the pipe-smokers of Holland—a dodge only to be justified on the equivocal maxim that all is fair in trade provided it just keeps within the margin we need not speak. A pipe manufactory was established in Flanders about the middle ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... as we have seen, sufficiently rash and daring when weapons were in question. But he had also the pride of a decent burgher, and was unwilling to place himself in what might be thought equivocal circumstances by the sober part of his ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... coming along, turn out of the way for him, and you'll save your new clothes." Without another glance at the discomfited beau, who was brushing his plaid pantaloons with his pocket-handkerchief, and muttering some equivocal language that would not do here, he went on his way to see the ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... Stanislas happened to come in just as I told the boy to get up again. A woman, under any circumstances, has claims which courtesy prescribes to a gentleman; but in contempt of these, Stanislas has been saying that he came unexpectedly and found us in an equivocal position. I was treating the boy as he deserved. If the young scatterbrain knew of the scandal caused by his folly, he would go, I am convinced, to insult Stanislas, and compel him to fight. That would ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... signs himself 'A Wiltshire Man,' and claims me for a countryman upon the strength of an equivocal phrase in my 'Christ's Hospital,' a more mannerly reply is due. Passing over the Genoese fable, which Bell makes such a ring about, he nicely detects a more subtle discrepancy, which Bell was too ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... satisfaction to find herself included among Madame Adelschein's intimates. It embarrassed her to feel that she was expected to be "queer" and "different," to respond to pass-words and talk in innuendo, to associate with the equivocal and the subterranean and affect to despise the ingenuous daylight joys which really satisfied her soul. But the business shrewdness which was never quite dormant in her suggested that this was not the moment for ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... attack and defence proceed with equal indifference, where the most nonchalant display of grace is answered with the same nonchalance; while the vivacity of the Polka, charming, we confess, may easily become equivocal; while Fandangos, Tarantulas and Minuets, are merely little love-dramas, only interesting to those who execute them, in which the cavalier has nothing to do but to display his partner, and the spectators have ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... possess some portion of Central America. Moreover, the agreement not to fortify any part of that region was not reciprocal, so long as Great Britain held Jamaica and commanded the entrance to the canal. He had always regarded the terms of the British protectorate over the Mosquito coast as equivocal; but the insuperable objection to the treaty was the European partnership to which the United States was pledged. The two parties not only contracted to extend their protection to any other practicable communications across the isthmus, ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... say Count Hertling's answer is very undecided and most confusing, full of equivocal sentences, and it is difficult to say what it aims at. It certainly is written in a very different tone from that of Count Czernin's speech and obviously with a very different ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... classes of people. And every week in the social season that drawing-room in the rue de Bagneux was the scene of a heterogeneous gathering of under sacristans, cafe poets, journalists, actresses, partisans of the cause of Naundorff,[1] and dabblers in equivocal sciences. ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... in view of my house to-day for two or three hours in the course of your business, so do please call and see me. I am sadly disappointed that you have not come before, for can I help anxiety about my own equivocal relation to you?—especially now my aunt's fortune has brought me more prominently before society? Your daughter's presence here may be the cause of your neglect; and I have therefore sent her away for the morning. Say ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... my business frankly. I said I heard the house was considered to be haunted, that I had a strong desire to examine a house with so equivocal a reputation; that I should be greatly obliged if he would allow me to hire it, though only for a night. I was willing to pay for that privilege whatever he might be inclined to ask. "Sir," said ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Philippe's. The exhausted old man and the Rabouilleuse were now plunged by their nephew into the excessive dissipations of the dangerous and restless society of actresses, journalists, artists, and the equivocal women among whom Philippe had already wasted his youth; where old Rouget found excitements that soon after killed him. Instigated by Giroudeau, Lolotte, one of the handsomest of the Opera ballet-girls, ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... doctor, softened perceptibly under this; she was so young and innocent-looking, this girlish little English mademoiselle. Monsieur up-stairs must be a lucky man to have won her tender young heart so utterly. Strange and equivocal a thing as the pretty child (she seemed a child to him) was doing, he never for an instant doubted the ignorant faith and love that shone in the depths of her beautiful agonized eyes. He bowed to her as deferentially as to a sultana, when ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... spirituelle, very much sought after and the idol of brilliant companions, at the age of twenty-six she abandoned the world to devote herself to God. At thirty-six years of age she died of sorrow and remorse for having signed an equivocal formulary of Pope Alexander VI., "through pure deference to the authority of her superiors." The papal decision concerning Jansenius's book, already mentioned, was drawn up in a formula "turned with some skill, and in such a way that subscription did not bind the conscience; however, the ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... to pursue a course so equivocal without arousing suspicion. In after years many who had been committed to it became ashamed of their actions, and loudly proclaimed that they had really been devoted to the Union; to which it was sufficient to answer that if this had been the case, and if they ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... having invested his entire capital in the construction and equipment of a factory, will be quite likely, when B., C., and D. erect factories in his immediate neighborhood, to hold his peace when sundry varieties of swill milk are offered at his door, instead of speaking out an equivocal protest against the insult thus offered to his professional pride and sense ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... who see good in the natural man admit his native tendency to err. Sir Thomas Browne asserts that "human nature knows naturally what is good but naturally pursues what is evil." The Earl of Clarendon gives the equivocal explanation that "if we did not take great pains to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us." Addison, from the detached position of an observer and critic of manners and men, concludes that "as man is a creature made ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... vitals of the church. The sanctity of religion is thrown, like a mantle, over the horrid system. Under its auspices, robbery and oppression have become popular and flourishing. The press, too, by its profound silence, or selfish neutrality, or equivocal course, or active partizanship, is enlisted in the cause of tyranny—the mighty press, which has power, if exerted aright, to break every fetter, and emancipate the land. If this state of things be not speedily reversed, 'we be all dead men.' Unless the pulpit lift up the voice ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... Masinissa, and not contented with the humiliation of their old rival, aimed at her absolute ruin, though she had broken no treaties. The Carthaginians, broken-hearted, sent embassy after embassy, imploring the Senate to preserve peace, to whom the senators gave equivocal answers. The situation of Carthage was hopeless and miserable—stripped by Masinissa of the rich towns of Emporia, and on the eve of another conflict with ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... contains immortal and mortal elements; the intelligence or reason, and sensuality. The immortality of the soul is also proved by the memory. The subsequent union of life and matter in the production of the universe is the work of an intermediate, equivocal being, the demiurgos. Thus Plato opposes the eternity of the intelligence to Ionic materialism, and the eternity of matter to the ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... mysterious man you are.' 'Ay, ay!' observes Mr. Fairfax, 'Indeed!' Now Mr. Fairfax says this ay, ay, and indeed, which are slight words enough in themselves, with so very unfathomable an air, and accompanies them with such a very equivocal smile, that ma and the young ladies are more than ever convinced that he means an immensity, and so tell him he is a very dangerous man, and seems to be always thinking ill of somebody, which is precisely the sort ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... younger days, and had never fully cured himself of that passion, which now broke out afresh, like a fire which has only slumbered for a time. He spent night after night at his club, playing at baccarat, and could be met in the betting ring at every race meeting. Then, too, he glided into equivocal society and appeared at home only at intervals to vent his irritation and spite and jealousy upon ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... enter into is commonly known by the name of the Story of the Three Seals. It is to be found in the Appendix, No. 10, to the First Report of the state and condition of the East India Company, made in 1773. The word Report, my Lords, is sometimes a little equivocal, and may signify sometimes, not what is made known, but what remains in obscurity: the detail and evidence of many facts referred to in the Report being usually thrown into the Appendix. Many people, and I among the rest, (I take shame to myself for it,) may not have fully examined ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... things, and occasionally "showed her head" (a term in the lexicon of such characters) in the Bois, where the fashionable young men of the day began to remark her. In fact, before long Malaga was very much talked about in the questionable world of equivocal women, who presently attacked her good fortune by calumnies. They said she was a somnambulist, and the Pole was a magnetizer who was using her to discover the philosopher's stone. Some even more envenomed scandals drove her to a curiosity that was greater ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... the which much delighted the king. She was as gay as a lark, always laughing and singing, and never made anyone miserable, which is the characteristic of women of this open and free nature, who have always an occupation—an equivocal one if you like. The king often went with the hail-fellows his friends to the lady's house, and in order not to be seen always went at night-time, and without his suite. But being always distrustful, and fearing ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... There is evidently something equivocal in all this; and I pointed this out when outlining and discussing the different theories of matter. It consists in taking from among the whole body of sensations certain of them which are considered to be special, and which are then ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... Zametoff saw what I had by me, and perhaps he can say whether I was in my right senses yesterday or whether I was delirious? Perhaps he will judge as to our quarrel." Nothing would have pleased him better than there and then to have strangled that gentleman, whose taciturnity and equivocal ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... two to three million votes, and which expected to draw heavily from the discontented ranks of the old-line organizations, was not viewed with absolute equanimity by the campaign managers of Cleveland and of Harrison. Some little evidence of the perturbation appeared in the equivocal attitude of both the old parties with respect to the silver question. Said the Democratic platform: "We hold to the use of both gold and silver as the standard money of the country, and to the coinage of both gold and silver without discrimination against either metal or charge ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... landed on the sands of Massachusetts Bay. The illusion was gone,—the ignis-fatuus of adventure, the dream of wealth. The rugged wilderness offered only a stern and hard-won independence. In their own hearts, not in the promptings of a great leader or the patronage of an equivocal government, their enterprise found its birth and its achievement. They were of the boldest, the most earnest of their sect. There were such among the French disciples of Calvin; but no Mayflower ever sailed from a port of France. Coligny's colonists were of a different ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... native cavalry, in the brilliant tunics and feathered coronals, already described, must have completed the diversity of the variegated cortege. Had poor Hammond been mounted among them, his costume would have been as equivocal as his new complexion, for he had attired himself in the scarlet coat of a British officer of rank, with several blazing stars of glass jewels, surmounted by a white Panama hat, in which clustered an airy profusion of ladies' ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... more agreeable. That is to say, she was CHATTY; and to be chatty is no slight recommendation at sea. She became EXCESSIVELY intimate with most of the ladies; and, to my profound astonishment, evinced no equivocal disposition to coquet with the men. She amused us all very much. I say "amused"—and scarcely know how to explain myself. The truth is, I soon found that Mrs. W. was far oftener laughed AT than WITH. The gentlemen said little about her; but the ladies, in a little while, pronounced her "a ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... Caqueta coming from the south-east, and that the Rio Negro issued immediately from it. (* See the classical memoir of this great geographer in the Journal des Savans, March 1750 page 184. "One fact," says D'Anville, "which cannot be considered as equivocal, after the proofs with which we have been recently furnished, is the communication of the Rio Negro with the Orinoco; but we must not hesitate to admit, that we are not yet sufficiently informed of the manner in which ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... will unveil his youthful beauty, and St. George will display beneath his armour the muscular wealth of a robust virility; apostles, confessors, doctors, and God the Father himself will appear as ordinary beings like you and me; the angels will affect an equivocal, ambiguous, mysterious beauty which will trouble hearts. What desire for heaven will these representations impart? None; but from them you will learn to take pleasure in the forms of terrestrial life. Where will painters stop in their indiscreet inquiries? They will stop nowhere. They ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... night, and awoke to the decision that she would not be so foolishly unhappy any more. She would shut her eyes to the haunting horrors, and forget. Theo had forbidden her to make herself too miserable. Why should she not obey him? And she proceeded to do so in her own equivocal fashion. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... the declaration of war is said to have a retroactive effect, and to render it liable to be considered as the property of enemies taken in time of war. The property is seized provisionally—an act hostile enough in the mere execution, but equivocal as to its effects, and liable to be varied by subsequent events, and by the conduct of the government, the property of whose subjects is so detained. Where the first seizure is equivocal, if the matter in dispute terminates in reconciliation, the seizure is converted into a mere civil ...
— The Laws Of War, Affecting Commerce And Shipping • H. Byerley Thomson
... The equivocal and ambiguous position in which the Unionists placed themselves in the course of this episode is a striking commentary on the impossibility of governing a country against its will. The Tories tried once again, in the historic phrase, to catch the Whigs bathing and steal ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... dancers. In these, as at the New Tivoli, lately opened at Chateau Rouge in the suburbs, a broad space made smooth for the purpose is left between tents, where the young grisettes of Paris, married and unmarried, or in that equivocal state which lies somewhere between, dance on Sunday evening ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... a better name for me," she said, casting Crossman a look whose intimacy made his blood run hot within him. "'The Black Dawn'—n'est-ce-pas? Though I have heard him call me in the night—by another name," with which equivocal statement she swung the axe into the curve of her arm, turned on her heel, and softly closed the door ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... discovery of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope the identity of this island as described or alluded to by writers is often equivocal, or to be inferred only from ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... experience that Miss Zaidie possessed a very proper spirit of her own, and that it was just as well not to push matters too far. She further recognised that the circumstances were extraordinary, not to say equivocal, and that she herself occupied a distinctly ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... mistress's" moods without complaint, and be willing to take buffets or caresses according to the temper of the hour. To Kirstie, thus situate and in the Indian summer of her heart, which was slow to submit to age, the gods sent this equivocal good thing of Archie's presence. She had known him in the cradle and paddled him when he misbehaved; and yet, as she had not so much as set eyes on him since he was eleven and had his last serious illness, the tall, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... drums from the mustered garrison outside—in the normal manner; and after a solemn warning from the commandant that vengeance would follow any act of aggression, the council broke up. To the forest leader's equivocal announcement that he would bring all of his wives and children in a few days to shake hands with their English fathers, ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... the King, as you'll have noticed. The King can't be in favor of anything till the Assembly or the Chancellor express an opinion. Prince Vandarvant favors it personally; as Prime Minister, he is reserving his opinion. We'll have to get the support of the Crown Loyalist Party before he can take an equivocal position." ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... Prussia, returning to Berlin, began to put his army on a war footing. The emigrants, triumphing in the engagement they had entered into, increased in numbers. The courts of Europe, with the exception of England, sent in equivocal adhesions to the courts of Berlin and Vienna. The noise of the declaration of Pilnitz burst forth, and died away in Paris in the midst of the fetes in honour of the ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... have been repeated and extensive, though not always judicious. It has also endeavoured to promote manufactures. It has gardens and museums fitter for scientific than practical instruction, admirable lecturers, a library most generously opened, a drawing-school of the largest purposes and of equivocal success, and various ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... Northern Persia the 15,000 troops which by that time Russia had assembled there,—at Kasvin, Resht, Enzeli, Tabriz, Khoy, and other points in the so-called Russian sphere. Mons. Poklewski-Koziell, the Russian Minister, had in fact given an equivocal sort of a promise to the effect that "if no fresh incidents arose," the Russian troops would be withdrawn when Persia accepted the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor |
