"Vital" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to disclose. Enough, however, was known to leave no doubt of the greatness of the risks, and it was the master's part to represent them. The occasion, however, was not one of a mere diversion, of a secondary operation, but of one vital to the nation's cause; and Hawke's reply, stamped with the firmness of a great officer, showed how little professional timidity had to do with his laudable care of his fleet in Basque Roads two years before. "You have done your duty in warning me," he replied; "now lay us alongside ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... four men, Hal Sinclair was the vital spirit. In the actual labor of mining, the mighty arms and tireless back Of Quade had been a treasure. For knowledge of camping, hunting, cooking, and all the lore of the trail, Lowrie stood as a ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... its history, without stopping to gather any instruction from facts. Let it suffice to say that the same causes made the Arabs victorious over the Byzantine emperor and the Persian Shah-in-Shah, and that these causes were the weakness and exhaustion of the national dynasties in the presence of the vital elements of the conquerors. The people suffered from the carelessness of their kings; individual energy was powerless against the invasion of disciplined and fanatical tribes, commanded by generals ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... of the United States an element of order, of force, of duration, which Hamilton has not powerfully contributed to introduce into it and to give it a predominance," stated but the simplest truth. Equally correct is his remark, that "Hamilton must be classed among the men who have best known the vital principles and fundamental conditions of a government." Alone of all the New York delegates Hamilton ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... of a thousand newspapers cannot touch her apprehension or rouse her to excitement. Next year's fashions do not much preoccupy her mind; she knows that they will come to her, in due time, from France, to be taken or rejected. When a change is something more than a fashion, and vital conditions begin to be affected, her lethargy is broken in a moment and she is awake and alert. So it was with the fashion of air-travel. The first aviator's certificate granted by a British authority was issued by the Royal Aero Club of the United Kingdom to Mr. J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... from the union of the one Church on the ground of heresy. How would Victor have ventured on such an edict—though indeed he had not the power of enforcing it in every case—unless the special prerogative of Rome to determine the conditions of the "common unity" ([Greek: koine henosis]) in the vital questions of the faith had been an acknowledged and well-established fact? How could Victor have addressed such a demand to the independent Churches, if he had not been recognised, in his capacity ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... of a most violent and tormenting distemper, which, thank God, seems now much abated as to pain, but has left me as weak as a new-born infant. However, I hope to have strength enough to set out from this place on Friday next." The disease was an inflammation of the stomach and other vital organs; and when he should have been in bed, with complete repose of body and mind, he was racked continually with the toils and worries of ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... broken heart is one of vital importance, because it is essential to salvation. The heart, by nature, is hard, and cannot, and will not break itself. Angels have no power to perform this miracle of mercy and of justice. It is the work of the Holy ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... agonizing look of old man Grossetete, who stretched his supplicating hands to her as if to say, "Enough, enough!" At the same instant a sound of tears and sobs was heard. Moved by such sympathy, unable to bear the balm of this general pardon, she was seized with faintness. Seeing that her daughter's vital force was gone at last, the old mother summoned the vigor of her youth to carry ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... people and to her incalculable wealth, the United States is yet English-led and English-ruled." This was merely a way of phrasing a great historic truth—that overwhelmingly the largest element in the American population is British in origin[51]; that such vital things as its speech and its literature are English; and that our political institutions, our liberty, our law, our conceptions of morality and of life are similarly derived from the British Isles. Page ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... in entering the cabin and engine-room, Garret Jackson accompanying the party to aid with the machinery. It did not take long to start the motors, dynamos and the big gasolene engine that was the vital part of the craft. A little water was admitted to the tanks for ballast, since the food and other supplies were not yet on board. The Advance now floated with the deck aft of the conning tower showing about two feet above the surface of the creek. Mr. Swift and ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... watched, spellbound, the sudden cessation of the doorbell's ring went unnoticed. He stood there, willing with every cell of his body the miracle that would make that small shred of green take the first vital step. ...
— Such Blooming Talk • L. Major Reynolds
... him steer clear of both; still, I try to remember that I was once his age myself, and I am given to understand that the rivalry between the several colleges in these matters is more intense than ever. There was a time when nothing seemed to me of such vital interest as whether Harvard or Yale won the boat race. The Darwinian theory paled in comparative importance beside it. Indeed, I still take more interest in it than it deserves, perhaps. Nevertheless, I took pains to impress upon ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... "I dare say! I dare say they won't appear vital to you, Allen. Nothing does. And if I had told you, I should have been met with ridicule, I suppose. But I knew BETTER than to tell; I respected myself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sporting propensity. Although it is not obsolete in the average of them, or even in any appreciable number of individuals, yet the predilection for sports in the commonplace industrial classes is of the nature of a reminiscence, more or less diverting as an occasional interest, rather than a vital and permanent interest that counts as a dominant factor in shaping the organic complex of habits of thought into which it enters. As it manifests itself in the sporting life of today, this propensity may not appear to be an economic factor of grave consequence. Taken simply by itself ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth—above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes—were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... said Thorndyke, "although I might. But the matter is of vital importance and we can't be too careful. Yours is the only evidence that could convict these people. They know that and will stick at nothing to get rid of you—for by this time they will almost certainly have ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... stay in New York was less than two years in length, but the vital ideas that he shared with disinterested minds made of this period the seed-bed for future ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... that is to deprive you of life, Jack," answered Adair. "You'll get your flag, as I hope to get mine one of these days; although I know it is possible that a bit of lead may find me out, yet the chances are if it does it won't hit a vital part. Still, in case such a thing should happen, you will bear my affectionate farewells to Lucy, though she knows that I love her as ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... the past." But if we must feed our moral natures on "baseless fancies," most men will prefer the Christian dogmas of immortality, the infinite capacity of development of the human soul, the brotherhood of the race and its vital union with its Creator, and its perfectibility of human institutions and social conditions in this life under the leavening influence of Christian principle, although Mr. Mill may stigmatize them as grandiose and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... of Indian history of the most vital importance, and he has embroidered on the historical facts a story which of itself is deeply interesting. Young people assuredly will be delighted with ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... for jest," said the Bishop angrily. "You said you had a matter of vital import to lay before me. Make haste. And remember that you are here only on sufferance. I shall be pitiless. I shall scourge the evil principle you represent from the face of ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... children, too much beneath the spell of their own genius, to be critics. Compare them with the great writers of other ages; and we feel instinctively that, in spite of their surroundings, they have far more of vital kindred with Homer or the creators of the mediaval epic, than with the Greek dramatists—Aschylus excepted—or with Dante or with Goethe. The "freshness of the early world" is still upon them; ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... art what vital forces his will could command, he devoted himself, with an intense energy, to the study of English literature, making himself a master of Anglo-Saxon and early English texts, and pursuing the study down to our own times. He read freely, also, and with a scholar's nice eagerness, in further ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... with its eight or ten men and three or four Indian women, its hunting, and trapping, and firewood-cutting, and fishing, and trading, and small domestic arrangements and dissensions, was the one place of vital importance and interest, before which empires and dynasties and the trifling matter of politics sank into mere insignificance! In the second place, it created an intense longing—a hungering and thirsting—for news ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... the wide swelling ocean, the desires and destinies of life all the world over. The sea lay steel-bright beneath the suffused sunlight, and seemed to gaze on the rugged land as on a beloved child instinct with vital power. Cling thou to the mighty one, or thy ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... for those years: though the radical humour contain in it sufficient oil for seventy, yet I perceive in some it gives no light past thirty: men assign not all the causes of long life, that write whole books thereof. They that found themselves on the radical balsam, or vital sulphur of the parts, determine not why Abel lived not so long as Adam. There is therefore a secret gloom or bottom of our days: 'twas his wisdom to determine them: but his perpetual and waking providence ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... vital importance that we should get the last two acts soon. The Queen and Prince are coming—Phipps wrote me yesterday the most earnest letter possible—the time is fearfully short, and we must have the comedy in such a state as that it will go like a machine. Whatever you do, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... ignorance; Sloth, an indolence which smothers all conviction; Presumption, carnal security, which hardens against reproof—(Andronicus). These are the great opposers of vital religion. The end ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... advantage of a nick-name. Dickson thought he was being addressed as "Dogson" after the Poet's fashion. Had he dreamed it was Leon he would not have replied, but fluttered off into the shadows, and so missed a piece of vital news. ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... have sought the wider medical and scientific audience of the United States. In matters of faith, "liberty of prophesying" was centuries since eloquently vindicated for Englishmen; the liberty of investigating facts is still called in question, under one pretence or another, and to seek out the most vital facts of life is still ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... sequence. In the weak, distracted state of the country, and in the assumed necessity of not losing our influence in those distant regions, the Government of India, however, considered that a road from our frontier to Chitral should be made, and certain positions retained in order to guard it. This vital question having been carefully considered at home, the Secretary of State for India, on June 13, 1895, telegraphed to the Viceroy that her Majesty's Government regretted they were unable to concur in the proposal. He went on to say that no 'military force or European Agent shall be kept at ...
— Indian Frontier Policy • General Sir John Ayde
... your form was first designed? The sun and earth produce, of every kind, Grass, flowers, and fruits; nay, living creatures too: Their mould was base; 'twas more refined in you: Where vital heat, in purer organs wrought, Produced a nobler kind raised up to thought; And that, perhaps, might his beginning be: Something was first; I question if 'twere he. But grant him first, yet still suppose him good, Not envying those he made, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... the whole body; whereas, if too loose, the shoulders will have all the weight to bear, while, if too tight, the corselet is no longer a defensive arm, but a "strait jacket." (1) Again, the neck, as being a vital part, (2) ought to have, as we maintain, a covering, appended to the corselet and close-fitting. This will serve as an ornament, and if made as it ought to be, will conceal the rider's face—if so he chooses—up to ...
— On Horsemanship • Xenophon
... on an important change of plan, replaced the log and charts in the rack as the first logical step. They contained nothing but bearings, courses, and the bare data of navigation. To Davies they were hard-won secrets of vital import, to be lied for, however hard and distasteful lying was. I was cooler as to their value, but in any case the same thing was now in both our minds. There would be great difficulties in the coming interview if ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... civil strife and at its lowest ebb of productive energy and wealth, its sole recuperative chance depending on the labor of its former slaves. To deport this labor, under the circumstances, would have been cruelly to deprive that section of its last vital resource, and to sink it to a state of industrial collapse and misery, by the side of which its condition at the close of the war might have seemed prosperity and paradise. Second, the nation itself could ill sustain the shock incident to such a huge amputation from the body of its ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... the Glass House tract; Who were her heirs, no record shows; The title's bad, in point of fact, If she left children, at her death, I've been retained to clear the title; And all the questions, raised above, Are, you'll perceive, extremely vital. ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... completely blank a mind as he would wish. So, at least, I found. It is not so much that the recent American invasion of London music-halls has bitten into one's brain a very definite taste of a jerking, vital, bizarre 'rag-time' civilisation. But the various and vivid comments of friends to whom the news of a traveller's departure is broken excite and predispose the imagination. That so many people who have been there should have such different and decided opinions about it! It must be at least remarkable. ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... to the belief that votes for women or anybody else are far less important than their advocates or their opponents assume. The biologist cannot escape the habit of thinking of political matters in vital terms; and if these lead him to regard such questions as the vote with an interest which is only secondary and conditional, it is by no means certain that the verdict of history would not justify him. The present concentration ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... ensure the apostolic doctrine. The conflicts within the sphere of the rule of faith, the struggles with the so-called Montanism, but finally and above all, the existing situation of the Church in the third century with regard to the world within her pale, made the question of organisation the vital one for her. Tertullian and Origen already found themselves face to face with episcopal claims of which they highly disapproved and which, in their own way, they endeavoured to oppose. It was again the Roman bishop[169] who first converted the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... Is the ambition to own a fine farm more ignoble than the desire to own shares in a copper mine? It really does not matter so much what one gossips about or what one's delights are or what the carving of the rungs on ambition's ladder; the vital question is the effect of these things on character. Do they stunt or encourage the inner life? It must be admitted that country people do not always accept their environing opportunities for enjoying the higher life of mind and ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... mansions, it would be among the angels that rejoice over one sinner that repenteth. You can distinguish in another the feeblest light of conscience that ever dimly burned, and see in it the germ of a beautiful light, that may one day, by a little fanning and fostering, shine as a star, and shed a vital heat that may set the machinery of the heart in motion to throw off glorious actions. But let not the man that shams a conscience come in your way. I have seen you play off such an one till he has burst forth—up, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... rules of "Light on the Path" are, undoubtedly, curious though the statement may seem, the most important in the whole book, save one only. Why they are so important is that they contain the vital law, the very creative essence of the astral man. And it is only in the astral (or self-illuminated) consciousness that the rules which follow them have any living meaning. Once attain to the use of the astral senses and it becomes ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... for some time produced no sensible effect, the embers were, in all probability, kept glowing, and the vital power revived, for, after a considerable pause, respiration was gradually renewed at long intervals, a languid motion was perceived at the heart, a few feeble and irregular pulsations were felt at the wrist, the clay-coloured livery of death began to vanish from his ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... who is a common toiler like the rest, finds the moving world a sealed book to him, for he cannot spare the needed dollar, and live. And those editors who will fiercely rend and tear, with all the power of their trained brains and skilled pens, at this vital need of our times may live to see the day when they too will believe this world is round, and that calling the original believers fools, thieves, scoundrels, rascals, and enemies to civilization was ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... the personnel of legations and embassies, strongly as we disapprove of the methods by which they are recruited, urgent as is the reform of the Foreign Office, it remains no less true that the function of diplomacy is more vital to-day than it ever was in the past. For it is of the very purpose and raison d'etre of diplomacy to be conciliatory and pacific. Its object is to achieve by persuasion and negotiation what otherwise ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... general European situation of that day and the prospects for England. It has never been printed, because it stood only for the sentiment of the moment, but may be opportunely quoted now that the aspect of European politics shows symptoms of soon undergoing vital changes. "The truth is," wrote my father, "there is a spirit lacking in England which we in America do not lack; and for the want of it she will have to resign a foremost position among the nations, even if there were not enough other circumstances to compel her to do so. Her good ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... Christians from death." answered the monk, beginning again to regard his mastiff with friendly looks, for at first there had been keen reproach and severe displeasure in his manner—"not to speak of the bodies that have been found by his activity, after the vital spark had fled." ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... constitution, comprising the four categories of elements which have been enumerated, is at all points, whether written or unwritten, enforceable by the courts; the conventions, although they may and not seldom do relate to matters of vital importance, are not so enforceable. The conventions consist of understandings, practices, and habits by which are regulated a large proportion of the actual operations of the governmental authorities. ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... feature of vital importance in the history of Anglo-Saxon law is its tendency towards the preservation of peace. Society is constantly struggling to ensure the main condition of its existence—peace. Already in AEthelberht's legislation we ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... shed, the audience looked for a long, hushed moment on the scene, on the now familiar room where so much of joy and grief had happened,—deserted, tranquil, but suddenly, in this new light of emptiness, realized to be how vital a part of the lives of those people who had made the play! It used to seem, indeed, as if the drama had not achieved full reality until the old kitchen had thus had its say, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... the memory of such a man at this moment; one who for forty years sought the vital spark of his country’s existence, striving to resuscitate what he called “the great soul of history,” as it developed through successive acts of the vast drama. This employment of his genius is ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... along with her, up the little bench under the cedars straight toward Shefford. Her face held a white, mute agony, as if in the hour of strife it had hardened into marble. But her eyes were dark-purple fire—windows of an extraordinarily intense and vital life. In one night the girl had become a woman. But the blight Shefford had dreaded to see—the withering of the exquisite soul and spirit and purity he had considered inevitable, just as inevitable as the death of something similar in the flower she resembled, when it was broken ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... her difficulty the less able Adela felt herself to ask Mrs. Rodman to come or to mention her to Stella. The trouble spoilt her enjoyment of a concert that evening, and kept her restless in the night, for, though seemingly a small matter, it had vital connection with the core of her life's problem; it forced her relentlessly to a consciousness of many things from which she had taught herself to ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... the breath of life began to stir in that full bosom, to which again a vital warmth had on this day of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... competent tribunal during a suit to collect the tax and before the demand of the State for remittance becomes final.[591] A hearing before judgment, with full opportunity to submit evidence and arguments being all that can be adjudged vital, it follows that rehearings and new trials are not essential to due process of law.[592] One hearing is sufficient to constitute due process;[593] and the requirements of due process are also met if a taxpayer, who had no notice of a hearing, does receive notice ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... tortuous snies, to be groped along dexterously with the poles, but dropped at last into better water, ending at a portage, where we dined. This portage led to the farmhouse of a Mr. Houle, a native of Red River, who had left St. Vital fifty-eight years before, and was now settled at a beautiful spot on the right bank of the river, and had horses, cows and other cattle, a garden, and raised wheat and other grain, which he said did well, and was evidently ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... at once. The islanders of Torres Straits use models of dugong and turtles to charm dugong and turtle to their destruction. The Toradjas of Central Celebes believe that things of the same sort attract each other by means of their indwelling spirits or vital ether. Hence they hang up the jawbones of deer and wild pigs in their houses, in order that the spirits which animate these bones may draw the living creatures of the same kind into the path of the hunter. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... order through the skylight and shook himself into a more vital interest in his work. He opened his mouth to direct the mate in some detail of mooring ship, and it remained open until he half-closed it in a whistle of surprise and seized Little violently by the arm. His ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... gaze round and wondered where Breitmann was. Could the man be asleep on a morn so vital as this? No, there he was, on the very bowsprit itself. The crew was busy about him, some getting the motor-boat in trim, others yanking away at pulleys, all the preparations of landing. A sharp order rose now ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... not an anticipation of the discovery of the circulation of the blood, but it shows how close were men's ideas to some such thought five centuries before Harvey's discovery. For Hildegarde the brain was the regulator of all the vital qualities, the centre of life. She connects the nerves in their passage from the brain and the spinal cord through the body with manifestations of life. She has a series of chapters with regard to psychology normal and morbid. She talks about frenzy, insanity, despair, dread, obsession, anger, ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... King never paid much attention to business, and his illness is, therefore, less felt than it would have been in the conduct of affairs; but it is nevertheless felt, and that in a very vital part—the collection of the revenue. The expenses of Government are about one hundred (100) lacs a-year; and the collections this year have not amounted to more than sixty (60), owing to this illness, and to a deficiency in the autumn harvests. All ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... that surrounds it, he carries with him the home influences of kindliness and use. Possibly my line of life may be drawn to the verge of a wider circle than his; but so much the better for interest and amusement, if it can be drawn from the same centre; namely, fixed beliefs daily warmed into vital action in the sunshine of a ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... awaking from a terrible dream, and was so sincerely delighted, so deeply moved by your real existence, that you appeared to me as one newborn. In this spirit I greet you on this, to me, highly important birthday. Your friendship is an absolute necessity to me; I cling to it with my last vital strength. ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... passing of time. This was a new book by a strong man with the gift which makes alive people, places, things. The ones whose lives had taken possession of his being in this story were throbbing with vital truth. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Conceive that he here satirizes those omniscient rationalists who demolish, at a touch, all supernatural systems of theology, and proceed to construct purely natural systems in their place as devoid of vitality and inspiration as dead tree-trunks are of vital saps. So conceive this dramatic monologue, and the baleful humor appears, and is captivating in its biting sarcasm and unanswerable argument. Caliban is, in his own opinion, omniscient. He trusts himself absolutely. He is as infallible as the Positivists, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... artistic requirements of any other. Once the creative impulse that gave it life was withdrawn the falsity of the kind as a form of art became manifest; and though it lingered on for many years its life was but that of a fashionable toy, with little or no hold over the vital literature of its day. The popularity of the pastoral eclogue or idyll was of far longer duration. Though the form was more or less definitely conditioned, it had less of the structural rigidity of the drama, it brought its subject less into contact with the hard limitations of reality, and, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... you afford to shirk, or make-believe or practise pretense in any act of life? No, no; for all the time you are molding yourself into a deformity, and drifting away from the Divine. What the world does and says about you is really no matter, but what you think and what you do are questions vital as Fate. No one can harm you but yourself. Work is for the worker. And so I will answer the questions of the critics as to how society has been benefited by, say, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... out to struggling nations their course, let but a single star be lost, and, if there be not utter darkness, the luster of the whole is dimmed. Do my countrymen need any assurance that such a catastrophe is not to overtake them while I possess the power to stay it? It is with me an earnest and vital belief that as the Union has been the source, under Providence, of our prosperity to this time, so it is the surest pledge of a continuance of the blessings we have enjoyed, and which we are sacredly bound to transmit undiminished to our children. The field of calm and free discussion in our country ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... did when Drake sailed. All the rest is tame. We do little imitations of the real thing with blue ribbons tied to them, and think we are camping or roughing it. This life of yours is glorious, is vital, it means something in the march of the world;—and I doubt whether ours does. You are subduing the wilderness, extending the frontier. After you will come the backwoods farmer to pull up the stumps, and after him the big farmer and ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... advantage over Sanchez of perusing a MS. copy of Jordi's original poem, makes out a very plausible argument in favor of the originality of the Valencian poet. After all, as the amount stolen, or, to speak more reverently, borrowed, does not exceed half a dozen lines, it is not of vital importance to the reputation ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... of the fall of Harper's Ferry, and that Jackson with picked brigades was already on the way to join Lee. Had he known these two vital facts his anger would have burned to a white heat. Surely no day lost was ever lost at a greater cost than the one McClellan lost after the finding of ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... carbonic acid gas in the same waters being five times as much as is necessary to keep the lime in a fluid state. Carbonate of lime, therefore, can rarely be precipitated at the bottom of the sea by chemical action alone, but must be produced by vital agency as in the case ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... first place, the best Promoter of Health. Repinings and secret Murmurs of Heart, give imperceptible Strokes to those delicate Fibres of which the vital parts are composed, and wear out the Machine insensibly; not to mention those violent Ferments which they stir up in the Blood, and those irregular disturbed Motions, which they raise in the animal Spirits. I scarce remember, in my own Observation, to have met ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Beware, nor with light lips utter that word. You love me!—know you what it is to love With love that is the life-blood in one's veins, The vital air we breathe, a love long-smothered, Smouldering in silence, kindling, burning, blazing, And purifying in its growth the soul. A love that from the heart eats every passion But its sole self; love without hope or limit, Deep love that will outlast all happiness; Speak, speak; is such the ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... head was clear and cool. Another proof of his healthy condition was the fierce hunger that soon assailed him. A powerful body was demanding food, the furnace needed coal, and there was no way just yet to supply it. This was the vital question to him, but he took wilderness precautions before ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the trouble with advancing years is that the material which in youth went directly to building up the vital organs is diverted to the connective tissue, so that after a time there gets to be too much connective tissue and too little to connect. When the imagination is in its first freshness, a story is almost ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... see the narrowness of it all, I see that I was giving up many things which are interesting and beautiful, many friendships that might have been delightful, but on the other hand there was always the pressing on, the big, vital side, the great throb of life. I miss it. I feel to myself as a great factory sounds on Sundays and holidays, when the engine that drives all the machinery of the place is silent. I wander among the empty, quiet places, and ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... familiar examples, have this peculiarity of structure—that their soft bodies are enclosed within a coat-of-mail formed of carbonate and phosphate of lime. In fact, they carry their skeleton outside their bodies, both for defence of the vital parts within, and for the attachment of the muscles which move their limbs, and every part of their frame. No warrior of old was ever more completely enveloped in his hard coat-of-mail, with its jointed greaves and overlapping scales, than is the lobster in its crustaceous covering; with this ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... nail-heads. They too were relics from the Spanish castle which Norman Westfall had stripped of its ancient appurtenances to fashion an appropriate setting for the beautiful young Spanish wife whose death at the birth of Diane had goaded him to suicide. That Norman Westfall had regarded the vital spark within him as an indifferent thing to be snuffed out at the will of the clay it dominated, was consistent with the Westfall intolerance ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... experiences keen sensation; but the wavy line of the melody as it goes along and up and down the stave is treated conventionally and changed into a lovely pattern for the ear's delight; and as there can be no regular pattern without regular rhythm, rhythm is a vital element in Bach's music. So with Purcell, with a difference. The early "imitative" men had sought chiefly for dainty conceits. Pepys was the noted composer of "Beauty, Retire" and his joy when he went to church, "where fine music on the word trumpet" will be remembered. ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... extreme seriousness of which might otherwise have depressed them unduly. I had read of such things being done in mediaeval mystery plays, and here was an instance in my presence and not as an imitation or resuscitation of a dead archaism but as a vital growth. ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... Ashford. He was sad when he first beheld the wreck; but when he thought what a glorious assurance this would be of his conduct on the field, he was pleased with the idea; and while in his heart he thanked the rebel marksman for not putting the bullet any nearer to the vital organ beneath the envelope, he was not ungrateful for the splendid testimonial he had given him of ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... lime is one of most vital importance to the farmer; indeed, so varied are its modes of action and its effects, that some writers have given it credit for every thing good in the way of farming, and have gone so far as to say that all permanent improvement of agriculture ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... whose opinions are alone of vital moment in his estimation, and who will not yield a point in an argument, is much to be dreaded in any company, and effectually brings to an end any general conversation ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... view of escaping those questions of greatest import which every moment of loneliness or leisure presses upon them—the questions relating to the wherefore, the whence, and the whither of life. Curiously enough, our scholars never think of the most vital question of all—the wherefore of their work, their haste, and their painful ecstasies. Surely their object is not the earning of bread or the acquiring of posts of honour? No, certainly not. But ye take as much pains as the famishing and breadless; and, with that eagerness ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... repent having dealt so harshly with a man over whom she had so much influence, and being unwilling to lose him, not only on account of their past friendship, but also because of his vital role in the conduct of her affair, she sent a message to him to say that she wished to speak to him one more time and that afterwards she would leave him free to do as he pleased. One is very vulnerable when one ...
— The Princess of Montpensier • Madame de La Fayette
... acquiesced in the negotiations after Bloemfontein, but what he wanted was a polite but absolutely inflexible insistence upon the Bloemfontein minimum, and at the same time such military preparations as, in view of the clear possibility of a failure of negotiations, seemed to him absolutely vital. This, however, was not the course which the Salisbury Cabinet thought right to adopt; and the problem that now lay before him was to convert the illusory concessions, which were all that Afrikander mediation was able or even desirous to wring from President Krueger, ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... This intuition those have who have not extinguished their freedom of thinking by notions previously adopted and confirmed by various arguments respecting the soul of man, which is held to be either pure thought, or some vital principle the seat of which is sought for in the body; and yet the soul is nothing but the life of man, while the spirit is the man himself; and the earthly body which he carries about with him in the world is merely an agent whereby ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... equally unworthy zeal, been for several years seeking to establish her peculiar institutions. Epidamnus proved a Grecian Kansas. As in our own country, the hostile factions refrained from war as long as human nature would allow; but, once engaged in it, it became a vital struggle, that could be terminated only by the exhaustion of one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... was now hinted were formidably maintained, and would be found hard to answer. Astonished, (not by any means for the first time in my life,) at the apathy which seemed to prevail on questions of such vital moment, I determined at all events not to be a party to a craven silence; and denounced from the University pulpit with hearty indignation that whole system of unbelief, (if system it can be called,) which ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... of feeling in others; and if I were a dramatist I think I should quite humbly go to that play where they hiss the villain for his villany, and inquire how his wickedness had been made so appreciable, so vital, so personal. Not being a dramatist, I still cannot indulge the greatest contempt of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... but of the intellectuals who spoke good French and bought good books and liked ten minutes' chat with the mother and daughter. (Madame was an Alsatian lady with vivid memories of 1870, when, as a child, she had first learned to hate Germans.) She hated them now with a fresh, vital hatred, and would have seen her own son dead a hundred times—he was a soldier in Saloniki—rather than that France should make a compromise peace with the enemy. She had been in Amiens, as I was, on a dreadful ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... awful door through which each has disappeared, confessing his absolute inability to determine if there be any difference between them. Death surely triumphs here. It is true that there may be a possible distinction between the "breath," or vital principle of each; but this uncertainty only adds to the mystery, and increases a thousand fold the agonizing need for light. God be thanked that He has given it. The darkest problem that has faced mankind all through the weary ages, has been triumphantly solved; ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... your fears, or argue grief away, or drown your woe by shedding tears, call on me any day. I have a sympathetic heart that bleeds for others' aches, and I will ease your pain and smart unless the language breaks. And so to Bildad and his mate I made a helpful talk, with vital truths that elevate and break disasters' shock; I pointed out that stricken men should not yield to the worst, but from the wreckage rise again like flame ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... again, after the war, in his mansion in the Avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, where he was consuming the fortune left him by his wife, Louise de Mareuil, become prudent, with the wisdom of a man struck in a vital part, and trying to cheat ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... far, therefore, as it applied to the actual enrolment and mobilisation of the commandos, the military system of the Boer Republics appeared well-nigh perfect. Yet it had radical and grievous defects, and these, being in its most vital parts, robbed it of half its efficiency. The election of military officers by the votes of the men they were destined to command would be a hazardous expedient in the most Utopian of communities; ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... the jacquerie breaks out afresh: in truth, it is permanent and universal. Just as in a body in which some of the elements of its vital substance are affected by an organic disease, the evil is apparent in the parts which seem to be sound: even where as yet no outbreak has occurred, one is imminent; constant anxiety, a profound restlessness, a low fever, denote its presence. Here, the debtor does not pay, and the creditor is afraid ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... a Potawatomie Indian. The popular explanations of the symbols of Masonry are fitting for the multitude that have swarmed into the Temples,—being fully up to the level of their capacity. Catholicism was a vital truth in its earliest ages, but it became obsolete, and Protestantism arose, flourished, and deteriorated. The doctrines of ZOROASTER were the best which the ancient Persians were fitted to receive; those of CONFUCIUS were fitted for the Chinese; those of MOHAMMED ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... collisions may sometimes be between the constituted authorities of the citizens of our country in relation to the lines which separate their respective jurisdictions, the results can be of no vital injury to our institutions if that ardent patriotism, that devoted attachment to liberty, that spirit of moderation and forbearance for which our countrymen were once distinguished, continue to be cherished. If ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... surprise of everybody the dying man actually recovered. The vital spark, which had glimmered faintly in the socket, received fresh fuel from the oil of gladness which the little lawyer poured into his soul. It once more ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... true that ownership, or property in man is not in itself wrong, and that it may be benevolent to all concerned. It is interesting to recollect that in proportion as human relations are cardinal, or vital, they approach most nearly to ownership, as in the case of parent and child. The highest relation of all, that between man and God, finds its most perfect expression in terms conveying the idea of ownership on the part of God. 'For ye are not your own;—therefore glorify God in your body ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... aside his colleagues, to accomplish what he deemed a good end, he did evil. When this rich patrician collected the proletarian burgesses to decree against the veto of the tribune that the public property should be distributed among them, he struck a vital blow on the constitution of his country, and made a step toward monarchy, for monarchy was only reached through the democracy—was only brought about by powerful demagogues. And hence the verdict of the wise and judicious will be precisely ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... human, it can hardly pass over the whole North Shore of voters in order to give special protection to the little, voteless No-Man's-Land of the Canadian Labrador; though immediate special protection is a very vital concern to that most neglected part of Canada. The Dominion stops short by water as decidedly as the Province does by land. So an ideal place is left defenceless between the two, as if expressly made for the Commission ...
— Draft of a Plan for Beginning Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... particular had occurred. But it sometimes happens that a Government is willing, or even anxious, to accept defeat on a side issue, although of minor importance, in order to escape from, or at all events to postpone, a decision on some question of vital import. Sometimes, too, there are reasons, well known to all members of a Government but not yet in the knowledge of the public, which incline a Ministry to find a reason for resigning office in the result of some casual division which cannot be said to amount to a vote ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... anguish: and young Richardson said to his father, when they returned, that he hoped to be preserved from such diversion as had been that day the lot of Pope. From this time, finding his diseases more oppressive, and his vital powers gradually declining, he no longer strained his faculties with any original composition, nor proposed any other employment for his remaining life than the revisal and correction of his former works, in which he received advice ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... with effort and struggle—worn above all with hating. Delia looked at it with a sob in her throat. Surely, surely, the great passion, the great uplifting faith they had felt in common, was vital, was true! Only, somehow, after the large dreams and hopes of the early days, to come down to this perpetual campaign of petty law-breaking, and futile outrage, to these odious meetings and shrieking newspapers, ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... previous lectures I have had occasion to mention the principle of cohesion; but it plays so vital a part in the constitution of States and their relations to each other that I consider it advisable to devote this ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... carried them back to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a harder one than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic bombs had been a profound one, and for a while the cunning side of the human animal was overpowered by its sincere realisation of the vital necessity for reconstruction. The litigious and trading spirits cowered together, scared at their own consequences; men thought twice before they sought mean advantages in the face of the unusual eagerness to realise new aspirations, and when at last the weeds revived again and 'claims' began ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... not characteristic of all Reviews, rather of the Tory organs alone, and the Radical Westminster took pains to deny the truth of the picture, asserting again and again that the vital and sole cause of the conflict was slavery. Previous articles are summed up in that of October, 1863, as a profession of the Westminster's opinion throughout: "... the South are fighting for liberty to found a Slave Power. Should it prove successful, truer devil's ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... which I was no longer able to do, but that I am able is owing to my past life; for, by a person who always lives in these pursuits and labors, it is not perceived when old age steals on. Thus gradually and unconsciously life declines into old age; nor is its thread suddenly broken, but the vital principle is ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... best-intentioned of Mr Benson's critics in London have fallen into the habit of concentrating attention on unquestionable defects in Mr Benson's practice, to the neglect of the vital principles which are the justification of his policy. Mr Benson's principles have been largely ignored by the newspapers; but they are not wisely disregarded. They are matters of urgent public interest. They point the right road to the salvation of Shakespearean drama on the modern ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... few opportunities will be offered for slow aimed fire with the pistol or revolver, although use will be made of the weapon under circumstances when accurate pointing and rapid manipulation are of vital importance. ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... three of the vital elements required toward the completion of the work: first, steam used expansively; second, the double-acting engine. It will be remembered that Watt's first engines only took in steam at the bottom of the cylinder, as Newcomen's ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... her wistfully. It was so wonderfully sweet to have this bright, beautiful young thing asking her these vital questions. ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... Irishman. It was not his heart, but something as vital. The very movement of the earth seemed to be suspended when the great form blocked the door to the forecastle and the ringing ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... sight. As Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, his landscape painting is almost all done by the lucid use of colour. Nevertheless this bluntness of organization in relation to the less important senses, no doubt contributed something to the singleness and simplicity of the deeper and more vital of Scott's romantic impressions; at least there is good reason to suppose that delicate and complicated susceptibilities do at least diminish the chance of living a strong and concentrated life—do risk the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... steam-engines, pigs, newspapers, schools, churches and bolts of calico. For twenty centuries this taking of stock by governments had been an obsolete practice, until revived by the framers of the American Constitution and made a vital part of that instrument. The right of the most—and not of the richest, the best, the bravest, the cleverest, or the oldest in blood—to rule being formally recognized and set down on paper, it became necessary to ascertain ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... energy is expended unnecessarily while waiting. If we are obliged to wait for any length of time, it does not hurry the minutes or bring that for which we wait to keep nervously strained with impatience; and it does use vital force, and so helps greatly toward "Americanitis." The strain which comes from an hour's nervous waiting, when simply to let yourself alone and keep still would answer much better, is often equal to a day's labor. It ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... glimpses of its meaning, or live a true and divine life in the world; and in the "Sartor" he has embodied and illustrated this in the person and actions of his hero. He saw that religion had become secular; that it was reduced to a mere Sunday holiday and Vanity Fair, taking no vital hold of the lives of men, and radiating, therefore, none of its blessed and beautiful influences about their feet and ways; that human life itself, with all its adornments of beauty and poetry, was in danger of paralysis and death; that love and faith, truth, duty, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... from the union of soul and body. Thus the movement of heavy and light things results from their substantial form: for which reason they are said to be moved by their generator, as the Philosopher states (Phys. viii, 4). Wherefore this movement is called "vital." For which reason Gregory of Nyssa (Nemesius, De Nat. Hom. xxii) says that, just as the movement of generation and nutrition does not obey reason, so neither does the pulse which is a vital movement. By the pulse he means ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... misjudged as to character. He was a remarkable personality, who interpreted an era of unusual interest, vital and picturesque, with a result unparalleled in literary annals. When he died in England in 1902 the English papers paid him very high tribute. The London Spectator said of him: "No writer of the present day has struck so powerful and original a note as he has sounded." This ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... and subsequent vital statistics as to Baker's university and clerical career are from the account of him in J. and J.A. Venn, ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... point of vital importance. We do know that there were, originally, ten of these creatures roaming the country. Eight are accounted for. The other two are ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... Belgian infantry were huddled under cover out of the way of shrapnel bullets if they could get the shelter of a doorway or the safer side of a brick wall. I stared into their faces and saw how dead they looked. It seemed as if their vital spark had already been put out by the storm of battle. Their eyes were sunken and quite expressionless. For week after week, night after night, they had been exposed to shell-fire, and something had died within them—perhaps the desire to live. ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... than the fabled philosopher's stone came into being, and the beginnings of fortunes which would pass the hundred million mark and place tradesmen's daughters upon Oriental thrones grew from this new force. Within fifty years it has become as vital to industry as ...
— The Clock that Had no Hands - And Nineteen Other Essays About Advertising • Herbert Kaufman
... things really and deservedly obsolete, most strangely avers that "The words thou and thee are, except in the mouths of Quakers, obsolete. The plural forms, ye and you, have replaced them."—Hand-Book, p. 284. Ignoring also any current or "vital" process of forming English verbs in the second person singular, he gravely tells us that the old form, as "callest" (which is still the true form for the solemn style,) "is becoming obsolete."—Ib., p. 210. "In phrases like you are ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... is the vital point to be attacked, because in cities the matter is already pretty well settled; there is in sight nothing that will greatly change the rule already given, a cost of $1000 per room of about 1200 cubic feet, with the finish and sanitary ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... find I had quite forgotten how very easy to look at he is! He apologized for the taxi which seemed most opulent to me, because his own speedster was in the shop, he having "broken a record and some vital organ the night before, and the mater was using the limousine and the governor was out of town with the big bus." His pretty plan was for dinner and the theater and then supper and some dancing, but I thought there was just the least bit of the ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... which may explain why orators and other great statesmen no longer put the ribbon in their buttonholes when in Paris, Leon showed Gazonal a sign, bearing, in golden letters, the illustrious name of "Vital, successor to Finot, manufacturer of hats" (no longer "hatter" as formerly), whose advertisements brought in more money to the newspapers than those of any half-dozen vendors of pills or sugarplums,—the author, moreover, of ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... become one of the most powerful factors on the American scene today, one of the most vital factors in the extension and preservation of democracy and the rights for which he laid ...
— Labor's Martyrs • Vito Marcantonio
... The vital trouble with America to-day is that she can not assimilate the 600,000 debased, ignorant, poverty-stricken foreigners who are coming in every year. They keep out the one peaceful nation. They exclude the Chinese and take to ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... number of articles and delivered hundreds of addresses in behalf of it, and preached many a discourse from my own pulpit. I have always held that every church is as much bound to have a temperance wheel in its machinery as to have a Sabbath school or a missionary organization. It is of vital importance that the young should be saved, and therefore I have urged temperance lessons in the Sunday school and the early adoption of a total abstinence pledge. The temperance reform movement made its ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... you said. It's astonishing how people forget the vital things, and remember trifles. Or perhaps as we advance from stage to stage what once seemed the vital things turn to trifles. Nothing can be more vital in the history of a man and a woman than how they became husband and wife, and yet not merely the details, ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... symmetrical development being interfered with, just as in other cases a sexual incompatibility is developed, near relatives failing to breed with each other. Mere arrest of development of a part may arise from accidental disease of the embryo; hence vital organs are left out, or portions of organs, like the dividing walls of the heart, are omitted. Sometimes an older fetus is inclosed in the body of another, each having started independently from a separate ovum, but the one having become embedded in the semifluid mass of the other and ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... the Maiden's form By silent sympathy. The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place, Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face. And vital feelings of delight Shall rear her form to stately height, Her ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... forgetting himself. Lady Amelia, who had been snubbed by Miss De Baron, shut herself up and wept. The Marchioness took to her bed. Then, exactly at the same time, two things happened, both of which were felt to be of vital importance at Manor Cross. Miss De Baron wrote a most determined refusal to her lover, and old Mr. Tallowax died. Now old Mr. Tallowax had been Dean Lovelace's father-in-law, and had never had a child but she who had ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... knowledge and suggestion, never anything like the same breadth of outlook, the same universality of imaginative freedom. That is so in spite of infinite turmoil and confusion. Moreover the effort now is less concentrated, less dramatic. There is no one vital center to the modern movement which disaster can strike or decay undermine. If Paris or New York slacken and grow dull and materialist, if Berlin and London conspire for a mutual destruction, Tokio or Baku or Valparaiso or Christiania ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... sardonic, cynical and seductive, in which Vindice pours forth the arguments and rolls out the promises of a professional pleader on behalf of aspiring self-interest and sensual self-indulgence: no dramatist that ever lived could have put more vital emotion into fewer words, more passionate reality into more perfect utterance, than Tourneur in the dialogue ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... smiling brightly at Lindsay, "brought you a letter, I know." It was extraordinary how detached she could be from her vital personal concern in him. It seemed relegated to some background of her nature while she occupied herself with the immediate play of circumstance or was lost ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... puff of wind, the last vital rally of the expiring breeze, carried the Spindrift forward till the punt at her moorings lay ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... under no apprehensions on account of any future one." "We expect a very bloody summer in New York and Canada," wrote Washington to his brother John Augustine, in May; and repeatedly, through the days of preparation, he represented to his troops what vital interests were at stake and how much was to depend upon their discipline and ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... first shock of her life. It was right, of course, it must be right, but he should have told her, and she remonstrated with him for the first time in her life. Why had he not consulted her, she asked, before taking such a vital step? Then Dr. Winters expressed in words one of the underlying principles of his life. "A man's first duty is to his country and his God," he said, "and even if you had objected, it would ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... fact, matter of fact, sober reality; truth &c. 494; actual existence. presence &c. (existence in space) 186; coexistence &c. 120. stubborn fact, hard fact; not a dream &c. 515; no joke. center of life, essence, inmost nature, inner reality, vital principle. [Science of existence], ontology. V. exist, be; have being &c. n.; subsist, live, breathe, stand, obtain, be the case; occur &c. (event) 151; have place, prevail; find oneself, pass the time, vegetate. consist ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... contained in a proper handling of this subject is so great and so important to the interests of the Nation that I shall present it to Congress as a separate subject apart from my annual message. Concentration of the necessary work for naval vessels in a few navy yards on each coast is a vital necessity if proper economy in Government expenditures is ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... vital interests of Spain was the abuse of the ceded right held to be that the earliest efforts of the first new Cabinet under Ferdinand VI. were engaged in a revision of the commercial differences between that country and England. England was persuaded to relinquish the Asiento contract in exchange ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... bunk by fierce hands—remembered a vision of savage faces, and the presence of some danger that menaced him. He remembered that, while lying on his blankets, struggling with the coming fever, he had overheard a conversation of vital importance to himself and to the ship, but of the purport of that conversation he had not the least idea. In vain he strove to remember—in vain his will, struggling with delirium, brought back snatches and echoes of sense; they ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... positive as she had been when the past unrolled itself that she had no wish to see the first man again; that did he stand before her his power would vanish. He was a back number—a fatal position to occupy in the imagination of a vital and ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... King Albert and his Belgians, on the other hand, knew full well that, in barring the invader's road, they were inevitably sacrificing their homes, their wives and their children. Unlike the heroes of Sparta, instead of possessing an imperative and vital interest in fighting, they had everything to gain by not fighting and nothing to lose—save honour. In the one scale were fire and the sword, ruin, massacre, the infinite disaster which we see; in the other was that little word honour, which also represents infinite things, ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck |
