"Expressiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... speech emphasis to the formal patterns of verse, but also—and this is the more important point of view—as adjustments in the second degree, adjustments of the prose-and-verse harmonies to the fullest expressiveness of which language is capable. It is a common observation that emotional language tends of itself to become rhythmical; the emotional and highly wrought language of poetry requires the restraint of verse as ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... the Hull-House residents to the pre-Raphaelites recognized that they above all English speaking poets and painters reveal "the sense of the expressiveness of outward things" which is at once the glory and ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... altered the case entirely. He took pleasure in withdrawing his hasty remarks, and in assuring the House that he profoundly venerated PETERS, and that PETERS had two perfect eyes of unusual expressiveness. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... of us want most in the present grayness and din of the world is some one to play with, or if the word "play" is not quite the right word, some one with whom we can work with freedom and self-expressiveness and joy. Nine men out of ten one meets to-day talk with one as it were with their watches in their hands. The people who are rich one sees everywhere, being run away with by their motor-cars; and the people who are poor one sees ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... announced his arrival, and presently a broken-down, prematurely aged man appeared, with sunken cheeks, pale withered lips, and staring eyes starting from their sockets, and with but the ghost of their former brilliance and expressiveness. ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... very slightly, and there was a peculiar expressiveness in the action which betrayed his foreign education, but the cool silence with which he waited for the Provincial to speak again was essentially British. The Jesuit moved and glanced slowly beneath his lowered eyelids towards ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... anywhere in the work, though the moments are not infrequent when the utterance is more fluent than significant. The typical phrases which he chose to symbolize the persons and passions of the play are most of them deficient in plasticity, and nearly all of them lack that expressiveness which Wagner knew so well how to impress upon his melodic elements; the greater, therefore, was the surprise that Mr. Damrosch was able to weave them together in a fabric which moved steadily forward for more than an hour, and ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... before the fall of Richmond. The usher giving intimation that the President would see his audience at once, all were ushered into the inner room. "Abraham Lincoln's countenance bore that open, benignant outline expected; but what struck us especially was its cheerful, wide-awake expressiveness, never met with in the pictures of our beloved chief. The secret may have been that Secretary Stanton—middle-aged, well-built, stern-visaged man—had brought in his budget good news from Grant." After saluting his little circle of callers, they were ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... crossed her feet, which drove the finest ladies of the young generation to despair. Her voice had remained in her head during one-third of her lifetime; but she could not prevent a descent into the membranes of the nose, which lent to it a peculiar expressiveness. She still retained a hundred and fifty thousand livres of her great fortune, for Napoleon had generously returned her woods to her; so that personally and in the matter of possessions she was a ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... succeeded so well that in three or four hundred years they had changed the very face of Europe. They had covered the country with beautiful sumptuous buildings, expressing the genius of free unions of free men, unrivalled since for their beauty and expressiveness; and they bequeathed to the following generations all the arts, all the industries, of which our present civilization, with all its achievements and promises for the future, is only a further development. And when we now look to the forces which have produced these ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... which music is developed. It is demonstrable that these inflections and cadences are not accidental or arbitrary; but that they are determined by certain general principles of vital action; and that their expressiveness depends on this. Whence it follows that musical phrases and the melodies built of them, can be effective only when they are in harmony with these general principles. It is difficult here properly to illustrate this position. But perhaps it will suffice to instance ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... antiphonal singing of the loveliest and most faultless sort. Strangers journeyed from afar over rough country roads to hear this wonderful chorus, and were moved in the depths of their souls with the indescribable sweetness and loftiness of the music, and with the charm and expressiveness of its rendering by these ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... old and an almost obsolete word, but it is a word of great expressiveness and point. It bears on the face of it what it means. An outgate is just a gate out, a way of redemption, deliverance and escape. And her rare outgates does not imply that Lady Robertland's outgates were few, but that they were extraordinary, seldom matched, and above all expectation and praise. ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... faults in reading, which all teachers and parents deplore. The dramatic appeal of the stories will cause the child to lose himself in the character he is impersonating and read with a naturalness and expressiveness unknown to him before, and this improvement will be evident in all his oral reading, and even in ...
— Children's Classics in Dramatic Form - Book Two • Augusta Stevenson
... intellectuals, as much at home in English as their fellow Americans, but critical of the American emotions, and the American way of thinking, as only a brain formed by different traditions can be. Soon the Mediterranean races domiciled here will pass into literary expressiveness. It is as impossible that we should not have criticism of the national tradition expressed in our literature as that an international congress should agree upon questions of ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... even the mischievous little boy who belonged to Mrs. Dow. What was he doing here in Butternut Street? Matilda's steps slackened. The boy knew her, for he looked and then grinned, and then bringing a finger alongside of his nose in a peculiar and mysterious expressiveness, he repeated ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... Hauptmann. But it remains impersonal and never becomes direct comment or even argument as in Shaw. It is used not only to suggest the scene but, above all, its atmosphere, its mood. Through it Hauptmann shows his keen sense of the interaction of man and his world and of the high moral expressiveness of common things. To define the mood more clearly he indicates the hour and the weather. The action of Rose Bernd opens on a bright Sunday morning in May, that of Drayman Henschel during a bleak February dawn. The desperate souls in The Reconciliation meet on a snow-swept ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... us tower, then the picture must mean what it makes us do. That is, a combination of feathery fronds and horizontal lines of water, bathed in a gray- green silvery mist, can "mean" only a repose lightened by a grave yet cheerful spirit. In short, this theory of expressiveness cannot go beyond the mood or moral quality. In the sense of INFORMATION, the theory of Einfuhlung contributes nothing. Now, in this limited sense, we have indeed no reason to contradict it, but simply to point out that it holds only in this extremely limited sense. When we see broad ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... August last, thirty gentlemen resident who were in some way brought thither by the traffic in herring—among the number a young Russian, who, with his wife, sat at a little table apart, and kept jabbering their language with glib expressiveness. His name was Walk-off, and his object was the annexation of fish for Muscovite consumption. He had a flabby face and long, dark hair, which he publicly combed. She was small and pretty—doll-like, indeed—with jewels in her ears, which glittered and flashed ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... in the modulation and use of the voice. Indeed, gymnastic exercises are indispensable aids to proper training in reading, which, as an art of a high order, is immediately dependent upon position, habits of breathing, the consequent power of voice, and expressiveness of tone. I am fully satisfied that much more may be done in the early period of school life than is usually accomplished. In the district mixed schools the primary pupils receive but little attention, and they are not infrequently occupied from one to three years ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... on big gilt footstools at her feet; man after man joined the group that stood or sat around her; and in the centre of it, the brilliance of her black head, sharply seen against a background of rose brocade, the grace of her tall form, which was thin almost to emaciation, the expressiveness of her strange features, the animation of her gestures, the sweetness of her voice, drew the eyes and ears of half the ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... shade and a pleasing contrast of rectangular and curved lines, but by emphasizing the constructive divisions and elements of the building and the vertical support of the piers, it also contributes to the expressiveness and vigor of ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... Morgiana, a musician playing upon an instrument like a huge and stringless harp. But it is the happy tomb of Thi that lingers in your memory. In that tomb one sees proclaimed with a marvellous ingenuity and expressiveness the joy and the activity of life. Thi must have loved life; loved prayer and sacrifice, loved sport and war, loved feasting and gaiety, labor of the hands and of the head, loved the arts, the music of flute and harp, singing by the lingering and plaintive ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... are built up! How interesting is their working-out: and the orchestral score is far more than a mere accompaniment. As regards virtuose effect only Paganini's music compares with his, and Paganini, of course, did not play it as it is now played. In wealth of technical development, in true musical expressiveness Vieuxtemps is a master. A proof is the fact that his works have endured forty to fifty years, a long ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... an expressiveness which was a little disquieting; for it was on the cards that the duke might still find me out. And I was not a practiced shot—not at my fellow-men, I ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... children of Israel also.—The reason why the whoredom is here attributed to the face, and the adultery to the breasts, is well given by Manger: "We need not have any difficulty about seeing adultery attributed to the very face and breasts. There is a certain expressiveness in this conciseness which demonstrates, as it were before our eyes, that, in her whole deportment, the wife was given over to sensuality, and that her whole aim was only to excite to it, and to practise it. For the face is, with ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... sonatas and symphonies are of this wonderfully varied form of writing. How full it can be of expressiveness you know from the Songs without Words by Mendelssohn, and the Nocturnes of Chopin; how full of flickering humor you hear in the Scherzo of a Beethoven symphony; how full of deep solemnity and grief one feels in ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper
... dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized.[287] It is the rationalistic critic rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never can ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... quick enough in perceiving that here she was on her own ground entirely. Her fine shape, her well-rounded form, the regularity and yet expressiveness of her features, her light-brown braided hair, her long neck—she ran them all over in her mind, and calculated on their pictorial effects, and if she had only known that her beauty showed to more advantage when she was still than when she was in motion, because ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... here let me remark parenthetically, the habit of dealing in parentheses being one I especially dislike, only necessity compelling me thereto, and before I proceed further, that the word "confugium," which, both on account of its terse expressiveness, as well as its curiosa felicitas in the present application, I have chosen in order to define my den, has not, I hope, escaped the notice of the discriminating scholar. Moreover, I trust that I shall not incur the imputation of vanity if I take to myself some little ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... the capacity of so modulating their voices and throwing virtue into their tones that whoever hears them feels an indefinable thrill. So in writing: where sounds follow sounds in harmonious sequence, and the beat of the accent approaches regularity without falling into it, language takes on the expressiveness of music. It is well known that music expresses a range of feeling that lies beyond the powers of words: who can explain, for example, the thrill roused in him by a good brass band, or the indefinable melancholy and gloom created by the minor harmonies of one of the great funeral marches, or, ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... copyist; but these drawings, representing angels and allegorical people, were done by an influence which directed the artist's hand, he not knowing what his next touch would be, nor what the final result. The sketches certainly did show a high and fine expressiveness, if examined in a trustful mood. Dr. ——— also spoke of Mr. Harris, the American poet of spiritualism, as being the best poet of the day; and he produced his works in several volumes, and showed me songs, and paragraphs of longer poems, in support of his opinion. They seemed ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... out in marked contrast, in manner, physique, in everything. Where Fyfe was reserved almost to taciturnity, impassive-featured, save for that whimsical gleam that was never wholly absent from his keen blue eyes, Monohan talked with facile ease, with wonderful expressiveness of face. He was a finished product of courteous generations. Moreover, he had been everywhere, done a little of everything, acquired in his manner something of the versatility of his experience. Physically he was fit as any logger in the camps, a ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... another moment to one whom she could not but see before her in the scholars' seats. She did not know that men were looking at her, as she raised her clear warbling voice amid the silvery trebles of the choir, and uttered with all the expressiveness of genuine emotion those strains of poetry and passion which thrilled from the heart to the harp of the warrior-prophet and poet-king. And never did truer prayers come from a woman's lips than those which her heart offered as her ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... travels in Jutland, and his visit to Charles Dickens, and his intended journey through Spain, and his delight at meeting a traveler all the way from California, and whatever else came into his head—all in such mixed-up broken English that the meaning must have been utterly lost but for the wonderful expressiveness of his face and the striking oddity of his motions. It came to me mesmerically. He seemed like one who glowed all over with bright and happy thoughts, which permeated all around him with a new intelligence. His presence shed a light upon others ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... better effectuate, from their preference of the sublime, or serious stile; which, having so much less of quickness or rapidity of execution, than the comic dance, admits of more attention to the neat expressiveness of every motion, gesture, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... triple division of the factors in aesthetic experience: (A) the sensuous, (B) the perceptual or formal, (C) the imaginative, including all that is suggested by the aesthetic presentation, its meaning and expressiveness. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... as in an earlier day he had picked up piloting. He would never become a German scholar, but his vocabulary and use of picturesque phrases, particularly those that combined English and German words, were often really startling, not only for their humor, but for their expressiveness. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... thought, that he should be long without one, so varied were his interests and so many his gifts. He was a man of about thirty, with a thin ugly face (May would certainly have called him common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an intense expressiveness; but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... continued to watch, I should soon see his countenance light up under the recognition she could not fail to give him. And I was right; in another instant it did, and with a brightness there was no mistaking. But one feeling common to the human heart lends such warmth, such expressiveness to the features. How handsome it made him look, how distinguished, how everything I ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green |
