"Profundity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a visitor at Wendell Phillips's home in Boston, and the music of his voice, the liquid charm of his words, the purity, the transparency of his diction, the profundity of his knowledge, the fascination of his personality, and his marvelous art of putting things, I shall never forget. He sat down on the sofa beside me and talked as he would to an old schoolmate, and it seemed to me that I had never heard such exquisite and polished English. I have met several ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Mott's, given in compliment to herself, where she had sat nearly speechless for an hour and a half while half a dozen young ladies had discussed the origin of evil with great volubility, and what seemed to her, however it might have impressed metaphysicians, astounding erudition and profundity. She had assisted at that sacred rite of musical devotees, the Saturday night Symphony concert, where a handful of people gathered to hear the music, and all the rest of the world crowded for the sake of having ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... whipped syllabub. There was no investigation of first causes, first principles. There was no investigation of any thing at all. There was no attention paid to that great point, the "fitness of things." In short there was no fine writing like this. It was all low—very! No profundity, no reading, no metaphysics—nothing which the learned call spirituality, and which the unlearned choose to stigmatize as cant. [Dr. M. says I ought to spell "cant" with a ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... its last resting-place, there to repose "till the sea gives up her dead,"—this, with the wailing moan of the wind aloft, the sobbing of the water alongside, and the solemn glory of the dying day all uniting to imbue the scene and the occasion with a profundity of sadness and a sublimity that would have been impossible under other circumstances. And so deeply was Leslie moved by it that, for the first time since the words of his cruel and unjust sentence had fallen upon his ears, he once more ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... position. Bold though the seaman was, and desperate the circumstances, his strong frame quivered when he gazed down and felt himself gradually toppling. The height he knew to be little short of sixty feet, but in the dark night it appeared an abyss of horrible profundity. A cold sweat broke out upon him, and for one moment he felt an almost irresistible tendency to let go the umbrella and clutch the window-sill, but he was too late. Like lightning he shot down for a couple of yards; then the parachute expanded ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... the 'Ode of Life.' The only fault we have to find with this really remarkable effort—a sort of expansion of Wordsworth's famous Ode—is that it is rather too long for its ideas; but it possesses power, sweetness, occasional profundity, and unmistakable music. It is, when all is said and done, a true 'Ode,' sweeping the reader along as the ode should ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... than even with Rubens; it was to support and give preciousness to cool color above, while it remained itself untouched as the representative of warm reflexes and extreme depth of transparent gloom. We believe this employment of the brown ground to be the only means of uniting majesty of hue with profundity of shade. But its value to the Fleming is connected with the management of the lights, which we have next to consider. As we here venture for the first time to disagree in some measure with Mr. Eastlake, let us ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... campaign of the Austrians is incomprehensible to all our military men—not on account of its profundity, but on account of its absurdity or incoherency. In the present circumstances, half-measures must always be destructive, and it is better to strike strongly and firmly than justly. To invade Bavaria without disarming the Bavarian army, and to enter Suabia and yet acknowledge the neutrality of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... "and it is that which attaches me to you. By assuming your likeness yesterday, I became acquainted with your character, and was no less astonished at the profundity and range of your thoughts than at the heroic magnanimity with which these were combined. And now, in addition to these, you are dedicated to the great work of the Lord; for which reasons I have resolved to attach myself as closely to you as possible, and to render you ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... either the brilliance or the profundity of your own active intellect! What you say is of interest. We already have followed with profound interest your efforts. Your words here justify our concern in meeting you. This is perhaps the first time in our history when a woman has been asked to meet ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... is asserted to be the case not only in respect to brief messages, but in long addresses, which are given every Sunday in our principal cities before large audiences, and in the writing of books of considerable length, but not, as a rule, of any great profundity or literary value. To all these claims, however, we can simply record the verdict "not proven." When a man writes or says anything we want more than his mere assertion to prove that it does not come from his own mind. And, even if we are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... once said with equal truth and profundity, knows what a minute may bring forth, much less, therefore, does anybody know what an evening of say two hundred and forty minutes may produce. For instance, Harold Quaritch—though by this time he had gone so far as to freely admit to himself that he ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... a low guttural grating. No cub had a cavernous profundity of sound such as that. Still there was not the stir of a muscle, so far as his ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... Appendix to an English Work, lately translated into German, and published at Leipzig, a judgment of yours upon English poetry is quoted as follows: 'That in English poetry great genius, universal power, a feeling of profundity, with sufficient tenderness and force are to be found, but that altogether these do not constitute poets,'" etc., etc. (see Poetical Works, 1901, v. 340, 341, and Letters, 1900, v. 100-103). The originals of the Dedication and Letters were conveyed to Goethe ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... perceive how slight is the justice we have been able to render to the rare combination of powers exhibited in the works we have enumerated. We have left unnoticed the wonderful extent and accuracy of the learning, the compass and profundity of the thought, the inexhaustible spirit, ever preserving the happy mean between mental languor and nervous excitement. In these twenty-seven volumes of criticism, scarcely an error has been detected, scarcely a single repetition is met with; there is scarcely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... began. There were eight in all to read essays—nice looking girls, and much like the Lasells and Wellesleys we used to know. As for the essays—well, there was either a good deal of bosh in them, or a profundity of learning and thought to which Jack Harcourt never attained. But the people cheered like mad whenever one was ended, and sent up flowers, while I grew hotter and hotter, and when the seventh went up, and unfolded the 'Age of Progress and Reason,' ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... here is a reading of it by a Unitarian—a reading, I venture to say, for all minds, for all places, for all times—a reading which stands clear of controversial theology, and which, in spite of its profundity, is a message for the simple as well ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... writing is well-nigh unintelligible; nay, in some instances, the Baron can only approximately arrive at the meaning, as though it were a writ in a foreign language with which his acquaintance was of no great profundity. Certes, the learned and reverend compiler hath a keen relish for this quaintness, but not so will fifteen out of his twenty readers, who, pardie! shall regret the absence of a key without which some of the treasure must, to them at least, remain inaccessible. With this reservation, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... one; but he could hold his tongue, if that were more expressive, and he usually did so when his perplexities were greatest. He had been sitting for several evenings in a beer-cellar, smoking his pipe with a profundity of reticence. This attitude was so unbroken that it marked a crisis—the complete, the acute consciousness of his personal situation. It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an evening. At this particular establishment ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... ornament never overloads the chaste eloquence of the principal lines. His best works abound in combinations which may be said to be an epoch in the handling of musical style. Daring, brilliant, and attractive, they disguise their profundity under so much grace, their science under so many charms, that it is with difficulty we free ourselves sufficiently from their magical inthrallment, to judge coldly of their ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... is reserved for our final consideration. Of him Schumann said, "This John is a prophet who will also write revelations," and he has revealed to those who can read that high art is the abiding-place of reason, that it is moreover compounded of profundity of feeling yoked with profundity of intellectual mastery. Dr. Riemann writes of him, "From Bach he inherited the depth, from Haydn, the humor, from Mozart, the charm, from Beethoven, the strength, from Schubert, the intimateness of his art. Truly a wonderfully ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... hypothesis of an "over-soul" from whose universal being the ideas of beauty and truth and goodness may be supposed to proceed. It is a clumsy and crude speculation, easy to be grasped by the superficial mind, and with an air of profundity which is entirely deceptive. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the command. He was a navigator of some renown, principally derived from a voyage of destruction against the Spaniards in 1592; but he was a vain and affected character, little calculated for decisive and manly action. Instructions were prepared, but the King, with his accustomed profundity of folly, directed that they should be sealed in a box, and not opened until the voyagers arrived upon the coasts of Virginia. In the vessels there embarked, beyond the regular crews, one hundred five ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... Jeffrey, Editor of the Edinburgh Review; Walter Scott, still the Great Unknown; and many other distinguished notabilities. The cheerful old man delighted them with his kindly talk, as well as astonished them with the extent and profundity of his information. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... reminding me of flowers pressed between the leaves of a book,—and now offer the bouquet, such as it is, to any whom it may please. These fitful sketches, with so little of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose,—so reserved, even while they sometimes seem so frank,—often but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image,—such ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... see and do a good deal in that time," I said, not flattering myself on the originality of the remark, but desiring to set him talking. In the country, as elsewhere, we must forego profundity if we wish ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... Our muleteer, Delorier, brought up the rear with his cart, waddling ankle-deep in the mud, alternately puffing at his pipe, and ejaculating in his prairie patois: "Sacre enfant de garce!" as one of the mules would seem to recoil before some abyss of unusual profundity. The cart was of the kind that one may see by scores around the market-place in Montreal, and had a white covering to protect the articles within. These were our provisions and a tent, with ammunition, blankets, and presents for ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... country have possessed attainments more varied than were those of Mr. Adams. Every department of literature and science received more or less of his attention—every path of human improvement seems to have been explored by him. As a statesman, he was unrivalled in the profundity of his knowledge. His state papers—given to the world while Minister, Secretary of State, President, and Member of Congress—his numerous addresses, orations, and speeches, are astonishing in number, and in the learning they display. ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... was distributing hand-shakes to sundry old acquaintances, Jean caught scraps of the conversation of those about him that filled him with a despairing melancholy—school ushers railing at the cookery of cheap eating-houses, tipplers maundering contentedly to one another, enchanted at the profundity of their own wisdom, schemers planning to make a fortune, politicians arguing, amateurs of the fair sex telling highly-spiced anecdotes of love and women—and amongst it all ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... a substratum of truth in this, although it requires a wide stretch of imagination, as well as a profundity of faith, to believe that consumption can be cured by passing the body of the patient three times through a wreath of woodbine cut during the increase of the March moon. Yet to this day some French peasants believe that the curative properties of ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bruyere, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... spiritual one; its incidents are its feelings, its progress is the successive conditions of mind, and it terminates with the triumph of virtue. If it be not a record of actual conversation, it is an embodiment of a most wonderful ideality. The eternity of God, the grandeur of Nature, the profundity of the soul, move in silent panorama before you. The great and agitating problems of human existence are depicted with astonishing energy and precision, and marvellous is the conduct of the piece to us who behold it as a painting away back on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... literacy required for most "jobs." But I wonder if the quite surprising keenness of their interest is not due to another cause. I wonder if they do not feel—perhaps unconsciously—that words indicate the man, that the power to write well shows intellect, and measures, if not its profundity, at least the stage of its development. We fasten on the defects of the letters written by undergraduates, on their faltering speeches, on their confused examination papers, as something significant, ominous, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... pulled it out, and that one of his middle teeth in his lower jaw, broke out while he was at dinner." He sat (for the last time) for "a second picture to Mr. Ryley," p. 379. Ashmole's intimacy with Lilly was the foundation of the former's (supposed) profundity in alchemical and astrological studies. In this Diary we are carefully told that "Mr. Jonas Moore brought and acquainted him with Mr. William Lilly, on a Friday night, on the 20th of November," p. 302. Ashmole was then only 26 years of age; and it will ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... tangled jungle, involves incessant labour of the most sweatful kind. A work on structural botany tells me that "the average rate of perspiration in plants has been estimated as equal to that of seventeen times that of man." Only dwellers in the tropics are capable of realising the profundity of those pregnant words. Nowhere does plant life so thrive and so squander itself. And to toil among all this seething, sweating vegetation! No wonder that the trashing of sugar-cane is not a popular pastime ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... Jesus could not grasp the simplicity and profundity of his message; still less could his opponents. When the crisis came, he alone remained unshaken in his faith. He was accused of blasphemy to the ecclesiastical authorities and of insurrection to the civil rulers. He was condemned and crucified. His followers were scattered every man ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... extraordinary book, and this is an epithet which our readers are already fully prepared to apply. But the book, in our judgment, is extraordinary in more senses than one. It is as remarkable for the great mental energy it displays, for its originality and occasional profundity of thought, as it is for the astounding conclusions to which it would conduct us, for its bold paradoxes, and for what we can designate no otherwise than its egregious errors. As a discipline of the mind, so far as a full appreciation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... other considerations of method, concerning propositions, are chiefly touching the utmost propositions, which limit the dimensions of sciences: for every knowledge may be fitly said, besides the profundity (which is the truth and substance of it, that makes it solid), to have a longitude and a latitude; accounting the latitude towards other sciences, and the longitude towards action; that is, from the greatest generality to ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... moral truths from etymologies. He has an argument for the deterioration of man, drawn from the fact that the Romans expressed in the same word, supplicium, the two ideas of prayer and punishment (Soirees, 2ieme entretien, i. p. 108). His profundity as an etymologist may be gathered from his analysis of cadaver: ca-ro, da-ta, ver-mibus. There are many others ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... is not entirely new. The Restoration had heralded its coming, and the tone of Halifax has more in common with Bolingbroke and Hume than with Hobbes and Filmer. Nor has the eighteenth century an historical profundity to compare with that of the zealous pamphleteers in the seventeenth. Heroic archivists like Prynne find very different substitutes in brilliant journalists like Defoe, and if Dalrymple and Blackstone are respectable, they bear no comparison with ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... Star, with a glance of her eyes, for Folter was busied with her hair; "I want to know your opinion of it." Folter gave a toss of her head that seemed to say, "Have not I spoken?" but what it really did mean, how should other mortal know? for the main obstructions to understanding are profundity and shallowness, and the latter is far the more perplexing of ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... their profundity of erudition, and their liberality of sentiment, their total want of pride, and their detestation of hypocrisy, are so proverbially notorious as to place them far, far above either ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... from the body! Every wave in that illimitable ocean of space is freighted with wisdom, every sound is the tone of undying truth, every breath is redolent of divine wisdom. We wonder now at the wisdom of the sages of our own and of ages gone by—at the learning, the profundity, the astonishing acquirements of the Newtons, the Lockes, the Bacons, the Franklins, and the Humboldts. But when we shall stand, in all the nakedness of pure, unfettered spirit, within the confines of the spirit land, and gaze with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... impression that he was asked to enter his service as preceptor in the sciences to himself and his family. His numerous treatises, which include metrical annals, hagiographical and philosophical works, are not distinguished by originality or profundity, but he is the best representative of the culture and mental activity of his age, upon which, as the minister of education of the great emperor, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... been thinking," said Captain Reud, placing the forefinger of his left hand, with an air of great profundity, on the left side of his nose, "I have been thinking of the very curious fatality that has attached itself to Mr ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... as it regards man, in this machinery for sifting and winnowing the merits of races, there is a system of marvellous means, which by its very simplicity masks and hides from us the wise profundity of its purpose. Often-times, in wandering amongst the inanimate world, the philosopher is disposed to say—this plant, this mineral, this fruit, is met with so often, not because it is better than others of the same family, perhaps it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... in political power you must not show what good but what harm you can do. You must not alone possess talents, you must be able also to inspire fear. Accordingly, the very day after my marriage, I shall assume an air of seriousness, of profundity, of high principles! I can take my choice, for we have in France a list of principles which is as varied as a bill of fare. I elect to be a socialist! The word pleases me! At every epoch, my dear friend, there ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac
... kitchen; but Henry was too well acquainted with the navigation of these straits to experience danger, either from the Scylla which lurked on one side in shape of a bucking tub, or the Charybdis which yawned on the other in the profundity of a winding cellar-stair. His only impediment arose from the snarling and vehement barking of a small cocking spaniel, once his own property, but which, unlike to the faithful Argus, saw his master return from his wanderings without any ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... "but here is another bust, with a greater depth and a still more capacious forehead." "Bless me!" exclaims the craniologist, taking out his rule, "eight inches! who can this be? this is indeed a head—in this there can be no mistake; what depth of intellect, what profundity of thought, must reside in that skull! this I am sure must belong to some extraordinary and well-known character." "Why, yes," says the sculptor, "he is pretty well known—it is the head of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... and temperately. Whatever they take in hand, they do it with their utmost will and vehemence. There are so many dangerous steps, that, for the more safety, we must a little lightly and superficially glide over the world, and not rush through it. Pleasure itself is painful in profundity: ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... was caught up,—snatched out of that black profundity with inconceivable swiftness,—and when the ascending movement ceased, I found myself floating lightly like a wind-blown leaf through twining arches of amber mist, colored here and there with rays of living flame ... I heard whispers, and fragments of song and speech, all sweeter ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... especially as I should give you a chance to see, by the profundity of my attention, that if I am not happy, it 's not for ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... height which produced the idea of insurmountable confinement. The interception of all lateral light caused a dismal gloom. Round us was a perpendicular rock, above us the distant sky, and below an unknown profundity of water. If I had any malice against a walking spirit, instead of laying him in the Red-sea, I would condemn him to reside in the ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... before our eyes, a moral phenomenon of amazing profundity takes place which is, nevertheless, so simple as never to be noticed. If two men meet in a salon, one of whom has the right to hate or despise the other, whether from a knowledge of some private and latent fact ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac
... life, among statesmen, men of business, and artisans, exist noble examples of exceptional profundity and reality of knowledge, but in the great average of so-called educated people of our own generation, we find the majority possessing very fragmentary interest in any of the subjects which, as students, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... example shows the profundity of these moral truths. She perceived that she had senses. A second was enough to bring about this discovery, to change her soul, to alter her whole life. To have learned to know herself was at first a delight. The {greek here} of the ancient ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... N. depth; deepness &c. adj.; profundity, depression &c. (concavity) 252. hollow, pit, shaft, well, crater; gulf &c. 198; bowels of the earth, botttomless pit[obs3], hell. soundings, depth of water, water, draught, submersion; plummet, sound, probe; sounding rod, sounding line; lead. bathymetry. [instrument to measure ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in a satisfactory way, even to Archie ordering a new suit of clothes. The youth came out temporarily from his usual profundity, and had a real, natural boyish talk with Ralph. The latter recited the incident of the adventure with Billy ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... must be, shall be!" Bakahenzie grunted his acknowledgment of the profundity of the statement. "He who would trap the leopard must needs dig the pit!" Another uncompromising silence urged Birnier to force the pace a little: "O son of Maliko, what say the omens and the signs ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... was not their mission. It was theirs to act, to reform the practical life and faith of the people, not to waste all their strength in a war of books. They wrote what they needed to carry out their lofty aim; and this was, perhaps, sufficient. They did lack profundity of thought; but, let it be remembered that their work was restorative, not initial. Pietism, though it ceased its aggressive power after Francke and Thomasius, was destined to exert a reproductive power long afterwards. From their day to the present, whenever there ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... turned about upon my entrance, and regarded me certainly with no alarm, but with a profundity of wonder which almost robbed me of my self-possession. 'My dear madam,' he cried at last, 'and who the devil ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... shall, to encourage you in the profundity of your craft, let you know, that, at a full assembly and conclave of our princes and principalities of this place, your project was discoursed and tossed from one side of our cave to the other by their mightinesses; but a better, and as was ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... said the doctor, laying his hand kindly upon her shoulder; "you'll want something fresh again presently. What mine of profundity are you digging ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... at the profundity of the maxim. This inequality is, in a great measure, the result of abuses in the institutions of society. They do not speak of what exists, but of what ought to exist. Every one should be left at liberty to obtain all the advantages ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... 'How did the mighty sage, Yavakri, son of the ascetic Bharadwaja, acquire profundity in the Vedas? And how also did he perish? I am anxious to hear all this, just as it happened. I take delight in listening to the narration of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... he spent many years and a large part of his fortune in the collection of materials for his history of the wars between France and England, it is not as an historian that he is now remembered; it is as a writer of magnificent prose. His Chroniques, devoid of any profundity of insight, any true grasp of the movements of the age, have rarely been paralleled in the brilliance and animation of their descriptions, the vigour of their character-drawing, the flowing picturesqueness of their style. They unroll themselves like some long tapestry, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the borderline between profundity and insanity was thin and inexact and it was now clear on which side she stood. I looked at Gootes to see how he was taking her hysterical outburst, but he had found a batch of empty testtubes which he was building into ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... recognize there also the voice of kindness. And then the vagueness of the warning—because what can be the meaning of the phrase: to spoil one's life?—arrested one's attention by its air of wise profundity. At any rate, as I have said before, the words of la belle Madame Delestang made me thoughtful for a whole evening. I tried to understand and tried in vain, not having any notion of life as an enterprise that could be mi managed. ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... by then and buzzing with voices. I had been looked at with curiosity by every one, but how am I to describe the sensation produced by the appearance of Falk himself blocking the doorway? The tension of expectation could be measured by the profundity of the silence that fell upon the very click of the billiard balls. As to Schomberg, he looked extremely frightened; he hated mortally any sort of row (fracas he called it) in his establishment. Fracas was bad for business, he affirmed; ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... acuteness and yet save his labour, not often obscure, and never wearisome, an evident generalisation of long experience, without pedantry, without method, without deductive reasonings, yet wearing an appearance at least of profundity; they delight the intelligent though indolent man of the world, and must be read with some admiration by the philosopher . . . . yet they bear witness to the contracted observation and the precipitate inferences which an intercourse with a single class of society scarcely fails to ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... not only being diverted from her purpose, but led by a side tract to an unexplored profundity. On the further side of it she discerned, dimly, the undesirable. It was a murky region, haunted by still murkier presences, by Lady Cayley and her kind. She persisted with a ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... which he picturesquely describes as resembling that of "a dog in a coal-box," he picks him up and philosophically informs him that "all the different styles of fence were invented and established for man's protection, not for his destruction. Besides," he adds, with much profundity, "the laws thereto appertaining are based on certain strict principles of honor, which you have unquestionably violated in this case. Now, take my advice, never again engage in fight without having some just cause of quarrel. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... nothing can enlarge such grandeur as we have here. Sea and pine-forest are the same, alike in thunder-cloud or under a serene sky—summer and winter, lightning and rain—we can hardly add by a hairbreadth to the profundity of the impression ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... intelligible. The remainder is a fair specimen of that skimmy-dashy style of thought which glances over the surfaces of things and never reaches their substance or reality, yet boasts of its unlimited profundity because it does not know the meaning of profound. Such thinking must necessarily end in falsity and folly, of which the lecture gives many specimens, which it is worth while to quote, to show what the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... less elaborate work of a contemporary of Dickens and Thackeray. As regards "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret,"—the title which, for lack of a better, has been given to this Romance,—it can scarcely be pronounced deficient in either elaboration or profundity. Had Mr. Hawthorne written out the story in every part to its full dimensions, it could not have failed to rank among the greatest of his productions. He had looked forward to it as to the crowning achievement of his literary career. In the Preface ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... island as a match for Popish bigotry. There will be no love lost between them—be assured of that—and justice will be done to both, though neither should do it to her rival; for philosophy, which has so long sought only amusement in either, is in these latter days of growing profundity applying herself steadily to the profound truths which dimly are descried lurking in both. It is these which Mr. Newman is likely to illuminate, and not the faded forms of an obsolete ceremonial that cannot now be restored effectually, were it even important that they should. Strange it ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... deep sigh he replied, "The profundity of your contempt I can only guess at. Whatever it is, I share it. ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of a solemn scientific expedition, it would have about it that gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of that kind, and withal so attractive. Yet notwithstanding it is only a record of a pic-nic, it has a purpose, which is to suggest to the reader how ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... d'oeuvres. I should be hardly believed were I to relate the instances which fell in my way, of the utter ignorance respecting pictures to be found among persons of the first standing in society. Often where a liberal spirit exists, and a wish to patronise the fine arts is expressed, it is joined to a profundity of ignorance on the subject almost inconceivable. A doubt as to the excellence of their artists is very nervously received, and one gentleman, with much civility, told me, that at the present era, all the world were aware that competition was pretty well at an end between our two nations, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... last one," remarked Richard, with great profundity. "She was probably some giddy young thing of seventy or eighty. Those old widowers never take a wife of their own age. I shouldn't want you to be seventy, Margaret,—or ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... oscillations of equal magnitude would have no corresponding effect in the bed of the ocean generally, believed as it is to have a mean depth of 15,000 feet, and which, whether this estimate be correct or not, is certainly of great profundity. Subaerial denudation would not of itself lessen the area of the land, but would tend to fill up with sediment seas of moderate depth adjoining the coast. The coarser matter falls to the bottom near the shore in the first still water which it reaches, and whenever the sea-bottom on ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... difficulties, philosophical, historical, and scientific, which preclude the modern mind from an assent to the philosophy of Catholicism. He displayed on this occasion, a broadness and a balance, if not a profundity of thought, in which many theologians who call themselves liberals are wanting. He spoke even of militant atheists, such as Huxley and Tyndall, without any sarcastic anger or signs of moral reprobation. He spoke of their opinions, not as sins which demanded chastisement, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... weeping, and were so joyously consoled that they forgot to wipe away their tears. They were bright but not clear—large and shimmering, as if reflected from some invisible sea, not immediately present to his eyes. The gulfs in which they floated were black blue with profundity. There was no moon, but the night was yet so far from dark, that it seemed conscious throughout of some distant light that illumined it without shine. And his heart felt like the night, as if it held a deeper life than he could ever know. He wandered on till he came to the field where ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... this young man, as in most of the men who live in that way, of amazing profundity,—passions too vast to be drawn into petty incidents. His want of means compelled him to lead an ascetic life, and he conquered his fancies by hard work. After paling all day over figures, he found his recreation in striving obstinately to acquire that wide general knowledge so necessary in ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... the reflection that "the essence of scholarship lay in profundity and acumen rather than in the ability to rattle off pages like so many psalms." Yet those "five hundred leaves" of his gave me ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... was not always interested in the specific, obscure field, but by saturating himself in facts about it, he has developed an interest in it amounting to passionate absorption, which manifests itself in "absent-mindedness" of such profundity as to make him often an ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... rarely bestowed, animated and brought into full operation every faculty; while his steady, reserved, and earnest demeanor secured obedience and discipline. His very appearance excited awe and reverence; his figure was proud, lofty, and warlike, while his bright, piercing eye expressed profundity of thought, combined with gravity and mystery. His favorite study was that of the stars, and his most intimate friend was an Italian astrologer. He had a fondness for pomp and extravagance. He maintained sixty pages; his ante-chamber was guarded by fifty life-guards, and his ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... remember that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof—an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... so much the more credit to Marx, who, at that time, we are informed, had never studied the works of the philosopher of Koenigsberg, and his basing music upon the Kantian philosophy is therefore but a proof of the profundity of his genius. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... alarm at the suspicion that this witch instrument was beginning to play them some foul trick in punishment of their temerity; but Columbus was ready with an ingenious astronomical explanation, and their faith in the profundity of his ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... require brushing, seats himself in a corner as though pondering some weighty matter, tries to look profound—when he probably looks simply, stupid. This is intellectual snobbishness. How many people we meet who cover their ignorance by a look of profundity. ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... literary blow flies will pounce upon the errors with delight, and, buzzing with the ecstasy of infernal joy, endeavour to hum their readers into a belief of the profundity of their critic erudition;—I shall nevertheless, with Churchill, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... ray of light penetrated into the profundity of the cavern. It being high-water, the entrance was closed by the sea. But the artificial light, which escaped in long streams from the skylights of the "Nautilus" was as vivid as before, and the sheet of water shone around ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... listen, as he generally listened, for anything she might find that would explain the situation. His fingers went from habit, as a man might play with his watch chain, to the symbol of his faith; her eyes followed them, and rested mutely on the cross. There was a profundity of feeling in them, wistful, acknowledging, deeply speculative. "You could not forget that?" she said, and shook her head as if she answered herself. He looked into her upturned face and saw that her eyes ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... reason is partly that true symbolic or figurative writing is the simplest form known to literature. The simplest, that is to say, in outward form,—it may be indefinitely abstruse as to its inward contents. Indeed, the very cause of its formal simplicity is its interior profundity. The principle of hermetic writing was, as we know, to disguise philosophical propositions and results under a form of words which should ostensibly signify some very ordinary and trivial thing. It was a secret language, in the vocabulary of which material ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... down. He was followed by a sallow-visaged, black-bearded speaker, who poured forth abundant venomous froth of denunciation. He had caught enough of the phraseology of the more philosophical Disciples, to impress the earnest ignorant with some show of profundity. I was glad when his stream dried up. Pendlam next arose and read a paper upon "Magnetisms and Organizations." After him, came forward a gentleman with a model, illustrating the design of a dwelling-house for the Associated Disciples. He showed, entirely to the satisfaction of himself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... great deal more, with tipsy profundity and a serio-comic air, and keeping his eye all the time on Mrs Sliderskew, who was unable to hear one word, Mr Squeers concluded by helping himself and passing the bottle: to ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... we to-day read them; but it is because there is to be found in them wonderful characterization expressed dramatically, namely, before an audience. And this audience is what the scholars seem to forget. For by it is the dramatist limited, since profundity of thought or skill in allusion is good or bad, artistically, exactly in proportion as the thought is ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... characteristic is the sense of profundity, of mighty significance. And this feeling is not necessarily an illusion. The nature of our materials — be they words, colours, or plastic matter — imposes a limit and bias upon our expression. The reality of experience can never be quite rendered ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... buy books because they are written by great stylists, but few read for just that reason. They read because there is something in an author's work which attracts them to his style, and that something may be study of character, skill in narrative, or profundity in truth, of which style is the perfect expression, but not the thing itself. Only connoisseurs, and few of them, read for style. And, furthermore, I very much doubt whether readers go to Conrad to learn about the sea. They might learn as much from Cooper or Melville, but they have ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Though Lincoln had to deal with a single issue demanding no great width of knowledge, it must be evident that the passions aroused by it and the confused and shifting state of public sentiment made his problem very subtle, and it was a rare profundity and sincerity of thought which solved it in his own mind. In expressing the result of thought so far deeper than that of most men, he achieved a clearness of expression which very few writers, and those among the greatest, have excelled. He once during the ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... Michelagnolo, at least his equal; but in colouring they would have it that he surpassed Buonarroti without a doubt. These humours, having spread among a number of craftsmen who preferred the grace of Raffaello to the profundity of Michelagnolo, had so increased that many, for various reasons of interest, were more favourable in their judgments to Raffaello than to Michelagnolo. But Sebastiano was in no way a follower of that faction, since, ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... though not versed in the methods of the higher mathematics, had considerable native power as a mathematician, was unable to perceive the force of Laplace's reasoning. Indeed, this is one of those cases where clearness of perception rather than profundity of mathematical insight was required. Laplace's equations of motion did not express all the relations involved, nor was it possible to judge, from the results he deduced, how far the stability of the Saturnian rings depended on the real structure of these appendages. One who ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... "Even now, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in spite of an unparalleled advance in our knowledge of the natural sciences, the world has not yet produced a mind, which can equal that of Aristotle in its astounding versatility and profundity of learning." She determined to persevere, but was it her subconscious self which discovered a vast arrear of letters which it was incumbent on her to answer before she thought of ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... are disposed to confound the tinsel and bombast of the phraseology with want of weight in the thoughts. Thus, from the imposing and oracular nature of the style, people are tempted at first to imagine that our author's speculations are all wisdom and profundity: till having found out their mistake in some instances, they suppose that there is nothing but common-place in them, concealed under verbiage and pedantry; and in both they are wrong. The fault of Dr. Johnson's style is, that it reduces ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... of the ironies of history that the province over which parties battled with so much display of legal profundity was not yet in the possession of the First Consul. Six months after the ratification of the treaty, in the old Cabildo at New Orleans, Laussat received from the Spanish governor the keys of the city and took possession of the province in the name of his ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... greatest art. Savages lack self-consciousness and the critical sense because they lack intelligence. And because they lack intelligence they are incapable of profound conceptions. Beauty, taste, quality, and skill, all are here; but profundity of vision is not. And because they cannot grasp complicated ideas they fail generally to create organic wholes. One of the chief characteristics of the very greatest artists is this power of creating wholes which, ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... the profundity of an observation made by Mr. Bagehot —a man who carried away into the next world more originality of thought than is now to be found in the Three Estates of the Realm. Whilst remarking upon the extraordinary ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... the exquisite sensation of departed pain almost atone for the discomfort of its presence? How heartily, for your sake, would I be the most profound and able writer in the world, and how gladly should all my profundity and ability be laid ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... bosom of the ocean, under a strong full moon, like a wind-blown ghost to whose wanderings there had been no beginning and could be no end—so small, so helpless she seemed between the two infinities of sea and sky. There was no cloud to break the blue profundity of heaven, no line of horizon, no diversity in the long lazy roll of the green waters to dispel the illusion of an interminable ocean. The great crestless waves rose and fell with pulsing monotony, round, smooth and intolerably silent. It was as if the undulating sea had ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... way to a third and still grosser misrepresentation on which he apparently had set his heart: namely, that, after borrowing the whole substance of my philosophy from Hegel, I have been guilty of making "vast and extravagant pretensions" as to my own "novelty," "originality," and "profundity," not only with regard to my published books, but also with regard to my "still unpublished system of philosophy." ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot |
