"Extemporaneous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... began. My address to the Almighty was prepared and part of the game is to make believe that it is purely extemporaneous. Every move, intonation and gesture is noted and has its bearing on the final result. I was saying to the ecclesiastical jury: "Look here, you dumb-heads, wake up; I'm the thing you need here!" Sermon ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... wonderful thing about Webster's reply is that his notes were confined to a sheet of letter paper. Afterwards Webster said that it had been carefully prepared, for while there is such a thing as extemporaneous delivery, there is "no extemporaneous acquisition." Not until he entered the Senate Chamber and saw the crowds did he feel the slightest trepidation. "A strange sensation came. My brain was free. All that ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... at me with expectant eyes as if they would say, "See, the General is about to speak; his words are sure to be full of wisdom." I endeavoured to display great coolness, and I do not think I failed very markedly as an extemporaneous orator. I was helped very considerably in the speechmaking part of the programme by my good friends the Rev. Neethling and Mr. W. Barter, of Lydenburg. I have not now the slightest idea of what I spoke about except that I congratulated the little ones and their mothers on being preserved from ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... was the widow of an English gentleman; she had recently come to America, and had but few acquaintances, and still fewer friends; she felt the loneliness of her situation, and admitted that she much desired a friend to counsel and protect her; the adroit adventuress concluded her extemporaneous romance by adroitly insinuating that her income was scarcely adequate to her ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... Representatives assembled at the mairie of the Tenth Arrondissement, and what did they do there? Every shade of opinion was represented in this extemporaneous Assembly. But four-fifths of its members belonged to the different conservative parties which had constituted the majority. This Assembly was presided over by two of its Vice-Presidents, M. Vitet and M. Benoist d'Azy. M. Daru was arrested in his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... was not introduced among the Buccaneers for many years after their settlement of the western coast. In the mean time they selected women for extemporaneous partners, to whom they addressed a few significant words before taking them home to their ajoupas, to the effect that their antecedents were not worth minding, but this, slightly tapping the musket, "which never deceived me, will ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... of speech applied to the occurrences of life. Some that they rehearse, in a kind of recitative, at their bimbangs or feasts, are historical love tales like our old English ballads, and are often extemporaneous productions. An example of the former species ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... measure of his spirit. It is doubtless a pleasure, and a help too, to read the good books of good men; but there are many good men who write good books, and he is among the few who cannot. He has suffered from ill health, particularly difficulties in the head; and though his gift of extemporaneous speech is remarkable, he cannot compose for printing without labor of the brain which is injurious to him. In this he also resembles Dr. Follen, of whom he reminds me, who ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... discovered that the ambition of Pippin chiefly consisted in the utterance of his speech. He saw, too, in a little while, that the nonsense of the lawyer had not even the solitary merit—if such it be—of being extemporaneous; and in the slow and monotonous delivery of a long string of stale truisms, not bearing any analogy to the case in hand, he perceived the dull ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... have no wish to be hasty; but as for disarranging the whole economy of the house, and getting up an extemporaneous meal for me, I cannot think of it. Mr. Beckendorff may live as he likes, and if I stay here I am contented to live as he does. I do not wish him to change his habits for me, and I shall take care that, after today, there will be no ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... proved himself as elegant a conversationist as he was a writer; his tone was thoroughly English, and his pronunciation, like that of Washington Irving, was singularly correct. As a speaker, he at times rose to splendid flights of oratory, although his delivery from memory was less effective than the extemporaneous style. Macaulay never married, but was always happy in the social circle ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... State society held a spirited and successful convention.[167] Julia Smith gave an extemporaneous talk to the great delight of the audience, who applauded continually; Mrs. Crane, a fine elocutionist, gave a reading from Carlyle; Mrs. Hooker closed with a brief resume of the work ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the sermon that day, for not only was the preacher aware that bright eyes looked upon his deeds, but he saw his enemies in the front of the battle. Surely all extemporaneous speakers, in court, pulpit, or senate, must be accessible to such external influences. It ought not to be so, of course, but I fancy it is. Would John Knox have been so fiery in denunciation if those ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... asked. Edward looked at him. Mr. Beecher's face was tense. After a few moments he said: "That's generally the way with extemporaneous remarks: they are always dangerous. The best impromptu speeches and remarks are the carefully ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... were intermingled. At one moment she told the little girls, Annie and Lizzie, of the immorality of the conversations in the dressing-rooms of theatres; at another she stopped the Rehearsal of an opera bouffe to preach to the mummers—in phrases that were remembrances of the extemporaneous prayers in the Wesleyan Church—of the advantages of an earnest, working religious life. It was like a costume ball, where chastity grinned from behind a mask that vice was looking for, while vice hid his nakedness in some of the robes that chastity had let fall. ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... the tender subject of lay-preaching and lay-ministering; nor did he think it altogether prudent or decent to indulge the wishes of some of the warmer enthusiasts of the party, who felt disposed to make the rest partakers of their gifts in extemporaneous prayer and exposition. These were absurdities that belonged to the time, which, however, the Major had sense enough to perceive were unfitted, whether the offspring of hypocrisy or enthusiasm, for ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... faith, and a brighter realization of heavenly truths. And there are mediums, too, from whose lips distil a lofty eloquence and a remarkable wisdom upon any or all subjects proposed, with a flow of extemporaneous poetry or of heavenly music which has never been equaled under such ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... brazen trumpets, and enforced by the discharge of two thousand pieces of artillery, ten square miles of people repeated the order for silence, in loud and reiterated shouts—and at last silence obeyed the order, and there was silence. The chief brahmin rose, and having delivered an extemporaneous prayer, suitable to the solemnity and importance of the occasion, he proceeded to read the will of the late king—he then descanted upon the Molean controversy, and how it was now an article of the Souffrarian faith, which it was heresy and impalement not to believe, that "moles were not scars, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... style seems rather flippant, it is because I have been trained as an extemporaneous speaker and not as a writer. For fifteen years I traveled over the country lecturing on the Mooseheart School. My task was to interest men in the abstract problems of child education. A speaker must entertain his hearers to the end or lose their attention. And so I taxed my wit to ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... discovery on her venturous way, and carriest man and his merchandise to the Equator and to the Pole! Vain were the auspicious breeze unless it blew upon thy opening sails; and what were the sheet-anchor, but for that cable of thine which connects it with the ship. Vegetable iron! incomparable hemp! Extemporaneous memory can scarcely follow thy services. Talk of the battering-ram—but what propelled it forward? The shot, whizzing in the teeth of adverse winds, carries thy coil to snatch the sailor from the rock where he stands helpless ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... animated, earnest, and strong in public addresses. His mind was active; apt to take an independent, original view, and vigorous. His sermons were often very impressive and powerful. Few who heard in whole or in part his discourse on the words, "The world by wisdom knew not God"—an extemporaneous sermon—will forget the terse, vigorous sentences which came from his lips. It was, I believe, the last sermon he prepared in outline to be delivered to our churches in this country. It was full ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... Mr. Webster been idle. He was not an extemporaneous speaker, and he passed the summer in carefully studying, in his intervals of professional duties, the great constitutional question which he afterward so brilliantly discussed. A story is told at Providence ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Dayton, in his "Last Days of Knickerbocker Life," left a description of the service at the Dutch Reformed Church of that day. He told of the long-drawn-out extemporaneous prayers, the allusions to "benighted heathen"; to "whited sepulchres"; to "the lake which burns with fire and brimstone." Of instrumental accompaniment there was none, and free scope was both given and taken by the human voice divine. Then the sermon! Men were strong in those days! ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... attacked, and to give the reasons that made it necessary to fight,—reasons which none but a consistent Friend or avowed non-resistant can pretend to dispute: His ordinary style in speaking is pointed, staccatoed, as is that of most successful extemporaneous speakers; he is "short-gaited"; the movement of his thoughts is that of the chopping sea, rather than the long, rolling, rhythmical wave-procession of phrase-balancing rhetoricians. But when the lance has pricked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... his antisepticized Environment, he acquired the Art of putting over the saccharine Extemporaneous Address, and he could smile, with his Teeth exposed, for an Hour at ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... him permission to continue under her roof till morning. Having performed this humane action, she summoned her female companions to their spinning, which occupied the chief part of the night, while their labour was beguiled by a variety of songs—one of which was observed by Mr. Park to be an extemporaneous effusion, created by his own adventure. The air was remarkably sweet and plaintive, and the ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... Life Thoughts, gathered from the Extemporaneous Discourses of Henry Ward Beecher. By a Member of his Congregation. Boston: Phillips, Sampson & ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... on Natural Philosophy in its bearings on a kettle. The entertainment of a "Night with Mr. Bagges" was usually extemporaneous. It was so on this occasion. The footman brought in the tea-kettle. "Does it boil?" demanded ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... taste for the Beautiful to study what graces of diction will best adorn a noble sentiment; too obtuse a conscience to care if the popular argument were purified from the dross which the careless flow of a speech wholly extemporaneous rarely fails to leave around it. But this was no ordinary occasion. Elaborate study here was requisite, not for the orator, but the hypocrite. Hard task, to please the Blues, and not offend the Yellows; appear to side with Audley Egerton, yet insinuate sympathy with Dick ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... translation from Latin to English, together with several Catholic ceremonies, in some places even employing candles and incense. The Calvinists, on the other hand, worshiped with extreme simplicity: reading of the Bible, singing of hymns, extemporaneous prayer, and preaching constituted the usual service in church buildings that were without superfluous ornaments. Between Anglican formalism and Calvinistic austerity, the Lutherans presented a compromise: they devised no uniform liturgy, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... communication, is that of impromptus. Your correspondent MR. SINGER (p. 105.) supposes Malherbe the poet to have been "ready at an impromptu." But, to say the least, this is rather doubtful, unless the extemporaneous effusions of Malherbe were of that class which Voiture indulged in with so much success at the Hotel de Rambouillet—sonnets and epigrams leisurely prepared for the purpose of being fired off in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... advantage of doing that is that it enables a young beginner to form his own style at the outset by careful and systematic writing. Spurgeon, often when a youth, read some of his sermons, although afterwards he never premeditated a single sentence for the pulpit. Dr. Richard S. Storrs was a most fluent extemporaneous speaker, but for twenty years he carefully wrote all his discourses. My own habit, after a time, was to write a portion of the sermon and turn away from my notes to interject thoughts that came in the heat of the moment and then turn to my manuscript. This was generally ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... plaudits; and the sonnet itself was excellent and spirited. Excellent I mean in its general effect, as an improvvisazione:—how it would stand the test of cool criticism I cannot tell; nor is that any thing to the purpose: these extemporaneous effusions ought to be judged merely as what they are,—not as finished or correct poems, but as wonderful exercises of tenacious memory, ready wit, and that quickness of ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... short-lived, ephemeral; flying &c. v.; fugacious, fugitive; shifting, slippery; spasmodic; instantaneous, momentaneous[obs3]. temporal, temporary; provisional, provisory; deciduous; perishable, mortal, precarious, unstable, insecure; impermanent. brief, quick, brisk, extemporaneous, summary; pressed for time &c. (haste) 684; sudden, momentary &c. (instantaneous) 113. Adv. temporarily &c. adj.; pro tempore[Lat]; for the moment, for a time; awhile, en passant[Fr], in transitu[Lat]; in a short time; soon &c. (early) 132; briefly &c. adj.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... broad, to Castro Pol, the first town in the Asturias. I now mounted the factious mare, whilst Antonio followed on my own horse. Martin led the way, exchanging jests with every person whom he met on the road, and occasionally enlivening the way with an extemporaneous song. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... the speeches were written out beforehand in the study, the manuscripts served as a means of further publicity afterwards. The great extemporaneous speakers, on the other hand, were attended by shorthand writers. We must further remember that not all the orations which have come down to us were intended to be actually delivered. The panegyric, for example, of the elder Beroaldus ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... English and Latin in the schools of his native village. At the age of 14 years commenced reading law in the office of Francis Sylvester, and pursued his legal novitiate for seven years. Combining with his professional studies a fondness for extemporaneous debate, he was early noted for his intelligent observation of public events and for his interest in politics; was chosen to participate in a nominating convention when only 18 years old. In 1802 went to New York City and studied law with William P. Van Ness, a ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... imperturbable equanimity made his pupils like and respect him. The survivors, in their old age, recalled the impression he made upon them, and especially remembered the solemn tones of his voice at morning and evening prayer, extemporaneous exercises which he scrupulously maintained. His letters at this time are like those of his college days, full of fun and good humor and kind feeling. He had his early love affairs, but was saved from matrimony by the liberality ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Bernisco, and a hundred servants. At every halting place the natives capered before them and tabored a welcome, while at Kama, where Gelele was staying, they not only played, but burst out with an extemporaneous couplet in ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... of the friends of Eric Blodaxe, king of Denmark or Norway, then residing in Northumberland, and which he had just conquered, procured a pardon by singing before the king, at the command of his queen Gunhilde, an extemporaneous ode. Egill compliments the king, who probably was his patron, with the appellation of the English chief. 'I offer my freight to the king. I owe a poem for my ransom. I present to the ENGLISH CHIEF the mead of Odin.' Afterwards he calls ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... view, she went about the construction of an extemporaneous bed in the easy-chair, with the addition of the next easy one for her feet. Having formed the best couch that the circumstances admitted of, she took out of her bundle a yellow night-cap, of prodigious size, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... their places. They have no step, but shuffle along the ground; nor does the music appear to be any thing more than a confusion of noises, distinguished only by hard or gentle blows upon the buffaloe skin: the song is perfectly extemporaneous. In the pauses of the dance, any man of the company comes forward and recites, in a sort of low guttural tone, some little story or incident, which is either martial or ludicrous; or, as was the case this evening, voluptuous and indecent; this is taken up ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark |
