"Inexact" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... properly than to Briareus, there is not one which holds anything firmly. In the precipitancy of her course, what appears great is small, and what appears small is great. Our estimate of men is apt to be as inaccurate and inexact as that of things, or more. Wishing to have all on our side, we often leave those we should keep by us, run after those we should avoid, and call importunately on others who sit quiet and will not come. We cannot at once catch the applause ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... wish heartily it were. But the truth is one; it has first to be discovered, then justly and exactly uttered. Even with instruments specially contrived for such a purpose—with a foot-rule, a level, or a theodolite—it is not easy to be exact; it is easier, alas! to be inexact. From those who mark the divisions on a scale to those who measure the boundaries of empires or the distance of the heavenly stars, it is by careful method and minute, unwearying attention that men rise even to material exactness or to sure knowledge ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... expressing in poetry his acute and subtle sense of its beauties—by lavishing on it (as we say) 'the colours of his imagination,' He was then an 'individual mind'—according to the current, but (as Shelley held) inexact terminology. He has now, by death, wholly passed out of the class of individual minds; and he forms a portion of the Universal Mind (the 'One Spirit') which is the animation ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... the solar spectrum. He announced the existence of hydrogen, among other elements, in the sun's atmosphere in 1862, and in 1868 published his great map of the normal solar spectrum which long remained authoritative in questions of wave-length, although his measurements were inexact to the extent of one part in 7000 or 8000 owing to the metre which he used as his standard having been slightly too short. He was the first, in 1867, to examine the spectrum of the aurora borealis, and detected and measured the characteristic bright line in its ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... London, and saw, as one of the most interesting sights of the city, a dramatic performance at the Swan. Later he communicated a description of the building to his friend Arend van Buchell,[248] who recorded the description in his commonplace-book, along with a crude and inexact drawing of the interior (see page 169), showing the stage, the three galleries, and the pit.[249] The description is headed: "Ex Observationibus Londinensibus Johannis de Witt." After a brief notice of St. Paul's, and a briefer reference to Westminster Cathedral, the traveler begins to describe ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... a mystery—something which responds to a special sense, peculiar to the human race. This is ordinarily called the esthetic sense, but that is an inexact term, for esthetic sense signifies a sense of the beautiful and what is esthetic is not necessarily beautiful. Sense of ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... this observation, for nothing perverts our judgment of the American crisis more than the inexact definitions which are given of abolitionism. We willingly picture abolitionists to ourselves as madmen, seeking to attain their end on the spot, regardless of all else, through blood and ruin! That there may be such ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... fragments of architecture, and from the lie of the ground. The testimony derived from the lie of the ground is more important than any other, for several reasons. First, an historical document may be false, or inexact; for instance, the invention of a Brutus, son of AEneas, is false and absurd on the face of it. Or a document may be wrongly interpreted. Thus, a fragment of architecture may through ignorance be ascribed to the Roman, when it belongs to the Norman, period—one ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... of all Bacon, has risen to so noble and profound a conception of this most strangely commingled of all human affections. There is no modern thinker, again, who makes Beauty—all that is gracious, seemly, and becoming—so conspicuous and essential a part of life. It would be inexact to say that Emerson blended the beautiful with the precepts of duty or of prudence into one complex sentiment, as the Greeks did, but his theory of excellence might be better described than any other of modern times by the [Greek: kalokagathia], the virtue of the true gentleman, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... and fewer still that dare to reveal it; they are afraid of the coarse world and its summary judgments and can get no farther than the plain meaning of traditional language. In this conventional tongue, which is voluntarily inexact for the sake of social simplification, words are careful not to unveil, by expressing them, the many shades of reality in its multiple forms. They imprison it, codify it, drill it; they press it into the service of the mind ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... something theatrical in the delivery of Fitzpiers's effusion; yet it would have been inexact to say that it was intrinsically theatrical. It often happens that in situations of unrestraint, where there is no thought of the eye of criticism, real feeling glides into a mode of manifestation not easily distinguishable from rodomontade. A veneer of affectation overlies a bulk of truth, with ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... centres, certain early taverns inaugurate the business of the day. It was into one of these that Challoner, coming round the corner of the block, beheld his charming companion disappear. To say he was surprised were inexact, for he had long since left that sentiment behind him. Acute disgust and disappointment seized upon his soul; and with silent oaths, he damned this commonplace enchantress. She had scarce been gone ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... ii. 27 (inexact quotation).—The story told in this section was a favourite of St. Charles Borromeo (Alban Butler, Lives of ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... may be omitted, as tautological[15] in English. Cf. our inexact idiom 'he promised to come' ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... Fables of Pilpay for upwards of a century. At last the Pehlevi or old Iranian origin of the work found an able and strenuous advocate in Baron von Hammer-Purgstall [FN128] who worthily continued what Galland had begun: although a most inexact writer, he was extensively read in Oriental history and poetry. His contention was that the book is an Arabisation of the Persian Hazar Afsanah or Thousand Tales and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... precise contents of the three crucibles, and he carefully went over the proportions of the ingredients in the one from which he had just taken his specimen. He made a strong effort of memory, trying to recall whether he had been careless and inexact in weighing any of the materials, but he knew that he had been most precise. He had also noted the hour at which he had put the mixture into the crucible on Saturday, and he now glanced at the sand-glass and made another note. But he did not lay the ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford |
