"Surplusage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beast wants water?" Blue Jeans was deeply offended. Such opulence in anyone at such a moment would have seemed a needless taunt; that chance had selected the superintendent to flaunt it was surplusage of insult. Yet he could not even resent the superintendent's gesture, wide-flung and arrogant to all beholders. Again the superintendent looked to have the right of it. He clicked to Girl o' Mine and she came to him, out of the way, like an ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... subject, that the styles of the letters and of the poems, agreeing well enough between themselves, differ most remarkably from that of the Heptameron. The two former are decidedly open to the charges of pedantry, artificiality, heaviness. There is a great surplusage of words and a seeming inability to get to the point. The Heptameron if not equal in narrative vigour and lightness to Boccaccio before and La Fontaine afterwards, is not in the least exposed to the charge of clumsiness of any kind, employs a simple, natural, and ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... in this it is bad to beat, in him or out of him. The small space forbids mere surplusage of description, and the plot—as all plots should do, but, alas! as few succeed in doing—acts as a bellows to kindle the flame and intensify the heat of something far better than description itself—passionate ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... slender defect into an odious vice, and any common infirmity into a strange enormity; turning a small "mote in the eye" of our neighbour into a huge "beam," a little dimple in his face into a monstrous wen. This is plainly slander, at least in degree, and according to the surplusage whereby the censure doth exceed the fault. As he that, upon the score of a small debt, doth extort a great sum, is no less a thief, in regard to what amounts beyond his due, than if without any pretence ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... adolescence is at its height then the chief stress of religious instruction should be laid upon Jesus's life and work. He should be taught first humanly, and only later when the limitations of manhood seem exhausted should His Deity be adduced as welcome surplusage. The supernatural is a reflex of the heart; each sustains and neither can exist without the other. If the transcendent and supernal had no objective existence, we should have to invent and teach it or dwarf the life of feeling ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... forth on the one hand; on the other a high and thick tuft of trees cut off the view; between was the mouth of the huge laver. Twice a day the ocean crowded in that narrow entrance and was heaped between these frail walls; twice a day, with the return of the ebb, the mighty surplusage of water must struggle to escape. The hour in which the Farallone came there was the hour of flood. The sea turned (as with the instinct of the homing pigeon) for the vast receptacle, swept eddying through the gates, was transmuted, as it did so, into a wonder ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of which you did deny your self) Bestow'd on me, and with a prodigal hand, Whom she pick'd forth to be the Architect Of her most bloudy building; and to fee These Instruments, to bring Materials To raise it up, she bad me spare no cost, And (as a surplusage) offer'd her self To be at ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher |
