"Penetrative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great question as to the point at which the contest between shot and armour will be brought to a standstill. That it cannot proceed indefinitely may be confidently taken for granted. The plate-makers thicken their armour while the gun-makers enlarge the size and increase the penetrative power of their weapons, until the weight that has to be carried on a battle-ship renders the ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... image, from this toil of clay Already freed, with eager joy who hail'd The mirror of eternal truth unveil'd, Mid light effulgent and celestial day:— I, more than cherub, whose unfetter'd soul With penetrative glance aspir'd to flow Through nature's veins, and, still creating, know The life of gods,—how am I punish'd now! One thunder-word hath hurl'd me from ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... forgotten the other man. But now I noticed that the pseudo-bandits wore a watchful and not unhopeful air. And suddenly one of them whistled—a thin, shrill note that had, as Tish later remarked, great penetrative power without being noisy. ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of art, made the palace of the soul, becomes its dungeon-house, self-generating and filling fast with all loathsome and deathly shapes; and the heaven of intellectual joy becomes at last a more penetrative and intenser hell. The "Idylls of the King" are but exquisite variations on the one note—that the only true and high life of humanity is the life of full and free obedience; and that such life on earth becomes of necessity one of ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... a few steps hurriedly he paused, once more listening. The night was intensely calm;—not a cloud crossed the star-spangled violet dome of air wherein the moon soared serenely, bathing all visible things in a crystalline brilliancy so pure and penetrative, that the finest cuttings on the gigantic grey facade of Notre Dame could be discerned and outlined as distinctly as though every little portion were seen through a magnifying glass. The Cardinal's tall attenuated figure, standing alone and almost ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... of this volume will give the reader a more correct idea of the character discussed than he would probably get from reading their biographies. The lecture is analytical, penetrative, terse, incisive, and candid. The book is worth its price, ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... in goodness a penetrative power that nothing can withstand. Cunning and malice melt away before its mild, open, steady glance. Not alone on the fields where chivalry charges for laurels, with helmet and breastplate and lance in rest, can ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... radiation emanates oscillate in ultra-red periods. Let us apply this test to the radiation from a flame of hydrogen. This flame consists mainly of incandescent aqueous vapour, the temperature of which, as calculated by Bunsen, is 3259 deg.C, so that, if the penetrative power of radiant heat, as generally supposed, augment with the temperature of its source, we may expect the radiation from this flame to be copiously transmitted by water. While, however, a layer of the bisulphide of carbon 0.07 of an inch in thickness transmits ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... builder of theologies or cosmogonies; the engineer, as well as the artist, all work under the rays of this illuminator; and, other things being equal, he excels all others on whose work those rays shine with the most sustained and penetrative force. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... no specious explanations for her withdrawal from the debate, and when Mary Brooks innocently inquired "what little yarn" she told the registrar, that she could get away so often, Eleanor fixed her with an unpleasantly penetrative stare and answered with all her old-time hauteur that she ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... to Halicarnassus and—kicked him. That sounds very dreadful and horrible, and it is, if you are thinking of a great, brutal, brogan kick, such as a stupid farmer gives to his patient oxen; but not, if you mean only a delicate, compact, penetrative punch with the toe of a tight-fitting gaiter,—addressed rather to the conscience than the shins, to the sensibilities rather than the senses. The kick masculine is coarse, boorish, unmitigated, predicable only of Calibans. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... opportunity. Mademoiselle asked them all in, and tried to furnish a seat to each; but failing, 'Sieur George went straight across the room and sat on the hair-trunk. The action was so conspicuous, the landlord laid it up in his penetrative mind. ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... he said, complacently—"The board of announcement was prospective, not penetrative. Orders were consumed in rotation, and his lordship Charlemont was the ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... and jerked for fresh meat and cream for clarified butter; in fine, all eatables of one and the same kind, it is unlawful to buy or barter some for other some.[FN331]" Now when the doctor of law heard her words and knew that she was wit-keen, penetrative, ingenious and learned in jurisprudence and the Traditions and the interpretation of the Koran and what not else, he said in his mind, "Needs must I manoeuvre with her, that I may overcome her in the assembly of the Commander of the Faithful." So he ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... with this adjunct, sweete; but yet very improperly, for it differeth not only from sacke in sweetness and pleasantness of taste, but also in colour and consistence, for it is not so white in colour as sack, nor so thin in substance; wherefore it is more nutritive than sack, and less penetrative." Via recta ad Vitam longum. 4to. 1622. In Howell's time, Canary wine was much adulterated. "I think," says he, in one of his Letters, "there is more Canary brought into England than to all the world besides; I think also, there is a hundred times more drunk under ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... stared in surprise; but his blunter perception proved less penetrative than the keen insight of the women, and he simply wondered what this rather rough looking stranger could know about it, anyhow. He expressed a hope that it might be as Mr. Gray said. For himself he hadn't much faith. But, if there wasn't ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... asked the group collectively, in a voice that was singularly clear and penetrative. "I haven't seen him ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... Boss," he was saying excitedly. "Lay a big barrage against them—no, not on them—in front of them—always in front of them. Pull it back as they come on. But churn h—l out of the ground in front of them! Get the rocketmen to make a penetrative time rocket. Shoot it into the ground in front of them, deep enough to be below their canopy ray, see, and detonate under them as ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... beginning. Norton, like Grimald, insists on extreme accuracy in following the original, but he bases his demand on a truth largely ignored by translators up to this time, the essential relationship between thought and style. He makes the following surprisingly penetrative comment on the nature and significance of Calvin's Latin style: "I considered how the author thereof had of long time purposely labored to write the same most exactly, and to pack great plenty of matter in small room ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... Quincey's essays in general it may be said that they bear witness alike to the diversity of his knowledge and the penetrative power of his intellect. The wide range of his subjects, however, deprives his papers when taken together of the weight which might attach to a series of related discussions. And, remarkable as is De Quincey's aptitude for analysis and speculation, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... Raymond's Mr. Lloyd George: A Biographical and Critical Sketch. The author of Uncensored Celebrities is far too modest when he calls his new work a "sketch." It is a genuine biography with that special accent due to the biographer's personality and his power of what I may call penetrative synthesis. By that I mean the insight into character which coordinates and builds—the sort of biography that makes a ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... temperature (after three months of barbed stab of cold, and the breach of the seal of the seventy-seventh phial of Dr. Stirbacks), in gratitude for that miraculous escape, he did his very best to please everybody. To Dr. Upround he was an agreeable and penetrative companion; to Mrs. Upround, a gallant guest, with a story for every slice of bread and butter; to Janetta, a deity combining the perfections of Jupiter, Phoebus, Mars, and Neptune (because of his yacht), without any of their ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... another kind of rays are set free, which differ greatly from those described by Lenard as cathode rays The most marked difference between the two is the fact that Roentgen rays are not deflected by a magnet, indicating a very essential difference, while their range and penetrative power are incomparably greater. In fact, all those qualities which have lent a sensational character to the discovery of Roentgen's rays were mainly absent from these of Lenard, to the end that, although Roentgen has not been ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... inspection of her churches, palaces, and pictures. That marvelous intelligence which was her pride, burned brightly in a long series of historians and annalists, who have handed down to us the biography of the city in volumes as remarkable for penetrative acumen as for definite delineation and dramatic interest. We possess picture-galleries of pages in which the great men of Florence live again and seem to breathe and move, epics of the commonwealth's vicissitudes from her earliest commencement, detailed tragedies and highly finished episodes, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... pale, liquid maiden, ascending through the roots and veins to meet air, a blue boy robed in golden warmth, descending through the leaves, with a whisper, to her embrace. So the personifications of death in literature, thus far, give us no penetrative glance into what it really is, help us to no acute definition of it, but poetically fasten on some feature, or accident, or ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... could Lois be satisfied. Then, there were the women who always spoke as if a man were an animal and a woman were not a woman, but a spirit; but Lois was very much a woman! She settled at last, after penetrative thought, on one husband and wife, the latter a plain little person no longer young. Every man liked to go to her charming, comfortable house; every man admired her; and that her husband, a very handsome man himself, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... salt, or rather more quickly if a little acetic acid be present. Such dyes are very useful for dyeing heavily milled or felted fabrics, such as hat bodies for instance, as then the dye possesses greater penetrative properties and passes more into the substance of the fabric, which is, therefore, better dyed through. Also they are suitable for dyeing half-wool fabrics as will be seen on referring to the chapter dealing with the dyeing of union or ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... sign-post to Erebus, is strong enough to go the other way. This strength of optimism, indeed the strength we find always underlying his tolerance, his radicalism, his searches, prophecies, and revelations, is heightened and made efficient by "imagination-penetrative," a thing concerned not with the combining but the apprehending of things. A possession, akin to the power, Ruskin says, all great pictures have, which "depends on the penetration of the imagination into the true nature ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... in this penetrative suggestion of life that the secret of that sweetness of his is to be found. He gives us indeed no lovely natural objects like Leonardo or Titian, but only the coldest, most elementary shadowing of rock or tree; no lovely draperies and comely gestures of ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... height, and, especially latterly, somewhat stout; his forehead was of splendid proportions, recalling instantaneously the Stratford bust of Shakespeare; and his gray-blue eyes were clear and piercing, and characterized by that rapid, penetrative ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... course, only mere surmises, but Liszt, although often wrong as to incidents, is, thanks to his penetrative genius, generally right as to essences. Indeed, if George Sand's surroundings and Chopin's character and tastes are kept in view nothing seems to be more probable than that his over-delicate susceptibilities may have occasionally been shocked by unrestrained ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Lamarck—must be counted an exception to the general rule, but in England and Germany there are few men of scientific reputation who do not accept Mr. Darwin as the founder of what is commonly called "Darwinism," and regard him as perhaps the most penetrative and ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... such verses, we find ourselves very far away indeed from the veritable poetry of Japan,—from those compositions which, with a few chosen syllables only, can either create a perfect colored picture in the mind, or bestir the finest sensations of memory with marvelous penetrative delicacy. The Daikoku-mai are extremely crude; and their long popularity has been due, I fancy, rather to the very interesting manner of singing them than to any quality which could permit us to compare them with the ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... whose penetrative wisdom found The South-Sea rocks and shelves, where thousands drown'd, When credit sunk, and commerce gasping lay, Thou stood'st; nor sent one bill unpaid away. When not a guinea chink'd on Martin's boards, ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... when they, the monarch's "unfortunate subjects,"—so they were described in the memorial—besought the king's "gracious majesty," of his "well-known munificence," to grant them a something towards the drinking of the royal health. (Ah, with what keen eyes and penetrative genius did little Charles, from his corner, watch the strange sad stream of humanity that trickled through the room, and may be said to have smeared its approval of that petition!) And while Mr. Dickens was enjoying his prison honours, he was also enjoying his Admiralty pension,[3] ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... has gathered in its corporate experience through the ages. The valuable content of his message, so far as he succeeds in delivering one, the ideas with which his words are freighted, bear the marks of the slow accumulations of spiritual experience, and they reveal the rich and penetrative influence of the social group in which the mystic's inner life formed and ripened. They have a history ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... activity involved in the making of poetry are three: personalizing, combining and versifying," it is obvious that we have been dealing with the first two. If we prefer to use the famous terms employed by Ruskin in Modern Painters, we have been considering the penetrative, associative and contemplative types of imagination. But these Ruskinian names, however brilliantly and suggestively employed by the master, are dangerous tools for the beginner in ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... and now Reason may very well say to me, "You are in very great danger"; but I am not in any danger, because I am guided whenever necessary by some condescending sagacity far more sagacious than my poor Reason, infinitely more penetrative and effectual than any sense of eye or ear. I remain fully convinced that at this time, at any rate, it was an outside sagacity which guided me—truly a ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... essays critical and historical, volumes of travel-impressions in various parts of Europe; but his finest work is contained in his vivid and masterly studies on "Les Origines de la France Contemporaine" and in his "History of English Literature" (1833-4; Eng. trans, by Van Laun), the most penetrative and sympathetic survey of English literature yet done by a foreigner; he was a disciple of Sainte-Beuve, but went beyond his master in ascribing character too much to external ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... advertisements of the programme, the substance of which I have already given. But hardly, if at all less noticeable, were two others which rose up irrepressible upon every prominent space, searching all places with a subtle penetrative power against which precautions were powerless. These advertisements were not in Italian but in English, nevertheless they were neither of them English—but both, I believe, American. The one was ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... in fact, they owe to him. To have exercised his vivifying and fertilising influence over the minds of others his intellect was bound to be of the dispersive order; it was essential that he should "take all knowledge to be his province," and that that eager, subtle, and penetrative mind should range as freely as it did over subject after subject of human interest;—illuminating each of them in turn with those rays of true critical insight which, amid many bewildering cross-lights and some few downright ignes fatui, flash forth upon ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... Berselius from his fellow-men. Between him and them a great gulf was fixed, a gulf narrow enough to speak across, but of an impenetrable depth. Berselius was always so assured, so impassively calm, so authoritative, his conversation so penetrative, so lit by intuition and acquired knowledge, that Adams sometimes in his company felt that elation which comes to us when we find ourselves in the presence of a supreme mind. At other times this overpowering personality weighed upon him ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... was a very well disciplined one at that time; he was, I believe, "a good hater," a dangerous opponent, yet withal he had immense self-command. On the whole, he was generally regarded chiefly as a man of penetrative intellect and sarcastic wit; but under all this I discerned a spirit so true, so delicate and tender, so touched [30] with a profound and exquisite, though concealed, sensibility, that he won my admiration, respect, and affection in an equal degree. He removed ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... discovered that neither of them was so frivolous as it appeared, or, at least, that there were visitors in Parton Street who seemed less frivolous, and whose frivolity shocked her more. Her shy brown eyes were penetrative, and often saw more than one would have imagined, and at last they believed that they had seen through the philosophic indifference of Lady Garnett's shrug, the gentle irony of Rainham's perpetual smile, the various ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... whom he happened to be addressing himself at the moment. I felt that no effect upon my mind of what he uttered, no emotion, however transitory, in myself, escaped his notice, though not from any positive vigilance on his part, but because his faculty of observation was so penetrative and delicate; and to say the truth, it a little confused me to discern always a ripple on his mobile face, responsive to any slightest breeze that passed over the inner reservoir of my sentiments, and seemed thence to extend to a similar reservoir within himself. On matters of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... a venerable figure with hair as white as snow, and a face strikingly characterized by benevolence. It bore marks of thought, however, and penetrative insight; although the keen glances of the eyes were now somewhat bedimmed with tears, which the aged shed, or almost shed, on lighter stress of emotion than would elicit ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the meanwhile, suffered a corresponding agitation, more penetrative in proportion to the finer substance of her nature. She did not know until the scene was over how much vital force it had cost her; when she took off the veil a fire danced before her eyes, and her limbs ached and trembled as she lay down in the darkness. All night ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... sinner must be indeed a pleasure. The spire is two hundred and fifty feet high. I mounted and saw the great bell, over three tons in weight. I also saw the bishop's robes of wondrous richness and penetrative virtue, the consecrated slippers which the acolytes wear, with their scarlet robes, remindful of Egyptian flamens and African flamingoes; the blessed candle-box and the seven-times blessed candles, which at once drop tallow on the holder's clothes and ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... shot is kept up. The long gun enables the pressure of the gases formed by the burning powder to act longer on the shot, with the result that a higher velocity is given to it, not only increasing its range, but also its penetrative power. ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... arms was still delight, Quiet as a street at night; And thoughts of you, I do remember, Were green leaves in a darkened chamber, Were dark clouds in a moonless sky. Love, in you, went passing by, Penetrative, remote, and rare, Like a bird in the wide air, And, as the bird, it left no trace In the heaven of your face. In your stupidity I found The sweet hush after a sweet sound. All about you was the light That dims the greying end of night; Desire was the unrisen sun, Joy the day not yet begun, ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... in the spring of 1906, a stocky, sturdy, penetrative temperament of not more than twenty-four or -five years of age, steady of eye, rather aloof and yet pervasive and bristling; a devouring type. Without saying much, and seeming to take anything I had to say with ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... indefeasible right to liberty of heart, he saw himself, somewhat [72] wearily, very far gone from the choice, the consecration, of his boyhood. If he could but be rid of that altogether! Or if that would but speak with irresistible decision and effect! Was there perhaps somewhere, in some penetrative mind in this age of novelties, some scheme of truth, some science about men and things, which might harmonise for him his earlier and later preference, "the sacred and the profane loves," or, failing that, establish, to his pacification, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... no penetrative mind To know these fellows: when You meet them, you, unless you're blind, At once discern ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... were generally used. The dum-dum bullet is a soft-nosed missile which, when it strikes a bone, flattens out and splatters, creating a jagged wound which it is almost impossible to treat or heal. The Germans, in ordinary, use a steel jacketed bullet which possesses high penetrative powers, while the French at the beginning of the war were ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... life, and the play of individual qualities, displayed itself. There were two intellectual sides to his mind—one which made him a poet, quickness and delicacy of observation and sympathetic interpretation, the realising and anticipating power of deep feeling and penetrative imagination; the other, at first sight, little related to poetry, a hard-headed, ingenious, prosaic shrewdness and directness of common sense, dealing practically with things as they are and on ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... presented her stern to the enemy, she has thrown up the game, barring some fortunate accident. The aggregate weight of metal discharged by each ironclad from all its guns was nearly the same,[12] but the Arkansas had a decided advantage in penetrative power by her four 6.4-inch rifles. Her sides, and probably her bow, were decidedly stronger than those of her opponent; but whatever the relative advantages or disadvantages under other circumstances, the Carondelet had now to fight her fight with two 32-pounders opposed to two VIII-inch ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... vision we find first the species kept in the memory; secondly, the vision itself, which is caused by the penetrative power of the soul, that is, the faculty of imagination, informed by the species; and thirdly, we find the intention of the will joining both together. But each of these trinities falls short of the Divine image. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... for operating upon. I was assured that this was an excellent mode of separation, there being no tearing about or splintering of the wood. It might be a good method where there is perceptibly much impasto of glue, and which, while almost readily yielding to the penetrative power of steam, is a great nuisance under ordinary circumstances. Another method would be that of getting some lengths of soft cotton rag or other substance that would retain moisture well when wetted; these could ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... Tallien menacing Robespierre with a dagger, Billaud roaring out proposals to arrest this person and that Robespierre gesticulating, threatening, yelling, shrieking. His enemies knew that if he were once allowed to get a hearing, his authority might even yet overawe the waverers. A penetrative word or a heroic gesture might lose them the day. The majority of the chamber still hesitated. They called for Barere, in whose adroit faculty for discovering the winning side they had the confidence of long experience. Robespierre, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... in common: they were poets and moralists. They reproduced the conditions of life in the light of penetrative observation and ideal contemplation; they illustrated its duties in their breach and in their observance, by precepts and well-chosen portraits of character. The particular form in which they wrote makes little difference when we come upon the utterance of a noble truth or ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... farther ask you to read, in the same volume, the close of the chapter 'Of Imagination Penetrative,' pp. 120 to 130, of which the gist, which I must give as the first principle from which we start in our to-day's inquiry, is that "Imagination, rightly so called, has no food, no delight, no care, no perception, except of truth; it is for ever looking under masks, and burning up mists; ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... social comprehension and sociologic interpretation went even deeper than this. His mastery lay not alone in penetrative reflection of a bit of sectional life and a vanished phase of our civilization, not alone in astute criticism of an "institution" blotted from the American escutcheon and a collective racial passion that periodically ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... only free from even the momentary intrusion of either the clown or the caricaturist, but even from the presence of "comic properties" (as actors would call them) of any kind: scenes of which the external setting is of the simplest possible character, while the humour is of that deepest and most penetrative kind which springs from the eternal incongruities of human nature, the ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... moving force, and recognizes two original forces, repulsive, expansive superficial force or force of contact, by which a body resists the entrance of other bodies into its own space, and attractive, penetrative force or the force which works at a distance, in virtue of which all particles of matter attract one another. In order to a determinate filling of space the co-operation of both fundamental forces is required. In opposition to the mechanical theory of the atomists, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... shown any indifference towards her, but in the end, a sweet smile em eloped her face, and the pleasantest conviction of a young life seemed to thrust itself upon her. She was forced to tell herself that his eyes never turned from her, until they had looked into hers with that deep penetrative glance that makes us feel that a soul is looking into another soul. His hand had never been drawn away from hers until she had detected that slight, almost unwilling pressure that has only one meaning. When the tongue ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... clear-sighted, discriminating, penetrative, shrewd, crafty, keen, perspicacious, subtile, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Ruth by the wayside, adding these humble children of the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionate souls. In this respect, Wordsworth's work resembles most that of George Sand, in those of her novels which depict country life. With a penetrative pathos, which puts him in the same rank with the masters of the sentiment of pity in literature, with Meinhold and Victor Hugo, he collects all the traces of vivid excitement which were to be found in that ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... its complicated structure, we behold what has all the appearance of a wide and indefinitely prolonged area strewed over with discontinuous masses and clouds of stars which the telescope at length refuses to analyse.' The Great Cluster in Perseus, which lies in the Milky Way, also baffled the penetrative capacity of Herschel's instruments. We cannot help quoting Professor Nichol's description of Herschel's observation of this remarkable object. He says: 'In the Milky Way, thronged all over with splendours, there is one portion not unnoticed by the general observer, the spot ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... of the Guards Corps, the flower of the Prussian Army, were sent like a catapult at the gap in the French line, immediately in front of Rheims. Five times they charged, and with such heroic daring and such penetrative energy that General Foch did not dare break from his position. As they came up for the fifth assault, a wild cheer of admiration broke out along the French line. But the rifles spoke steadily, none the less for that. After the fifth assault, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... those chiselled features, which one sees on ancient busts and coins no less than in the streets of modern Rome. The checks were sunken and sallow; the large, black, melancholy eyes had a wistful, anxious, penetrative expression, that spoke a stringent, earnest spirit, which, however deep might be the grave in which it lay buried, had not yet found repose. The long, thin, delicately formed hands were emaciated and bloodless; they clasped with a nervous eagerness a rosary and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... large measure with the qualities of an historian of the highest order. A clear and comprehensive vision, a wide knowledge and careful study of human nature, free and generous sympathies are united in him with a penetrative imagination which vivifies the life of past times, with a reverence for truth which excludes prejudice and prepossession, and with a profoundly religious spirit. The tone of his thought is manly and vigorous, and his style, with the beauty of which the readers of his essays have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... your coat, my dear Algy, I will talk to you about Mrs. Lovell." Edward kept his penetrative eyes on Algernon. "Listen to me: you'll ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... my employer. As he stood before me, I surveyed him; a well-formed gentleman, above the ordinary height, with pale complexion, set off by dark, penetrative eyes; a shapely head covered with long, heavy masses of straight dark hair. The impression his appearance conveyed to me was that of a person benevolent but apathetic; unhappy without the will or power to ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... and disopilate; neither doth it so, untill it be helped by Art, as it is ground, stirred, and made fine, in the preparing of it; the Sulphurous parts, and those of quick-silver, being thinne, active, and penetrative, they mingle, at the last with those parts, which are Earthy and astringent: Insomuch, that they being mingled after this manner one with another, we cannot now say, that the steele is astringent, but rather, that it is penetrative, ...
— Chocolate: or, An Indian Drinke • Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma
... fun. The delicacy of Roman satire died with him; to reappear in our own Augustan age with Addison and Steele, to find faint echo in the gentle preachments of Cowper, to impress itself in every page on the lambent humour, the self-accusing tolerance, the penetrative yet benignant wit ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... the things of modern habit and creation; I have listened to his luminous interpretations of the changed conditions which he saw about him; I have noted his unconcern toward the merely material advances of society, his penetrative insight into its intellectual and moral developments. A mind so capacious and open, a nature so trained and poised, could not be otherwise than self-contained and calm even in the presence of changes so vast and manifold as those ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... the Word speak but one language, teach but one set of truths. How was it possible that the writers of the earlier Scriptures described physical phenomena with wonderful sublimity, and with such penetrative truth? They gazed upon the same heaven that those men saw who ages afterward led the world in knowledge. These latter were near-sighted, and absorbed [Page 245] in the pictures on the first veil of matter; the former were ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... labour, and so impatient, that after they were taken they died from insupportable dolour. As soon as any man, invaded these bulls, they rushed with such, terrible press upon him that they struck him to the earth, taking no fear of hounds, sharp lances, or other most penetrative weapons."—Boetius, Chron. Scot. Vol. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... their reputation for intelligence. One of Mr. Middleheath's favourite tricks for disabusing a jury of the belief that they possessed any common sense was, before addressing them, to stare each juryman in the face for half a minute or so in turn with his piercing penetrative eyes, accompanying the look with a pitying contemptuous smile, the gaze and the smile implying that counsel for the opposite side may have flattered them into believing that their intelligences were fit to try such an intricate case, ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... few with minds touched by nature or right cultivation to the finer issues, admire the supreme genius which takes some poor Italian tale, with its coarse plot and gross personages, and shooting it through with threads of variegated meditation, produces a masterpiece of penetrative reflection and high pensive suggestion as to the deepest things and most secret parts of the life of men. But to the general these finer threads are indiscernible. What touches them in the Shakesperean poetry, and most rightly touches them and us all, are topics eternally ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... You have laughed at my occult tendencies, sneered at my Theosophy, but I can now, alas! give you convincing proof of the penetrative power of the one, the sustaining power of the other. I became so nervous at your continued silence and absence that I did what I had promised you not to do—went out in my astral to hunt for you—and I found you! Would to God I had never ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... familiar from her very birth. She treads as though her footsteps had been among marble palaces, beneath roofs of fretted gold, o'er cedar floors and pavements of jasper and porphyry—amid gardens full of statues, and flowers, and fountains, and haunting music. She is full of penetrative wisdom, and genuine tenderness, and lively wit; but as she has never known want, or grief, or fear, or disappointment, her wisdom is without a touch of the sombre or the sad; her affections are all mixed ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... Superficies, for if we found the beams of Light that rebound from the Object to the Eye, to peirce deep into the Colour'd body, we should not judge it Opacous, but either Translucid, or at least Semi-diaphanous, and though the Schools seem to teach us that Colour is a Penetrative Quality, that reaches to the Innermost parts of the Object, as if a piece of Sealing-wax be broken into never so many pieces, the Internal fragments will be as Red as the External surface did appear, yet that is but a Particular Example that will not overthrow the Reason lately offer'd, especially ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... Lancaster or a Reilly in his hand. After very few trials he can imitate them, if not excel their Leeds, provided he has a steady hand. And it is to forward this end that this paragraph is written. African game require "bone-crushers;" for any ordinary carbine possesses sufficient penetrative qualities, yet has not he disabling qualities which a gun must possess to be useful in the hands ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Doris wondered what had happened. There was a loneliness in the very air, as there had been when Uncle Leverett died. The sky was overcast, not exactly promising a storm, but soft and penetrative, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... Westerner of the forum, the rostrum, and the tribune, as he stood to be inaugurated under the war-cloud in 1861. But there is another Lincoln as dear to the common people—the Lincoln of happy quotations, the speaker of household words. Instead of the erect, impressive, penetrative platform orator we see a long, gaunt figure, divided between two chairs for comfort, the head bent forward, smiling broadly, the lips curved in laughter, the deep eyes irradiating their caves of ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... forty-five years of age, perhaps less; for the abundant mass of dark chestnut hair reveals not one silvery thread. One glance is sufficient. Never was character more cleverly delineated than upon this woman's face. There, in bold relief, is the deep penetrative mind—one that has power to read the masses as they pass before her mental vision. Her's is the heart that opens wide to the one crushed and broken by the uncharitable sect called "the world." Her's is the hand ready to help the suffering and support the tottering. The shoddyisms of modern ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... interaction, obtaining a measure of result far surpassing their mere addition. The creations of our mind are, of course, mere spiritual existences, things of seeming, akin to illusions; and yet our mind can never rest satisfied with an unreality, because our mind is active, penetrative and grasping, and therefore craves for realisation, for completeness and truth, and feels bruised and maimed whenever it hits against a dead wall or is pulled up by a contradiction; nay, worst of all, it grows giddy and faint when suddenly brought face to face with emptiness. ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... with the penetrative terseness that made him a master of the apophthegm, pronounced it "not to be enough to have great qualities: a man must have the economy of them." Or, as another writer says: "Empire in this world belongs not so much to wits, to talents, and to industry, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... development of our race is ever progressing. The church must exist on its own basis during the interval. Human deeds of righteousness tend toward the perfection of the church. Then will religion permeate the world. Yet it will not exist as something separate, but all-penetrative. It will not be absolutely divine, but superlatively human. Thus will the dualism of the human and divine, the religious and the moral, be destroyed. When the day of ecclesiastical perfection—which is really civil perfection—arrives, the state will ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... due to penetrative wounds (because of the important function of this joint and its large capsule, which when inflamed discharges synovia in a manner that closure of such an open joint is seldom possible) ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... gazed through the stony shroud, as if, by very force of penetrative sight, I would clear every lineament of the lovely face. And now I thought the hand that had lain under the cheek, had slipped a little downward. But then I could not be sure that I had at first observed its position accurately. So I sang again; for the longing ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... whose magic art, Had plumbed ('twas said) the human heart, Whom for the penetrative ken Wherewith he probed the souls of men The Public and the Public's wife Declared synonymous with Life,— Sat idle, being much perplexed What Attitude to study next, Because he would not wholly tell Which Pose was likeliest to sell. To him the Muse: ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... really count for as much as one that takes the course of years to produce its slow results? The most ephemeral of all our literary productions—the daily paper—is incalculably the most influential, and its influence largely depends on this dynamic quality that has been noted—the penetrative power of a thing of light weight moving at a high speed. And this penetrative power effective literature must have to-day on account of the vastly increased mass ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... of the century the air was full of ideas upon these social subjects. The temptation was irresistible to turn from the confusion of squalor, oppression, license, distorted organisation, penetrative disorder, to ideal states comprising a little range of simple circumstances, and a small number of types of virtuous and unsophisticated character. Much came of the relief thus sought and found. It was the beginning of the subversive process, for it taught men to look away from ideas of practical ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... genuine manhood. Let your life and your thought be narrow, and your sympathy will shrink to a like scale. It is a quality which follows the seeing mind afield, which waits on experience. It is not a mere sentiment. It goes not with pity so much as with a penetrative understanding of other men's lives and hopes and temptations. Ignorance of these things makes it worthless. Its best tutors are observations and experience, and these serve only those who keep clear eyes and a wide field of vision. It ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... only thing he ain't never done," the tried and true servant answered, her tone more gratingly penetrative than ever. ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... slippery rocks, and felt like a cochin-china fowl, or muscovy duck, or dodo, trying to keep pace with a humming-bird. Their voices were well suited to their small brilliant forms; not loud, though high-pitched and singularly musical and penetrative, like the high clear notes of a skylark at a distance. They also reminded me of certain notes, which have a human quality, in some of our songsters—the swallow, redstart, pied wagtail, whinchat, and two ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... bold—walks with a spring—looks rather above the heads of his fellow-passengers—but with a quick, easy turn of his own, which is lightly set on his shoulders; his mouth is a little open—his eye is bright, rather restless, but penetrative—his port has something of defiance—his form is erect, but without stiffness. Such was the appearance of the Baron's companion. And as Randal turned round at Levy's voice, the Baron said to his companion, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... word; to send the message by the law of suggestion from mind to mind. The mental intimation will reach the one to whom it is sent if the conditions for telepathy are observed, for thought is far more penetrative than the Roentgen ray, and the atmosphere is magnetic, and carries it as the wire does the electric current. All these finer conditions are beginning to make themselves felt as practicable forces. Humanity is becoming "plastic to the spirit touch;" sensitive to those vibrations too ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... Bellini or Perugino, will attain the most profound and serene color, while it will never betray into looseness or audacity. But if in the mind of the painter invention prevail over veneration,—if his eye be creative rather than penetrative, and his hand more powerful than patient—let him not be confined to a system where light, once lost, is as irrecoverable as time, and where all success depends on husbandry of resource. Do not measure out to him his sunshine in ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... penetrative power of telescopes has not been further increased, it is because that power detracts from their light; and the moon, which is but a reflecting mirror, does not give back sufficient light to enable us to perceive ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... in wisdom, might possibly have fallen a prey to some of the numerous deceptive artifices which originated in these causes, if the admirable political sagacity of his vigilant and august consort, the worthy daughter of Maria Theresa, aided by the keen council of our immortal Nelson, and the penetrative wisdom and address of the British minister and his accomplished lady, had not preserved his Sicilian, majesty's unsuspecting mind from the ruinous effects of such, destructive machinations. Nothing can possibly be more obvious, than that the advice of these friendly fellow-sufferers ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison |
