"Verbiage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the established rights, in short, of ancient custom required all to be done over again, in attested copies of title, draughts of title as to defects for counsel's opinion, and so on, even if all the paper and verbiage were to go straight to the waste-basket; and thus a not over convenient bill of about 70 pounds was rolled up. But I must at the same time bear in mind that this heavy drag applied to all landed property, restricting business in it and reducing its value. Had Torrens's Act been then in action, ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... sincere. Even the Holy Alliance, the pet offspring of his pietism, does not deserve the sinister reputation it has since obtained. To the other powers it seemed, at best "verbiage'' and "exalted nonsense,'' at worst an effort of the tsar to establish the hegemony of Russia on the goodwill of the smaller signatory powers. To the Liberals, then and afterwards it was clearly a hypocritical ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Lavretsky was sitting in the drawing-room, listening to the insinuating tones of Gedeonovsky's wearisome verbiage, he suddenly turned round, he knew not why, and caught the deep, attentive, inquiring look of Liza's eyes. That enigmatical look was directed towards him. The whole night long Lavretsky thought of it. His ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... Sherburne's, and proceed at once to business. On behalf of Messrs. Haviland and Murray the offer is made for all right and title possessed by Violet St. Vincent Grandon, and by Floyd Grandon, her husband, in all interests, inventions, etc., with much legal verbiage that alike confuses and interests Violet. But the sum offered seems enormous to her! She gazes blankly from one to another, as she hears again that all income thereof is to be hers, that no one can touch the principal until she is twenty-five, that it is ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... support. In debate, therefore, one's first effort should be to state his own side so clearly and concisely as to make the principles involved easily understood. His second object should be so to divest his opponent's argument of useless verbiage as to make it stand forth clearly; for as truth is self-evident, so error bears upon its face its own condemnation. Error needs only to be ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... the joys of the table and the grosser things of life. You should see his eyes sometimes when the right note is struck, watch his mouth when he sits and thinks. He uses words for an ambush and a barricade. He talks often like a gay fool, a flood of empty verbiage streams from his lips, and behind, all ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... it had been searched out with painful toil from the heap of chaff. "By their fruits ye shall know them." The fruit of the deep study of Browning is an intimate knowledge of the use of English particles; and the fruit of the devoted study of Hegel was an intimate knowledge of metaphysical verbiage: being, substance, essence, and absolute. But of life-giving nourishment there was none to be had. The barrenness of all this, Turgenef indeed soon did perceive, but when the disenchantment came, his blood was already poisoned; his very being was eaten into by doubt, and almost ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... verbiage the merchant of the Rue du Mail—"Commission-Exportation"—had a very definite idea. He wished to give up his shop, to retire from business, and for some time he had been thinking of going to see Sidonie, in order to interest her in his new schemes. That was not the time, therefore, ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... the honour of patronising him, as a Representative Man; but their real text-book, you will find, is Proclus. That hapless philosophaster's a priori method, even his very verbiage, is dear to their souls; for they copy it through wet and dry, through sense and nonsense. But as for Plato-when I find them using Plato's weapons, I shall believe in their ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... now. He has found his 'cure.' As a candle-flame in this broad sunlight, so all those earthly longings"—The old gentleman could not finish his sentence, though a sentence was dear to him almost as the truth from which, even in his love of verbiage, his speech never deviated. "So we leave it here," he said at last. "It is between us and our blessed dead. No one else need know what you have had the courage to tell me. Your confession concerns no other ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... ventroparolisto. Venture riski. Venture risko. Venturous riska. Veracious verema. Veracity vereco. Verandah balkono. Verb verbo. Verbal parola. Verbena verbeno. Verbatim (adv.) lauxvorte. Verbiage babilajxo. Verbose parolegema. Verbosity parolegeco. Verdant verdanta. Verdict jugxo. Verdigris verdigro. Verdure verdajxo. Verger pedelo. Verify verigi, ekzameni. Verily vere. Veritable vera. Verity vereco. Vermicelli vermicxelo. Vermifuge kontrauxvermajxo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... on the palm of her hand like one thinking about matters of profound import. Mr. Travers talked; he talked inflexibly, in a harsh blank voice, as if reading a proclamation. The other two, as if in a state of incomplete trance, had their ears assailed by fragments of official verbiage. ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... defended himself. "My way of putting things! My dear fellow I have merely stripped the rags of business verbiage and financial jargon off my statements. And you are startled! I am giving you the naked truth. It's true too that nothing lays itself open to the charge of exaggeration more than the language of naked truth. What comes with ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... dead could do nothing, neither could he change his mind, but having left an indelible record of his ideas by the strenuous verbiage of his virile and inspiring rhetoric, there was no room for doubt. As in all political and religious faiths founded on the ideas of dead heroes, this made for solidarity and power and quite prevented any adaptation of the form of government to the needs of ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... his confessor, if to secrets of State, to Prince Metternich. What the confessor may have thought of the Czar's political evangel is not known: the opinion delivered by the Minister was not a sympathetic one. "It is verbiage," said Metternich; and his master, though unwillingly, signed the treaty. With England the case was still worse. As the Prince Regent was not in Paris, Alexander had to confide the articles of the Holy Alliance to Lord Castlereagh. Of all things in the world the most incomprehensible ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... to abate these defacements and consequent waste of the library books, unless it is enforced by a positive law, with penal provisions, to punish offenders who mutilate or deface books that are public property. A good model of such a statute is the following, slightly abridged as to verbiage, from an act of Congress, of which we procured the enactment in ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... scientists and three Navy officers were arguing heatedly; employing deep-space verbiage not to be found in any dictionary. "Jarve!" Karns called out, and Hilton joined the group. "Does anything about this planet ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... odium given to Slang by superficial minds is undeserved. In other days, before the language was crystallized into the idiom and verbiage of the doctrinaire, prose, too, was untrammeled. Indeed, a cursory glance at the Elizabethan poets discloses a kinship with the rebellious fancies of our modern colloquial talk. Mr. Irwin's sonnets may be taken as an indication of this revolt, and how nearly they approach the ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... "In the verbiage of primitive optimism a misleading limitation is placed on the significance of the word Nature and its inflections. And the misconception of the meaning of an important word is as certain to lead to an inaccurate concept as is the ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... his character, simply from the way in which he listened to the wild and impassioned verbiage of my worthy uncle. While the excellent Professor spoke sentence after sentence, he stood with folded arms, utterly still, motionless to all my uncle's gesticulations. When he wanted to say No he moved his head from left to right; when he acquiesced he nodded, so slightly that you could ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... fermenting soil. Consider the authentic monuments of its thought—the speeches of Robespierre and Saint-Just, the debates of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, the harangues, addresses, and reports of Girondists and Montagnards. Never did men speak so much to say so little; the empty verbiage and swollen emphasis swamp any truth there may be beneath their monotony and their turgidity. The Jacobin is full of respect for the phantoms of his reasoning brain; in his eyes they are more real than living ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... would be proud and happy to share my existence—she concealed nothing, but, on the contrary, added many fresh follies to the recital. Maitre Mouche kept nodding his head in approval while cracking nuts. Then, after all this verbiage, he demanded, with an agreeable smile, what my answer ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... Of Pope, that "he could only rank with ingenious men," and that his works are superabundant with superfluous and unmeaning verbiage - his translations even replete with tautology, a fault which is to refinement as midnight is to noonday; and, what is truly surprising, that the fourth book of the Dunciad, his last publication, is more full of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... magnetism in the rush of Jasper Ewold's junketing verbiage which carried the listener on the bosom of a pleasant stream. Jack was suddenly reminded that it must be very late and he had far overstayed the retiring hour of the desert, where the ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... own private belief, and which for many centuries was kept from the knowledge of the uninitiated by their successors in the priestly office. As they were the sole custodians of the Scriptures, they made do change in their verbiage, but, adding the doctrine of future rewards and punishments to that written and openly taught system of faith known as the Exoteric creed, they made it the more impressive by instituting a system of imposing rites and ceremonies, ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... the character of public men, and who have some feeling of national pride and vanity in the super-eminence of English statesmen for integrity and high-mindedness. It is not very difficult to extract the truth from the mass of verbiage and contradictory assertions in which it is involved, and it appears that Urquhart, having got hold of the papers, communicated them to Palmerston, offered to publish them, and was encouraged by him to do so. Urquhart, who was appointed secretary of embassy at Constantinople while this ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Nono, who sat opposite the Menghyi, tucked his napkin over his ample paunch and went in with a will. He was in a most hilarious mood, and taxed his memory for reminiscences of his visit to England. These were not expressed with useless expenditure of verbiage, nor did they flow in unbroken sequence. It was as if he dug in his memory with a spade, and found every now and then a gem in the shape of a name, which he brandished aloft in triumph. He kept up an intermittent and disconnected fire all through dinner, ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... news some phrase To shock, to startle or amaze, Or found a daring innuendo— All swelling in one long crescendo, Till, shortly after five o'clock, When business people homeward flock, From all superfluous verbiage freed Comes JOFFRE'S calm laconic screed, And all the bellowings of the town Quelled by the voice of Truth die down, Enabling you and me to win Twelve hours' release ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 9, 1914 • Various
... have four separate paragraphs, five lines, and thirty-five words to express, in almost idiotic verbiage, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... had the misfortune about this time to read in paper or magazine something on the subject of heredity, the idle verbiage of some half-informed scribbler. It set him anxiously thinking whether his son would develop the vices of the mother's mind, and from that day he read all the printed chatter regarding natural inheritance that he could lay his hands ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... JOURNAL OF MAN. Nevertheless, I cannot deprive my readers of the pleasure and amusement derived from this correspondence. I have condensed the responses into a readable compass leaving out their useless verbiage, and putting them in a poetic form, as poetry best expresses the essence and spirit of an author's thought. I think the learned gentlemen, if they could peruse these doggerel rhymes, would acknowledge that their meaning has been expressed even more plainly and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... parliament were voted to Amherst and Boscawen. Boscawen received them in person, being a member of the House of Commons. The speaker read the address, which was couched in the usual verbiage worked up by one of the select committees employed on such occasions. But Boscawen replied, as men of action should, with fewer words and much more force and point: 'Mr Speaker, Sir, I am happy to have been able to do my duty. I have no words to express my sense of the distinguished reward ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... full and distinct upon Elspeth's ear as it could have done at any period of her life. She spoke also herself clearly, distinctly, and slowly, as if anxious that the intelligence she communicated should be fully understood; concisely at the same time, and with none of the verbiage or circumlocutory additions natural to those of her sex and condition. In short, her language bespoke a better education, as well as an uncommonly firm and resolved mind, and a character of that sort from which great virtues or great crimes ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... valuable little trinkets in great libraries, just as in other pursuits. A great deal of that appearance of dry drudgery which excites the pitying amazement of the bystander is nimbly evaded. People acquire a sort of instinct, picking the valuables out of the useless verbiage, or the passages repeated from former authors. It is soon found what a great deal of literature has been the mere "pouring out of one bottle into another," as the Anatomist of melancholy terms it. There are those terrible folios ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... quasi-historical chapters in this section (which I have followed M. Pauthier in making into a Fourth Book) are the merest verbiage and repetition of narrative formulae without the slightest value. I have therefore thought it undesirable to print all at length, and have given merely the gist (marked thus ), or an extract, of such chapters. They will be found entire in English in H. Murray's ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... same difficulty when we come to literature. What would Chaucer or Spenser have thought of Browning or Swinburne? Would such poetry have seemed to them like an inspired product of art, or a delirious torrent of unintelligible verbiage? Of course, they would not have understood the language, to begin with; and the thought, the interfusion of philosophy, the new problems, would have been absolutely incomprehensible. Probably if one could have questioned Spenser, he would have felt that ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... conjecture Mr. Wintermuth's surprise and genuine anguish upon receiving, one bright April morning, a communication in German, which, being translated by Mr. Otto Bartels with something more than his customary stolidity, proved to read, stripped of all superfluous verbiage, substantially ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... story. It requires a definite but simple plot, which enables the characters to act out their parts. In its perfect form it is the "bit of real life" which it is the aim of the short story to present. It is the story shorn of all needless verbiage, and told as nearly as possible in the words and actions of the characters themselves; and it possesses a strong climax. Therefore it demands the most careful and skillful workmanship, from its conception to its final polishing. It is the ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... the Welsh Triads, Britain derived its name from Prydain, a king, who early reigned in the island. Cf. Turner's His. Ang. Sax. 1, 2, seqq. The geographical description, which follows, cannot be exonerated from the charge of verbiage and grandiloquence. T. wanted the art of saying ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... unspeculative days. The actual whirl of Paris caught me and left me little time for conjecture. I wrote once or twice to Joanna; but my letters were egotistical outpourings; the mythological picture at Menilmontant inspired sheets of excited verbiage. She replied in her pretty sympathetic way, but gave me little news of Paragot. It was hardly to be expected that she should write romantically, like a young girl foolishly in love, gushing to a bosom friend. Paragot himself, who disliked pen, ink, and paper, ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... become too critical to feel through all Fenimore Cooper's verbiage the real lakes and woods, or the wild fervour of romance beneath dear Sir Walter's mat of words. You lose the unreclaimable flavour of books. A friend you may irretrievably lose when you lose a friend—if you are so deadly unfortunate as to lose a friend—for even the memories ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... that the great, if not only, cause of complaint against the missionaries comes from the action of the Roman Catholic priests and the native Christians of that faith.... Had they (the Chinese Goverment) stated their complaints in brief, without circumlocution, and stripped of all useless verbiage, they would have charged that the Roman Catholic missionaries, when residing away from the open ports, claim to occupy a semi-official position, which places them on an equality with the provincial officer; that they deny the authority of the Chinese ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... perceive you both know the South Seas, wherefore, without undue expenditure of verbiage on my part, I am assured that you will appreciate the charm of my princess, the Princess Tui-nui of Talofa, the Princess of ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... more in the marvellous vivacity and fertility of his creation. For the very first time in English prose fiction every character is alive, every incident is capable of having happened. There are lively touches in the Elizabethan romances; but they are buried in verbiage, swathed in stage costume, choked and fettered by their authors' want of art. The quality of Bunyan's knowledge of men was not much inferior to Shakespeare's, or at least to Fielding's; but the range and the results of it ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... popular assembly so powerful; close, compact, cogent, Demosthenic in simplicity and force, not a word misplaced, not a word too many, and fraught with that strange power over the feelings, lent by sadness and despondency, a state of mind, I think, most favorable to real eloquence, in which all verbiage is eschewed, and the burden [64] upon the heart is too heavy to allow the speaker to think ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... Kant's noumenon, in the battle of impulses which rages in the breast of man. Metaphysicians, as a rule, are sadly deficient in the sense of humour; or they would surely abstain from advancing propositions which, when stripped of the verbiage in which they are disguised, appear to the profane eye to be bare ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... the windings of a stream under the shadows of the trees. Past waterfall and banks of flowers and choiring of the birds, he goes on forever, except he force himself to pause. Shakespeare is always an enticement, whose turns of poetic thought and verbiage are a pure delight. Note this quality in the quotations—a word naturally expresses a thought. Shakespeare's figures express a series of thoughts as varied landscapes seen in pictures; in consequence, to read him ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... again, when reading newspaper articles full of pompous words borrowed from Latin through French, when wearied with 'velleities' and 'solidarities' and 'altruisms' and 'homologators,' or when vainly endeavouring to discover the real meaning which lies hidden in a jungle of Parliamentary verbiage, I have said to myself, remembering my similar labour upon the 'Variae,' 'How like this is ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... disease broadcast without any power to stop them. Failing some such measure, table articles and food may continue to be smeared by hands soiled with syphilitic material, as in case 1; section 6 of the Social Hygiene Act remains mere useless verbiage, and the infecting of innocents, as in case ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... work the text remains as it was. It is usual to credit the composer's friend, Baron van Swieten, with the "unintelligible jargon." The baron certainly had a considerable hand in the adaptation of the text. But in reality it owes its very uncouth verbiage largely to the circumstance that it was first translated from English into German, and then re-translated back into English; the words, with the exception of the first chorus, being adapted to the music. Considering ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... there was artistic ability employing itself with literature which was so unlike literary ability. Godolphin conceived perfectly of the literary intention in the fine passages of the play, and enjoyed their beauty, but he did not value them any more than the poorest and crudest verbiage that promised him a point. In fact, Maxwell found that in two or three places the actor was making a wholly wrong version of his words, and maturing in his mind an effect from his error that he was rather loath to give up, though when he was instructed as to their true meaning, he ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... counsel is not a man of ability, this amazing volubility, which is found equally in all, serves more to weaken than to convince; for the little sense there may be, is spread over so wide a surface, or is diluted with such a dose of verbiage, that the whole becomes tasteless and insipid to the last degree. But this fluency, on the other hand, in the hands of a man of talents and genius, is a most powerful weapon. It hurries you along with a velocity which, from ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... especially of Italy. Toscanelli again refers to Kublai Khan's message to the pope which—more or less mixed up with the vague notions about Prester John—had evidently left a deep impression upon the European mind. In translating the above sentence I have somewhat retrenched its excessive verbiage without affecting the meaning.] ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... All this verbiage sounded like a confused murmur to Mme. Favoral's ears. "Yes, no," she answered, hardly knowing ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... ancient, wore a double veil. They hid their sense in verbiage, and also in narrow Germanifled letters, farther deformed by contractions and ornamental flourishes, whose joint effect made a word look like a black daddy-long-legs, all sprawling fantastic limbs and the ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... these offenses he should not have been allowed to hold his office for an hour beyond the time required for a fair trial. But the Articles of Impeachment did not even refer to any charge of this kind, and a stranger to our history, in perusing them, could not possibly infer that behind the legal verbiage of the Articles there was in the minds of the representatives who presented them a deadly hostility to the President for offenses totally different from the technical violation of a statue, for which he was arraigned,—a ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... have. No one, certainly no student of science, can thoroughly understand how little some persons know about science, until he has observed how much will be believed, if only published with the apparent authority of a few known names, and announced with a sufficient parade of technical verbiage; nor is it so easy as might be thought, even for those who are acquainted with the facts, to disprove either a hoax or a paradox. Nothing, indeed, can much more thoroughly perplex and confound a student of ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... appeal for the information and final decision of the highest authority in England, to which any dissatisfied party could appeal against the report or decision of the Commissioners. The address or "Petition" to the King, dated 1664, and given above, pp. 153-9, in all its tedious length and verbiage, shows how grossly they misrepresented the character and objects of the Commission, preparatory to resisting and rejecting it, while the King's letter in reply, also given above at length, p. 166, completely refutes their misstatements, and ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... stronger and more indignant scribes who cried aloud against the sins and sinners of the courts. When simple folk had expended their rage in denunciations of venal eloquence and unjust judgments, they amused themselves with laughing at the antiquated verbiage of the rascals who sought to conceal their bad morality under worse Latin. 'A New Modell, or the Conversion of the Infidell Terms of the Law: For the Better promoting of misunderstanding according to Common Sense,' is a publication consisting ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... he could get on moderately well upon falsehood. Luther could not. No matter what the danger to himself, if he could smite a lie upon the head and kill it, he was better pleased than by a thousand lives. We hear much of Luther's doctrine about faith. Stripped of theological verbiage, that doctrine ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... dames with all the rare and far-fetched artifices that idle curiosity has taught them. Then the love-thoughts of the heart clothed themselves simply and naturally as the heart conceived them, nor sought to commend themselves by forced and rambling verbiage. Fraud, deceit, or malice had then not yet mingled with truth and sincerity. Justice held her ground, undisturbed and unassailed by the efforts of favour and of interest, that now so much impair, pervert, and beset her. Arbitrary law had not yet established itself in ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... taken as a test of the intellectual capacity of their tellers. For in style the folk-tale changes greatly as it travels. A story which we find narrated in one country with terseness and precision may be rendered almost unintelligible in another by vagueness or verbiage; by one race it may be elevated into poetic life, by another it may be degraded into ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... man should be Secretary for Foreign Affairs who cannot speak better. The Duke made no case for the Terceira business, and delivered a very poor speech; but I like his speaking—it is so much to the point, no nonsense and verbiage about it, and he says strongly and simply what he has to say. The other night on Greece there was a very brisk skirmish between Palmerston and Peel, and the former spoke, they say, remarkably well; the latter, as usual, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... will perceive that the difficulties, evident even to the capacities of a child, have never been removed by divines the most practised in dialectics. You will find in their replies only subtle distinctions, metaphysical subterfuges, unintelligible verbiage, which can never be the language of truth, and which demonstrates the embarrassment, the impotence, and the bad faith of those who are interested by their position in sustaining a desperate cause. In a word, the difficulties which have been ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... that Probka was dead, but Sobakevitch's tongue was borne on the torrent of its own verbiage, and the only thing to be ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... assured, it is not on dubious testimony, that I found my conviction of his being corrupted by the lax morality of these evil times, in which one party deems an attachment to the antient constitution an excuse for debauchery, and the other uses the verbiage of religion as a commutation for obedience to its precepts. It is most true, Eustace was publicly disgraced by Lord Hopton, accused of crimes to which he pleaded guilty, suspected of others which he faintly denied. With horror I must tell you that his unfortunate ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... "said's" and "same's" without end, but ordinary business letters do not. It is perfectly possible to express oneself clearly in the language of conversation (which is also the language of business) without burying the meaning in tiresome verbiage. And yet reputable business houses every day send out letters which are almost ridiculous because of the stiff and pompous ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... of the uncouth verbiage of the old narrative, there is a touch of human pathos about it which makes it ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... proof, he mentioned his former silence, at which you was alarmed, and its being followed by the most explicit declarations, in which you had professed yourself fully satisfied. After a great deal more of such verbiage, I stated your wish as to the dissolution. He objected strongly to the taking so capital a step till something was decided about the negotiation at Paris. If the war should continue, it would be necessary to determine on some plan suited to such an event. But if we ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... drive slavery out again. When all the trash, the words, the collateral matter, was cleared away from it, all the chaff was fanned out of it, it was a bare absurdity,—no less than that a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it has a lawful right to be. Clear it of all the verbiage, and that is the naked truth of his proposition,—that a thing may be lawfully driven from the place where it has a lawful right to stay. Well, it was because the judge could n't help seeing this that he ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... speaking, the proceedings bear an advantageous comparison with those of any popular movement with which we are acquainted, either in this country or in America. Very rarely in the oratory of public meetings is the part of verbiage and declamation so small, and that of calm good sense and reason ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... last encounter, and Balder had so far forgotten himself as to throw Hiero into the sea; but it was the part of good-breeding, as well as of Christianity, to forget such errors, and heal the bruise with an extra application of balsamic verbiage. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... sense of constraint became an irritation—due in part to the slight headache, coming and going, which reminded her of her bad night. Among the things she meant to do this morning was the writing of several letters to so-called friends, who had addressed her in the wonted verbiage on the subject of her engagement. Five minutes proved the task impossible. She tore up a futile attempt at civility, and rose from the desk ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... 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 sufficiently picturesque vocabulary, avoids all verbiage and roundabout writing, and both in the narratives and in the connecting conversation displays a very considerable advance upon nearly all the writers of the time, except Rabelais, Marot, and Desperiers, in easy command of the vernacular. It is, therefore, not wonderful that there has, at ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... which arose in the shade of this immense growth of pseudo-classical verbiage was a very modest undertaking indeed and developed little beyond the primary school and classical academy first established. These were housed in a little building in Detroit, twenty-four by fifty feet, on the ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... agonies of a speech delivered in the for ever memorable day of June 22, 1843—delivered of the mare's nest so miraculously conceived. Here is the bantling bodily, stripped of all the swaddling-clothes of surplus verbiage in which it was enveloped on entering the world of Westminster—resolved, "That, in the opinion of this house, it is not expedient that, in addition to the great expense to which the people of this country are subject for the civil, military, and naval establishments of the colonies, they should ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... the pagan Empedocles[186] as well as the Christian Paul, have insisted on the necessity of an inspiration, a joyful emotion, to make moral action perfect; an obscure indication of this necessity is the one drop of truth in the ocean of verbiage with which the controversy on justification by faith has flooded the world. But, for the ordinary man, this sense of labor and sorrow constitutes an absolute disqualification; it paralyzes him; ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... you two hundred pounds for the sole right to deal with the thing on your behalf. My solicitors will send you a document full of verbiage which you had better send off to your solicitor to look through before you sign it. It will be all right. I'm going to take the proofs. Of course this stops publishing," he remarked, looking round from the dressing-table where he was ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... sexual reproduction, no eggs. But they perish (as he strangely thought, without apparently attempting to verify his belief) in the winter. How, he asks, can they reappear? Is it not more likely that these simple organisms are themselves regenerated? After much verbiage and repetition, ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the doctors of Paris, still exists, but it has been transformed into an oil warehouse. John de Troyes, senior of the Faculty of Theology, was the spokesman, and read the decisions of the faculty on each of the twelve articles. It is unnecessary to go through the long verbiage of abuse and blasphemy with which these theologians thought it their duty to ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... day was over, and welcomed the Ottawa speakers with a relaxation of the tension that had held me, for I had been upon the rack. Mind and ear had been taxed to miss no word or intonation, for a slighted syllable might lose our cause. The speeches had droned like flies at midday, but all the verbiage had been heavy with significance. I spoke French, Huron, and Ottawa in turn, and through it all I listened, listened for the ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... into a brown study with his eyes fixed upon the stamped-leather devil in the panel at the opposite end of the compartment. When he spoke again, Kent wondered at the legal verbiage, and still more at the clear-cut, ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... and sometimes would strain a point in order to effect strict and substantial justice. As a judge, he was peculiarly cautious. However intricate was any case, he bent to it his whole mind, and the great effort was always to learn the right—to sift from it all the verbiage and ambiguity which surrounded and obscured it, and then to sustain it in his decision. Upright and sincere in his pursuits, methodical, with fixity of purpose, he was never in a hurry about anything, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... refuge for the past few days had left him in ignorance of the public exasperation in his regard, the sermons, the dithyrambs with which the newspapers were filled on the subject of his corrupting wealth, articles written for effect, hypocritical verbiage to which public opinion resorts from time to time to revenge itself on the innocent for all its concessions to the guilty. It was a terrible disappointment, which caused him at first more pain than anger. Deeply moved, he concealed his distress behind his opera-glass, turning three-fourths away ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... is so commonly supposed to be the writer of Johnson's books? The English language has not often been more beautifully handled. It is true that, until one looks closely, the last words of the first sentence appear to be a piece of empty verbiage; but taken as a {199} whole the passage moves with a grave music fitted to its sober truth. The art in it is as admirable as ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... commendable one, though expressed with unnecessary verbiage," replied Ning. "To what solution did ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... him to die. Say to him rather, that it is a disgraceful thing for a man to allow his spirit to be crushed and broken by pain, that it is shameful to yield to it. For as for your maxim, if it is violent it is short, if it lasts long it is slight, that is mere empty verbiage. The only real way to mitigate pain is by the application of virtue, of magnanimity, of patience, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... minions of the local constabulary—are assuaged by the brilliant narrative manner in which The Wisdom of Father Brown (CASSELL) is set forth. Here is the paradoxical world of Mr. CHESTERTON'S imagination described in his own verbiage and proved by actual and grisly events. In that starry dream of a detective story which I sometimes have, where sleuth-hounds are pattering along the Milky Way and pursue at last the Great Bear to his den, Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes, the one spectacled, the other lynx-eyed, are following ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... Verity's friends. It is impossible to comprehend what is meant by such a statement as that every truth is somehow connected with religion. It may be that the notion—if it really is not, as I suspect it to be, mere verbiage and clap-trap, used by certain fools to mislead others—means that there is some such coherency between all truths as there is, for instance, between the elements of the body. I would admit that, but is not blood a ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... we believe, who objected to some poet, that he put too much water in his ink. This objection would apply to the uncounted host of our amateur versifiers, and poets by the grace of verbiage. If an idea, or part of an idea, chances to stray into the brain of an American gentleman, he quickly apparels it in an old coat from his wardrobe of worn phrases, and rushes off in mad haste to the first magazine or newspaper, in order that the public may enjoy its delectable beauty at once. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... with legal verbiage, and there were several expressions of which she did not perhaps appreciate the full effect; but a very hasty glance enabled her to ascertain the purport of the paper. It was a will, by which, in one item, her father ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... exists on the subject of the Rhine and its legends, but with few exceptions the works on it which are accessible to English-speaking peoples are antiquated in spirit and verbiage, and their authors have been content to accept the first version of such legends and traditions as came their way without submitting them to any critical examination. It is claimed for this book that ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... know, and his professor deemed the question improper. I visited the eleventh recitation in Othello in a high school class of nineteen pupils, not one of whom knew how the story ended, so intent had they been kept on its verbiage. Hence, too, has come the twelve feet of text-books on English on my shelves with many standard works, edited for schools, with more notes than text. Fashion that works from above down the grades and college entrance requirements are in large measure responsible ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Hamlet a poetical as well as a dramatic tragedy. With this end in view he accumulated the mass of rhetoric with which we are now so familiar. It as been Mr. IRVING's task to prune this well-meant but somewhat excessive verbiage so that the real dramatic stuff can at last "get over." But he has done no more. Any rumour to the effect that he has introduced American songs or dances, or that a "joy plank" bisects the stalls of the Savoy is untrue and deserves the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... earnestly the Confessions lied about what it pretended to expose. The smell of the indecent and venal informer exhaled from the pages. The vital feature, however, lay in the revelation of Sister Claire's character, between the lines. Beneath the vulgarity and obscenity, poorly veiled in a mock-modest verbiage, pulsated a burning sensuality reaching the horror of mania. A well-set trap would have easy work in catching the feet of a woman related to the nymphs. Small wonder that the Livingstone party kept her afar off from their perfumed and reputable society while she ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... a farce to give them the courtesy title of sovereignty. I don't think you realize, never having been in this country, what a farce it really is. I am not able to write you a learned book. All I can do is to write you these letters, which are surely devoid of all legal verbiage, because I don't know any. If I were a scholar, a student of international politics, I would wrap all my statements in fine, well-chosen language, quoting treaties and acts and agreements and all the rest of it, and you wouldn't ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... the business of the day. Once, twice, and thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was discouraged by the stoic apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring verbiage of his wife. There is nothing of the Indian brave about me, and I began to grill with impatience. At last, like a highway robber, I cornered Hanson, and bade him stand and deliver his business. Thereupon he gravely rose, as though to hint that this was not a proper place, ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ancients, for we have been flooded with these by the art of printing. Yet any one who has investigated any period knows how the same facts are told over and over again, in different ways, by various writers; and if one can get beyond the mass of verbiage and down to the really significant original material, what a simplification of ideas there is, what a lightening of the load! I own that this process of reduction is painful, and thereby our work is made more difficult than that of the ancients. A historian will ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... altogether taken the wind out of his sails, summed up in the same vein, to prove that James was a Solomon and a prophet, and would show no favouritism to Scotchmen. He held out no hope of a reprieve. "The base and barbarous murder," he said, with ample legal verbiage, "was exceeding strange;—done upon the sudden! done in an instant! done with a pistol! done with your own pistol! under the colour of kindness. As Cain talked with his brother Abel, he rose up and slew him. Your executioners of the murder left ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... read selections here and there, as most of us do, is to get a wrong idea of the man and to join either in fulsome praise of his brilliant oratory, or in honest confession that his periods are ponderous and his ideas often buried under Johnsonian verbiage. Such are the contrasts to be found on successive pages of Burke's twelve volumes, which cover the enormous range of the political and economic thought of the age, and which mingle fact and fancy, philosophy, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the boys could hardly suppress their jubilation. Stripped of their official verbiage, the letters informed the young men that each of them was made a corporal, Joe for valorous service in saving the lives of "three Americans entombed in a cave; Slim for heroism and presence of mind in saving and bringing back to the lines an American soldier," and Jerry "for coolness and ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... said Cyril. 'From the court' She answered, 'then ye know the Prince?' and he: 'The climax of his age! as though there were One rose in all the world, your Highness that, He worships your ideal:' she replied: 'We scarcely thought in our own hall to hear This barren verbiage, current among men, Light coin, the tinsel clink of compliment. Your flight from out your bookless wilds would seem As arguing love of knowledge and of power; Your language proves you still the child. Indeed, We dream ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... than half what is said. But Roger Carbury was certainly not one of these. As he sat on the garden wall at Carbury, with his cousin's letter in his hand, her words had their full weight with him. He did not try to convince himself that all this was the verbiage of an enthusiastic girl, who might soon be turned and trained to another mode of thinking by fitting admonitions. To him now, as he read and re-read Hetta's letter sitting on the wall, there was not at any rate further hope for himself. ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope |
