"Narrowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of vice. So far as the black priests possess any influence, however, it is believed to be used conscientiously, and with excellent effect; nor, though provoked to smile at these queer specimens of the cloth, could I indulge the impulse without being self-convicted of narrowness and illiberally. St. Augustine, and other Fathers of the church, if I have heard aright, were of the same sable hue as the priests of St. ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... the southern coast of Hindostan. The cat's-eye is a greenish translucent quartz, and when cut en cabochon it presents a moving internal reflection which is ascribed to the presence of filaments of asbestos. Its perfection is estimated by the natives in proportion to the narrowness and sharpness of the ray and the pure olive-tint of the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... uttering words of stern reproof and earnest expostulation. No one was near to watch the countenance of the young Greek, until he suddenly met a person richly attired in the costume worn at the Syrian court, who came upon him in a spot where the narrowness of the path precluded the two men from avoiding each other without turning back, and so brought about a meeting which, to the last comer ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... had the soul of a poet, quick to enthusiasm; the sight of the Eagles planted on the Acropolis at Carthage moved him in a way he never forgot. He acquired the habit of seeing big, and began to cast off race prejudices and all the petty narrowness of a local spirit. When he became a Christian he did not close himself up, like the Donatists, within the African Church. His dream was that Christ's Empire upon earth should equal the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... for sea while Sir Joseph Yorke was First Lord of the Admiralty, having a flush-deck, and carrying 18 32-pounder carronades and two long nines. They were fitted with stern chase-ports, but from the narrowness of their sterns there was no room to work the tiller, while the guns were pointed from the ports. They were defective also in having their masts too slight, while they were in other respects heavily rigged. The worst vessels, however, constructed at a later period, ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... preserves his native gaiety of style even when solving crabbed problems of bibliography. He is at times discursive, but he is never tedious; and he shows no trace of that philological pedantry and narrowness or obliquity of critical vision which the detailed study of literary history has been known to breed in English and German investigators. While M. Jusserand betrays all the critical independence of his compatriot M. Taine, his habit of careful and laborious research illustrates ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... sort to make all sorts. Why have standards and a regulation pattern? Why have a human criterion? There's the point! Why, in the name of all the free heavens, have human criteria? Why? Simply for bullying and narrowness. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... leader, or rather a companion, of the people. Palmerston was exclusively an Englishman, and made his boast in the House of Commons that the interest of England was his Shibboleth; LINCOLN thought always of mankind, as well as his own country, and served human nature itself. Palmerston, from his narrowness as an Englishman, did not endear his country to any one court or to any one nation, but rather caused general uneasiness and dislike; LINCOLN left America more beloved than ever by all the peoples of Europe. Palmerston was self-possessed and adroit in ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... characterizing many of the remains; but as already seen in the discussion of masonry, the latter results were attained by the patient industry of many hands, although laboring with but little of the spirit of cooperation. The narrowness of the largest doors and windows in the ancient pueblos suggests timidity on the part of the ancient builders. The apparently bolder construction of the present day, shown in the prevailing use of horizontal openings, is not due to greater constructive skill, but rather to the markedly greater ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... religion? Wright in the American Journal of Theology, Volume XVI, page 385, quotes Leuba as defining religion as a belief in a psychic superhuman power. Wright has objections to this definition on the ground of its narrowness. He attempts to add breadth to the definition in: "Religion is the endeavor to secure the conservation of socially recognized values, through specific actions that are believed to evoke some agency different from the ordinary ego of the individual or ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... freaked with perverse tints, left her mildly skeptical; so that he felt, with just a flicker of his old irritation, that the very plentifulness of esthetic corruption that he could display to her testified for her to his essential guilelessness, and, perhaps, to a blandness and narrowness of nature that lacked even the capacity for infection. Jack had to own to himself that, though he strove to make it rigorously esthetic, his seeing of d'Annunzio—to take at random one of the fleurs du mal—was as a shining, a luridly splendid ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the custom of observing Christmas was looked upon as sacrilegious. It savored of popery, and in the narrowness of the light then dawning the festival was abolished except in the Anglican and Lutheran Churches. Tenants and neighbors no longer gathered in the hall on Christmas morning to partake freely of the ale, blackjacks, cheese, toast, sugar, and nutmeg. If they ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... honest, thrifty, devout, tolerant of the opinions of others. As Holland sheltered the English Puritans from ecclesiastical intolerance, so New Netherland welcomed within her borders the victims of New England bigotry and narrowness. ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... volume, The Drama, says: "It is in finding the mean between personal narrowness which is too selective, and photographic impersonality that is not selective at all, that the individuality of the artist, his training, and his ideals, are tested. It is this that determines how much his work shall ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... mind came back from its wandering with a start. Go back to his father a failure! He drew his lip down hard over his teeth. Not while he lived! And yet, what was there in prospect for him? His whole soul revolted against the dreary monotony and the narrowness of his present life, and yet, what other path lay open? Cameron went straying in fancy over the past, or in excursions into the future, while, parallel with his rambling, the sermon continued to make its way through its various ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... family life, founded upon such principles, are, in relation to a little child, obvious; but I may be permitted to recapitulate them. Here was perfect purity, perfect intrepidity, perfect abnegation; yet there was also narrowness, isolation, an absence of perspective, let it be boldly admitted, an absence of humanity. And there was a curious mixture of humbleness and arrogance; entire resignation to the will of God and not less entire disdain of the judgement and opinion of man. My parents founded ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... was!—what more wretched, more pitiable than a man groveling and moaning in the mire of his own self-contempt? "Governor!" I said to myself, as I saw awful thoughts flitting like demons of despair across his face. And I shuddered, and pitied, and rejoiced,—shuddered at the narrowness of my own escape; pitied the man who seemed myself as I might have been; and rejoiced that I had had my mother with me and in me to impel ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... the energy with which he worked for it, but as he grew older he lost some portion of the old urbanity, exchanging it disastrously for traits which would seem to have been the result of increasing narrowness of religious faith rather than part of his real self. Savage writes of him: "a hardness in publick and ridgidity in private life, are too observable in his character, and even an eagerness for pecuniary gain, which might not have been expected in a soldier and a statesman." That ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... narrowness, must not be understood of the gate simply, but because of that cumber that some men carry with them that pretend to be going to heaven. Six cubits! What is sixteen cubits to him who would enter in here with all the world on his back? The young man in the ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... be a trifle, because he has been accustomed to think of the whole earth; and when they sing the praises of family, and say that some one is a gentleman because he has had seven generations of wealthy ancestors, he thinks that their sentiments only betray the dulness and narrowness of vision of those who utter them, and who are not educated enough to look at the whole, nor to consider that every man has had thousands and thousands of progenitors, and among them have been rich and poor, kings and slaves, Hellenes ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... The narrowness of most of the canals of Venice, with the innumerable angles and the constant passing, have given rise to a fashion of construction and of rowing that are so peculiar to that city and its immediate dependencies as to require some explanation. The ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... re-grouped by specialists, but the only addition which the writer sees as necessary in consequence of the study of taboo is the fact that the way of the woman transgressor is peculiarly hard because of the sex taboo, the ignorance and narrowness of good women, and the economic limitations of all women. Ignorance of the results of entrance into a life which usually means abandonment of hope may be a contributing cause. Boredom with the narrowness of family life and desire ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... than good. There was far greater reason to fear that too much would be attempted, and that violent movements would produce an equally violent reaction, than that too little would be done in the way of change. But narrowness of intellect, and flexibility of principle, though they may be serviceable, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... reason why he had come to St. Joseph's. It was all over with the red-haired lady, and it was for her that he had come to St. Joseph's! But that could not be.... She saw him moving in rich and elegant society, where everyone had a title, and the narrowness of her life compared with his dismayed her. It was impossible that he could care for her. She was remaining in Dulwich, with nothing but a few music lessons to look forward to.... But when she reached the operatic stage her life would be like his, and the vision of her future ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... great forest had disappeared. What other figures in our history are quite so remarkable as the itinerant frontier priests, the circuit-riders as they are now called, who lived as Elijah did, whose temper was very much the temper of Elijah, in whose exalted narrowness of devotion, all that was stern, dark, foreboding—the very brood of the forest's innermost heart—had found a voice. Their religion was ecstasy in homespun, a glory of violent singing, the release of a frantic emotion, formless but immeasurable, which at all other times, in the severity of the ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... hollowness of nearly all the aims and ambitions of daily life we cannot expect to find coexisting with the coarser "blood-sympathies," the direct passion, and the dogged and tenacious hold of temporary and smaller objects and issues, which distinguish the American politician, or with the narrowness of view, the zeal, and the moral persistency which characterize the practical reformer. There was, therefore, in his nature a certain want of the sturdier, harder, and more robust elements of character, which, though commonly manifesting ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... Nor does any kind of unwonted disturbance put him in bad humor, or frighten him out of calm self-possession. In passing through a narrow gorge, I once drove one ahead of me from rapid to rapid, disturbing him four times in quick succession where he could not very well fly past me on account of the narrowness of the channel. Most birds under similar circumstances fancy themselves pursued, and become suspiciously uneasy; but, instead of growing nervous about it, he made his usual dippings, and sang one of his most tranquil strains. When observed within a few yards their ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... gathering of our young people; they will have such a pleasant, happy time in their weekly meetings, that they will not reverence God's house. Think you, you are more pleasing in His sight, you who turn out of the way the lame and the blind. Ah, it were better never to have been born, than by narrowness of soul, by false reasoning, and warped judgment, to have led astray, or turned aside from God one of these youthful souls. As fathers and mothers, should you not rejoice that your children are among you; that they are ...
— 'Our guy' - or, The elder brother • Mrs. E. E. Boyd
... from society, ceaselessly afraid of receiving less than his due; privately, meanwhile, he deplored the narrowness of the social opportunities granted to his daughter, and was for ever forming schemes for her advantage—schemes which never passed beyond the stage of nervous speculation. They inhabited a little house in a western suburb, a house illumined ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... is properly and regularly academical, such persons I am afraid either have not considered the constitution and design of an university, or else think very meanly of it. It must be a deplorable narrowness of mind, that would confine these seats of instruction to the limited views of one or two learned professions. To the praise of this age be it spoken, a more open and generous way of thinking begins now universally to prevail. The attainment ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... lie if I assured you that the dissertations of this Dominican pleased me. First, however illuminated the man may be, he does not attract me. Without speaking of the frenzy of his penances, what scrupulousness of devotion and narrowness of piety was his! Think that he could not decide on drinking till he had first, as a preliminary, divided his beverage into five parts. He thought thus to honour the five wounds of the Saviour, and, moreover, he swallowed his last mouthful in two gulps to ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... as was proven true afterwards that the marks in the shoes would certainly identify the remains, did some valuable detective work under the direction of Sheriff Plummer. Mr. Poock was struck by the narrowness of the shoes worn by the dead girl, and opened them to discover the size and width. He recognized the fact that 11 and 22 in the shoe would give him the information desired if he had ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... in general expect from Comedy I have already shown: it is an applied doctrine of ethics, the art of life. In this respect the higher comedies of Moliere contain many admirable observations happily expressed, which are still in the present day applicable; others are tainted with the narrowness of his own private opinions, or of the opinions which were prevalent in his age. In this sense Menander was also a philosophical comic writer; and we may boldly place the moral maxims which remain of his by the side at least of those of Moliere. But no comedy is constructed ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... introductions to people in Holland. 'They have been sent open for me to seal, so I have been amused to see the different modes of treating that favourite subject myself.' He is to be allowed L240 a year, but he is determined not to be straitened, nor to encourage the least narrowness, but to draw on his father when necessary. Wilkes had gone to France, but had let him have some franks 'to astonish a few North Britons.' Parting for a time with Temple, whose family was now in straitened circumstances, he assures him that their friendship should be 'an exalted comfort' ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... were Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale, and they were the great instruments of his tyranny. None of them had the talents or audacity of Strafford, or the narrowness and bigotry of Laud; but their counsels were injurious to ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... had remained at home, true to the duties required of him. The devoted son was the heir; the father did not disparage his worth, nor deny his deserts. His displeasure over the rejoicing incident to the return of his wayward brother was an exhibition of illiberality and narrowness; but of the two brothers the elder was the more faithful, whatever his minor defects may have been. The particular point emphasized in the Lord's lesson, however, had to do with ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Aubrey, whom she desired to inquire of some responsible person the meaning of this apparent commotion. Aubrey reined in his horse accordingly, as he passed a gentleman in clerical attire, which at that date implied a cassock, bands, and black stockings. Had Aubrey known it, the narrowness of the bands, the tall hat, the pointed shoes, and the short garters, also indicated that the clergyman in question ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... natives, although they experienced great hardship in this matter; for neither corn nor wine nor any other good thing is produced there. Nor indeed can anything be carried in from elsewhere on account of the narrowness of the paths, unless it be carried by men. However, the Lazi were able to live on a certain kind of millet which grows there, since they were accustomed to it. These garrisons the emperor removed from the place and commanded that ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... am not at all unwilling to acknowledge that truths like this have very often been preached both with a tone and in a manner that repels, and which is rightly chargeable with exaggeration and undue gloom and narrowness. But let me remind you that it is not the Evangelical preacher nor the Apostle only who have to bear the condemnation of exaggeration, if this representation of my text be not true to facts, but it is Jesus Christ too; for He ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... river we were compelled to lie out in the river, owing to the great boar, as it is called; it is a quick overflowing of the water, which rises in a great body and with such violence that it breaks down all before it. It arises from the narrowness of the river, and the force which it makes from the sea; in the course of two minutes it rises to the height ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... too quickly; she learned to know the depression and irritability which greeted her every effort to rouse and to please him. It was at such times that Lorimer made bitter revolt against what he termed her narrowness and prejudice, or burst into occasional angry petulance, if she tried to urge him to cut loose from the club and from the constantly-growing influence of Lloyd Avalons who was discerning enough ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... imagination could be subjected. It is chiefly against the incubus of this celestial monster that Mr. Moore dared to lift up his eyes; and many a less courageous or less clear-sighted person was thankful to him for it. But a man with such a mission requires a certain narrowness and concentration of mind; he has to be intolerant and to pound a good deal on the same notes. We need not wonder if Mr. Moore has written rather meagerly, and with a certain vehemence and want ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... befallen the world. But his intellect was less than mediocre. His passion for the bureau, his slavery to routine, his puerile ambition personally to superintend details which could have been a thousand times better administered by subordinates, proclaimed every day the narrowness of his mind. His diligence in reading, writing, and commenting upon despatches may excite admiration only where there has been no opportunity of judging of his labours by personal inspection. Those ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... No such narrowness troubles the Monomotapan. He will prefer—and very wisely prefer—an opinion that renders him comfortable to one that in any way interferes with his appetites; and if two such opinions contradict each other, ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... could take place from there. Crass and Sawkins accordingly lifted the coffin off the tressels, and—while Hunter held the light—proceeded to carry it downstairs, a task of considerable difficulty owing to the narrowness of the staircase and the landing. However, they got it down at last and, having put it on the handcart, covered it over with the black wrapper. It was still raining and the lamp in the cart was nearly out, so Sawkins trimmed the wick and ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... a moment the log disappeared beneath projecting eaves. Another was just behind it, and behind that yet another, and another, like great patient beasts rising from the coolness of a stream to follow a leader through the narrowness, of pasture bars. And in the booms, up the river, as far as the eye could see, were other logs awaiting their turn. And beyond them the forest trees, straight and tall and green, dreaming of the time when ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... commissioners were compelled to return; the brave Montgomery was killed before the walls of the city; Canada was lost to the Colonies and forever forfeited as an integral part of the United States; all of which was due to the narrowness and intolerance of those who in the supreme hour could not refrain from the fanaticism ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... previous moment when she had voluntarily revealed a portion of her past to him. The more he thought upon the matter the more evident it became to him that he had given her his love—that he had been upon the verge of offering her his honorable name. He trembled a little at the narrowness of his escape. Yet, he still loved her. There was no objection to that according to the ethics of the Hon. Morison Baynes and his kind. She was a meaner clay than he. He could no more have taken her in marriage than he could have taken ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sold at one dollar and twenty-five cents the acre by the square mile, there should in any considerable part of it be a want of room,—any necessity for crowding the population into pent-up cities,—any narrowness of streets, or want of commons and parks. And yet it is an undeniable truth that our American cities are all suffering the want of ample thoroughfares, destitute of adequate parks and commons, and too much crowded for health, convenience, or beauty. Boston has for its main street a serpentine lane, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... the Church was a part of the world, and even the lovers inhabitants of that orb. But they all felt a certain truth—the truth that the moment you love anything the world becomes your foe. Thus Mr. Kipling does certainly know the world; he is a man of the world, with all the narrowness that belongs to those imprisoned in that planet. He knows England as an intelligent English gentleman knows Venice. He has been to England a great many times; he has stopped there for long visits. But he does not belong to it, or to any place; ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... books than ours, none buys fewer." To be sure, Germany was then a poor country and its readers had some excuse for being economical in supplying their literary wants. But there was no excuse for the notorious narrowness of vision and judgment shown by many of the leading critics, theatres, and literary journals of that time. Writers of mediocre talent were praised to the skies. But old Grillparzer, Hebbel and Ludwig, Keller, Raabe, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... the narrowness of human knowledge may well preclude all self-exaltation, it would be worse than folly to hold as naught the many important truths which have been wrought out for us by the mighty intellects of the past. If they have left us nothing for vainglory, they ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... disappointment in his ambition for preferment, and a natural narrowness of soul, had turned Colonel Landcraft into a military martinet of the most pronounced character. He was the grandfather of colonels in the service, rank won in the old Indian days. That he was not a brigadier-general was a circumstance puzzling only to himself. He was a man of small ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... Germans were manufacturing more than three-fourths of all the coal-tar products of the world and supplying material for most of the rest. The British cursed the universities for thus imperiling the nation through their narrowness and neglect; but this accusation, though natural, was not altogether fair, for at least half the blame should go to the British dyer, who did not care where his colors came from, so long as they were cheap. When finally the universities did turn over a new leaf and began ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... always a limit to human capacity; and no one can be a great genius without having some decidedly weak side, it may even be, some intellectual narrowness. In other words, there will foe some faculty in which he is now and then inferior to men of moderate endowments. It will be a faculty which, if strong, might have been an obstacle to the exercise of the qualities in which he excels. What this weak point is, it will always ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... at Court gave my relatives some grounds to hope that I might have the coadjutorship of Paris. At first they found a great deal of difficulty in my uncle's narrowness of spirit, which is always attended with fears and jealousies; but at length they prevailed upon him, and would have then carried our point, if my friends had not given it out, much against my judgment, that ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... only thus general benefactors in an age of turbulence and crime, in spite of all their narrowness and spiritual pride and ghostly arts and ambition for power, but they lent a helping hand to the peasantry. The Church was democratic, and enabled the poor to rise according to their merits, while nobles ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... distrust of myself; I remembered I was pitted against two, younger and no more fallible than myself. As soon as doubt of myself attacked me, I strove to look on the other side; I strove to rid myself of the old prejudices, the old superstitions, the old narrowness of faith; it was useless,—I was too old, and my prejudices had become part of me. It was in this state of perturbation that I had gone one day up to the top floor of the Palace Hotel. Thank ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... so much of his existence, which had kept him so strangely innocent and ignorant of the world on shore. Twice he had been shipwrecked. Times innumerable he and all with him had been threatened with death, and had escaped their doom by the narrowness of a hair-breadth. He was always unwilling at the outset to speak of this dark and dreadful side of his life: it was only by adroitly tempting him, by laying little snares for him in his talk, that she lured him into telling her of the terrors of the great deep. She sat listening to him ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... doubts of the practicability of the latter part of this proposal, on account of the narrowness of some streets, and the difficulty of placing the draining-sleds so as not to encumber too much the passage; but I am still of opinion that the former, requiring the dust to be swept up and carry'd away before the shops are open, is very practicable in the summer, when the days are long; for, ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... loftily above the transepts and nave, and, while the general proportions are not such as to suggest undue narrowness, the effect is of much greater height than really exists. This, too, is apparent when viewing ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... a half paddling we reached the Fura, which I should call a creek; it is not out of the mangrove-region. The bed is set in high, steep banks submerged during the rains; and the narrowness of the mouth, compared with the upper part, made it run, after the late showers, into the Ancobra like a mill-race. In fact, the paddlers were compelled to track in order to make headway. After ten minutes (200 yards) we reached a ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... alternatives. His immunity had been purchased at the cost of taking refuge in the somewhat rarified atmosphere of his perceptions; and his world being thus limited, he had given unusual care to its details, compensating himself for the narrowness of his horizon by the minute finish of his foreground. It was a world of fine shadings and the nicest proportions, where impulse seldom set a blundering foot, and the feast of reason was undisturbed by an intemperate flow of soul. To such a banquet his wife naturally remained ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... faded daguerreotypes of memory suggest but faintly any idea of the people with whom I began my life as a minister's wife. I can only show their narrowness. I am not able to give the shrill high notes of faith in their lives. They made an awful business of being good. And the contrast between them and the witty, mind-bred, spirit-lost people of the world ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... duty, and thus gains the good opinion of his fellow-townsmen and the confidence of his superiors; along with which, he gives himself up to the enjoyment of a pleasant contempt for all that immediately surrounds him. Pedantic /literati/, vain youngsters, every sort of narrowness and conceit, he banters rather than satirizes; and even his banter expresses no contempt. Just in the same way does he jest about his own condition, his misfortune, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the narrowness with which he defines "virtue," the broadness with which he defines "vice," his failure to recognize any intermediate ground between "virtue" and outright "vice," or any shades or degrees of either, the positiveness with which ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... and Dol certainly—rank with our smaller English cathedrals, allowing for a greater effect of height, partly positive, partly produced by narrowness. They are, in fact, English second-class churches with the height of English first-class churches. Bayeux, in every way the largest of the three, perhaps just trembles on the edge of the first-class. Coutances, the smallest, is distinctly defective in length; the ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... of the ridiculous,—of which, of course, you think I haven't a bit. It is, for instance, a constant vexation to me to be poor. It makes me frequently hate rich women; it makes me despise poor ones. I don't know whether you suffer acutely from the narrowness of your own means; but if you do, I dare say you shun rich men. I don't. I like to go into rich people's houses, and to be very polite to the ladies of the house, especially if they are very well-dressed and ignorant and vulgar. All women are like me in this respect; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... simply: "If to be a Russian is to be a bigot, like most of you Pan-Slav enthusiasts, then I am no Russian, but a European." Has he not put the whole gospel of Nationalism in half a dozen sentences in Rudin? He refused, however, to adopt along with his Nationalism the narrowness with which it has been ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... were not to be ticketed. What chiefly surprised her, in addition to their kindliness, to their taking her on faith without the formality of any recommendation or introduction, was their lack of intellectual narrowness. She did not, of course, so express it. But she sensed, in their presence, from references casually let fall in their conversation, a wider culture of which they were in possession, a culture at once puzzling ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the desolateness of the scene, which in nowise heightened our anticipations of the renowned glen. At length we rejoined the Sorgues and entered a little green valley running up into the mountain. The narrowness of the entrance entirely shut out the wind, and, except the rolling of the waters over their pebbly bed, all was still and lonely and beautiful. The sides of the dell were covered with olive trees, and a narrow strip of emerald ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... serviceable to the community, to what is useful in fact. Aristotle says quite naively, Those virtues must necessarily be the greatest which are the most useful to others. So the ancients thought patriotism the highest virtue, although it is really a very doubtful one, since narrowness, prejudice, vanity and an enlightened self-interest are main elements in it. Just before the passage I quoted, Aristotle enumerates all the virtues, in order to discuss them singly. They are Justice, Courage, Temperance, Magnificence, Magnanimity, Liberality, Gentleness, ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... understaffed and ill-equipped private adventure schools—they are sent into business prematurely, often at fourteen or fifteen, they become mechanical "respectable" drudges in processes they do not understand. They may escape want and squalor for a while, perhaps, but they cannot escape narrowness and limitation and a cramped and anxious life. If they get to anything better than that, it is chiefly through almost ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... this quiet man, his great height accented by a fit leanness, a narrowness of waist and hip, a length of leg and arm. His main article of clothing was the universal shorts of the Xecho settler. But, being fashioned of saffron yellow, they were the more brilliant because of his darkness of skin. For ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... that Amy should hint dissatisfaction with the loneliness in which her days were mostly spent. She had never lived in a large circle of acquaintances; the narrowness of her mother's means restricted the family to intercourse with a few old friends and such new ones as were content with teacup entertainment; but her tastes were social, and the maturing process which followed upon her marriage made her more conscious ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... of devotion. Fra Angelico had a special gift for expressing in his artistic creations is own spiritual life; the very qualities for which he stood, his virtues and his errors,—purity, unquestioning faith in the miraculous, narrowness of creed, and gentle and adoring humility,—all these elements are seen to completeness in his decorative pictures. Perhaps this is because he really lived up to his principles. One of his favourite sayings was "He who occupies himself with the things of Christ, ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... relation save the personally luxurious ones of love and admiration, or the identity of political opinion, or religious creed." We have learned to recognize them as selfish, although we blame them not for the will which chooses to be selfish, but for a narrowness of interest which deliberately selects its experience within a limited sphere, and we say that they illustrate the danger of concentrating the mind ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... morning we were divided into details for our various units, and sleepless, unshaven and hungry, I was again guided to where the 42nd Division had its headquarters—a spot to the south of the 29th, and, roughly, in the left centre of the short line of the Allies. The narrowness and shallowness of the area of our occupation struck all observers at once. The great ridge of Achi Baba, some six hundred feet above sea-level, barring our advance upon Turkey, confronted us the very moment that we climbed to the top of the cliffs that enclosed every ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... the oar, and, notwithstanding the breach of the seas and the narrowness of the passage, steered the boat close to the rock ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... narrowness is the attempt to manufacture "cultural backgrounds" for various important but quite ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... it as belonging, equally with the Manor, to a period of the past. It was a delightful, roomy, almost medieval kind of a place, so picturesque, in its old-world fashion, that one could forgive the lowness of the rooms, the narrowness of the passages, the steepness of the stairs, and the inconvenience of the fact that the front door opened directly into the dining-room, and the bedrooms nearly all led into one another. None of these drawbacks ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... and all other nationalities, especially that of America. They will never confess it; nevertheless, it is as essential a tonic to them as their bitter ale. Therefore,—and possibly, too, from a similar narrowness in his own character,—an American seldom feels quite as if he were at home among the English people. If he do so, he has ceased to be an American. But it requires no long residence to make him love their island, and appreciate it as thoroughly as they themselves do. For my part, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual impartiality should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered be a cause not partisan. Yet the work of Reconstruction, if admitted to be feasible at all, demands little but ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... not upon principles of exclusionism—not from narrowness of view, or illiberality of sentiment—but because I believe that our admirable Constitution, on principles more exalted and under sanctions more holy than those which Owenism or Socialism can boast, proclaims between men of all classes and degrees in the body politic a sacred bond of brotherhood ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... intimacy, in which there was scarcely any inequality, with the Princess of Lamballe, was soon followed by a more perilous affection. The Countess Jules de Polignac, who was generally detained in the country by the narrowness of her means, appeared at court on the occasion of a festival; the queen was pleased with her, made her remain, and loaded her, her and her family, not only with favors, but with unbounded and excessive ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... had read and travelled and thought and felt; whose mind met him even in the unhesitating confidence of knowledge—it is no wonder that he was in a dream. It turned his little world upside down: so brief a time had elapsed since he had cursed woman for bringing crime into his life, in the narrowness of his ignorance thinking them all alike. He was in the presence of a superior, and his own smallness came over ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... mysteries of the lock and the heavy portals swung open. In another instant the door had closed noiselessly, and the three were shut off from the street by a barricade of iron grillwork and plate glass. Both Bob and Merkle were weak from the narrowness of their escape, but the way was still barred by another door, through which two elaborate H's worked into French ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... lads could only think of their attempt with a shudder, for their efforts, though they did not quite grasp the narrowness of their escape from death, had resulted in a peculiar shock to their system, one effect of which was to make then disinclined to do anything more than sit and lie in the darkness watching the faint suggestion of dawn in the direction of the submerged archway. Then, too, ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... though Bacon had showed himself capable of taking a broad and calm view of questions which it was the fashion among good men, and men who were in possession of the popular ear, to treat with narrowness and heat, there was nothing to disclose his deeper thoughts—nothing foreshadowed the purpose which was to fill his life. He had, indeed, at the age of twenty-five, written a "youthful" philosophical essay, to which he gave the pompous title "Temporis Partus Maximus," "the Greatest ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... seemed to be indeed. A grey head, covered with short, close hair, strangely full behind the ears, and drawn out in the face to a portentous length, the narrowness of his forehead up to its summit widening over the eyebrows, which were shaggy and met, pointing downwards over the bridge of the nose, imperfectly shading with their sable outline the cold and inexpressive eyes; the short, rough beard, irregularly spread over ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... eldest son and heir of Jeremiah Styles—a cultivator of the soil—who, losing his first wife, took unto himself, at the mature age of fifty, a second, called by the neighbours, by reason of the narrowness of her economy, and the slenderness ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... few have a right to form any view. Hence the misconceptions of character, hence the false impressions and reports of words or deeds, which are the rule, rather than the exception, in the world at large; hence the extravagances of undisciplined talent, and the narrowness of conceited ignorance; because, though it is no easy matter to view things correctly, nevertheless the busy mind will ever be viewing. We cannot do without a view, and we put up with an illusion, when we cannot get ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... perhaps still more forcibly, to their appearance under the varied solemnities of night. Milton, it will be remembered, has given a clouded moon to Paradise itself. In the night-season also, the narrowness of the vales, and comparative smallness of the lakes, are especially adapted to bring surrounding objects home to the eye and to the heart. The stars, taking their stations above the hill-tops, are contemplated ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... the bay and town of Therapia, and the high promontory, as accessories merely to a plot of ground under the promontory and linked to it by the descending terrace. There is no word fitly descriptive of the place. Ravine implies narrowness; gorge signifies depth; valley means width; dell is too toylike. A summer retreat more delicious could not be imagined. Except at noon the sun did but barely glance into it. Extending hundreds of yards back from the bay toward the highlands west of the town, it was a ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... the very important things on which he insisted, in spite of very great opposition, and especially an opposition from the other churches of his denomination (for this was a good many years ago, when there was much more narrowness in churches and sects than there is at present), was with regard to doing away with close communion. He determined on an open communion; and his way of putting it, once decided upon, was: "My friends, it ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... criticism should really go his very characteristic summary of the question of the Red Indian. It marks the combination between the mental narrowness and the moral justice of the old Liberal. Dickens can see nothing in the Red Indian except that he is barbaric, retrograde, bellicose, uncleanly, and superstitious—in short, that he is not a member of the special civilisation of Birmingham or Brighton. It is curious to note the contrast ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... her youth. For us there can be no more the throne of marble—for us no more the vault of gold—but for us there is the loftier and lovelier privilege of bringing the power and charm of art within the reach of the humble and the poor; and as the magnificence of past ages failed by its narrowness and its pride, ours may prevail and continue, by its universality and ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... an affectation of being thought conversant with the ancients, or the narrowness of our minds, I know not, but we often pass over those actions in our contemporaries which would strike us with admiration in a Greek or a Roman. Their histories perhaps cannot produce a greater instance of public spirit ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... them, not caricatures. The Grandson of twenty-three referred to himself five or six times as an "old traveler," and as many as three times (with a serene complacency which was maddening) as a "man of the world." There was something very delicious about his leaving Boston to her "narrowness," unreproved and uninstructed. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... washer enter recesses in the face plate. It will be evident that, by turning the sleeve, F, so that the screw works inward, the jaw and all its appendages will be moved bodily in corresponding direction. But its movement is limited by the arms of the washer, G, which, through the narrowness of the recesses, are allowed only just enough play to compensate for slight changes in the jaw. As the above device is applied to every jaw, it follows that any one of them may be nicely adjusted from the outside, so that all are ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... this merely a result of the English formalism and narrowness in their interpretation of the word suo in the writ (disseisivit de teuemento suo). Gewere, 429-432. But there was no such narrowness in dealing with catalla sua in ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... as in the opening of the debate, much may be gained by an attitude which will win the favor of the hearers toward the speaker and his ideas. An attitude of petty criticism, of narrowness of view, is undesirable at any stage of the debate. The debater who is inclined to belittle his opponents will only belittle himself. To the judges it will appear that the speaker who has time to ridicule his adversaries must be a little ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon |
