"Incompleteness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out of its scrappiness and incompleteness he gathered this much! that somebody who was about to be dismissed from an aeroplane factory for the very usual reason that he could not stand the terrific noise, had succeeded in either making or procuring plans of Uncle Sam's new aeroplane engine, ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... restrain a feeling of suddenness and incompleteness and a natural pang of wonder and regret for a life so richly and so vitally endowed thus cut off in its prime. But for us it is not fitting to question or repine, but rather to rejoice in the rare possession that we hold. What ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... say, they either have been or will be men like ourselves; others are evolving on entirely distinct lines of their own. Before proceeding to consider them it is necessary, in order to avoid the charge of incompleteness, to mention that in this branch of the subject two reservations have been made. First, no reference is made to the occasional appearances of very high Adepts from other planets of the solar system and of even more august Visitors from a still greater distance, since such matters cannot fitly ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... this seeming indifference, is only a mask. A critic, speaking of Tchekoff, has said: "He is a tender crayon." It would be hard to find a more suitable expression. The delicacy of tone, the softness of touch in the outlines, the polish of some of the details, the capricious incompleteness of others are, in fact, the mark ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... she hastily completed a toilet, which, despite the Abbe's caution, had the appearance of incompleteness, and taking the great key from behind the door, led the way out into the glare of the setting sun. She unlocked the great gate and threw her weight against it with quick, firm movements like the movements ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... Cobden and those who shared his spirit. Like others who have been constrained by a noble enthusiasm, they had their visions; and in their sense of the greatness of that new force which was ready to operate upon human life, they both forgot the incompleteness of their own doctrine, and under-estimated the influences which worked, and long must work, upon mankind in an opposite direction. In perfect sincerity the leader of English economical reform at the middle ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... with a man's feelings?" he went on, with another emphatic dig of his stick. "I am quite serious in asking if you like me—for this good reason, that I like you. Yes, I do. You remember that day when I bled the old lady's dog—well, I have found out since then that there's a sort of incompleteness in my life which I never suspected before. It's you who have put that idea into my head. You didn't mean it, I dare say, but you have done it all the same. I sat alone here yesterday evening smoking my pipe—and I didn't enjoy it. I breakfasted alone this ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... hands are busy? So that it is the spot where God has put you, and the work He has given you to do? Your real life is within—hid in God with Christ—ripening, and strengthening, and waiting, as through the long, geologic ages of night and incompleteness waited the germs of all that was to unfold into this actual, ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... high ethical principles and ideals, his unfeigned honour for all that is pure and brave and unselfish and tender, his generous estimate of what is due from man to man of service, affection, and fidelity. His fictions embodied truths of character which with all their shadowy incompleteness were too real and too beautiful to lose ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... of his life. It is as depressing as one of his own morbid, fantastic tales. His career leaves a painful sense of incompleteness and loss. With greater self-discipline, how much more he might have accomplished for himself and for others! Gifted, self-willed, proud, passionate, with meager moral sense, he forfeited success ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... printed matter relating to native composers, and the utter incompleteness and bias of what exists, I have based this book almost altogether on my own research. I studied the catalogues of all the respectable music publishers, and selected such composers as seemed to have any serious intentions. When I heard of a composer whose ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... whole, when Sir Frederick Roberts sent me his view on the defence proposals, I was struck with the contrast between the completeness of the manner in which a defence scheme for India has been considered, and the incompleteness, to say the least of it, of all strategic plans at home. Sir Charles Macgregor put on record at the same time his view that a mere offensive on the North-West Frontier of India would be folly, if not madness, and that it would be necessary also ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... fishermen's lights burning in the boats far off upon the sea. Then—then I knew that I had only half my dream, and I was ungrateful, Maurice. I almost wished that I had never had this half, because it made me realize what it would be to have the whole. It made me realize the mutilation, the incompleteness of being in perfect beauty without love. And now—now I've actually got all I ever wanted, and much more, because I didn't know then at all what it would really mean to me to have it. And, besides, I never thought that God would select me for perfect happiness. Why should he? What have ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... in a perfect uproar of applause, and drank water. In spite of the applause he was haunted by a sense of incompleteness. There was something he had left out of his speech, something he had particularly wanted to say. It seemed to him more vital, more important, than anything he ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... consideration of a matter which may seem foreign to the question under discussion. We must dwell upon the nature of the records, and the credibility of the evidence they contain; we must look to the completeness or incompleteness of those records themselves, before we turn to that which they contain and reveal. The question of the credibility of the history, happily for us, will not require much consideration, for, in this history, ...
— The Past Condition of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... exquisite incompleteness, The theme of a song unset; A waft in the shuttle of life; A bud with the dew still wet; The dawn of a day uncertain; The delicate bloom of fruit; The plant with some leaves unfolded, The rest asleep at ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... since the earliest days. Emerson himself, though a man of unusual discernment and a diligent drinker from German spigots, nevertheless remained a dilettante in both aesthetics and metaphysics to the end of his days, and the incompleteness of his equipment never showed more plainly than in his criticism of books. Lowell, if anything, was even worse; his aesthetic theory, first and last, was nebulous and superficial, and all that remains of his pleasant essays today is their somewhat smoky pleasantness. He was a Charles Dudley ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... be manifest that different organisms correspond with this environment in varying degrees of completeness or incompleteness. At the bottom of the biological scale we find organisms which have only the most limited correspondence with their surroundings. A tree, for example, corresponds with the soil about its stem, with the sunlight, and with the air in contact with its leaves. But it is shut off by ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... indications are strong that rules of conduct are not inherent in the human mind, that men become moral to the extent that they are taught the principles of justice, and grow one-sided in their ideas of virtue through incompleteness in their moral education. What we call sinfulness is largely a matter of custom and convention. Men cannot properly be said to sin when their actions are checked by no conscientious scruples, and what one people would consider atrocious instances of wrong-doing, ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... back. Her voice, her smile, the very gown and cap she wore, and the needlework she carried in her hand, came sensibly before her. Yet how long ago it seemed! Christie remembered how many times she had taken it with her to the fields, when the incompleteness of their fences during the first year of their stay on the farm had made the "herding" of the sheep and cows necessary that the grain might be safe. She had read it in the woods in spring-time, by the firelight in the long winter evenings, ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... inflammation is said to be acute, and chronic when they take place slowly. Chronic inflammation is more complex than is the acute, and there is more variation in the single conditions. The chronicity may be due to a number of conditions, as the persistence of a cause, or to incompleteness of repair which renders the part once affected more vulnerable, to such a degree even that the ordinary conditions to which it is subjected become injurious. A chronic inflammation may be little more than ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... jury," he began, "what is really damning for my client is one fact—the dead body of his father. Had it been an ordinary case of murder you would have rejected the charge in view of the triviality, the incompleteness, and the fantastic character of the evidence, if you examine each part of it separately; or, at least, you would have hesitated to ruin a man's life simply from the prejudice against him which he has, alas! only too well deserved. But it's not an ordinary case of murder, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... romantic that the dragon should swallow St. George. He turned a small country into a great one: he made a new diplomacy by the fulness and far-flung daring of his lies: he took away from criminality all reproach of carelessness and incompleteness. He achieved an amiable combination of thrift and theft. He undoubtedly gave to stark plunder something of the solidity of property. He protected whatever he stole as simpler men protect whatever they have earned or inherited. He turned his hollow eyes with a sort of loathsome ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... animal never beheld by human eyes, even to the mingling contrasts of scales and wings, of feathers and hair. Through the combined lenses of science and imagination, we look back into ancient times, so dreadful in their incompleteness, that it may well have been the task of seraphic faith, as well as of cherubic imagination, to behold in the wallowing monstrosities of the terror-teeming earth, the prospective, quiet, age-long labour of God preparing the world with all its humble, graceful service for his unborn ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... of short sentences may be used with good results to describe rapid action. In conversation, also, sentences are generally short, and often grammatically incomplete, though they may be understood by the hearer. Sometimes this incompleteness is justified by the idiom of the language, but more often it is the result of carelessness on the part of the speaker. The hearer understands what is said either because he knows about what to expect, or because the expression is a familiar one. Such carelessness not ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... necessarily pure, communicates of its quality to whoever becomes aware of it, and thus in some measure counterweighs the lowering tendency. Moreover, the morally bad, deriving its character of evil from incompleteness, from the arresting or the perversion of good, like fruit plucked unripe, and being therefore outside the pale of the beautiful (the nature of which is completeness, fullness, perfection of life) cannot by itself be made captivating through the beautiful. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... introduced to him just at the period of his escape. By the aid of the faithful Guapo he had hastily collected a few things, and with his wife and family fled in the night. Hence the incompleteness of his travelling equipage. He had taken one of the most unfrequented paths—a mere bridle-road—that led from Cuzco eastward over the Cordillera. His intent was to gain the eastern slope of the Andes mountains, where he might conceal himself for a time in the uninhabited woods of the ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... critic, but he is no painter. He must be absorbed in what he sees to the exclusion of everything else; impartiality is a virtue to all the world except him. There will always be a onesidedness; either the conception or the embodying of it halts, is only partially realized; some incompleteness, some mystery, some apparent want of coincidence between form and meaning is a necessity to the artist, and if he does not find it, he will invent it. Hence the embarrassment of some of the English Pre-Raphaelitists, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... he was thought capable of doing than by what he did. By serious students, however, the real worth of Coleridge will be differently estimated. For them his peculiar value to English literature is not only undiminished by the incompleteness of his work; it has been, in a certain sense, enhanced thereby. Or, perhaps, it would be more strictly accurate to say that the value could not have existed without the incompleteness. A Coleridge ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... It was mutual,—that want, that dependence, that sense of incompleteness which each felt without the other. It was a blessed thing to have, something to be cherished, and he knew how desperately he had reacted to everything that ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... then, is to bring the mind into such a condition of training and cultivation that it shall be a perfect mirror of past times, and of the present, so far as the incompleteness of the present will permit, 'in true outline and proportion.' Mommsen, Grote, Droysen, fall short of the ideal, because they drugged ancient history with modern politics. The Jesuit learning of the sixteenth ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... second part which, however, left the story apparently as incomplete as before, in 1808. The two parts were first published in 1816. The poem is a picture of white innocence, purity, and truth, pursued and persecuted by the powers of evil. Its incompleteness seems to enhance its interest. "Completion could scarcely have failed to lessen its reality, for the reader could not have endured, neither could the poet's own theory have endured, the sacrifice of Christabel, the triumph of evil over good; and had she ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... subjugated Saxons gradually became infected with all the vices and addicted to all the social disorders that prevailed among the Irish in the same age; only in Ireland the anarchy endured much longer from the incompleteness of the conquest and the absence of the seat of supreme government, which kept the races longer separate and antagonistic. Perhaps the most humiliating notice of the degrading effects of conquest on the noble Saxon race to be found in history, ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... in the United States new applications of electricity literally every day. Before the written page is printed some startling application is likely to be made that gives to that page at once an incompleteness it is impossible to guard against or avoid. There is a strong inclination to prophesy; to tell of that which is to come; to picture the warmed and illuminated future, smokeless and odorless, and the homes in which the children of the near future shall be reared. Some of ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... of the remaining five-sixths, who attended the public schools. The returns also showed that there were 2,974 children between the ages of seven and fourteen years who did not attend school, and 530 persons over fourteen years of age who were unable to read and write. The incompleteness of these returns detracts from their value; but, as those towns where the greatest interest existed were more likely to respond to the call of the Legislature, it is probable that the actual condition of the whole state was below that of the two hundred and eighty-eight towns. The interest ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... abominable pettiness of German prejudice. But, withal, I cannot find that his life was great, as a whole; I cannot see him caring for his land, for the poor, for religion, for humanity; he was always a restless soul; and the ceaseless wear of incompleteness finally killed, as a maniac, him whom a broader Love might have kept alive as a glorious ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... incompleteness with which the first movement ends. The main theme is a compound of a vigorous march-like motive, closely related to one of the subsidiary phrases of the first movement, and a running figure in the bass—the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... a higher synthesis. The first signs of this longing became apparent in the period of the French revolution; (we find traces of it in the works of Rousseau and in Goethe's Werther); it was developed by the romanticists and represents the typical form of modern love with all its incompleteness and inexhausted possibilities. The achievement of this eagerly desired unity, which would be synonymous with the victory of personality over the limitations of body and soul, is the great problem of ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... satisfaction is the growing feeling of fraternal regard and unification of all sections of our country, the incompleteness of which has too long delayed realization of the highest blessings of the Union. The spirit of patriotism is universal and is ever increasing in fervor. The public questions which now most engross us are lifted far above either partisanship, ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... do struggle confusedly, with pitiful leaders and infinite waste and endless delay; that it is to our indisciplines and to the dishonesties and tricks our incompleteness provokes, that the prolongation of this war is to be ascribed, I readily admit. At the outbreak of this war I had hoped to see ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... write a book which would 'make the human mind as plain as the road from Charing Cross to St. Paul's.'[29] This was apparently the task to which he applied himself in his vacations. The Analysis appeared in 1829, and, whatever its defects of incompleteness and one-sidedness from a philosophical point of view, shows in the highest degree Mill's powers of close, vigorous statement; and lays down with singular clearness the psychological doctrine, which from his point ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... readers to believe that when, (before the end of the second century,) the four Evangelical narratives were collected into a volume and dignified with the title of "The Gospel,"—S. Mark's narrative was furnished by some unknown individual with its actual termination in order to remedy its manifest incompleteness; and that this volume became the standard of the Alexandrine recension of the text: in other words, became the fontal source of a mighty family of MSS. by Griesbach designated as "Alexandrine." But there will have ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... in combination to give new and even contradictory meanings to a root. Thus n, like the Latin in, signifies "penetration," "motion towards," or simply "remaining in a place," or, again, "permanence." M, like the Latin ab or ex, indicates "motion from." R expresses "uncertainty" or "incompleteness," and is employed to convert a statement into a question, or a relative pronoun into one of inquiry. G, like the Greek a or anti, generally signifies "opposition" or "negation;" ca is, as aforesaid, intensitive, and is employed, for example, to convert afi, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... concrete minds, which move from facts to ideas, are generally the champions of abstract notions. Each pretends to that over which he has least power; each aims instinctively at what he himself lacks. It is an unconscious protest against the incompleteness of each separate nature. We all tend toward that which we possess least of, and our point of arrival is essentially different from our point of departure. The promised land is the land where one is not. The most intellectual of natures ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... effectuating a government essentially strong and beneficial to the governed. The time therefore, we may expect, will come, when a second interference will be demanded, both by the recollection of our present conquest and the incompleteness of its consequences; and we shall be doomed to find, that we have won two hard-fought battles merely to enforce the necessity of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... felt before what it was to be altogether without ties of kinship to any fellow-being. This incompleteness in her lot had been perfectly filled up by her relationship with the whole family of the Seftons. She had found in them all that was required for the full development and exercise of her natural affections. But she had lost them. ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... acquit her of the intent to rob, or participation in the stealing of valuables, from which it follows that they intended also to acquit her of the intent to murder, and only through a misunderstanding, which arose from the incompleteness of the president's summing up, omitted to express it in due form in their answer. Therefore an answer of this kind by the jury absolutely demanded the application of statutes 816 and 808 of the criminal code of procedure, ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... fine frame of mind to make love to a woman. He had pictured that scene as one of the great moments of life, so subtly beautiful and dramatic, so exalted and exulting, so perfect in its very incompleteness, that not a lifetime of suffering and disappointment could blur it. And he felt exactly like the flat tyre of Janet's distinguished vernacular. Even his body was worn out, for he had had but nine hours' sleep in two nights. What a dead cinch the playwrights had. A man might as well try ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and its theory exclude. It therefore turns to experience, and directs its attention on those combinations which military history can furnish. In this manner, no doubt, nothing more than a limited theory can be obtained, which only suits circumstances such as are presented in history. But this incompleteness is unavoidable, because in any case theory must either have deduced from, or have compared with, history what it advances with respect to things. Besides, this incompleteness in every case is more ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... although he thought he had killed Harry, although he knew he had Pauline gagged and bound in the bottom of the runabout, Hicks was afraid. He was afraid of the incompleteness of the thing. He was eager to have done with the girl as well as with the man. And now this latest plan of Owen's was but another ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... preachers once said: "We do not know anything about God unless we first know that we cannot know Him perfectly." [1] How superb, as against all this impatience of spirit, are the reserve and patience of Christ. Accept doubts, he says. Bear with incompleteness. Give faith its chance to grow. First the blade, then the ear, and then the harvest. There are some things which youth can prove, and some which only the experience of maturity can teach, and then there are some mysteries which are perhaps to be made ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... garden, however, where the gold light beat down straightly, there was a sense of waiting, unrest, sweet and tumultuous. Out here in the garden it was glorious, but it was not peaceful. What was it that was responsible for that misty halation of incompleteness, longing? the shaking breath of the wide-lipped roses? the secrets within the bowed slender lilies? the tortured joy of the whole garden life ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... a touch of rawness in the picture, a hint of incompleteness, with a promise of much to come. Sage Butte was, perhaps, a trifle barbarous; but its crude frame buildings would some day give place to more imposing piles of concrete and steel. Its inhabitants were passing through a transition stage, showing signs at times of the primitive ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... perpetually bringing them into contact with fresh experience and new trains of thought, considering how they worked, and how they ought to be modified in order to maintain what was really sound and valuable in their content. Hence, Mill is the easiest person in the world to convict of inconsistency, incompleteness, and lack of rounded system. Hence, also, his work will survive the death of many consistent, complete, and perfectly ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... passive to active wrong-doing is not only easy, it is often a relief; it is that return to sincerity which we all require. Howbeit, it gave that ring of assertion to Daniel Harkutt's voice already noted, which most women like, and only men are prone to suspect or challenge. The incompleteness of his statement was, for the same reason, overlooked by ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... giving special mention to Friar Bacon, Bishop Wilkins, and the Portuguese friar, De Guzman. But, although he seems to suggest that others should avail themselves of his theoretical knowledge, there is a curious incompleteness about the designs accompanying his work, and about the work itself, which seems to suggest that he had more knowledge to impart than he chose to make public—or else that he came very near to complete solution of the problem of flight, and stayed on the threshold ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... Richard Alger's face in poor Sylvia's best room, although her candle was always lit, they never saw Barney at his old home, the new house advanced not a step beyond its incompleteness, and Barney never was seen at Charlotte Barnard's on a Sabbath night. Once, indeed, there was a rumor to that effect. A man's smooth dark head was visible at one of the front-room windows opposite Charlotte's fair one, and everybody ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Professor Virchow enlarges on the extreme incompleteness of every man's knowledge beyond those provinces which he has made his own (and he might well have added within these also), and when he dilates on the inexpediency, in the interests of science, of putting forth as ascertained ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... hypothesis, the reviewer sought to find flaws in the author's mode of reasoning, and concluded that "we are called upon to accept a hypothesis on the plea of want of knowledge." Defective information, vagueness, and incompleteness are charged upon the man whom we now delight to honour; "intellectual husks," we are told; are all that he offers. Professor Huxley, who lectured at the Royal Institution, on February 10, 1860, on "Species and Races and their Origin," and ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... His various accomplishments of course represented many hours of toil, but it was toil of which his associates never heard. He treated himself as a work of art, of which the beholder must judge only by the charming result, with no knowledge of the foregoing effort, no thought of the periods of ugly incompleteness that have been passed on the way ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... its perfect symmetry. But, alas! called from his work never to return, it is completed by less skilful hands, a less delicate conception, and, while the result is pleasing, the perfect harmony of proportion is wanting, and those who see it feel conscious of its incompleteness, yet scarcely know why. ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... and one of the finest in Great Britain. On the hill there were good roads and walks and some monuments. One of these, erected to the memory of Nelson, was very ugly, and another—beautiful in its incompleteness—consisted of a number of immense fluted columns in imitation of the Parthenon of Athens, which we were told was a memorial to the Scottish heroes who fell in the Wars of Napoleon, but which was not completed, as sufficient funds had not been forthcoming to finish what had evidently ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... Facardins and the finished Le Belier, run each of them to 142 pages; the shortest, L'Enchanteur Faustus, has just five-and-twenty; while Fleur d'Epine, in its completeness, has 114, and Zeneyde, in its incompleteness, runs to 78, and might have run, for aught one can tell—in the mixed tangle of Roman and Merovingian history in which the author (possibly in ridicule of Madeleine de Scudery's classical chronicling) has chosen to plunge it—to 780 or 7800, which ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... embarrassment of riches, we cannot compete with the Chinese nor pretend to have outbuilt their Babel; but I doubt whether the statement can be questioned if confined to European languages. I must rely on the evidence of my list, and I would here apologize for its incompleteness. After I had patiently extracted it from the dictionary a good many common words that were missing occurred to me now and again, and though I have added these, there must be still many omissions. Nor must it be forgotten that, had obsolete words been included, the total ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... material world there presents itself a seeming confusion, it is certain to turn out but an incompleteness of our observation, and on closer inspection it resolves itself into some higher scheme of Order. This is not so in the realm of thought. Wrong thinking never can become right thinking. A profound writer has said: "One explanation only of these facts can ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... again. Still I cannot truly say that we gave Providence our entire confidence as long as there remained the chance of further evil through the sort of romance we had dreaded for the girl. Till she was married there was an incompleteness, a potentiality of trouble, in the incident apparently closed that haunted us with a distrustful anxiety. We had to wait several years for the end, but it came eventually, and she was married to a young Englishman whom she had met in Canada, and whom she ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... it, and at the same time, in me at least, it always excites a kind of restlessness, a kind of uneasiness, even melancholy. What is the meaning of it? Is it that in the face of nature we are more vividly conscious of all our incompleteness, our indefiniteness, or have we little of that content with which nature is satisfied, but something else—I mean to say, what we need, nature ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... little play of the same year, 1902, a play that for all its crudity and incompleteness is full of insight into Catholic Ireland, youth is again the theme, or the intolerance and self-righteousness of youth. "Eoghan's Wife" (1902) is only a monologue, only the old story of the woman who finds her home lonely and depressing because the wrong man is the man of the house. She looks out ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... voice: the last note was in the minor key—it held the ear as if more must follow: like a wail after a triumph of resolve. It was a masterpiece of audacious dramatic musical genius addressed with sagacious cunning and courage to the sympathizing audience present. The supposed incompleteness kept them listening; the intentness sent that last falling (as it were, broken) note travelling awakeningly through their minds. It is the effect of the minor key to stir the hearts of men with this particular suggestiveness. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... trying to influence an unreal series of events, and in the case of the object of beauty in statue or painting by the impossibility of possession. The world of art is thus thought of as one of pure contemplation, a place of escape from the difficulties, the pangs, and the incompleteness that beset all action. It is true that the imagined world creates special conditions for emotion, and that the will does not act in respect to that world; but does this imply any radical difference in the emotion, or ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... Incompleteness lies on life—restlessness is in the heart. True love has no final habitation on earth; there is no abiding-place for our deepest affection, our most tender yearning. It is curious how deeply one may love, and yet feel that there ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... known by its fruits,—and the fruits of chance are incoherence, incompleteness, unsteadiness, the stammering utterance of blind, unreasoning force. A coherence that binds all the geological ages in one chain, a stability of purpose that completes in the beings born to-day an intention expressed in the first creatures that swam in the Silurian ocean or crept ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... less frequently are they, when fulfilled, as good as we painted them! The prismatic splendours of the rain bow, which gleam before us and which we toil to catch, are but grey rain-drops when caught. Joys attract and, attained, have incompleteness and a tang of bitterness. The fish is never so heavy when landed on the sward as it felt when struggling on our hook. 'All is vanity'—yes, if creatures and things temporal are pursued as our good. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... influence of the French Revolution as near as possible to reality, has been a three years' task. The autobiography of David Ritchie is as near as I can get to its solution, and I have a great sense of its incompleteness. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... he be, when in each moment of attainment he is pricked by the knowledge that it must soon be over? The youth is not happy, because the shadow of the future is on him. The man is not happy, because the knowledge of life's incompleteness is with him." ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... day, presented a wonderful spectacle. It was a mining camp positively crystallizing into being before the very eyes of all beholders. It was nearly all tents and canvas structures—a heterogeneous mixture of incompleteness and modernity to which the telegraph wires had already been strung from the outside world. It had no fair supply of water, but it did have a newspaper, issued ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... the positive depth of even the shadowy parts in the back grounds of Corregio; the paint itself is a rich substance, with the lustrous depth of precious stones. So that it would appear that there is in Rubens' style of colouring an original incompleteness, destructive in part of the naturalness he would aim at; it is a mannerism, very tolerable in such light works as those lucid and charming pictures by Teniers where all is light and unlaboured; but becoming a weakness where the other labour and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... impressions, and capable, as very few are, of apprehending the many-sidedness of truth,—as he had the rare quality of being honest with himself,—his works seem fragmentary, and give at first an impression of incompleteness. But one learns at length to recognize and value this very incompleteness as characteristic of the man who was growing lifelong, and to whom the selfish thought that any share of truth could be exclusively his was an impossibility. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... the constitutional State, the Jewish question is the question of constitutionalism, of the incompleteness of political emancipation. As the semblance of a State religion is there preserved, although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula, in the formula of a religion of the majority, the relationship of Jews to the State retains the semblance of a religious ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... of other events of daily life are occasions which may arouse thinking on the part of a little child. It is not the type of situation, nor its dignity, that is the important thing in thinking, but the way in which it is dealt with. The incorrectness of a child's data, their incompleteness and lack of organization, often result in incorrect conclusions, and still his thinking may be absolutely sound. The difference between the child and the adult in this power is a difference in degree—both possess the power. As Dewey says, "Only by making the most of the thought-factor, ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... Redwood and Bensington, Winkle, in spite of the incompleteness of his instructions, became a leading authority upon Boomfood. He wrote letters defending its use; he made notes and articles explaining its possibilities; he jumped up irrelevantly at the meetings of the scientific and medical associations to talk about ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... towards the incompleteness of Eucken's philosophy. He does not introduce his philosophy with a systematic discussion of the great epistemological and ontological problems. Philosophers have often introduced their work in this way, and it has been customary to expect an introduction of the kind. To do so, ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... nothing and a showy person—continued it on nothing and the reputation of fashion—and ended no one cares how or where. There are character, smartness and passion in both these tales—though a certain looseness of structure and incompleteness of style prevent us from being extreme in praising them, or from recommending them by quotation,—and though, as has been said, the tone and taste of the life which they describe must jar on the feelings of those who are unwilling to ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... very well, at another very ill:—well, when they have full time, full scope, and a sympathetic listener:—ill, when they fear interruption and are annoyed by the impossibility of exhausting the topic during that particular talk. The partial genius is flashy—scrappy. The true genius shudders at incompleteness—imperfection—and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not every thing that should be said. He is so filled with his theme that he is dumb, first from not knowing how to begin, where there seems eternally beginning ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... hand, Ugliness to me is eternal, not in the essence but in its incompleteness; but its eternity does not daunt me, for its eternal unfulfilment is a cause of joy. There is in it nothing new or unexpected; it is the old evil stretching out and ever seeking the end it cannot find; it may coil and writhe ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois |
